Doesn’t this mean one fewer Republican Senators then? He was elected in 2023 so he still had safe years on his term in office.
Also from Wikipedia:
“He is the only currently serving senator without at least a bachelor’s degree.”
Well, trump has said “I love the poorly educated”, so this is an on-brand choice for trump.
Feb 16 2026 Justice Department head Pam Bondi says “all Epstein files released”
“Attorney General Pam Bondi announced in a letter to Congress that the Justice Department has released what she described as ‘all’ of the Jeffrey Epstein files, saying the agency has fulfilled its obligations under the Epstein Transparency Act.”
Mar 4 2026 … apparently that thing she said was a lie.
GOP 2016: “fuck your feelings”
GOP 2026: “feelings are now national policy and justification for unprovoked war”
I agree, but we should also take it a personal warning that, maybe not today, but as we age and our mental faculties decline, we too may fall victim to something like this.
There was another article from a very similar set of circumstances of a man originally from Portland going off the deep end with an AI relationship. He committed suicide by jumping off a bridge, not because a prompt told him to, but because of the deep psychosis from the long term engagement.
If you feel this happens so frequently, give me a series of prompts to use so that I can replicate this.
And since you won’t, that’s what I thought.
The chatlogs as reported were 55,000 pages long.
If those logs become public you’ll have your chance. I hope you don’t wear out your fingers in your attempt to replicate it.
I posted my response to this sentiment in another thread of another man killing himself because of his deep AI chatbot addiction, but it applies here too.
It is sad that there are people who are so alone that they can no longer determine the difference between genuine human interaction and a facsimile.
Do you believe you have never responded to a post by a bot on Reddit, Lemmy, or elsewhere where you believe to be conversing with a human? While I know we’re talking about different degrees between this man and the rest of us, it should give a tiny piece of what they were experiencing before we dismiss that it could never happen to us too.
Its not often trump officials admit to falling for a scam and attacking another country.
The Trump administration and its allies in Congress presented a shifting new justification Monday for the U.S. attack on Iran, with House Speaker Mike Johnson suggesting that the White House believed Israel was determined to act on its own, leaving the president with a “very difficult decision.”
Mom: If someone else is jumping off a bridge, would you too?
GOP: Yes
Executive Branch’s tariff plan gets around the Congressional spending controls. I’m pretty sure those funds from tariffs are income that doesn’t come from taxpayer budgets that Congress controls/approves.
OpenAI said it had found a way to put safeguards into its technologies that would somehow prevent the systems from being used in ways that it does not want them to be.
When pressed for specifics on the nature of the safeguards, OpenAI’s Altman replied, “We’ve included the phrase ‘pretty please don’t use this for killing people or spying on Americans’ in our contract with Department of Defense. With this language in place we’re confident that our company values respecting human life and the privacy of all Americans is protected”. /s
It really doesn’t make sense to lump rent and mortgage together, and I feel like Gen Z is hit hardest because they’d have the lowest rates of homeownership.
The real title is the title of the graph in the artle: “Gen Zers Most Likely to Struggle with Housing Payments”.
The article is lumping rent and mortgage together because including both covers all ways someone can pay for housing. The “hit hardest” part is in there to communicate that, while GenZ is getting its ass kicked the most on housing costs, it isn’t the only generation having trouble.
Guess what I’m saying is I’ve sort of dared AI to suck me in, and … I am unchanged.
I’m not sure this tests the point I was raising. In all of those cases, you knew at the beginning that you were dealing with AI. Yes, the man in our article did too, but what if you didn’t know it was AI to begin with when you started interacting with it? How would your interactions change? What “safe guards” would you not have up if, as an example, it was appearing to you like a Lemmy poster instead of a dedicated AI interaction window?
I don’t think for a second there is any sort of emotional or intelligent entity in the other end.
Of course, because there isn’t when we are rational. I also assume you are a psychologically healthy person. There is a suggestion the man in the article may have had an underlying condition, but he wasn’t aware of it.
I think if more people experimented with generation settings like temperature and watched AI go to incoherent acid trips, it would feel more like a machine to them.
I completely agree. I’ve done some experiments of my own training a small LLM from scratch (not Fine Tuning an existing commercial model) using training data exclusively from a small set of public domain books I have read. I then had this LLM produce output. Since I had read the books, I could see pieces of where it got components of its responses. Cranking up temperature would make it go off the rails, which was fun to see. Overfitting made it try to give me something close to what I asked for, but obviously fail. I really liked the whole exercise because it was a small enough set of data with all of the levers and knobs exposed for me to see how far it could go, and more importantly how far it couldn’t.
They were not a thing like they are today
I disagree with your statement.
Do I need to point to obvious examples such as the US Declaration of Independence in 1776?
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”
And human rights have always been a thing only respected by democracies. But nowhere as much as in EU where it is a requirement.
Even ancient Rome had a number of things legally protected that we call “human rights” today. I think you’re conveniently cherry picking conditions and a time to make your statement true ignoring history. You’re welcome to do that, but I believe that’s intellectually dishonest. You’re free to your opinion and your position though, so I’ll leave you to it. Thank you for conversing up to now. I hope you have a great day.
