Oog - my little brother.

He’s a walking stereotype of a tech libertarian (which is to say, a shallow, bigoted, reactionary, right-wing IT guy who for some inexplicablec reason seems to think that all that’s necessary to count as “libertarian” is to rail against “the woke mob.”)

The first time I heard the term “mansplaining,” I knew exactly what it meant, because it’s his customary mode of communication. I already know that by about the third time I hear him say, " Well, what you have to understand is that…" I’m going to have to leave the room.

He likely won’t bring up politics directly - not surprisingly, he’s generally ignorant of both the philosophical side of it and the practical side of it. Instead, he’ll bloviate about whatever the right-wing/tech media bubble is bloviating about, so essentially political issues without the complication of political context.

It’s invariably awful, and it’s always a matter not of if but merely of when I’m going to have to leave the room because the only alternative is going to be a messy verbal explosion. And I presume it’s going to be worse than ever this year, since he’ll undoubtedly want to mansplain the mindless dogma he’s been fed about Trump and Musk and Ukraine and tariffs and immigrants and trans athletes and so on…

All I know is that Kagi triggered my scam alarms from the start, and moving into the browser market just made them ring even louder.

Intelligence is a measure of reasoning ability. LLMs do not reason at all, and therefore cannot be categorized in terms of intelligence at all.

LLMs have been engineered such that they can generally produce content that bears a resemblance to products of reason, but the process by which that’s accomplished is a purely statistical one with zero awareness of the ideas communicated by the words they generate and therefore is not and cannot be reason. Reason is and will remain impossible at least until an AI possesses an understanding of the ideas represented by the words it generates.

And if the world were a just place instead of a twisted shithole designed to maximize the privilege of a relative few wealthy and empowered parasites, you could work fewer hours, make the same or even more money and afford a house.

But instead the system has been warped so that you have to work long hours for insufficient pay and still can’t afford a decent life, and all so that a relative few executives, board nembers, bankers, investors and politicians can siphon off the bulk of the wealth you generate so that they can buy more houses and bigger yachts.

No - actually I was talking worldwide. Russia’s just a notable example.

And I would say that all of the things you listed are, directly or indirectly, consequences of the fact that wealthy authoritarian parasites have warped societies to their benefit regardless of the harm done to others, so are actually examples of exactly what I’m talking about.

News flash for wealthy authoritarian parasites around the world, because you all seem ignorant of this fact:

Declining birthrates are a direct result of the simple fact that more people all the time decide that they have no desire to bring children into this world, and that in turn is a direct result of the fact that you’ve turned this world into a warped, corrupt, toxic, authoritarian shithole.

You have no one to blame but yourselves.

And I guarantee that billionaire Larry Ellison blithely believes that he’ll be exempt - that all of this surveillance will just be used against the little people. And he’s almost certainly right.

So… Meta’s “plan” is to dodge responsibility?

Gee whiz… I sure never saw that coming…

People on every single relatively small forum ever in the history of the internet have gotten frustrated and angry when other people do that, because it’s spammy.

Do you not know the history of the term “spam?”

It’s from a Monty Python skit

That’s what the front page of a forum (or the inbox of an email account) looks like when someone “spams” it - like “spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, baked beans, spam, spam, spam and spam.”

If he’s trying to say “Biden wanted this but Trump already started it”

Which “he?”

Zuckerberg blames it exclusively and entirely on the Biden administration.

that tells me BOTH parties requested it. Hence, if you don’t like Biden because of this, you don’t want Trump either. And of course, vice versa. In short, this policy is not unique to either party or administration.

Exactly, but that’s explicitly not what Zuckerberg is saying. He’s saying that it was entirely and exclusively Biden, which is a lie.

Why did Zuckerberg choose now to make this announcement and publicly reveal the inside play?

There’s actually a tidbit that the author notes that points at the obvious reason for it.

In his letter to Congressional investigators, he flat-out said what everyone else has been saying for years now.

In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content…

The author then goes on to say though:

A few clarifications. The censorship began much earlier than that, from March 2020 at the very least if not earlier.

What’s significant about that? Trump was president then.

