I am left thinking that many people here in the US are going to have a hard time accepting that having this person, at this stage in his life, as the national figurehead will do permanent damage to the US’ prestige and global standing. Doesn’t matter if Reagan was sundowning, media was more controlled then and his handlers were there to support the institution of the presidency at least as much as they were there to support a narcissist. In 2016, other countries could look at Trump as a temporary aberration and wait him out. This time, it’s clear that the US is no longer a reliable partner.

An intentional sacrifice of the US’ role as head manager of the global economy is not nearly as well thought out as the people pushing it think it is.

It doesn’t even fit with the axioms of market logic! If the platform in question has terrible content moderation, primarily generates revenue from profoundly repulsive people, and was intentionally bought out to be used as the central propaganda organ for a destructive political movement… why wouldn’t you leave?! Dude just doesn’t want to admit he’s too lazy to redo his follows elsewhere

Atlantic writer: “better dubble down on Twitter huhuhuhhuh”

https://archive.is/OtYCo

Calls to disengage from X, now that Elon Musk has turned it into a white-supremacist haven, certainly have a moral appeal. But if this election showed how difficult it is to meaningfully “deplatform” speakers you disagree with, it also demonstrated the danger of ignoring the platforms where they speak. Unfortunately, the only way to change what’s happening in an echo chamber may be to add your own noise.

This is your periodic reminder that Steve Jobs’ widow owns that toilet-paper factory. And that they still pump out hot new singles from hitmakers like David Frum and, occasionally, my personal favorite, Eliot “GW Bush Did Nothing Wrong” Cohen.

Given that Trump lost votes compared to 2020, I think it’s past the peak of its relevance. Not many new people are entering the self-referential echo chamber. It’s one of the main vectors for crypto and meme stock scams, as well as the main vector for Musk himself. When all those promises are broken once again, fatigue will start to set in among the bluechecks. It may linger, but it will be a spent force by the end of the decade. Keep up social pressure to get people to leave.

Malcolm McDowell successfully blew up a star in one of the Star Trek movies, even if it did immediately get reversed by a time-travel MacGuffin. Perhaps we just need new leadership?

The more I think about it, the more “Day One” comes across as nonsensical.

I woke up this morning, we had multiple data centers across the globe filled with millions of servers… Day One.

I clocked into the swing shift, we have bins overflowing with unthinkable amounts of returned items, many of which are semi-perishable toiletries and personal hygiene products… Day One.

As a simple-minded catchphrase to orient one’s thinking, it becomes more and more absurd as the company scales. But Jeff don’t care, he punched out a long time ago.

Said it before, I’ll say it again: if Americans are all temporarily embarrassed millionaires, HN is where the temporarily embarrassed billionaires go to hang out

The original statement was clearly meant to dereference a pointer to an object of type “reactionary,” but I expected it to return maybe a Yarvin or at least a Catturd

I especially want to be sure that everyone here is aware that the video thumbnail clearly shows that JD Vance was not seated upon, or otherwise interacting with, a couch. JD Vance was calmly seated in a standard office chair for the duration of this interview. Any posts containing out-of-context references to couches will be dealt with vigorously.

Well, he was already practically an SS-Mann without the neck lapels, so why be surprised about this?

Facebook platforms are likely to follow the same trajectory as Fox News, and perhaps Zuckerberg can see that. The main site is obviously full of bullshit and practically useless for its original purpose, and it’s also increasingly abandoned by core demographics because it doesn’t have enough of their preferred flavor of bullshit. I’ve known MAGA guys who make a game out of creating secondary accounts to avoid Facebook jail. That sort of pathological use case is surely driving somebody’s OKR numbers, someplace in the company. After that game stops being fun, some of these people will either decamp for other platforms or (gasp, shock, horror) give up on social media entirely!

Instagram has almost completely subsumed the “my favorite celebrity might reply back to me” appeal that Twitter used to have, although TikTok is also stealing a lot of that. If they lose that shine, Zuckerberg’s in real trouble.

“Leaking rationalist-evidence-bits” is an unexpectedly top-tier euphemism for the aftermath of digesting Wendy’s chili

why do we want people who can’t deliver viable technology raising more kids?

why should we assume that they would be any better at the kid-raising than the technology?

How interesting, a volcel who only thinks he’s an incel. Many such cases

LinkedIn cold-emailed me this morning to suggest that I follow Vivek Ramaswamy, who lists his job title as “Founder at Vivek Ramaswamy”

Two of the major donors pushing to recall the mayor of Oakland, CA are cryptocurrency “executives.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/27/billionaires-oakland-mayor-sheng-thao-recall

Over the summer, Jesse Pollak, a cryptocurrency investor and executive at Coinbase, launched Abundant Oakland, an advocacy organization that funds “moderate” candidates running in Oakland races. The organization is explicitly linked to similarly named entities in San Francisco and Santa Monica.

Abundant Oakland has a related political action committee, Vibrant Oakland, which, campaign filings show, has received donations from Pollak ($115,000), the Oakland police officers association ($50,000), cryptocurrency executive Konstantin Richter ($60,000), the northern California carpenters regional council ($150,000) and a Pac controlled by Piedmont landlord Chris Moore ($100,000).

Yeah, this is the “emperor has no clothes” reality that I keep bringing up with my friends who are still invested in the bubble (emotionally if not financially). The genAI/LLM tech stack defies the entire decades-long cost curve and investment thesis for computer technology. Up through the smartphone era, you bought in because you could get more utility for lower cost. What’s being pushed now is higher-cost for dubious utility gains; it’s just that some vendors are eating losses to hide the costs. (And of course the externalities get swept under the rug.)

Maybe not super amazing, he probably avoids/firewalls out most of these people because they’d constantly be hitting him up for money

It’s slowly dawned on me over the last few years that one of the biggest reasons why I find the endless reams of Tolkien/D&D-ripoff fantasy fiction distasteful is because its popularity enables guys like this to smuggle racism into broader discourse. If your entertainment already has you primed to think in a racialized framework, it’s going to take you that much longer to cotton onto what this dingleberry and his buddies are actually pushing.

what do we pay this dang guy for, anyway