notthemessiah

Joined 15 years ago

Karma
1,065
Submissions
306
Member since
Jan 19
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Recent submissions

Comment · 7 days ago
Comment · 19 days ago
Elon was not invited, and he still insisted on showing up. That makes Elon the asshole.
Comment · 19 days ago
I guess not being able to yell fire in a movie theater is censorship too. There's good reason most civil people agree that there's a time or place for certain words and actions, and incitement is frowned upon.

It says a lot that the only "free speech" you care about is the hate speech that infringes on others civil rights and creates a chilling action on civil participation for minorities, yet you seem to not care one bit when Erdogan cracks down on opposition to his authoritarianism and Musk helps out, you welcome that government censorship.

Comment · 19 days ago
Vernon wasn't an official, but he's the first guy the officials called to help and come up with a plan. Elon Musk wasn't trying to help, he was trying to get publicity. Had anyone listened to Musk, the children would have died. I think someone who doesn't know what they are doing wedging themselves in a life or death situation while arguing with the experts with the knowledge and experience wasting their time with cockamamie plans is a villain in my eyes. Elon Musk is basically Syndrome in the Incredibles movie: angry and jealous that he isn't the center of attention.

And if it isn't clear today, Musk is clearly a villain. The Thai cave rescue was when he showed his real face to the world by being a total and utter jerk to the real heroes.

Comment · 20 days ago
Which is why I said "one of". And by "one of" I mean one of the leaders of the whole operation, someone who lives in Chiang Rai and has extensive knowledge of the cave complex, who coordinated Thai government working with the British Cave Rescue Council.
Comment · 20 days ago
Comment · 20 days ago
In 2014, he fired his PR person when she asked for a raise (she was very good at her job).

In Spring of 2018, investigative reporters at the LA Times found that Elon acted like a tyrant removing yellow hi-vis safety tape at Tesla factories because he didn't like the aesthetic, which lead to more workplace accidents. This was when Elon started getting extremely adversarial with the press.

https://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-tesla-factor...

A few months later, during the Thai cave rescue, he flaunted some kind of coffin made from spare rocket parts as his plan to save children who were trapped in a Thai cave, and when one of the actual rescuers Vernon Unsworth told him the cave was too narrow for that to be of use, Elon called him a "pedo" (note, Elon also begged to go to Jeffrey Epstein's parties).

It all went downhill from there.

Comment · 20 days ago
> Algorithm is much improved.

I can't see anything past all the blue checkmarks who pay for visibility. I've had to run the "block the blue" userscripts for hours just to make the site usable.

> WAY less censorship.

You could power a datacenter with how fast Orwell is spinning in his grave, as Elon's Xitter approved 83% of censorship requests by authoritarian governments (compared to pre-Elon Twitter's 50%). But I guess letting Grok undress children means "less censorship" for you specifically.

https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-05-24/under-el...

> Community notes are the best "fact check" type implementation I've yet to see.

This is the only thing I agree with.

> Better bot control

Elon just crashed out when Ukraine bombed a Russian data center, and right-wing account activity dropped on Xitter.

> More responsiveness to technical issues.

Things breaking and then getting reverted isn't better than things not breaking in the first place

> And some of the most insufferable voices seem to have moved to Bluesky.

It probably would have been better if Twitter itself had moved to AT Protocol, as it's the future. But I'm happy to leave the people using Grok to undress pictures of children on Xitter.

Comment · 1 month ago
Comment · 1 month ago
There's a big difference between "AI is creating misinformation and intelligence failures that could compound, especially given the fact that in a pre-AI world we came to the brink of nuclear warfare" vs the AI Doomerism of "Super-intelligent AI will kill us all in some mysterious way" of the AI "safety" TESCREAL cult, often used to hype up their own product capabilities.
Comment · 1 month ago
Comment · 1 month ago
Comment · 1 month ago
The only reason why Putin is there now is because we strongly backed Boris Yeltsin despite his unpopularity, we interfered with the 1996 election in order to prevent Communist Party challenger Gennady Zyuganov from winning re-election amidst disastrous liberalization policies and lowering life expectancy, and then Boris Yeltsin ended up appointing Putin, who did war crimes in Chechnya in an effort to appear tough as a strongman against the separatist threat. In 2001, the NYT had op-eds from Thomas Friedman that were "Rootin' for Putin". Had we not interfered, we probably would have had another Gorbachev.
Comment · 1 month ago
Good:

The Open Web

Bad:

Insta requiring login Facebook requiring login Xitter requiring login

Comment · 1 month ago
Yes, you want a space only for those who think the same as Elon Musk, with his thumb being pressed down on the algorithm which you have no choice but to use.

On Bluesky/ATProto, I am free to chose my own algorithm or my own client software and affiliate with the people I want to. My data is always my own because I can host it on my own PDS. On Mastodon, I have similar freedoms, and you can opt into bridging ATProto with ActivityPub through Bridgy Fed. I like the freedom of the open web, but I guess not everybody thinks the same as me.

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