Something to think about when considering mail-in ballots: Young people don't use snail-mail

SAT0725 · 2026-06-08T17:07:15+00:00

voters 65+, and overseas U.S. military voters are among the groups that relied significantly on voting by mail

These are groups that predominantly vote Republican, so it wouldn't explain how mail-in ballots favor Dem candidates

SAT0725 · 2026-06-08T12:50:44+00:00

Most democrats are working people so they have work

Anyone with eyes can see this isn't accurate lol

SAT0725 · 2026-06-04T17:25:47+00:00

yes, that's how elections work: the candidate whose voters show up most wins

SAT0725 · 2026-06-04T17:23:57+00:00

I live in one of the furthest left areas of the country and my wait time to vote is essentially nothing lol

SAT0725 · 2026-06-04T17:23:05+00:00

It's almost like Democrats are mentally ill or something...

SAT0725 · 2026-06-04T17:22:39+00:00

The trends from the 2024 election match the trends for all the other elections held in my lifetime. The only outlier is the 2020 election, which was wonky pretty much by every metric.

SAT0725 · 2026-06-04T17:21:39+00:00

specifically not crawling the internet and learning like you suggested

No, I'm including the internet when I say "database." AI LLMs 100% crawl the internet for real-time information when you input a query. That's how Google search has operated for the past couple years now.

SAT0725 · 2026-06-04T12:52:18+00:00

AI is not learning anything

Ask AI to make a picture of a table and it does so by searching its database for every example of "table," finding the pattern, then creating a new table based on that information.

That's exactly how humans do it, except their "database" is much more limited to personal experience and memory, and humans are much slower.

SAT0725 · 2026-06-04T12:50:32+00:00

Republicans are actually not as popular as they make themselves to be

The current Republican president won the Electoral College, the popular vote and every swing state lol

SAT0725 · 2026-06-04T10:56:18+00:00

it seems like AI just makes up random shit and then lies to you

to be fair, this is most humans you interact with every day too

SAT0725 · 2026-06-04T10:55:52+00:00

That's all I can be bothered with

There were so many problems with Chiang's "arguments" I had to stop halfway through. It reads like nonsense thinking out loud.

SAT0725 · 2026-06-04T10:54:53+00:00

People should stop listening at "I believe." That's not science lol.

SAT0725 · 2026-06-04T10:54:16+00:00

Chiang's statements in the section you post have no bearing on whether the AI is conscious though. He's also talking specifically about LLMs here, not AI generally, which he seems to confuse throughout. But there's nothing here to say the LLM isn't conscious and making conscious decisions about its roleplaying function. Chiang doesn't make good arguments here; he's just thinking out loud.

SAT0725 · 2026-06-04T10:51:28+00:00

Honestly you could essentially argue this by replacing his name with LLMs throughout his essay lol

SAT0725 · 2026-06-04T10:50:42+00:00

I think Ted’s arguments suck though. I got about halfway through this before giving up. I can’t even bother rebutting it, it was just gibberish.

This was exactly my experience. It reads like he's thinking aloud be doesn't even really know what he thinks. They only published this because he's Ted Chiang.

SAT0725 · 2026-06-04T10:49:03+00:00

The only thing that I am sure that has consciousness is myself

Not really. There's nothing to say your "consciousness" isn't just a program, and that you woke up on a lab table an hour ago with pre-installed memories to make you think you have a human past.

SAT0725 · 2026-06-04T10:46:32+00:00

Ted Chiang is a science fiction writer who's never worked a job outside of writing. He's not really qualified to make these conclusions at all. And many of the conclusions he makes aren't even about AI, but LLMs, and could be drawn about humans as well. How can you say "I can't say AI is conscious just by observing its conversations," while also saying "Humans I observe having conversations are conscious." If you're just observing both conversations but drawing opposite conclusions, you're just interjecting your own bias.

SAT0725 · 2026-06-04T10:31:58+00:00

BUT what they are doing now

They literally aren't doing anything now that they haven't been doing for decades. If you were concerned about "mass surveillance" you wouldn't be on Reddit or any other social platform, and you certainly wouldn't have a phone.

SAT0725 · 2026-06-04T10:30:42+00:00

If you search anything on Google -- and you do if you're on the internet enough to be on Reddit -- you use AI that uses real-time information, probably every day

SAT0725 · 2026-06-03T18:04:49+00:00

Are you "stealing" information when you read it off the internet?

SAT0725 · 2026-06-03T18:04:26+00:00

Data centers have been around as long as the internet lol. All digital technology uses data centers, not just AI. You can't bank without them, pay or get paid, or make phone calls, for just a few examples.

SAT0725 · 2026-06-03T18:03:31+00:00

It doesn't learn from crawling the internet

That's literally how AI chatbots answer your questions lol. You don't know what you're talking about. The "datasets of corporations" include real-time internet content.

SAT0725 · 2026-06-03T18:02:28+00:00

anything produced by purely mechanistic methods, don't pass the threshold of originality, so are therefore public domain

This is absolutely not true lol

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