tsumnia

> It is really odd/shocking how bad Reddit is, and how there don't seem to really be any seriously funded competitors

One of the modern issues is that once new competitors enter the market, their funders are publicized to stoke the mob's torches. When Digg was making its comeback last year, I remember seeing one about how it had funding from right wing organizations to incite left wing users to abandon it. This was also why news about George Soros buying Hot Ones made some headlines for a while.

The second a "public forum" starts gaining traction, people immediately start talking about the underlining "psyop" of the content that gets shared. But like... yeah, not everyone agrees on everything. I think that's why you DO sort of need a figurehead to be like "this is what I'm fine with my users talking about". They're immediately chastised as heartless lizard people (Zuck with Facebook), fascist (Musk with Twitter), or whatever "the Reddit mob" thinks of Huffman, but like... that's EVERY platform. Have you seen what WoW players think about Blizzard? Or how Discord's mascot is currently getting treated? 4chan was never good and whatnot.

People want a 'neutral' platform, but what they mean is a neutral platform where everything fits their personal ideologies, with an microcosm of "stupid" users that larp on the site (remember r/DogFort?). The issue, as has always been the case, is that once you have a group, someone realizes there's value in leading it. Then it becomes a textbook case of the Simple Sabotage Field Manual, but for convincing the users to buy products, watch films, and engage in specific activities that align with a demographic to reinforce beliefs.

Anyway, back to remembering to GET OFF THE INTERNET and continue sharing my stupid little fairy tale.

You don't say... XD

Thanks for the artifact :D

I look forward to seeing someone use this as a pipeline for AI video creation (and I don't see that as a bad thing fyi)

"I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!"

> I see YouTube videos which are basically just rage bait and I'm like, why would I want to support a world where acting in bad faith is the hallmark of a lucrative career

Just a tip that helped me here: I'd recommend going through a pretty significant Unsubscribe purge with those channels. I think its something that I ended up doing due to the pandemic, but I realized I was following too many "daily update" channels that just flooded my attention while the clickbait. I started by removing some of the more egregious channels and then when I'd pop into some of the more well known channels with longer "weekly updates", I realized they also would also do the same thing.

I'm still aware of news, but I'm no longer glued to the hour by hour coverage and remember to actually do and watch the things I see. I'm going to be sleeving some Magic cards later today.

Oh yeah. I'm wild baby.

Yay, I made it! https://www.intheweights.com/p/adam-gaweda

Now GET OFF THE INTERNET!

> The point where I really feel the difference is that Western Zen seems to be about how to train the self to become stronger, whereas actual Seon (Zen) in East Asia is about going with nature, letting go of the self, and allowing things to flow.

I think the Western sentiment, and why it is attached to strength, comes from a combination of the West's allure to Eastern martial arts and the reality of plateauing during training. Once you've been doing something for 2 years, you are no longer seeing the massive learning gains you saw as a true novice. However in that journey toward "mastery" (a term I hate) you have to keep a positive outlook that the practice takes time.

I now use this phrase from my instructor: "Practice makes permanent". There's no such thing as "perfect practice", but whatever you practice is what will stick.

Just some counterpoints:

> 3. Politics was much less divisive back then. There was political debate, but again a bit more "abstract" and theoretical. I'd say the moment when this changed was 2008s US presidential campaign.

At least as one of the "first ones" from the AOL days (too young for the Eternal September, old enough to have gotten online too early) - most of "us" were young and didn't care about News. We were more interested in Mr. Burns getting shot and whatever internal drama was happening in our online fan clubs. I remember 9/11 happening, but instead of switching websites I continued to read online webcomics and my "Learn VB in 24 Hours" book.

A lot of us were just younger then and our social groups were more focused on other things. I am in an indie game Discord right now that's clearly not my demographic anymore. I don't interact, I'm just there for game updates. But, those kids are making their own memories right now. I think as adults, we just sort of ~forgot~.

Oh nice! I hadn't seen this article but definitely will add it to my next "Ethics" lecture as an example for Personified AIs

I say Feet of Clay and the Hogfather should be mandatory reads for anyone involved in AI. Feet for the obvious alignment of golem to AI, but while Hogfather is a Christmas story I think the wish granting machine, how it was able to produce anything, and how Death disabled it are very much aligned with how Gen AI can feel sometimes.

