I’d argue the internet was moving things left, while the bar for entry was at least nominal. When the bar for sharing your ideas was at least as high as “learn to code HTML and find a place to put your site up” the Time Cube cranks were few and far between, and most people participating on the web could be assumed to have some modicum of intelligence. However, the defining factor of the Internet as it stands, dominated by social media platforms, is that it’s frictionless by design. And yes, the platforms are pushing right-wing content, but to a certain extent that’s accidental, or at least was when engagement algorithms first became a part of the experience. Left wing content, reality-based as it tends to be, is generally full of nuance, equivocation, and explanation that takes time and (critically) doesn’t reach down into the basal structures of the brain and squeeze the amygdala quite like a right-wing fearmonger shouting “TRANS PEOPLE ARE SNEAKING INTO YOUR DAUGHTER’S SCHOOL RESTROOM TO ASSAULT HER BE AFRAID!”

Could social media be designed to put the brakes on reactionary content and boost thoughtful, well-researched opinions? Yeah, probably. But that requires expensive and time-consuming human intervention in the form of fact-checking, and doesn’t boost engagement like content that just pushes all the fight-or-flight buttons way down in the lizard brain. Making the Internet easy and frictionless only turbocharged Terry Pratchett’s idea that “A lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on,” because technology makes the lie spread faster than ever, but the process of getting to the truth never got easier at quite the same rate.

Yes, and I was one of that generation who believed broad adoption of the Internet would cut out the gatekeepers and lead to a better-informed electorate that would give more radical ideas a shot. And I guess it did, but the problem is that it’s primarily allowed the worst of bad actors direct, unfiltered access to a vast swathe of the most credulous, easily-manipulated idiots in the world. Arguably it’s massively tilted the field towards authoritarianism because before the Internet, left-wing activists were better-educated, and more capable of organizing and communicating. Now, though, it takes no special knowledge or effort for a right-wing conspiracy theorist or authoritarian demagogue to jump on X or Facebook or whatever other platform you like and immediately blast their message out to vast numbers of their followers – who are largely passive consumers of this stuff, waiting to given their party line and marching orders. Before the Internet, they had mostly-mainstream ideas because that was what the filter of the mainstream media gave them. Now they’re getting sucked into the far right because social media is biased for shareable outrage-bait propaganda and against validated facts and nuanced discussion.

What I will say about them publicly is that if we are afforded another shot at democracy after all this, they and their fellow travelers cannot be permitted to have a voice in the political process. Just about any system of government can work if everybody involved is commited to making it work, but if 1/3+ of voters hold pluralistic, representative democracy in active disdain there is no system that can protect itself against those people engaging with the system in bad faith. This was the fundamental failing of reconstruction, and it’s shaping up to be the undoing of freedom in the US now.

I’m increasingly coming to the conclusion that just letting the “marketplace of ideas” play out is tantamount to throwing the gates open to any demagogue with a big enough megaphone. Participation in the political process must be restricted to good-faith actors in some fashion, be that at the “supply side” of media and content creation or at the voting booth. Anything else is akin to a basketball team kicking, biting, and throwing punches on the court and the referees shrugging and insisting they have to be allowed to play anyway.

Elon in his Cave Johnson era and we’re here for it

He should really aim higher.

Personally, I’d like to suspend the 8th Amendment for law enforcement and senior executive branch personnel. Fuckers need to feel the Sword of Damocles actively tickling their scalp at all times.

Look, I’m in no position to talk seeing as I once wrote a cron job in PHP, but the profusion of JavaScript in the late aughts and early teens for things that weren’t “make my website prettier!” feels very much like a bunch of “webmasters” dealing with the fact that the job market had shifted out from under them while they weren’t looking and rebranding as “developers” whose only tool was Hammer.js, and thinking all their problems could be recontextualized as Nail.js.

Mona Lisa’s eyebrows may have faded with time, but his appear to have migrated down onto his eyelids, somehow.

UHC denied coverage after the fact for my wife’s gall bladder removal surgery because they claimed she was insured with a other carrier through her previous employer. That got straightened out with a couple phone calls, but it was still ridiculous.

Even more ridiculous, though, was the time that they convinced a former insurer of mine to retroactively deny already-paid claims, on the (false) basis that they had been my primary insurer in that time period, only to then deny those same claims when the doctor resubmitted them on the (correct) basis that I had no active policy with them at the time! I suspect that it was a case of a faulty automated system rather than active malice, but the net result was a massive headache for three unrelated parties and a mind boggling amount of paperwork on my part, because they couldn’t be bothered to write software that could properly handle the same person having two different policies with a gap between them.

