Every time I see a picture of him I think it has to be edited or something. He’s like a walking Snapchat filter.

So I have something of an unhealthy obsession with finding out just how dumb this guy is. I don’t know why.

I’ve pirated a couple of his books and found he appeals to a very specific type of person- that being, the person who wants to appeal to science without understanding a single thing about it. He cites HUNDREDS of reputable sources, and sprinkles in his own bullshit website to give the appearance of legitimacy by proximity to real scientists. But even funnier than that, it’s clear he only ever reads the headline of the studies and never goes past that. Without fail, he’ll just straight up make up fantasies about what the study actually is and what the researchers think. Hilarious, if so many people didn’t buy into it.

3 hour deep dive of book screenshots and debunking coming soon to a YouTube channel with single digit subscribers near you

Copium should be a controlled substance

One point to keep in mind is that drama also brings engagement IN, not just out. When the drama subsides, the temporary boost in activity from new users or lurkers will go down too.

That being said, the percent decrease was always gonna be in the single digits. The average redditor was never gonna stick with a prolonged protest of a service that remains free to use.

Just a very small correction- as with all biology, natural selection will drive a virus to replicate more effectively, that’s it. This does NOT mean a virus will automatically become less lethal over time. That’s an older hypothesis that scientists found was not in line with observation.

The newer hypothesis is known as “virulence-transmission trade-off”. The oversimplification of the idea is that if a mutation increases both transmission and virulence, it will also tend to be selected for. COVID is inconsistent with both hypotheses in certain ways though, so really predicting its virulence in the short or long term has proven difficult. Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10066022/

Can someone convert the measurement to bratwurst for the Europeans?

Oh no thanks, with the release of Ahsoka I’m filled up on fantasy for a while

This isn’t easy to answer for a lot of reasons. People “leave Reddit” in a lot of ways. Some deleted their account. Some nuked all their comments but left the account up. Some just deleted the app. Some stopped using Reddit but will eventually return. Some JOINED Reddit specifically to watch the exodus drama. Some made bot accounts to fuck with the numbers for fun. And of course, some users joined without ever being aware there was drama at all. Looking at the change in the number of users alone won’t yield the answers.

Other useful metrics would be number of posts/comments contributed, and daily active user statistics. But again, engagement may have actually been driven upwards recently because drama is fun to be a part of and redditors are notorious keyboard warriors.

Growth of lemmy and other similar platforms is another metric to use, but that number is affected by the converse of all of the reasons I listed above as well: A lemmy account doesn’t mean they deleted Reddit. It doesn’t mean they’ll stay off it. Not to mention lemmy’s growth is likely inflated by people signing up for multiple instances due to slowdown.

tl;dr: No one is gonna have a good answer to this yet. If they say they do, it’s likely gonna be a pretty inaccurate estimate.

… you have some reading to do my guy.

RFK can say he’s pro-vaccine all he wants, but he’s the chairman of probably the most well known and active anti-vaccine organization operating today. He has personally spoken, funded, and advocated for antivaxx events and movies, and is one of the biggest mouthpieces for the lie that vaccines cause autism, writing several articles and even books about it.

The EU thing is bullshit too, by the way. The US and EU have similar governing bodies for vaccine testing and approval.. And mandates? EU has similarly common childhood vaccine mandates in most major countries.

RFK is one of if not the major megaphone for the idea that trace amounts of thiomersal is driving autism rates, despite it 1. not being used in childhood vaccines since the 90s and 2. never having any link to autism whatsoever..

Saying “I’m pro-vaccine, I just believe the vaccines are causing an "autism holocaust" and we should let parents skip vaccine schedules because vaccines are actually just poison” is just being anti-vaxx but with a veneer of libertarianism.

And to be clear, I’ll entertain the libertarian arguments against mandates (they’re not convincing imo, but that’s a conversation for another day), but RFK is absolutely not arguing that position in good faith. He has inadvertently caused preventable deaths worldwide by advocating for fringe pseudoscience.

