Today in "propaganda I didn't think I needed to worry about" - Cybertruck kids books!
And another one! This one actually has a good title in "The Ugly Truckling" and I'm legitimately mad as the father of a truck-obsessed child that it's wasted here.
this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2025
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Slate says: "For the Love of God, Stop Profiling This Couple!"
The Collinses are ineffective, abusive industry plants from Peter Thiel’s extended circle. They know they’re entirely media creations. They play off that fact to ensure that journalists never follow up on how many initiatives they’ve started and abandoned, neglect to interrogate their contradictory stances on issues like abortion and “race science,” and even seem to accept that they’re openly being taken for a ride by these dorks. Yet in spite of it all, no one listens to their podcast, they don’t really have much of a following, and their specific appeal is concentrated to a few far-right circuits.
i still can't get over how they look
like why the fuck would you wear glasses like those
was there even a point in time where this was fashionable
West Coast of USA, late 2000s to early 2010s, yes, the thick squared dark eyeglass frames were popular. Every time I see photos of these folks, I'm reminded of a couple people I know IRL as well as folks I know professionally who still prefer the thicker frames. Personally, I've always needed a very heavy prescription, and so I've always looked for the thinnest frames, but it really was a trend a decade ago.
Dear acausal robot God, that was cathartic. Refreshing to see a mainstream journalist see through techbro weirdo uwu smol bean antics for what they are, especially after so many credulous puff pieces.
This includes the Guardian (twice), the Wall Street Journal, the Philadelphia Inquirer, CBC News, Business Insider, Bloomberg, and Dallas Magazine, among many, many others. My industry peers very clearly want me to know about these people—a lot about them!
I knew that a couple of outlets had done profiles of them lately, but I didn't realize they were attention whoring this hard. Maybe their thing isn't a breeding kink after all, but exhibitionism.
I also didn't know about the child abuse, though I could have seen it coming without subjecting myself to two Grauniad bits on these fuckers^1^.
And then there’s the slap. The most notable aspect of the Guardian’s May 2024 profile—which, again, profiled them twice in the same year—was a moment when Malcolm slaps his son in the face, in public, after the then-2-year-old accidentally bumped into a table, leaving the boy “whimpering.” To her credit, reporter Jenny Kleeman didn’t let this go, forcing the couple to defend this punishment.
1: Don't even know if "fucker" is appropriate here given these bougie failchildren are apparently opting for IVF for the actual baby making part.
I think the first Guardian article had some value, just because the reporter hung around the Collinses long enough that they indicted themselves through their own actions and words. Whether that outweighs giving two eugenicists a platform to tell people about their beliefs is difficult to judge.
Iirc, whatshisface defended himself by claiming that black parents were more likely to hit their kids, therefore it was racist to criticise him for doing so
Headline photo is actually a jump-scare
Fun fact, I looked at that article. And my monitor exploded. No joke. I was in sudden darkness, and the mains were turned off. Pc survived thankfully, and I have a secondary monitor but lol wtf. (I need to go to bed).
Maybe your monitor was trying to protect you
Rest of my electronics have survived so very likely. Guess it got confused as I'm also looking for new glasses and went "dont pick one of those*
Pivot to AI: Amy is retiring! Probably! yes my cowriter has heard the call of revolution and will be having full and frank debates in the marketplace of ideas. WIth sweet reason.
Send her my thanks for her service! o7
early hire at... roblox
I think you'll find Guangdong did a lot of the actual building.
According to some roblox wiki also the richest person (in roblox). So wonder if it is libertarian goes monarchist.
So the far right people are already infighting each other with disinformation. Now they are accusing others of being part of the USAID thing. See this tweet by I,hypocrite (lporiginalg) (Note the guy is a bad guy (an anti-Semite for example), so this is fasc on fasc action).
"So let me get this straight...
Vaush
Aella
Richard Hanania
James Lindsay
Were all funded by USAID? WHO ELSE?
<community note pointing out this isn't true>"
They are coming for you Aella, hope you have an exit strategy (Just saying: Publicly burning bridges, and dropping the chatlogs of others would create a lot of goodwill on the anti-fascist side, and would be a good first step in rebuilding trust with some people (even if for a lot this cannot be regained)).
Perhaps using a lot of lying shitheads to get political clout is a bad idea, as even when you are in power, they will not stop lying (and being shitheads).
Evergreen reaction image.
Basically this is the usual battle between the literal neo-nazi antisemites and the more mainstream fascists who've pivoted from virulent antisemitism to anti-muslim racism and support for Israel (but that won't stop them from having a go at the (((globalists))) every other day). Fun for all.
Yeah very much whoever wins we lose. We should just build a large trebuchet and fire them all into the sun. But sadly the gov does nothing.
The gov is currently just another faction of the fash infighting.
Thankfully im not American. Checks Dutch news ow fuck our fasc is also infighting
Yeah, thankfully little happening here, too. Checks Finnish news oh, apparently a cop guarding the president's house killed himself in November. Also some expert's "this kind of Muskian coup could not happen here because that would be illegal" shirt is raising questions already answered by his shirt.
There are days where I think that desktop Linux usability has gotten so good, it has come such a long way since I started using it in the late 90s, and that now it's really good. And then there are days like today, where I just install some system updates, reboot, and suddenly I'm greeted with:
Note: I have absolutely no idea what "Fcitx" even is. Or why and how it's launched, or whether I'm actually using it or not. Or what this notification is trying to tell me exactly, and whether it is desirable for me to "improve the experience" with it. Or how the latest updates caused this. It appears that it has something to do with keyboard input, I guess. I assume that I could find out more by crawling the web. But honestly, I'm just too fucking exhausted to even bother figuring it out. I don't even want to know how much lifetime I've already spent chasing Linux problems like that.
