This may have been the debate Donald Trump wanted, but it wasn't the one he needed.

With one last chance to make a pitch to the American public that he should be trusted with the presidency, the Republican nominee had to make efforts to expand his base of support.

He had to find a way to distance himself from the allegation that he has a history of sexual harassment.

He had to position himself as the change candidate - just days after a Fox poll showed that Hillary Clinton, whose party has held the presidency for eight years, was beating him on the question of who would "change the country for the better".

Instead, after roughly half an hour of something resembling an actual policy debate about the Supreme Court, gun rights, abortion and even immigration, the old Donald Trump - the one who constantly interrupted his opponent, sparred with the moderator and lashed out at enemies real and perceived - emerged.

He called Mrs Clinton a liar and a "nasty woman".

He said the women accusing him of sexual harassment bordering on assault were either attention-seekers or Clinton campaign stooges.

He said the media were "poisoning the minds" of the public. And, most notably, he refused to say whether he would accept the results of the election if he loses.

Mrs Clinton had her own moments where she was put on the defensive - on her emails, on the Clinton Foundation and on embarrassing details revealed in the Wikileaks hack.

The difference, however, is that Mrs Clinton largely kept her poise and successfully changed the topic back to subjects where she was more comfortable. It was, in fact, a master class in parry-and-strike debate strategy.

The key takeaway from this debate, however - the headline that Americans will wake up to read in the morning - will certainly be Mr Trump's refusal to back way from his "rigged" election claims.

That was what Mr Trump wanted to say, but it isn't something the American people - or American democracy - needed to hear.

Just thought everyone should get a whiff of the post-debate 2016 flava to temper the feeling that anything at all is "in the bag". Also - it's amazing, isn't it.

Sandy Springs-based UPS is laying off more of its employees, after earlier this year announcing it was cutting 12,000 jobs in its management ranks.

UPS made $7 Billion dollars net profit last year. It was a decline from the 11.5 Billion net profit they made in 2022.

A ride though a sunflower field near Lawrence, Kansas. The field, planted annually by the Grinter family, draws thousands of visitors during the week-long late-summer blossoming of the flowers

CHARLIE RIEDEL/AP

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/19416727

Artificial intelligence is worse than humans in every way at summarising documents and might actually create additional work for people, a government trial of the technology has found.

Amazon conducted the test earlier this year for Australia’s corporate regulator the Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) using submissions made to an inquiry. The outcome of the trial was revealed in an answer to a questions on notice at the Senate select committee on adopting artificial intelligence.

The test involved testing generative AI models before selecting one to ingest five submissions from a parliamentary inquiry into audit and consultancy firms. The most promising model, Meta’s open source model Llama2-70B, was prompted to summarise the submissions with a focus on ASIC mentions, recommendations, references to more regulation, and to include the page references and context.

Ten ASIC staff, of varying levels of seniority, were also given the same task with similar prompts. Then, a group of reviewers blindly assessed the summaries produced by both humans and AI for coherency, length, ASIC references, regulation references and for identifying recommendations. They were unaware that this exercise involved AI at all.

These reviewers overwhelmingly found that the human summaries beat out their AI competitors on every criteria and on every submission, scoring an 81% on an internal rubric compared with the machine’s 47%.

(1) the ruling class benefits from illiteracy.

(2) short-form video entertains more than it sticks.

(3) reading is a discipline distinct from listening, watching, or other forms of literacy. It’s a skill that needs to be honed separately.

(4) Absolutely no one comes to save us but us. . . .

The reason you hate reading is because the ruling class benefits from illiteracy.

Not total illiteracy, mind you. That’s bad for business. . . . Read enough to be able to consume and to execute, not to consider critically, certainly not enough to create. Because then what? A mass of people realizing we can create and recreate everything we see and touch to something kinder for us?

. . .

Your relationship with reading is more than likely a direct result of your experiences with authority figures as a child.

In a great many iterations. If you were lauded for reading, put on a pedestal in front of your peership, it might be stress-inducing to return to work the muscles you know have atrophied. Are you still good or worthy of help if you cannot read voraciously, like you did as a child? If you were labeled a problem, difficult in class, slow… I bless and keep you. Worse, if you were made to feel less than because of your reading ability (unintelligent. burdensome. a waste of space. bound for prison) then you likely have a literal stress-response when someone mentions or suggests reading to you. Reading is a site of trauma your body holds onto for most of us. Anyone that suggests reading must not understand what you went through. Every objection imaginable will materialize when someone suggests that you *try *to read.

cross-posted from: https://awful.systems/post/2262316

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/12798779

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/12776322

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/19085346

https://lemmy.world/post/19085147