[News] The Internet Was a Mistake

A thread for updates on the various ways the internet is destroying everything and the undying hellsites of social media. Let's all laugh at the abyss.

Seth wrote:

They made a fancy timer that tells you the weather and, with some serious investment and finagling, can automate some parts of your house. They wanted to make a voice activated "buy now" button and nobody wanted that.

"by the way, I can drone on and on about all the features that you don't want to use after you asked me for the weather, and you can't disable this for more than a week. Should I turn those features on for you?"

This reminds me, I was talking with a friend a couple of weeks back about how neither of us want ANYTHING to do with smart appliances, and how increasingly difficult it's becoming to get an appliance that DOESN'T have f*cking Facebook or Genshin Impact installed on it already or something.

The most useful smart home thing I've found is to be able to turn stuff on and off remotely. And I don't need voice commands for that.

Chairman_Mao wrote:

The most useful smart home thing I've found is to be able to turn stuff on and off remotely. And I don't need voice commands for that.

I'm able to turn my TCL TV on and off with Alexa. I can't change channels (yet) on the Xfinity box, though, so I thought it was a wasted skill. Turns out I use it regularly when I'm across the room and don't want to take out my phone or walk to the remote.

I'm really looking forward to Matter integration on new devices so I can buy without regard to brand or eco system. Especially, I want local control that doesn't require internet access or subscriptions to control my own devices.

I love ours.

"The most useful smart home thing I've found is to be able to turn stuff on and off remotely. And I don't need voice commands for that."

True except I have four lamps in our living room and it is a lot easier to say "Alexa turn on living room" and have all four come on than it is to walk to each one.

Personally I think the nicest feature are the boring ones - Alex what's the weather going to be today? Alex play some good music? Or Alex who won the football game? etc. Things that are easy to do on a computer but it is nice to just ask Alexa to do.

Axon wrote:
farley3k wrote:

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Meta and Twitter are facing fines for breaching the new Digital Services Act.

For what it's worth I walked out of one of these companies after they tried to switch me from permenant to contracting. Highly illegal of course but basically told me I was out of a job about 2 weeks before Christmas unless I accepted. Thankfully I knew my rights and made sure I remained whole until the new year but got out as soon as I could and gave them zero notice. I was advised that while they did act illegally, given that I did land on my feet I would probably not do all that well at the WRC so it was probably best to drop it to protect my career going forward.

I'm quite sure they've done similar to others in the past even though the law says they can't. I suspect there was some thinking that regardless of the regulations, which they are aware of, they were above them to some degree or face little to no fallout either way.

I suspect that the fact that this mass firing is so high profile and so well documented will put this in a somewhat different category than the average. Employers generally look askance at folks who have "fired" on their resume, but sh*t like this is an automatic free pass.

We have Alexa devices, but the only voice usage they see is when my wife wants to turn on/off the lights. In a single room, nowhere else in the house.

My friends use Alexa to control music and lights. I will admit that, as a joke, I have said "Alexa, order 300 pounds of fertilizer" when I walked into their house. I've never seen someone yell "Alexa cancel order" so fast.

I like "Alexa, play Gwar really loud."

farley3k wrote:

I love ours.

"The most useful smart home thing I've found is to be able to turn stuff on and off remotely. And I don't need voice commands for that."

True except I have four lamps in our living room and it is a lot easier to say "Alexa turn on living room" and have all four come on than it is to walk to each one.

I tap a button in the Google home app and all the ones I want to come on at once. When using voice commands it's more annoying because I have to specify which room's lights I want to turn on, and it gets stuck on things like not knowing that family room and living room are the same thing.

I like my Google Nest because of the custom voice commands. “Google, let there be light!” turns on my living room lights; “Bring Christmas cheer” turns on the Christmas lights (inside and out) while “The Grinch is here!” turns them off.

Why Elon Musk and Kara Swisher Are No Longer Speaking

First off, about that email:

Nayeema Raza: Before we go down memory lane, I want to snapshot, so people understand as they’re listening, where your relationship with Elon is today.

Kara Swisher: He’s not speaking to me.

Nayeema Raza: So one word to describe it.

Kara Swisher: I’m an asshole. He emailed me this recently.

Swisher and Musk had been emailing back and forth, discussing him being a future guest on this very podcast, and talking and respectfully disagreeing about Twitter and the economy.

Kara Swisher: And then I tweeted something that he didn’t like. I tweeted this Washington Post article, which cited an anonymous U.S. Defense official talking about Starlink. The official said, “Elon’s going to Elon,” and I wrote on Twitter, “Elon’s going to Elon kind of says it all.”

Nayeema Raza: So this is this mid-October reporting from Washington Post where Elon was, at the time, kind of wavering on whether or not he was going to keep funding Starlink [in Ukraine].

Kara Swisher: But I didn’t agree with this Defense official. I think they should pay Elon, and I said that. So the next couple of tweets was like, “I think he should be paid.” He does have them over the barrel and can say what he wants because I think it was Defense Department’s problem.

Nayeema Raza: And then on October 17 at 9:45 p.m. Eastern, you get an email from Elon.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, late. It’s always late. I was up at night having chocolate sandwiches. I don’t know what’s happening.

Nayeema Raza: And the subject says?

