I love how deep-facebook boomer mindrot is the official stance of my government! It only got better when the mindrot could generate itself at the low low price of boiling an ocean!

Fuck this reality man. Who can I talk to about cashing it in for a new one?

Not sure the UK’s interested in having us back at this point.

It’s that “everyone with a brain” bit that’s different now. Because you’re right, nothing here is new. Trump and Epstein’s ties have been pretty common knowledge to anyone not in the cult.

What’s changed is that those inside the cult can’t really ignore it anymore. They went from “the democrats are all pedophiles and the Epstein files prove it!” to “they have the Epstein files on their desks, they are just doing some final checks before they release them” to “there are no Epstein files, there never were any Epstein files, and if you think different you need to shut up.”. Cognitive dissonance may be a powerful force, but “the Epstein files” have been the conspiracy bread and butter that’s been holding this cult together for a while now. They were probably willing to bend on just about anything but that.

A lot of hay is made out of the fact that Trump managed to fuck up running a casino, and it’s true. In a business where the saying goes “the house always wins”, it takes a special breed of incompetance to bankrupt the house. This feels very similar. Dude could have said that aliens stole the Epstein files, Q-anon folks would have bought it. Or better yet don’t say anything at all. I think a lot of folks wouldn’t have bat an eye if Trump’s cronies were still “working on releasing the Epstein files” in 2028.

But he didn’t do that. He made a huge song and dance about “releasing the Epstein files” then obviously canned it at the last minute. For the rabid conspiracy theoriests that comprise his base, the folks who were willing to invent an entire child trafficing code for pizzagate, that was probably the one manuver even he couldn’t pull.

Will this mean anything in the long run? Well, I’ve kinda had my hope beaten out of me in that respect. But this does kinda feel different, I will say that.

Yeah, I think this is more valuable to her as conservative bonafides than anything. “I stood up to libral, woke, Disney and won!” will probably play great fox news and the other rocks these folk thrive beneath. It’s a further step in a career in the rightwing culture-war bullshit sphere, not back twords Disney.

This has been a republican strategy decades in the making. The comment above framed it as an arms race and that’s a good way to put it. They’ve had the overthrow of democracy in their heads as an objective and have undertaking a concerted strategy to achieve it.

The democrats were always going to be at a disadvantage simply responding to that, but that disadvantage is made a lot worse by the fact that they don’t seem to want to respond to it. They have an idea of what this country is and that comes with a bunch of lines their unwilling to cross. Meanwhile republicans had a clear idea of what they want this country to be and were willing to trample any line, break any law or norm, in order to make it a reality.

This? The news story we’re responding to? It may represent the first stumbling steps off the starting line. But it doesn’t change the fact that the starting pistol sounded decades ago and the republicans have been running the whole time.

Too little, to late. I don’t want that sentiment to be true, but I find it hard to look at this situation and view it in any other way.

Yeah, I know. Just leaving room for miracles I guess.

On paper there’s plenty that could. The Supreme Court could have stepped in to stop a lot of this. Executive orders only stand in places where a full fledged law from congress doesn’t cover the issue. The military is theoretically as obligated to disobey an unlawful order as they are to obey a lawful one and states are theoretically pretty insulated from federal interference except in a few explicit areas.

But, we don’t live on paper and none of those protections exist unless there are people out there who are ready, willing, and able, to act on them. What happens if the Supreme Court somehow manages to rule against the administration and they just flagrantly disregard the order? What happens if Trump orders the military to start attacking US citizens openly or starts an illegal war without congressional approval? What happens if Trump runs for president again in 2028? Or just says he’s president for life and we’re not doing elections anymore?

The answer is nothing, unless people stand up against him. And… so far… we haven’t seen much of that. Not from people in government at any rate. We’ve seen a bit from normal folks on the ground in places like LA, but our government’s been working to neuter the power of popular protest since the civil rights protests, perhaps even earlier. So reasonable people can disagree on the efficacy of that.

I really don’t want to echo the doomer line I’ve seen written here a lot, but yeah, we’re probably fucked. Like maybe if something was done like… a decade ago? Two? Maybe we wouldn’t be in this situation. But… as things stand? I don’t even know if the damage from the first Trump presidency can ever truly be repaired and more damage is being done on a weekly, almost a daily basis. Personally? I think it’s only a matter of time before this man breaks the global economy irreparably. In a way that simply can’t be swept under the rug again. Domestically? Who the fuck knows at this point? I have to resist the urge to laugh out loud whenever people ask where I see myself in five years because at this point I’ve got no idea what the next two weeks are gonna hold.

So… yeah. Fun times in the ol US of A.

