Jon Stokes
@jonst0kes
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Author. Coder. CTO. θηριομάχης. Building: https://t.co/otXT4Wy6WR. Writing: https://t.co/dBPBtyCIHw. ⏩
Joined July 2008
I do a historical overview of prompting and next token prediction going all the way back to the late 40's, then cover the DeepSeek work and what it means for the race for AGI.
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Theory I floated in a GC that I'll go ahead & surface here: they used parts of the illegal, highly secret anti-domestic-terror apparatus to find this guy, & all the stuff we're seeing in the official report is classic parallel construction.
I’m sorry but a nutrition bro being caught at McDonald’s with an anti-healthcare “manifesto” is really giving “we immediately found the passports of the 9/11 hijackers” vibes.
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There's no sugar-coating this so I'll give it to you straight: .1. We don't have a competitive domestic chip industry & we won't have it in the next 10yrs.2. China will take 🇹🇼 & control TSMC.3. We will keep buying chips from TSMC w/ CCP backdoors in them, & pretend it's fine.
Intel is cooked. - 15,000+ to be laid off.- $INTC down 29% today.- Dividend suspended.- Foundry business hemorrhaging billions.- Broken Raptor Lake chips unfixable.- ARM taking over laptop market.- ARM taking over data center market.- Totally missed the AI hype train
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My wife said some unidentified rando paid for her order at Starbucks (didn't see the person). Her: I love when that happens!.Me: ⁇.Her: It happens sometimes.Me: No it does not, at least not to me or anyone I know.Her: It's a random good deed thing. Chat is this real? Do people.
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@LudditeHacker She's pretty hot. And she had just gotten her hair done. I suspect this was some dude & I told her this but she's convinced it was random act of charity.
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Chat is this true? Is 40 too old for backpacks?.
Saw a 40 year old man with a backpack the other day. Buddy, you’re not going on a hike. Buy a briefcase.
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Ok I gotta get this off my chest: I'm FB friends with a large # of ppl who legit think they're living in a full-blown fascist dictatorship of Nazi or USSR proportions. Ok fine. What I can't get over is how 100% of their anguished posts are about self-care & making connections.
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The greatest “I bet he’s thinking about other women” moment of all time.
In 1956, 26-year-old Edgar Dijkstra invented a classic path-finding algorithm while out with his fiancée at a café in Amsterdam. It all happened in his head: “Without pencil and paper you are almost forced to avoid all avoidable complexities,” he said.
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There are not quite 50K longshoremen on strike. For $50B -- chump change, really -- we could give them each $1M to retire in 5 years while we spend some multiple of that to fully automate all the ports. I bet they'd take it, then we could just move on.
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I'm telling you, ours is the last generation to see the moon at night without lights on its surface. The amount of time humanity has of looking up at a bare, unadorned moon is measured in years, not even decades.
BREAKING 🚨: Russia and China are working on plans to deliver and install a nuclear power plant on the Moon by 2035
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This US Navy IG post is making the rounds. It's truly something else, man. That man is the captain of this vessel & a graduate of the Citadel. For non-gun ppl, obvious 🙀 things happening here are:.1. That optic is backwards!.2. Lens caps are on.3. From his shoulder to his grip
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They give you free oxygen refills if you’re sitting at the slots hooked up to an oxygen tank. I am not making this up. The whole scene is extremely grim, especially if you go down to Old Vegas & see it in person.
Today I learned there are LARGE groups of retired senior citizens who move to Las Vegas with the very explicit intention of spending all of their money playing slot machines until they die. They budget carefully, manage their spend, and play slots all day, knowing they’ll lose.
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Had a fascinating chat with a well-placed friend who tipped me to something Eurocrats are quietly freaking out about: there’s now a place in Europe where the world is handing guns to randos by the millions w/ zero tracking or oversight. Guns that’ll make their way back EU cities.
