Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
re: election results. unfortunately iām not surprised or even disappointed by now. it makes me feel sad for my 2015 self and her naivete. she didnāt understand what a disgusting and evil culture she lived in
I donāt have too much coherent to say right now
fuck the fascists for what theyāve done and what they intend to do
fuck the neoliberals for doing their best to convince marginalized people that they shouldnāt defend themselves against a terrible fate
fuck the accelerationists for pumping shitheaded propaganda into the fediverse, for the victory lap theyāre taking now, and for the general idea that their revolution is worth our deaths
shitās about to get very hard and very weird and I canāt stress enough how important it is to be careful who you trust with your life
what a surprise, the thread all the leftist shitposters on mastodon boosted about how youāre a class traitor if you donāt vote for the Green Party (who I donāt buy as socialist) or āany other socialist partyā (fucking who??? am I supposed to write āsocialismā on my ballot in crayon???) conveniently went missing
anyway post your favorite fuckhead accelerationist here, mastodonās a shooting gallery tonight
i do love how the āanti-imperialistā protest vote against harris was a choice between like three or four putin apologists. the state of the US left is really fucked up and i donāt want to look at it ever again.
i bet the self-described antiimperialists going all for Southern Lebanon Parking Lot 2024 feel real smug right now
anyway post your favorite fuckhead accelerationist here, mastodonās a shooting gallery tonight
Iāve intentionally been avoiding feeds the last few days because I just do not have the headspace for it, but I quickly checked on shit now
and
fuck
Didnāt the Green Party woman also just go āIām pro Israelā the day for the election or so? Which I think is one of the reason she might have picked up a few moves (the idea she might be more pro gaza I mean).
The bad guys have definitely learned a new sort of trick. Havenāt wrapped my head around it yet, but it is bad, innit?
Apologies for the screed:
Quick recap:
2016-2020: executive orders every day, non-elected positions being captured by conservatives, dems just hand-wringing and tweeting. but Dems get lucky with a pandemic and trump loses
2021-2024: weekend at bidenās.
Where was the election reform? The dismantling or reform of the electoral colleges? The extra seats on the SC? Bribing the public with stimulus packages to boost the economy?
Remember when we pushed Biden left? Remember when the dems preserved abortion rights, prevented the invasion of ukraine, and stopped bankrolling Israelās genocide?
āexercise your democratic rights and voice by voting for our candidate that wasnāt democratically chosen as our candidateā. āvote blue and do not voice any critical thoughtā. āany vote that isnāt for the party that didnāt meaningfully reverse or prevent conservative actions is a vote for trumpā.
In sum: the bad guys didnāt do anything new.
The closest we got to a trump loss was some republican spook who went to a trump rally with a gun because it was closer than the harris rally.
According to some reports the dems simply stayed home and he even lost votes compared to 2020
The thing thatās most baffling to me is how the difference in ground game had zero impact. We were pounding the pavement, doors got fuckin knocked. The GOP did less than zero, firing their entire staff responsible for in-person outreach and gave 100 million to PACs run by grifters who put it directly into their own pockets.
Unless weāve missed a trick, retail politics as it has existed is dead.
Dem talking heads spending so much energy courting moderate conservative votes was an excellent way to demobilise their base. They really gave their all to lose an election that should have been a free win.
I mean, I donāt think it was unreasonable to expect liberals to show up against someone whoās sole policy proposals were mass deportations and political reprisals, and so I can understand the logic of focusing on the center (which in US politics means center-right).
But this being the democratic party, they also couldnāt commit to an actual narrative to make that play. Rather than ālook at their ties to Big Tech!ā or even sticking with ālook how weird these people are!ā they had to go hat-in-hand and stake themselves to divisive (to say nothing of abhorrent) policies because thatās the only connection they could try to make. I think weāre seeing a major problem with the whole ābig tentā concept.
This wasnāt a free win, however. The reason Harris took over in the first place was because Bidenās performance in the debate was poor enough that the Democrats thought there was no longer any chance with him, and this was already with lowering approval ratings. Had he stayed, I bet Trumpās victory would have been even wider.
It was twitter. Elon Musk joins Trumpās team. What happens? Harrisā chances begin to drop.
