makes it difficult to develop new browsers, giving one company a near-monopoly.

Totally an accident by the way! They weren’t trying to become a monopoly, promise!

I look forward to dying at your side.

Don’t worry. Once we are no longer useful to them, something the billionaires are actively working on, and once they have successfully insulated themselves from the resulting conflict, they will start to kill us all off and they will say they are doing it to “save the planet”. They still care about the planet. Just not with all of us poor people still on it. It deserves to be returned to nature. Except for the billionaires and their friends, of course.

Absolutely true. They’ll buy the data they want from some shitty crawler running from some data broker in some far-flung and lawless part of the world, hallucinate the actual source, and pretend they had no idea their “data partner” wasn’t respecting robots.txt if they have to, which they won’t ever have to do because it’s literally impossible to detect and prove and realistically unenforceable.

This is a company that removed it’s company motto of “Don’t be evil” because it found it too “limiting”. Don’t be naive.

Never been happier that all my computers run Windows 10 or Linux. Windows 11 is dead to me, and if anything happens to accidentally get it installed somehow, it’s going to be replaced with Linux going forward.

They don’t really understand anything because they don’t really think. They just repeat what they’re told while convincing themselves its an independent thought that appeared in their head as if by magic. These are the people outsourcing most of their thinking these days to ChatGPT, because it’s not something they’ve ever really valued or been interested in doing themselves. Life’s a lot easier when you don’t have to think about much. They’re “doers” not “thinkers”. And frankly, it shows. We see an awful lot of stuff getting done right now, and very little thinking.

They are freely expressing their fear of dangerous western ideas which must be censored to protect the motherland /s

Ah, I see I’ve found a fellow member of la révolution. I applaud your scientific curiosity.

I’m really curious what brainrot is in that man’s head.

The “Unhook” addon (increasingly required for Youtube now, in my opinion) will still completely block this as it blocks all shorts. Fuck shorts anyway. Also as TechnologyConnections pointed out in a recent video, the subscription feed still and always has completely bypasses Youtube’s recommended brainrot anyway and allows you to subscribe to and follow the creators and topics you actually care about. Until we have a viable alternative to Youtube (and hopefully stuff like this will drive that to happen sooner rather than later) the other option is to stick to subscriptions as much as possible and only subscribe to creators that don’t abuse this or use shorts at all, preferably.

“But first, we need to discuss the white genocide in South Africa!”

Maybe we could generate those with AI… oh wait, I think I see the problem…

Removed by mod

It’s my “opinion” that a device running a slightly modified Linux 2.6 kernel is literally running Linux, yes. Maybe you’re making the point that it’s not a full GNU/Linux distribution that most people imagine when they hear Linux, and that’s a valid and valuable clarification which I thank you for providing, but you don’t need to imply I’m wrong to provide that clarification.

Kobos are pretty nice. They’re not cheap, as you pointed out, but you can get an older or used one for quite a bit cheaper and it’s just as good. They run Linux. It’s almost completely open, and anything that isn’t might as well be. That said you really don’t need to open it up much, just enough to install something like koreader which basically completely replaces the OS on the thing. It does everything I would ever want to use my ereader for … granted that’s pretty much just “read ebooks”.

Parenthesis, exponents, multiplication, division, addition, subtraction.

should actually be

Parenthesis, exponents, (multiplication and division), (addition and subtraction).

Addition and subtraction are given the same priority, and are done in the same step, from left to right.

It’s not a great system of notation, it could be made far clearer (and parenthesis allow you to make it as clear as you like), but it’s essentially the universal standard now and it’s what we’re stuck with.

I doubt there is video of that… why would they be filming his back?

What bubble have they got you trapped in? Literally every video I can find shows both Nazi salutes Elon Musk did. Here’s a link to PBS’s video.

I skimmed through most of it, it’s a huge and badly organized info dump, but it seems legit, most of the research was done through the internet archive and everything it listed is verifiable and reproducible, although as far as I can tell the link to the CIA is pretty weak and relies on a single news story with a single example alleged “CIA site” that allegedly leaked out of , it’s not really that hard to believe that they would have such sites. Almost certainly all spy agencies do. It’s totally plausible steganography, like the numbers stations on radio, or botnet controllers quietly directing their army of bots through normal-seeming posts on normal-seeming accounts on social media. Hiding operational information in plain sight allows a useful hidden communication method that doesn’t raise any obvious alarm even if it is noticed to be a bit strange or dumb. It blends in perfectly with all the other strange and dumb content on the Internet.

Obviously all the sites are gone now and there’s nothing of any particular intelligence value there but the appearance and contents of the sites are still available on the archive, and of course there are at least hundreds of them, in various languages, on various topics, with a variety of different technologies in use, but the similarities also seem pretty clear. It’s not much of a conspiracy this is fairly basic stuff although of course we don’t have rock solid proof I don’t think that would really make it any more interesting. If the CIA did come out and say “yep, those were our sites” would it actually be any more interesting? would it be less interesting? or would it be the same interesting? I think it would be the same interesting. But that’s just, like, my opinion.

I think you’re missing mine. I know it’s not clever. I think everything it creates is either slop, plagiarism and almost always both.

My point is: An arbitrary random number generator without any stable internal model of the world would still be a bad thing if it can, without any conscious intention, trick/confuse people into thinking its so awesome and clever that they choose it to be emperor of Earth, leader of the economy, decider of reality, and build it a great throne upon which they can worship it and and an altar to burn oil on as a sacrifice to the environment. That’s what LLMs are doing. It doesn’t matter whether the LLMs intend to, it doesn’t matter whether they have intentions at all. What matters is that it’s so “well presented” that people fall for it. It’s the effectiveness it has at making people fall for it that’s the problem. Dismissing those people as weak, naive, stupid can’t be done because their actions matter, their votes matter, their financial choices matter, they’re part of the civilization we live in, and frankly, they seem to be the majority.