I come from a country using the more traditional form of the “Westminster” system of government that the US’ system is also based upon but which from the outset made significant departures from. Because your use of the term “opposition leader” I’m going to hazard a guess you might be from another Westminster Style parliamentary democracy nation as well. If that’s the case I think what’s happening here is that you’re expecting a “leader of the opposition”, a singular individual officially holding that specific title, like we have in Westminster style Parliamentary systems. The US works a bit differently, and no such role exists. Likely the reason you remembered a person occupying this role in the past is because you were probably seeing press coverage of the opposition party’s official presidential candidate, which would look like a leader of the opposition to us but there’s a big difference because they do a different job.

In the US system the elected representatives of both chambers of their bicameral system, which over there is referred to as “congress” rather than “parliament” as in many Commonwealth countries, are voted in by local electoral processes like in Westminster systems, however unlike in the Westminster system, the ‘executive branch’ which is the branch of government that is headed by the office of, ‘president’ is voted in by an entirely separate process and the president themselves aren’t a member of the congress; they’re not in the House of Representatives or the Senate and they also don’t have to face question time by them either. When the president loses an election or serves out their maximum term limits, they tend to fade from media attention because they don’t have any real job anymore in the party. In a Westminster system, a Prime Minister has a double job, they got their seat in parliament and thus eligibility for their Prime Minister role by winning an election to be the elected representative of a small local area within the nation they govern at the same time as their party’s officially chosen leader which the party gave them through internal decision making. This means when their party is in power their job is to be both a local representative and a prime minister and when their party is out of government, their job is to continue to be that local representative (unless that local area got sick of them and also voted them out) AND the official leader of the “shadow” cabinet. In that role as leader of the opposition they have to represent the party in front of the media and respond to the actions of the government of the day and criticise and challenge them. They’re a constant face as they try to either lead the party BACK in to power they lost or until the party has a vote internally and decides that the public probably won’t vote for them while they continue to have their current leader and they decide to pick a different one.

In the US system parties have leaders in each of their two chambers of congress, one for the Senate and one for the House of Representatives so that’s why if you ask your question as you’ve phrased it, some people might answer you with Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries who are the opposition or “Minority” leaders in both the Senate and House of Representatives respectively right now, both of them from the Democratic party which does not currently hold majority in either chamber hence “minority” leaders. This can get pretty confusing if you’re used to the Westminster system because in the US, the election of their president and the election of members of their congress (which would be our parliament) are entirely separate elections and the process by which one becomes a one of two leaders in Congress on behalf of a party or by which one becomes a party’s official presidential nominee are different and so you have no opposition leader or 3 depending on what you decide the equivalent of the opposition leader is.

So finally, the bit that hopefully explains why it seemed like before you had a more known face as a leader of the opposition. When they pick candidates for Presidential elections, as opposed to Congress, major parties in the US have since the 70s done this via a process of lots of separate local elections around the country known as the ‘primaries’ run by the parties themselves (which are private organisations) with votes cast by members of the public who’ve chosen to register with the party. It’s a very long winded process but eventually this leads to an additional voting contest where the people voting are party insiders that are theoretically bound to vote in a way that lines up with the results of those earlier contests. This happens on the year of a presidential election so until then they don’t officially have a nominee. Likely in the past there would have been a lot of coverage of a nominee once they became an official nominee so those could well be the people you were thinking of as opposition leaders before. There’s usually also pretty strong favourites before someone is officially announced as a nominee including former presidential race losers sometimes as happened with Trump and so there’s usually some faces that kinda looks like they’re probably likely to be the next presidential nominee for their party before this process and also during the long months of primaries before the official final vote that picks a winner. If your question was why isn’t anyone seemingly strongly emergent from your perspective this time around well as an outsider I’m less well placed to know the answer but I would suspect that the way things shook out last time with them having to dump Biden at the last minute and inserting Harris outside of the whole primaries process and then her losing has left them in a bit of a shambles and that messy loss combined with a lot of ill will over what seemed to be a concerted effort by party insiders back in 2016 to rig the process of selecting their nominee and the fact that they’re in minority in both chambers of congress might have made the party a more fractured entity of late with less candidates that have strong public support and the blessing of the powerful party insiders, that are clearly raising their heads just yet. But this last bit I’m really much less informed about, I’m mostly just focusing on the US electoral mechanics because they seem so weird when you’re used to the Westminster system.

Cheers

I should probably learn how you link all this stuff up, probably not doing myself a lot of favours ignoring it.

Is the AI vision local?

This could come in pretty handy for me. What’s he edit on that does this?

And not even the final one

Oh yeh that looked cool I was pretty pumped about that. Is it not so good after all?

