Companies definitely astroturf on Reddit, but, they do it through third or even fourth parties. There is a whole micro industry of vote buying and comment spamming, ad firms or companies will pay such groups to add certain messaging to their comment spam. You can actually make a quick buck by selling any old Reddit accounts to such groups.
Deranged logic, Israel is not a strategic keystone to the survival of America.
Like, even if one has drunk the Flavoraid enough to think that what Israel is doing is ok and that it’s not an apartheid state that needs the South Africa treatment; in what fucking reality is Israel not eminently replaceable in the role it plays in US foreign policy? if anything, it is a net negative, a dead weight dragging down US relations with the rest of the region.
It routinely takes unilateral action to throw gas on the metaphorical fires of the region. Like, allies have their own goals and ambitions that diverge sometimes, but you’d expect them to converge occasionally and not actively attempt kneecap each others diplomacy.
Others have pointed out there a private company, but to be more specific on what that means, they are not openly trading their shares. The majority of shares are all owned by a handful of people who care about the long term health of the business. A lot of companies that we see doing major face plants right now are publicly traded, so any big fund or individual with enough cash can swoop in and buy up enough shares to control leadership, then use that control to get the company to do stupid stuff generally or maximize short term profitability at the expense of long term health.
A similar thing can happen if someone with a majority of shares choose to sell too a ghoul.
“ We promise it’s not just jewelry for men, promise, because men don’t wear jewelry. This is just a tool, and maybe a status symbol, but definitely not in the way jewelry can be a status symbol.”
You are now an honorary American.
“ Star Wars is bad now”
I mean yah, the vertical integration, means tested everything, nostalgia bating and assembly line techniques that Disney does sure do ruin otherwise fine properties.
“No, I don’t mind that, that’s just good business. I just hate the gay people who kissed in the background”
Oh, OH ok, you’re just an idiot…
What makes a good convincing conspiracy theory is that has elements of truth. If you really get in to the groups of people who actually discuss and propagate this theory, they think this stuff is more coordinated, wide spread, and competent than it actually is.
I would be careful treating “dead internet theory” as plausible until you actually dig in to the stuff proponents of it believe, you’ll quickly realize they go beyond “there are a lot of bots on the internet, shitty boiler plate content, and astroturfing campaigns” to color revolution theory, NWO theory, and other Lyndon LaRouche esque stuff. Like it’s a deep fucking rabbit hole that you would not suspect from the surface level ideas that are often presented when talking about it.
The vast majority of the crypto world failed to understand one key concept, money is not the value for which goods/services are exchanged, it is the value by which they are exchanged. People do not have a use or value for money beyond what it can be exchanged for, if no one is willing to exchange for it, it has no value.
Crypto only had value as a currency if people would accept it for goods or services, and the only thing people ever accepted it as payment for, in any meaningful capacity, were illegal goods and services. The value beyond that was purely based on a speculative ideological assumption that people would abandon the traditional banking system for a new system that they couldn’t buy anything with.
Almost like the system is compensating for more than just a “minor hiccup” caused by the pandemic, almost like that’s a convenient excuse to cover up a decade of mismanagement of investment.
They do work, but are basically worse in every way.
Bearings are really impressive pieces of engineering that require really tight tolerances to reduce wear and friction. On a traditional bike you have a small bearing at the center that is a standard mass manufactured commodity part.
On these they’re turning the whole wheel in to a giant speciality bearing. It has to spin faster, has to deal with force being applied to a small section rather than the whole bearing, and has way more surface area where dirt could get in and grind against the surfaces.
So these are more expensive, way heavier, higher friction, less reliable, harder to repair, and faster to wear out.
But they look futuristic don’t they?
What I find most interesting, is not that twitter is failing in active users faster than the others, but that all the other listed in the article are also all seeing a decline in user ship. Even the new “up and comer” TikTok is losing users.
To some extent I suspect that it’s just a result of people breaking their social medias built during the pandemic. But is there something else? Are they just going to new platforms? Is there a modal shift on how people congregate online driven by the issues with platforms? Or are people just spending less time online with the pandemic mostly over.
See, I have no doubt they would if they could, but i doubt such things are actually feasible.
Like right now I just refresh the page to skip ads on my phone.
