@crooksandliars "Thinking", for authoritarians, means "finding new and more plausible ways to protect your propaganda from the enemy's evidence".
In this paper I will
I don't necessarily view Hank Green as a high-quality information source, but I found his recent video about Anthropic's new "Mythos" LLM to be, well, concerning.
Does anyone have any good sources that can back up Anthropic's claims, or is this just more "AI is going to take over the world" style hype?
...because, as we all know, English operates by consistent rules that must be used at all times, or else sentences will not compile properly. ^.^
@AnnaAnthro Odd that there's no mention of Zenni (which, last I heard, still sells prescription glasses at a reasonable price).
My impression, entirely from outside, is that these branches of Christianity have been taken over by authoritarian powermongers, enabled by flocks raised in authoritarian followership who don't feel safe thinking for themselves because they might get punished for saying or believing the wrong thing.
The question in my mind is how much of this is new and how much is just cultural attitudes that go back to the Puritan colonists -- where the thing that has changed may just be that technology (starting with PA systems which made megachurches possible, but further enhanced by social media) has empowered the authoritarian leaders to reach a much larger audience of authoritarian followers, and thereby suck them in to the very worst distortions and mutations of their supposed religious beliefs.
If you think of religion (good or bad) as being like a virus, technology has basically packed more people into the same room, allowing the most aggressively infectious forms to thrive.
I tend to avoid looking at the news, but occasionally I want to check in on something specific. I always go to Google News because it's a good aggregation of everything, but I trust Google less and less nowadays and feel like I shouldn't depend upon them. I've gone to Google News for so long that I don't even know what else is available.
What's a good replacement for Google News? Something that just aggregates all the headlines without editorializing, and doesn't require an account? :BoostOK:
That's easier said than done, and these are legitimate questions.
The point of asking them is to find out if the EU will stand behind commitments to those principles, guided by subject experts, not to find out if the current codebase just happens (in the best judgement of one possibly-inexpert person doing a quick review of a large amount of material).
Have you seen this news?
#Mastodon just got funding to add end to end encryption into their software.
So, some time next year, youâll be able to send truly private messages to the vast majority of the #Fediverse
Im so excited about this.
Because itâs an open spec, this opens the doors for every Fediverse app to join the party.
Yesterday, this project was a proof of concept. Today, Mastodon has turned it into a stampede.
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2026/04/sovereign-tech-agency-funding/
Today's sleeping configuration: kitty-corner :blobcatgiggle:
@AutisticInnovator There's an additional reason it's a strength: when people find others they can trust, they can work together far more effectively than people who don't trust each other.
In other words: autistic people form unusually tight-knit independent communities that are not subject to any kind of top-down control.
Authoritarians hate that.
Neurodivulgence is good; expert neurodivulgence is even better.
Illegitimi non carborundum and all that.
@smp I noticed other changes yesterday-ish, so I think there must have been an update, and that must have fixed the issue!
@feorag I did that with LibreOffice last year, I think, but I can't remember the exact details; it may have involved other software (but all of it open-source).
@mekkaokereke
I think this is what the classicists call a "Sapphic victory"? :blobcatthinksmart:
RE: https://mastodon.social/@JuliusGoat/116397364357512184
Finally recognizing that sickness exists allows for diagnosis; diagnosis allows for opportunity to finally start doing better:
The remedy is going to need to involve the deconstruction of the empire and the ideologies that undergird it: our collective worship of capitalism and profit, of billionaires and other predators, of punishment, of military, of policingâall will have to be deconstructed and dismantled, and be replaced with a institutions born of a commitment to a pluralistic, diverse, open world dedicated not to individual domination but universal interconnected thriving.
[...]
There will have to be a purge of our Republican Nazis from every level of government. There will have to be an overthrow of the corrupt corporate leaders of the establishment Democratic party. There will need to be a general outlawing of billionaires. We'll need to deconstruct our military and our police and our prisons. We will need to build parks and transportation and housing. We will need to subsidize art and music and poetry and philosophy and literature. We will need to fund day cares and libraries and schools.
...and this bit mirrors what I've been saying lately about how we need to get all the sensible people working together in a way that successfully tunes out the BS factory so we can finally start making positive changes:
If a person hasn't yet been persuaded to seek remedy by a madman with a nuclear arsenal and an increased willingness to use it, I think we need to leave them to their skepticism and save our energies for finding people who are serious about health, and pursuing the remedy without the help or permission of those who are not.
@jwildeboer Yes! If the goal is "convincing people of a predetermined agenda", then fedi is indeed a failure -- not a very good tool for propaganda. The masters will not find it pleasing.
If the goal is "getting good ideas into the discussion so they can propagate naturally", however... ^.^