I only have so many minutes to spend on this plane of existence, so if I look through something and decide “this isn’t enough to go anywhere”, then no, I’m not going to spend more time on it. I’d be happy to be wrong and see Trump and his cronies get brought down by a ragtag group of statisticians who found the truth and didn’t give up until justice was served, but I really don’t think that’ll happen.

… did you read the update to that last link? Kinda undermined quite a bit of this.

I’m open to the idea that a conspiracy happened. We know they aren’t above things like sending an alternate slate of electoral votes and then hoping to override the legitimate results in Congress, because that absolutely did happen. But stealing seven separate elections in all the swing states is a hell of a tough job, and harder to do it without being caught for months. If it did happen, there’d be more evidence than just statistical anomalies within the official results. You’d see people recorded as voting who say they never did, you’d see exit polls that don’t make sense, you’d see an audit reveal missing paper ballots, there’d be something more. And even if it was the perfect crime, you’ll need to find a flaw to actually get anything done about it anyway. There isn’t enough here to say it happened. There’s enough to look into some suspicious stuff in a few places, and go ahead and check those out, but don’t get your hopes up or say that it’s the only conclusion. The simplest and most obvious answer remains the most likely: the country elected Trump by choice.

When did I say I don’t trust math people? I do, but not when they’re saying “these numbers don’t look quite right, so here’s an entire story about how maybe they used satellites to steal an election.” I’ve said repeatedly through the thread that this stuff should be looked at, but we need to keep in mind that stealing an election is very hard to do and not immediately dismiss contrary evidence like the fact that many elections that absolutely could not be manipulated the same way showed a similar result of a giant swing to the right, or that independent exit polls didn’t report anything unusual.

I’m open to the idea that there might be something here, I just haven’t seen anything particularly compelling, it’s all been very typical conspiracy theory stuff. The Trump lawyer thing I did hear about, I don’t remember anything about actually changing results though, just unauthorized access. Trump saying something suspicious, well, he says a lot of stuff. The drop off rates being different between the two candidates seems sensible to me, I’d expect quite a few Trump voters to just care about Trump and not the rest of the races, and less so on the Democratic side. It’s the reason turnout now seems to help Republicans, they’ve won over a lot of unreliable voters and Trump brings them out better than most. A coordinated, multi-state conspiracy to rig the election seems very unlikely to stay completely airtight for over a year.

Is there a source that specifically claims that these anomalies are happening in states using the same voting system and not in others? I haven’t seen that in anything linked to me so far, and that would be at least interesting.

The breathless reporting and big numbers immediately set off my BS detector. Usually, when a stat says something like “the odds of this happening purely by chance are 1 In a hojillion!” it’s just bad statistics, for example saying “even if each of my windows had a 75% chance of breaking in the hurricane, the odds that all of them would break is less than 1%, so clearly someone sabotaged my house!” No, they were all in the same hurricane, not independent random hurricanes, you can’t just multiply the probabilities like that. It’s very easy to do bad stats and come up with wild results.

It also looks like this is mostly focused on Pennsylvania, where there’s actually more to look at. Again, sure! It’s worth looking into. Let’s see evidence that this crosses state lines and isn’t just Pennsylvania. Let’s see evidence that the machines really were vulnerable and not just that they could’ve been. Let’s find someone who will name names and give specifics about this conspiracy. If this stuff is true, it’ll get picked up by more sober voices that aren’t yelling “it was stolen, it was stolen, don’t you all see???” and then it might be worth tuning in.

Okay, so where’s the massive exit poll discrepancy between who voters say they voted for and the official results? That would be a red flag worth paying attention to, if it showed inconsistent results between down ballot and top line races but only in states that used these supposedly compromised voting machines.

This is why Trump was so convinced the dems cheated. The people outvoted a vote shifting algorithm.

See, this is exactly what the conservatives say when you ask “well, how did Trump win in 2016 and 2024 if the elections are rigged?” Obviously, the sheer power of True American Patriots overwhelmed the Democratic rigging. It’s not any more sensible when we do it.

I can’t say I read everything here, but what I did looked mostly like “these numbers seem funny to me.” Which is reason to look further, sure, but far short of definitive proof. Is there any reason to believe the vote tabulators were running this compromised code, or had default passwords set? Is there an independent statistics expert saying “they’re right, this is suspicious”? A confession by one of what must have been hundreds of co-conspirators in this, apparently, multi-year project that has perfectly evaded scrutiny until these folks found the truth? It’s an extraordinary claim, and the bar for believing it hasn’t even come close to being met.

Okay, sure. That’s one thing in one election that should be looked at, and if more comes up, great, chase that down too. There is a massive gap between that and “zomg the national election was totally stolen!”

I don’t think this is true. There’s no mechanism for correcting a fixed election other than impeachment as far as I know, and that would require Republicans to play ball, and obviously they won’t. Not to mention that nothing in this post is backed up by any evidence, just “this could have happened.”

There is basically zero actual evidence here. The argument basically goes “this could’ve happened, then this other thing could’ve happened, then a third thing could’ve happened, someone said something vaguely ominous in a group chat, and then something we all know is impossible happened: Donald Trump was elected President despite being obviously bad. There’s only one conclusion: the election was stolen and now we just need to track it down.” Read the article again and try to pick out the things that are shown to have actually happened and weren’t just suspicions or possibilities.

