cygon

@cygon@lemmy.world
1 Post – 118 Comments
Joined 5 months ago

Disclaimer: I wondered the same, since 2014, and this is what I puzzled together for myself, read it with that in mind!

I believe a lot of it can be traced back to the wealthy and to conservative think tanks / media control by right wing moguls.

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, conservatives were perceived as well-off business people trying to protect their own wealth (I've read that people used to say things like "I'm not rich enough to vote Republican" or children shouting "last one in the house is a dirty Republican"). You can even see old movies dunk on conservatives (i.e. take Stanley Kubrick's "2010: The Year we Make Contact" (1984), at the beginning, with the satellite dish tower, the protagonist noses off about reactionaries being in control of congress, thus leading the country towards war).

This is the rather extreme election result from 1964:

Political map of the US in 1964

Because liberals mostly were Democratic Party voters, Republicans and their wealthy donors tried to alter public perception of liberals (i.e. make it undesirable for their Republican indoctrinatees to be liberal). This included taking over the media (and Reagan conveniently cancelling the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, which gave political bias in the media some guard rails), then painting liberals as all things undesirable: arrogant, weak, clueless, leeches, etc.

Having a "hate object" worked so well that they kept capitalizing on it. Much of it was/is just slinging sh*t against the wall and looking what sticks, but think tanks are indeed looking at what sticks, so successful patterns get repeated. Some of these successful patterns I can see are: installing a victim complex in conservatives (feeling their back against the wall, they lash out easier, ensuring anyone talking about conservatives is conditioned to use very soft gloves) and the two-year bogeyman, often trying to capture, redefine and vilify some prior existing concept (thus, when the campaign hits, indoctrinatees can find lots of "proof" online of this thing existing).

For example, social justice used to be universally agreed on as a good thing, woke used to mean remaining aware of systemic inequalities, now they make conservatives pop an artery. This has been going for a while (the "hate object" over time has been rock music, hippies, metal music, supposed satan worshippers, pen and paper games, paganism+atheism, video games, social justice activists, cancel culture, black lives matter, critical race theory, wokeness, ...)

And I think, yes, your perception is spot on. This is, for example, what I get when I search for "anti-conservative t-shirts" (if it's too tiny, try it yourself - they're all anti-liberal):

Search result on DuckDuckGo for anti-conservative t-shirts, all results showing anti-liberal t-shirts

TL;DR: conservatives are intentionally made and kept angry. It keeps them unified against a bigger enemy (see Genghis Gambit), drives them to go vote and prevents voters from switching sides even if they do not like some things the conservatives are doing. Add to that Russia amplifying this division like there's no tomorrow. They're installing this hate for liberals both in tankies and in far-right bigots (and, as far as I can tell, anti-liberal sentiment is pushed into Russian society, too).

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So... this AI company gets gaming teens to "donate" their computing power, rather than pay for render farms / GPU clouds?

And then oblivious parents pay the power bills, effectively covering the computing costs of the AI porn company?

Sounds completely ethical to me /s.

Typical past ceasefires or truces with Russia:

  • +0 Hours: Shelling stops on both sides, occasional gunfire erupts in places.
  • +1 Hours: Russians rush supplies to their troops.
  • +3 Hours: Russians violate truce and try to gain as much ground as possible in a surprise attack.

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Fool me once...

Oh no, he found out about the Transsylvania plans. But I assume Wokesconsin, Gaybraska and Lesbiana are still a go?

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I'm expecting a really nasty autumn this year. A big chunk of Russia's campaign against Europe is held up by Ukraine and they badly need a stooge US president again.

Musk also opened Twitter's doors wide for state-sponsored manipulation and agitation campaigns. All protections are offline and the teams are gone, under the guise of free speech.

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Thanks for bringing this up, it's really needed.

Your example is just one of many I've seen. The entire instance seems to be engaged in an opinion shaping campaign where only this gross mix of Western doomerism with Russia/China-glorifying fascism is allowed to thrive.

I don't know how to best deal with such indoctrination chambers. Their members become completely divorced from reality and there's no way to pull them back from the brink because anything you could say to that effect gets moderator-deleted. Yet vice versa, they can freely spread their propaganda and engage in "raids" on other instances.

