Focus groups aren't meant to be used for gaining an understanding of a broad swath of the population. Focus groups are used for exploratory research, concept testing, and understanding the "why" behind opinions and behaviors.

If you want to generalize trends towards large populations, you're going to need a large sample size. It's statistics that suggests that many respondents will leave you with extremely low confidence in the outcome.

For example, if you are trying to judge the voting preferences of a population of 100,000 people, you'll need 383 randomly sampled people in a survey to reach a 95% confidence interval. 13 is nowhere near the amount of people required to cover those that considered themselves "independents" before the debate.

That's not to say this tells us nothing, but it's by no means a predictive study.

*edit: I actually would say it's harmful because I think that it portrays the narrative as if it is predictive, when it's not.

I'm not surprised. Alito is straight up huffing Newsmax like it's paint but trying to hide it, Clarence Thomas is outwardly corrupt and unabashedly fascist, and the other conservatives are, weirdly, not as extreme and still attempt to maintain this air of professionalism and integrity in their profession. Don't get me wrong, they don't actually and in them we have a religious nut, an idiot frat boy, an egoist, and at the head, a conniving political operator. All of which are driving us closer to fascism in their own style.

But I get the feeling like John Roberts is embarrassed by Clarence Thomas and his clinically insane QAnon conspiracy wife or Alito and his "election was stolen" flag antics. So they're going to see things differently.

Depends who you are. If you're a person of interest to the Russians for any reason, I wouldn't trust it.

People should have "the right to not be pregnant."

I'm an AI researcher and yes, that's basically right. There is no special "lighting mechanism" portion of the network designed before training. Just, after seeing enough images with correct lighting (either for text to image transformer models or GANs), it will understand what correct lighting should look like. It's all about the distribution of the training data. A simple example is this-person-does-not-exist.com. All of the training images are high resolution, close-up, well-lit headshots. If all the training data instead had unrealistic lighting, you would get unrealistic lighting out. If it's something like 50/50, you'll get every part of that spectrum between good lighting and bad lighting at the output.

That's not to say that the overall training scheme of especially something like GPT-4 doesn't include secondary training operations for more complex tasks. But lighting of images is a simple thing to get correct with enough training images.

As an aside, I said that website above is a simple example, but I remember less than 6 years ago when that came out and it was revolutionary, so it's crazy how fast the space has moved forward in such a short time.

Edit: to answer the multiple subjects question: it probably has seen fewer images with multiple subjects and doesn't have enough "knowledge" from it's training data to accurately apply lighting in those scenarios. And you can imagine lighting is more complex in a scene with more subjects so it's more difficult for the model to use a general solution it's seen many times to fit the more complex problem.

Hahaha, as someone that works in AI research, good luck to them. The first is a very hard problem that won't just be prompt engineering with your OpenAI account (why not just use 3D blueprints for weapons that already exist?) and the second is certifiably stupid. There are plenty of ways to make bombs already that don't involve training a model that's an expert in chemistry. A bunch of amateur 8chan half-brains probably couldn't follow a Medium article, let alone do ground breaking research.

But like you said, if they want to test the viability of those bombs, I say go for it! Make it in the garage!

I just do not understand how anyone is on the fence about DJT... Like, they see this conviction and that's what changes their mind? After everything else?

Conservatives are just projectors. Everything they are guilty of they blame on political opponents or demonize: pedophilia, gay sexual relationships, corruption, and not caring about the average worker. That's not to say Democrats don't sometimes fall into these categories, but it's definitely to a lesser extent.

Join the club.

Tough shit Zuck

I would argue that "the right to vote is fundamental to a democracy" has never been an American conservative ideal. Conservatives have always tried to limit the number and kind of people that can vote and still do: non land owners, ex-slaves, black people, women, ex-felons, and all minorities now. Conservatives have also made a very successful effort to limit the relative power of people's votes when it doesn't suit their agenda through gerrymandering and unequal representation.

Also, really not sure what "the Senate should represent the states and not the people" means. Like it should represent the land? Not the people inside the state?