No way. If anything, that kind of thing just supresses people from expressing themselves honestly in a way that might help them.

Real human connection and compassion might make a difference. A cookie cutter template message is (genuinely) a “we don’t want you to talk about this here” response

We aren’t beholden to advertisers, we don’t need this

So I should suffer just to suffer? You listed a whole lot of things that they hire people to do just about as soon as they can so they can. And offloading that let’s them do their actual job better

I work with black boxes all the time. When I have a black box, I poke and prod it until I understand how to make it do what I want. And this particular black box was interesting, so I decided to open it up and learn how it works

That’s the essence of software development. My job is not typing or data entry, my job is to trick a rock into doing things humans don’t want to do

I’ve been doing it for more than a decade without help, I’m not any better at spelling or misclicks

And to be clear, I can do it - I just really, really don’t want to. I hate it so much, my eyes glaze over and I have to force myself every second of the way. It’s not interesting, there’s no puzzles involved… It’s basically data entry

No, it’s all different - like a normal use case is “write me a stored procedure to optionally update all fields on a row on this table” or “given the following json response, build a class to parse it into”

We have a ridiculous database and multiple new api’s to integrate with every year, so this comes up a lot

I use it so much. All my Google searches for syntax or snippets? Web searches are unuseable at this point, AI can spit it out faster. But the real savings? Repetitive code. I suck at it, I always make typos and it’s draining. I just toss in a table or an api response and tell it what I want and boom

It probably does write 75% of my code by lines, but maybe 5% of the business logic is AI (sometimes I just let it take a crack at a problem, but usually if I have to type it out I might as well code it)

What it’s good at drains my concentration, so doing the grunt work for me is a real force multiplier. I don’t even use it every day, but it might be a 3x multiplier for me and could improve

But here’s the thing - programmers are not replaceable. Not by other humans, not by AI - you learn hyper specific things about what you work on

Do not ask people how to do this. If you don’t know from a web search, you shouldn’t try this without backing up a full disk image and understanding how to roll it back. Or at least backing up everything you care about

It’s not a particularly hard thing, but it’s a very irreversible one

Yes. Literally brain dead.

When you collaborate with fascists, it always goes one way. They use you, then they turn on you. Every single time.

They must always be the victims. There must always be new enemies. If you join hands with fascists, you’re just empowering them and volunteering yourself as the next enemy

What do you think this would even look like? They like the trappings of Christianity. They’re not going to give up religion. They’re just going to pick or create a more convenient hate-filled flavor and try to make it the national religion

There’s a word for that. It’s called collaboration.

I don’t care what you want to do, working with fascists is the stupidest way to do it.

You’d join hands with fascists against a pope put in place to oppose it?

They’re not full of hate - they’re full of fear and anger. Warranted fear and anger. Just misdirected

In Trump’s last presidency, nothing fascist really happened. Bad things certainly, disastrous even, but honestly? Living through it, it was mostly business as usual. Things got worse, but the COVID response was really the worst, and there’s no living comparison… So it’s a mishandling of a unique crisis, so it was what it was

You don’t understand propoganda.

One of the times I felt most ignorant was when I was working in France, and talking politics I called them socialist and they laughed. Because all my life, France was labeled socialist, I learned it in elementary school through college. I was already a leftist. But I never thought to evaluate my understanding of socialism against my understanding of French politics. And when called out, I immediately realized it was a complete blind spot and felt ashamed. I learned to doubt what I’d been taught, to examine my geopolitical beliefs more deeply. I’d never have done that without a wakeup call

They don’t know what fascism is. They’ve never experienced it. The Nazis are unambigiously evil to them, but they don’t know the fascism checklist. The news they consume reframes everything as normal partisan politics… It downplays it all to a degree that can only be described as lies.

They don’t know that there’s any inconsistency. They are the highest form of ignorant - they don’t know to question yet

I’m not talking about Nazis. When all this is over, they can deal with the consequences of their actions

I’m talking about the people who genuinely have no idea what’s going on. The Trump supporters you see in real life. The ones who were shocked when the tarrifs went through. The ones who think Trump is religious. The ones who thought Elon was actually intelligent and is reducing fraud

Most people you meet in real life aren’t the raving lunatics you see online, they’re people who watch the news. In American news, everything Trump says is sane washed.

