Is this worth the issues with Gen AI? I don't think so, but it does show that a bit of restraint and purpose can make it work as a tool.

While I do have qualms about it, I did see a residential construction company that posts their walk throughs of their sites' prebid and they used some brief AI overlay to show what basement flooding and the collapse of a wall to good effect, even if I thought it was distracting.

This ad was decidedly slop, it looks bad, it moves in weird disturbing ways, it's unclear what's happening. The reason for that isn't because it's AI, but because the creative team didn't put any effort into it, & when you don't put effort into your art you get slop, no matter what tools you use.

Will they? I'm inclined to say it's statistically unlikely...

... but, fuck it, let her run. If she can do it, she'll do it.

I keep saying that the people who are most *passionate* about politics are frequently also ones who know the *least* about politics.

Before the 2024 elections, I kept encountering Americans online who obviously didn't understand how any of it worked, but had strong opinions!

Too many people think their vote is their personal “brand” … instead of hiring the best of two imperfect options for an important job. “Hiring either of these security guards is beneath me, let that creepy incel in the next office choose. My hands are clean.”

This is what kills me: "Genocide is a red line and that's why I spent months hounding everyone I met with that fact, thus discouraging them from voting Harris, but when it was just me alone in that little voting booth, well, I threw all my morals out the window and voted Harris. Why are you mad?"

Instead we get "look what you made me do"

"Don't tell me not to throw rocks at a hornet's nest! I do what I want and follow my conscience, you dickrider for Big Hornet!"

"Aah! All these hornets are stinging me! Why didn't you stop those hornets?! You obviously didn't want me to be un-stung, you just wanted to fundraise and do nothing!"

Granted, the real thing that ties all these groups together is fundamentally corruption and power, so it ends up being more like mafias taking over governments, but it also means they're far more willing to work together to tamp down opposition across borders.

This is something I've observed as well over the last 15 years.

Authoritarian nationalism has been cropping up in a lot of fairly distinct countries, both in mature democracies (Germany, UK, Italy, Japan, India) as well as authoritarian states (Russia, China) and they seem to all be coordinating.