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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • The article says he was chatting with Daenerys Targaryen. Also, every chat page on Character.AI has a disclaimer that characters are fake and everything they say is made up. I don’t think the issue is that he thought that a Game of Thrones character was real.

    This is someone who was suffering a severe mental health crisis, and his parents didn’t get him the treatment he needed. It says they took him to a “therapist” five times in 2023. Someone who has completely disengaged from the real world might benefit from adjunctive therapy, but they really need to see a psychiatrist. He was experiencing major depression on a level where five sessions of talk therapy are simply not going to cut it.

    I’m skeptical of AI for a whole host of reasons around labor and how employers will exploit it as a cost-cutting measure, but as far as this article goes, I don’t buy it. The parents failed their child by not getting him adequate mental health care. The therapist failed the child by not escalating it as a psychiatric emergency. The Game of Thrones chatbot is not the issue here.









  • It’s not that much of an outlier. Nate Silver is tracking Trump’s lead in Florida across numerous polls at +3%. With leaners, this poll found +2%. Off the average by one point with a 3.5% margin of error. Which is to say, well in line with other results.

    The article is sensationalistic and likely wrong in portraying that as a toss-up or close to tied. Trump won Florida in 2020 by +3%. A result that suggests he has a similar lead suggests that he’ll win by about as much as he did in 2020.

    Silver has seven recent polls that inform the Florida average. Not a single one shows Harris ahead. Trump has also outperformed his polling in both of the last two contests, so his actual lead in Florida may be greater than the polling average suggests, but there is nothing to suggest Harris is ahead or likely to pull ahead.

    Trump is likely to win Florida. The race still hinges primarily on Pennsylvania. Harris is not gaining ground. The race is locked in essentially a dead heat, with a tiny edge for Harris if you believe the polls and a tiny edge for Trump if you believe he’ll again outperform the polls.

    I detest these articles and the conspiratorial side of me thinks they’re planted by the right to encourage complacency among Democratic voters. This election is as close as they come and requires everyone to show up and vote.