canada has come up several times in the last several days and based on my small sample size, americans have no idea that the US government has been unsubtly threatening CA with annexation. these are not politically unconcerned or right wing people either
this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2025
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for a moment there i thought i'd been uninformed about the US threatening to annex California
The usa already tried to flood California, which might cause some food problems in the future.
A lot of the reporting is using kids gloves instead of calling out the thinly veiled threats (god our media sucks), but anyone who can connect dots and read the tariffs + greenland + canada 51st state + panama + gulf of mexico news should be able to see Trump's hawkish expansionist dreams pretty easily.
Is this a matter of not following the news, poor critical thinking, or just so much stuff hitting the fan that it's hard to keep up?
On the kid gloves, my bank keeps sending me updates on the state of the world economy and general big picture investment advice (and explaining their own actions). And between a lot of talk on AI, I saw they posted "we are going to take our profits on the usa investments, despite the tarifs being off the table". Which was, esp the first half, an interesting way to suggest to readers that they are pulling a lot of money out of the US and others might be wise to also do so. (Not that they would literally say the latter as 'not financial advice' etc). But yes worrying.
looks like our sneer comrade DisneylandDiplomat (disney6830 on discord), who did the Thinkateria rationalist-parody blog, died in Oct 2022. From Reddit Sneerclub:
Hello, I am writing since I saw this sub is a bit active again. I am wondering if anyone remembers the blog “thinkateria” or the reddit user DisneylandDiplomat who often posted links to promote it here. he was my little brother and he killed himself in October of 2022, after deleting the blog, and I only saw his reddit activity afterwards. I think it was satirical writing making fun of these other bloggers discussed here. He was very private and this sub is really the only insight into his state of mind at that time that I have. There’s no point to this post except I feel a need to share that he is gone and this is the only place I know he had any connections with. It must have been hard for everyone who talked about this so early on.
Wow that sucks, doubt his fam will read this but still condolences.
from a discord. musk did not actually marry grimes, but apart from that my aplogies for mr beaning the whole america
Fingers crossed that the next domino is “nuclear holocaust due to particularly bad day on social media”
I randomly remembered crying wolf and decided to make that everybodies problem
IIRC this was the post that made Daniel Harper start his nazi-tracking podcast I Don't Speak German
Speaking of non-german speakers, I hope poptart is doing alright. Haven't heard anything of him since the blackout.
I had forgotten about that one. Thanks, I hate it.
I was already largely out of step with the Rats at this point, and I definitely hadn't read it with the new "actually I feel like I was right about this one, neener neener" header. What strikes me now is the attitude here. Like, it takes a staggering degree of reflexive contrarianism to frame this as "see Trump isn't that racist" instead of "hey look how fast the rest of the political establishment embraced this overt racism. Maybe we should have listened when everyone tries to tell us how racist the political establishment was underneath the respectable and reasonable public face". Just because the wolves have taken off the wool suits now doesn't mean they weren't wolves the whole fucking time.
The header was written somewhere during the first Trump admin iirc. But for some reason he didnt add a year. (For people who worry a lot about epistemics and stuff like that another dumb move, imagine people reading that now and thinking he added that last year, it all aged a bit badly). Funny how every time he adds a header he makes it worse. See also his 'i don't believe a lot of this anymore' header above the anti nrx post (which has a year).
That was literally the inflection point on my path to sneerclub. I had started to break from less wrong before, but I hadn't reached the tipping point of saying it was all bs. And for ssc and Scott in particular I had managed to overlook the real message buried in thousands of words of equivocating and bad analogies and bad research in his earlier posts. But "you are still crying wolf" made me finally question what Scott's real intent was.
Even if it wasn't the seed of doubt about his real intentions, it also reveals how out of touch he is in a way (esp now 8 years later), and just how silly some LW stuff is. Like how they all want to be super-predictors, and try to keep notes on how good their prediction etc are, but how little all these other predictions matter when you make a mistake like this. "All this stuff about how [trump] is “the candidate of the KKK” and “the vanguard of a new white supremacist movement” is made up." Also note that he [Scott/Trump/The LGBT person who wrote that text on the flag] didn't notice that the lgbt flag was upside down.
I can't find the exact quote because google has decayed into hot garbage juice, but there's a line in Gideon the Ninth where Harrow asks Gideon how she thinks necromancy works exactly, and Gideon says something like, "I don't know, maybe you think about bones really hard until something happens?"
That's how LW people think actual intelligence works.
Well this is the final straw. Guess I'll keep my current iPhone while it still works (unless they ruin iOS too much before that)... but then, what? I don't want a Google thing either :(
So I guess it'll have to be some Android fork. GrapheneOS or so? But even that involves giving money to Google for a Pixel phone... there's just no good option.
Or am I overlooking something? I don't need many features or apps on a phone -- I don't really like today's smartphones anyway. Mostly I just need the basic features to work reliably. (Context: my last attempt at a non-Android Linux phone was the original Jolla phone, over 10 years ago, and that has left me a little cautious with the idea of a Linux phone, due to the many bugs with basics like "working mobile data" or "working GPS in a navigation app"...)
I have been looking into Fairphone for work. My focus for that is mostly long lasting, repairable, hardware. I want a minimum of friction with switching the users, so it would be Android for us, but I think there are open non-Google options.
Plus 1 for GrapheneOS, has been pretty solid so far. Also, it seems that police imaging software doesn't work on it yet!
Graphene is very nice, but you should be aware that:
- the only supported hardware at present are pixel phones by google who are not the world’s most ethical company
- google are implementing security policies on their devices that cannot be implemented on grapheneos and will prevent certain apps (notably banking ones) from working
A) True, though I got an older model on sale. That said, it is a tradeoff. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism.
