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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • John Witmire is a DINO by every definition of the word. He’s deep in bed with the police, he loves privatization of public services, and he makes common cause with the state’s Republican leadership on a regular basis. Nothing the man loves more than “balancing the budget” on the backs of public workers and low income residents.

    But he’s been a Democrat since he took his State Senate seat and squatted in it back in 1983. So the party apparatus loyally and mechanically supported him all through the primary and general elections. The “It’s my turn” candidate is taking his turn.





  • The study isn’t bs.

    There’s a lot of “I’m childless and proud and how dare you suggest living in isolation and screaming at my computer screen all day has had any negative impact on my mental health. You’re just trying to trick me into breeding! A thing I became intensely averse to just recently, after spending 16 hours a day on incel forums full of reactionary influencers.”

    So much of the knee-jerk ingrained responses online are indicative of people who have utterly lost the ability to think for themselves and are only capable of lashing out in defense of their latest favorite social media trend. Add in the artificial interactions created by bot accounts and people spamming content for self-promotion, and you’ve got a real recipe for mass psychosis.


  • In theory, we have the Third Space for that kind of socializing. Parks, plazas, union halls, club spaces and dance halls, churches, community centers, libraries…

    In practice, they’ve been gradually privatized and monetized until everything is The Mall. If you don’t have $10 to spend for the hour, there’s nowhere you can legally so much as sit down. Hard to socialize on these terms.

    My city decided to take its $7B budget and close a $330M shortfall by gutting parks, libraries, and other public amenities. Meanwhile, the police and fire departments are seeing a budget surge of over $100M.






  • The Billion Dollar Question.

    Japan tried to bomb the US by sending balloons over the jet stream and it was largely ineffective due to the range and lack of precision. Moving a weapon across an ocean and into range of a target without a ton of telecommunication support and manual intervention would be a herculean task. Far easier to just bomb one of the hundreds of US military bases local to your neighborhood, as with the Al Qaeda bombing of the US base in Somalia or the Houthis in Yemen targeting US bases and large ships trying to navigate the Red Sea.

    But domestically? A little surprised nobody has tried to turn a large drone aircraft into a weapon for an Oklahoma City style attack.

    If you look at the techniques employed by the Ukrainian insurgents against Russia, explosives embedded into the shipping containers of large trucks have been incredibly potent. Drones hidden within the tops of shipping containers put Ukraine within striking distance of the Russian bomber fleet.

    Definitely something a committed insurgency within the States could employ against police/military.



  • Historically ('10s era) they were very focused on being “family friendly” and censoring anything they considered violent, sexual, perverse, deliberately deceptive, or otherwise upsetting to your middle-aged middle-income housewife/grandma.

    Post-COVID, Zuckerberg’s been increasingly blackpilled, with an eye towards shock-jock engagement bait over any kind of civil moderation, fact-checking of misinformation, or discouragement of fraud/scam posts. So a site plenty of users have historically complained about feeling cloistered and sterile in the Disney-fied sense is now a total madhouse of AI slop, bum-fights clips, drop-shipper spam, and bargain basement rumor-mongering.

    We’ve gone from a space that’s Mormon-style conservative to Fight Club-coded conservative.





  • Human posting of AI-generated content is definitely a problem

    It isn’t clear whether this content is posted by humans or by AI fueled bot accounts. All they’re sifting for is text with patterns common to AI text generation tools.

    There wasn’t necessarily anything stopping people from doing the same thing pre-GPT

    The big inhibiting factor was effort. ChatGPT produces long form text far faster than humans and in a form less easy to identify than prior Markov Chains.

    The fear is that Wikipedia will be swamped with slop content. Humans won’t be able to keep up with the work of cleaning it out.