Can you fight them as hard as they fought you

Nope

Filibuster maybe?

Only when there’s nothing pending

Procedural moves that slow them down

Nah

Could you at least not vote to enable them

Votes to enable them silently with intense eye contact

What the fuck can you do?

Pulls out phone, texts you for $20 for their battle fund

Jesus fucking christ

Well that makes more sense than LLMs I suppose. Doesn’t really make a lot of sense why musk would want that given the one thing he doesn’t run is an ad network.

As someone that works in the tech sector though, this idea doesn’t really seem super compelling. The advertisers already have this data, so it just seems like a weird kind of heist to go pull off.

Advertisers already know how much money you make, what illnesses your suffering from (based on things you search for), I mean we live in an unprecedented surveillance states.

Maybe musk wanted his own version of that to sell to people, that’s a somewhat plausible scenario. This just sounds a lot like a conspiracy theory and the rule for a conspiracy theory is “someone has to make money” for the theory to be true.

Is musk a piece of shit, sure. Does the government have data, yep. Does taking the data from the government make musk money, maybe? I guess in the world where it’s a play for him to close the gap on a bunch of demographic information people can already buy from google or X, which he owns.

So I suppose if we see X or xAI offering significantly improved ad targeting or data brokerage that would make this all hang together.

I’m open to the idea it’s for something else. Data to feed into AI is the thing people are willing to pay heaps of money for right now. And musk has an AI company so I thought the thinking was “musk is taking data for his stupid ai company”

If that’s not what he’s doing, then what data and for what purpose?

I loathe musk, but having some trouble connecting the dots.

So if not for feeding into xAI, what data do people think he’s taking and what’s he doing with it?

The thing I’ve never really understood about this is what kind of data would the government have that would be any use to an LLM?

I’m sure that musk wanted that government data, but you all ever work with the government? Every data set is some weird pile of forms encoded in fixed width field, wrapped in json, plopped into the cdata of an xml node. Fucking enjoy parsing that shit and when you do you realize you have a form some guy filled out in 1972 to register a trailer.

Is the government sitting on some treasure trove of data that you could feed into an LLM as training data? Because that’s what would actually be valuable.

But musk is a fucking moron so I wouldn’t put it past him to break into an empty bank vault and then scuttle away like the fucking roach he is.

After his 40 minute solo dance party, he’s probably exhausted.

Let’s say he was dictator for one day only, just as a fun thought experiment.

That is also awful

Imagine someone walking into your house and saying, “I’m only going to ignore the law for 15 minutes while I’m here tonight.” Sorry, what the absolute fuck. Even if they kept their word that’s a monstrous thing to say, what the fuck are you going to do for those 15 minutes?!

That’s when you kick that fucker out of your house. So America, let’s kick that fucker out of this house.

We had a bunch of stalls in the 90s without doors, but the janitors told us it was just because asshole kids would break the doors for fun and the school would run out of money to repair them.

Even just partially damaging a door can make it a dangerous enough that the school would rather take it down than risk a lawsuit.

Made more sense to me than some sort of anti masturbation strategy. High school kids are fucking dumb as shit and I can definitely imagine them breaking stall doors for fun

I suppose you might get to kill people but that doesn’t mean that the law is going to be ok with that. Proportionality of force is a thing. Stand your ground states are doing their best to change that, but that’s a very mixed bag.

If you shoot and kill someone for blocking your waymo and being a creep, in most places you are going to have to convince a district attorney and a jury that you were justified in ending their life. Even if you do that and escape criminal liability, you’ll then have to convince more people not to hold you liable in civil court.

Sounds pretty cool to go “I got a shooty bang bang so if I feel threatened in any way I can come out blasting.” It is true in the moment, but if you place any value on your future liberty, money, and time you might want to consider the ramifications of killing another human being.

Finally, even if society decides you shouldn’t face any criminal or civil penalty for killing someone, you will have to face yourself. Sitting behind a keyboard it sounds badass to shoot someone that’s pissing you off. In the moment you will probably feel justified. Many a young man sent to war or employed as a police officer didn’t think that taking a life would change them, only to find the reality of taking a life is not what the action movies promised. Self doubt, self loathing, ptsd, depression, these are all common reactions to reckoning with the fact that you are the cause of another persons death.

It is hard to feel like a righteous badass as you watch a grieving widow mourn someone that may have even done something stupid or wrong, knowing that their child has no father now and their wife no partner. Are these people jerks and creeps, sure, is the punishment for being a jerk or creep death, rarely. It is a heavy burden to carry to end another.

Board of Directors shocked, absolutely shocked, that they were supposed to be directing the company. When reached for comment several wealthy looking people were seen with dictionaries in hand looking up the word “director” looking absolutely aghast

If the republicans thought that the Green Party was going to be an attractive option for their voters in 2000 they certainly adopted an odd strategy

https://web.archive.org/web/20050912163938/http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20001027/aponline115918_000.htm

Hoping to boost Ralph Nader in states where he is threatening to hurt Al Gore, a Republican group is launching TV ads featuring Nader attacking the vice president.

The ads by the Republican Leadership Council will begin airing Monday in Wisconsin, Oregon and Washington, all states that are part of Gore’s base and where Nader is polling well. The group plans to spend more than $100,000 at first and hopes to raise more over the weekend.

It’s not some crazy conspiracy either, the Republican Leadership Council explained the ad buys in this way

The Republican Leadership Council, a centrist GOP group, has been helpful to Bush before, airing ads during the Republican primaries critical of challenger Steve Forbes. Several members of the RLC board were early Bush supporters.

The RLC ads will run initially in four markets: Eugene and Portland, Ore.; Madison, Wis., and Seattle.

