conicalscientist

@conicalscientist@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google, X and Facebook Are Modern-Day Tobacco Companies⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not very wild when you realize you’re talking to addicts. The whole world is addicted.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cops are deploying AI-powered social media bots to talk to people they suspect are anything from violent sex criminals all the way to vaguely defined “protesters”⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  its executive director of public safety, Chris Clem, who is a former US Customs and Border Protection agent who testified before Congress about border security last year and regularly appears on Fox News

  So a bunch of chuds managed to take their weekend pedo hunting and turn it into a shitty startup.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨4chan hacked and taken offline. Hacker reopens /qa/ and leaks all admins emails.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  People know what 4chan is. There’s no illusions about it. reddit and its derivatives are were the real trolling goes down.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Facebook Pushes Its Llama 4 AI Model to the Right, Wants to Present “Both Sides”⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Notice the “free market” vanishes when it’s a thing they don’t like. Suddenly we need strong authority to ensure it’s “fair”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do people really think setting up domestic manufacturing in the USA is easy?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s the tech oligarchs. They’re doing their own gilded age. Their empires exist in the tech domain. Mostly IT services. They’re going after the whole pie. They want the entirety of American industry.

  What they have in mind exactly is anyone’s guess. We’re not going back to the times of railroad or oil barons. We’re not necessarily going back steel and auto manufacturing. The future is in things like robotics, renewable energy, semiconductors, or whatever the future holds.

  I think crashing the economy just to buy stock is old news too. The saying has become rather mindlessly echoed. They have relatively little to gain from this. The rich hold 90% of stocks. There’s little to extract from the remaining 10%. Plus I think people have believed too much in the idea that stocks are a shell game. It’s not as much as people think. The markets are still based on tangibles meaning actual industry. That is what the oligarchs are after. What’s better than owning stock in the industry is the industry itself.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If you're still on Reddit...⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The chronically online incels look for things to mass report. It’s part of their ongoing campaign to shove the Overton Window far right.

  Reddits content moderation are cubicle farm employees that barely look at content. They’re just clear tickets to make quota. Right wingers exploit this to control discourse.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Musk 'Pressured' Reddit CEO to Silence DOGE Critics, Leaving Moderators Outraged: Report.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It feels like a warped in to another dimension. Did everyone start using only 5 years ago?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why the world is looking to ditch US AI models⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The music can come screeching to a halt for the US tech industry. They haven’t been innovating for a long time. Just relying on monopolization, rehashing old shit, or straight up VC baiting with useless garbage. The rest of the world needs to continue to realize they can do tech too. They can produce novel and actually useful things. Whereas the US industry has been strangling itself to death with anti-competition.

  Especially with regards to AI. Once more others realize the milestone innovations in this field comes from academic research which is then taken by the private sector for profit. Others can realize and follow this path. They can spin up quicker than they think. With the education system being systematically dismantled in a pivot to identity politics protectionism over innovation, the future looks rather grim for the US. Bright for others though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There was definitely a time when people were smarter. I read a comment on r/xennials that stuck with me. They were lamenting the loss of a the culture of their youth. I’m not sure I can rephrase it as well as they said it.

  Basically they were describing how it used to be about how we questioned things. Like the show The X-Files. It was about seeking the truth. They noted how that show was reflective of how reality was. There was this common mindset that the answers are out there. That we can work together even to seek the answers and we will find them inevitably.

  You see that doesn’t make much sense in 2025 because everyone has the answer to anything and everything. Except it’s their own answer. Not the answer. More than ever their answer is one which is derived from their internet / social media bubble.

  There is no longer some big unknown out there full of mysteries to unravel. Not anymore. The zeitgeist right now is that I have my own world view and that’s the one. I know how the system works. I know the way. It’s the way I see the world. So why doesn’t everyone else come join my world view??? Are they stupid?

  In the past we didn’t know everything. Nobody knew anything. Nobody had any illusion that they did. Nor could they whip out their pocket rectangle and find answers immediately.

  In the past people had to be more open minded. They had to be honest about not knowing. Without modern media they had to be seekers of knowledge. As opposed to over confident purveyors relying on a quick internet search (these days a simple GPT query). The modern zeitgeist is one where everybody talks. Nobody listens. 8 billion deaf ears listening and learning nothing. Just waiting for their turn to talk. Everyone learned everything and they’re so damn sure of it.