Fcitx is an input method editor used to type different languages, especially those that need to be composed from context (Chinese, Japanese, Thai, etc.) I believe it comes preinstalled with KDE (at least in kde-full it does, unsure about the smaller packages), but it should be totally safe to remove if you don’t need this functionality.
Thanks! I uninstalled it and things appear to work normally.
I dunno, still not as bad as the last Win10 update I was presented with that wanted to resize the recovery partition and shrink my C drive at the same time. That was the push I needed to switch to my Gentoo install and never look back. I presume that Windows is probably pretty decent about live partition resizing these days, but I don’t know that for sure, and I don’t want to waste time being concerned about it on a system that’s mainly for gaming anyway.
Yep, I'm certainly not claiming that Windows is better at it these days... (Possibly unpopular opinion: Windows usability peaked with WinXP.)
I distinctly recall a lot of people a few years ago parroting some variation of "well I don't know about Bitcoin specifically, but blockchain itself is probably going to be important and even revolutionary as a technology" and sometimesI wish I'd collected receipts to say "I told you it's not".
Here we are, year of Nakamoto 17 and the full list of use cases for blockchains is:
- Speculative trading of toy currencies made up by private nobodies
- Paying through the nose to execute arbitrary code on SETI@Home's evil cousin
- Speculative trading of arbitrary blobs of bytes made up by private nobodies
And no, Git is not a fucking blockchain. Much like the New York City Subway is not the fucking Loop.
year of Nakamoto 17
so what you're saying is, next year a whole lot of these guys are suddenly going to lose interest
you forgot sanctions evasion, volunteering as a liquidity pool for iranian laundromat, and north korean ransomware
Ok, maybe cryptocurrencies made those a little bit easier than doing the same thing with MMO money or having to mail physical goods. I can even go out on a limb and credit the blockchain itself for them, even though the design kind of makes transactions inherently more traceable than some possible aleternatives do.
The rise of ransomware and cryptocurrencies sadly are linked.
I know, that's why I'm giving them this one.
Sorry, misread your tone.
No worries. I do agree ransomware industry might not have taken off or at least might have taken off a lot slower if the victims had to make a gold mule video game character or mail cash or precious metals through seedy relay addresses to pay the ransom. So I'll habe to credit cryptocurrency, if not necessarily blockchain per se, for that dubious achievement.
Yeah good point on the blockchain tech split vs actual cryptocurrencies. Esp considering the stories some of the exchanges basically did away with the blockchain for internal trades.
there are always swiss banks and abu dhabi charities
Rats have reached the "put up stickers to proselytize" stage of their weird religion
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SvtKronRNrw9AxXwa/clement-l-s-shortform?commentId=ZifQXkhxo5dJvrL3Q
not sure if this is entirely ignorable as a tactic or if the counter-tactic is to post similar stickers but with references/QR codes to classic shock sites.
I hate LLMs so much. Now, every time I read student writing, I have to wonder if it's "normal overwrought" or "LLM bullshit." You can make educated guesses, but the reasoning behind this is really no better than what the LLM does with tokens (on top of any internalized biases I have), so of course I don't say anything (unless there is a guaranteed giveaway, like "as a language model").
No one describes their algorithm as "efficiently doing [intermediate step]" unless you're describing it to a general, non-technical audience
what a coincidence
and yet it keeps appearing in my students' writing. It's exhausting.
Edit: I really can't overemphasize how exhausting it is. Students will send you a direct message in MS Teams where they obviously used an LLM. We used to get
my algorithm checks if an array is already sorted by going through it one by one and seeing if every element is smaller than the next element
which is non-technical and could use a pass, but is succinct, clear, and correct. Now, we get^1^
In order to determine if an array is sorted, we must first iterate through the array. In order to iterate through the array, we create a looping variable
iinitialized to0. At each step of the loop, we check ifiis less thann - 1. If so, we then check if the element at indexiis less than or equal to the element at indexi + 1. If not, we outputFalse. Otherwise, we incrementiand repeat. If the loop finishes successfully, we outputTrue.
and I'm fucking tired. Like, use your own fucking voice, please! I want to hear your voice in your writing. PLEASE.
1: Made up the example out of whole-cloth because I haven't determined if there are any LLMs I can use ethically. It gets the point across, but I suspect it's only half the length of what ChatGPT would output.
My sympathies.
Read somewhere that the practice of defending one's thesis was established because buying a thesis was such an established practice. Scaling that up for every single text is of course utterly impractical.
I had a recent conversation with someone who was convinced that machines learn when they regurgitate text, because "that is what humans do". My counterargument was that if regurgitation is learning then every student who crammed, regurgitated and forgot, must have learnt much more than anyone thought. I didn't get any reply, so I must assume that by reading my reply and creating a version of it in their head they immediately understood the errors of their ways.
I had a recent conversation with someone who was convinced that machines learn when they regurgitate text, because “that is what humans do”.
But we know the tech behind these models right? They dont change their weights when they produce output right? You could have a discussion if updating the values is learning, but it doesnt even do that right? (Feeding the questions back into the dataset used to train them is a different mechanic)
That's true, and that's one way to approach the topic.
I generally focus on humans being more complex than the caricature we need to be reduced to in order for the argument to appear plausible. Having some humanities training comes in handy because the prompt fans very rarely do.
i got quoted as an ai authority, talking about elon's rational boys https://www.dailydot.com/news/elon-musk-doge-coup-engineer-grant-democracy/
AI alignment is literally a bunch of amateur philosophers telling each other scary stories about The Terminator around a campfire
I love you, David.
If Jason Wilson calls you for a quote, you give him your best.
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