Trump did lose support, but there was probably enough propaganda on Twitter to make enough people go āboth sidesā and just sit out the election.and of course, Twitter and Facebook style influence campaigns work just as well or even better elsewhere, in communities that havenāt hardened themselves against that type of bullshit
IDK, do you really think twitter still has that much cultural relevance? ugh
Iām sure it played a part, though.
Iām seeing some takes now that the ground game did make a difference of a couple of points in the swing states, where it was concentrated, itās just that that wasnāt enough.
Not enough for the presidential race, sadly; perhaps enough to scrape by with a few Senate victories.
I canāt stress enough how important it is to be careful who you trust with your life
strong agree
minor upside: itās going to be a good time to make lists of people who suddenly feel comfortable to mask off
fucking fuck this sucks
minor upside: itās going to be a good time to make lists of people who suddenly feel comfortable to mask off
correct. keep receipts.
fuck the accelerationists for pumping shitheaded propaganda into the fediverse, for the victory lap theyāre taking now, and for the general idea that their revolution is worth our deaths
So much this
Not surprised, still very disappointed, I feel sick.
Yeah this is fucked up. I feel so bad for everybody (esp the Americans, but this will hurt the world). Shit this prob means I should start looking into seriously helping out locally when all this explodes into more international shit. (Which imho is the best you can do anyway, do things locally, build a bit of a support network for your community).
(Note Iām not American, but I think this will end badly, just the fucker stepping out of the paris accord for example, and all the weird blowhard fascists this will make feel emboldened to do more politics locally).
E: I really hope the people who go āthis is the same as in 2020, wait till all votes are countedā are correct and not on hopeium.
i think they indeed are on hopium/copium
I canāt tell, US elections have imho always been extremely dumb. (But, in the past decades+ ours have not been much better).
both by electoral college and by popular vote trump has advantage, and worse than that house and senate are republican now
Yeah, turns out this is the bad place.
The history books are going to refer to this era as āThe Stupid Yearsā.
Because all of this is very fucking stupid.
I fully expect they are, even as I also hope theyāre not.
Well, itās more like 2000, really, in the sense that the courts are being used to restrict voting rights. Thereās strong evidence of flagrant UOCAVA violations: thousands of absentee ballots which should affect the federal election have been challenged in swing states. Edit: Here is part 1 and part 2 from an attorney whose Pennsylvania UOCAVA ballot was challenged; he goes through the law and explains what heās going to do.
The level of fucked we are is too big for words
I wanted to say something darkly comedic about the AI bubble popping under the new regime, but my heart is too sick to make a joke
I think Iām more angry than anything. l hadnāt realized how tight my media bubble had gotten and was pretty sure this wasnāt realistic. I had gotten myself ready for another round of 2020 nonsense and denial, not this.
Š”Š»Š°Š²Š° Š£ŠŗŃŠ°ŃŠ½Ń. The world has failed you.
are you US-based? very sorry, take care
yes, i am. iāve been plotting to get out for years but iāve been too depressed since my partner died to make any progress tbh. iāve no idea what to do
ugh that sucks, Iām sorry
I would suggest Canada, but weāre set to get our own Trump in power in about a year or so. Too many people looking on the house on fire and thinking that pouring gasoline on it is the best solution.
The American electorate has just covered itself with gasoline because eggs cost 2 dollars more. Come January they strike the match. gg. HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH IāVE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE NOVEMBER 5TH. My only consolation is that Iāll hopefully get to watch some of the Magas/non voters/vote-your-conscience peeps suffer before the end. But Ol musky and peter thiel will be in their gilded bunkers while the fires consume us all.
yeah, a lot of broke trumpists will get fucked over, along with all other broke americans, getting worse if they are lgbt or non-white or need healthcare, or are migrants. on top of palestinians, lebanese (done deal at this point), ukrainians (likely) and maybe taiwanese
one thing that i can think of that could reduce damage is that while some policies are stupid, cruel and obviously harmful for everyone, that didnāt stop them previously, but this might make line no go up for billionaire republicans, and if they have trumpās ear, that could make their implementation ineffective on purpose. i mean here specifically undocumented migrant work whose deportation would make post-covid inflation look like a joke
Nashville, here. I hear ya.