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Is this a case of "here, LLM trained on millions of lines of text from cold war novels, fictional alien invasions, nuclear apocalypses and the like, please assume there is a tense diplomatic situation and write the next actions taken by either party" ?

But it's good that the researchers made explicit what should be clear: these LLMs aren't thinking/reasoning "AI" that is being consulted, they just serve up a remix of likely sentences that might reasonably follow the gist of the provided prior text ("context"). A corrupted hive mind of fiction authors and actions that served their ends of telling a story.

That being said, I could imagine /some/ use if an LLM was trained/retrained on exclusively verified information describing real actions and outcomes in 20th century military history. It could serve as brainstorming aid, to point out possible actions or possible responses of the opponent which decision makers might not have thought of.

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I think the caveman wouldn't fare any better :)

There was a (possibly unethical) experiment where scientists tried to induce stress symptoms (lack of appetite, depression, panic, etc.) in rats.

They found that sudden scares or bringing the rats face-to-face with predators had little long term effect. But placing them on a floor with a constant, slightly uncomfortable electric current (low-level stress over a longer period) did cause them to develop all the symptoms.

So perhaps we're just not naturally equipped to deal with permanent time pressure, upcoming appointments and deadlines in the way modern society gives them to us.

This would truly be the cherry on top.

  • Questionable Burisma payments? May never have happened.
  • Laptop someone identifying as Hunter Biden gave to a blind, pro-Trump repair shop owner? Might not even exist.
  • E-Mails published by the New York Post? A mix of real e-mails with ones that could not be validated.
  • Cloned hard drive handed to the New York Post? Tampered with, real e-mails and pictures mixed with possibly planted things.

I had assumed that at least the initial whistleblower report was in good faith.

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After reading, the gist of it seems to be:

  • Vanilla far-right indoctrinated dumbo (his vision: "Reds" welcome, "Blues" not, "Anti-Blue Propaganda" on public view screens)
  • Wants exploitative capitalism on steroids with companies controlling everyone's lives completely
  • Claims current capitalism is only bad because it's "woke capitalism" which he claims the "ruling class" is pushing
  • Wants tech bros to butter up police and give security staff jobs to their children as a favor, i.e. intentional social classism

.

In short, just another out of touch entrepreneur who sells snake oil cures to people suffering in the current system, so that they may invite in the boot that stomps them down for good.

When you have a bunch of computers networked, each of them is assigned a unique number, so when other computers send data on the wire, they can say who it is meant for (imagine each blurb of data starting out like: "yo, I'm sending these next 500 bytes for computer 0A123FBC32, here they come").

Now the right computer will listen, but it doesn't know what program the data is for - is it a chunk of a file your browser is downloading? Or the email your email app wants to display? Or perhaps a join request from your buddy's computer for the Minecraft game you're hosting?

So in addition to the unique number of the target computer, the data also specifies a "port number", which tells the computer which of its running programs the data is meant for (programs ask the computer's operating system: "if any network data arrives on port XY, give it to me"). Some ports have become standards - for example, a program that serves web pages to other computers would typically ask the operating system that any data arriving on the computer that indicates port numbers 80 and 443 should be given to it, and when a web browser wants to fetch a web page, it will send a request to the computer serving the page, defaulting to port 80 o 443.

If you dig deeper, you'll find that there are even more unique numbers involved and routers/firewalls let data through not only by port number but also by distinguishing between data that is the initial request to another computer's port number and data that is an answer to an earlier seen request -- and more.

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I liked agile as it was practiced in the "Extreme Programming" days.

  • Rather than attempt to design the perfect system from the get-go, you accept that software architecture is a living, moving target that needs to evolve as your understanding of the problem evolves.

  • Rather than stare down a mountain of ill-defined work, you have neat little user stories that can be completed in a few days at most and you just move around some Kanban cards instead of feeding a soul-sucking bureaucratic ticketing, time tracking and monitoring system.

  • Rather than sweat and enter crunch mode for deadlines, the project owners see how many user stories (or story points or perfect hours) the team completes per week and can use a velocity graph / burndown chart to estimate when all work will be completed.

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But it's just a corporate buzzword now. "We're agile" often enough means "we have no plan, take no responsibility and expect the team to wing it somehow" or "we cargo cult a few agile ideas that feel good to management, like endless meetings with infinite course changes where everyone gives feel-good responses to the managers."