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This woman is a child of God, her pain is real, & while she may have no claim on our territory or our tax dollars, she does have a claim on our empathy, our prayers, and our sincere hope that she can find what she needs in her own country while we rebuild ours.
Migrants in Ciudad Juárez who were waiting for their 1 pm CBP1 parole appointments learned 20 minutes ago that the app has shut down & those appointments are no longer valid.
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Sure, I can explain it: there is no "arc of history" that bends in any particular direction, there is no "right side" or "wrong side" of history, & your secular eschatology is fake.
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This is a purification ritual & not an actual thing of science. Dude might as well be burning sage.
Our COVID-Busters are out in full force cleaning & disinfecting to make a safe return to the classroom possible. Good luck to all NYC students & staff on your first day back!. #BacktoSchoolNYC
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Confession: I thought "vibe coding" was a dumb X thing until I did it today with Claude Code and shipped an amazing refactor with it. I've had my head in the problems with this code for over a week, so I could guide the model through the decision tree and really direct it and.
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In 2019, I was taking my 3 girls somewhere when suddenly in the back seat I heard the middle (8) explaining to the youngest (6) that "some girls are born with a penis." *record scratch* What? They were in public school at the time, so I asked the 8yo where she got this false info.
@CtzCow @docpelton @jonst0kes I'd be interested in personal examples and not "it's happening" hype articles fed by the heritage foundation machine.
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Apropos of nothing, today I am pondering Ellsberg's famous advice to Kissinger when the latter first got his top secret clearances.
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I never posted about this, but ~2yrs ago my kid (then 13) was in the B&N YA section & some middle aged bluehair employee woman approaches her & chats her up & starts recommending books that "the Christians don't want you to read." You can guess what kind of lit this was.
>Be me.>want to buy a famous mystery novel .>Go to Barnes and Noble.>endless romance novels .>books by people like Whoopi Goldberg on display.>self help books everywhere .>quarter of the store dedicated to manga and funko pops.>small fiction section doesn’t have the book I’m
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The appeal of “groomer” is IMO really simple & I’m surprised so many are surprised at it catching on. The pattern is:.1. I’m an adult & you’re a small child.2. We talk about sex.3. Your parents don’t need to know about this conversation.4. Eventually you & I will have sex.
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I've re-assessed this thread from Mike. Here is what I think is likely in the coming weeks, and why.
8. But this is not simple political warfare. This is an intra-elite conflict over control of state resources and cultural institutions. There will be a winner and a loser. This is critical because intra-elite conflict historically leads to civil war and state breakdown.
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We’re sitting on 100M doses of AstraZeneca that we can’t use & that’s going bad, which should have been sent to India many weeks ago. They have every right to their rage. I’m fuming, too.
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As in, they know for a fact they've got the right guy, & now they need to build a plausible body of evidence that passes legal muster & will get a conviction -- like having him carry around the murder weapon + manifesto on all his trips out for a burger.
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First, the idea that he kept the murder weapon on him for 5 days & was just carrying it around is a red flag. Really?! But parallel construction isn't just to cover how they located him -- it's mainly to establish that he's definitely the perp.
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I think some dark switch has flipped just very recently. Today I saw a boomer in lefty FB replies fantasize about punching Trump in the face, & then in replies to a larger moot I saw an account doing "blood of tyrants" stuff in anger at the anti-DEI push.
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There has been plenty of this kind of thing since the GWOT started, but you think it's just solid detective work. which is the whole point. It's explicitly designed to look like solid detective work that doesn't require some secret capability.
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I am hearing from healthcare workers that CDC is actively /not testing/ people for coronavirus. I know other journos are, too. I agree with @matthewstoller -- there is a coverup going on here. I know it sounds Alex Jones, but it's true. They're trying to keep the numbers down.
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This is fan-freaking-tastic. I love me some Trader Joe's, and am glad to keep supporting them. This is how you handle scolds and crybullies:
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What cheeses me to the max about the Gay thing:. Unlike Gay, I'm not the scion of Haitian concrete magnates, & I didn't go to Phillips Exeter. I grew up in a 1K sqft house next to the interstate, & I went to Louisiana public schools. I borrowed like $70K in un-dischargeable loans.
