Candescence 's Techdirt Comments

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  • On the post: Senator Cruz Figure Out Who Was President From 2018 To 2020 Challenge; Impossible

    Candescence ( profile ), 06 Oct, 2025 @ 11:18am

    Ted Cruz is either a mendacious liar. Or an idiot.
    I'm inclined to put him in the "both" category, thanks.

  • On the post: George Washington’s Worries Are Coming True

    Candescence ( profile ), 03 Oct, 2025 @ 11:45am

    Okay, so you're antimuslim, antisemite and a fascist. Cool, thanks for signalling that your opinion is worthless, then.

  • On the post: George Washington’s Worries Are Coming True

    Candescence ( profile ), 03 Oct, 2025 @ 09:28am

    Oh yeah, I forgot to mention this - Trump is still trying to cover up the Epstein Files despite his attorney general saying they were "on [her] desk" and despite having made it a campaign promise because the DOJ discovered how much he was implicated in the sexual abuse and trafficking of children. That alone should make any president wildly unfit for office.

  • On the post: George Washington’s Worries Are Coming True

    Candescence ( profile ), 03 Oct, 2025 @ 09:19am

    Oh, so your idea of course-correction is electing a thin-skinned mad, stupid king whose health is failing and is becoming increasingly senile, changes his mind based on who last talked to him, is driving the American economy off a cliff (while putting inflation in the "too hard" basket and basically making it worse), completely ignoring the courts whenever it suits him, and has turned ICE and the FBI into his personal gestapo. Oh, and right now he's considering a $10 billion bailout of farmers who got fucked over by his trade policies and the only people trying to prevent ordinary Americans' healthcare costs from skyrocketing are the Democrats (hence the shutdown). Gee, how's that working out for you? Or are you just so happy to see people of color and non cis people getting fucked over that you don't care that you're getting fucked by the uber-rich?

  • On the post: The Murder Of Charlie Kirk Didn’t Help Anyone

    Candescence ( profile ), 11 Sep, 2025 @ 10:22pm

    Side-note, but against an oppressor it has to be accepted that you have to readily reserve self-defense as a fallback option, if not the only option available. Despite popular history depicting him as a pacifist, Martin Luther King Jr. embraced the right of black Americans to arm themselves against white oppressors, his methods were not spotless and pure (he has been severely whitewashed over time), armed black resistance was just as crucial to the civil rights movement as the peaceful marches if not moreso, and if you need to push back, push back. "This Non-Violent Stuff Will Get You Killed" by Charles E. Cobb Jr. and "We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement" by Akinyele Omowale Umoja, amongst other books, should be required reading for folks who really want to understand the civil rights movement and how it involved decades of armed resistance. Also, "we've been duped" by lil bill.

  • On the post: The Murder Of Charlie Kirk Didn’t Help Anyone

    Candescence ( profile ), 11 Sep, 2025 @ 11:16am

    I have two things to say about Kirk's death - I agree that killing him doesn't help anyone nor was it the right way to deal with his hateful, bigoted rhetoric. On the other hand, he was killed via the exact sort of political violence he advocated for, and was probably shot by an alt-right lunatic because of something utterly inane. Play stupid games, reap what you sow, etc. etc. RIP in piss bozo, and I hope he burns in hell.

  • On the post: Federal Prosecutors: Thrown Sandwiches Are A Felony But Openly Carrying Rifles Isn’t A Problem

    Candescence ( profile ), 27 Aug, 2025 @ 09:28am

    As it happens, the DC grand jury assigned to this case did the funniest thing and basically told the DOJ they can get fucked. This says a lot about how hard it's gonna be for them to charge him. If they can't even get a grand jury to indict him, a jury for even a misdemeanor offense wouldn't find him guilty.

  • On the post: Ross Scott Gets A Second Chance For His ‘Stop Killing Games’ Crusade

    Candescence ( profile ), 16 Jul, 2025 @ 08:20pm

    For what it's worth, it's not like Ross Scott is an expert in campaigning either - hell, he explicitly said in one of his recent videos that he thinks he's the wrong person to head a campaign like this, but he's the only one that stepped up at the right time, due to being passionate on the issue. He's expecting to end his involvement entirely once all options are exhausted. I'm just happy that the alarm that the EU petition might fail supercharged it instead.