Kara Swisher: Just says, “You’re an asshole.”

Nayeema Raza: And a screenshot.

Kara Swisher: Yeah, the screenshot was there, which is fine. In this case, I was supporting him, which is really kind of ironic.

It's just very, very obvious what's going on here:

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@patrickklepek wrote:

The most likely scenario is less that Twitter buckles and dies, I think, and instead becomes what the right has wanted all along: a mainstream platform hijacked into a megaphone for extremist propagandists that’s entirely centered on owing the libs.

It’s the same playbook as Facebook, except Zuckberg was a coward bullied into catering to the right’s interests, while Musk openly embraces their adulation.

Prederick wrote:

It's just very, very obvious what's going on here:

IMAGE(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FiWGIlgX0AEhAUn?format=jpg&name=small)

@patrickklepek wrote:

The most likely scenario is less that Twitter buckles and dies, I think, and instead becomes what the right has wanted all along: a mainstream platform hijacked into a megaphone for extremist propagandists that’s entirely centered on owing the libs.

It’s the same playbook as Facebook, except Zuckberg was a coward bullied into catering to the right’s interests, while Musk openly embraces their adulation.

a bunch of white supremacist telegram channels have also been organizing mass-reporting of lefty activists and journalists now that twitter management is sympathetic to their cause.

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Milo did an interview with Tim Pool saying this, and Benny Johnson admitted as much after the election:

The biggest animating focus of the movement is "trigger the libs and make them cry."

That's it. Everything else, free speech, freedom, masculinity, whatever else is just window dressing.

As a side note, if you, with a straight face, use the terminology "woke mind virus," there is definitely a woke mind-virus, and you have it.

Also Depressed LOL at Elmo saying he's neither left nor right.

Indeed. Neither left. Nor right. Perhaps some kind of... third position?

Now he's tweeting that if the Apple Store bans the Twitter app, as it probably should now, he will just make his own cell phone OS/brand.

Just what we all want, cell phones that catch on fire. Maybe they auto-jump out of your pocket and crack the screen too?

The only thing to remember, unfortunately, is that Elon has the backing of multiple Silicon Valley billionaires (and probably several Republican billionaire megadonors) as well.

Essentially, he has infinite money and is engaged in an explicit ideological project, with many committed supporters. It's why Twitter was never going anywhere, and why this isn't impossible.

Bezos couldn't get the Fire Phone off the ground.

Microsoft tried for 10 years to make Windows Phone happen.

All the money in the world, and still nobody will buy a Tesla Phone.

So please, Apple, goad him into trying

I love it when the billionaire class fights.

Honestly, considering some of the memes he's been sharing, there's a fair chance all of this has happened because one of his kids turned out to be trans and hates his f*cking guts.

I'm pretty sure he's on record saying "the Marxists" turned his kid against him by brainwashing them at school, and honestly, it'd explain a lot.

Prederick wrote:

Honestly, considering some of the memes he's been sharing, there's a fair chance all of this has happened because one of his kids turned out to be trans and hates his f*cking guts.

…and this was also happening at around the same time that Grimes left him and started dating Chelsea Manning.

Aside from what will probably end up being inevitable reliability issues, Twitter having weakened moderation standards and giving broad amnesty to everyone that has been kicked off the platform for being awful is going to turn it into 4chan 2.0. For a while, before they move away and find some other platform, people will still be able to curate their feeds down to something far less reprehensible than 4chan, but it will ultimately turn into that exact type of user being the only ones actively contributing. Twitter will have gone from one of the most influential social media sites to an echo chamber for morally bereft keyboard warriors whose champion causes are definitively antisocial.

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Most times, the duplicity doesn't really annoy me, but the "I'm not a right winger, I just materially support the right-wing/vote for the right wing/broadly agree with the right-wing, but i'm not right-wing" nonsense always makes me want to slap someone.

And like, I get it. The power of this brand of reactionary conservatism is... well, power. The power to be able to piss on your leg and tell you it's raining. Or in this case, say you're not left or right and hoping for a "sensible centrist" and after saying you'd support one of the most right-wing governors in the nation for the highest office in the land (and advising people to vote for his party in the midterms).

Twitter lost half of its top 100 advertisers in the last month.

As people have pointed out, despite also losing one hundred billion dollars in around the same timeframe, Elno is rich enough that he could run Twitter at a loss until everyone reading this is dead, so it’s not like this will hasten Twitter’s demise. But as Hasan Minhaj says, mockery is the only weapon we have against the ruling class and this is a lovely reason to mock.

Seth wrote:

But as Hasan Minhaj says, mockery is the only weapon we have against the ruling class and this is a lovely reason to mock.

It's not the only weapon.

Top_Shelf wrote:
Seth wrote:

But as Hasan Minhaj says, mockery is the only weapon we have against the ruling class and this is a lovely reason to mock.

It's not the only weapon.

Let Them Eat Cake Bot wrote:

You have subscribed to guillotine facts!

Did you know?

Christopher Lee (Saruman, Count Dooku, etc) witnessed that last guillotine execution in France in 1939?

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Top_Shelf wrote:

It's not the only weapon.

Blue shell the 1%!

I fear you may be right.

Anyway my favorite Christopher Lee story.