I donāt know what else to say, I canāt explain any of this, but also please know that youāre not alone out there.
Ubisoftās NFT game is going great:
Ubisoftās NFT game, which has about 6 active players, has a game breaking exploit where one player is winning every match.
āOne player pointed out that the Paulstar111 account was top of the rankings with over 56,000 matches played. Itās not yet clear how the player has been able to connect to so many games and automatically win themā
a real web3 moment if there ever was one.
unfortunately the six active players bit is a joke
For any drive by readers who slightly want to know more background about some stuff: Why Richard Feynman wasnāt a great rolemodel.
(more context for the drive by readers, Feynman is often held up as a great man in STEM circles, and even more so in the world of LessWrong Rationalism. (Which is fine if it is about scientific achievements, but it often goes beyond that as here in their page on ātraditional rationalityā)).
Before my postmodern deconstruction and unlearning of the worship of Great Men, all I needed to know about feynman not being a good person to look up to was the calling women bitches thing. Miss me with that PUA shit
Considering the history of PUA stuff on lesswrong, Im going to assume this was a pro not a con for them even.
Feynman reminds me of the brujo (one specific man, not brujerĆa in general) from Pirsigās Lila. Feynmanās safecracking and unorthodox approaches are like the brujoās routine flaunting of social norms; through routinely doing things the wrong way (sacred clowning), new possible behaviors and modes of social existence are explored. Also, Feynmanās attitudes towards women remind me of that brujoās tendency to spy on women by looking through their windows into their homes while they were not necessarily dressed, which the brujoās society did not tolerate.
The worst part about Trump being president is Trump being president for a year. The second worst part is Vance being president for the next three (after Trump dies of heart failure). The third worst part is the fact that Iāve been owned in a way I canāt even explain to my closest friends.
The third worst part is the fact that Iāve been owned in a way I canāt even explain to my closest friends.
Oh god, this so much. Well, third worst for me personally, as a non-American white guy. I suppose Palestinians, Ukrainians, and marginalized groups in the US might have a few issues theyād rank higher.
the bit i wonder about is: would president couchfucker block weapons exports to Ukraine
Most likely. Backing out of international obligations and supporting fellow authoritarians seem to be pretty consistent aspects of what passes for MAGA ideology.
i guess this depends on how much vested interest (monetary) he has in MIC
trump seems to treat nato as americaās weapons shop buyers club
I havenāt done a headcount yet and the electionās not fully tallied, but I think that the Senate still has around 70% support for NATO, and historically we can expect to see a āblue dogā phenomenon in the House as a reaction to Republicans gaining seats. Effectively, both the Democrats and Republicans will function as big tents of two distinct parties, and there is usually tripartisan support (everybody but the far-right Republicans) for imperialism. We may well see votes where the legislators override presidential vetoes to force weapons sales and otherwise fulfill NATO obligations.
And yes, you read that correctly; Democrats move right as a reaction to Republicans doing well. Go back to bed, Americaā¦
there is usually tripartisan support (everybody but the far-right Republicans) for imperialism
iām not sure how thoroughly trumpists have purged the party of noncompliants, so maybe this non-far-right republicans block is smaller than it used to be
And yes, you read that correctly; Democrats move right as a reaction to Republicans doing well
iām not surprised by small to medium number of spineless MPs effectively changing sides, i have seen that previously. it is surprising to me that it keeps happening and dems donāt boot these people without notice, or at least deny them places on ballot
What did sideburns ever to do that guy?
@slopjockey @BlueMonday1984 Vance concerns me more than Trump.
The orange site is an easy target, but the lack of solidarity in the comments about the NYT Tech Guild strike fills me with dread.
A significant fraction of the people commenting on HN believe themselves to be the next Jeff Bezos. They cheer for the boot that crushes them, as surely one day they themselves will own that boot.
Said it before, Iāll say it again: if Americans are all temporarily embarrassed millionaires, HN is where the temporarily embarrassed billionaires go to hang out
We live in a world where you can watch billionaires publicly humiliate themselves on the daily and never suffer consequences for it. Whatās a little temporary embarrassment compared to that?
