We are really going to have to confront the fact that about a third of the country are hardcore religious extremist theocrats who want a brutal theocracy and do not give a single fuck about ideas like democracy, human rights, and an impartial legal system, beyond cosplaying like they care about them for the sake of appealing to normies.
You don't understand how people can think this way because you weren't raised, indoctrinated, in this way of thinking.
I was, and I am telling you at least 1/3rd of the population of the country is like this.
Faith-based, motivated reasoning, that is very often utterly delusional.
The exact opposite of critical thinking.
The conclusion is already known, the evidence and reasoning must be made to fit.
As opposed to... the evidence is known, the reasoning must lead to any potential conclusion, and when the body of evidence changes, this neccesitates revision of conclusions.
This is a very serious problem for way, way, waaaay more people than just Trump.
Trump just is his own God, as he is a malignant narcissist, but there are basically around 100 million people minimum in the US whose brains basically operate in this way.
Its gonna be real fun when more people figure out that the reasons AIPAC isn't required to register as a foreign lobbying group go all the way back to 'the whole Bay of Pigs thing', as Nixon put it.
... Israel kickstarted its nuclear program by stealing fissile material from the US.
And then the investigation into that kinda just... stopped happening, petered out for some reason, and then for the longest time we just had this weird sort of standard where... everyone was 'pretty sure' Israel had nukes, but 'couldn't 100% be certain'.
Sorta like how the Epstein investigations had been... you know, going on for like two decades, and we didn't really hear too much about it untill everyone involved fucked up unimaginably badly.
And then of course there's the USS Liberty Incident which recently got Ben Shapiro to be extremely defensive about, treating the whole thing as definitevly decided to be a genuine accident, when you have a long history of lots of directly invovled and highly informed relevant people believing precisely the opposite, that it was orchestrated to try to draw the US directly into the Six Day War...
You know, like... some kind of half century + long cover up, or something.
It does very much annoy me that, yeah, its always been possible to do this.
I believe Claim A! Claim A deniers are bad, smell bad, and are probably also demons!
EDIT:
Welp, looks like Claim A is dubious, thanks to user so and so for setting me straight, see their explanation below.
Yeah you have always been able to do that or something very close to it on basically every forum or social media type thing ever.
But... you are probably right that if you give people a mea culpa flag as a built in part of the UI/UX, that would almost certainly spur more people to do it.
... Its still terrifying to me that a large segment of people would need such a button to exist before they would be ok doing it.
I guess this isn't a case where the sort of 'desire path' solution manifests and is then maybe formally adopted, seems like you'd have to basically social engineer humility into people.
I hate that this would probably work, in the sense that it isn't just DUH obvious to everyone already that they don't need a button specifically for this, but I also love that this would probably work.
I can imagine a 'year end wrap up' where you get to see all the stuff you said that you decided was stupid.
Then I guess just pair it with some kind of affirmative message of 'hey, you're trying to admit your mistakes, and that's probably good'.
Its less deceptive than trying to delete shit dumb stuff, as... everyone can still see you did say it, but realized it was bad.
The version I originally heard was not that its like, completely 100% not real people and instead is some kind of bot or something like that, but just that its increasingly more and more proportional internet traffic is like that.
A couple of years ago there were a few reports about just how much traffic on the internet is some kind of automated web scraper, some kind of automated system pinging some other kind of automated system... and then also how many accounts on forums or reddit or twitch or whatnot were not 'real' accounts, but were either bots or paid trolls of some kind... vs genuine human traffic by actual people using the internet in some way.
I guess a bunch of people oversimplified that a bit to just fit into some kind of creepy pasta / simulation theory /solipsism type narrative.
But either way, now both scenarios are converging toward being more true at the same time, as... seemingly 90% of people are either easily transfixed or fooled by LLM produced content of some kind... and yeah, we are getting closer and closer to it being difficult to tell, on most popular platforms, whether you are engaging with a real person or not.
Also, agruably... the entire point of 'the algorithm' on any corpo social media, tiktok, insta, facebook, etc... the whole point of those has always been to piegeon hole each user into their own little curated content feedback loop, their own personal content/advertising pocket dimension.
I guess it just had to get more extreme for people to realize how bad this can be.
"We’re releasing more than 3 million pages today, and not the 6 million pages that we collected,” Blanche said. “That means that the department produced approximately 3½ million pages in compliance with the act.”
Yep, yep, nothing to see here, just uh 3 million files that aren't relevant, because the people in charge of the most obvious cover up in human history say so.
I mean, the only way Dead Internet Theory could ever possibly be interpreted was weird creepy and dystopian, but yes, we're just making it much, much more real, faster and faster.
