Honestly, it’s scale. It dillutes the humanity to nothing, and all that remains is our worst selfish impulses

Communities become so large that bonds and reputation mean nothing. We create organizations to try to artificially recreate that, and they grow so large their primary purpose is to self purpetuate

It’s hard to muster up the will to hurt people right in front of you, it’s much easier if you can abstract it all to rules and numbers, and separate the actor from the decision maker

I think the only way something like communism works is like the fediverse - we need to find a way to weave ourselves into small communities that can act together. You can’t let power sit anywhere for long, or you’ll draw in power hungry sociopaths like flies - but inside a community they have to keep on good terms with others

We still have to collaborate, but if we shared methods and designs openly we could produce a lot of stuff locally. We don’t have to always be scaling up - if you have a thousand people, you don’t have to produce a 100k phones a year to make a phone. Working at that small scale even let’s you get creative and make better things - there’s all sorts of technologies that we don’t have access to only because they can’t be produced at scale

Plus it means people would be smarter and more skilled… Capitalism wants people to be interchangeable cogs, and that makes for craftsman that require a whole supply chain to be useful. Giving up scale means you have to make things last and be easily reparable. It means picking and choosing between your priorities

You had me at communication. That’s like 95% of any relationship… Literally everything is up in the air … Except being on the same page

Why does noone support my 4d earth theory?

Know what? I endorse it. Aside from the cyber truck, if you want to pretend, ok take that as “I was bamboozled”. But the cyber truck… There’s no hiding that. There’s no hiding the timeframe on that. You can’t just call that POS a Toyota

Sorry, but that’s a bridge too far. Deal with the consequences… It’s just spray paint, if anything it’s protective compared to the lack of any kind of paint. Take it on the chin

Ah, fair enough. Out of curiosity, what’s the context?

Yup. I’m glad I had this cool as Caribbean co-worker who now and again would “teach me the facts of the world” when I first entered the workforce

The world ain’t fair, you gotta play the game. It saved me so much learning through failure - sometimes you gotta slow down so you have room to pull a miracle out of your ass. Sometimes you gotta play it close to the vest. Manage their expectations and they’ll be grateful, give them your all and they’ll only ask for more

It’s so very true. I add at least an hour, if not a day, before I commit something - unless it’s an emergency. Then I pull out the stops and drink a pot of coffee, and they worry about losing me, because my normal pace is enough that they get new features and when the chips are down and they’re losing money I’ll find fix it today, if not tomorrow morning

You have to know when to drag your feet, when to pull out the stops, and what you need to keep to yourself. They don’t care that I keep my mornings for myself, don’t come to meetings, and occasionally can’t be reached for a day… To then I’m a miracle worker, not a workhorse. They’re happy with my output, because I balk at anything that takes more than 5 minutes and under promise, then over deliver. But when they’re panicking, I tell them I’ll make it work no matter what it takes. And I still wait an hour if it didn’t take me all night

People beat workhorses to make them go faster, they fear losing a magician. Magicians are eccentric. They’re allowed to demand accommodations - but you have to keep up the mistique. Otherwise you’re just a flawed workhorse, because people are kinda stupid, managers and owners especially so

A workhorse seems replaceable, even if they’re better than the magician

It’s a learned skill… I’ve fucked it up in the past and broke the illusion by coming through too quickly once it became an emergency. But if you have knowledge they don’t, they don’t know what takes how long anything takes, even technical people. You have to play it up, because once the magic is broken for any reason, you’re now a lazy workhorse

Humans are fucking dumb. Manage expectations properly and reality is secondary, optics are everything.

I turned this into a skill. If I can’t find something, I ask “if I were me, where would I put it?”

Best part is, it works with my code. If I were me, what would I name this? How would I structure this? What would this name mean and imply?

I take the weirdest but crazy high density notes because of it. Placement on the paper can matter, different shapes have different implications, the name of something I’ve done before with the surrounding context will always give me the same impression.

I am me throughout space and time, and through my own consistency the tiny imperfections remind me of the details

I mean, they’re ruining their search anyways. It’s almost unusable at this point, it’s like asking for relevant ads and two year old Reddit posts

Is it censorship? Did they decide to just straight up sell SEO? Are websites locking down and blocking their crawlers to stop AI training crawlers?

I legitimately find Bing to be better at this point, but whatever they’re doing it’s maddening. Even better AI assisted web searches kinda suck because the data fed into them is more of the same

But solid chance they’re trying to boost Gemini, which has been a shockingly bad llm for a company that basically wrote the book on AI not too long ago

Could run out of weapons in 2-3 months time

Man, seems like that’s going to push Ukraine and Europe to make some more aggressive moves if anything…

Hell no. So many people think “it’s not real, you just need to try harder”, or they think “it’s real, so I need to look even closer for any mistakes or sloppiness” and develop confirmation bias

If you need accommodations, I would go through HR, and I’d probably wait until after the fact even if that weakens your legal protections

I might confide in my boss eventually, but probably by telling them without telling them - I’ll tell them my brain works in a weird way, that I need to walk to process information, that I need music/videos playing in the background because it actually helps my focus