B) I'm an adhd caveman who came from a LightPhone II. It helps to have an appetite for mild annoyance when stepping outside the regular tech ecosystems.
Edit: Apologies for sounding defensive, wanted to share my personal experience and ended up simping for software. @rook is 100% right that options are slim and fiddly!
Thanks for the infos everyone!
I can live with mild annoyance, if it allows me to sufficiently separate things from Google. Banking apps and such could indeed be a pain point, but I could just put them on another device (e.g. old iPad, which I'm never really using anyway, so i could make it a special purpose device for "those few shitty apps that the world requires me to have"), since I never need that on the go on my phone anyway.
google are implementing security policies on their devices that cannot be implemented on grapheneos and will prevent certain apps (notably banking ones) from working
That is concerning. Tbh, banking apps are probably the main reason I use a smartphone at all, because there's no way anymore, at least where I live, to get a TAN without their stupid apps since they have all deprecated SMS TAN. Some still sell you physical token generators for ridiculous prices, but that's going away, too.
And on the main topic of this thread: can Xwitter in general just fucking die already?
Regarding banking apps. A relative bought a Huawei just as they were pushed out of the western market and it turned out that it was shipped with a Android fork with a Huawei store. Most things worked fine, but banking apps was a problem because they could only be installed through Google Play or App Store.
The solution I found for her was installing a virtual Android environment with Google Play. So when banking apps are needed she opens the virtual environment.
I don't know if this solution will continue working, but it works for now. Guess I will find out.
I saw a toot recently showing a number of methods to deal with the general casual shit (such as checking whether something was installed from play store, etc). don't know if I stored the link, but might be worth a look around re the latter bits
(e: to be clear, not saying you're wrong for indicating those issues (which are entirely valid concerns), and all of this very much depends on whether user wants to even screw around with stuff. just mean to point out that there are definitely some workarounds and options kicking around, although personally nfi how extensive they solve)
The thing that currently cannot be worked around is the “play integrity api”, but relatively few applications make use of it yet.
It is a terrible security measure (because it give the impression to app developers that a 5+ year old android installation that’s never had a patch is more secure than an up-to-date graphene install) so there’s a chance that it might be improved in future, but it is currently a looming problem.
ah yeah, I've heard of play integrity. that shit should burn.
the scott alexander fanclub on reddit is especially unhinged lately. Some choice picks, beginning gently with a sneer:
Anyone who says there is a 0% chance of a fried egg being sentient is overconfident. Nobody knows what causes consciousness. We have no way of detecting it & we can barely agree on a definition. So we should be less than 100% certain about anything to do with consciousness and fried eggs.
moving on,
For me, I currently believe that the way forward is gathering my Dunbar community of ~150 values-aligned people and dropping out together to live in intentional community, generally off-the-grid, interacting with technology only as a tool (no news/algorithms/push notifications), close enough to a major city to visit friends but far enough away to isolate ourselves when we want to.
We then push forward into an unknown world, supporting each other, doing enough trade and consulting with the outside world to ensure a positive trade surplus for the collective and distributing the profits among us to sustain the community.
Yes, that is a response to AI despair. In a "non-doomer thread". Because of course.
but what takes the cake is the regularly scheduled IQ thread, a beautiful dumpster fire which burns especially bright on this day. Yet one specimen soars above the din:
The average should recognize and accept their inferiority and make peace with the fact that they will live and die a mediocre life. They should stop trying to interfere in the affairs of their betters and content themselves with their own garden, which can provide enough happiness for them until the end of their life if properly cultivated.
Further study of the user's excreta clarifies that they are:
- sincere
- definitely not racist
warning: HEAVY PSYCHIC DAMAGE and I really hope the spoiler block functions correctly on your end
spoiler
[sic] we should treat all low human capital like zoo animals regardless of skin colour [\sic]
We then push forward into an unknown world, supporting each other, doing enough trade and consulting with the outside world to ensure a positive trade surplus for the collective and distributing the profits among us to sustain the community.
That's just a commune. Like my brother in Christ I think you're just talking about communism.
They have leveled up from the socialism of fools to the communism of dipshits.
i think they just want to live in a cult compound
I think it's quite funny that they talk about distributing the profits. these guys are all far right creeps. realistically the only thing they're going to be distributing is calories to the nearby bears
For me, I currently believe that the way forward is gathering my Dunbar community of ~150 values-aligned people and dropping out together to live in intentional community
Years ago (sadly I forgot to take a acreenshot, as the posts were silently removed) there was somebody recruiting for something like this on themotte. Something like "you sound like a good match for our homesteading group, check out our blood and soil(*) voat". Which was a pretty bad sign (wonder how much of that shit was done via dms).
*: for the few who do not know, this is one of those undeniable neo-nazi terms.
E: And the universe aligned and reminded me of this tweet
Yep that's a brickin
if a fried egg cannot code, then how come [piece of software you dislike] exists?
A fried egg cannot code
Prove it. It is more likely it actually can code, but refuses to do so. Perhaps fried eggs have a genetic predisposition to vore?
E: other comment there:
We can't be 100% sure of anything
Are you sure about that?
When I asked Claude if it’s sentient
AAAAAa (it gets even worse when they are gods in the gapping sentience).
in the slatestar club. straight up 'sleight of mouthing it'. and by 'it', haha, well. let's justr say. My peanits.
couldn't find if this has featured here before, so linking for others as I figure a few of you are likely to appreciate: destroy AI
bonus, learned about asrg and an art piece that goes immensely hard
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