  Stupid people think they know it all. Smarter people are unsure of what they know. Of course there were stupid people before. But they knew they were stupid. Today the stupids can mask it by repeating words from the podcast, the tiktoks, the youtube videos they just watched.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Brian Eno: “The biggest problem about AI is not intrinsic to AI. It’s to do with the fact that it’s owned by the same few people”⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Attaching “tech” to everything makes it more palatable. Desirable even. It masks the fact that feudal lords are reinventing everything but with “tech”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Internet forums are disappearing because now everything is Reddit and Discord. And that's worrying.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Forums were micromanaged far more than modern social platforms. Reddit is one of the “free speech absolutist” sites like its sibling 4chan. These were opposing paradigms to forums.

  I’ve long contended that modern social media users would absolutely hate the old style forums. If people think subreddit mods and reddit content mods suck. They haven’t met the admin of Joe Bobs phpbb forum hosted from his garage. Joe Bob doesn’t suffer fools gladly.

  I don’t think it’s a free speech problem. I think people have not only been conditioned to be content junkies. They’ve become addicted to being Greater Fuckwads.

  Maybe nobody cares what you think and whatever your words are they aren’t that important. Social media has devoured peoples egos turning them into the Greatest Fuckwads. With social media everyone has a podium and everyone has very important words with billions of doomscrollers as an audience. Don’t you dare steppy my freedoms!!1!

  Anyways I think the real test is whether people can handle a small forum with strict moderation and focused discussion. That will reveal who has half a brain apart from the fuckwads. I’ve seen people come to what are now basically private forums and get smacked down real quick. A sobering dose of reality for them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨DOGE Plan to Push AI Across the US Federal Government is Wildly Dangerous⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Make solutions in search of problems while collecting big tech premiums. If anyone accuses you of wasteful spending call them science illiterate to turn the public against them to divert the attention away from you.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit will warn users who repeatedly upvote banned content⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It means accounts that consistently upvote posts that end up being banned.

  The naive take is that this will remove bot/brigade swarms that are collaboratively boosting content that breaks site wide rules. You can derive ulterior motives from this if you want but I’m pretty sure that’s the basic premise.

  I have no doubt this will be leveraged by the far-right to sow more discord. They already have a history of raiding subreddits with false flag attacks to get them sanctioned until it escalates into full blown subreddit ban. This is all but formalizing the mechanism.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Brave CEO rants about "lefties," "glowies," George Soros⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Brave browser is a litmus test.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nobody Wants a Nazi Electric Car⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  So capitalism.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bad UX is keeping the majority of people away from Lemmy⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m certain those replies are in bad faith to discourage people from leaving reddit. The first one is obvious for your aforemention reason. The second one. I mean the internet has been around for decades. People haven’t suddenly forgot how to use it. Even normies have been able to figure out how to click a server. They’re fomenting lazy inertia.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Meta’s AI Profiles Are Already Polluting Instagram and Facebook With Slop⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s a whole thing in sports psychology about what happens when you give kids millions of dollars. Not only that but they are the top in the world at what they do. They were raised to believe they are a special breed of human. It’s not just the top pros who get multi-million dollar contracts. It can happen to the kids who don’t even make it pro too. It mindfucks a person.

  I’ve been saying for a long time this kind of thing happens in tech too. I grew up with a lot of guys who’ve made various levels of success in tech from average guy to multi-millionaires. It happens. They really do live in another reality. I don’t think it’s much different between the pro-sports bubble and the tech bubble. They live and breath tech. It’s their whole life. Replace tech with sport. Not much different.

  One notable difference is that sports actually recognizes this phenomenon. It’s a known studied field of psychology. They make an effort to engage athletes in the community and stuff. Things that keep individuals grounded in reality.

  I don’t think such things exists for tech. If anything they believe whatever latest antics they’re up to is what helps the community and helps themselves keep in touch with reality. Because what the world needs is one more world changing app, another bright idea for a startup that is totally making the world a better place and absolutely not strip mining human sanity for profit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Day 1 Reddit Refugee⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s no going back anyways. I’ve tried making new accounts. It’s impossible to post anywhere.

  The account vetting filters block me everywhere. Can’t post unless I’m a vetted poster. Can’t become vetted because I can’t post to begin with. I can’t be bothered to seek out and karma farm on random subreddits that aren’t a mess of filters.