See, that was my response too! Federated servers will waste a bit of energy with duplicate fetch requests, sure, but it’s a far cry from the decades of compute time wasted with adversarial validation and cryptographic mathematics. And that doesn’t even deal with the shitty coins themselves.

Was very confused why they seemed to think the concepts were the same, and thought maybe I was the idiot.

Are we referring to Musk as a glitch now?

I remember in the early days of the Musk takeover he was mocked for talking about introducing microtransactions using Dogecoin as a way to combat bots and scraping. And it was good he was mocked, because crypto was a stupid as fuck idea for about a thousand different reasons. It’s interesting to read how a lot of people here support the idea of automatically sending a fraction of a cent to a website for each post to discourage bots and support smaller servers though.

With how prevalent the AI and data scraping conversation has become, I wonder what the view of Musk’s Twitter would be if he had stuck with that original plan instead of selling meaningless blue check marks. Probably still extremely negative, since a system like that would kill engagement overnight without SEO pumping tweets anyway… but an interesting thought experiment.

Not like the monetization scheme of blue check marks even ranks in the top 10 of terrible Musk decisions at this point. Seems like the dude is just constantly making and reversing poor choices.

Uhh, what the hell is this article talking about? His approval has remained steady with both Republicans and all Americans, and even saw a small uptick recently..

Sounds like they’re still operating under 2020 and 2022 logic. Biden is pretty widely disliked nowadays outside his own party and 2024 should in no way be viewed as an easy Dem win.

Growing evidence that governments/corporations would sooner give up seeing the goddamn sun than get off even a fraction of fossil fuel usage

Is Ratatouille a mecha anime? Discuss.

Vaccine safety HAS been demonstrated. Him choosing to ignore that is the issue. Has it ever occurred to you that maybe he’s not interested in proving vaccine safety, he’s interested in fabricating its harm?

He’s not being “skeptical of clinical trials”, he’s willfully broadcasting misinformation. Did you even click on a single link I sent?

Anti-mercury? Did you even fucking click one link I sent you? Thiomersal isn’t in any childhood vaccines, it was removed in 1999, and even then it was never shown to be harmful at the doses present in vaccines. Yet he still runs anti-vaxx events on that obvious lie.

Did it ever occur to you that people lie about their priorities when they’re running for office? This dumbass has caused irreparable harm to health worldwide and continues to fund general anti-vaccine propaganda. He’s STILL the chairman of the CHD, the most prolific anti-vaxx advertiser on the internet. Read my fucking links dude. Him being not only scientifically ignorant but also a raging hypocrite is a selling point to you?

I’m really not trying to be a jerk here, but you have me floored. For fuck’s sake, let his track record speak for itself. He can say “I’m pro-vaccine” all he wants, but he’s poured millions of dollars and countless hours into anti-vaccine propaganda. He’s one of the main reasons people think vaccines cause autism, even though that’s not the slightest bit true. He’s one of the main opponents of the COVID vaccines, despite their safety being demonstrated over and over. He just barely wrote another book on the subject!

If running one of the worst anti-science hoaxes of the century doesn’t disqualify you from being the president of the US, which if you weren’t aware, comes with extreme influence over the research direction and funding of the US… what fucking would disqualify someone?

Funny…. But I don’t see this as a good use of advertising.

You’re not swaying anyone visiting the site, and may instead be invigorating R voters.

Well no shit, who else is she gonna support, the anti-vaxxer with a grudge against Fauci?

Good. Here’s hoping for a swift trial.

I’ve recently started to go through the videos from jauwn. Really funny dives into terrible NFT games and their communities.

Someone make that “know the rules of the workplace” meme with boycott and cancel culture. Guaranteed at least 5 whole upvotes

I’m going door to door trying to gather pledges from all technology subscribers.

Will YOU downvote all Musk posts in this community until people post them in their proper place (c/enoughmuskspam)?

I’m not sure Chumba Casino really cares what their ad ends up next to tbh

Be your own favorite small time creator and plug away!