Point me towards systems that don’t have a human in the loop, particularly any that utilize fully-autonomous swarms, and I’ll agree. Scary as the former are, there’s a world of difference between a handful of FPV suicide drones, and a cloud of HL2-Manhack-esque things operating on face-recogniton-guided autopilot.

I’ve low-key started to think the only reason we haven’t seen autonomous hunter-killer drones yet is that nobody’s willing to break the seal, and I’m scared for what happens when somebody finally does.

Yeah. We can quibble over the moral dimension of public servants getting out vs staying in to try and stop the coming insanity, but any HUMINT asset on assignment outside of friendly first-world nations would be stupid not to take early retirement ASAP. Even if Trump doesn’t burn them like he did to so many last time around, there’s a drug-addled oligarch in debt to several foreign countries who’s leading a squad of college-age numpties from department to department on a mission to extract all their confidential data and put it on unsecured servers for nebulous ends. Somebody’s gonna leak or lose or sell their names, guaranteed.

I was the last of my immediate family on Facebook, and I only stuck around to keep in touch with a couple hobby groups. I decided to cut the cord once Zuck went mask-off, and honestly I haven’t regretted it. The family group text is still chugging along fine, and most of the people I actually want to talk to are on other platforms at this point.

I don’t blame anybody who feels like they have to keep Facebook to stay in touch with loved ones… but man, it feels good not to have that spammy time suck on my phone anymore.

I design labs, and my current employer serves primarily higher ed and government clients. This is gonna blow a massive hole in our bottom line, and fear that something like this was coming is why I’m starting to look for employers with an international footprint and/or more private sector clientele. Even if this freeze is only temporary, it’s going to kick off a massive wave of brain drain from universities and federal labs to private industry and foreign institutions, and I don’t blame the folks making those choices, but it’s also gonna impact how much demand there is for my services.

Nobara is just Fedora with a heavy layer of gaming-focused polish applied. In that regard it’s quite a bit more familiar than something like Arch, which makes a point of not holding anybody’s hand, and (just in terms of ease of use and overall userbase) feels a lot closer to what Gentoo was like back when I last was in this space.

I was heavily in the camp of Debian-based distros back in the day, but Debian proper has never been a great choice for desktop, and Ubuntu’s star is much faded of late, so I decided to give an RPM-based distro a chance before jumping way off into the deep end. I don’t have the time to fiddle that I used to, and (at least until yesterday’s hiccup) Nobara was much closer to “it just works” out of the box than anything like Arch would have been.

I’m an ex-sysadmin so I guess I get to be the middle head, but blundering my way through the current distro scene after not having touched a desktop Linux install in, oh… twenty years or so, I feel more like the right. I suppose on the one had I had the good sense not to jump right into Arch or Nix, but even more familiar territory like Nobara has its pitfalls. Just today I had to clean up a botched release upgrade because the primary maintainer had left conflicting packages in the repository for an extended period. Not laying blame per se, that’s what you get when you sign on to a one-man effort, but it was a real pain in the butt to diagnose and correct.

Say it with me now: model collapse! I think this approach is especially insidious in that rather than dumping obvious nonsense into the training corpus that can then be scrubbed, it pushes the downstream LLM invisibly towards spontaneously imploding.

Only in the world of scrappy “low-cost” commercial endeavors, AFAIK. The appeal of FRC-style reactors has more to do with lower cost of construction than any inherent physical advantages. Tokamaks are still where most of the nationally- and internationally-funded research is happening.

I was personally rooting for stellarators, but whatever operational benefits they offer over tokamaks seems to be outweighed by the incredible design complexity that they add, and they’ve stayed small-scale research projects relative to tokamaks.

hard disagree. The residential building code isn’t terribly hard to adhere to – especially in new construction – and nearly every bit of it is written with the health and safety of building occupants in mind. I’d much rather deal with a bit of bureaucratic oversight to be sure my house and/or my neighbor’s house doesn’t collapse in a stiff breeze, or blow up from a gas leak, or kill all its occupants in a fire, or turn into a heap of rot after the first heavy rain, etc., etc. You might have the skills and ethics required to do the job right without somebody looking over your shoulder, but not everybody does, and I’d venture at least half the big home building firms would cut every corner they could in the absence of code enforcement.

There’s no reason you couldn’t still do that, as long as you pull the necessary permits and your work can pass inspection. Most jurisdictions make specific exemptions in the contractor licensing rules for homeowners working on their own properties.