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When you read one of these letters, imagine a man of ~50yrs in a nice apartment, wife is crying, kids in another room, stack of bills on the table (including inescapable permanent student loan debt), & it’s not just that he has lost his job — his entire career track is suddenly.
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There is no plan B for their careers. They can't pivot into some other industry, they have no marketable skills beyond working in the parts of the blob apparatus that are on fire right now. This is the Palisades fire, but in DC -- total loss but no insurance or safety net.
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A thing someone said to ~2wks ago that I'm still thinking about: "The 20th century model of [pandemic] containment was protecting lives. The 21st century model is protecting markets.". And here it is right out in the open. This isn't just some Trumpworld or US thing, either.
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They're usually better at coming up with parallel construction excuses, like a photo where they were able to match the counter top to a specific manufacturer.
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This is wild. Here we have a GPT-3-class model that you can fine-tune on a single high-end gaming GPU in ~5 hours, & run inferences on consumer hardware. If you're wondering why @OpenAI wants AI regulation, here you go. A regulatory moat can substitute for a tech moat.
alpaca-lora: Code for reproducing the Stanford Alpaca InstructLLaMA result on consumer hardware. github:
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It means you should stop crapping up my feed with endless AI engagement bait that gives people the sensation of having learned something without them actually having learned something. Thanks! 🙏
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oh no. oh god.
@hoffmang Ok. How about this: If in 3 years bitcoin is worth more than $100, I'll eat a (very small) cake in the shape of John McAfee's lost maleness.
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First, there are a lot of people with platinum resumes & important titles who have worked their way up to the very top of the NGO/gov/blob career track, who are in their nice brownstone apartments or two-story homes dealing w/ total shell shock at some letter or email.
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Like you literally think you are living in a literal actual Nazi state that is getting ready to violence you and send you actual, no-foolin' camps, and your response to this is some "Eat, Pray, Love" pablum about reaching out toward one another but also taking self-care time.
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Lake City is one of the biggest manufacturers of AR-15 ammo in the US. I have a few thousand rounds of their 5.56 stashed away here. It's all over my gun circles that they just announced a total, immediate stop to all civilians sales of AR ammo. It's all military orders, now.
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Many hours, many images, & 4,500+ words worth of everything you need to know to go all the way from absolute zero to #stablediffusion hero, *for free* (the post is free & so are the essential tools):
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🚨 BREAKING: In a newly leaked benchmark from Stanford, OpenAI's GPT-4 has just blown past the infamous Bärnhauer-Czernijewski Boundary Condition. Here's what it means for or B2B SaaS, a 🧵.
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Yep. Any political party that owns the position, "don't tell parents what happens at school, & actively mislead them about critical identity issues that have serious, lifelong medical implications for their child," is utterly doomed & I am here for it.
@jonst0kes Our charter school in CA was forced to adopt a policy that required teachers affirm all trans identities while at the same time hide the identity from the parents if they weren't aware. I.E. Use trans name and pronouns in all contexts accept when parents were around.
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Think about what happens to all the small arms that are flooding into Ukraine & being given to any warm body with any kind of passport (or none at all). All the guns the Russians are leaving on the ground. Where do they go. How do you keep them from Paris or Berlin?.
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I mean, this is the Venezuela and guns timeline:. 2012: total civilian disarmament.2017: pro-regime militias selectively armed, & scattered reports of them killing citizens.2019: "the order is to massacre the people". 2A ppl don't need to reach back to Germany anymore.
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Our kids are not at that school anymore, needless to say. But the story in this thread is not unique, nor is it the only such story I have personally. Parents are being blindsided by this stuff, & it's not right. Insofar as the Dems own this, I can't imagine voting for one again.
