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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: December 6th, 2023

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  • If he’s trying to say “Biden wanted this but Trump already started it”

    Which “he?”

    Zuckerberg blames it exclusively and entirely on the Biden administration.

    that tells me BOTH parties requested it. Hence, if you don’t like Biden because of this, you don’t want Trump either. And of course, vice versa. In short, this policy is not unique to either party or administration.

    Exactly, but that’s explicitly not what Zuckerberg is saying. He’s saying that it was entirely and exclusively Biden, which is a lie.


  • Why did Zuckerberg choose now to make this announcement and publicly reveal the inside play?

    There’s actually a tidbit that the author notes that points at the obvious reason for it.

    In his letter to Congressional investigators, he flat-out said what everyone else has been saying for years now.

    In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content…

    The author then goes on to say though:

    A few clarifications. The censorship began much earlier than that, from March 2020 at the very least if not earlier.

    What’s significant about that? Trump was president then.

    So Zuckerberg is rather obviously trying to pin entirely on the Biden administration a set of policies that were already in place under Trump.

    To what end? Obviously to do the same thing he did in 2016 and 2020 - to overtly promote Trump.

    This particular one certainly not coincidentally plays into the whole Republican narrative that the Democrats are oppressive and dishonest, which in turn is meant to provide a context for their intention to dispute the election results when Trump loses. Zuckerberg is simply doing his part to further that narrative.





  • Write enormous screeds about how literally insane it is that the world is being actively destroyed at the behest of and for the benefit of a wealthy, powerful and profoundly mentally ill few.

    Play video games and work in the garden.

    The first likely accomplishes nothing of any note - even if other people recognize it, part of the insanity is that the psychopaths in power have arranged things so that nobody can stop them.

    The second doesn’t accomplish much of anything either, but they’re at least situations in which my efforts aren’t systematically undermined and exploited for the benefit of psychopaths. Instead of being rigged so that whatever I do benefits the ruling class, they’re situations in which I can actually make choices solely based on what I think will work best in a given situation and reap the rewards if I choose correctly.






  • I’m roundaboutly reminded of one of my favorite novels - Greener Than You Think, by Ward Moore.

    It’s a science fiction story about the end of the world that was written in the late 40s. The proximate cause of the end is all of the landmasses of Earth being smothered by a gigantic and very aggressive strain of Bermuda grass, but the real cause is the utter and complete failure, due to ignorance, greed, selfishness, short-sightedness, incompetence, arrogance and so on, of every attempt to combat it.



  • In all seriousness, I sort of pity conservatives.

    They’re sort of like the one kid in kindergarten who could never manage to figure out which plastic peg went in which hole and would just get frustrated and throw things. Except that they never grew out of it. Here they are, twenty or thirty or sixty years later, still unable to grasp the simple fact that the world just is what it is and the round peg isn’t going to go in the square hole no matter how much you pound on it, and still angry over it, as if it’s some sort of vast conspiracy rather than just the fact that they’re fucking morons.

    That has to be an unpleasant way to live.

    Of course, they’re such vile and loathsome and destructive assholes that my pity is short-lived, but still…



  • This is actually true.

    Most notably to me, the ability to sift through and collate enormous amounts of data has led to surprising things like diagnosing diabetes through retinal scans.

    But those sorts of things, beneficial and impressive though they might be, remain at the fringe of AI research for the simple reason that those sorts of uses are too niche to provide the revenue stream that all of the bubble-building corporate parasites demand. Their focus is on the AI-as-a-substitute-for-real-intelligence aspect (and increasingly “AI” as just a meaningless marketing buzzword), since that’s where the money is. And unfortunately but not coincidentally, that’s where most of the public attention is too.