All I know is that Kagi triggered my scam alarms from the start, and moving into the browser market just made them ring even louder.

Intelligence is a measure of reasoning ability. LLMs do not reason at all, and therefore cannot be categorized in terms of intelligence at all.

LLMs have been engineered such that they can generally produce content that bears a resemblance to products of reason, but the process by which that’s accomplished is a purely statistical one with zero awareness of the ideas communicated by the words they generate and therefore is not and cannot be reason. Reason is and will remain impossible at least until an AI possesses an understanding of the ideas represented by the words it generates.

And here we have the root cause of every other problem that plagues the US - the entire nation, socially, politically and even psychologically, has been warped towards the sole purpose of pouring as much wealth as possible into the pockets of a relative few.

And I guarantee that billionaire Larry Ellison blithely believes that he’ll be exempt - that all of this surveillance will just be used against the little people. And he’s almost certainly right.

I think you have forums confused with microblogs.

I presume I’m supposed to care, but I dont, and I don’t know why anyone would.

So… Meta’s “plan” is to dodge responsibility?

Gee whiz… I sure never saw that coming…

Just be patient.

With all due respect, fuck the normies. The fediverse is better off without them.

People on every single relatively small forum ever in the history of the internet have gotten frustrated and angry when other people do that, because it’s spammy.

Do you not know the history of the term “spam?”

It’s from a Monty Python skit

That’s what the front page of a forum (or the inbox of an email account) looks like when someone “spams” it - like “spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, baked beans, spam, spam, spam and spam.”

If he’s trying to say “Biden wanted this but Trump already started it”

Which “he?”

Zuckerberg blames it exclusively and entirely on the Biden administration.

that tells me BOTH parties requested it. Hence, if you don’t like Biden because of this, you don’t want Trump either. And of course, vice versa. In short, this policy is not unique to either party or administration.

Exactly, but that’s explicitly not what Zuckerberg is saying. He’s saying that it was entirely and exclusively Biden, which is a lie.

Why did Zuckerberg choose now to make this announcement and publicly reveal the inside play?

There’s actually a tidbit that the author notes that points at the obvious reason for it.

In his letter to Congressional investigators, he flat-out said what everyone else has been saying for years now.

In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content…

The author then goes on to say though:

A few clarifications. The censorship began much earlier than that, from March 2020 at the very least if not earlier.

What’s significant about that? Trump was president then.

So Zuckerberg is rather obviously trying to pin entirely on the Biden administration a set of policies that were already in place under Trump.

To what end? Obviously to do the same thing he did in 2016 and 2020 - to overtly promote Trump.

This particular one certainly not coincidentally plays into the whole Republican narrative that the Democrats are oppressive and dishonest, which in turn is meant to provide a context for their intention to dispute the election results when Trump loses. Zuckerberg is simply doing his part to further that narrative.

Just the opposite. I’m the one who goes off to do something else at family gatherings because they just talk and talk and talk.

Though it’s not so much that they talk so much as that it’s just the same stuff over and over - alternately, my brother slavishly regurgitating right-wing techbro quasi-libertarian bullshit and my mom reciting in excruciating detail some anecdote that’s maybe vaguely related to the topic at hand and that she’s told countless times already, because it’s her go-to every time something in that vicinity comes up.

And what I wouldn’t give to know them less well…

Most similar to Advance Wars:

Final Fantasy Tactics Advance

Tactics Ogre: Knight of Lodis

Super Robot Taisen: Original Generation

Shining Force:Resurrection of the Dark Dragon

Just in general:

Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow

Summon Night: Swordcraft Story 1 and 2

Drill Dozer

Golden Sun 1 and 2

Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap

Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town

Guru Logic Champ

Metroid Fusion

Metroid Zero Mission

Medabots RPG

Klonoa: Empire of Dreams

Almost immediately after Vance got the nod, I hit on a description for the way he appeared to me. At the time, it was necessarily based on very little info, so mostly I posted it because I liked the imagery - I admittedly wasn’t sure how accurate it really was.

Imagine that life is a roleplaying game, and in every interaction, one chooses from a set of possible responses.

And imagine that each response is labeled, so there’s the kind response or the neutral response or the angry response or whatever.

It’s as if, in every situation, J.D. Vance chooses the asshole response.

It’s actually sort of surprising to me how accurate that has proven to be. .

Yes - that’s exactly what it is. Vichy Twitter is to historical Twitter as Vichy France was to historical France.

I stole it myself, so you’re welcome to it.

I have no idea who originated it, but from the first time I saw it, I haven’t used anything else. It just so perfectly sums it up.

Write enormous screeds about how literally insane it is that the world is being actively destroyed at the behest of and for the benefit of a wealthy, powerful and profoundly mentally ill few.

Play video games and work in the garden.

The first likely accomplishes nothing of any note - even if other people recognize it, part of the insanity is that the psychopaths in power have arranged things so that nobody can stop them.

The second doesn’t accomplish much of anything either, but they’re at least situations in which my efforts aren’t systematically undermined and exploited for the benefit of psychopaths. Instead of being rigged so that whatever I do benefits the ruling class, they’re situations in which I can actually make choices solely based on what I think will work best in a given situation and reap the rewards if I choose correctly.

So there are only two possibilities - either Vichy Twitter is such a poorly run site that it crashed on its own, or it’s such a poorly run site that it’s not prepared to deal with being DDOSed.

I don’t believe that my approval or anyone else’s is at all relevant.

My position is that there’s only one person who has the right to decide whether or not it’s acceptable to trade sex for money, and that’s the person entering into the trade. Assuming that all other contractual requirements are met - they’re of legal age and acting of their own free will and so on - it’s just as much their right to trade sex for money as to trade ditch digging or code writing or coffee brewing or meeting taking for money.

(edited for clarity)