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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: April 24th, 2024

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  • For dating apps in particular this is even more stupid.

    It used to be the case that if you were talking to a bot, or a person pretending to be someone else… well you’d probably drop the whole app and determine its a scam.

    Now that’s apparently a groundbreaking, paradigm shifting feature.

    … I have lost the ability to parody, these last few years. The dumbest things imaginable just keep happening and getting normalized.


  • Just give them a CyberTruck and have it Full Self Drive themselves into a pond.

    The doors and window controls will short out and lock you in. Its not waterproof so water will be seeping in. The electronics will short out. The windows cannot be broken. The battery may explode/burn like thermite

    Its a race between what will kill you faster: Drowning, Toxic Asphyxiation, Electrocution, or Burning.


  • I am unfortunately too young to have seen or even heard of that movie, but I do like the song!

    As to the scene itself: Mhm, yep, its basically that, but many orders of magnitude more expensive, complicated, and even worse, as an multi-AI generated conversation is basically certain to say things you wouldn’t say, ask things you wouldn’t ask, and agree to things you wouldn’t agree to.




  • Trump is the vector, not the disease itself.

    The disease is the curdling rage of the (mostly) working class that’s massively failed to achieve the American Dream™ that was promised to them, which has been perfectly heightened misdirected and cultivated by decades of right wing radio talk show hosts, psuedo ‘philosophers’, outright racist and religious extremists, conservative ‘think tanks’ lending credibility to failed economic doctrines, 30+ years of conservative influence on our public education systems essentially ruining it to the point that now only around 10% of Americans are capable of comparing and contrasting news coverage critically… etc etc.

    Trump was just the first presidential candidate to completely drop the pretense and show the country that its fine to go totally mask off with your inane bullshit falsehoods, that there is no real need for anything other than appeal via signifiers and cliches and dogwhistle.

    Actual policy means nothing, only spin.

    Actual hypocrisy means nothing, just sling more baseless shit at others.

    Reality means nothing, everyone else is wrong, you know in your heart what I am telling you, no matter how contradictory or incomprehensible it is, is true…

    … because it allows you to feel rightfully indignant.

    This has always been the strong undercurrent amongst conservatives.

    Trump was just the vector that metastisized it into basically mass psychosis.


  • This really is the idea bouncing through many tech companies heads right now.

    Take yourself, give the app enough of you for an AI version of you to be trained on, then have that AI interact with other people’s AIs to… save everyone time.

    Zoom is currently trying to make this work for meetings. Meetings suck, right? So here, lets turn everyone into AI facsimiles and have those things ‘meet’ and then just email everyone the resulting transcript.

    https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/3/24168733/zoom-ceo-ai-clones-digital-twins-videoconferencing-decoder-interview

    So basically now everyone will just get transcripts of AIs hallucinating at each other instead of actually being present in meetings which probably could have just been an email anyway.

    (Zoom is also promoting this ‘new vision’ at the same time they’re demanding their own employees stop working remotely).

    The tech bros run everything now and they’ve completely lost their minds.



  • Possible, but that would imply he simply had no sexual desires/attraction whatsoever.

    Of course, when debating the supposed sexuality of people who lived and died roughly 400 years ago there’s always going to room for argument, differing interpretations, and of course rumors.

    To which I submit this, part of a ‘Fragment on the History of Apostasy’, written by Newton himself:

    The way to chastity is not to struggle directly with incontinent thoughts but to avert the thoughts by some imployment, or by reading, or meditating on other things, or by convers. By immoderate fasting the body is also put out of its due temper & for want of sleep the fansy is invigorated about whatever it sets it self upon & by degrees inclines towards a delirium in so much that those Monks who fasted most arrived to a state of seing apparitions of weomen & their shapes & of hearing their voices in such a lively manner as made them often think the visions true apparitions of the Devil tempting them to lust.

    https://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/THEM00061

    Attempting to summarize and translate this into more modern parlance:

    Newton thinks the best way to maintain chastity is not to entertain your sexual fantasies/desires in your mind, but to constantly busy yourself with work, reading, meditating or conversation, and also that fasting as monks do actually makes sexual desires so inflamed that it has resulted in many monks having dreams or visions or hallucinations of tempting, lustful women which are so vivid that monks believe them to be from the Devil.

    To me, this reads as Newton himself telling us his own preferred strategy of maintaining chastity, implying it is something he struggles with, must put effort into, thus implying he is not asexual, and that his method of quenching his sexual urges is actually superior to that of what many monks do.

    Thus, volcel, not asexual.

    Again though, this is far from definitive proof!

    I’d be interested if anyone could source some actually real evidence either way on this, as a whole lot of Newton’s speculated sexuality is pop history or pseudo history based on hearsay.








  • I have despised twitter since basically its inception.

    1. The character (original) character limit fundamentally means you are strongly encouraged to limit conversation to basically soundbites, slogans, and pithy comments. Even though this was changed later, it still created a culture that generally mocks anything long winded.

    While its true that brevity is the soul of wit, wit is not the same thing as a detailed and nuanced discussion of a complex topic.

    It thus lends itself to being an optimal tool for political slogans, celebrity gossip, and direct corporate advertisement.

    1. Twitter is far, far, faaar too open ended, as in one to many kind of network connections. Its a dream come true also for narcissistic, attention seeking individuals who want to win Twitter.

    2. Twitter blew up before Facebook completely shifted (enshittified?) their entire model from being focused on actually connecting friend groups, and directly pushed Facebook toward just being an unmitigated firehose of ‘content’ from every which way, which just became the norm for ‘social media’ design.

    Of course X now is even fucking worse, but I am so glad its dying.

    The way I see it, Twitter contributed heavily toward destroying the older, more personal formats of social media, it helped destroy the old forum culture of the net where people had communities and a measure of intellect, privacy and respect.

    It took the sincerity out of online discourse, and was foundational in shifting the internet from a ‘place’ with lots of weird locales, into some kind of Eldritch god’s sick joke of a species level omni-mirror, reducing online humanity to a popularity contest of political slogans, narcissistic clout chasers, gossip mongers, and corporate sloganeering and brand worship… and giving all of this to us in an undifferentiated constant flow.