In Arizonaās U.S. Senate race, Republican Kari Lake told Politico why she feels confident in her chances, despite recent polling showing her behind Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego: āOur polling is a little different. We take polling, but we also combine it with AI, which reads all of whatās happening on social media and across the Internet.ā
Edit: Found the map sheās using:
Iām sure her results would be very accurate if troll farms could vote and chatgpt was doing the count.
Looks like she lost despite the polls legitimately being pretty left-biased this year. Even when itās right the hallucination machine is still wrong.
Just some thoughts about musk trying to be liked and doing whatever idiotic thing he can to become liked, specifically speaking at trump rallies:
- The maga turn as framed by this working theory makes sense, but it is also just what youād expect of any idiot that got lucky under capitalism.
- I read a hypothesis somewhere that when he does the jumping jacks at the trump rallies, heās trying to make the letter X with his body. Iām just hoping this somehow derails the fitness industry.
- itās telling that he wears that occupy mars shirt, the thing that people liked him for before, well, pretty much everything after he became well known.
Also: I donāt think weāll make it to mars!!! Fuck mars. The earth is our coffin and hope is a mistake.
NB: am not a US voter.
The earth is our coffin and hope is a mistake.
such a metal album name
Their grindcore coverband is called Earthcofffin Hopecrusher. Their 2 minute long album with 14 songs was pretty good.
Afterwards I was thinking it could also pass as an emo album name. I wonder if there is a good guessing game in āmetal album title or emo album title?ā
I feel like itās slightly more emo for sheer length, āThe Earth is Our Coffinā and āHope is a Mistakeā are both awesome metal albums in their own right, but the combination can only be from the genre that brought you āA Detailed and Poetic Physical Threat to the Person who Intentionally Vandalized My 1994 Dodge Intrepid Behind Kateās Apartmentā
Brb mailing this to myself
I think āany idiot that got lucky under capitalismā is a pretty good description of Musk and his type, to be fair.
The Martians seem to think that Mars will be like a new colony, with all the āhopeā that implies, but it seems to me that colonization was a wretched process for many of the colonists (to say nothing of the people being colonized). Musk is only cheerful about it because he thinks heāll be whipping the slaves rather than working the arid red soil.
The thing that really grinds my gears about the escape to Mars plan is that Earth is already habitable (for now) and Mars is not. If we can make an uninhabitable planet habitable, we could just make the already habitable planet stay habitable. There is no scenario where terraforming Mars is easier than, uh, āterraformingā the Earth.
This is like 30-90% of why Iām a mars hater. Not only should we rehabilitate earth first, the fact is we are dehabilitating it instead and are not making any meaningful effort in the other direction.
Forced to endure an episode of an Irish tv programme about the environment in which a guest sincerely listed carbon capture & storage and small nuclear reactor as potential energy solutions. As mentioned above, the earth is our coffin, hope is a mistake, etc
Carbon capture, small nuclear reactors. We stopped thinking big. To really solve climate change we need to do one easy, but big thing. Blow up the Sun.
Kill and dethrone God.
Youāll hear no complaint from me.
Malcolm McDowell successfully blew up a star in one of the Star Trek movies, even if it did immediately get reversed by a time-travel MacGuffin. Perhaps we just need new leadership?
Donāt think we should put another space guy into politics, no matter their expertise at blowing up stars. They tend to go bad quickly.
SMRs make me so goddamn miserable. We already know how to build nuclear plants. Build those! Weāre kind of on a tight deadline here, maybe donāt waste time trying to invent a less efficient reactor thatās supposed to solve a problem we donāt have.
We already have working carbon capture technology, too. Itās called plants. Thanks to deforestation and ocean pollution weāre making negative progress creating CC machines, nice job.
You know that thing that happened with the AI generated DOOM?
Well, someone decided to do the same thing with Minecraft, and you can see that the results areā¦ basically abysmal:
https://youtu.be/7Jd-Rr9cJYo?si=-9XZ51ss6cBuSiC3 Skip to 2:00 for the actual āgameplayā.TL:DW nothing is saved outside of the view screen, things arenāt even saved within the view screen, the resolution is like 240p at 20fps, input latency and mouse latency is awful, and this was all apparently done by training on literal millions of hours of Minecraft footage. The mid-range computer I had from 2006 could run the game better than this. A 14-year-old netbook could run the game better than whatever supercomputer theyāre using to render this.