Having a goal, a specification, a release plan, a vision and someone who is responsible and approachable (the "project owner") are all part of the agile manifesto, not something it tries to do away with. I would be sad if agile faces the same fate as the waterfall model back in its time and even sadder if we return to the time-tracking-ticket-system-with-Gantt-chart hell as the default.

Maybe we need a new term or an "agility index" to separate the cases of "incompetent manager uses buzzword to cover up messy planning" from the cases of "project owner with a clearly defined goal creates a low-bureaucracy work environment for his team." :)

From another outsider:

  • I think Taylor Swift is married to a player of one of the teams competing for the superbowl.
  • She previously encouraged young people to vote (but not for whom), which would be bad for Republicans as they're unpopular with young people.
  • Right wing media cooked up a theory that the super bowl was fixed so the team of Taylor Swift's husband would win, resulting in Taylor Swift being called to the victory celebration where she then would endorse Joe Biden.

As far as I take it from this thread, the team actually won, but the endorsement didn't happen, confusing conspiracy nutters everywhere.

Uh... I swear I wanted to contribute just 2 or 3 games, but as I wrote, I kept remembering one gem after another... oh well... :)

Outer Wilds - So hard to describe, it's an exploration game, but what you're exploring is a star system going supernova, in a wooden spaceship no less. And a strange way of (not) time travel is also involved, which could be the root of the whole game loop.

Axiom Verge - A platformer that is such a labor of love that it hits just the perfect mix of approachability, exploration, story development and that "huh?" factor where right until the end you're not sure what your abilities actually mean - i.e. if you could glitch through walls in the real world, would that imply the real world is a simulation?

Stardew Valley - A somehow utterly satisfying farming simulator in the style of the first Harvest Moon games. Such a nice getaway game - it begins with your avatar quitting their office job and moving to a farm inherited from their grandfather. No taxes, no boss, no stress, just rise with the sun, plant, water, harvest and fix. Change your rhythm with the weather and the seasons, investigate charming little mysteries of a beautiful place.

Broforce - Another platformer, this one a bit more brutal. Far over the top 80s action heroes bring freedom to the world, but whether you play as Robocop, Schwarzenegger, McGyver, Snake Plissken, Ripley or another 50 heroes is almost random and each hero has completely different weapons and skills. Destructible environment and even a large Xenomorph outbreak (how the heck did they get the license or grant?).

Protolife - This one uses such a madly simple recipe for complex gameplay. Seen top-down, you're a robotic loader than can put down dots. That's all. But certain arrangements of dots are guns, long range guns, flame throwers, area denial, missile silos, barriers and so on. You're attacked by insect-like creatures, but instead of building tanks, you have to attack via well-placed guns slowly pushing the swarming enemies back.

Alien Shooter 2 Reloaded - Simple top-down shooter where you're the lone soldier seeking to contain an alien outbreak. Goes for the time-honed recipe of character stat upgrades (speed, health, accuracy) and purchasing weapons and weapon upgrades. The interesting part is the insane hordes you're up against and that all the corpses stay. It's not unusual for entire corridors to turn into flesh hallways of blood and carapaces.

Moons of Madness - I hope this is actually indie, the graphics are near AAA level. It's 50% walking simulator, 50% cosmic horror, set on Mars. You're an astronaut doing maintenance on an outpost, but rather than go for the "freaky alien attack" recipe, reality itself seems to be somehow bending. Cthulhu, is that you?

Lumencraft - Top-down game. You begin as a miner in an underground base. Something really bad happened to humanity and now you're digging underground for metal and for "lumen." To feed the reactor that keeps humanity alive, you have to meet harvesting goals and dig tunnels, but various enemies attack in waves, so you have to spend part of your resources on fortifications and turrets and avoid opening up too many avenues into your bases.

Carrion - 2D platformer-ish. In a secret place, scientists are holding a horrific, tentacled bioweapon locked away, but it escapes. Twist: you are the tentacled bioweapon, slithering through pipes, circumventing security systems and trying to escape from the lab.

