I think Tumblr users are having much more fun drawing 36,304 variations of Hatsune Miku and watching an anime about cooking and eating fantasy creatures than Twitter users are having.... just... in general.

I think, but can't be sure, that the Pope is some variety of Roman Catholic

I say that lots of people on the addictive brawling website aren't having a good time, but have you seen any of the screenshots that leak from bluesky?

Compared to them, I'd say that Twitter users are having a great time.

Tumblr is a paradise where you can post about the ships in your weird game without trouble, by comparison.

It's officially Joever.

We'll see what happens after this.

Well, I say "officially," but there's a lot of speculation because it's just a post on the site formerly known as Twitter, on an account that is obviously run by a staffer. That was on July 21st.

On July 20th, the same account posted (bolding mine):

He was in it to win it. There are claims that staff were still out arguing that he would stay in even on the day of. (Thanks to the Internet and cell phones, fortunately, no one was still making a pro-Biden speech in the evening after the midday announcement.)

So, step back. After the debate, whenever Biden said he would stay in, how useful would those statements be in predicting whether he would stay in? Would they be { strong-for, weak-for, weak-against, or strong-against } signals?

Right.

Now, suppose that a statement coming in is being evaluated based on its correlation to reality, with a range from 0 (totally random with respect to reality) to 1.0 (perfectly matches reality).

Could a sender lose the ability to establish that a statement is above some number on that scale (such as a 0.5)?

What happens to the number of bits (or words) required to transmit the same amount of information in this scenario?

Suppose a candidate uses a lot of bombastic rhetoric, but is relatively consistent directionally (e.g. spends his time calling for "10,000 miles of road construction," but actually just consistently supports 100 miles of road construction). Is there an algorithm that can take his statements and reliably convert them into statements that are higher on the 0-1.0 scale? Is anything lost?

fuck elon musk but the privating of likes on twitter is a really interesting exposure of the absolute panopticon culture going on there

there are droves of people freaking out that they can't check people's likes before following them anymore (something i have never done or thought to do??) because "what if i accidentally follow a predator?" the pedopanic is ramped to the MAX. if you want to have privacy you must have something shady to hide.

with the general culture of "oomfs you follow this Unperson u have 24hrs to unfollow or you will be unpersoned as well" idk why i'm surprised it's considered normal to pilfer through ppl's liked posts to justify harassing them. the lack of choice on users' part whether their likes are public or not (a feature tumblr has had for years) is shitty design but i can't help but be intrigued by the panic of purity-obsessed weirdos as a feature that gave them an illusion of control is taken away

sorry guys, life isn't that easy. shitty people will exist alongside the righteous and will often be indistinguishable. the idea that you can fully avoid them by stalking their shit is not a healthy thought process. make peace with privacy.

There are several things that Elon Musk did with twitter that made it just straight up a better user experience, and there are several tings Elon Musk did with twitter to de-claw "cancel culture" or the "woke mob" or whatever you want to call it. You could call it pressure groups, or brigading, or just trying to get people banned/fired.

In 2013, it really didn't take much to get people fired, but as late as 2020, you could pressure an institution like the New York Times to fire a war correspondent based on a handful of twitter users getting a thousand re-tweets from a hundred or so blue checkmarks.

On Mastodon (before bluesky), this was even worse. At some point, admins of popular instances threatened to defederate all instances that didn't defederate with instances that still federated with journahost (2 to 3 hops so far) because journahost didn't kick a journalist who posted a link to the New York Times.

But now bluesky has all the weird slacktivists, the social justice posters who left tumblr over the 2018 porn ban, and the normie #resist twitter posters. That's better for twitter, and better for mastodon.

The problems are:

There's an ongoing argument right now over whether hiding likes is a good feature or a bad feature, within differing ideological groups.

I'm not sure. I was definitely getting some bot likes though, seems like this will paper that over without removing the bots.

Multiple people here have said they see me as unusually calm and even-handed by tumblr standards, which is weird to me b/c internally I am always simmering with rage over something or another, I guess I've just gotten better at hiding it.

I'd say TheAgeofShoddy on Twitter is similar, but he goes through cycles of locking his Twitter account, presumably when he gets too tired of trying to post calmly about things that he feels passionately (angry) about.

Sometimes I want to get into more econ talk on this site, but then I remember that if I did that I would probably end up just making three hotkeys for the following phrases:

and just wearily hitting them over and over in a Sisyphean manner.

Also painful: posts meant for econ-familiar people leaking beyond them to users who don't know the terms, who then start screaming at you over words they don't even understand

One time on Twitter I was feeling suspicious about a guy's level of knowledge, so I asked him to "define 'profit' in terms of revenue and expenses".

