No, it’s just as basic as the OP let on… Going to church every Sunday indoctrinates the, “appeal to authority” logical fallacy. The very premise that the religion itself is the source of truth in the world is the trap that leads people down the road of falling for charlatans and other scam artists.

All it takes is for their priest or pastor to endorse (directly or indirectly) any political view, candidate, or person/product and “the flock” will adhere. To not adhere is to deny the authority and thus, the religion itself. That often also means expulsion from their community and very real other social and sometimes worse consequences.

The only “escape” is to simply not participate which actually resolves into two scenarios:

• An honest one where the former adherent admits that they no longer believe (the authority; not necessarily the entire religion).
• A dishonest one where conformance and piety is claimed and faked as a sort of performance art. After all, who can deny piety exists in an individual? It’s all in their head. This method can be quite profitable if you have no scruples! (For example, a Jesus fish in an official company logo/slogan… That’s basically the modern day version of the money changers in the parable of the money changers!)

At an even more basic level, going to church and claiming publicly that you adhere to a religion like evangelical Christianity opens you up to be scammed. Since there’s no official tests or regulations regarding what counts as “Christian” literally any scammer/scummy company can claim to be Christian and thus, “on the team”.

Christ’s teachings are pretty clear that everyone is on the same team and not to favor one group over another based on ethnicity (and by extension, religion) as given by the parable of washing the prostitute’s feet. However, that’s not really taught much in evangelical churches these days! In fact, if your pastor isn’t bringing that up right now–as Trump promises to intern immigrants, forcing them away from their families/communities–with regularity they’re probably in that second camp I talked about: Faking piety for profit.

Ahaha! Microsoft employees are using AI to write hallucinate their own performance reviews and managers are using that very same AI to “review” said performance reviews. Which is exactly the dystopian vision of the future that OpenAI sells!

What’s funny is that the “cult of Microsoft” is 100% bullshit so the AI is being trained in bullshit and as time goes on its being reinforced with it’s own hallucinated bullshit because everyone is using it to bullshit the bullshitters in management who are demanding this bullshit!

Gelsinger said the market will have less demand for dedicated graphics cards in the future.

No wonder Intel is in such rough shape! Gelsinger is an idiot.

Does he think that the demand for AI-accelerating hardware is just going to go away? That the requirement of fast, dedicated memory attached to a parallel processing/matrix multiplying unit (aka a discreet GPU) is just going to disappear in the next five years‽

The board needs to fire his ass ASAP and replace him with someone who has a grip on reality. Or at least someone who has a some imagination of how the future could be.

Working analog clock minute hands after the first minute.

“obviously fake”: NO, damnit! What’s “obvious” is that about a third of Americans can’t differentiate between what’s real and what isn’t.

Yeah seriously! Why does it have to be a Christian supernatural force? It could just be Baba Yaga “reaching out” as it were, to a kindred spirit.

Why couldn’t it be the fae trying to pull him into their world? Or perhaps an evil yokai finally tracked him down?

Maybe his original soul escaped the mirror dimension and was trying to claw its way back into his body!

Surely they can’t all be this dumb.

After a few decades following American politics you’ll realize that yes, yes they can all be that dumb.

Just have a general conversation with your most conservative neighbors about basically anything and you’ll quickly learn that there’s nothing they don’t have an opinion on and their level of ignorance is… Impressive.

Like, dude, you’re 60+ years old and you think hurricanes are a conspiracy‽ The point where they lost their mind was long ago.

Sooner or later you can’t help but wonder if they ever had sanity or they just faked it long enough to have a career/survive until retirement.

Yeah that’s the part I don’t get: The law is literally telling doctors to kill their patients and the doctors are just going along with it? WTF!

It takes effort but you have to milk it for all its worth!

Not true! The female nipple is actually useful.

Here’s the thing: That’s exactly what Trump supporters want. That’s the “pain” Musk talked about.

They don’t care about the cost. Money or human.

I asked a Trump supporter how they wanted to handle American citizen children of illegal immigrants and they said they wanted the children taken away and placed into Christian indoctrination programs (they didn’t call it that but that’s what they meant).

Meh. This is but a fraction of what the big media companies think the world owes them for piracy.

As another (local) AI enthusiast I think the point where AI goes from “great” to “just hype” is when it’s expected to generate the correct response, image, etc on the first try.

For example, telling an AI to generate a dozen images from a prompt then picking a good one or re-working the prompt a few times to get what you want. That works fantastically well 90% of the time (assuming you’re generating something it has been trained on).

Expecting AI to respond with the correct answer when given a query > 50% of the time or expecting it not to get it dangerously wrong? Hype. 100% hype.

It’ll be a number of years before AI is trustworthy enough not to hallucinate bullshit or generate the exact image you want on the first try.

No. That’s if he’s Arab. Chinese get interned.

Or if China doesn’t like them either, “returned to the homeland” where they’ll be disappeared forever in one of their, “put them here until trial” black holes where people go in but they don’t come out (without the right bribes/political influence).

Yeah! Deliver Big Ben and maybe a few other famous UK monuments to Washington, DC and we’ll call it even 👍

Well yes: At this juncture in history conservative speech is hate speech, misinformation (and disinformation), and things like AI-generated images of politicians in situations that never happened.

Actual conservative speech like bitching about the national debt or setting themselves up to get flamed with references to A Modest Proposal aren’t getting censored at all.

Some people just don’t like swearing.

To those people I say, “What the fuck‽”

In short: They’re not. They’re basically guessing at this point for anyone under 50.

Not only that but anyone under 50 who they do reach is the type of person who doesn’t use an ad blocker. In other words, iPhone users and the ignorant.

In the past he’s said it takes him six or seven flushes to get anything down.

Stealing political yard signs? No.

Marking up political yard signs? Yes.

On my way to vote today I saw a trump sign that had “FELON” and “RAPIST” graffitied on it. That’s a much clearer message than if there were no sign there.

It was quite respectful, actually… It still very clearly said, “Trump/Vance” it was just given some flair and it wasn’t even untrue 👍