It doesn’t hold up for the same reasons the 2020 doubts didn’t hold up. Did they do this in every state? Because the results were pretty uniform across the country, it was a big swing right. It’d be the biggest and most successful conspiracy in history, getting away with rigging a wide variety of completely separate voting systems, many of which are heavily or entirely paper-based, many of which are run by blue states or weren’t even competitive, with no leaks and no discrepancies in any of the public records.

Or, maybe, just maybe, Biden was incredibly unpopular and Kamala didn’t run a good campaign, while Donald “I’ll fix everything and everyone will be rich” Trump promised to take action and not just continue the same policies for another four years, so people gave him another shot. “Oh, but he had felonies! Surely the electorate would never!” Yeah, they would. We elect terrible people all the time. He won. This isn’t productive.

Some states do it this way. Other states do it all electronically (fewer now than in the past, thankfully). Other states do it all on paper and do the counting with offline counting machines, then spot check some precincts at random. Some do it by mail entirely on paper.

And that’s the big reason why this line of inquiry is nonsense. The entire country showed a huge shift to the right, not just the swing states or the states that are more vulnerable. That’s 51 entirely separate election systems that you’d have to manipulate, make sure public information about the election matches exactly, and also not go so far that any independent exit polls show anything fishy either. The scale of conspiracy to do it in even one state, make no mistakes, and have no one leak is hard to believe. Doing it across the entire country? You’re going to need a lot more than “I feel like the numbers are fishy” to be convincing. The conservatives were wrong when they said 2020 was rigged, and anyone saying 2024 was rigged is equally wrong.

It’s very good for navigating and editing text quickly, and fantastic for situations like “I need to do the same thing 100 times” with things like macros. Coders are frequently opening a big, complex file, jumping around it a lot, changing big and small parts of it, and doing repetitive tasks. For something more like writing out thoughts for an email, editing them slightly, then being done with that text forever, there aren’t as many advantages, you’re spending most of your time in “insert” mode which is effectively “normal text editor that people are used to” mode. That said, it’s one of those things where when you do get used to it and start to enjoy it instead of being frustrated by how different it is, you start wanting it wherever you have to type anything.

They also took away the ability to specify your answer separately from the answer you were looking for from others, so now it’s just “did you say the same thing.” Which doesn’t make any sense for some questions, like “do you prefer a partner that is a) taller than you, b) shorter than you, c) doesn’t matter”, if you both picked A or B, you aren’t a match for this question!

It’s worse, a single infinite loop will warm up the computer a bit, this program starts two copies of itself, each of which starts two copies of itself… unless you’ve set some limits on things the computer’s going to be locked up within seconds.

I think you’re thinking of SerenityOS (although it isn’t actually a Linux):

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/not-a-linux-distro-review-serenityos-is-a-unix-y-love-letter-to-the-90s/

It’s the same rule, “fair use”. Copyright isn’t absolute, it needs to strike a balance between “give creators control of their thing” but also “people deserve to participate in our collective culture.”

Making a one-off drawing of a character and not trying to make money off of it likely checks the fair use boxes (it’s an explicitly fuzzy system, so a trial would be needed to say for sure if it’s fair use or not). Whether the training set for a generative AI system is fair use or not is still an open question, but many feel that it can’t be, as it’s operating on a massive scale (basically every image ever created by humanity) and has the potential to eliminate the entire industry of humans selling the art they create, which copyright is supposed to protect. Ghibli isn’t going to be harmed by someone drawing a picture of their characters for a meme. It could be harmed by another company making money off of mass production of knockoffs of their style which were created with thousands of unauthorized copies of their direct artwork.

Fellow former popes, you mean, by reading this message you hereby excommunicate yourself.

I’m bitterly clinging to my iPhone 13 mini, because I suspect it’s the last phone I’ll ever actively enjoy. I went along with bigger phones when that became the trend and decided I didn’t like them, and the mini line was such a relief to go back to. Once it’s no longer tenable, I’ll probably just buy a series of “the least bad used phone I can find” because I know I’ll be mildly frustrated every time I use it.

It’s the last one, the “wait a day” option and the “pay $20” options aren’t equivalent. If it’s still a day away from viability, it isn’t viable yet, but if it’s $20 away, it is. You may be of the opinion that waiting a day isn’t a big deal, or is only $20 worth of hardship, but that’s not your choice to make for others.

You’d think ending a doomed pregnancy would be a simple matter even for pro-lifers, yes. They often don’t consider the issue, or assume that it’ll always be clear-cut and obvious in every circumstance, or worry that any exception will be used as a loophole.

I can’t believe this word doesn’t seem to have made it into any part of this thread, but I think you’re looking for viability: the point where a fetus can live outside of the womb. This isn’t a hard line, of course, and technology can and has changed where that line can be drawn. Before that point, the fetus is entirely dependent on one specific person’s body, and after that point, there are other options for caring for it. That is typically where pro-choice folks will draw the line for abortion as well; before that point, an abortion ban is forced pregnancy and unacceptable, after that point there can be some negotiation and debate (though that late into a pregnancy, if an abortion is being discussed it’s almost certainly a health crisis, not a change of heart, so imposing restrictions just means more complications for an already difficult and dangerous situation).