Yeah… this is an interesting angle on all of this.

And for context, it’s likely worth noting that this followed on the heels of Trump threatening to fire Jerome Powell.

While Trump is obviously the prime mover of the ludicrously obvious wholesale destruction of the US, more and more I don’t really blame him. At heart, he’s really just a thin-skinned ball of insecurity with the emotional development of a toddler driven by primal instincts to attack everything that he considers a threat, which is pretty much anything and everything.

I think more all the time that the lion’s share of the blame for all of this is more legitimately placed on the thousands and thousands of people who all have access to authority with which they could stand up to him, and who are just too craven and cowardly (or complicit) to actually do it.

The zionists were the original middle eastern terrorists.

I have no doubt that this is real, and we can expect to see much, much more of it.

LLMs, by their very nature, not only can but will, if so prompted, reinforce delusions.

The current “AIs” do not think or reason in any way, shape or form. They have no understanding of their output because they’re not actually intelligemt, or even aware. They’ve just been programmed to combine words with other words in ways that are statistically likely to be relevant to the prompts they’re given.

And that means that a person who’s sufficiently determined can, without conscious intent, feed an “AI” prompts that will lead it to treat whatever delusion they feed it as real, and even to surround it with enough other strings of coincidentally meaningful words and phrases that it appears, to the incautious mind, to be revelatory.

It was wonderfully awful.

Faced with a whole bunch of users and mods angry because Reddit had just announced that they were going to price third party apps out of existence, Spez apparently decided to do some damage control, and then couldn’t manage to be anything other than alternately petulant and sanctimonious.

Yes - I’m sure he thinks it’ll be a boon.

But that’s because I’m sure that, like virtually every executive at every film, TV, music or game studio in existence, he wouldn’t recognize real creativity if it walked up and punched him in the face.

The only reason that they support LGBTQ is because it gives them an opportunity to pretend to be leftists in spite of being center to right on basically every single other issue. And because it’s okay with their megarich donors.

If the donor class opposed it, they wouldn’t even support that.

I never really liked Reddit much, and avoided it for a long time. It was just too big and too shallow.

I finally had to give in in about 2015, because there just weren’t any other good threaded message boards left. But I was always on the lookout for somewhere new.

Over the years, I followed links to every new board I happened on but they never panned out. Then, in the wake of Spez’s pretentious AMA, I happened on a link to lemmy. I expected it to just be another failure, but I found I liked, and more broadly, liked the fediverse. And the more I looked around, the more I liked it. And I just never left.

Remember the good ol’ days, when it was only the urban housing market that was dominated by rent-seeking parasites?

Centrist Democrats Are the Actual Traitors to Their Party

embarrassing

That’s an odd way to spell “incriminating.”

Sort of on-topic - I disable the music in most first person open world RPGs.

It started with Oblivion. I first disabled it because I didn’t like that the combat music is triggered as soon as you’re detected by an enemy - it feels like a cheat. But the thing I discovered was that it did wonders for immersion, because suddenly the only sounds I heard were actual in-universe sounds - footsteps, wind, flowing water, animals etc.

After playing like that for a couple of years, I got the urge to listen to the music again, so I re-enabled it. And it was very weird, because I had gotten so used to only hearing in-universe sounds that I kept subconsciously trying to place the music in the world - like there was a symphony orchestra in a forest clearing nearby or something. I had to turn it off and have never turned it back on.

I’ve never even heard the Skyrim music - I disabled it right from the start.

The only exceptions are game music that actually is in-universe, like the music played over your Pip-Boy in Fallout or over a car radio in GTA.

weapons company

That’s the most important bit.

An awful lot of the otherwise inexplicable international support for the utter evil Israel is visiting on Gaza exists solely because it’s profitable for a handful of corporate parasites.

Which is its own sort of evil.

Regarding your tangent - I think that individual brains work in relatively fixed ways that are established early on - likely at least in part genetically, then refined mostly in infancy and early childhood. There’s a fairly wide range of things a brain can do, but even beyond likely genetic inclinations, there’s not enough available energy or time for individuals to develop all of them, or even generally most of them. And once established, I think they’re fairly fixed - the individual brain already has a number of set paths that it follows and specific regions that are most well-developed, and the body focuses on maintaining those rather than building new ones.

And a lot of the things that we recognize as distinct fields are actually comprised of multiple abilities.

So yeah - you end up with seeming oddities like mathematicians also generally having some artistic/creative ability and business majors generally not having any. The underlying abilities that make mathematics a rewarding field necessarily include abstract thinking, while those underlying business do not - business thinking is necessarily very concrete.

And it’s s perennial problem when people who are especially skilled in one particular type of thinking believe that that means they’re skilled in “thinking” in a broad sense, so able to meaningfully comment on things that are actually entirely outside of their skill set - like tech bros pontificating about art (or my personal biggest pet peeve - research scientists pontificating about philosophy).

This whole “loneliness epidemic” thing is almost enough to make me feel sorry for extroverts.

Almost.

But you know - as an introvert, I’ve spent my entire life dealing with smugly well-meaning extrovert assholes who think my introversion is some sort of problem that needs to be fixed, so now that society is shifting in my direction - now that living my life without having to subject myself to a bunch of spiritual vampires demanding my attention is easier than it’s ever been - I just can’t really find it in myself to care that they aren’t coping so well with it. Almost, but not quite.

I’m sort of looking forward to a techbro trying to condescendingly tell me that Crime and Punishment is about a man who goes to prison or The Stranger is about a guy who randomly kills another guy or One Hundred Years of Solitude is about a Mexican family.or Moby Dick is about a whale.

To be sort of fairish, I get the impression that anyone who would say that is the sort of person who could read a book cover to cover and manage to not get anything more than a rough outline of the plot out of it anyway.

I think one of the most concise ways to conceptualize the current conservative project is that they looked at the French Revolution and the collapse of the Ancien Regime and drew the wrong conclusions.

Rather than seeing it as the inevitable result of the systemstic oppression of the majority for the obscene privilege of a select few, they see it as a failure of the select few to sufficiently protect their privilege. And their goal is to recreate the conditions of the Ancien Regime, but this time around to prevent the peasants from successfully rebelling.

Yes, though with a feudal system mixed in.

Corporations and wealthy individuals will be the sole property-owners and will play the roles of feudal lords, and the people will be serfs, allowed to live on the lords’ estates only if they serve the lords.

Since homelessness will be criminalized while all property will be owned by the feudal lords, those who won’t serve the lords “willingly” will be imprisoned, and yes, they will then be slaves.

And further - the establishment of a single, fediverse-wide account for each user would make it far too easy for those so inclined to silence anyone they wanted merely by banning their one and only account.