I’m very very confused. You…don’t think the concept of human rights existed before 1939 (or 1945)?
I read this story this morning and have been thinking back to it all day. This wasn’t just some idiot that was too stupid or young to not realize he was talking to a bot and did something like drink bleach because it told him to.
This was one of us.
He fit lots of behaviors I see here from me and my fellow Lemmy posters. He:
Doesn’t this guy sound like someone that would be a Lemmy poster to you too?
He started using LLMs (ChatGPT specifically) as a tool only to advance his hobby and work. When he first started it appears he understood it was just a tool, and didn’t think it was something sentient. Only later after hundreds of hours of exposure did this idea arise in him.
Was there some underlying psychological problem that the LLM exacerbated? Possibly. But at what level was his original underlying issue? Do we all have some low level condition that would make us equally susceptible? I know we’d like to think we don’t, but how do we know? This man certainly didn’t think he did, I’m sure.
Next I think about what it would take for me to get down this bad path without realizing it. At one point would I be talking to a chat bot, not realize it, and let what that chat bot said change or influence my thoughts when I’d have zero knowledge of it being just a fancy program? I consider myself moderately smart with good critical thinking skills, but I’m sure this man did too.
Then it occurred to me that I have to concede that I have, at some point, already interacted with a bot in years past on Reddit or even today on Lemmy and I had no idea it was a bot. Was that interaction a throwaway conversation about pop culture that would have no impact on my world view or was it a much deeper and important political or philosophical conversation that the bot introduced an idea or hallucinated evidence to support a point and I didn’t catch it to challenge it? Am I already a few or many steps down the bad path of falling for illusions of a bot? I certainly don’t think so, but neither did he.
How many of us are already on the same path as this guy and just as ignorant about the danger as the man in the article?
Geopolitically you’re cherry picking from a time when nations of the EU are not as powerful globally. When Germany was powerful, look how they treated the Poles. When Belgium was powerful look at it treated the people of Central Africa (Congo). Spain, at the height of its power, treated the Aztec and other nations in the Caribbean with zero respect.
also because to be in EU it is a requirement to observe human rights. Disrespecting the rights of people even if they aren’t of your own nationality, is contrary to democratic values.
That is part of the diplomatic veneer. Yes, its an ideal, but it will be discarded when geopolitically necessary. How many boats of migrants have drowned off the coast of Italy or Greece? Are diplomats and citizens of Israel still allowed free movement in the EU with its treatment of those in Gaza?
Keep in mind, I’m not criticizing the EU. I recognize the really ugly realities that come with geopolitics and the choices that national leaders make to serve the interests of their citizens, even with it conflicts with their own ideals.
You may be thinking China and Russia are just as bad or maybe even worse, but that isn’t the pattern you should be looking at, you should compare with other democracies, and especially countries that have better democracy than USA.
Comparing “degrees of disrespect” is ignoring geopolitical realities. If you want to have a conversation about ideals humanity should adopt we will likely agree on most of the points of the discussion, but understand national leaders will (when push comes to shove) ignore all of it and do what they think is best for their nation no matter the cost to other nations.
Also, none of this is a defense of the actions of China, Russia, or the USA. Its a recognition that powerful nations do these things when it serves their interests.
Nah that’s Biden’s fault too. But Trump is so much greater than Biden as well.
How are they trying spin that to make it make sense? Biden was a regular private citizen when the 2020 election took place. He didn’t even hold any political office at the time. One could even have called Biden and “unemployed old man” at the time the election had taken place.
Rape as a method of power is a tiny tiny tiny part/tool of geopolitics at the nation state level. Almost too small mention. The same original statement is the rationale for colonization of the Carrebean/Americas/Africa by European powers in the 15th century and beyond as just an example.
Trump wants his fuckin name all over everything
There’s a fantastic new IRS approved tax advantaged retirement savings account for newborn (and otherwise young) children. The asshole named it after himself and even called the tax form 4547. I’m considering skipping using it simply because of his name attached to it, but trump will be long gone when children owing these accounts finally put them to use, so I’ll likely bite the bullet and use them anyway.
Trump wants his fuckin name all over everything
Pro-Trump activists who say they are in coordination with the White House are circulating a 17-page draft executive order that claims China interfered in the 2020 election
So the narrative they’re going with is that China interfered with the election while trump in charge, and trump was powerless to detect or stop it, but that 4 years later President Biden was able to execute free, fair, and accurate elections?
They’re admitting he’s a loser and couldn’t do the job?
This is likely one case where capitalist polluters and leftist environmentalists are on the same side. Neither wants to see this plant in operation.
Coal is an expensive way to generate electricity in the USA. Its a PITA to get the coal and deal with the tailings. Further with the death of coal power being obvious for decades, plant operators have put off maintenance again and again knowing that the plants closing is forthcoming. The forced demand from the government would require at least some of that expensive maintenance done to keep operating. Plant operators don’t want to spend that money for something that is going to be closed as soon in the years ahead as trump isn’t in the picture anymore.