He referred to this as "technical jargon."

Among Twitter accounts, PYeerk is a definite recommend from me.

He's extremely talented with this sort of maneuver. He's not really right-wing, but there isn't a progressive alive that can lay a finger on him. He just demolishes the frame in every encounter.

I'm not on his level.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, but the whatever-you-call-it cluster of the internet right (e.g. the group centered around BAP, Zero HPL, Passage Publishing etc.) has zero value preposition for basically anyone. Completely collapsed into their own assess, to the level that would put most fervent DSA theorycels to shame. Reduced to inane mean-girls-act catfighting on twitter all day every day.

I think in some sense they're victims of their own success.

The take economy is about information value gain, and BAP & Co. took advantage of the social taboos present in 2015 to provide a higher value of returns relative to the conservative establishment, with a portfolio of positions with greater epistemic and moral leverage (leverage as in the 'debt-financed' meaning in "leveraged buyout").

While the Overton window narrowed in major left-leaning institutions 2017-2022, it has widened on the political right more generally.

New actors like Rufo (and to some degree, Hanania) were able to consolidate the positions from BAP & Co. with lower epistemic and moral debt loads into a new product more palatable to mainstream audiences, reducing the gain between mainstream-accepted actors and BAP & Co.

Website landscape changes are an important factor.

Substack enabled Matt Yglesias to begin his program of reducing the epistemic debt load of the Democratic party constellation (reducing the relative value of rightism generally), and Razib Khan to provide a more centrist outlet for discussion of ancient human migration patterns. Science summary blogger Crémieux (tw:cremieuxrecueil) also covers a broader array of studies in addition to demographic studies, which enables him to build legitimacy to spend.

Meanwhile, Musk's takeover of Twitter broke the ideology-coordinating power of the previous bluechecks (which had allowed them to converge on some really dumb ideas), reduced the censorship load, and introduced the Community Notes feature, which reduced the value gain from the "dissident right" generally by being a powerful non-partisan attack against the misinformation the previous bluecheck class were accustomed to spreading.

Steve, the long-term competitor, is more focused on the reliability of his product, and lacks the 'killing instinct' we see with BAP. He has a lower moral and epistemic debt load, and isn't really impacted by the changes.

This whole situation has left BAP & Co. to either push into even higher-risk territory, or continue with the same takes but with less gain.

BAP has been exercising some leadership, such as setting the message on the Israel-Palestine conflict (wrangling the native far right), but available alternatives shrink BAP's potential recruiting pool, and also make it more difficult to convert people to the far right.

While sales of his (most probable BAP candidate) recent book seem to be robust, I think the medium-term and long-term projections look worse for him.

Note: I do *not* endorse BAPism.

I will now discuss the underlying ideological basis, and why technological change is likely to disrupt BAP's coalition, requiring at least a reorientation and new ideological development.

One thing I'd like to bring up is that ZHPL, extradeadjcb, and presumably even BAP himself are not, theoretically, as bad as they could be.

Here's ZHPL himself admitting that genetics influence weight gain, and lamenting that people shouldn't need heroic willpower not to grow fat:

What is Zero HP Lovecraft? In some sense, a glorified 90's bully. And what is a 90's bully? Still human.

We should view our time alive not as our only time to experience pleasure, though of course you shouldn't attempt to go through your life without pleasure, but as the only time in which we have agency, the ability to actively shape the world.

As long as BAP lives, he is able to moderate BAPism, to try to use it to shift the Overton window while adjusting the positioning based on how closely people are actually following it.

What might BAPism without a human soul look like?

It would probably look a lot like K-SAT, the hypothetical autonomous AI bullyciding system from one of my short science-fiction posts.

There are really two options, here.

The first option is that this is highly sophisticated trolling by someone who has really thoroughly researched the ideological system, "calling the bluff," an attempt to force the far right off their position.

(I once joked that, "Advanced by left-wing theorists, ninth-generation warfare sees all acts as existing on a spectrum of political violence. Most acts of ninth-generation warfare consist of extreme pranks.")

The second option is that this man is broken.

What is the purpose of executing drug dealers? Leave aside Fascist notions about the health of the national body, though with enough national security brain, you can eventually reconstruct something that at least vaguely resembles a functional society.

Leave aside, also, the pharmacological demon hypothesis, even though it is convenient to that theory that drugs accelerate entropy of the body and mind in order to grant a temporary hit of pleasure, as if they were someone draining someone's life force.

The purpose of executing drug dealers is to save those who would have been destroyed by drugs.

The unwary. The naive. The young. The weak.