Love The Soul of a New Machine as a retrocomputing enthusiast, probably the best book I’ve read covering an engineering project. Too young to have experienced the minicomputer era but I’m fascinated by it. Rest in Peace.

Reminds me of the Bellingcat system where they crowdsource an effort to help identify locations and other helpful information in images related to child sexual abuse. I imagine AI will be really helpful for this kind of work in the future if it isn’t already being utilized.

So let’s be clear: your only example of what was happening under Biden is the thing that Trump has turned up to eleven while also doing all the other things I listed.

We’re talking Iran, Venezuela, Iran again, Cuba next, threats against Greenland and Canada within a few months. You really have to be clueless to pretend this is just the same thing that was happening the previous four years under Biden.

Ah, but it’s not just those who voted this way. It’s more those who actively supported this idea and were pushing for people not to vote because of it. We’ll never have certainty about how much of an impact it made on the actual vote but I think any reasonable person would concede by this point that the consequences of the result they were advocating for have been much, much worse than just picking the lesser evil even if you believe that lesser evil allowed an unrestrained Israel to conduct genocide. I do think the facts contradict that claim anyway since we’ve seen Israel’s actions rise to a whole another level after Trump has truly let the Netanyahu government loose but even if that wasn’t the case there’s a lot more harm being done both domestically and abroad in addition to that all continuing.

It’s also not just the presidential election by the way, in a world where the House had been under Democratic control we’d probably have seen Trump limited in meaningful ways over the past year.

Agreed, I don’t mean to suggest anyone should go back to viewing the Republicans as a normal political party if they do. It would be purely opportunistic on their part.

There’s also value in making him even less popular at home as this is very likely to do if it drags out with no clear end. If the dems got control of the both the senate and the house in November everyone probably would have to deal with less of his bs. Even better if the majority becomes big enough for them to do more. There’s probably even a point where even his own party would start to finally distance themselves from him more.