The internet had always been full of those gun boner guys fantasizing about taking up arms against threats to freedom. Younger me had no clue they were the tyranny themselves.

Videos anywhere from 10 to 60 minutes at an anxiety inducing attention disorder riddled pace. Yet all the information can usually be boiled down to a 5 to 10 minute read. It makes no sense. But actually it does because these “infuencers” are modern day infomercial salesmen. The point is to keep you watching so eventually you’ll be persuaded to purchase product. Unfortunately I think probably anyone under maybe 25-30 has no clue wtf an infomercial is so the analogy is lost on those who could use it the most.

There’s a whole thing in sports psychology about what happens when you give kids millions of dollars. Not only that but they are the top in the world at what they do. They were raised to believe they are a special breed of human. It’s not just the top pros who get multi-million dollar contracts. It can happen to the kids who don’t even make it pro too. It mindfucks a person.

I’ve been saying for a long time this kind of thing happens in tech too. I grew up with a lot of guys who’ve made various levels of success in tech from average guy to multi-millionaires. It happens. They really do live in another reality. I don’t think it’s much different between the pro-sports bubble and the tech bubble. They live and breath tech. It’s their whole life. Replace tech with sport. Not much different.

One notable difference is that sports actually recognizes this phenomenon. It’s a known studied field of psychology. They make an effort to engage athletes in the community and stuff. Things that keep individuals grounded in reality.

I don’t think such things exists for tech. If anything they believe whatever latest antics they’re up to is what helps the community and helps themselves keep in touch with reality. Because what the world needs is one more world changing app, another bright idea for a startup that is totally making the world a better place and absolutely not strip mining human sanity for profit.

This happened in the earlier years of Android. Developers were FOSS until people helped them get the app to a polished state. Then close it and charge money. Make a big push to promote the paid app.

My family mellowed out a lot after the parents of the baby boomers died. The boomer generation gets a lot of flak online but for us it was the prior generations who were problematic.

There’s no going back anyways. I’ve tried making new accounts. It’s impossible to post anywhere.

The account vetting filters block me everywhere. Can’t post unless I’m a vetted poster. Can’t become vetted because I can’t post to begin with. I can’t be bothered to seek out and karma farm on random subreddits that aren’t a mess of filters.

Is there any politician that actually stands up to tech? It’s like a cheat code that not even Trump is immune to. Nobody wants to be politician who says no to those nerds who use “innovation” as a weapon. Except most of the tech industry is rather useless but everyone is too afraid to be accused of being tech illiterate. We’re not losing anything by saying no to the 10000th buzzword salad tech company making yet another useless widget.

It’s culture war to distract us from the class war.

I’m pretty sure it’s mutual. Republicans are happy they finally entered the 21st century. They don’t have to know anything. Now the magical modern machines are working for them.

I’m 99% certain Musk told Trump that he will use twitter algos to nudge targeted segments of the population to find those “11000 votes” he needs. Probably Zuck and Thiel did the same with Meta platforms and reddit respectively. Hence the final weeks of the campaign the republicans seems to stop caring at all. Just blow job a microphone it doesn’t matter. The tech bros had fixed the election already.

Just like 3D film and television. The VR stuff surfaces periodically with another iteration of the tech.

I don’t think it’s really uncomfortable to say but whatever.

There used to be a digital social contract that we were all stewarding a global information database. That was before the era of “inflluencers” and information arbitrage. In other words people deriving monetized content from other content. Why would anyone want to do the leg work for some random jerk to take all for personal gain.

The whole proposition is a negative spiral. The paradigm changed from stewardship to something shit. This scroll zombie thing or whatever. We have the few users who are the “creators”. Everyone else are consuming whatever is fed to them. It has discouraged people from thinking for themselves and maybe even adding something to the pot.

One thing I’ve noticed the git repo snipers. People will camp on forks looking at your work. If you don’t submit to upstream then someone else will copy your patch(es) and make a pull request.

Also more generally things I do that I don’t publish to posts/blogs is liable to be sniped. So might as well keep it to myself unless I’m will to go the full mile making a big show of staking ownership.

It’s ultimately about ad money. They haven’t cared it’s humans or bots either. They keep paying out either way. This predates long before the LLM era. It’s bizarre.

It’s pretty much a case of the POSIWID. The system is meant to be genuine human engagement. What the system does is artificial at every step. Turns out its purpose is to fabricate things for bots to engage with. And this is all propped up by people who for some reason pay to keep the system running.

Grim milestone and barely a peep about it in popular discourse. Everyone needs to prepare personally for the consequences.

For one thing I’m not expecting food prices to level off for the rest of my life. Everything’s just going to get more scarce and expensive. Is it possible common foods we enjoy now we may never have again at some point?

On a lighter note. I got a new winter jacket in 2019. Between covid and the rapid decline of cold winters I’ve barely worn it.