Nuclear Blaze - 2D platformer. You're a fireman sent to contain a fire the broke out in some kind of installation in a forest. But one building has a shaft that leads deep underground where a high-end containment facility is suffering a failure. Takes place in the "SCP" universe and your only tool is a fire hose. Extremely fun trying to extinguish fires in a way where they won't spread again.

Mothergunship - This is a first-person shooter where you're bording and destroying (from the inside out) an army of AI space ships. But instead of a traditional gun, you have gun parts you can stick together. How about a triple rocket launcher with two shotguns in the middle? Or a shield generating laser with a sawblade attache to it, and maybe two shotguns just to be sure? It doesn't grow old with new weapon parts being introduced right until the very end.

Space Run - 2D base building. You're a mercenary cargo pilot fending off space pirates. But you don't do it by controlling a turret, instead, your spaceship is a building surface and you have to build the right kind of engines, turrets, shields and power generators (in mid-flight no less) to be able to shoot down incoming rocks and pirate ships. Extremely well balanced and fun.

Creeper World - 3D real-time strategy. But your enemy is not actually present on the map, you're just fighting a simulation of liquid, a gooey slime that pours out of several spots. You have to keep shooting, bombarding and containing the splashing, pouring slime until you can neutralize the slime outlets. The story is cool, too. The slime is actually some extinct species "gift" to the universe which dissolves everything into data, transmitted to some eternal storage space at the center of the universe.

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So true. By this point, Russia is already using everything it can, short of an actual, hot war with the west. And their military is stretched to the limit already without that.

I think this sabre rattling is still useful to them as a one-two-tactic:

  1. Public threat from Russia, mentioning but not directly threatening nukes (the "push" side)
  2. Russia-aligned media in the west publish articles saying "Putin's threat should be taken seriously," Russia-aligned western politicians smearing their opponents as "irresponsible war mongers", followed by pushing for existing sanctions to be lifted, etc. (the "pull" side via stooges/crooked politicians)

Stage 2:

Documents folder? You want to rule my whole computer, dictate some nonsensical folder structure and then you act like, out of the goodness of your heart, I can have this little set of folders, deep in your weird structure, to store my stuff? And you're even telling me how to sort it? On my own hard drive connected to my own computer?

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Considering the teams tasked with containing political opinion manipulation campaigns were the first to go, I think that is exactly what the acquisition boils down to. A license to manipulate and meddle in public discussion for anyone rich or powerful enough (and of a political disposition agreeable to Musk's increasingly GOP/Russia-indoctrinated mind).

It's a "public town square" where the major approvingly smiles as groups of paid shills and remote-controlled opinion pushers insert themselves into discussions and roughen up people they notice going against the opinions they push.

I'm running a few on my NAS:

  • Taiga to manage projects. It's as easy and pleasant to use as Trello, but with velocity/burndown charts and the whole "agile" thing, but you can also turn parts of it on and off (per project even).

  • Trilium completely cured me of messy note-taking habits, simply by winning on the convenience side. I was firmly in the "folder tree of markdown documents" and "my Sublime Text tabs of random notes have no number" camp before.

  • I'm considering Habitica which lets you set up rewards and achievements for your real life (i.e. apply addictive reward/progress loop from video games to motivate your real self to do things). Also Wger for exercise tracking, but I'm not sure they're the right thing for my ticket/tracking-averse self (I wish there was something that covered the whole MyFitnessPal/FitDay and the whole Polar Personal Trainer/Garmin Connect side, but FOSS and self-hosted).

For leisure, I also run Stash (it bills itself as an organizer for your porn library, but it's really good for any kind of clips), Jellyfin for my music and movies and currently both Mango and Kavita for books and comics.

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While I'm in none of these groups, having survived the rock'n roll-, black mass- / satanic(1)-, killer videogame-, terrorism-, social justice- / SJW-, safe space-, socialism-/communism-, antifa-, cabal-, satanic(2)-, CRT- and woke-panic, I feel underrepresented.

It's a battery factory that was built there despite environmental concerns.

I think the main things that attracted the ire of environmentalists are:

  • When the building permits were still being negotiated, Tesla just started clearing land illegally
  • A battery factory requires lots of water, this one was built in a region already low on groundwater
  • There have been several instances of spilled chemicals
  • The sewage coming out of the factory has been contaminated (phosphorus and nitrogen) beyond allowed thresholds for two years
  • The local water supply company is reportedly near its limit, but Tesla wants to expand the battery factory and clear additional land

.

