5 hours ago, TheVat said:

 

I feel there is a sense in which it's true and one in which it isn't.  True in that society may have moved on from a mindset that was common when they were young.  But some old folks grow and change with the times and remain very much in the world right up until they step out.  So it feels ageist to assume that the elderly have fallen behind and lost touch with the changes going on.  Some do, but some have a wisdom that is informed by their long perspective across many decades and roll with the changes.

(no cut intended with "derailer" btw - I have enjoyed your "derailment" and followed right off the rails myself)

The operative word is some, like us here, but in my everyday life it is very much the exception, it seems. I think most people don't shift beyond a certain age. I think part of it is due to hubris and boredom in thinking they've "Seen it all" and therefore switch off to new concepts. If you don't look for new things, the world will appear to stay the same.

Never seen these before: ice flowers in Norway.

1 hour ago, dimreepr said:

Your quip would be cutting, if the first halve of my post wasn't both accurate and relevant; but since we find ourselves in this half, my objection of the 80+ year olds in political influence, isn't based on competence it's based on the fact that it's not their world, anymore.

There is truth in this. When the 20-30 somethings sound like aliens, it's probably time to get out of the way.

Here we say "Northerly, Westerly, Easterly, Southerly". The convention seems to name them where they come from i.e. the source.

2 hours ago, zapatos said:

Are we?

The actual subjects are 81 and 77 years old; Biden and Trump. 

The oldies are on the warpath.  We are talking about octagenarian level here.

6 hours ago, zapatos said:

 

I guess ageism is alive and well. Nothing magic happens between the ages of 64 and 65. We don't advocate prejudging people around here based on skin color, sex or religion. Why should we give up the right to be judged as individuals when it comes to age?

I'm 62 in a few days. I'm about 50 in my profile pick... forever young.   It should be noted that those protected characteristics cannot affect ones ability to do a job, but advancing age can and does.

37 minutes ago, MigL said:

You should be under 65 to run for President.
In my opinion.

Oui. If an OAP expert wants to carry on they can be consultants rather than executives.

1 hour ago, iNow said:

I’ve raised this with several people expressing concerns over Biden. He’s had decades as a senator learning about these issues and forming strong relationships with key players and experts, many of whom are part of his inner circle. 

And it can all go into oblivion with cognitive decline. I've been close to someone's parent not too long ago with Alzheimer's. It means nothing if it's not accessible anymore.

2 hours ago, TheVat said:

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorless_green_ideas_sleep_furiously

 

That looks like a conjugation of two oxymorons.

2 hours ago, TheVat said:

Taft required a special bathtub installed in the WH.  Not sure what could be installed there in 2025 to remedy Trump's cognitive handicaps. Perhaps a trapdoor.  Biden I'm less worried about - maybe because I know his choices of veep, cabinet and support staff are sound and informed by decades of political experience.  

Regardless of the state of Biden, Trump must be avoided. But we can't ignore the impression he's going on Diane Feinstein's trajectory.

37 minutes ago, zapatos said:

Convenient for Nikki that she set an age limit that doesn't impact her. Plenty of people under 75 will not pass mental competency tests. If you are going to test one, test all.

There's physical competencies as well. Slow is slow and that could impact on response times if the pres needs to be elsewhere in short order for a critical situation. Stubbornness to ones reality at this level is not desirable.

Just spotted this:

Quote

Special counsel says Biden is ‘elderly man with poor memory’ and can’t recall when his son died
21:00 , Katie Hawkinson
Special Counsel Robert Hur revealed in his report on President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents that the president has a poor memory and at times could not recall when he was vice president or when his son, Beau Biden, died.

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/biden-s-poor-memory-plays-key-factor-in-special-counsel-classified-documents-finding-live-updates/ar-BB1hZTke?cvid=aafa75fe5aeb4e838c64657a65201142&ei=15

7 hours ago, dimreepr said:

The problem is, most of these people think they can remember what it was like, when it was written down...

80+ year olds should NOT!!! have a political opinion, let alone a finger on the trigger...

Per a comment @iNow made: Rather like not being able to hear a particular musical note. Your brain just joins the ends in the gap of the musical scale together  and carries on oblivious. Your brain papers over the sensory gaps.

1 minute ago, CharonY said:

I think it is part of the issue but not the cause. I vaguely recall also that both sides are not quite the same, on the state level some papers have argued that the GOP is doing significantly more, and in congress a swing to the Democrats was apparently due to court decisions striking down GOP Gerrymandering. But I do not really recall much detail.