Note that the person in the video isnāt part of the team/whoever that created it, just someone who is reviewing it.
maybe iām a weirdo but i actually really like this a lot. if there werenāt armies of sycophants chanting outside of all our collective windows about how AI is the future of gamingā¦ if you look at this āgameā as an art object unto itself i think it is actually really engaging
it reminds me of other āgamesā like Marian Kleinebergās Wave Function Collapse and Bananaftās Yedoma Globula. thereās one other on the tip of my tongue where you uploaded an image and it constantly reprojected the image onto the walls of a first-person walking simulator, but i donāt recall the name
I do like it also, but notice how they try to hide most of these strange effects in their demo video. Theyāre trying to pass it off as a playable minecraft. Anything interesting about the technology is a defect to these people.
They also claim this is āthe first playable AI-generated gameā when the exact same sort of thing already existed in 2022 (and it looked a lot more efficient and haunted): https://madebyoll.in/posts/game_emulation_via_dnn/ Maybe it doesnāt count if you call it āNeural networkā instead of āAIā.
That article gave me a whiplash. First part: pretty cool. Second part: deeply questionable.
For example these two paragraphs from sections āproblem with codeā and āmagic of dataā:
āModular and interpretable codeā sounds great until you are staring at 100 modules with 100,000 lines of code each and someone is asking you to interpret it.
Regardless of how complicated your programās behavior is, if you write it as a neural network, the program remains interpretable. To know what your neural network actually does, just read the dataset
Well, ājust read the dataset broā sound great sounds great until you are staring at a dataset with 100 000 examples and someone is asking you to interpret it.
What the hell is this even arguing for? Is one module with ten million lines somehow better than 100 modules Ć 100k lines?
yeah, that āmost of the internet will be Al-generatedā nonsense is tanking my ability to take them as domain experts seriously.
still, something gets me about completely generated, transient-when-youāre-not-looking, constantly shifting worlds. might have to collect more examples
still, something gets me about completely generated, transient-when-youāre-not-looking, constantly shifting worlds. might have to collect more examples
Itās dream logic.
Showed this to my wife.
You know what the worst part is? Weāre spending all this computing power to generate this bad acid trip, but if I just took a bunch of LSD you know what Iād still have? The things in my pockets. Iād have a better time just having a bunch of LSD and walking down to the 7-11
oh cool, Minecraft LSD: Dream Emulator edition
which would be a cool concept, if the generative AI model werenāt incredibly prohibitively expensive to run, trained on plagiarized videos, and incapable of coherently tracking state (believe it or not, LSD: Dream Emulator does have a gameplay and progression loopā¦ game-like things without one tend to get dull very quick)
game-like things without one tend to get dull very quick
This has been a thing with games leaning heavily on procedural generated content as well. Takes a lot of effort to make those more interesting in the longer term. The ai is the future of gaming people are sure to rediscover this fact again. Sadly compared ro pgc people they will waste a lot more energy and money.
I think itās fine to have little art games that are only interesting to play for a few minutes. They can still have an impact that stays with you forever. Catacombs of Solaris for instance is one I love and think about all the time.
These AI guys though, god it must be so sad working on this stuff. They canāt be proud of what theyāre making if the goal is to trick people into thinking you can have a real Minecraft game in there. The game is not even relevant, as far as I can tell theyāre only using it to draw attention to their stupid and doomed ASIC business.
goddammit! you have no idea how many variations of āfirst person walking simulator projected image texture trippy visualsā i slapped into every search engine!
but yes, that was the one i was thinking of
Ah awesome! I didnāt think it was because you canāt upload pictures, but maybe you can in the āRevisitedā version!
i went and bought it, and yup, the revisited version is the one i was thinking of. time to walk around inside a picture of Sam Altman so i can absorb his raw intellect and business acumen
Pgc can be a useful tool in the toolbox however. Just look at dwarf fortress for example. But games need more than just that. And with LLMs there could also ve some use (generation of voices I think for example, or some low level of conversational chatter). The problem is the data usage, the anti worker stuff (no voice actor wants their voice stolen for example), and like in this case, the people just promoting their other crap. Like how crypto games are just a shell to promote their crypto bs.
