"Lettuce Speak".

As a rimworld player I fear sims players. Rimworld has a certain degree of violence inherent to it, it's part of the game. The Sims though? Particularly unmodified Sims? It inspires creativity. Horrifying, horrifing, creativity.

Every day we get closer to teaching the robots how to feel pain.

It's... better in the sense that you don't have right wing weirdos all over the place. But technically? Organizationally? Feels like we're on track to replay the same exact shit over again. It feels like people just aren't learning the lessons they should from the Twitter takeover.

While the other cable news networks stuck with live special coverage for the rest of the evening, Fox News decided that its audience needed a break from the deflating electoral results for conservatives. After Hannity signed off at 10 p.m., Fox aired its regularly scheduled broadcast of “comedy” show Gutfeld!, which was pre-taped and didn’t make any mention of the elections.

Gutfeld acting as a conservative american "swan lake" might be the saddest thing I've heard all day.

That's what I don't get. These are expectations that I've had for years. The indie space has kinda proven that creativity will take a game a hell of a lot farther than cash ever will. With few exceptions I simply don't buy AAA games anymore because honestly I just don't expect the same level of effort will be put into making them.

I've lived in the US my entire life. I wish I could tell you your wrong.

I can't.

Some of my earliest memories revolve around watching the evening news, listening to them say that "X amount of American lives were lost" and wondering why "American" lives were substantially different or worthy of note. A life lost is a life lost. And that's a tragedy no matter how you slice it. Where that life started or where it lived has no bearing whatsoever on it's value.

At least... that's what I believe. The current state of things has me thinking I might be in the minority on that one.

As to revolution, protest, anything that could even prove an inconvenience to the status quo... I'll believe it when I see it. Not to make excuses, but I think forces in the American culture have been working to defang popular protest since at least the civil rights movement, or perhaps even earlier. Even if it's demostriably wrong... I can't begin to tell you how demoralized I feel. My government just... went and did this. It's illegal. The very shape of our government is supposed to prevent this kind of thing from happening. And yet... here we are. One illegal invasion and (apparently) kidnapping of a sovereign head of state later.

...I wish it were otherwise, but it feels like there's very little that can be done about it. Americans just... don't seem equal to the task of holding their government to account. The one thing we are supposed to be good at.

I can't even begin to tell you how many outrages there were up to this point. Too many. Far too many for concence to allow. This... feels different. Is different. Has to be different, then the way we've been allowing things to ride.

But... I've been disappointed before. I'm certain I'll be disappointed again. I hope this will be different, but...

...I can point to plenty of times it should have been different before. Times that would have prevented this from happening. It's... hard to maintain hope in the face of that.

This is why they're losing advertisers left right and center.

Fixed that for you.

Ok so this is just desperate right? Like chasing 3rd party devs off could theoretically force more people to use their app, the reddit gold thing could be them paving the way to put in something more abusive. But this? Hoping to annoy your users to the point that they'll pay you a ransom to make you stop? How is this anything other than embarrassingly desperate?

I'm not against nuclear power, but could they have concocted a worse set of motivations? Restarting Three Mile Island to power Microsoft's AI ambitions? Shit reads like something a super villan would cook up.

I'm gonna be honest, I did not think this was staged when I first read it...

...Because why on earth would that be what you want to stage? Like sure, they say in the article it was to "prove Putin isn't hiding behind others" or some such shit. The message it sends to me is "our air defense is so shit we can't even lock it down when the guy in charge comes to visit". What a bizarre choice of propaganda.

I kinda don't get these articles. "Giuliani expected to surrender" the fuck else is he gonna do? Flee to Russia? Make a run for it? Cover himself in his own melting hair dye like Arnold Schwarzenegger trying to escape from the predator? I'd fucking love to see him try. But really the fuck else could he have even done?

Is it the tech? Or is it media literacy?

I've messed around with AI on a lark, but would never dream of using it on anything important. I feel like it's pretty common knowledge that AI will just make shit up if it wants to, so even when I'm just playing around with it I take everything it says with a heavy grain of salt.

I think ease of use is definitely a component of it, but in reading your message I can't help but wonder if the problem instead lies in critical engagement. Can they read something and actively discern whether the source is to be trusted? Or are they simply reading what is put in front of them then turning around to you and saying "well, this is what the magic box says. I don't know what to tell you.".

Shit, even if it is a small inside joke or some shit, I can't imagine the conversation nor the thought process that leads to "I'm gonna pose for a camera with a make believe jar of J.D. Vance's jizz. Like, the fuck do you have to be on to think that's even a remotely good idea?

Bro took a long shower I guess.

It's like Elon has read every book with an evil corporation in it and decided to make it his whole ascetic. X corp, sounds like the big bad that some plucky band of YA book protagonists have to team up to take down.

It's kinda wild to me. I used to think that as a millennial the next generation would be more technically savvy than mine for similar reasons to why my generation was more technically savvy than the last. That doesn't quite seem to have panned out and I'm not sure if I'm just not seeing things right or if technical literacy is really that much on the decline.

What a brilliant way to put it, "theft from the public domain". I'm gonna have to remember that one.

Honestly, in my social circle we're all kinda treating it like this... strange, self-inflicted, natural disaster. Like we can't even really joke about it, still. It's like we all know it's gonna be bad, the only question is how bad it's going to be. There's a lot I'm hoping is over-reaction, but honestly that's a pretty shitty thing to hope for and a hard hope to maintain all things considered.

To be fair, considering the right wing hellscape our (US) Overton window overlooks the bias bot might actually have a point.