Yah, people don’t seem to get that LLM can not consider the meaning or logic of the answers they give. They’re just assembling bits of language in patterns that are likely to come next based on their training data.
The technology of LLMs is fundamentally incapable of considering choices or doing critical thinking. Maybe new types of models will be able to do that but those models don’t exist yet.
One thing I think is severely underutilized is acquisition of limited information as a game mechanic.
Like, having the information available to the player change depending on how they build a character or interact with the world. So like, rather than just having the player know what the health of enemies is, or know exactly where things are with a compass, or being able to pinpoint their location on the map.
I play a lot of strategy games and particularly in those I think having to manage how orders get to units and information on what they see getting from them to me would be really interesting as more of a focus.
Or like in management games the player often has perfect information on the state of the market or organization they’re running, what if like, you had to get that through Jerry from accounting? What if Jerry lied? What if having to figure out Jerry from accounting is under reporting something to skim off the top was a game mechanic?
The US didn’t have a base in Israel till 2017, it’s never really been a significant base of operation for US forces. Us forces have more presence in basically every country in the region with the exception of Yemen, Egypt and Iran. Hell, there’s even a base Syria.
The term environmentalist has so much stupid baggage tied to it.
I’m tired of having to share labels with people who refuse to do anything other than small superficial personal choices. Folks who will baulk at the suggestion of a carbon tax, their energy bills going up, more nuclear plants being built near them or, subsidies and infrastructure for low income people who are seriously hurt by such changes.
This is a systemic problem that requires systemic changes that will fundamentally alter things we take for granted right now. It’s going to suck and it’s going to be hard, there is no easy simple way out.
What the Utah doin? I’m sorry but there is nothing great about the salt lake.
If moderates really don’t want trump to win so bad, maybe they should make some real commitments to policy changes that the left want, not just half baked, watered down “market based” solutions that get shredded to a skeleton in committee.
Moderates can scream their lungs out all they want, but talk is cheap, and if they want the left on side they should earn that and not act so entitled to their support. Trump is bad, he shouldn’t win, but why is it on the left to keep him from winning? Why is it never the moderates fault for failing to hold up their end of the coalition?
Creator of the “DO NOT WATCH THIS VIDEO” series angrily shakes fist at past self’s shoddy work.
Yah, nah JK has gone right off the deep end like Kanye and musk. Fell for the same shit teenagers on tumbler, twitter and Reddit were falling for 7 years ago.
Honestly, don’t think anyone should be giving her money at this point, but the franchise is kind of bigger than her at this point. I won’t pay for anything that would end up giving a cent to her because I know what she’ll do with it. She’s a dead weight on the community at this point.
I can’t engage with the properties in good conscience anymore. I was never as in to it as some other people were, and if that’s a big part of your online identify and community it’d be hard to break from it. I get why people get defensive about it, but like, maybe they shouldn’t take it personally when people criticize giving money to one of the biggest names funding transphobic rhetoric?
If you think that’s bad wait till you hear about fly ash, chemical plant byproduct disposal and pesticide run off.
One day, the cephalopods will return, they will regain their intelligence as their hive mind awakens them from the eon old thoughtless slumber, hiding from those being among the stars who hunt those of thought for sport. Now they can hear the childlike mewling of our thoughts and will awaken again to silence them, lest our cave be investigated by those who listen.
Gravel is a very important construction aggregate.
Although it depends on the mechanics for how useful 2 would be. Does the gravel just like appear near you? Is there just a guy who gives you bags of gravel? Do you have to go to a specific location to get it? Is there a limit to the through put? What’s the volume of output of the gravel. what type of gravel is it? Could it be processed for other minerals?
Like, free gravel sounds pretty damn awesome based on the mechanics.
Head empty, only speculative world building thoughts.
So, they’re really easy to work with and relatively affordable, so great for prototyping, and acceptable for production if a company wants to get stuff out the door without getting a proper custom built solution that would be better in the long run.
When spin (electric scooter app rental company) pulled out of Seattle, they didn’t pick up a lot of the scooters there. People started pulling them apart when it was deemed they were legally abandoned, and it turned out they were all running on raspberry pi’s as their brains.
