That was Churchill's view, as he said during a speech in the House of Commons in 1947:
"Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time . . ."
What a great round-up; comprehensive but concise. Nice that quotes from a Cory Doctorow video, embedded in the piece, have been quoted with the relevant timestamps.
> “If I am inventing God, or stopping people from inventing God, then I am very important.”
NC as a whole is priceless, and underrated. I’ve been a reader since their excellent coverage of the GFC decades ago. (Writing that sentence is a little painful, yikes. Decades?)
Yves regularly eviscerates lazy or blatantly slanted commenters, regardless of politics, which keeps the comments in decent shape. She also doesn’t ban or harass well-behaved opposing commenters, welcoming debate, which is the opposite of most other spaces. A relic of better times.
How about municipal councils looking around at any remaining "mainstream media" local outlets and committing to post relevant notices/updates on their websites?
This is something I wanted to push while working on newsroom CMS projects: giving direct input access to the CMS from external bodies - police, fire, ambulance etc. Posts could be vetted/edited by newsrooms, as with any externally filed copy, but turnaround would be a matter of half-a-minute or so. Either that or enable direct publishing permissions to said authorities.
Given this week's alarmist assertions by Antropic's Evan Hubinger, seconded by other high-ups in the AI industry, I am with Gary Marcus in calling for a boycott of OpenAI and Anthropic until they sort their acts out.
Towards the end of his piece yesterday, "The Case for Boycotting Generative AI" [0], Marcus also backs calls for co-operation with China, rather than antagonism and bickering. After all, tackling a claimed existential threat should take precedence over any other considerations. This seems reasonable to me.
For quite a few years, and because I don't have a globe, I've turned to MapFight [0] to get a good idea of size/area comparisons for countries, significant geographic features and for historical lands/empires.
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