He was, undoubtedly. But in my memory and my conception of the two characters, their interactions were always like this . With Miss Piggy the angry diva or upset girlfriend to Kermit having a chuckle. It might actually have been that that happened maybe a couple of times ever but as a little kid you don’t have the best grasp of nuance so that’s the impression it formed. I also had obviously a lot less appreciation for characters having roles and functions so even though that exchange was actually really funny and very memorable since I still remember it even today, as a child I only take it on a very literal level, so Miss Piggy isn’t a diva character that creates funny situations by being quick to anger and not tolerating anything she considers beneath her, instead she’s “mean” or “fussy” you know? Obviously different as a grown up, but it made me not like the character as a kiddo.

As a kid I always hated Miss Piggie since she as sort of the humourless foil to Kermit but I think I can appreciate porcine Yoda a bit more now if only for the voice.

Yeh he always seemed rock and roll!

It was a hell of a surprise when I cut open a peach and the pit was smaller and softer than usual and it split in two in my hands and a little slightly drowsy looking winged ant crawled out of one of the halves and started walking around on the counter. Little guy must have had such a long journey. I don’t know how the hell they got INSIDE the pit.

It’s more likely a collection of more mundane unconscious observations using all of your more normal senses that get very quickly consolidated in to one intuitive sense of dubious reliability but which in the absence of better information keeps you a bit safer.

If the username doesn’t have to be unique, couldn’t you impersonate people?

I don’t feel like LLMs are conscious and I act accordingly as though they aren’t, but I do wonder about the confidence with which you can totally dismiss the notion. Assuming that they are seems like a leap, but since we don’t really know exactly what consciousness is, it seems difficult to rigorously decide upon what does and doesn’t get to be in the category. The usual means by which LLMs are explained not to be conscious, and indeed what I usually say myself, is something like your “they just output probability based on current context” or some variation of “they’re just guessing the next word”, but… is that definitely nothing like what we ourselves do and then call consciousness? Or if indeed that is definitively quite unlike anything we do, does that dissimilarity alone suffice to declare LLMs not conscious? Is ours the only possible example of consciousness, or is the process that drives the behaviour with LLMs possibly just another form or another way of arriving at consciousness? There’s evidently something that triggers an instinctual categorising, most wouldn’t classify a rock as conscious and would find my suggestion that ‘maybe it’s just consciousness in another form than ours’ a pretty weak way to assert that it is, but then again there’s quite a long way between a literal rock and these models running on specific rocks arranged in a particular way and which produce text in a way that’s really similar to the human beings that we all collectively tend to agree are conscious. Is being able to summarise the mechanisms that underpin the behaviour who’s output or manifestation looks like consciousness, enough on it’s own to explain why it definitely isn’t consciousness? Because, what if our endeavours to understand consciousness and understand a biological basis for it in ourselves bear fruit and we can explain deterministically how brains and human consciousness work? In that case, we could, if not totally predict human behaviours deterministically, then at least still give a pretty good and similar summarisation of how we produce those behaviours that look like consciousness. Would we at that point declare that human beings are not conscious either, or would we need a new basis upon which to exclude these current machine approximations of it?

I always felt that things such as the Chinese Room thought experiment didn’t adequately deal with what I was driving at in the previous paragraph and it seems to me that dismissals of machine consciousness on the grounds that LLMs are just statistical models that don’t know what they are doing are missing a similar point. Are we sure that we ourselves are not mechanistically following complicated rules just as neural networks and LLMs are and that’s simply what the experience of consciousness actually is - an unconscious execution of rulesets? Before the current crop of technology that has renewed interest in these questions, when it all seemed a lot more theoretical and perennially decades off, I was comfortable with this uncomfortable thought. Now that we actually have these impressive models that have people wondering about the topic, I seem to be skewing more skeptical and less generous about ascribing consciousness. Suddenly now the Chinese Room thought experiment as a counter to whether these conscious-looking LLMs are really conscious looks more convincing, but that’s not because of any new or better understanding on my part. I seem to be just goal post shifting when faced with something that does a better job of looking conscious than any technology I’d seen previously.

An Xbox remote?

MSN Messenger for the win!

Do you think they can be trusted not to take some sort of action that might take the whole situation and process out of OP’s control have a lot of unintended consequences? I feel like one’s plea that they not act upon it has a lot of risk of being overruled, or ‘act’ having some multitude of interpretations. Your suggestion makes some sense in terms of trying to get ahead of thing in case they spiral out of control for some other reason but it could result in these 3rd parties making things so much worse for everyone even if he has no ill will from the outset.

It’s also clever that they called that shift “blue watch” lol

Thanks mate haha glad my veteran underage drinking shenanigans were good for something other than misspent youth. Hope OP saw it before they decided that another drink will probably be fine. 🥳🥴🤢🤮😪

It’s really easy to feel like so far, everything has been feeling great and you’re not even really that drunk yet so why not have another drink? It’s also easy, each time you have a drink to be less good at deciding if having another one is a good idea until you’re quite suddenly really quite drunk and now you can’t do anything about it and also the effect continues so my best advice is, if it’s feeling ‘pretty great, I could take more’, that’s the perfect time to stop because you’ve probably got away with the buzz you wanted but not all the consequences of getting way drunker than you meant to.