Christina Holland

So I don't know any details but seen some articles about how the sausage is made and there isn't a machine that picks a random American meeting whatever criteria they're looking for, they keep very manual lists of people they ran into in real life or while doing another story, or friends of friends

Any time I've seen anything concrete about where a source came from when they needed a "typical" person of some criteria, it ends up someone they ran into before or they asked all their friends to ask people they know or they put out a call on social media, it's all six degrees of separation stuff

Kind of a tangent but my hot take is nobody wants to be yelled at. Even the people who are like "I love triggering people, your hatred energizes me," are just regular people who want positive attention, can only get negative, and are sour grapesing themselves that they actually prefer it, yum yum

Television tuned to a dead channel isn't a color it's two colors

Also in addition to people deliberately gaming the system for various reasons, "skin in the game" can only increase motivation which doesn't increase accuracy for people who don't have any special access to information or insight, it just encourages them to believe harder in their ungrounded wishes

The whole article is even worse, it's about how they can't seem to get women as hooked on AI products as men are, and the "solution" as always, for every stupid product women aren't buying, must be to dumb it down to something women can understand www.nytimes.com/2026/10/25/s...

You will never ever ever get any investors if your pitch is "we're going to bring more women into this currently male dominated segment by making a version of the product that is more advanced and higher quality". They cannot conceive of marketing to women as anything but going the other direction

I'm not in any position to say what normal Americans think but just as a random data point, when I was growing up, my family (Chinese, immigrant parents) thought Denny's was fancy and Olive Garden was extremely fancy

I really don't think there's any new skill to "prompt engineering", people often complain the computer won't do what they want and I suggest some common sense thing I would say to a person I don't trust to follow directions good, and it works. This is an old skill called giving directions to idiots

Do people not listen to you because you "tell it like it is" and "don't kiss ass" or could it also be partly because you explain things starting from the end, bring up names you never introduced, go on long tangents about irrelevant parts and spend two words on the important part or skip it entirely

I really don't think there's any new skill to "prompt engineering", people often complain the computer won't do what they want and I suggest some common sense thing I would say to a person I don't trust to follow directions good, and it works. This is an old skill called giving directions to idiots

The other thing you realize is a lot of people's only communication dial is more polite to more rude, so their idea of "giving directions to idiots" is to be more condescending and rude which feels good I guess, but if you actually want things done you want to assume nothing and give all the details

Star Trek V, the one with Yosemite and God, had a really well-acted scene or two and a good potential theme about how a lot of zealots who are smugly convinced they are selflessly serving a greater cause are just worshipping themselves with a God disguise on

Like father like son hehe futurism.com/advanced-tra...

I think it's ok to use AI for things that you don't care about or aren't important, like work

*being transformed into a beautiful constellation of stars after begging the gods to save me from my pursuers* So... not that I don't appreciate this but I had like plans

I mean I know it doesn't matter and he'll just say whatever without thinking or caring about the actual subject as long as he gets attention but my problem isn't that you can't do that or it's insulting, it's that you want to name a thing New [thing it's inside of]? The state replaces America?