So Zuckerberg is rather obviously trying to pin entirely on the Biden administration a set of policies that were already in place under Trump.

To what end? Obviously to do the same thing he did in 2016 and 2020 - to overtly promote Trump.

This particular one certainly not coincidentally plays into the whole Republican narrative that the Democrats are oppressive and dishonest, which in turn is meant to provide a context for their intention to dispute the election results when Trump loses. Zuckerberg is simply doing his part to further that narrative.

Just the opposite. I’m the one who goes off to do something else at family gatherings because they just talk and talk and talk.

Though it’s not so much that they talk so much as that it’s just the same stuff over and over - alternately, my brother slavishly regurgitating right-wing techbro quasi-libertarian bullshit and my mom reciting in excruciating detail some anecdote that’s maybe vaguely related to the topic at hand and that she’s told countless times already, because it’s her go-to every time something in that vicinity comes up.

And what I wouldn’t give to know them less well…

One of the greatest songs ever IMO, though I much prefer the original.

All songs start with silence, then build a series of sounds until a song is achieved, then return to silence, but few illustrate the magic and wonder of that process quite as well as A Forest.

Yes - that’s exactly what it is. Vichy Twitter is to historical Twitter as Vichy France was to historical France.

I stole it myself, so you’re welcome to it.

I have no idea who originated it, but from the first time I saw it, I haven’t used anything else. It just so perfectly sums it up.

So there are only two possibilities - either Vichy Twitter is such a poorly run site that it crashed on its own, or it’s such a poorly run site that it’s not prepared to deal with being DDOSed.

No surprise there.

After Knesset members actually got up and angrily defended the supposed right to rape Palestinians and the finance minister lamented the fact that the rest of the world would condemn arranging for the death by starvation of 2 million Palestinians, there’s pretty much no low left that’s too low for the Israeli government.

Altruistic? ALTRUISTIC?!

Just who in the fuck does he think he is?!

The only altruists on Reddit are the users who freely provided the content that this fucking parasite feeds off of.

I’m so glad I left that awful shithole of a site.

I’d never considered this before, but I think you’re 100% correct - that it is something that’s notably important to them, and something that they should be denied. And not just that they should be denied that privilege because it’s a satisfying bit of vengeance, but because they don’t deserve it.

Yeah… the more I think about it, the more certain I become.

He opened his mouth and words came out. Some number of them were falsehoods, inevitably.

At this point, my working theory is that a crucial aspect ofTrump is that he actually has little to no understanding of the distinction between truth and falsehood.

It’s not really that he “lies,” since that’s a volitional act - it implies a conscious awareness of the truth and a conscious decision to claim something else. Rather it’s that he simply says whatever he thinks will serve his purposes at the moment, and that it’s not even that he doesn’t value the truth when he does, but that the whole idea of truth just doesn’t even enter into it. As if he genuinely doesn’t even grasp the concept.

That explains an aspect of Trump I’ve never understood - he’s obviously extremely charismatic and convincing - people want to believe what he says. That stands in sharp contrast to the fact that, personally, he’s some grotesque combination of cartoonish and repulsive. He’s really, no matter how you look at him, foul on a very personal and immediate level - a gross, pale, flabby, oily, overly made up lump who looks (and notoriously smells) like what you’d get if a life-size drain clog got up and started walking around.

So how is he so charismatic?

I think it’s because no matter what he says or to whom, he’s entirely 100% sincere. In spite of knowing full well that he lies constantly, people, when talking to him, just find themselves believing everything he says, because he radiates sincerity. He doesn’t exhibit even the slightest trace of even the subtlest of hints that he’s not telling the truth because his brain isn’t even able to make that distinction. The entire mechanism by which humans recognize and distinguish between truth and falsehood, is, in his brain, so broken that it effectively doesn’t exist at all. So it’s not even that he projects unwarranted sincerity alongside his falsehoods, but that he projects the exact same sincerity that anyone else could only entirely effectively attach to what they deeply believed to be completely true to literally every single thing that falls out of his mouth, and not consciously or deliberately, but simply because his brain is broken in such a way that his sincere belief in whatever is falling out of his mouth at the moment is entirely divorced from its truth value.