Nitter is probably actually dead this time. (Zedeus is the primary maintainer, and has never called it dead before)
The last way left in was a guest-account system used by an old version of the Twitter Android app. Nitter was hanging on by creating thousands of these rate-limited guest accounts using a network of proxies.
Twitter shut down guest account creation 5 days ago. Guest accounts expire after 30 days, so some instances might keep going for a little while, but will all be dead within a month.
Fascinating thread on the genetics of the area from a few days ago:
Closest people [to samples recovered from the Bronze Age and Iron Age Levant] are usually Christian Levantines > Many Jewish groups > Muslims > Other Jewish groups
Palestinian Christians are almost genetically indistinguishable from Roman-era Levantines, people of the time of Jesus Christ, the Apostles, etc.
Almost all Jews, Christians, and Muslims of the region carry noticeable Bronze Age/Iron Age Levantine ancestry. This means that almost all modern Levantines are at least partially (some overwhelmingly), descended from Israelites or people genetically indistinguishable from them
As you can see Samaritans (yes they still exist, but they are dying out) are almost indistinguishable from not just Israelites, but even Bronze Age Canaanites. Very impressive continuity. But it comes at the cost of serious inbreeding. There are only a couple hundred of them left
Everyone else (Jewish, Christian, Muslim) has mixed non-Middle Eastern ancestry, the majority of it being European (Greek and even Bactrian ancestry that entered the Levant after Alexanders conquests). Muslim Levantines also carry ~3-5% sub-Saharan African ancestry on average that Christians and Jews mostly lack, and a noticeable chunk of Arabian ancestry, but that is lower than most people would expect.
The reason Christian Levantines are closest the Canaanites, Israelites, Roman-era Jews, etc is because they never relinquished their religion, and therefore never mixed with other groups after the Islamic invasion. Those Christians who converted to Islam now had opportunities to mix with other Muslims, and even slaves from sub-Saharan Africa.
This is what it looks like happened.
The Bronze Age inhabitants of the region were Canaanites, Amorites, Eblaites, etc. The ancestors of the Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Chaldeans, etc also came from the BA Levant.
A subgroup of Canaanites became Israelites (they are genetically indistinguishable from Canaanites). This subgroup remains largely similar to each other until Alexander conquers the entire Middle East.
Then, Greek and Bactrian ancestry start entering the Levant. At this time, Samaritans split off from the ancestors of Jews, Christians, and Muslims of the Levant.
They are the first to split off. This is because they barely mixed with the incoming Greek/Bactrian groups.
The new population Roman-era Levantines are almost indistinguishable from modern day Palestinian Christians, Lebanese Christians, etc. They stay like this till the modern period, refusing to mix with Muslim Arabs (they weren't allowed to regardless) and not usually being allowed to own slaves.
This is where Levantine Muslims (Palestinian Muslims, Lebanese Muslims, etc) split off from the Christians - some Christians convert to Islam. They are now allowed to own slaves from Africa, and mix with Arabians and Egyptians and other Muslim groups. They carry some of this foreign ancestry.
Before, during, and after Alexanders invasion you had many other Jewish groups of course, splitting off and going to Europe and North Africa, being forcibly deported to Mesopotamia, etc. They are the only ones who either
1: didnt convert to the Arabian religion
2: didnt convert to the new religion that was formed/evolved through Judaism
The truth is, everyone in the Levant is overwhelmingly descended from ancient Jews, or at the very least those genetically indistinguishable from ancient Jews.
Lots of Muslims like to exaggerate their relationship to Arabians, since that is where their religion is from, and their prophet was an Arabian. The truth, for better or worse, is that almost none of them carry much Arabian ancestry. Only Negev Bedouins and Yemenite Jews do.
A bunch of people then take him to task in the comments for not sufficiently addressing Ashkenazi Jews.
One thing that's confusing me here is his statement [slightly trimmed] "the Jewish groups splitting off and going to Europe and North Africa, etc, are the only ones who didnt convert to either Islam or Christianity". Were there no jews who never left the area but also never converted to christianity or islam? Did they just not exist, or are they just missing from these genetic samples (perhaps they so completely mixed with immigrant jews that they're no longer a distinguishable population?), or am I just blind? The closest included sample geographically is Syrian_Jew.
I feel like there's enough information leaking through here to infer what happened -- why would they stay quiet, with no defectors; "a range of events"; etc -- but I'm too stupid to put it together.
Any guesses?
Looking back into this a few days later: some people went to a strip club
Much less interesting than I was imagining.
Travis Kelce’s manufactured rise to fame
The Chiefs have been in 4 of the last 5 Superbowls (winning 3), and 6 of the last 6 AFCCGs. Kelce has the most postseason receiving yards in NFL history. And Mahomes is famously weird and uncharismatic.