Regardless, I’ve even been warned off by older co-workers (I failed a drug test for my meds, even though I brought the bottle) who said even if it’s illegal some people will try to get rid of me anyways

I’m of two minds on that… On one hand, yes, this is closing one of the final relief valves

On the other hand, this is a powerful way to manufacture consent… They get to control what people get to talk and what they hear. They can put their plants to ask questions, and a lot of people will buy that the majority supports Trump and Musk, which was never really true and will only become less true

I’m sure it’s probably just going to be pulling relevant data, which is a pretty good use case if it’s citing sources - military stuff tends to use absurd amounts of manpower to avoid mistakes, so I can’t imagine they’ll be trusting it anytime soon

Probably because of Hollywood - for some reason they always seem to shake with their left hands, which always stands out to me

I’m not sure what the reason is, but I’m sure it’s related

I think forking android could be viable if they put some weight behind it

The difference between this and fireOS is they’re almost guaranteed sales. No foreign government is going to stick with an American company if they have a comparable option from a reliable ally at this point… That’s got to be hundreds of millions of sales on that front alone

If they can make something good, polish it for a few years, and demonstrate they can lock it down that’s almost guaranteed sales. And if they use that opportunity to further improve for a couple generations, they could become a real contender

The only question is will they throw enough resources at it and will they stick with improving it without giving up too early

Citation needed. He definitely holds the record for spewing shit, but nearly every literal thing that comes out of his is a lie and I think he used to talk a lot faster

Although if we account for how shitty the shit is, I could believe it

They censored mainstream media. They boost and censor mainstream social media. They lie constantly, so fast we can’t keep up. The Democrats were neo liberals, they seemed like they were going to shift more progressive but now they’re becoming neoconservatives

Lobbyists write the laws they may tweak before voting on. The Democrats let the conservatives stack the court, while refusing to do the same

The electorial college, voter suppression, and “it’s whatever we give you or the orange guy who wants to destroy the country” has stolen our power

The system is rigged. Almost none of us want this, not just what’s happening now, but the destruction of the middle class, the impossibility of housing, the enshitification of everything, healthcare that cripples you to use (if insurance doesn’t just delay until you’re also physically crippled)

No, this isn’t us. We’re not in control, our democracy has been hacked by a small number of very powerful people. We have to fix it - but this isn’t our fault

Very, very true. And I mean honestly, the fact we no longer have third spaces and our communities have moved online have given an insane boost to the most extreme voices. Groups based on location and hobbies might lean to one side, but there’s going to be moderating voices

But in a right wing echo chamber, you just have to listen to people attacking others. The left is plenty welcoming, but there’s these people who are just sitting there to attack any perceived bigotry or ideology - like once I got called out for using the wrong pronouns in a new voice chat because I had the wrong name… And it was just this one drunk girl and we just moved on and someone else privately apologized for her, but that injustice just feels terrible

It’s not that left spaces aren’t welcoming, it’s just that it takes one person to make you feel constantly on edge and sour you on anything like it

And it’s not like the right doesn’t do the same - they ban people left and right for perceived purity tests and label you a far left instigator, but pound for pound they need less people because they’re more organized than we are

They have leaders at every level and every checkpoint from general dissatisfaction to rabid Fascism to feed you the next level of hate you need to repeat

We have liberals who hate the left more than they hate fascism and constant infighting between what few communities we do have

We really need to set a set of next step goal posts, like universal healthcare, worker protections, and forcing corporations in line

We need to be able to talk to tankies and just avoid geopolitics, we need vegans to be able to talk about reducing meat consumption instead of all or nothing, we even need to be able to talk to bigots and focus on why they actually agree with our next step goalposts once they understand them

We need to provide a ramp to leftism, even if we have to hold our noses at some of it. We can still have our safe spaces and leftist spaces, but we need to do outreach and give people stepping stones and middle grounds so people can slowly learn, where we’re lazer focused on key subjects and let the rest slide

We also need places where we can organize around issues we all agree on so we can organize and make actual progress, where we don’t talk about end goals, ideals, and values - just on the next step

The truth is, most everyone wants a lot of the same things, and they’d support it if they understood it - we need to be able to teach them issue by issue what we want to do, no matter what baggage they haven’t yet overcome.

Lateral motion doesn’t affect vertical motion unless air resistance comes into play, they’re both going to be pulled down at the same acceleration from the same height. Canada isn’t going to be kicked up either, just forward

On the other hand, Canada is falling face first, and the US is tumbling backwards, so they’ll probably fall slower

Oh, progressives offer them plenty, just not on social issues (and that’s the only type of change on the table)

To put it another way, anxiety is preparing for a fight. It destroys you spending all your life looking for an enemy you can’t see. But we all feel it

The right offers them an enemy, and a way to fight for something better. It’s a bald faced lie, but the need for something to change is overwhelming for a lot of people

I love the unedited fox news interview

Would you release the Epstein files?

Uh… Well… Uh… Maybe? Yeah, I think I would, but I’d have to take a closer look, it could cause problems for people. But yeah…I think I would. Yeah.

After rapid fire “yes” to every other document they asked about, it really stands out