“Data, stop. Data. Stop. Data, SHUT UP!”

It’s Google devouring Google Search!

Hi Tom,

I was just taking a look at your resume, and your experience at Deceased really caught my eye! I’m especially interested in your knowledge of being missed by friends and family. Did you know that complications from heart surgery is in high demand right now?

I’m a head hunter looking for dynamic individuals who are interested in positions at an exciting new startup, and I think you’d be a perfect fit!

I hope we get a chance to chat soon!

This is sort of implicitly true. You can’t get people’s money if they can’t figure out how to use your product/service.

At the same time… People are pretty dumb.

I think the fans & press deserve equal blame for the initial hype. At some point I saw a supercut of things Sean Murray said, then the resulting headlines and Reddit posts.

In an interview, the journalist asks: “Will you be able to play with your friends in a shared universe?” The answer: “Well…we hope that eventually there will be at least some multiplayer functionality, though maybe not on day one…like maybe you could explore one another’s planets or share pictures or something.”

Headline: “NO MANS SKY WILL LAUNCH WITH MULTIPLAYER!”

Reddit comments: “I’m already forming a guild, we’re going to play as bounty hunters chasing down other players who are pirates in glorious multiplayer space battles!!”

There were tons of examples of that. Journalists would poke and prod for a soundbite, take it out of context and exaggerate it, and the community would just go batshit with their expectations.

Substitute “convince by indirect and non-confrontational means” for “trick”, and you’re saying the same thing as the original post. Makes for a shit joke though.

A while back, one of the image generation AIs (midjourney?) caught flack because the majority of the images it generated only contained white people. Like…over 90% of all images. And worse, if you asked for a “pretty girl” it generated uniformly white girls, but if you asked for an “ugly girl” you got a more racially-diverse sample. Wince.

But then there reaction was to just literally tack “…but diverse!” on the end of prompts or something. They literally just inserted stuff into the text of the prompt. This solved the immediate problem, and the resulting images were definitely more diverse…but it led straight to the sort of problems that Google is running into now.

This has nothing to do with net neutrality. Google is not an ISP. With or without net neutrality, Google could fuck with YouTube users.

This take is exhausting. It’s like the political version of narcissism: here’s how everything that happens in the world is actually a conspiracy against me!

If Musk was a plant to sabotage Twitter on the behalf of the 1%, why would he have done it slowly with a series of increasingly bad decisions that caused a mass migration to distributed open-source platforms? Why not just flip the switch and kill it in one go? Or: why not start a program of bots to talk about how awesome Teslas are, and make Trump seem cool, while shadow-censoring criticism of Musk’s friend’s companies or governments?

You think They are competent and dastardly enough to plan a takeover of Twitter, but then too bumbling to make better use of it than slowly discrediting it with a series of half-baked ideas from a deranged and detestable front man?