Here's a couple other people who had anything to say about him before today (you have to manually click "Search" unfortunately), all on the /r/volunteersforukraine subreddit. As a cautious heuristic I'd consider any random person who had anything at all to say about him before today to be more credible than any random person who has anything at all to say about him after today.
Bonus from that search: here's a reddit account of his that nobody else seems to have found yet.
He was also in a NYT article in March 2023
The thing about western volunteers in Ukraine, which is a scene I've looked into before, is that anybody can just show up and do and claim whatever, it's all incredibly ad-hoc, and it massively disproportionately attracts high-agency crazy people.
I linked xcancel because it's currently a functioning way to read twitter without an account, it's a straightforward mirror of twitter. I've never encountered popups on it, though it has a single layer of bot check redirect thing that kicks in on new visits or every few hours of use.
bro
1yr ago
Jesus christ lol. Are you being deliberately obtuse? I am asking "was the guy aiming for the specific person he hit, or just firing wildly into the crowd", "did he leave the house in the morning intending to shoot up that mall or did he see it on the way", "was he trying to start a race war, or to impress Jodi Foster". Not as a leading question but because I want to know what literally happened.
Piracy is good because digital media is a non-rivalrous good and the rights-holders in Movies and TV are almost universally bad: fuck them.
I try not to pirate things from people who aren't bad, usually small creators.
This should also apply to games, but as Gaben prophesized, Steam is just too convenient (there is also a higher proportion of rights-holders who aren't very bad in Gaming than in Movies/TV).
His Twitter lists have some familiar posters on them, and he follows SSC on Substack. Viewed as one big jumbled pile at once, his online detritus reads as much TED-pilled as ted-pilled, but it might be informative to see when several of the slightly more suggestive bits of it were actually from. He went quiet online 5 months ago.
bro
2yr ago
If a non-black celebrity was robbed, then tweeted about how he's about to go DEFCON 3 on black people and gave multiple interviews about how he's not about to keep getting victimized by black criminals, would it go very differently?
Not sure about the name (nypost seems to be the terminal source for it, and they previously, for example, confidently reported he was Chinese), but a photo that's being widely circulated along with it is apparently just some random guy on twitter who was just fucking around.
Not 100% sure about this photo either for that matter, which at the moment is the only known(/suspected?) photo of the shooter alive. I saw it emerge on 4chan with no attribution or explanation then 10 minutes later just be everywhere without question. It certainly seems consistent with the ~2 other currently-known photos of the assassin dead, but when and where is it supposed to be from? Like was it taken by someone at the rally today before he was on the roof?
Yet: it was not nearly as crazy an information environment today as I would have expected. After 8 years of reality-fracturing hysteria, someone finally actually tried to assassinate Donald Trump. By shooting at his head, with a rifle, in public. And they hit him! They shot off the top of his fucking ear! We came 2 centimeters from Donald Trump's head exploding on national TV today. And the worst fracture of consensus material reality we've got so far is some relatively mild mistaken identity with no political valence?
Already some discussion on this topic happening over in the Small-Scale Questions thread
In the emerging Culture War aspect: it's interesting that the "50 year old" part is relatively much more operative than the "white guys" part than usual.
That PDF is 400 pages long and not text-searchable, but it's obvious from the order of magnitude that this must be something like "every recorded medical event in tens/hundreds of millions of people" and completely meaningless without comparison to base rates.
Warning about Ryan Routh: he is not, and never has been, associated with the International Legion or the Ukrainian Armed Forces at all. He is not, & never has been, a legion recruiter. He is misrepresenting himself and lying to many people.
Though it does seems he was in Ukraine at some point
Wild claims on his twitter seem consistent with him being a high-agency crazy:
#pnhhaiti I have thousands of Afghan solders that wish to serve for the Haiti national police at cheap wages. 1000 with passports ready to fly.
I'm sure there are people who unironically think that trans women are the ONLY women
Because they are among the only people in modern society who undertake a mortifying and harrowing coming of age ritual that ends with choosing a new identity and induction into a rarefied community, trans women are men and cis men are not.
The New Yorker has published a 9000-word article rehabilitating Shane Gillis (archive), the comedian who was prominently fired from SNL in 2019 after clips surfaced of him making racist remarks against asians.
(almost immediately after being announced as part of a new cohort including the first asian cast member, the shitstorm centered on a clip which included him saying the word "chink" on his podcast (original instigating tweet, offending clip, full episode), and he was fired 4 days later)
(fwiw, this was in the context of doing an implicit impression of "the kind of guy who would say that"; but he's said "worse", about even more protected groups, in ways which would require even more discernment than this to escape, which is already impossible enough that he didn't ever publically attempt it)
That they attempted to bring Shane Gillis into as hallowed an institution as SNL in the first place was remarkable and seemed to me at the time like it could even have been an early sign of a potential vibe shift (at a time which absolutely did not have a lot of that). He was explicitly intended to be red-tribe outreach, and as far as I know SNL has not attempted anything like that again since.