  • On the post: Trump Budget Bill Turns ICE Into A Superpredator

    Candescence ( profile ), 07 Jul, 2025 @ 07:59pm

    And this means that ICE will continue to be this terrible long after Trump leaves office (assuming, of course, he decides to respect this particular law). Once the money becomes part of an agency’s budget, it takes a concerted effort to roll back the expected annual funding. And from what we’ve seen of the federal government pretty much since its inception, funding only gets cut if it scores political points. Since ICE is part of the DHS and the DHS is still pretending it gives a single shit about homeland security, all it will take for ICE to remain the largest US law enforcement agency is periodic assertions about its national security-related efforts, even if those efforts are just regular-ass racism the agency pretends makes this country safer.
    I wouldn't bet on that with certainty. Zohran Mamdani's NYC mayoral primary win is already emboldening Democrats annoyed with the party establishment (between Schumer and Jeffries being unable to meet the moment and multiple Dem congresspeople dying due to cancer and old age which only made it easier for the GOP to pass this bill, the party establishment is very on the nose recently), I can imagine a full-fledged Democrat "tea party" movement occurring and ousting a lot of incumbents, especially in safe seats. And this particular insurgency would be particularly hostile to ICE and would be loudly clamoring to defund it. A fight over ICE's funding could easily happen as soon as 2027, depending on the outcome of the midterms (which is likely to be a blue wave in any case, which would easily hand Congress to the Democrats due to the GOP holding it by a tiny margin). I would be very surprised if this amount of ICE funding survives the midterms.

  • On the post: Why Centralized AI Is Not Our Inevitable Future

    Candescence ( profile ), 16 Jun, 2025 @ 06:37pm

    I think you perhaps may be a little too optimistic about Sam Altman, his competence and his intentions. The man is a grifter first and foremost, the Orb alone should've demonstrated that, and I'm not sure even he believes OpenAI is capable of making any big advances in machine learning tech anytime soon, even if he tries desperately to hype up fans and investors. But first and foremost, he's most interested in squeezing as much cash from the "AI" bubble as possible before it bursts. I am still yet to be convinced it isn't a bubble, frankly, even if it's more useful than crypto and has genuine applications in certain areas.

  • On the post: Republicans Plan To Steal Billions In Already-Awarded Broadband Grant Money From States That Attempt ‘AI’ Oversight

    Candescence ( profile ), 10 Jun, 2025 @ 10:28am

    Hilariously, there's probably gonna be a fight over both of these state regulation bans. MTG has stated she didn't know the budget bill had a ban on AI regulation and unless it gets removed she'd vote against the bill if it comes back to the House (which it likely will, a bunch of Senate Republicans really don't like the bill as it is) because states rights. There's gonna be some shit-slinging between the House GOP and the Senate GOP because of irreconcilable differences and I'm gonna be eating popcorn all the while.

  • On the post: John Carmack: Calm Down About Video Game AI Tech Demos, Folks

    Candescence ( profile ), 23 Apr, 2025 @ 10:16pm

    I still remain severely unconvinced that "generative AI" isn't going to hit some kind of wall within a year or two. There's not enough data and power and even increasing that apparently has diminishing returns, and even distilled models have major issues. I wasn't exactly freaking out about the Quake "demo" either, I mean, it runs at a comically low framerate and the environment changes completely just by turning around. There are fundamental issues with it that I can't see anyone fixing anytime soon.

  • On the post: Trump Admits US Can Get Abrego Garcia Back From Torture Camp He Was Accidentally Sent To; But DOJ Makes Clear It Won’t Even Ask

    Candescence ( profile ), 14 Apr, 2025 @ 10:17am

    Not even an hour after this article was posted and Trump and Bukele are laughing at the idea of bringing Abrego back and calling him a terrorist with no evidence to support it. The Supreme Court gave Trump a relatively easy layup and he's still ignoring it, purely because he can't ever admit he made a mistake.

  • On the post: Tow Center Study Again Shows “AI” Sucks At Conveying Accurate News

    Candescence ( profile ), 20 Mar, 2025 @ 09:08pm

    I mean, the problem here is that these models are just fancy word-matching algorithms, they literally have no capacity for identifying what is correct or incorrect, all these models know is what seems correct based on what they've been trained on. Some of them are just better at being less wrong than others.

