shutting out a significant portion of your community without seeking their input first isn’t a sensible move for such a foundational open source project.

Ironic when X shuts out anyone who isn’t logged in and shuts out anyone who doesn’t pay for a blue checkmark from having visible replies.

Having an X account isn’t consequence-free - if it becomes where updates occur, people have to sign up for an account and subject themselves to nazis everywhere and all manner of crypto spam just to see updates. And they have to pay Elon tribute to be heard in response. It’s crazy that anyone sees it as being friendly to users.

Trump had the best performance among minority voters of any President in recent memory. And then:

• One token black cabinet member - in HUD of course, just like last time
• Top priority is deporting Hispanics specifically
• Silences and discussion of diversity/inclusion in federal agencies on threat of firing
• Eliminates ability to do anything about discrimination
• Approves ethnic cleansing of Gaza
• Allies closely with South African who blamed LA wildfires on black firefighters and Boeing’s door problems on racial diversity

I think we need to be unafraid to say the truth. Trump is definitely, obviously racist. Yes, people do get accused of being racist unfairly. Trump is not one of them.

We completely changed how the algorithm worked, pushing pro-Trump and right-wing posts to the top of people’s feeds.

I thought this was common knowledge. Users have been talking about how everyone is getting flooded with right-wing posts on r/twitter ever since Elon took over.

I think he’s sugar-coating it because their bonds are about to go up for sale. From the article:

While equity investors have reportedly slashed the value of their stakes by as much as 78 percent, the Journal reports, “banks hope to sell senior debt at 90-95 cents on the dollar, while retaining more-junior holdings.”

If they were breaking even, the bonds wouldn’t be getting sold at a loss. Keep in mind, the bond holders get paid before the stock holding investors, so if they’re taking a loss, the equity investors are getting nothing (hence the 78 percent cut, basically their share is only worth the odds of a miraculous turnaround). That doesn’t happen with a company unless it’s losing money.

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All with little to no reaction from outside news outlets and governments. But that’s where they’re mistaken. Look at the reaction on campuses to Israel’s bombing - there was plenty of will in the west to back Palestinian rights. But because it started with a terror attack, it was easy for people to support silencing them.

What if it started with the equivalent of the George Floyd video instead of Oct. 7 and protests erupted without the anchor of Oct. 7 holding them back? Biden would’ve loved to take that opportunity to finally stick it to Netanyahu and cut off Israeli funding. It may be surprising, but with the sole exception of Trump every US president absolutely hated Netanyahu. But because Democrats can’t afford to lose Jewish voters they’ve tolerated continued aid. Give them the right excuse, and it ends (I mean not under Trump, but whoever the next guy is).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_vmQrTi3aM

Perhaps before the 2022 invasion. You can see for example the first round of the last presidential election results here - the light blue supported the pro-Russia candidate Yuriy Boyko, who didn’t advocate being part of Russia but instead wanted better relations with Russia. After the invasion, Boyko himself apparently became part of a new party of ex-pro-russian candidates who now support Ukraine against Russia.

Generally it’s hard to say how many fit into the category of “wanted an independent Ukraine but that is still close to Russia”, but my sense is that it was a pretty large part of the blue group. Consider for example the average American liberal who wants the US to be more like Canada - probably there are some who would rather have their part of the country become part of Canada, but it’s probably not most and certainly nowhere near all. Additionally, it’s likely that many who actually did want to live in Russia changed their mind after the atrocities of the invasion.

Reminder that Fox News declared Michelle Obama a terrorist over a fist bump.

I’m always suspicious of this sort of analysis because what are they basing it on? If you have no data, you’re just speculating about what would have worked and that’s just lazy. For every analysis saying Democrats were too bipartisan, there’s at least 5 others saying they were too far-left. They’re all equally lazy, just relying on the author’s blatantly biased speculations.

I can think of two things that are too obvious to be doubted about this last election: 1) Inflation and the non-informative way the media covered its causes drastically harmed Democrats 2) Biden was a terrible candidate due to being old as fuck and shouldn’t have run. Anything else, bring evidence.

For an example of a non-lazy opinion that focuses on actual data about why people voted one way or another, this is the best one I’ve seen.

There’s a selection bias, we usually hear about the most successful shitbags. Most ordinary shitbags live pretty terrible lives. Just look at the life of the typical red state resident. Usually working their ass off in a blue collar for some plutocrat who abuses them, subjected to country music all day long. Almost makes me feel bad for them.

You can also see the original thread here: https://xcancel.com/koshercockney/status/1878502195319992667#m . Good lord, there’s so much nazism on X now. It’s become a goddamned Nuremberg rally. You’ve got zionist fascists fighting with nazi fascists.

The ol’ Ellen Pao

Yes. People still lend Adam Neumann money, despite his record of epic failure. When you have the skills that get other people to pay the bills, failure is not a problem.

He was a first mover on podcasts, and already being a reality TV celebrity he got a lot of big guests early on.

This has been annoying me as well, so many city services got used to just using twitter and then Elon took over and now you just can’t find out about things unless you have an X account. Shortly after the change to X I drove hours to use a hiking trail that was closed - I checked the conditions on the park service’s website, but it was using a twitter feed and the top post was “trail is open, come on in!” because it had been changed to show the top post of all time instead of the newest post.

There should be some non-profit funded by cities that’s basically just a webpage where cities can post important info, or maybe they can have their own mastodon node.

Many of the food couriers I worked alongside were young international students struggling to earn an income while they make their way through school. Others were refugees or undocumented workers, navigating precarious lives.

I honestly wonder if pretty much all of the surge in illegal immigration over the last 5 or 6 years comes down to Uber Eats.

I fail to see a definition of murderer that includes this CEO and doesn’t include literally everybody. I mean how many future people do we all murder when we drive our cars or even order a package delivered. Unless you’re just sitting in a corner eating rice and beans and washing it down with water, you’ve probably contributed to someone’s death by now.

The real murderer is the capitalist US health care system, and that’s still very much alive and well. This CEO’s death is negligible compared to the problem, instead it’s just a second problem.

It’s the same mistake that all of society has made for about 5000 years now. Punishing individuals for preventable deaths that are caused by bad systems at best causes suffering for a steep cost and virtually no actual benefit while providing an opiate that keeps us from confronting the actual problem, and at worst actually contributes to those preventable deaths.

Most people just do not think entirely rationally. Take anything that most people believe - obviously religion, but also their favorite sports team, car brand, dare I say linux distro - it’s probably irrational on some level. Instead people believe what they want to believe.

But why would someone want to see their own life as miserable? Perhaps part of it is who we want to be. Most people want to see themselves as having overcome some sort of adversity to earn whatever they have in life, and that creates a bias to see one’s own life as unlucky and miserable. I definitely went through a phase of seeing my life this way as a kid. Now I try, when I remember, to focus on what’s been lucky and not adverse in my life. And there’s definitely plenty in that regard.

So then how do we define natural general intelligence? I’d argue it’s when something can do better than chance at solving a task without prior training data particular to that task. Like if a person plays tetris for the first time, maybe they don’t do very well but they probably do better than a random set of button inputs.

Likewise with AGI - say you feed an LLM text about the rules of tetris but no button presses/actual game data and then hook it up to play the game. Will it do significantly better than chance? My guess is no but it would be interesting to try.