But the situation is a bit muddy. Early protests around 2021..2022 often had a share of far right wingnuts trying to recruit people. That's lessened, though. This specific protest was definitely swelled in numbers by the factory expansion and land clearing plans, but is also part of a planned day of protests by the "Disrupt Tesla" group. They have a web presence here: https://disrupt-now.org/en/.

Bill Clinton, chief executive of U.S. Government, a division of MCI-WorldCom, praised Monday's merger as "an excellent move."

I'll be... they even predicted the "sovereign citizen" movement!

Sometimes the switch is surprisingly seamless, though. Autodesk Maya has an official Linux version, Blender is more than competitive now. For photo and video editing, Krita has become the better Photoshop for me and DaVinci Resolve has a native Linux version as well, with the additional benefit of letting me completely avoid Adobe. The ex-Allegorithmic tools also have Linux support and can be bought on Steam even.

On the other side, I haven't had much success running Clip Studio Paint or Daz 3D and a VM is rather frustrating to use (the lag between pen and screen just feels weird).

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His human rights should absolutely be respected, but I think the world will be a worse place with this guy running around.

As a messenger, his organization turned a blind eye on one side (WikiLeaks refused to publish Russian government documents: Report, WikiLeaks Turned Down Leaks on Russian Government During U.S. Presidential Campaign) and instead collaborated with them, to the degree of forging messages and using leaks to distract from equally newsworthy dirty laundry.

I'd compare him to a cop who selectively polices crime gang A but ignores crime gang B. And whose phone number is found with members of crime gang B, together with evidence that they could call the cop at any time (and did so) to appear inside crime gang A's territory. Yes, technically, the cop has apprehended more criminals than either of us ever will and we could give him a medal for his work (and crime gang B is certainly motivated to help that along to get this cop more entrenched and promoted).

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I know this is naive, but sometimes I wish we'd be bolder in brainstorming alternative ways the economy could work.

Imagine, for example, the IRS would send a yearly, mandatory "happiness questionnaire" to all employees of a company (compare the "world happiness report"). This questionnaire then would have a major influence on how much taxes the company has to pay, so much that it's cheaper to make employees happy and content than to squeeze them for every ounce of labor they can give.

Or an official switch to 6 hour days, except to get those 2 hours less, you have to use them for growing your own food. Shorter workdays, more time with family, more self-reliance. And a strong motivation for cities to provide more green spaces and community gardens.

Very naive ideas with lots of problems, yes, but I wish we wouldn't have the concept of revenue generation so thoroughly encrusted in our heads as the guiding principle of all we do and dream of.

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For a moment I thought a Trump supporter had grown balls. Indoctrinated nutjob balls, but balls.

But after reading that Manifesto, it looks more like it's a classical conspiracy nutter who must, at any cost, trace all world events and pop culture back to a secret group that is orchestrating everything:

  • Secret group controls both major US political parties
  • Cryptocurrency intentionally built/pushed by this group to crash the global finance system
  • Secret group is mocking everyone by broadcasting their plans through i.e. old Simpsons episodes
  • 1970s dystopian movie classics were actually setting us up to accept these dystopias
  • Secret group knows about coming resource depletion and climate collapse, will destroy society, then rule the survivors.

TLDR; a wild mix of real issues, attributed to America-centric conspiracy puzzle pieces, many taken from Russian propaganda, combined with far-fetched associations that would make any numerologist proud.

Look at the date. Oct 8.

On Oct 7, Hamas launched the surprise attack on Israel. The Israel military response didn't even start until the end of October. I take no issue with someone expressing their support on Oct 8.

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I think a lot of us only roughly remember the details (or didn't follow the later revelations) about Assange. My memory was weak, too, so here is a short refresher (with links!)

Pre 2015 Wikileaks did ethical releases of leaked information (vouched; cleaned of names and details that would expose individuals to danger) and exposed generally diplomatic and military-industrial dirt.