That he even lasted 4 days at that level of shitstorm in a cultural place so far behind the lines is remarkable, and there is all kinds of kremlinology you can do at any level of suspicion about how deliberate or coordinated any of it is about how that went down.
Similarly with this rehabilitation.
I took a little look at this earlier:
- There was a spot reserved for Oceania (total pop. 44M)
- Every other spot was from either global-pool qualifiers, or regions like "Europe" or "Americas" containing 1-5 billion people
- She won the qualifier event
- The 2nd place finisher did not seem significantly better
- If you watch her press leading up to it, it seems unlikely it was a protest or joke, she was fully into it
Also here is a list of her academic output, as a PhD in breakdancing
Note that the finals (can't link to videos because the Olympics' insane copyright regime is working) with the better competitors were actually pretty good, I enjoyed watching them on a partly unironic level and the competition was quite good and compelling, and I look forward to watching the men's event tomorrow.
"Lets Go Brandon" as a watershed moment of realization 'you can mock the king and get away with it.'
This doesn't ring true to me at all. As bad as the culture war got, lese majeste was never much of an issue, the sacred cows were other things.
Did even the most brain-poisoned boomer in the depths of the worst of it ever feel like they couldn't freely mock Joe Biden? I don't recall any holding back before that moment, from people who weren't holding back after it. And I didn't get any impression that that played any particular part in a preference cascade freeing cowed silent people on the borderline from their bonds either.
At most, it gave already committed partisans a big single meme to regroup around and build some confidence and unity.
Presumably like all other legacy print media they've been fucked by default since the internet was invented. What was even their main value proposition, color photos?
Regarding the Swimsuit Issue specifically, presumably guys used to buy it to jack off to and they don't do that anymore.
That was the business. Oops!
Maybe they thought they could still wring some value out of a lingering perception of their brand among the lame and out-of-touch as having the legacy power to unilaterally proclaim what is sexually desirable, and tried to trade off of that. A formerly empowered authority trying to sell people "YAASSS!" certificates on the old letterhead. I think Playboy and Victoria's Secret both tried something similar. Clearly didn't work.
While moral culpability is certainly part of the question (I think the answer is easy enough to be uninteresting: you are right), my question is literally which parts were in the plan?
Which parts they implicitly expected would happen, vs which parts were explicitly in the plan, vs what instructions were propagated to the men, vs what actually happened.
Between any two of those, surely not all, surely not none.
The Houthis seem to use the Yemeni tricolor as they represent themselves as the government, so I think the protestors get away with this one on that front.
As long as you have backups and appropriate procedures for them, the use of commercial game controllers is not by itself a problem. There are several good reasons that serious (indoors) military hardware is starting to do this and even better reasons for any organization smaller than that to, vs trying to develop their own hardware which can be much more stupid and dangerous. It's similar to the reason why billionaires, princes and presidents all use the exact same iPhone you can buy at the drug store.
Potential problems around it are:
-
Bluetooth. Insane.
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Passing it around in that insanely cramped space, both because it could be dropped (especially with those huge stick extensions), and in apparently giving control over to passengers (depends on particulars of their culture around this, but no clues are public that it was very good)
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No alternate backup control system. Uncertain that this is the case but looks likely. The problem here would not be not having something "more advanced", but rather not having something that's much simpler.
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... okay maybe there could conceivably be some issues about its functioning in weird atmospheric conditions, it really depends on the specifics which I don't know, maybe it's just perfectly normal surface temperature/pressure/humidity/composition and fine. But the problem wouldn't be that they used the controller, it would be whether and how they tested it.
Perhaps the most telling indication about any of this is the story of how they didn't discover some thrusters were installed in the wrong orientation until they were already down at the Titanic. With a culture like that, it’s possible that their fatal error was something more mundane than anyone is imagining.
(but it was probably just the hull)
Effective altruists wrote the semiconductor export restrictions
Is there anywhere else a public discussion of this is happening besides that impenetrable tumblr thread? This seems incredibly significant.
What an absolutely fucking wild thing to off-handedly drop as a polemical jab in an off-topic subthread lol
bro
7mo ago
ctrl-f "parasites"
ctrl-f "strife"
At minimum, that doesn't contain quotes that have been reported as being in the manifesto. Possible it's a supplementary piece of writing, but no particular reason to believe that without some corroborating bits. There's already been a hoax youtube account etc.
A clip which was surgically cherry-picked for the purpose of destroying a comedian's career is usually not going to be a hilarious standalone representation of their work at its best.
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