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  • Conspiracies that require absolute lock tight secrecy to function at a basic level aren't generally tenable to be sustained for longer than a handful of years at a time at most. Somebody always fucks up or basically was just lucky nobody checked for awhile. The nessesity of any large scale collaboration creates inefficiencies and potential error points in the system. Even the best of the best spy agencies fuck up and get caught rather routinely, particularly when operating on their home soil. A lot of investigative journalists accidentally trip over stuff all the time but have good faith arrangements (or in some places laws) to not disclose the active manoeuvres of the state to the public.

    It's just really hard for humans in general to accept that events that effected them or things they care about very deeply personally weren't somehow also grand in design. Grocking sometimes it really is just random chance or stupid mishandling is not something we're well wired to handle. Stories of all powerful conspiracies masterminding the world scratch that itch... But logistically speaking the conspiracy aspect is completely unnecessary. If someone is trying to blame a nebulous bogeymen who exists as nameless, numberless ultimately wealthy but also totally off the books super spies.... chances are they are just trying to capitalize on making you feel flattered, smart and empowered by something "only you are smart enough to believe" - while feeding you bullshit they can personally profit from in some way with you none the wiser.

  • Related to the current election, that OG conservatives, or Reagan and Bush conservatives (referring to George H. W. Bush) are the same thing as MAGA conservatives.

    The difference is, the old guard blithely preserved the kind of policies that shredded social safety nets and business regulations in favor of tax cuts, leading to precarity and the rise of paranoia that led to the Trump takeover in 2015.

    The OGs just wish they had another mile or two of altitude to plummet, and are freaked out about the ground looming so close and rushing so fast. But they will still keep the same policies, and will still lay a ground of Ayn Randian, Reagan-worshiping Mitt Romney / Jeb Bush / Ted Cruz candidates until some other charismatic narcissist Mussolini-wanabe rushes in and plucks the whole party from their hands again. And they'll get all butt-smoochy with the new guy like Lindsey Graham did with Trump (after predicting how this loose cannon will end the Republican party).

    They didn't just buy the ticket to ride. They bought stocks in the railroad line, and insisted that fascism-backed one-party autocracy was the destination. They knew it since Reagan. By George W. Bush it was showing serious signs even before the PATRIOT act.

    So when people freak out today because we're on the brink of losing our democracy, I have to wonder where they've been the last two decades. How is it after George W. Bush, and torture and Iraq and the pig lagoons and Abstinence-Only sex ed, did you think another Republican president was a good thing? I know Clinton was scary, but did you take even one look at Trump?

  • Spelling, punctuation, and the use of contractions. The part that really sells the irritation factor is when they try to say they’re correct by making up some definition for what they said or claiming “common usage”. I guess it’s because people don’t really read much anymore. Reading someone else’s words that have been carefully edited, corrected into good sentence structure, and spellchecked can really help get it your own head.

    They place the burden on the reader to decipher their made-up vocabulary. It really isn’t too awful, it’s just that people have to have read the correct way something is used yet insist on not changing.

  • That we'd all be better off if we accepted our own fallibility. That we are not perfect little robots, and as a result more tolerance and forgiveness in the world is necessary.

  • We have figured out how to run everything, absolutely everything, in the 1950s.

    The original computer "AI" craze was started by "cybernetic systems" and for good reason. You probably only know of the bastardizations of "cyber-" that don't have anything in common with the original concept.

    The original concept goes like this:

    1. set a goal
    2. perform an action
    3. measure how much impact that had, did it get you closer to your goal or not?
    4. If you are at your goal, you're done,
    5. otherwise adjust your actions, got to 2. (This is "feedback" and the reason that word is now so common. People at the time knew)

    The faster you go through the loop, the faster you will figure out what works.

    You can measure anything you want, as vague is you want. Happiness, money, productivity. It's the way democracy is designed to work, in which case the feedback is vague and the cycle time is measured in years. It runs your thermostats, in your home, big national power grid power plants. It's how autopilots autopilot.

    The idea that "nobody could have predicted..." or "nobody responsible" is a myth. We have the science. We know how it works.

    Every failure we still experience is a failure we allow to happen. Because of profit, politics, or whatever.

    Didn't catch something "going on for years", maybe someone should check more often. "Crazy single individual causing a tragedy"? No, that's a person at risk, probably with social or mental problems you didn't take care of before, didn't flag, and didn't stop in time.

    "Nobody wants to work on our open source project" Really, how is your onboarding? Do people take a look at the docs/culture and run away screaming? Yeah?

596 comments