The problem here is that if this is unreliable…

And the problem if it is reliable is that everyone becomes dependent on Google to literally define reality.

Those would be easy things to add, if you were trying to pass it off as real.

A closer US parallel might be getting appointed to the Supreme Court.

Regardless of how the image was generated, why is Google treating a random blogspam site as the authoritative version of a work of art over (say) Wikipedia?

According to the article:

As 404 Media has reported in January, Google is regularly surfacing AI-generated websites that game search engine optimization before the human-made websites they are trained on. “Our focus when ranking content is on the quality of the content, rather than how it was produced,” Google told 404 Media in a statement at the time.

Does that mean I can search for any famous image, take the largest existing version, upscale it by 1% and post it on my own site, and instantly be featured at the top of google searches?

The way to push them left is to actually push them left—protesting, calling your representatives, donating to campaigns you support, voting for candidates in local primaries where your vote is exponentially more influential, et cetera.

But voting in a presidential election doesn’t push anyone anywhere. For one thing, pushing is a continuous, incremental feedback process, while the outcome of a presidential election is a discrete binary one—there’s no map between the two. But more significantly, this buys into a narrative that the media has constructed over the past few generations, in which voting is a semiotic process with the people signaling their desires with their votes and politicians signaling their response with legislation. This leaves the media in full control of the political process by interpreting for each side what the other “means”: because the votes and bills in themselves are devoid of meaning beyond their real effects, the media is free to insert whatever meaning suits them.

Voting is a direct act of endorsement

endorse | verb [with object]
to declare one’s public approval or support of.

Your vote is expressly not public—you’re prohibited from keeping or sharing any proof of your vote. In part this is to prevent people from using their votes as signals of anything outside the immediate issue.

There aren’t only two candidates.

In the event that your vote actually decides the election, it does so by giving the winner one more vote than the runner-up; at that point those are the only two candidates at issue. And that’s the only event in which your vote matters.

Voting for a third party, like trying to walk through a third door, is an indication of intent. Going through the door would be getting them elected to office.

And yes, supporting a party would be endorsing whatever evil policies the party supports—but voting isn’t an act of endorsement. Nobody knows how you vote; it has no meaning as a personal statement. Its only meaning is in the differential effects of the policies of the two candidates your vote decides between, in the most likely scenario in which it is the deciding vote.

You absolutely should support and endorse a party you believe in, but don’t mistake voting in a presidential election for either of those things.

Typing with long nails is the embodiment of “beauty is pain.”

The pain is real, but the beauty is subjective.

The presence of minor parties on the ballot doesn’t “place immense pressure on the duopoly”—it just tips the balance toward one or the other component of the duopoly. Which is why either party will actively encourage it when it suits them.

Edit: There’s a historically-proven method of forming new parties in the U.S., which is why we don’t still have the Whigs or the Federalists. In the past, distinct factions would form within one of the dominant parties, until the parent party imploded and two or more new parties emerged. That process of internal fission was suppressed after the Civil War, and that’s how the “duopoly” now maintains its power.

Of course, a different voting system would serve the same purpose (arguably better), and the suppression of alternate voting methods is also duopolistic. But the existence of minor parties under the current system just reenforces the duopoly by channeling dissent away from internal factions.

It applies to any house that isn’t designed to infer your intended goal and automatically rebuild itself to suit.

Couldn’t you theoretically do the same thing by tracking someone’s eye movements on video chat, if they look at their keyboard while typing?

I’m not familiar with every client, but on mine it only hides the domain for users on my own server. (Early email used to work exactly the same—you could send an email addressed to just a username with no tld and it would go to the user with that name on your own server by default.)

It should work the same as email: you can trust it’s them if the user account is hosted on their own site, or their employer’s, or if they link to it from another confirmed source.

They don’t mention any kind of control—I guess an appropriate one would be having a human interact with the participants one-on-one to see if they were as effective. (Although even if they were, the chatbots would likely be easier to implement in practice.)

See my comment here.

When cats meow, there’s a one-to-one correspondence between the aural qualities of the sound and the communicative intent of the cat—the same meow doesn’t have different meanings depending on the preceding and following meows. That’s how animals normally use sounds to communicate.

There are two common exceptions, where animals string arbitrary sounds together in longer sequences in which the individual components don’t have distinct communicative intents in the way animals usually interpret them: songbirds and humans. (Another possible exception might be cetaceans.)

(For example: If I said “pass the butter”, “don’t eat all the butter”, or “I need to get more butter”, the word “butter” would have different communicative intents even if I said them the exact same way—like a note of a bird’s song, and unlike a cat’s meow.)

Animals are good at interpreting other animals’ nonverbal cues, and can often pick up a human’s general intentions without understanding their speech. But the speech itself probably seems like a bad attempt to create an accompanying musical score.

Buying recommendations as in a list of products provided on request, rather than intrusive narratives that disrupt what you’re trying to watch.

Or perhaps an AI that blocks ads and then gives you buying recommendations based on products from their competitors.

There is no dark side of the moon Facebook, really—matter of fact it’s all dark.