America: let’s disband the CDC, FDA, USDA, any set of letters we can that might regulate something. all the livestock dies from preventable diseases

Meanwhile, China: wHaT dO wE dO wItH aLl ThEsE cHiCkEnS?

This is just willful misunderstanding of history. Several of the founders were against political parties, but since game theory hadn’t been invented yet they put in place a system that would force a two or one party system. Which it quickly did. There have been two parties from the very beginning, just not the same two parties. But arguably, the same two broad positions: the Federalists favored elites, while the DRs favored liberalism.

Words also just rotate around in popularity like any other fad. Remember synergy? Paradigm shifts? Thinking outside the box?

Academia isn’t immune to memes, far from it. In the semi-contained world of higher education, trends in words and phrases are even more pronounced and likely to spread.

If this is evidence of LLM usage, it could easily be the machines reflecting back trends. These things pick up on subtle cues in your prompts to match tone with you as well so I wouldn’t rule out human influence either in prompts or the RLHF process.

Why? So they can betray you at a critical junction to claim power for themselves, or so you can betray them without feeling too guilty about it?

Because you sure as hell can’t work with them on any leftist projects. They have zero desire to unconcentrate the accumulated power in Washington, only to claim it for themselves.

It’s an untenable situation because its so much bigger than the tech world and open source. FOSS fundamentally works on a communal model: everyone needs lots of software, no one can hope to write it all themselves, so what if we distributed the labor out among the community so that everyone can work on some things important to them and the whole community benefits.

Then, capitalist businesses entered the picture and began using more and more open software as backbone for their enterprises. Government entanglements further complicate the picture, but fundamentally the capitalist mindset is incapable of building or maintaining our current technological base. It isn’t capable of maintaining or building our infrastructure either: almost all of that was built on government subsidies, socialism.

And now that vulture capitalism is the law of the land, everything is falling apart because there’s no more “slack” in the system where people can engage in personal socialism on projects like FLOSS, every bit of our time is being stolen to pad the numbers of capitalists.

This bleeds over into attitude as well. Every entitled user who thinks their personal issue is more important than any other concern is a trump or musk in miniature, believing that the the blowhard bravado of our current government is a model for forcing work to get done rather than a death spiral there’s no pulling out of.

You want FLOSS software that’s good? You want less burden on maintainers? You want a safer, saner, more human-centric technology base? You want a better tech world?

Eat. The. Rich.

The United States will happily supply all the weapons our oldest ally, Canada, needs for this battle of survival against the tyrannical forces of the United States. Will you be paying with cash, credit, layaway, or mineral rights to all your natural resources?

There’s a break-up song on Chvrch’s debut album called Tether. One line, frequently repeated, goes “I’m feeling capable of… seeing the end.” A fine lyric, very breakup, much hopeful.

Except, I can’t tell when listening that she isn’t saying “I feel incapable of…” I don’t know if it’s intentional but I think the ambiguity really elevates the song from semi-empowering breakup song to powerfully-relatable song about the chaos of seeing a relationship end; simultaneously believing you can get through it while also having no idea how you’ll ever get through it.

It’s just fun wordplay too: feeling capable/feel incapable. Makes me want to use that structure more in my own writing.

Imagine being a director at this company. One of your employees brings you a report showing that your most active users, who are the backbone of your business, have a huge overlap with rape reports. This will destroy the company, and you know they’ll fire you for bringing it up and suppress it anyway. So you just… forget… to bring it up at the next quarterly. You used to work at Uber, and before that covering up how gambling and gaming companies float on a raft made of addicts, so this is well practiced blindness.

Ah sorry bud but You were Time’s person of the year in 2006 so now we’re all complicit!

The new Prince of Persia is the worst for this! There’s no auto-cloud save, so you have to manually manage uploading and downloading to the one cloud save slot between your three on-device slots.

And no matter what, no matter how long it’s been, it asks about it, like: “Your last save was 0 minutes ago, as you sure you want to exit?”

His exact tweet came up in another post of this story. He said we should eliminate Palestine and Isreal, which is that one step too far. Today’s Nazi’s actually can’t be openly antisemetic because the genocidal apartheid state of Isreal is their closest international ally.

I’m noticing a trend of scientific-sounding announcements about physics results that turn out to be theoretical explorations of simulations. The whole “false vacuum” idea isn’t really even a hypothesis, just a what-if. We have no indication that the ground vacuum state isn’t the lowest energy configuration. I think people just find a non-zero minimum unintuitive.

Anyway, the key figure in all these theoretical simulation articles is the multi-billion dollar quantum super computers running these simulations. Wouldn’t it be funny if tech investors with a lot of money staked on quantum devices pushed for low-quality science that required their machines to be done, thus expanding the market and value of their otherwise pointless supercomputers? This article ends on a very optimistic “these computers have so many uses in cryptography and science” which seems a little out of place when discussing physics results.

It’s also too fucking late. They’ve already got all the data and have backdoored the systems.

Elon and his little hack squad needs to be arrested and investigated not just for this but going back to whatever secret projects they were doing at Space X to interfere with the election. Trump and Musk both have admitted in public speeches that they did something to technologically undermine the election.

That’s the thing, they aren’t public employees. DOGE isn’t a valid government department, which requires congress. This is a private citizen and his private employees/associates (is he even paying them?) staging a take over of the government. Don’t just grant them authority because they claimed to have it.

Damn! ExistentialComics author ain’t messing around no more!

Great reference, going to be stuck in my head all day.

At one point recently I bought a two pack of USB Blu-ray burner drives for $25. Optical media is so dirt cheap now that the readers are BOGO. Gave one to my partner, the other is still serving my physical media needs very well.

Because the bots/trolls/feds have shifted over to driving a wedge between leftists to keep solidarity from occurring. Thus “tankie” is being thrown around heavily, people constantly bring up early Soviet support of the nazis as a reason to say “tankie=nazi” while ignoring that tankies (sue me, it’s a real term that has uses) is a broad term for all “authoritarian fascists,” many of whom came after the nazis, were very anti-nazi, and like all historical figures often had a mix of good and bad qualities.

Certainly its funny to harp on tankies while America falls to literal fascism. Who ever could benefit from scape goating and demonizing communists? Who historically, poetically even, is the famous first victim of fascism due to the strong threat they represent?

With massive tariffs on all incoming food, and sabotaging our vital food producing areas, its almost like he’s either deliberately damaging the country or using famine as a tool to commit mass murder of the poor.