This comment betrays a misunderstanding of history and of what fascism is and doesn't even engage with the article's points. A totalitarian fascist state does not come into being all at once; it emerges in steps that tend towards that outcome, steps which the article discusses in detail. Furthermore, that nascent fascism can be defeated through electoral means does not preclude it from being fascism.
> An I.C.U. nurse shot by federal agents was an American citizen with no criminal record, the city police chief said. A New York Times video analysis shows he was holding a phone, not a gun.
Call me a relic of a bygone era of seriousness and decency, but I don't think the White House should be in the business of mocking individuals online, either. But I know we're well past that point.
Actually, the case law seems pretty clear in the other direction. Deadly force is not justified once an officer has evaded a vehicle that might hit them.
It shows no such thing. The officer got out of the way and was fine afterwards in both videos. This is a man who was angry and possibly traumatized by a prior incident involving a car. He should not have been allowed to carry a weapon
I share the author's perspective that LLMs are not fun for programming. I don't use them to generate code, save for small snippets to demonstrate some concept or do something rote that I wouldn't enjoy writing myself.
However - and maybe I'm just an easily entertained simpleton - I find them really fun for exploring those random, not trivially Google-able questions that pop into my head on a daily basis, technical and otherwise. Most of my chats with ChatGPT begin with questions of this form. I keep my critical thinking cap on during the dialogue and always verify the output if it's to be used for anything serious, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy the process.
I'm a naturally socially awkward person, due partly to personality and partly to social anxiety disorder. I don't think I have the social intelligence/agility to pull off half of these maneuvers. Just reading about the author playing different characters with tables and imagining myself in that position made me want to throw up, I'd fuck it up so badly.
You sound a little like me. I wasn't aware people thought like that until my partner told me her thoughts took the form of a constant stream of well-formed English. My default mode of thinking isn't natural language (though I can force myself to think this way, it's laborious, as the article mentions), nor images (I struggle with visualization), but more like abstract sequences of both logical connections and intuitive feelings.
Adding a data point here for posterity, in hopes that someone researches this topic deeper. I recognise myself from the above, apart from "intuitive feelings" as I don't quite get what shi.. the person meant by that. My mother noted that from a very young age I was fascinated by books and indeed did an unreasonable amount of reading growing up. My sibling thinks with words. Visualisation of real things is a challenge for me, but I think I'm reasonably adept at solving more abstract things (e.g. mechanical linkages) in a somewhat visual-adjacent way that I call my "imagination". This extends to memories, as if you were to task me to picture a dog, I would feel much more comfortable picking a non-existing, imagined dog than any the dogs that I've actually seen or met, such as family members' pets. I do some painting and could wireframe-sketch this imagined subject for you and "fill in the blanks", but trying to remember any actual moment spent with those beasts is laborious and results in something akin to one-frame flashes that are immediately gone and can't be recalled at will. Inadequate memory formation/recall have caused me grief, but I have no trouble remembering for example number sequences.
This is part of it, but everyone to some degree has discomfort with being disliked and will do things to avoid it. At least in my experience, social anxiety is much more about the cognitive distortions that convince you others dislike you, when they may in fact be neutral or even have a positive view of you.
Just as one example, when I'm interacting with someone who I haven't reached a certain level of comfortability with, I'm highly aware of and sensitive to their reactions to me in terms of what they're saying, their tone, their micro facial expressions, etc., and I perceive any small negative reaction as a sign that they don't like me. This usually isn't true! But it ironically has the effect of inducing self-sabotaging avoidant behaviors in me, such as over-censoring of what I say and just general awkwardness around them, which makes it much more likely they will end up disliking me.