They aren’t Nazis. They don’t believe Nazi things. They don’t know or understand what’s going on, they think it’s business as usual because that’s what they’re being told

There’s genuinely not very many Nazis, there’s plenty of casual bigots, but the ignorant vastly outnumber the true believers

You can’t just write them all off. Some of them are just raving bigots and cultusts, fuck them. Let them the first step themselves, otherwise

Most of them were just lied to. Constantly, for all their lives. They don’t realize they’ve been lied to constantly, they don’t know to question it

They don’t have much interest in politics, because it’s long been the uni party fucking them over in different ways. Everything just gets worse, and they just want to live their lives

If anything, I think most people are leftists, they just don’t realize it yet. They just have to be woken up. They need to wake up to the lies, and they’re now woke. Most people can’t achieve that without a push, most people can’t even examine their own beliefs to that extent - they need someone to break things down for them and help think for them

You can be angry at them, but they’re angry too. We have to live with them. You can blame them, but that’s unproductive… We’re not going to kill them. They’re still going to exist. They’re still going to vote.

We can use them, their anger, their need for change. We offer what they don’t know they want. Winning is what matters

I agree to a certain extent, but at the same time - what level of responsibility do we really have?

I’d say it’s virtuous to keep yourself educated, but it’s also virtuous to realize your limits and to recognize when you should trust others on things beyond you. No one can know everything, and being able to weigh conflicting accounts accurately is a rare skill

Humans naturally drift to a certain distance from their perceived community consensus. Like the Overton window, or the whole concept of “normalizing” things. Our beliefs are relative to our society

Propoganda hacks this. If you hear something uncontested frequently, you start to internalize it. It happens without actually processing the information. If people around you generally seem to hold an opinion, your opinion is relative to this - except with social media, algorithms purposefully distort what you are exposed to

It just doesn’t seem fair to blame people for not rising above their own nature

Let’s say you have this test. If a few people fail, you can blame them. If half of them fail, you have to blame the teacher or the curriculum

If when you do something to a population, then get consistent results statistically, it’s not fair to blame people for not being outliers

Also, a lot of people are in a bubble when they go online. Maybe they go to their favorite news site, maybe it originates from Facebook, Instagram, tik Tok, even reddit at this point.

Their Internet bubble isn’t the same as yours, and a handful of people are purposely manipulating what people see. They edit Trump’s speech and package it by explaining what he actually meant, and so when they hear “Trump said he’s not sure if he has to uphold the Constitution” they’ve already got it ready to go in their heads “oh, that was out of context, he meant his lawyers are interpreting the constitution”

And what is the other option? Start up a third party? We don’t have time for that.

If the stars aligned, best case, it would take a bare minimum of 2 election cycles to get a party established. One to get enough seats to form a voting block and gain legitimacy to the average voter, then another to gain enough seats to be more than a side note

And meanwhile, Democrats will still exist, and since they hate the left more than fascism they’ll still fight tooth and nail.

We don’t have time or other options.

Oh, I’m certain they’ll fight, but I’m not talking about changing the party. I’m talking about taking their base to take their seats

I’m talking about a hostile takeover, we make a big enough faction and we can take the party, along with the infrastructure and less involved voters

Why do you think they’re trying to kick out Higgs? It’s not because they think he’s more dangerous as an independent

How does that help anyone? That would just be performative

The Democratic party is right there, and it stands for nothing. It has all the infrastructure set up already. So let’s take it.

Let’s tea party the Democratic party and force them left, kicking and screaming. Let’s build a large enough faction of actual progressives and leftists that Democrats are forced to come to the table. We flip red seats and take vacant ones. Then we primary incumbent Democrats who don’t get with the game plan

That’s what the whole fighting oligarchy tour is about

Overhang? More real estate terms…I should start keeping a list

Dude is regressing so fast it’s crazy

I like the idea. I’ve even experimented with some on device algorithms by basically weaving together feeds, even something simple like makes a noticeable improvement

Well, Republicans all completely fell in line with Trump after Elon said he’d primary anyone who didn’t

Then, Elon outspent the other candidate in the Wyoming supreme court election like 10:1 and still lost. There’s talk his involvement hurt more than helped. The very next day Trump said Elon has to go back to his businesses soon

No member of Congress can go out in public without being screamed at to do something. Historically conservative districts are flipping in special elections. Musk’s money is useless, Trump’s endorsement means less by the day, and even the oligarchs are getting nervous about Trump

Very few politicians are actually loyal to Trump, most are in it for themselves. There’s reason for some hope… The pressure is already high. Imagine how bad it’ll be in a few weeks, when people start seeing supply chain shortages on the shelves…