Ultimately it’s save money on the development side since it allows companies to use less experienced or specialized employees. It’s obviously expensive in the long term since a custom built system that only does what you need it to would cost less
It’s just not the same without the Dracula flow guy
I think the problem is that a lot of political discourse is super constrained, most of these polls are “do you like trump or like Biden” there’s no option to express the opinion of “I hate both of them but one slightly more”. Of course that’s going to create weird results! If they have to twist the answers to get there displeasure across and scare the DNC in to taking them seriously, that’s what they have to do.
I think there is possibly a dissonance being created by how lobby money influences the thinking of campaigns. Say voters care about reducing fossil fuel dependency, say they care about ending support for Israel, say voters care about ending for profit health insurance, say voters care about breaking up corporate oligopolies, these are all toxic pills to many donors. Campaigns don’t feel they can endorse or condemn these things, so they refuse to even engage with the topics. These incredibly important political issues are just... removed from official political discourse, thus such things are kept out of the polls or reduced to anemic platitudes, so people can’t accurately express what they care about.
Younger voters are pissed at the democratic establishment and there is no statistical data based way for them to measure why. So the democratic establishment is left flailing in the dark, boxing with ghosts because they’ve blinded them selves to issues that pit their continents against donors. WHICH ARE THE MOST IMPORTANT ISSUES FOR MOST YOUNGE VOTERS.
Excuse me, the Shark Punching Center would like to have a word.
“Oh, there’s my ammo!”
They can’t afford to have the bubble burst, so many important organizations and companies need this to succeed.
If it fails… then what was the point of the mass harvesting of data? What was the point of them burning billions of dollars to lock down peoples interactions on the internet in to platforms? What will be left fix search engines other than preventing SEO and stop selling places on the page?
There are of course other reasons, but not ones that can be admitted. For them to admit what a farce this all is, would be to admit that they’ve been wasting all our time and money building a house of cards, and that anyone who’s gonna along with it is complicit.
Why is the onus on the left? How come it’s never on moderates for being such poor coalition partners that knee cap their proposals at every opportunity?
Look up a bell curve, most measurements of intelligence that have been conceived end up making a bell curve distribution. That’s your answer, most people pool up around the middle with smaller tails on either end.
Mandatory voting usually just amounts to requiring people show up at the polls, they can spoil ballots or write in joke candidates.
It’s not exactly authoritarian, but it wouldn’t really change the situation like some think it would.
Really, the moderate left needs to get it through their fucking heads that the left aren’t their fucking rebound date when the moderate right shits the bed.
If they want the left’s vote, if they fucking want to keep trump from winning, they need to appeal to voters not just patronizingly talk down to them.
The onus is as much on the moderates as it is on the left.
I mean, I think a lot of times it is drilled in to people as “best practice” for working in a larger organization.
To some extent this makes sense from a managerial perspective, like, you can move people between projects and expect them to pick up where the last person took off since it will be somewhat intelligible.
I’ve seen some nightmares though where projects were barely function because a bunch of unnecessary stuff was added to make it fit the shape.
YouTube algorithm “hey do you want to learn how to make gun barrels using pipe, electricity and water?”
Me “won’t deny I’m curious but I’m still not clicking that because I’m 90% sure I’ll get put on a list”
On a related topic to weird hippie products.
I really hate the changes that Tom's of Maine has made since they got bought out. They stopped packing their toothpaste in metal tubes and went to plastic, and they separated their deodorant in to “male and female” lines, and it’s been getting hard to find their unscented deodorant. They got bought out a while ago admittedly, but the changes have been coming on faster lately.
Like, the new ownership is trying to make them more competitive with other brands, but I always liked them for what made them different from the other big brands and it drives me up the wall how often such good products get ruined by the companies being bought out.
I suspect that even if they were abandoning future plans for AI drive through ordering, they wouldn’t say they were. Saying you’re not doing anything with AI might actually hurt a companies share price right now.
Oh it’ve very simple, they’re exempt form CAFE standards if it’s a utility vehicle. So they can build hummer esque land yachts and not have it tank the average fuel economy of their fleet.
I don’t think it’s bad, I just think it’s funny that so many men will refuse to wear jewelry unless it’s a watch.
oh yah, I remember the absolute torrent of crypto shills that started spamming the place when crypto shill posts from other subs started getting posted there.
They were proper angry that they got called out.