Played around with it on my desktop machine. Someone’s distilled variant of Qwen 3.8-27B-Q4_K_M, on a intel12700k + RTX3090 24GB is what I use.

I haven’t adjusted the reasoning down from very high but I mostly use it for trying tweaks to half-finished coding projects I’ve lost motivation to complete many years ago. I used it to develop a very simple JS-free personal website. I have secure shell which I can access from Termux or PuTTY, but sometimes I have the llama.cpp webui insecurely accessible online for one day at a time just for fun.

If I have an avocado + rat poison and I throw it up, I get $2 back after the restocking fee, right?

I have some confidence in Ken Martin, the current DNC chair. DC consultants for the DNC seem to hate his guts, but he is partially responsible for the momentum Dems are seeing in unlikely places because the national party is not fully neglecting state races anymore, in favour of spending all the money in ‘swing state races’ as in recent years past.

Even if some kind of Blue tsunami manifests come Nov 3, and even IF Republicans reluctantly prepare for a peaceful transfer of Congress in Jan 2027, don’t stop the No Kings protests, don’t stop the resistance to ICE’s terrorism of cities and disappearing people into detention camps, don’t stop going to town halls to push back against Flock-style surveillance (including by other vendors) and AI data centres. Don’t stop calling and mailing your representative. The fight still continues regardless, every step we get will be through keeping the pressure on.

It doesn’t help when the President of the United States is repeating and knowingly spreading disinformation.

However, it might backfire because in his taunt Trump challenged Talarico to debate Paxton. In the very first TV appearance after that Talarico responded that he’s ready and would while the Paxton campaign is the one making excuses trying to avoid a debate.

I’ve gotta say even normally progressive and anti-Trump MSNBC runs smack segments against Ken Martin gives me confidence that Democrats should let him cook and bring the DNC into a new chapter.

Good start, but time to also have a 2 year plan and start drafting Project 2029* if no Democrat has already.

The two most important questions being: “What concrete differences do Americans want to see in their lives compared to before and now?” and “How will we (extending to the whole world) create a system that prevents reactionary right-wing psycopath billionaire-funded culture war zone-flooding politics to pave the way back to fascism?”.

*Project 2029 seems to be a thing, but at first glance seems like a scaled down and focused effort on a couple issues, explictly not designed to be an all-encompassing vision as the Republican version was. I don’t think it goes far enough, so either it needs to have more sections added, or the Democratic Socialist and neolib organizations each start putting their thoughts in their own treatises to compare notes later.

I also advocate for incrementalism, but I do think that very progressive positions need to be staked out and anchored by certain members in Congress, to move the Overton window allowing more moderate Democrats to ‘make compromises’ and still land everyone in a better position.

For DHS/ICE, if Congress can’t herd enough cats to abolish them, they can hamstring anything they are permitted to do without a judge-signed warrant. They can also first cut the slush fund appropriated in 2025. If neither of those things work, they can change the purpose of DHS/ICE to go after employers who abuse undocumented workers or leverage restrictive visas against them, and help immigrants get visas instead of locking up and torturing them.

It’s easier to settle on the three improvement positions if the initial anchor is closer to the extreme.

Communism! Hasan Piker! Zohran Mamdani and his scary fast and free buses are coming for you! We’re losing the culture war to Abdul MOHAMED El-Sayed because he’s walking away from it on Fox News! Turn up the Islamophobiaaaa!

Is what Republicans will fall back on

Alright, media and experts, time for you to say President Donald Trump ‘aspires’ to commit terrorism on the USA.

Two different scales means the crossover point is meaningless, but the trend is correct.

The licorice companies are waiting for RFK Jr to make a speech in the shade somewhere, so that a similar looking photo of contaminated licorice can be taken.

With humanoid robots manning the turrets by 2028, yuuuuuup.

Shawty got low low low low blood sugar levels.

I could imagine both scenarios where he moves left or right after the election my comment didn’t necessarily rule one out. Why are you only imagining Talarico moving to the right? And even if he does move rightward, the makeup of the Senate will still be more pro-trans than without him.

Imagine a continuous fart going brrrrrrrppppppp out of your butt. It’s that, but out of Trump’s mouth and Ministry of Truth Social page.

I beg to differ, it is my opinion that not doing so is what got the USA Trump (if that’s what you mean by ‘us here’) twice.

It’s out of self-interest I agree. And now that it affects them, they are skipping the sanewashing on this one issue. If it didn’t affect them, they would be reporting on it like:

White House uses unconventional legal theory to revoke press access

I’ll be frank: I don’t think Paxton winning over Talarico will tell the DNC a single thing with respect to trans rights.

Whereas if Talarico wins, what is preventing him from changing his views in any way, at any point within the next 6 years? A Dem President in 2028, with the support of Congress including Talarico, can codify better protections for all humans, in all states despite any state like Texas’ objections. Paxton as Senator would be an active obstacle to that type of effort.

Can I have a source on the claim that the Equality Act was changed to redefine what it meant so that it could exclude trans people?

If a Musky PAC were to run ads saying how terrible Brown or another candidate would be for trans rights, in the same way Jewish and Arab voters were shown contradictory messages in 2024, would that influence how or whether you vote?

they are copying their talking points to demonize us

To be clear, I think that trans people should compete in sports according to their gender and be conferred the same rights as anyone else. But people that want to limit trans people’s participation in sports for flawed, scientifically refuted reasons while treating them as humans, I don’t think is the same, as wanting to ban them from bathrooms changing driver’s licenses and treating them as subhuman demon freaks. We should not equate the two.

To give a similar example, the fight for gay sex and marriage in Canada was fought over decades, and the stigma remains in small pockets. A progressive Prime Minister decriminalized it in the 1969 while not his entire Liberal Party was openly for it, and it was still in the decades after that a ban on workplace discrimination and in the 2000s when marriage was recognized. So we have to pull in the same direction, allow trans people the same basic rights as anyone else, then talk about competitive and recreational activites like sports later rather than just labelling it all as anti-trans sub-humanization talking points.