big-city-gay
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User ID: 1772
big-city-gay
1yr ago
I have no idea what the strategy on Musk’s part here as to the rollout of these files.
Not the rollout to “alternative” journalists—he is probably right that the “mainstream” media would not cover this. (Emphasis on probably, because the Times absolutely loves to hate on big tech, and if they had any scoop on this shit going down inside of Facebook/Meta, they’d be on it like flies.)
I mean, why is this getting dribbed and drabbed out during one of the lowest media engagement weeks of the year in messy Twitter threads? This is not actively ongoing suppression. There is no upcoming election or policy debate that is immediately impacted by this. Nobody outside the extremely motivated and extremely online and extremely right is going to give even the slightest notice to this, as it’s presented in such a slapdash way during the peak of holiday season.
I wonder why most people don’t seem to care about thee drops?
Most people do not care even in the very very very slightest about the government maybe kind of pushing a private company to prevent conservative trolls from shitposting 280 characters at a time.
And they have absolutely zero patience, none, none at all for this being dribbled out slowly like this. It’s boring.
big-city-gay
1yr ago
What's there to read? The federal budget is dominated by stuff that is pretty much untouchable.
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Social Security, 21%, can't touch that, old people vote.
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Medicare/Medicaid, 25%, good lucking touching that, because again, old people vote, and poor people are a cross-party voting block.
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Defense, 13%, haha, by all means touch that live wire, why do you hate America and freedom?
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Interest on the debt, 7%, sure can't touch that.
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Benefits for government employees and veterans, 7%, have fun touching that, it's great PR to screw with veterans.
And then past that, it's really, really popular programs like SNAP until you get down to the 1% range, where the vaunted “waste, fraud, and abuse and funding Piss Christ” programs live, and messing with those bends the cost curve not even a teeny, tiny bit.
big-city-gay
1yr ago
Tutanota, an encrypted email service…
…that I use for buying steroids er, I mean conducting hard-hitting journalism, which is definitely what these email services are for, and they are definitely not for drug dealing.
big-city-gay
1yr ago
For consumer-facing banking stuff:
Machine learning for detection of credit card fraud. Which is hard to notice, as you just don’t tend to think to yourself “oh huzzah I didn’t get my identity stolen today”. But the banks put a lot of effort into this, because they sure don’t want to be on the hook for a stolen card number.
big-city-gay
1yr ago
The actual order of Musk’s tweets implies that he thinks withdrawing advertising dollars is suppressing free speech, which is a perverse concept of “free speech”, wherein a private company is compelled to put their ad dollars towards another company. And let’s put aside it could be something to do with Musk firing a huge percentage of the ad sales and marketing teams, and Apple doesn’t want to throw money into some black hole where they aren’t getting analytics back.
big-city-gay
1yr ago
I had to do some looking here. I figured the fixation on not killing insects was an allegory for empathy for humans outside your tribe.
Nope. Dude has spent a lot of time really fixated on insect suffering. But not just suffering caused by humans. Oh no: he is seriously considering how to intervene in nature to reduce predation in all contexts. As in, he is torn up about spiders killing flies.
big-city-gay
1yr ago
Or at least a bifurcation of the salt of the earth EA types away from the navel gazing longtermists.
Then what, exactly, is novel about EA once you get past the navel-gazers? I still do not understand what is new or interesting about EA.
Pledging to donate part of your income up front? Well, tithing is a well-known concept, and automatic paycheck withdrawals to your retirement account is a pretty well-established and useful concept.
Having metrics and quality control in regards to charities? It’s debatable when exactly effective altruism cohered as a concept, but critiquing donations to red tape-burdened inefficient charities is certainly not a new concept.
Like…once you strip out the funding for battling paperclip-optimizing super AIs, which still seems a silly concept given we can barely build a good Roomba to vacuum up my dog hair, let alone grey goo that will reshape physical reality…what is EA besides common sense? We don’t need Scottish philosophers to construct an elaborate taxonomy and praxis for automatic savings accounts and spending a solid 5 minutes to ponder that we are in fact quite well-aware of breast cancer by this point, and don’t need a month of NFL games to remind us.
big-city-gay
1yr ago
Well, the Taylor Swift thing is superficially silly—of course basic white girls aren’t entitled to socialized ticket prices.
But Ticketmaster/Live Nation is the vertically integrated nightmare monopoly that haunts anti-trust’s dreams. While it profoundly doesn’t matter, because it’s just concerts, having a conglomerate that controls ticket sales and owns the concert venues and manages the artists that play at those venues is really kind of a textbook example of an evil monopoly. It is really quite difficult to establish a fair market price and have competition when one company owns so much of the live music scene. They are also just shockingly incompetent, speaking from personal experience—I live near and attend events at 2 Live Nation venues, and their apps and websites are failure-prone pieces of shit that fall down on the very basics of keeping you logged in and showing available tickets. I just don’t know how such a large company has such a bad UX/UI experience…oh right, monopoly power, gotcha.
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Now on the Nvidia front…yeah, that’s just whining. These cards cost so much at launch because they cost so much to make. These are fabricated on TSMC’s absolute latest process, and it’s thought the masks alone cost $100 million to fabricate. The EUV systems to make these require huge amounts of power and have very low throughput, especially for GPUs, which are just big honkin’ slices of silicon, and require lots and lots of patterning passes. And there’s a whole mess of supply issues for all semiconductors right now…including obscure problems like a global shortage of neon, because something like 70% of the world’s neon is captured in Ukraine, for odd reasons.
big-city-gay
1yr ago
What or who is stopping him?
Could that be…Donald Trump?
Who is invested in a Twitter clone that is trying to go public?
Depends on context, namely weather, activity levels, and socializing.
Summer? Once a day, absolute bare minimum. Depths of winter, like late January? Every other day, otherwise my skin gets way too dry.
If I went to the gym? Shower. Rest day? Meh, maybe not.
Going to a club or party that night? Shower. Hermit-mode, working on a project? Probably not prioritizing a shower.
So it all depends. 85° and circuit party season, I’m in the shower up to 3 times a day, but if it’s the crushing 0° depths of winter, well, my dog isn’t judging me all that much.
Though, of course, I’m washing my face twice a day, moisturizing in the morning, and using an astringent followed by a heavier moisturizer at night. I’m not a monster.
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