Mark Miller, the group’s executive director, said the ads are partly a response to commercials being run by the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, which argue that a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush.

“Ralph Nader doesn’t believe that,” Miller said. “Ralph Nader and his supporters are not backing down because they believe Al Gore has had numerous broken promises.”

Miller added that some of Nader’s supporters have bragged that Nader has never had help from “soft money,” the unrestricted donations used by parties and interest groups.

“We’ll put an end to that,” Miller said.

You might notice how the answer doesn’t really make any sense, a pro Bush Republican PAC wanted to run ads in Gore strongholds promoting Nader with the argument that Gore broke numerous promises. Why? Because groups said that a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush. It sounds like they are trying to counter this but then their actions fully support that idea.

Maybe some republicans could be persuaded to join the greens, but I pay attention to how people spend their money because talk is cheap. If republicans spend money to promote Nader in states they want to win, they obviously think they’ll poach more gore voters than Bush voters, it just doesn’t make sense otherwise.

I actually agree that the Green Party is staking out policy positions that both parties have abandoned, but I still think the abandoned policies they’ve picked up to champion are still more attractive to left leaning people than right leaning people.

Unless the WSJ has been taken over by liberals, owned by famous liberal Rupert Murdoch, they seem to be following a similar path now https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/jill-stein-republican-support-harris-voters-5a194ebf

So while I imagine some of these policy positions might be attractive to some disaffected republicans, republicans seem to think it will be useful to promote them. The only way that makes any kind of sense is if they think it will attract more potential Democratic Party voters than republican.

I thought we were just casting aspersions for fun 🤣

It’s a nice straw man you’ve erected and if I did any of those things you might have some kind of point.

I didn’t attack anyone, I pointed out that this alternative plan is unlikely to bring about any substantive change either.

So you keep telling people to sit at home and I’ll wait for the glorious revolution, maybe if you shout down people and tell them to read more theory that’ll help. The American people are super into reading political theory.

So if you look at the policy positions of a Green Party, it tends to align more closely with voters who would traditionally vote Democratic.

Here’s their own blurb from their website

We are grassroots activists, environmentalists, advocates for social justice, nonviolent resisters and regular citizens who’ve had enough of corporate-dominated politics. Government must be part of the solution, but when it’s controlled by the 1%, it’s part of the problem. The longer we wait for change, the harder it gets. Don’t stay home on election day. Vote Green!

Considering that the Republican Party uses the phrase “social justice warrior” as an insult and to this day field candidates that reject climate change, the idea that Republican voters might choose to vote for this party over their own seems less likely to me.

The Green Party is politically left of center, so it seems reasonable to me that the people that would vote for them would be more likely to come from the group of voters more likely to cast a ballot for Harris than trump.

That’s not how evaluating a plan works.

Here, I’ve got a cure for cancer, shove pinecones up your ass.

You can determine that this plan is bad without having to have a cure for cancer.

No you see they have a plan.

1. Convince people likely to vote for Harris to throw away their votes by voting 3rd party or staying home
2. Suppress democratic turnout while leaving Republican turnout untouched.
3. Spoil the election while haughtily going “oh not voting is a vote for trump somehow” and snorting to themselves. Completely blind to context.
4. Have the things they claim to really super duper care about like genocide in Palestine continue under trump
5. Also have vulnerable groups in America, like legal Haitian migrants, be the target of Republican vitriol.
6. (step missing)
7. Glorious proletariat revolution against the most powerful military and militarized police force to ever exist

Its brilliance is in its simplicity!

I’m sure some reporters talked to him. There are some pretty amusing clips of him just sorta standing around awkwardly.

There is a non-zero chance that some reporter told him about the Taylor Swift endorsement. I truly hope he responded with the grace and elegance he had on display all night 😂

He’s currently standing awkwardly in the spin room hoping that people will talk to him.

Hosting the image on discords CDN allows you not to give out your IP address to any person that comes across the link, prevents you from getting hammered with download requests if your upload becomes popular, and allows your content to be accessed when your own machine goes to sleep or has any kind of networking interruption.

Before discord people used to self host teamspeak or some other software. One of the big things you don’t have to think about is the person you just made a joke about or beat in an online game trying to DDOS your machine, because they don’t know where you are.

Lucky for you the wikimedia foundation files annual reports https://wikimediafoundation.org/annualreports/2022-2023-annual-report/

I think this is the latest one available.

As to whether they need your money or not I’m a bit conflicted. They have raised and spent more and more money every year. They have a lot of money and some have argued they spend it poorly.

On the whole though, besides asking for donations, they have maintained their goal of being ad free. If you’ve ever used a fan wiki for a video game or hobby you have likely experienced how bad a wiki larded down with ads can be.

I think for myself as someone that has worked as a software engineer for my entire life building out massive infrastructure that is on a similar scale to Wikipedia, I don’t really know how they justify such high development spend when the tech isn’t really evolving very much. I’m sure it’s not cheap to host, so that spend is fine by me, but I’m not sure what all they are building. That doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile, I just have a hard time imagining it.

I would encourage you to look at numbers and decide if they make sense to you. Also people have written on the subject, so some googling will likely bring you to more opinionated pieces than my own.

Really enjoyed Farcry 5 but Farcry 6 was ok gameplay wise but the story was really underwhelming especially with the amazing talent they got in Giancarlo Esposito.

The real problem with Ubisoft games is that they are all 95% reskins. If you’ve played one farcry game you’ve played most of every farcry game, same with assassins creed, etc.

Now those games often end up having relatively fun mechanics so when another farcry comes out I’ll still play it because it’s a fun game to me.

I do wonder how much they are just hitting a saturation point where the same couple games reskinned over and over are just underwhelming