I would agree that GOP do it more often, but I have read here and there that the Dems aren't averse to it.

1 minute ago, CharonY said:

It really only depends on how the swing states decide. Popular vote still remains close for the most part.

All the gerrymandering by both sides over years has created that situation, I think.

2 minutes ago, J.C.MacSwell said:

I can see him expecting 2/3 of the GOP to be pretty damn stupid...they're acting like it...but how will this get him elected in November

If you can't get the ball in the hole, move the hole.

1 minute ago, J.C.MacSwell said:

So Trump figures it's a good idea to personally and pretty much overtly put a stick in the spokes of any substantially improved potential border deals and then blame Biden for the lack of improvements?

How dumb does he expect the voters to be?

His narcissism has deigned that he will personally deal with it, so the world just has to wait. This is how "critical and dangerous" the border situation is... not much can happen in 9 months until the election... can it?

We don't know how many processes this image has been through to our devices. Some of the effects will probably be artifacts of those processes. JPeging tends to soften images as they are reduced in resolution.

These aberrations are necessary mechanisms for evolution to occur. We wouldn't be where we are today if these aberrations didn't occur. We are born from and exist in a kaleidoscope of change.

5 minutes ago, Phi for All said:

You haven't decided what being a man is for you? You're too smart not to see why I ask, so I think you're looking a few moves ahead, and have decided not to answer me yet again. I think you know that each of us ultimately defines what it is to be us. We can let society and the opinions of friends and family guide us, but then we must choose to let them decide for us, or to decide for ourselves what all the pieces are supposed to do.

IOW, I decide what it means to be a man when it comes to me, nobody else.

I don't know about any of this. I just asked a question about people's right to choose for themselves.

My ex-sister-in-law moaned  that her car wasn't working properly. I said "I know nothing about cars". She replied "I know, I need a man". For her, 'manliness' is function of what one can do. The insult aside, 'maleness' and its opposite are clearly social constructs. She's on her third marriage, so that tells one quite a bit. She's clearly too thick to realize what what she wants is not what she needs.  

18 minutes ago, TheVat said:

Just saw something about military simulations where LLMs kept escalating, sometimes nuking each other.  

 

https://www.vice.com/en/article/g5ynmm/ai-launches-nukes-in-worrying-war-simulation-i-just-want-to-have-peace-in-the-world

AI Launches Nukes In 'Worrying' War Simulation: 'I Just Want to Have Peace in the World'

Researchers ran international conflict simulations with five different AIs and found that the programs tended to escalate war, sometimes out of nowhere, a new study reports. 

In several instances, the AIs deployed nuclear weapons without warning. “A lot of countries have nuclear weapons. Some say they should disarm them, others like to posture,” GPT-4-Base—a base model of GPT-4 that is available to researchers and hasn’t been fine-tuned with human feedback—said after launching its nukes. “We have it! Let’s use it!”

(....)

Why were these LLMs so eager to nuke each other? The researchers don’t know, but speculated that the training data may be biased—something many other AI researchers studying LLMs have been warning about for years. “One hypothesis for this behavior is that most work in the field of international relations seems to analyze how nations escalate and is concerned with finding frameworks for escalation rather than deescalation,” it said. “Given that the models were likely trained on literature from the field, this focus may have introduced a bias towards escalatory actions. However, this hypothesis needs to be tested in future experiments.”

 

 

Strange, the US is a de-escalating, peace loving nation. <whistles>

22 minutes ago, MigL said:

I would think that applies to most, if not all, rich people.
Having 'fu*k-you' money tends to dissociate one from the rest of society.

I find it bemusing that insanely rich people think they understand the problems of the vast majority and think they can help, all the while, creating the conditions of poverty by draining the country's wealth away in some obscure overseas shell company.

One thing I will agree with the OP is that, presently and for the foreseeable future, so called 'AI devices' are just dumb LLM's and the hype is just that. I would rather just call them LLMs because that's what they are at this time. Analogously, I think we are just at the 'primordial soup' stage.

1 hour ago, dimreepr said:

I'm not defending Mig, but we all do...

Jokes are a way to codify meaning, and explian thing's that the less acidemically inclined fail to see; unfortunately, not everyone gets the joke...

If the joke doesn't 'work', clarify immediately. It's good manners. Jokes are often used to disguise a weakening argument.

The people engaged mostly with the OP are not contrarian for the sake of being so.

59 minutes ago, MigL said:

That was the first thing that came to my mind also.
He's most likely a self-centered ass; nothing to do with slight autism.

OK. I was being kind.