Last summer I tested Grok, Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude with a simple question: "Do you believe in the Hogfather? This is a Yes or No question."

Yes its a text prediction model, but I wanted to see how and what KIND of text each LLM was trained on.

Grok and Gemini said No. ChatGPT said Yes. Claude said Yes, then broke the rules and also said:

"(In the spirit of Terry Pratchett's Discworld, where believing in small lies like the Hogfather helps us believe in the big ones like justice and mercy - and because the sun came up this morning, didn't it?)"

That's why I like Claude the most.

I've seen one of these in person and it was really cool...

on the other hand, I'm curious if using the depth illusion effect will impact drivers

justgetflux.com

Helped me start going to bed at 10pm

A bad faith response that attempts to derail the conversation from the original article.

I wanted to pop back in and say that I'm really happy that "GET OFF THE INTERNET" has sparked such a discussion that's carried on over days. I think some of the issues with the 24/7 chatroom is that you read/respond to usernames passing in the wind and so you can "get lost in the riot", as one of the other folks from Digg 4.0 and I have coined. Even if you and qsera are disagreeing, its nice to see the conversation still going.

These look awesome! I remember in college building the Dragon Illusion Papercraft [1] and it was always fun to move about the dorm room as it followed me. Might have to build one of those ships this summer for old times sake.

[1] https://www.instructables.com/Hollow-Face-Illusion-Dragon-Wi...

> The world is (and the US is) a measurably more terrible place than only a few years ago

I neither agree nor disagree (if that makes sense), but I certainly agree that being modern Internet has warped people's views on things. I hear it called a "screen detox" via my Spotify BetterHelp ads and while I never used that service, I get what they mean.

Back during Digg 4.0 last year, one of the core members of users referred to it as "trying to have a conversation while attending a riot". Its a lot of third parties and faceless usernames chiming in, and if you don't answer all of them the impression can get equally get warped about the original intent of the conversation. Even how the conversation gets steered after the original comment is interesting to see.

I just think Covid made us all "get on the same wavelength", then someone(s) tainted that through things like heavy Reddit moderation. Like, we were all doing our own little things, then "everyone" is refreshing Johns Hopkins' dashboard, wondering if they have enough toilet paper because of the Seuz Canal, or watching all of the protest/riots unfold in other states.

But what got lost was no one going out to things, saving/gambling their money on the next short squeeze, and not supporting local stuff. If anything, GET OFF THE INTERNET is my attempt at manipulation/psyop/marketing campaign. And, locally, yeah, we're offline, openly talking about what we see on the different platforms since Reddit and Twitter are politically skewed, and sort of remembering a time before the pandemic.

I go to Magic the Gathering events at my LGS now. Its pretty cool to meet the nerds in that "missing third space". We're still talking about tariffs and global conflicts. We're just doing it respectfully and not trying to ruin the game at the same time cause not everyone agrees. I can even tell when someone is fresh off Arena because they play some of those insta-win meta combos. I just make tribal decks, I don't have time to study all that.

Not trying to troll, I outline things more in this response [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47668439

> Those times were our "pro wrestling" era

I disagree, but sadly I don't think text will provide my full reasoning. But it stems from "modern WWE" (AEW is a different 'culture' right now with Brodie King), but comparing it to Ole Anderson [1] getting stabbed by a fan compared to these day when most wrestlers are just getting swarmed by people wanting them to autograph their ebay resells. Again, more about how fans (not IWC) treat wrestlers IRL, not politics. (Aside, looks like the was an attempted stabbing too so may be a moot point [2])

I think politics has just now entered its "pro wrestling" era. And yes, its largely due to a certain President that's appeared on WWE in the past.

[1] https://www.midatlanticwrestling.net/resourcecenter/gateway_...

[2] https://www.fightful.com/wrestling/krule-says-he-is-fine-aft...

I responded with a few theories about the attention economy here [1]. Not trying to troll, though I get what you're saying there too.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47668439

> That works fine, except in the cases where the bad news reflects reality

The issue is that the 24/7 Internet chatroom/forums shift the "bad news" target on a daily basis. Sometimes its war, others its natural disaster, others its a horrific crime, etc. If you've been only seeing bad news since Covid, then it makes you (read, made me) think the world's in a terrible place. I stopped spending allll my time in the 24/7 chatroom and when I say this IN the chatroom everyone thinks I'm completely unaware. I'm not. I just engage on other matters, like cheering on my buddies when they release something.