LLMs could have some minor use but with the backlash due to techbros going their usual vc style techbro ways, and steam requiring disclosure I doubt it will be of much use the risk is too great. Which considering the power costs is great.
We also have stuff like DLSS, which is pretty cool and I imagine ends up being more efficient in energy usage. The key thing I believe is itās built as a specific tool for a specific purpose, instead of general purpose slop machines eating humongous databases to excrete absolutely nothing useful for anyone.
Iāve seen this floating about quite a bit, and everyone I know is dunking on it - the most frequent comparison Iāve seen is calling it āMinecraft with dementiaā.
It also shows why those DOOM demos were only 2-3 seconds long, because thatās how long it can keep cohesion for.
Note that the person in the video isnāt part of the team/whoever that creates it, just someone who is reviewing it.
See, thereās the mistake. You canāt let outside people actually interact with the thing; you need to stick with cherry-picked 2-3s clips.
I donāt blame Saltman for this one, since itās just a more specific version of the general pathology that assumes the markets are basically Gods.
"In our top story today, the rapture has drawn the souls of the faithful into heaven and we have entered what experts are calling a āfinal tribulationā. Weāre also receiving reports that Dread Cthulhu has awoken from his deathly slumber in his house at Rālyeh, and environmental groups are claiming that increased sightings of wolves and frost giants could herald the arrival of Fimbulwinter and through it Ragnarƶk.
The stock market, however, seems to be taking the literal end times in stride, with strong performances from Raytheon and other manufacturers countering a downturn in other sectors."
you see, air defense is very useful against supernatural horrors beyond human comprehension
(also they recently changed name to RTX after merger. surely no fucked up managerial cancer would spread from there, like with Boeing-McDonnel Douglas merger. not like they make anything of absolutely critical importance for Ukrainians)
Lawns are functional though, they arenāt just a status symbol.
I grew up with a mossy front yard, and I have clover and ferns in my current yards to compete with grasses; there are better options, my dude.
They can be, but they can also be a social and recreational space.
Your mumās a social and recreational space, but I donāt see you going to bat for her despite being more useful
I was going to call them friendless losers who never had company over to play cornhole, have a bonfire, or lounge around on a hot summer day getting doused by a sprinkler while drinking beers because they are repugnant socially awkward cave trolls who are bitter and jealous of people who use their picturesque lawns.
But I would never do that because that is neither civil nor polite.
dang hates this one weird trick you can use to be an asshole in spite of the orange siteās civility rules
also what is that list of activities? did ChatGPT generate this? grass is required to play beep boop normal human games like cornhole now? youāre āhaving a bonfireā on grass and not in something normal like a firepit thatās safer on rocks or concrete? youāre just laying down on the grass, where the dog shits, slowly getting drunk and incredibly itchy from the grass as a sprinkler douses you?
picturesque lawns
oh maybe thatās it, the only people Iāve ever met with picturesque lawns are wealthy and wealthy people aināt fucking normal
Or you could just not water it, not fertilize it, not pesticide it and simply run the mower over it whenever the assorted vegetation (which will be mostly grass) exceeds a certain height.
It wonāt look ānice neighborhoodā nice but itāll still be fine.
i love when my yard is a giant mud patch rimmed by yellow with an occasional glimmer of green when the crabgrass blooms
the orange site is absolutely populated by the type of shithead whoās proud to be on their HOAās board
having a lawn is so easy first just hire a gardener to come every week, second live in a place where tap waterās inexpensive
motherfuckers
Weāre anti-grass lawns now? Fuck yes. I knew this place had potential.
Iām no landscaper so donāt quiz me on the options, but grass is in the lowest tier option for things to fill outdoor space with.
lawns in addition to other things are fine, but also all the stuff self said applies pretty hard
weāre lucky in ZA that weāre pretty good with getting a lot of this stuff out, which Iām often pretty happy about, but thatās an incident of geography (and personal location)
Been seeing some stuff from this artist. This is the most recent thing to pop up for me. They seem alright, though I donāt have the energy to fully investigate their politics.