We should really have another name other than “think tank” because I’m not convinced there’s a lot of thinking going on here.

Suggestions?

Oh god, the Nintendo DSi is actually retro now, huh

Is every vaguely prominent leader in Russia dumb as rocks? How did he think he’d get away with an attempted coup while leaving the dictator in power?

Did he expect to get points for being bad at a coup?

The “old idea” is actually baked into one of the parameters of the new model. It’s why I said the old hypothesis “was not in line with observation” rather than being “wrong”. It predicted some trends correctly, but failed to predict many others. Like all science, it needed to update as we gathered more info.

The “new” hypothesis also isn’t perfectly predictive of viral evolution, but it’s more accurate with the observed spread of other diseases. Like all models, it’ll get replaced eventually by something more powerful. Likely sooner rather than later specifically because COVID put a spotlight on a lot of holes in the idea.

Certainly not as egregious as some of the news coming out of Thomas’ and Alito’s camps, but this is still not a great look. Seriously, how hard is it to at least maintain the appearance of impartiality as a SC Justice? Can’t they write books to enrich themselves after their tenure?

For the uninitiated, check out this YouTube channel to really see just how horrid blockchain games can get.

Love FTL- one of the most unique takes on rogue-lites I’ve ever seen.

Nothing was more frustrating than trying to win hard with Stealth C

I like how Knowing Better went from “general history” to the “slavery and cults” guy. Dude has found his calling.

I like the enthusiasm, but the easy legal argument here is that he was never convicted of any of these crimes. I don’t think there’s a single justice who would entertain this notion without that backing.

So I hope I don’t come off as too aggressive or anything here, I just want to combat as much of the classic Reddit misinformation while this space is still small

the huge number of independents is everyone saying that they don’t want to be pigeon holed into anything online

That isn’t how a Gallup poll works. It’s a randomized phone survey with elected participation. Now obviously there’s inherent self-selection bias with any such survey, but it’s still at least an indicator of trends. This type of poll is the best for assessing party sentiment, which is what the subject of the article is about and what my original comment was addressing.

We’ll never know how many Rs we’ve lost to the pandemic either

I don’t understand why people started thinking this? States may have done a bad job reporting cause of deaths, but the death still gets reported. Like… do people think there are a ton of unmarked graves in Florida or something?

Excess deaths modeling over 2020-22 means it’s pretty easy to figure out how many people died in the pandemic. Whether those people were R voters can be reasonably predicted from county/demographic makeup, such as this study here..

But to your point, if all we care about is who votes for whom in 2024, we can just survey that too. And surveys from basically every site, R or D funded, have the race at a dead heat with Biden only slightly edging out Trump.. Now as we learned in 2016, polls can be very, very wrong, but they’re really all we’ve got at this juncture.

Again, hope you don’t read this as aggressive, I just want people to be better informed and stop listening to blog posts like they’re legitimate truths.

Based on how this was (apparently?) an automatic response by the Google search algorithm, seems more like a case of:

Twitter: ”You took everything from me!”

Google: ”I don’t even know who you are”

Probably coulda just like… emailed someone at Google and asked before making the switch.

So trying out changes to a platform isn’t a bad thing and can lead to a lot of good optimization, but usually you don’t just push them onto the entire user base without testing/marketing research to try and anticipate their effects.

How exactly do these changes make it to production without being evaluated? I know blame is mostly on Musk here but do the software devs really never stand up and say “we’ll look into it and get back to you in a few weeks”?

??? How could I cherry-pick polls? I sent you the five-thirty-eight page containing a summary of all polls submitted lol

Not sure why you sent me the CDC excess deaths link? That data reflects the exact trends you’d expect.

Very pertinent to my current field- lots of version control issues where I work that containerizing could solve more elegantly.

I’ll check out the videos and see if I can learn something!

This is extremely cute content, wow

Wait this is incredible.

I don’t even know how to hold a hammer correctly let alone solder a chip, but I might have to try a new hobby.