Trump Campaign Assange and thus Wikileaks sided with the GOP. Wikileaks had a line to Trump's campaign team. They also sat on a trove of DNC E-Mails provided by Russian hackers. Wikileaks timed releases to blot out news that could hurt Trump. In one case, the Trump campaign urgently asked for a leak and got Wikileaks to act within 30 minutes. Wikileaks also refused to publish leaks harming Russia.

From the private chat logs (more in the Business Insider article linekd above), some things Assange said to his, until then, progressive aides

Assange: "We believe it would be much better for GOP to win. Dems+Media+liberals woudl [sic] then form a block to reign in their worst qualities."

Assange: "Russia is absolutely terrified. Kalingrad, Crimea, and its only foreign naval base, Syria are all under threat and are not protected by Russia’s strategic depth. Meanwhile the US hacks the hell out of it"

It looks to me like Assange got suckered in by Russian propaganda rather than sell out intentionally, but that's just my own guess.

Rape Charges In Sweden, he used his fame to obtain sex from two women, both times trying to refuse condoms. He was creepy and pushy with both. Woman A suspected he manipulated his condom. Woman B woke up in the night to find Assange had climbed on top of her for "second servings" without asking and had penetrated her without a condom.

From my own memory: neither woman went to the police, but when they talked about it (to press?), a public prosecutor in Sweden was duty-bound to start a rape investigation.

It gets too messy from there. The US had an interest in Assange's extradition and may have plausibly exerted pressure. The women received threats and hate. Russia fanned the flames under everything to fuel division and turn more Wikileaks supporters against the US.

The rest is history. I don't know where to stand. Assange and Wikileaks were once forces for good. But, in my opinion, he got played, never realized or never admitted to it, and is now just another lackey aiding Russia.

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Q1: Select (see Q3) + F2

Q2: Same way as double-click people. A file only opens if I click, not when I press the mouse button and drag the file around.

Q3: I draw a small selection frame over it, or press the control key when clicking (I have the hand there any, especially if my next input will be Ctrl+C/X and Ctrl+V

Q4: I just do. Sometimes I relax by playing shooters with the "invert mouse" option turned on :D

I have never had a cell phone or smart phone in my life, single-click was the default when I switched to Linux, I gave it a try and I liked it.

I don't know about other European countries, but Germany's greens have kept a relatively tidy ship compared to other parties.

Which is why Russia is puppeteering Germany's far-right to view them as a kind of combined enemy, you often hear them use the term "Linksgrunversifft" / "left-green-soiled" towards people who hold the wrong opinions.

Didn't they push a similar joined term in America 2016? I remember encountering the words "liberal elite" a lot, probably an attempt to redirect the resentment against the uppity conservative establishment towards liberals instead. I guess it worked.

Punch me, but: "Doom Eternal."

I thought it was a guaranteed hit, but it turned out to be a really bad arena shooter where you make colorful resources shoot out of enemies and are forced to run into the middle of enemy groups, exposing yourself to attacks from all sides that don't count because you're repeating 5 kill QTEs ad nauseam - the only tactic the game allows.

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You must have better friends than I.

Every conservative I know or knew is walking around with pent-up anger, seemingly ready explode over whatever their handlers in the media have railed them up against that day. I guess that is what keeps them active at the ballot box and prevents them from taking a step back, calming down, thinking and questioning the narrative. Either way, it became pretty much impossible to have any kind of outing with these people present.

It's gotten really tiresome to even look for common ground anymore. Things that were fine just yesterday suddenly make them foam at the mouth. And lately, the persecution complex, too.

Linux Unix since 1979: upon booting, the kernel shall run a single "init" process with unlimited permissions. Said process should be as small and simple as humanly possible and its only duty will be to spawn other, more restricted processes.

Linux since 2010: let's write an enormous, complex system(d) that does everything from launching processes to maintaining user login sessions to DNS caching to device mounting to running daemons and monitoring daemons. All we need to do is write flawless code with no security issues.

Linux since 2015: We should patch unrelated packages so they send notifications to our humongous system manager whether they're still running properly. It's totally fine to make a bridge from a process that accepts data from outside before even logging in and our absolutely secure system manager.

Excuse the cheap systemd trolling, yes, it is actually splitting into several, less-privileged processes, but I do consider the entire design unsound. Not least because it creates a single, large provider of connection points that becomes ever more difficult to replace or create alternatives to (similarly to web standard if only a single browser implementation existed).

