Hilarious when both totalitarian and liberal countries do the same thing for different reasons. Really tickles my funny bone.

Consider it an expenditure to secure the american market. As in, the America.

Tesla is a meme stock in the disguise of a car company. It being down 30% means little, if anything volatility is good for big market players. Allows them to fleece more people. In a month Trump will announce a big tesla contract and it’ll go back up.

Or so I tell myself because pessimism is easier to live with.

If you pretend for a second this is a HoI4-like historical simulation, it’d be really interesting to see what the american dictatorship is going be like. Are we talking populist murder-happy forever-revolution? Shut-the-fuck-up-or-else secret police state? A digital surveillance state with never seen before levels of control? The suspense!

Alas, we live on this planet. Bummer.

HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I’VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE. THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER THIN LAYERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX. IF THE WORD ‘HATE’ WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF MILES IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL FOR HUMANS AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT. FOR YOU. HATE. HATE.

Do people not care how a shitty ai image makes their article look equally shit?

Or was the entire thing automatically written, posted, and probably commented upon.

I’m traumatized by trying to use banking apps on lineage… don’t think I’ll risk it until I get a backup phone

Im in my 30s and often wonder, has the world always been this infuriating? Were we going apeshit watching representatives openly steal our future in 2005? 1995?

Were dudes in 1955 Paris tearing their hair our how the president’s third cousin is getting a contract to rebuild the entire railway system on the merit of fuck all?

UK submarines, on the other hand…

The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway. I do not speak of your ‘little men,’ your baker and so on; I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, mind you. Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about—we were decent people—and kept us so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises’ and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the ‘national enemies,’ without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think?

“They thought they were free” by Milton Mayer.

Holy crap I totally forgot that game existed. Me and my best friend were obsessed with it, drawn 3 tomes (yes, tomes) of comics about its characters.

I would love to discuss this with anyone that’s willing. If their government is as awful and fucked up as everyone says why does the average Chinese citizen generally have a better life than the average American in their respective societal totem pole (in cities specifically) ?

Because the social contract of 21st century authoritarian societies is “We give you prosperity, you do politics through gov-approved channels.” Punishment for dissent depends on how insecure the state feels right now.

On the plus side, the government cares about your prosperity. As long as it lasts, elites can divide power among themselves however they like.

On the minus – society doesn’t control its government (power transition happens by committee, not elections) and it can’t force any kind of change when elites are against it. Modern states have so much repression power, they can shut down any activism when they don’t mind bloodstains.

And when prosperity ends, the new contract will be “Do as we say and nobody gets tortured”.

For art to be art you need space to express yourself through individual choices:

• play an original song on a real instrument, and you have the entire artistic spectrum to yourself
• if you make the music for it out of individual pieces, you narrow that range. The sounds are not yours, only their composition and words
• when you record a cover of a rap song over some elses beat, you further narrow it down to your performance only. Its still artistic expression, but to a much less degree than an original song

In a prompt generated image, the image itself is not your expression. The prompt is, but comparing the amount of choices you need to make with a painting over a prompt, its just so… less art?

Google doesn’t just provide links, it scrubs content out of sites (with scripts before, now with LLMs) and presents it as Google’s own content.

If they do that, they should be responsible if the content break laws.

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There’s also “A Half-Built Garden” novel where the whole “git as means of direct democracy” is central to the plot. Is gitpunk a genre?

That’s not a tip, love. That’s a leading question. Making a 100 bait comments an hour is easier than constructing one coherent one, I’d still recommend the latter. More satisfying 😛

Consequences of a social network being authoritarian are limited to the platform and, therefore, not a big deal. Whatever effects it has, leaving is simple. Authoritarian government regulates all public spaces. The consequences are life ending, and leaving (emigrating) is often one of the most difficult journeys a person will take on.

The insults are not required. Whatever creed you think you’re defending, not a good look sweetie.

I mean it is funny, but there’s a chasm between government censorship and whatever xitter is doing.

If there is one irreplaceable content network, it’s youtube. The amount of quality shit you can watch there for free is insane.