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There were all kinds of bathroom rules put in place, some small girls were threatened by the staff with trouble if they complained about boys in their bathroom, etc. & so on. All the stuff you know from Libs of Tiktok. It's real & it happens IRL.
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The idea that we're going to just man up & re-shore leading-edge chipmaking is a fairy tale. The problems that got us here are all part of the larger off-shoring of US manufacturing over the last 30yrs, & will not be solved by a few tariffs & some billions for Intel.
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The anniversary of the weirdest, most outlier mass shooting in US history. I don't have time for a comprehensive thread, but a few thoughts on this shooting and the gun control wars.
On this day in 2017, a gunman opened fire from a room at the Mandalay Bay casino hotel in Las Vegas on a crowd of 22,000 country music fans at a concert below, leaving 58 people dead in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
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The spectacle of public health authorities defending both the lockdowns AND the protests because "science" is just a catastrophe on every level. I cannot get over it. Good luck convincing anyone to vaccinate their kids. Good luck with that whole global warming issue. Disaster.
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The school pushed all this craziness on the staff and students because they were terrified of a lawsuit. Not because was any buy-in on these issues -- there was not -- but out of sheer terror of being sued. The activists have sowed bullying, & they're reaping at the ballot box.
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If you hate Disney, the #1 thing you can do at the ballot box is support copyright reform. The old Creative Commons "Founder's Copyright" was a good idea, & it should (once again) be the law of the land.
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They missed a super important one: when you're in public and you tell someone "excuse me" it means "GTFO of my way".
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Anyway, back to the incident truck. I had a chat with the kids right then & there about this issue. We had planned to wait to discuss this, but our hand was (rudely) forced. This is how I described my chat with the girls to a mailing list I was on at the time:
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Hi, former professional prepper here who has spent years gaming this out:. The answer to your question is, "yes." . Have you actually never seen cellphone footage of gunfights from Lebanon, Mexico, Syria, etc.?.
Leaving aside the rest of the craziness, the bitcoin thing gets me. So we're going to descend into Mad Maxish chaos, living off stored food and defending ourselves with personal guns — and also have ready access to the internet?
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Apparently her class had read "I Am Jazz," over even the teacher's objection & without the parents being notified or informed in any way. One of her classmates was going to be transitioning MtF, & his parents had strong-armed the school into having this book read to the class.
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This is going viral on the left side of my feed, and it's just a completely alternate universe where the #1 rule is to not actually believe what people are telling you every time they open their mouths, but rather to make up cartoon supervillain motives & believe that instead.
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If one party's position is, "any discussion of this issue that takes place on terms that I don't like is literal violence," then they've ruled out all dialogue. What is left if there's no dialogue, then? How do we resolve bitter, existential conflicts without using our words?.
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No it won’t ever be properly recorded because the previous round of exactly this mix — the occult + drugs + sex + madness — that gave birth to rocketry and the semiconductor and the personal computer has never been given proper attention.
I wonder if there will ever be a journalist ballsy and talented enough to discover and report the full story of Leverage, the Zizians, MIRI, et al. Here is this subculture that is entangled with the most profitable industry in the world from its origins, whose ideas have.
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I immediately called it the moment I saw that list on my feed.
r/WhitePeopleTwitter is now calling for the public execution of the DOGE software developers.
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I have been on more than one secret lefty list going back to the 2010's, and I am now in more than one "new right" GC. And the caliber of the discussion on latter is so far above the caliber of discussion on the former, it's shocking.
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No parents were informed of this foolishness either before or afterwards. The school had brought in consultants on the matter - a self-identified transbian from a local nonprofit who gave what I later found out was a weird/uncomfortable workshop to the staff - w/ no parent input.
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I felt like the Taibbi revelations were important & useful, but not in as much of a smoking-gun way as some others were trying to make them out to be. But this? This is a mushroom cloud IMO.
3. Take, for example, Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) who argued that Covid lockdowns would harm children. Twitter secretly placed him on a “Trends Blacklist,” which prevented his tweets from trending.