Iām about to pass out from the cognitive dissonance Iām feeling from seeing andressen and musk talking about privilege
Unfortunately there arenāt enough mind altering, ego-killing drugs out there for either of these dicks to understand and internalise the (common usage of the) words they posted.
why do neurotypical people love to do this. why canāt you say sam harris sucks in a normal way
People enjoy making amateur diagnoses of public figures, and people enjoy feeling like theyāre superior to neurodivergent people.
actual diagnosis, inexplicably not in the DSM-5
For a palette cleanser, you might appreciate that If Books Could Kill just released a solid dunk on Sam Harris
ha, the screen cap is from the ibck subreddit. one of my favorite podcasts
that adds a whole nother layer of lol
Atlantic writer: ābetter dubble down on Twitter huhuhuhhuhā
Calls to disengage from X, now that Elon Musk has turned it into a white-supremacist haven, certainly have a moral appeal. But if this election showed how difficult it is to meaningfully ādeplatformā speakers you disagree with, it also demonstrated the danger of ignoring the platforms where they speak. Unfortunately, the only way to change whatās happening in an echo chamber may be to add your own noise.
This is your periodic reminder that Steve Jobsā widow owns that toilet-paper factory. And that they still pump out hot new singles from hitmakers like David Frum and, occasionally, my personal favorite, Eliot āGW Bush Did Nothing Wrongā Cohen.
what in the absolute fuck
āyou shouldnāt do anything that works to resist fascismā is going to be the neoliberal siren call for 4+ years, isnāt it
It doesnāt even fit with the axioms of market logic! If the platform in question has terrible content moderation, primarily generates revenue from profoundly repulsive people, and was intentionally bought out to be used as the central propaganda organ for a destructive political movementā¦ why wouldnāt you leave?! Dude just doesnāt want to admit heās too lazy to redo his follows elsewhere
It makes sense if you consider that Twitterās users are essentially creating the product that is sold to advertisers rather than actually buying a product. Leaving Twitter en masse to try and force a policy change isnāt a boycott, itās a strike. And we know how neoliberalism feels about organized labor.
Unfortunately, the only way to change whatās happening in an echo chamber may be to add your own noise.
imagine writing something like this and considering yourself to be the adult in the room. just a big ol politics understander, writing and writing and none of it means a fucking thing. you get up every morning and somehow the dread doesnāt make you collapse back into bed.
I feel like we could solve a lot of the leftās problems in the US by building a time machine and giving 13 year old Aaron Sorkin about 10 lbs of 2024 weed.
Always has been.
Liberals: vote for us, we are diet fascism, we are the lesser evil! We reduce harm!
Itās been the siren call for the last 400 years.
My radicalisation just continues and deepens.
What deplatforming actually happened that this writer is referring to? āWe didnāt deplatform anyone. Therefore deplatforming badā ???
āweāve tried nothing, and nothing is working!ā this is going to be such a common refrain
God and thinking about it even a little bit:
Of course deplatforming works, you fuckface! Why did Elon buy twitter if not to secure a platform? It is surprising you managed to write anything at all, you stupid goblin.
In fact it was quite the blow for them, it cost him at least 44 billion, and massive amounts of attention. (Not as much as diablo 4 however).
Exactly!
Counterpoint: I have never seen anyone that invested into Diablo who wasnāt deeply depressed and hiding from it. The attempt to turn into whatever kind of influencer he is now must have also cost him functional coping mechanisms in addition to the money, reputation, and good will.
Mass media try not to cozy up to fascists challenge: impossible!
Story from .nl, after Wilders āwonā (he got the biggest share of the votes, and quite a lot more than before) the election last year, instantly the amount of horrible posts towards visible muslim people massively intensified (other groups, women, leftwingers and lgbt people (and the various intersections) also got worse replies (which on Dutch twitter always was bad already)). So this advice is so dumb, yes expose your people to more risk and potential burnout. And guess what, as we are a year in and most of Dutch twitter is still on twitter. It doesnt help. (And I cant tell, as switching to bsky has made me realize just how much of a breath of fresh air it is, but to me it feels twitter has gotten worse, but that is more likely explained by me getting better).
E: there is also the āthey need us more than we need themā factor. I have not seen rightwing Dutch trolls on bksy yet, Catturd however made the jump (and was promptly banned by everybody).
what a terrible fate https://archive.ph/X2s3z