I mean, we kinda already ended up there with the Ashley Madison hack in 2015. Problems with that site aside, I feel like it’s kinda the blueprint for everything wrong with companies that retain personally identifable info on folks. If a company collects details like your driver’s license, it’s not a question of if it gets out but when. There’s just no way to collect that sort of data and truly keep it safe.

But, it seems like we’ve kinda forgotten how to learn lessons in the modern day, so I’m sure this was an isolated issue and we’ll never see it’s like again.

(/s on that last part, just in case that wasn’t blindingly obvious.)

Every day we get closer to teaching the robots how to feel pain.

I’m gonna be honest, I did not think this was staged when I first read it…

…Because why on earth would that be what you want to stage? Like sure, they say in the article it was to “prove Putin isn’t hiding behind others” or some such shit. The message it sends to me is “our air defense is so shit we can’t even lock it down when the guy in charge comes to visit”. What a bizarre choice of propaganda.

“Lettuce Speak”.

I think… there was a kernel of a decent instinct there. At the point that John Oliver bit came out I feel like we were all kinda just marveling at how far stupid playground insults managed to get Trump. “Well, ok, maybe he’s onto something. Let’s try it and see what happens.” Was a fine reaction for the time, but I think it was best abandoned quickly.

In 2025, not useful in the slightest. I don’t know what is precisely, but I don’t think it’s petty name calling.

You know, there’s that old yarn about Alfred Nobel. That his obituary was accidentally published early and that he was shocked and dismayed to discover that the only thing he’d be remembered for was the invention of Dynamite. So, he went on to create the Nobel Peace Prize, in the hopes of contributing something other than death to the world.

I’m not saying Nobel was a fantastic dude, but at least he cared enough to not be remembered as the guy that made it possible for your son to get blown to peices in a war. He wanted something positive associated with name.

Even that seems too high a bar for these folks. They’ve become so entrenched in their own little world that I don’t think they much care what anyone outside it thinks.

Obviously this is all stupid and you’ll find problems anywhere you choose to look.

The problem I’m finding is this, if Facebook truly is betting on AI becoming better as a way to encourage growth then why are they further poisoning their own datasets? Like ok, even if you exclude everything your own bots say from your training data, which you could probably do since you know who they are, this is still encouraging more AI slop on the platform. You don’t know how much of the “engagement” your driving (which they are likely just turning around and feeding back into the AI training set) is actually human, AI grifter, or someone poisoning the well by making your AIs talk to themselves. If you actually cared to make your AI better, then you can’t use any of the responses to your bots as most of them will be of dubious providence at best.

Personally I’m rooting on the coming Hapsburg-AI issue so I don’t really have that much of a problem with Facebook deciding more poison is a brilliant business move. But uh… seems real dumb if your actually interested in having an actually functional LLM.

Yeah, fucked up though it might be, I think that within the moral framework she’s chosen to operate in she’s “doing the right thing”. That framework is monstrous and should be disqualifying for a position on the judiciary. But I think she’s got no moral qualms and would treat the morality that most of us have with a mixture of confusion and hostility.

God, I was just breathing a sigh of relief till this poped up a moment later.

The South Korean military says it will maintain martial law until it is lifted by President Yoon Suk Yeol, despite the nation’s parliament voting to block its enforcement, according to the country’s national broadcaster.

Hope that’s just postureing.

So, the following is a genuine question and not a snide remark.

Does that matter? Is the military going to respect that? I’d heard prior to this that the military had forbade parliament from gathering. What’s to say they don’t just side with Yoon?Certainly wouldn’t be the first time in history that a nation’s military has dictated the corse of the nation’s civil future. I really hate asking questions like this but I’m just not familiar enough with the politics of South Korea to know if this a done and dusted thing or if the military is likely to go for a coup if Yoon pitches it.

I can’t remember when I came to the realization, but for years now I thought that if (and I would love to hold on to the naive hope that it is an “if”) WW3 breaks out then the battle lines would be drawn between the forces of autocracy and democracy. Those would be our sides.

Now, I’m not even sure democracy is gonna make it out the gate… America’s elected a dictator who’s aligned with Russia who is itself a major factor of this unholy autocratic alliance with China, North Korea, and Iran… Now this?

There were no “good guys” in world war 1. It was the result of squabbleing European powers not realizing the destructive potential modern military technology had and how much that changed the game. It needed to happen in the sense that countries couldn’t continue to act the way they had prior to the great war, but that doesn’t mean anyone was in the right.

It’s hard to imagine “good guys” in world war 3 either. Increasingly, it kinda just seems like it’s a choice between “what shit flavor of authoritarianism do you hate less?”. Assuming that question even matters considered all the nuclear weapons that could fly in a third world war.

I dunno man, shit’s just looking pretty fucking bleak.

Walking through the streets of soho in the rain.

Probably fudges his rolls when playing with AI too.