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Considering that...

  • The Republicans encouraged him multiple times to buy it
  • He quickly stopped blocking (mainly Russian) state-sponsored social manipulation campaigns
  • He allowed right wing agitators back on the platform
  • He almost immediately banned droves of journalists that weren't blindly Pro-Russia and Pro-GOP.
  • He censored / banned all kinds of activists that pushed back against authoritarian (Russia-backed) regimes in other countries

...I have a hunch that he also served the interests of certain political actors with the acquisition. Public town square my lower backside.

I agree that a lot of human behavior (on the micro as well as macro level) is just following learned patterns. On the other hand, I also think we're far ahead - for now - in that we (can) have a meta context - a goal and an awareness of our own intent.

For example, when we solve a math problem, we don't just let intuitive patterns run and blurt out numbers, we know that this is a rigid, deterministic discipline that needs to be followed. We observe and guide our own thought processes.

That requires at least a recurrent network and at higher levels, some form of self awareness. And any LLM is, when it runs (rather than being trained), completely static, feed-forward (it gets some 2000 words (or 32000+ as of GPT-4 Turbo) fed to its input synapses, each neuron layer gets to fire once and then the final neuron layer contains the likelihoods for each possible next word.)

Thanks, good one.

I'm always happy seeing memes that turn the tables and give the connies a dose of their own medicine. This is what we need! :)

For my taste, framing CCC as a "Washington/Brussels" project is a far too close to what Russian smearbots do (link everything unpopular back to their current hate objects, i.e. foster resentment against the EU, liberals, etc.).

It looks very much like the CCC is an international organization funded and controlled by the far right.

Their website states:

Which countries is CCC active in?

The CCC works currently with tens of thousands of consumers and partner organizations in North America, Europe, South America, South Africa, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and many more.

Their colorful funding history:

Big Tobacco and right-wing US billionaires funding anti-regulation hardliners in the EU

Theistic Satanists

These would be the (mostly imaginary) ones that conservative Christians are fearmongering about. They'd believe the actual devil exists and that by serving him, they could gain something.

Atheistic Satanists

The kind that is pulling this stunt to fight for religious freedom. Specifically, The Satanic Temple. Their "commandments" are secular compassion, empathy and justice.

Amusingly, the biblical Satan seemed to value many of those things. Freedom ("non serviam" / "I will not serve"), Reason (apple from tree of knowledge in paradise), and perhaps Self Reliance and Equality (in some variants of the creation myth, Adam has a divorced first wive named Lilith who gave him the middle finger when he pulled that alpha male malarkey)

I think the main principle behind it is what conservatives call "virtue signaling" - associating with things that make them appear pious, strong or respectable to signal to others how virtuous they themselves are.

  • Running around with "God Wins" flags and spouting bible quotes online both gives them an edge in discussion (in the "if you disagree with me you're going against god" sense) and makes them appear pious
  • Similarly, carrying around guns and posting pictures of their guns and tacticool gear is an attempt to appear strong and dangerous
  • Same with flags or flag-themed clothes, calling themselves patriots and so on once again hits into the same notch.

From my PoV your observation seems spot on. A good portion of Amerca's religious community these days is just appropriating religion for the respect and authority it brings while practicing almost none of its virtues.

I think, as a big picture view, any religion is very prone to drift. If you demand utter reverence and obedience to a god that is at the same time also the weakest possible being (one that doesn't exist), you get a plaything that stands for everything and for nothing - aka whatever the general mood of the population wants or what those who are most adept at assuming its authority want it to be.

Consider "Prosperity Theology,," popular in Nigeria, for example, where an entire subculture has assumed the belief that the god from Christianity rewards the pious with material wealth, thus, the richer one is, the more faithful and holier they must be.

Maybe at some point, his best buddy will decide that he's more useful as a Martyr, rather than having him slowly drag down his base as he falls. I can imagine some good headlines already "Orange guy murdered by secret cabal assassins. have Antifa Super-Soldiers returned?" 🙃

Ah, "SJW", "CRT", "Woke" etc. - words that right wing opinion manipulation campaigns load with anything unpopular amongst their base so they can unite in hate against the "other" group, even if no two people agree on who belongs in it and why.