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@matthewstoller We bought Swift tickets, & it was the first time in my life I have used Ticketmaster (not a big concert person). From a software perspective, the experience was so baffling & user-hostile that it just reeked of monopoly. Clearly they've no competition or they'd be done for.
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So what do they do? Well, they have nothing left to lose. Absolutely nothing. It's YOLO time. So they will what they are good at: we are about to see a wave of letters to the editor, open letters, petitions, etc. from the most impressive names calling for military intervention.
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From the Gemini paper. It’s crystal clear that everything we’re seeing from this model was by design. I mean, look at this. The Bard version does what you ask, whereas the Gemini version refuses then moralizes at you.
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I've understated it here. It would be like if the MS IG team took a pic of an actual lead infrastructure engineer in charge of all Azure datacenters in North America, & the dude had his laptop upside down typing on the screen & staring at the keys. You'd immediately short MSFT.
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It’s not just the guns, of course. EU is also staring down the barrel of food & energy shocks as a result of this war. All that at a time when they’re diverting funds from the welfare state into defense in a way that hasn’t happened since WW2. The combo is pretty dystopian.
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Whatever social unrest they’re in for as a result of mass migration, food, & energy will get mixed in with this massive flood of totally unaccounted for arms. Probably hard for us in the US to grasp how grim that picture is.
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We need a complete & total reboot of all US industrial policy, with chipmaking as one part of that bigger effort. But even if we can get it together to do this, the path to that goes through a long period when CCP has root on our domestic systems & steals or sabotages stuff.
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It seems we've increased the total cognitive overhead of motherhood without doing the same for fatherhood, & I wonder if it's somehow due to modern connectivity greatly expanding the size of the graph that women use to send & receive signals about norms & expectations.
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Turns out the answer was, "about 8 weeks."
AI "voice cloning" technology used to fake a kidnapping. In this case, the mother was able to separately confirm her daughter was ok before paying any ransom.
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Oh wow this is a plot twist. I totally did not see this coming. What a completely unexpected turn for an essay diagnosing the problem with literally any institution, trend, idea, aesthetic, etc. in 2021.
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@lwoodhouse Yeah totally, man. Noted white woman Harriet Tubman has a lot of great quotes on this topic.
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The president just told everyone in NY, NJ, & CT to bug out immediately. It's going to be chaos, & it's going to spread COVID across the country. This is exactly what happened in Hubei & Milan, & now it will happen here. Unbelievable. Someone take his phone away.
I am giving consideration to a QUARANTINE of developing “hot spots”, New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. A decision will be made, one way or another, shortly.
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I really do think in the coming week this is going to be a big deal. There will be open calls from people who very serious people, respected, long careers, saying the military must step in and arrest Musk & depose Trump.
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You: Abolish grocery stores. Me: Maybe we could just reform them? Make them more sustainable & healthy?. You: No , get rid of them & let other institutions, like CSA, Farmers Markets, & local butchers take that work. Me: Ok but what if I need milk on short notice?. .
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I dunno. It's just the saddest, most low-agency set of behaviors, and on such a mass scale. Just a flood of this stuff. At least the 4B ppl have some kind of plan & are actually trying to do something they haven't already been doing for years.
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I gotta say, I'm REALLY against this if there is no bankruptcy option for these loans (& there isn't). Give ppl the option of bankruptcy on these loans, THEN we can get gangster about collections. But to do this to loans you can't declare bankruptcy from is playing w/ fire.
US Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said: “The government can and will collect defaulted federal student loan debt by withholding tax refunds, federal pensions, and even their wages.”
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I LOLed. None of the PH experts I tangled b/c they were telling the public not to wear masks apologized. They all quietly pivoted. Same w/ the outrage at border controls. I have yet to see any acknowledgment of failure of any kind. Sorry your field is debauched worse than Econ.
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Suggesting the Biden pardons are justified b/c Trump is going to maliciously & baselessly prosecute these ppl (Biden family, Fauci, etc) is a direct admission that you think the justice system is 100% fake/rigged. Think about it. If you believed they're innocent & the justice.
