Right but the bubble of rightness you speak of is usually only assumed to include the company staff. Really powerful CEOs have their board inside the bubble too, or even public investors. But Elon thinks the customers work for him too. That’s really beyond the pale.

Musk sheepishly suggested that he didn’t mean “advertisers as a whole.”

“Advertisers have a right to appear next to content that they find compatible with their brands,” he told ad giant WPP CEO Mark Read during an interview on Wednesday. “What is not cool is insisting that there can be no content that they disagree with on the platform.”

How is that “not cool?” I don’t understand how he can possibly object to a company spending their advertising dollars wherever they damn well choose to. He repeatedly makes it clear that he feels entitled to their budgets. There is zero basis for that. I truly cannot fathom how he can be so dense about this.

A fair perspective.

Humans aren’t great at reliably knowing truth from fiction too

You’re exactly right. There is a similar debate about automated cars. A lot of people want them off the roads until they are perfect, when the bar should be “until they are safer than humans,” and human drivers are fucking awful.

Perhaps for AI the standard should be “more reliable than social media for finding answers” and we all know social media is fucking awful.

You don’t want to be sending current up into the grid while workers are repairing it during a power outage. If you just plug some shit into your bedroom outlet, that will happen. You need to disconnect your house from the mains. Whole house generators are old news, but no, your bedroom wall plug isn’t rated to power your whole house, and no, you aren’t just electrifying your own wiring if you try to do so. Whole house generators aren’t hard but they aren’t this easy. And you should be suspicious at how magically simple it sounds to just plug a dynamo into your wall to power everything. It’s the kind of thing we would love to be true because it’s so elegant but there’s a little more to it.

I don’t hate everything about it but this is the most idiotic thing to start a fundraiser for.

I’m so glad you invented metalbending

Sigh. So many things in the world are like this. It’s not a bad idea, in theory, to favor more recent pages in search results. Finding 4 year old information is often not what you want. But in practice, when everyone knows this bias exists, they just fiddle with their pages daily to try to fool the algorithm. It must be aggravating to be Google, because as smart as they are, the entire world is engaged in an unending and ruthless quest to game their results for personal gain.

Job sites make money when you get a job. Companies pay a lot to get staffing vacancies filled. Recruiters and agencies cost a lot, so an online job board can literally get thousands of dollars sometimes for helping g facilitate a hire. This is how it should be.

But with dating sites, it does not work this way. There is no deep-pocketed business customer willing to pay a lot for making a match. Just two people with subscriptions, and that’s the company’s entire revenue.

I highly doubt that dating sites consciously try to prevent you from finding a mate because this will earn them more money. But I have to admit that the incentive structure is unhealthy.

Let’s compare a couple of points of view:

1. “I don’t feel safe walking through the middle of these protests!” - bad faith assholes trying to make the protests antisemitic. Of course, he could just not walk right through them.

2. “…” —> dead silence of a slaughtered Palestinian child whose entire apartment building fell on her in her sleep.

One of these points of view has a voice right now, because one of these actors is alive right now.

I’m in CA and while state taxes exist, they are a really small part of the taxes I pay. It’s such a small amount, i can’t imagine anyone moving to motherfucking Texass to escape them. Unless they already want to go.

Oh man I’ll never forget the plane trip I took where I was sitting next to a young couple and the girl was showing the guy Andrew Tate videos and telling him to be more like Tate. “You know how you’re always complaining like a bitch? Well watch this…” and then she played a video of Andrew Tate talking about how real men are stoic because no one wants to hear about their damn feelings. I was really hurting for this guy but he calmly told her she was an idiot and said Andrew Tate could fuck off.

Can I get the list of things that are in my smartphone because we asked for them?

There will be a rush of US startups to replace it, and they will all be stage 1 enshittification, so they might actually be good for a while, like TikTok once was.

We are blessed with a small but gorgeous local library that looks like a Frank Lloyd Wright creation, full of natural light. The stacks are lovingly curated and the computer services are great. Wonderful garden out front, friendly staff inside, and modern equipment that makes checkout a breeze. We can reserve books online or check if they are in, etc.

Anyway, after school, our kid walks to the end of the block with her friends and goes into the library. From there, we pick her up. That place is jumping in the afternoons, let me tell you. All the local regulars and all the kids just out of school: littles and teenagers. It’s busy and alive but not noisy (nor are they oppressive assholes about keeping silence). It’s a moment of civic joy to walk in there and get my daughter.

I say his kidneys could be very valuable.

Unenforced is a little different than unenforceable.

Society is unfortunately still functioning where I live.

I once plucked up my courage to ask a girl if she would like to go see a particular show with me the following night. She said “I would, but I am already doing something tomorrow.”

I was totally unprepared for this answer and just heard “no.” She was probably a little surprised to be asked out suddenly, and didn’t take the initiative to suggest another day.

We didn’t go out. That was that. Huge mistake by me. So my advice is: be open to complications in her answer. And listen closely. If she says “I have plans.” that’s a polite decline. If she literally says “I would like to go, but I have plans,” that’s quite different.

It’s hard to hear the differences and react smoothly if you’re nervous about asking, like I was. Best of luck!

I am highly expressive and have little filter. I think my upbringing allowed this or even encouraged it. The meta message in every movie I ever watched as a kid was “if you just look deep inside yourself and bring out the essence of what’s there, you can do / win / be anything!” I’m also male, and my family laughed a lot and yelled a lot and angered easily and forgave easily. As a result, I’m quite outspoken and some find me bombastic or overbearing.

It’s quite hard to put this genie back in the bottle once you’re an adult. If you’re like this and wondering how other people contain it, the likelihood is that they have been conditioned to contain it their entire lives. In some cases longer than that: In Chinese culture, for example, no one has is permitted to be emotionally demonstrative and this has been the norm for thousands of years. It might even have been selected for genetically over time: outspoken peasants executed, expressive daughters disowned…

I will say this though. As you grow older your vision and hearing get worse and your feelings become less sensitive. I can hold a hot object that my kids can’t even touch with one finger. Emotionally, it’s a bit the same. Reactions come slower, and are not as strong. And the muscles in the face don’t react as much, and the heart is less inclined to engage in a full flameout over something trivial. So it gets easier.

If you have no bicycle safe routes then sadly you should not be biking. Taking it onto the sidewalk not only endangers you in all the ways described in this thread, it also endangers pedestrians. Someone said they wouldn’t care about getting hit by a car coming out of a driveway, because that’s slower than a car on the street. Fine. But if I step out from my the huge bush my neighbor keeps on the boundary of our driveways, onto the sidewalk, and you crash your bike into me I’m going to feed it to you.