I was deep in the weeds of the ACA fight and this is not at all how it went down. Democrats had a filibuster-proof majority for only a few months altogether, and many in the caucus at the time were moderate red-state Democrats that didn't support a universal system. Hell, one of them, Joe Lieberman, had actively campaigned for John McCain and was on the shortlist to be his VP!

The ACA that passed via reconciliation was the most progressive possible version of it that could have passed; lose one senator or a couple of representatives in the final vote and it would have failed to pass (and arguably destroyed Obama's presidency in the process).

Inspired by?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFCv9foCLFw

If you give a sufficiently powerful model a goal, it will do whatever it can to achieve it, including stuff you didn't explicitly instruct or intend. There's a reason they're called "agents."

Isn't that the guy who copied a smaller creator's comic and then photoshopped fake evidence that he had created it first?

How to account for their success with music and visual art, though? Midjourney was making beautiful, intriguing images years ago, and AI music can be genuinely catchy and surprising. Again, the mainline models on default settings are pretty meh, but models tuned to the task are near-human quality. If there were enough of a commercial demand for high-level literary fiction to incentivize analyzing story structures, prosody, metaphor, etc., I don't doubt they could rapidly improve on that front as well.

I suspect most of this is due to imperfect RLHF that focuses on brand-safety and rhetorical tricks that get annoyingly noticeable when they're repeated at an industrial scale. The models are approaching superhuman ability at coding and math, but primarily because they're more easily verifiable (plus it's where the money is). But if there were a more rigorous way to quantify what makes good fiction work, there's no reason in principle why a strong model wouldn't be able to "optimize" it the same way it can images or video.

I've fine-tuned a local model on my own writing before and it's spooky how well it can capture a stylistic voice.

I don't know, we tried it in the 70s and people hated it enough to switch back pretty quickly. Under permanent DST, sunrise in January would not be until after 8 AM, while under permanent standard time sunrise in June would be shortly after 4 AM.

It's technically a Men's Association, but: The Stepford Wives

It's fatal. The tattoo and earlier abuse allegations combined dragged him from a mid-high single-digit lead to a statistical tie in a race with an opponent who usually overperforms. And this latest scandal is so awful that it has caused virtually every major supporter from Chuck Schumer and the DSCC to Ro Khanna and Our Revolution to cut bait. He might still have a diehard base of true believers, but that isn't enough to win.

The alternative where he drops out and gets replaced by a not-fatally-damaged Democrat who might actually be able to win?