  • On the post: GOG’s New Plan To Weaponize Its Community’s Wishlist Of Games To Pressure IP Holders

    Candescence ( profile ), 04 Feb, 2025 @ 06:25am

    Fun fact: there's at least one dedicated website hosting "pirated" fan-patched copies of NOLF that anyone can just download, that are fairly easy to find. Rock Paper Shotgun even linked to one of them in an article highlighting this. Speaks volumes about how the supposed rightsholders don't give a damn.

  • On the post: Why Generative AI’s Lack Of Modularity Means It Can’t Be Meaningfully Open, Is Unreliable, And Is A Technological Dead End

    Candescence ( profile ), 04 Dec, 2024 @ 02:05am

    As far as I'm concerned, generative "AI" has numerous problems that evangelists have no real answer for. It's an extremely contentious technology (just ask artists who are understandably worried about such models being trained on their works and how it would affect their livelihoods), is extremely inconsistent, and I believe a "one size fits all" solution is going to be functionally impossible. Perhaps "bespoke" models for a very specific purpose using limited but relevant training data are going to be more viable, but general-purpose generative models are extremely limited by their training data, introducing a "popularity bias" to things (as in, how well it performs on a specific thing is based on how much data it has on that thing) and because these models are already scraping basically the entire internet, they're already running out of data. The idea of introducing "synthetic training data" to the mix has been floated, but it's an insane suggestion because AI-generated data has actually shown to degrade the quality of models that include it in training data. There's also studies suggesting that there's actually a threshold where the amount of data used to train a model results in diminishing returns to the quality of the model as well. You also can't actually improve these models after training them with new data on the fly, the only way to improve them is to start again from scratch. It's going to be an uphill battle at best for these companies to overcome these problems, if not outright Sisyphian. While machine learning is likely going to have some really interesting and beneficial use cases, I'm convinced that generative "AI" is very likely to be a dead end. These models are hitting rapidly diminishing returns despite the amount of power and data being put into them, and while "AI" has proven to be venture capital bait, last I checked it's also hasn't proven to actually be profitable for anyone. I wouldn't be surprised if generative "AI" goes the way of blockchain and NFTs. The fact that Apple has been slow to get in on LLMs and their approach feels so half-hearted is a massive red flag.

  • On the post: Warner Bros. Still Cutting Off Harry Potter’s Nose To Spite His Face

    Candescence ( profile ), 09 Oct, 2024 @ 11:19pm

    Well, the fact that Joanne is an outspoken bigot and is just plain weird is probably a big part of it.

  • On the post: Warner Bros. Still Cutting Off Harry Potter’s Nose To Spite His Face

    Candescence ( profile ), 09 Oct, 2024 @ 10:48pm

    Wow, this is patently idiotic. You want to encourage actions that help people get into a fandom, and this is not the way to do that. Idiots. Though, really, any bad publicity for this overrated series with a ghoulish publisher and a bigoted author is good.

  • On the post: Press Struggles To Explain How The GOP Killed A Popular Broadband Discount Program, Driving Millions Of Poor Americans Off The Internet

    Candescence ( profile ), 29 Aug, 2024 @ 09:40am

    Well, for what it's worth, Manchin has no chance of being re-elected - his days were numbered the instant Jim Justice began running for Manchin's senate seat. Manchin also left the Democrats once that was obvious, and both he and Sinema are poised to lose all relevance along with their seats. He did briefly mull over the idea of challenging Kamala Harris at the DNC, but he quickly decided not to (likely because she'd completely destroy him and some important people also likely took him aside and told him to drop the idea or else).

  • On the post: Ukraine Turns To Flying Machine Guns And Autonomous AI-Controlled Drone Swarms To Counter Russian Numbers

    Candescence ( profile ), 05 Jul, 2024 @ 07:21pm

    For what it's worth, the apocalypse in Horizon was caused by self-replicating autonomous weapons that used bio-matter as resources. We're thankfully nowhere near that stage, however, and hopefully, if we do get anywhere near that stage, it'll be banned first. Unfortunately, we already have a Ted Faro in the form of Elon Musk, but it's fortunate he's not in the business of making weapons... Yet...

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