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Days like this I kinda wish I was still on Reddit because I couldn't resist telling them how badly they screwed up for things to get this far and reminding them how utterly powerless they are to stop what is coming (whatever that is, I can't even say for sure), and if they had an ounce of self-awareness and the ability to reflect, this might cause them to change some of their beliefs about the world but no, they will be stuck in a cycle of learned helplessness because they can't even exit the echo chamber that has rendered them completely incapable of interfacing with the reality on the ground, and the beliefs 'normal' people hold anymore.
And also Sotomayor has a decent chance of dying or retiring in the next 3 years so lol enjoy having that shoe waiting to drop the entire time.
I'm not really sadistic, but that site has really become a pustulent sore on the Internet's face. I want to keep poking it until it pops. At least 4chan has the decency to stay hidden on the internet's ass.
One of the great internet disappointments for me, Reddit. It was so good in its day. Perverted in parts, poisonous, like a loaded gun ready to go off--though even loaded guns are harmless if you know how to handle them. But also brilliant, funny, expansive, daring, poetic, a real scope into the lives of others, worse and better, and of course of our own familiars far off.
Now it's like an IV where you push for more stupidity and lies, push the button, push, until it euthanizes you.
There are still rare flashes of the old (dot) Reddit. Floating among the river of bravery posts on /bestof recently was this post where an industrial press mechanic answers a question about the shapes on the lids of tin cans.
It feels like that sort of thing used to happen frequently on Reddit. A small insight into some overlooked aspect of modern culture brought to the fore and given a human voice. Of course given the medium much of that was tech adjacent, like a '90s games dev popping up to explain how they exploited the hardware in a console to pull off a novel graphics effect, but also these more unexpected interactions that only happened because Reddit's userbase was so big and broad.
It's a shame that AMAs which began with people like that mechanic (or a pathologically upvote addicted biologist) inadvertently hijacking a thread to spontaneously answer people's questions on a slow work day were formalised and turned into cynical PR appearances for attention starved celebrities.
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Hilariously accurate. Used to be useful at least for keeping a thumb to the pulse of 'the internet,' but they went and alienated the actual fun parts of the internet so now its just a thumb on the slowly fading pulse of the particular brand of 2010's atheist/SJW leftist brigade who still think that their ironclad hold on the site makes them relevant.
The button pushing also helps euthanize the rest of the patients too.
"When does the Narwhal Bacon" indeed.
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Indeed, it's technical brillance compared to its contemporaries in the early and mid 2010s was so great, that even now 10 years later (an eternity in internet time) spinoff/dissident platforms like this one haven't found a better format. And when such a great tool was left to a representative slice of the western population (or at least, of the technophile western population), it really felt magical.
To ruin it, all it took was the admins coming down a couple of times on the same side of culture wars tussles (and it's not a matter of being the right or wrong side, just coming down on the same side a few times in a row is gonna do it), and the left noticing (as it often does) before the right the large amount of narrative-shaping power that was being left on the counter in the form of modship over ostensibly neutral subs.
It was inevitable. The years where it worked were great, but it was not a stable arrangement.
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I have checked https://old.reddit.com/r/somethingiswrong2024/ every day for weeks now. It's too good.
They think Trump will usher in a fascist dystopia and are horrified at Democrats smiling and nodding leading up to the inauguration.
They also think Elon Musk personally stole the election by changing votes using Starlink satellites with help from Russia. And it gets dumber from there.
Here's a nice little thread where they suggest that Elon Musk is... The Most Dangerous Man in the World.
And hey, he's probably in the top 1000, if we talk about potential to cause maximum chaos. In theory he could make millions of Teslas wrap themselves around telephone poles at 120 mph... But I don't understand how you can look at or listen to this dude and think he'd be the one who would order millions of men to their deaths or intentionally cause mass destruction.
There's a level of derangement that seems to arise when people notice a guy can shrug off social influence and utterly ignore bribe money and is, further, able to implement long term plans that happen to thwart your 'team's' goals.
But this is an extreme distortion of reality that only an internet-powered filter bubble/echo chamber can achieve.
Wow, I had not thought about how much of a security risk that was, I was just impressed by the self-driving capabilities.
The knowledge that has soured me on self-driving cars as a concept is learning more about cybersecurity.
If every Tesla is running identical software with approximately identical behavior, then there are predictable vulnerabilities that can be exploited by malicious actors.
One threat model is that teenage deliquents figure out (hypothetically) that Teslas will swerve to avoid any human-shaped obstacles in the road, so they start jumping in front of Teslas for fun, knowing that they won't get hit.
Another is, of course, malicious code gets injected which, under specific conditions triggers the car to accelerate at maximum and turn into the nearest cylindrical object once it reaches 100mph.
Think of how granular the STUXNET virus was.
The one benefit that human drivers have over robots is we don't have any way to hack humans to become suicidal at scale.
I've been saying for years that "youths" casually carjacking automated cars will be a thing because of this.
And now it's illegal for the company to have cars avoid streets where everyone keeps getting carjacked, so it will just keep happening forever and you'll lose your Wae2.go® Driving Privileges™ Account if you talk about it. Better hope you can afford a fire and urine-proof suit for the bus ride.
So be rabidly against mandated automatic driving.
A) there's absolutely no way to fight the economic pressure to adopt such a useful technology.
B) it's an incredibly useful technology that should be adopted.
C) you also can't fight the reddit "that's not happening and it's awesome that it is" tactic. Which is being used both about the mandates and the terrorizing. (I don't have my bluesky screenshots on this phone, but they're already doing the "haha look how scared those tech bros are, what if we burned them alive in Minecraft tee hee hee" thing with vids of mobs surrounding driverless taxis)
As always the only thing worth fighting is the one struggle against leftism, so that at least some exec will be able to tell the engineers it's ok for the taxis to avoid the intersection of MLK boulevard and Angela Davis Ave after the 20th carload of people are murdered.
I'm talking about 'mandated'. Yes, automated cars are useful.
Would I want to have a car that is connected to the internet or can be operated by a program or an algo ?
Fuck no.
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Yep. The irony is that there is simply NO WAY that any car company would program their vehicles to affirmatively use deadly force in defense of a passenger.
There might be a market for jailbreaks that allow your Waymo or Tesla to run down attackers if you shout a code word or something.
I actually think I'd want my self-driving car to be offline (i.e. not internet connected) at ALL TIMES, and if firmware updates are needed it should only support a physical internet connection then.
And that's already too much of a vector for mischief than I'd like.
"Air-gapped? Don't make me laugh. Show me an Iranian air-gapped defense system and I'll show you a ready victim awaiting our four zero day vulnerabilities."
Yep.
Reading the process by which they managed to inject that code makes you realize the only reason most of us are safe is because smart humans simply do not have any reason to target most of us for any reason.
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At the same time, it being online is extremely useful for navigation, so there'll always be demand for that.
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The continued existence of tech-optimists has been a huge mystery for me for quite a while. How can you observe what happened to all the other cool tech, and not immediately think of everything that can go wrong with it? I don't even think driving people into telephone poles is that much of a threat - such dramatic displays of power are sure to be met with retaliation, and thus are unlikely to happen to begin with. Try Canadian musings about how ridiculous it was that the truckers had the capability to drive into the capital, without the ruling class' approval.
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The same derangement that makes them so against JK Rowling. She disagrees, they apply pressure on social media in their typical way, she doubles and triples down. They can't bend her. Rather than have a "you can't win them all" attitude they turn a bit hysterical.
That's a Bingo.
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