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Re: debanking: I lurk in a large but FB group that has gone hard left & done purges over the years (I’ve not left a like or comment in yrs to avoid the commissars), & #1 hot topic is how all women must find a man who will be on a joint bank account b/c Trump will debank women.
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@CartoonsHateHer The way you've phrased this is everything that's wrong with the Dem approach. I know you really believe that white men want someone to appeal to them directly "as a white man" but we don't. If you try to appeal to me like "hey, white man" I'm going to assume you're some kind of.
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I've worked there, so I know something about this, & I imagine many or most of the MAGA right would actually go UAE-style labor mobility if the whole, entire system were really a possibility -- but you won't understand what I mean from this excerpt. What I mean is this: You can.
The UAE as a capitalist, open borders utopia. Americans could live like gods if not for small minded nationalism.
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Where it goes from there, I don't know. But the TL is about to get NUTS. This stuff from reddit & bsky is just the vanguard of what's next. We're going to see calls from the very top echelons for the security state to step in & do the thing on the grounds that we're in a crisis.
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You literally can't talk about this anywhere, even in a semi-private venue, with people who disagree without it descending into some kind of screaming match. I'm basically resigned to some kind of violence at some point around these things. Hard to see a way forward.
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Dan Simmons predicted Twitter way back in 1989. The loss of memory & attention, the all-consuming obsession w/ politics, the need to offer an opinion on everything no matter how picayune, the phone-induced zombification -- all of it.
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This, to me, is the main argument against, "the real fatality rate is less than 1%, so within the same order of magnitude as a bad flu season.". I just can't imagine locking down close to half a billion people & wrecking your economy for something that's not a very serious threat.
Breaking: Guangzhou City (population: 14 M) locked down. All residential blocks be isolated from each other. So far around 400 million people locked down in #China to contain #coronavirus. #coronavirusOutbreak Original Chinese official report:.
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The sort of coda to all this, at least for me, is that there really is no venue for either public or private dialogue about this issue that is not totally broken. The aforementioned mailing list where I posted that? I left b/c I was threatened & censored for discussing this topic.
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1-3 are undeniably present in some public schools now. It’s literally adults taking about sexual topics with kids & the parents aren’t in the loop. So if you plan to die in the hill of “yeah but cmon #4 isn’t happening!” then yeah you can do that but yikes?.
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This is a real, legit human tragedy just like the fire, & tho it's unpopular among many I know I do feel bad for them & their families. They've dedicated their lives to doing what they thought was right -- they just have a different idea of that right than me in some key ways.
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I’m just having a moment here because the same people who’ve been telling me, a gun nut, for years that small arms are useless because it’s impossible for an insurgency to resist a modern military are suddenly confident that a Ukrainian insurgency will make Ukraine unconquerable.
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Guy: What are you in for?. Me: I refused to turn on my AR glasses & see the barista as an anime fox otherkin spirit. Her glasses flagged that my filters were off. Guy: They arrested you for that?. Me: No. They unbanked me for it. Then I got arrested for stealing food.
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This is the same cohort of people who have been preaching the virtues of self-care & connection for how many years. So you did a bunch of self-care & kept the flame of hope alive w/ your art & cultivated community, yet it's all getting worse for you. so your answer is keep.
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I am deeply worried about stuff I'm seeing surfaced on my OSINT feeds from China, & stuff I'm seeing & hearing from farm- and ag-related accounts in the US & Europe. I'm not signal boosting this stuff mainly b/c I have apocalypse fatigue, but I am really concerned.
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It’s 2022: “LGB” now stands for “Let’s Go Brandon,” & the acronym takes the same culture war path as the “ok”sign. Every expansion of the acronym also becomes toxic as they’re all adopted by trolls, and orgs rush to change names. By the 2023, the 🏳️🌈 is a “hate symbol” per ADL.
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