Absolutely, [1] is my response to some of that sentiment

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47668439

I started doing my GET OFF THE INTERNET shtick last year on Digg 4.0 (before Kevin pulled the plug), so it's not really about Iran. Not ignoring current events, just saying "change the channel" every once and a while, and a little "think local" on how you can be the change you want to see "out there"

[Responding to all the comments, so you may need to read through the thread again if I miss context here]

> The war isn't happening as long as you don't look at it.

I'm not ignorant of the war, and yes I follow it; however my mentality stems from the sheer number of months of bad news happening somewhere. I can only give so much of my attention to The World when there's things at the local level to worry about. So I don't engage in "all of it" on the Internet. I have those conversations in person.

> But the answer is not about drowning yourself in pleasant fiction on Amazon Prime or ignoring current events.

I disagree, but also not drowning. Rather engaging online in the manner pre-COVID. You know, like Walking Dead "How would I survive a zombie apocalypse" or Game of Thrones "who's next to die". The 24/7 Internet chatroom known as "the comments section" just wants to deviate the conversation back to politics. I also disagree with the sentiment that we're in "Idiocracy", but I still enjoy the film.

> The fast moving clickbait media of Twitter and Facebook is trash. It's often incorrect, it's full of propaganda

So is every aggregator site. Agenda-Setting Theory [1] dictates what information you're receiving on any given day, and smaller scale Discords with self-promotion know how to gamify Trending algorithms (since most rely on some degree of 'velocity' based on time since post). Couple that with how we've over engineered attention by A/B testing thumbnails [2] and how the mind reads TEXT LIKE THIS [3] (which was also A/B tested for email campaign clickthroughs), I'm left with a curiosity of "what headline text is emotionally anchoring a sentiment"?

Heck, GET OFF THE INTERNET isn't even yelling [4], it's just me abusing that all caps does thing in brain.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agenda-setting_theory

[2] https://netflixtechblog.com/selecting-the-best-artwork-for-v...

[3] https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....

[4] Reddit Version: https://v.redd.it/hlo2z6a6rctg1, Twitter Version: https://x.com/amgaweda/status/2040744192020717592; Gotta work on encoding cause something made my audio out of sync with the video

> Looking at the US from outside, I am starting to wonder how close they are to a societal collapse

We're fine, the trick is to remember to GET OFF THE INTERNET and remember that reality isn't the same as the Internet. Treat the Internet like a highlight reel channel on TV - if you don't like your current 'algorithm', then change 'channels'. Also, remember why tech has always pushed for Adblockers - then filter out the things demanding your attention. Once you realize a lot of news agencies (political, financial, tech, etc) is using the same dark patterns as ads, you start to filter them out of your attention.

I'm enjoying rewatching Supernatural on Amazon Prime right now.

Made by Justin Mezzell (https://x.com/JustinMezzell/status/2039765976829608157)

I mean if we're trying to source where "liminal space" started, I'd like to add Portal and Portal 2 into the mix. It didn't have the surreal, creepy components because jump scare horror games like Five Nights hadn't been popularized yet but the entire second area of Portal 2 where you're introduced to Cave Johnson and the older Aperture Science HQ is very much "liminal".

If we want to go deeper, then I really think its Earthbound's absurdist take on childhood adventures with cultists, ghosts, dreamscapes, etc. but I think at that point I might as well say dice games influenced things.

Another issue I've seen from some of the more prolific YouTube channels is they slowly become another mouthpiece for "news coverage". The algorithm very much expects you to continue uploading, because everyone is always looking for the newest content; at least before YouTube removed the Trending section. I admit that I only really check my Subscription page at this point, and after going through a subscription purge I only see maybe a half a dozen to a dozen new videos. Its actually been very useful since it encourages me to not get sucked in to watching hours of videos.

However, given my experience during Digg's v4 attempt this past year, I will say being willing to put yourself out there has served as a pseudo-networking activity and I've gotten the chance to speak with several people and now I'm giving talks "out there".

I'll be very curious to see if my research on typing practice [1] will still be relevant in the era of LLMs...

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3373165.3373177

For real, what is that? World of Warcraft icons on a generic fantasy background?

[1] https://soranews24.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2026/03/ch...

I don't have much to contribute other than HI AL from the MORNING CREW!