We're gonna need the Blackwall from CP77 fairly soon, at this rate.
They can't open source their code because then people would rather rapidly discover all the backdoors they've built in for various US LE and Intelligence agencies.
... genuinely, how can they possibly expect to regain or have any trust after turning W11 into a constant wiretap via Copilot, that spams ads all up in your OS in every place, and then also just handing over the bitlocker master keys to the FBI?
You would have to be very uninformed or delusional at this point to think that Windows and privacy/security exist in the same universe.
The only thing they have going for them is inertia.
And they're now hitting the point where backlash against them is snowballing much faster than they could possibly reverse course on their own internal inertia and actually make any real changes.
And yes that applies to their consumer facing shit as well as B2B.
Shit like this is how we accidentally end up making 'magic' real, 100 or 1000 years in the future when are back to only 5% of the population being any kind of literate, and 'everything is computer', or at least computer relics.
Coined by Geoff Fraizer and Greg Boyko, who played the online multiplayer game Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness under the names Shlonglor and Warp. The pair had become so proficient at the game that few people would play against them, so, in order to avoid scaring off potential competitors, they created alternate accounts named PapaSmurf and Smurfette (characters from the Smurfs comic franchise).[1][2]
So basically the most infamous and potentially first widely known instance of this behavior, well they just picked Smurf character names, presumably for the effect of it being more humiliating to be owned by derpy cartoon characters.
Also, apparently 'smurfing' or a 'smurf account' also means basically a fake/decoy/money laundering/washing bank account:
(law enforcement, banking, slang) A bank account of many intended to handle illicit money in amounts too small to raise suspicion.
As far as I can tell, advertisement/profit-driven social media that is directly tied to your real identity might actually be the worst thing humanity has ever invented.
Oops!
Turns out we're mostly vain and stupid, in our default state.
Now amplify.
Oh and as a bonus:
It serves as a kind of self perpetuating auto-panopticon.
It never ceases to amaze me how many people just record thems committing, planning to commit, bragging about committing, or admitting to commiting crimes that can put you away for 5 years plus... on fucking TikTok.
Hey wow its like I've been saying that for a decade, but because I'm poor and I say that, clearly I am some kind of antisocial insane person, not somebody who can read a bunch of existing studies and data and form a conclusion.
The main reason why this process isn't "something for nothing" is that it takes twice as much electrical energy to produce energy in the form of gasoline. As Aircela told The Autopian:
Aircela is targeting >50% end to end power efficiency. Since there is about 37kWh of energy in a gallon of gasoline we will require about 75kWh to make it. When we power our machines with standalone, off-grid, photovoltaic panels this will correspond to less than $1.50/gallon in energy cost.
So basically juat imagine a gas powered generator hooked up to this to power the process of pulling gasoline out of the air.
Ok, see how that's silly?
Right, now, if you do run it off solar power, then sure! That makes more sense.
Hate hyrdocarbon fuels all you want, they are very good at being dense, portable, and exist in the vast majority of pre-existing logistics infrastructure.
But the thing isn't magic, it takes energy to convert air into basically a form of liquid energy.
And... you'd probably have to refine it or chemically treat it at least somewhat.
I'm not a chemist, but I am guessing this is the case, if you want gasoline that is just equivalent to what your car would expect.
So when he says 'maybe I'm the faggot'... he is literally just saying he's gay or bi, yes, and, what about it?
He's taking the word back.
And also, they replaced 'redneck' with MAGA.
Not sure if you actually know too many queer people who were 90s kids, but it was and still is pretty common for them to jokingly, ironically mock themselves or their friends using that term you seem to think is only ever a slur.
Maybe I'm old and out of touch at this point, but as a bi 90s kid, I'm qualified to at least explain how the terminology worked back in 04 when this song came out.
EDIT:
There was no need to delete your comment.
People can sometimes say things that are slightly innacurate, and then... learn, grow.
That, doing that is ... much better than trying to be 100% correct 100% of the time.
That is impossible.
... you can just say "Oh, I didn't know that / think of it that way."
Christian Fundamentalism.
There's your answer.
Ya'll Qaeda.
We are really going to have to confront the fact that about a third of the country are hardcore religious extremist theocrats who want a brutal theocracy and do not give a single fuck about ideas like democracy, human rights, and an impartial legal system, beyond cosplaying like they care about them for the sake of appealing to normies.
You don't understand how people can think this way because you weren't raised, indoctrinated, in this way of thinking.
I was, and I am telling you at least 1/3rd of the population of the country is like this.