Now that you mention it…

So can we assume it smells like some combination of stale bronzer, McDonalds, flop sweat and ass?

I get the impression that when he says “find your own way out,” he actually means “stop caring.”

It’s as of somebody somehow crossed Mr. Burns and Ralph Wiggum, brought him to life and made him president.

So the only question really is whether they’re arranging things so that as China becomes the clear world leader in the coming era, the US will be relegated to being a bankrupt has-been, clinging to outdated technology nobody else wants any more because their explicit goal is to destroy the US or just because they’re some stunning combination of corrupt and stupid.

I lean toward the latter, but can’t entirely discount the former.

Ah. And it all falls into place.

All that will be left once they get this established is to expand it a bit more, so that any citizen can be stripped of their cirizenship, and thus of their rights, and thus made subject to ICE’s authority and legally shipped off to a foreign concentration camp

It’s just one of the oddities of this timeline that Trump is not only corrupt, but repeatedly, openly, brazenly corrupt.

With the added and even greater oddity that the entire government and most of the media have all apparently decided to simply pretend that he’s not.

One thing you can say for this timeline - we’re making history. They’ll be studying the collapse of the US for centuries to come (if humanity survives that long), trying to sort out how it was that the nation could go from relatively stable to batshit insane seemingly in a matter of months.

Oh my god yes. The moment I read the headline, it all fell into place.

Yes - it’s necessarily pretty much the exact same effect, because the LLM, like the mentalist, is taking cues from the input it gets and making connections and feeding back whatever is most (statistically) likely to be appropriately on-topic.

And exactly as with a mentalist, everything that approaches what they want to hear is going to get an encouraging response, and likely further prompts which serve to narrow it down even further, and make it even easier to tell them even more precisely just what they want to hear…

Wow…

I had never thought about any of this before, but it actually makes perfect sense.

By its nature, an LLM feeds back some statistically close approximation of what you expect to see, and the more you engage with it (which is to say, the more you refine your prompts for it) the closer it necessarily gets to precisely what you expect to see.

“He was like, ‘just talk to [ChatGPT]. You’ll see what I’m talking about,’” his wife recalled. “And every time I’m looking at what’s going on the screen, it just sounds like a bunch of affirming, sycophantic bullsh*t.”

Exactly. To an outside observer, that’s likely what it would look like, because in some sense, that’s exactly what it in fact is.

But to the person engaging with it, it’s a revelation of the deep, secret, hidden truths that they always sort of suspected lurked at the heart of reality. Never mind that the LLM is just stringing together words and phrases most statistically likely to correspond with the prompts it’s been given - to the person feeding it those prompts, it seems like, at long last, verification of what they’ve always suspected.

I can totally see how people could get sucked in by that

And this is why SUDDENLY IRAN!

For some reason, he seems extra butthurt about getting caught lying this time.

Defeat is not a goal, and war is not a likelihood

The destabilization of Iran and distraction from Israel’s Palestinian genocide, and the vilification of Islam to aid in both of those things, are the actual goals, and those can be accomplished through the threat of war and the propaganda campaigns that accompny it.

So the zionists are going to help build the American Reich, and even help load the next set of detainees on the boxcars

At this point, I’m not even vaguely surprised.

This is a thing I’ve been saying about the Democrats for eight years now, though from a somewhat different angle.

They’re not only okay with losing elections - in ways they actually prefer it.

The worst case scenario for Democrats, and if you were paying attention, you saw it when it happened, is controlling both the presidency and a congessional majority. Then they have to go to ludicrous extremes to fail to accomplish anything, including still claiming to be obstructed by the Republican minority, even after spending the last however many years claiming that they couldn’t do anything to stop the Republicsns bevause they were the minority.

Somehow, the Republicans can stop the Demicrats no matter who has the majority, while the Democrats cannot stop the Republicans, again no matter who has the majority.

But the key, in my opinion, and not really addressed in this otherwise excellent essay, is that the one and only thing that the Democratic party hierarchy really cares about is keeping the soft money flowing. That’s it - nothing else matters to them.

And the way they keep the soft money flowing is to provide the appearance of opposition - to play the role of faces against the Republicsn heels - but to never quite manage to stop them, and certainly to never actually accomplish anything even vaguely leftist.

That provides a dual benefit for them - they keep their corporate sponsors happy by never doing anything that might actually lead to smaller executive pay packages or having to actually pay taxes and they can fundraise among the rank and file with their standard “Look at the horrible things the Republicans are doing and that’s why we need your support!”

And it all hinges on not successfully opposing the Republicans, and far and away the easiest way to not successfully oppose the Republicans is to lose key elections.

The Toddler-in-chief says Canada is a big meany so he’s going to take his ball and go home.

I’ve never understood Microsoft’s design and marketing strategy.

They appear to exist in some sort of mirror universe in which quality is a bad thing, so they mostly build OSes that are bloated, clunky garbage and do everything they can to fool/coerce/force people into using them. But then every once in a while it’s like they accidentally let an actually decent OS slip through, and they immediately panic and start trying to kill it. Like they can’t cope with having an OS that people actually want to use, and can’t wait to get back to where they’re comfortable - fooling/coercing/forcing them to use bloated, clunky garbage.

Well, first off it can’t bhappen “to Lemmy” because Lemmy isn’t va site - it’s a piece of software.

It not only can and will but already has happened to individual instances. And they end up getting defederated by other instances and then either fix the problem or fade away.

And individual users can just move to other instances (or if they’re smart, just stop using or even delete their account on the problem instance and keep using their other accounts on other instances).

And through it all, the rest of the fediverse just keeps chugging along.

Which illustrates the key difference between Lemmy/Mbin/Piefed/etc. and traditional social media - the fediverse is flexible. Individual instances can and will and do come and go, and it doesn’t affect the fediverse as a whole.

Now that you mention it, that is true. Not what they meant, but true.

Early on, I sort of wondered who was going to be the American Gestapo.

Of late, I’ve been pretty sure it was going to be ICE.

I’d say this cinches it.

It’s not “out-of-touchness” though.

It’s that the establishment media (and the establishment as a whole for that matter) explicitly serve the interests of the wealthiest few.

No war but class war.