ragequittah

Conspiracy theory? I was under the impression it's very well documented. Might not be everything, but you can see how a few million posts from troll farms/bots would sway the narrative to more extreme, and even the real people disagreeing might be doing so because they read a few too many of those posts.

This take is wild to me. The USA is currently in the midst of discourse about:

Banning abortion, making it criminal/murder to drop IVF eggs, burning/banning books in election ads, making it an offense to even mention your sexuality or home life in some situations, coddling Russia as if they're the good guys, electing a guy who clearly tried to engineer a coup, making it impossible to even identify as a trans person because of the social stigma (again).

But generally the people for all of the above (or parts of it) are crying murder when Canada tries to say maybe it's an offense to advocate for genocide and other such things online. The cases that happen with these laws won't be Trudeau's cronies coming up and taking you away in a van, they will go before perfectly reasonable judges who will rule if you were doing enough harm to warrant jail time. If the courts were stacked in the way the USA's have been I might be worried, luckily we have a better system up here for such things.

I feel like I might have perspective here, as I went through this decision. I died, was brought back to life (despite 99.99% chance of that never happening), and strangely have most of my faculties still available. I have a rare condition where I can just go v-fib at any time for no real reason at all.

The doctor came into my room, gave me the option of getting an ICD implant. My first 4000 thoughts were hell no. He explained that otherwise I could just drop dead at any moment, and in all likelihood I wouldn't be the 1/1000 that survived. And if I were to survive I might just be a vegetable next time. I very hesitantly accepted after a lot of thought. BTW this is my 20s that this happened.

Since then more than 1 person has died due to a software error with my device, and I have not been shocked once. I get "patched" all the time to rule out certain errors. But the odds of me dying without the device are still much higher than the odds of my dying with it. More importantly I fully believe the standard of care / investigation into my problems have increased significantly because I opted into having the device. Is that fair? Not really. Is that realistic? Yep, Boston Scientific wants data to make better devices.

I'm in a country where the device was free to install, all care after is entirely free, which definitely helped make the decision. But if there's never a situation in which you'd consider such a compromise I'd say you've probably never woken up in the ICU with no memory of the past 20 days.

Well the 'mainstream media' (I now hate this term) is being pretty fair, but you have offshoot "media" companies that aren't doing any real journalism, just riling up their fanbases to get more clicks/views. The 'real' media is being fair in criticizing the social media companies for promoting Fox News / OAN / whoever else as if they're on par with actual journalism. And for sending people down rabbit holes / filter bubbles so that when they see truth they scoff at it.

Fully agreed, but the conspiracies are now manufactured at a rate that would've been unfathomable 20 years ago. I have a friend who knows exactly 0 transgender people in life who, when talking politics, it's the first issue that comes up. It's so disheartening that many people equate Trump to being good for the world because they aren't able to make off-color jokes without being called out anymore, or because the LGBTQIA+ agenda is ruining schools. Think of the children! This person was (seemingly) totally reasonable before social media.

>I mean, most of FAANG has been US values being globalized.

Well given that we know Russia, China, and North Korea all have massive campaigns to misinform everyone on these platforms, I think I disagree with the premise. It's spread a sort of fun house mirror version of US values, and the consequences seem to be piling up. The recent elections in places like Argentina, Italy, and The Netherlands seem to show that far-right populism is becoming a theme. Anecdotally it's taking hold in Canada as well.

People are now worried about problems they have never encountered. The Republican debate yesterday spending a significant amount of time on who has the strictest bathroom laws comes to top of mind at how powerful and ridiculous these social media bubbles are.

It really does astonish me when people point to 'negative media coverage' when the media is being pretty fair about it. I listen to takes on all sides, and they all point to major problems. On the left it's genocide / misinformation about things like vaccines, on the right it's censoring the Biden laptop / some deep state conspiracy that makes almost every doctor in the world misinform their patients. And both adequately show the main problem that's happening due to these tech platforms: extreme polarization.

John Oliver, Amnesty International [1], Reuters Investigations[2], The US District Court[3]. Just can't trust anyone to not be delusional these days.

[1]https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...

[2]https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/myanmar-...

[3]https://globalfreedomofexpression.columbia.edu/cases/gambia-...

>Slowing down OpenAI will hurt the company if assumption is wrong and won't help if it is true.

Personally as I watched the nukes be lobbed I'd rather not be the person who helped lob them. And hope to god others look at the same problem (a misaligned AI that is making insane decisions) with the exact same lens. It seems to have worked for nuclear weapons since WW2, one can that we learned a lesson there as a species.

The Russian Stanislav Petrov who saved the world comes to mind."Well the Americans have done it anyways" was the motivation and he didn't launch. The cost of error was simply too great.

I've had great success with an old Dell Optiplex computer running xcp-ng with PCI passthrough of the NIC to pfSense. I was considering a protectli box, but for $300 on ebay + an old NIC I had laying around I got something much more powerful (Intel I5-8600 w/ 16GB of RAM) than even the most expensive protectli offering, which was ~$1500 last time I priced it out. I calculated out the power draw and the Optiplex ends up with only a cost of about an extra $1.10 on my power bill per month at high usage, which was the deciding factor.

As a bonus I have xcp-ng spin up a ubuntu server with Portainer running things like pihole / unifi controller / plex / a terraria server. I also decided to randomly throw in a cheap nvidia GPU for some extra oomph. Highly recommend it for tinkerers, and the only reason I would spend more for the protectli is if the fan noise of a mini PC might be a nuisance.

Which is a disaster far beyond kids missing some school in my opinion. Kid gets in a car accident, or falls of their bike in a bad way, they're then (preventably) missing school forever.

The lockdown were to slow the curve, not prevent people getting covid. No health official in their right mind ever thought you could stop this thing after a certain threshold, we generally had lockdowns when our hospitals were extremely close to collapse. At least where I am.

I'd ask the same question to you. What's your angle? Why minimize when there's so much evidence of various harms? Why attack someone trying to point out that people underreacting/comparing it to less problematic viruses were probably wrong?

My thing is that I have a heart condition that is highly exacerbated by covid, so people treating it with no caution (sneezing in my face these days, no care at all anymore) is very worrying for people like me. A flu, however, I'm totally fine with catching.

As someone who would've never done this age 10-40, experienced extremely severe trauma at age 40, then started having uncontrollable rage fits age 40-43 (it's mostly subsided now, but I still do get more irritated than I used to) I wouldn't be so quick to judge. I thought the same as you before something happened, but it turns out PTSD is a hellofa drug. It's not something you're able control. I didn't learn my way out of it through maturity, I grinded my way through it losing friends along the way. I have no idea what caused me to stop either, other than just distance from the trauma.

I feel like this idea of emotional intelligence is impossible to achieve without first having a partner to develop it along side . And given the surprising amount of men who never have a partner these days, to expect them to come factory installed with these settings seems like expecting a 3 year old not to spill juice on their shirt. I wouldn't expect a 25 year old woman who has never been on a date to understand the nuances of how to be a good partner either.

Sitting over here playing flight sim, aoe 4 (and 2 every now and then cuz that remaster was fantastic), Forza horizon, looking forward to starfall after the epic gameplay trailer, and wondering someone can have such a drastically different view. Not to mention all of these games are on gamepass, which saved me 100s of dollars.