Well, just personally speaking, I know Russian, and reading Russian news sources (state-owned as well as those that have been banned by the Russian state) from time to time, and talking with Russians directly, hasn’t even remotely convinced me that the “Russian empire” is equally bad as the “western empire”.

If I look or go outside, I’ll notice the blizzard, and adapt accordingly (get a scarf, umbrella…). If there’s a blizzard but I don’t even look outside to notice it, that means I don’t have to adapt to it, and thus not even be informed of its existence.

The meme doesn’t really reflect reality, it’s just a weirdly remixed right-wing meme. Climate change denialists don’t ask for sources as they dislike them in general (Youtube videos and huffing your own farts is quite enough for them), they will just say the MSM has implanted the snow propaganda into your brain.

but it’s not a place you go for open and honest discussions between people from both sides of the aisle

Where do you go for such discussions anyway?

If you’re thinking of American right-wingers and fascists who are currently celebrating Trump’s victory, I must say their view of the world is so dark, negative and pessimistic, that nobody could really describe it as utopia-like. This is a brief respite for them, nothing more.

If you’re thinking more abstractly, or of some very specific incredibly lucky people, then I guess it could be so.

Yeah, totally makes sense, “they” attacked IA one month in advance before the elections, knowing that IA would spend around a month rewriting and improving their site code until the Save Page option would be enabled again (unless IA themselves are a part of the plot???), so that news articles could be “edited on the fly” (with what result?) until the election day, while other similar web archiving services such as archive.is would keep working just fine.

clbottomt when the chtopt shows up [imagine this as that popular GIF meme]

Thanks. It’s a part of history I know very little about.

I meant the “for over a hundred years” part specifically, I bolded it but it’s not as noticeable as it should be.

the US a terrorist nation for couping democratically elected leader in favour of dictators for over a hundred years

Is this really true?

And that’s more or less what I was aiming for, so we’re back at square one. What you wrote is in line with my first comment:

it is a weak compliment for AI, and more of a criticism of the current web search engines

The point is that there isn’t something that makes AI inherently superior to ordinary search engines. (Personally I haven’t found AI to be superior at all, but that’s a different topic.) The difference in quality is mainly a consequence of some corporate fuckery to wring out more money from the investors and/or advertisers and/or users at the given moment. AI is good (according to you) just because search engines suck.

Reminds me of the “help me budget this” meme.

“Have fewer genocides.”

“No.”

Germans excused Holocaust by… saying that it would prevent trans genocide?

This is too stupid even for a troll.

Then, you end up finishing the game

I.e. you do win…

AI LLMs simply are better at surfacing it

Ok, but how exactly? Is there some magical emergent property of LLMs that guides them to filter out the garbage from the quality content?

Christianity developed in the Roman Empire?

I’m pretty sure we’re talking about the pictorial representation of Jesus, not when Christianity itself developed. Christian figurative art in Rome was rare and undeveloped, I highly doubt you have on your mind some examples of Roman portrayal of Jesus that actually support your idea. That’s why I described what I have found to be the situation in the middle ages, when the typical iconography zook shape - to the best of my knowledge, but maybe I’m talking with an actual art historian in which case you should have no problem with proving me wrong with examples.

I’m also confused about how you actually imagine the development of the supposedly racist Roman images of Jesus went about. At which stage did that happen, before or after Christianity became the state religion? Were Romans racist against the Middle East populations before Christianity too? Were Romans from the Apennine peninsula racist against them based on their darker skin colour, while themselves certainly being darker-skinned than e.g. Gauls?

If you don’t feel like discussing this and won’t do anything more than deliberately miss the point, you don’t have to reply to me at all.

Frankly this comes off almost as a conspiracy theory. Christian art in Europe developed its typical imagery when the vast majority of Europeans could have no direct contact with non-Europeans, before colonialism or coherent ideas about racial identities, when far-off lands were thought to be occupied by one-legged giants…

The comparison with your own childish vs adult drawings is simply off the mark. A more similar comparison could be provided by how artists depict the Vikings. It is well known today that the helmet with bull horns is made-up, and was probably never used by actual Vikings. Yet tons of people still portray them with such helmets, and most non-artists still have that same association in their minds. Why? Because a child growing up and developing their observational and artistic skills is not the same as a culture with its century-old symbols and images.

Admittedly the depictions of Jesus in art today are frequently done by more or less amateurish artists and are meant to be traditional in their style, which additionally makes them less likely to move away from the inherited imagery.

they’re a great use in surfacing information that is discussed and available, but might be buried with no SEO behind it to surface it

This is what I’ve seen many people claim. But it is a weak compliment for AI, and more of a criticism of the current web search engines. Why is that information unavailable to search engines, but is available to LLMs? If someone has put in the work to find and feed the quality content to LLMs, why couldn’t that same effort have been invested in Google Search?