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Yeah the whole idea of public mass social media has basically failed thus far.

Maybe someone will create some enlightened LLM based algorithm that solves the engagement optimization problem but what we have now has proven to be pretty disastrous through many iterations.

Small scale group chats/discord servers are the clear solution right now. Which is sad in some ways because the question then becomes how do you find your way into a good group chat.

But it’s the only way for the sane to not be overwhelmed by the engagement farming, political nonsense, and what Noah Smith calls the “shouting class” of people that have nothing else to do in life but dominate these platforms by stirring up drama all day every day.

Maybe if you have 5+ years experience at FAANG or something.

I have 5+ years experience at a no name place and can’t even get an interview anywhere. Maybe my resume is shit but I’ve tried many different versions with no luck in the last 4-5 months.

I asked ChatGPT to be a CEO and decide if everyone should work in office 5 days a week:

“ Final Thought (as a CEO):

I wouldn’t force a full return unless data showed a clear business case. Culture, performance, and employee sentiment would all guide the decision. I’d rather lead with transparency, flexibility, and trust than mandates that could backfire.

Would you like a sample policy memo I’d send to employees in this scenario?”

A better, more reasonable CEO than the one I have. So I’m looking forward to AI taking that white collar job especially.

They’d probably try to be more subtle about it.

We have the worst possible people in government for the financial environment the US is in.

Not only are we already in a bad place with government spending/debt given the new world of high interest rates. We’re just going to blow many trillions of dollars worth of new holes in the budget.

Then throw in the endless tariff stupidity and it’s all just bad, bad, bad.

E was what notable bleeding heart… Ronald Reagan chose during his time in office.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Reform_and_Contr...

“We’re incompetent and can’t achieve our goals by following the same laws and due process previous administrations used so we’re just going to perform as many random acts of evil and right violations to the people we can grab and hope that makes up the difference “

Immigration courts are already separate from the rest of the legal system so the implication here is wrong.

Going too slow for you? Hire more immigration judges, which are executive employees not full article 3 judges.

Voters across the political spectrum have made it clear in poll after poll the last few weeks that they do not approve of the way this administration is grabbing whoever they can and shipping them out of the country without any check or verification that they are deporting the right people.

If the administration can declare you an illegal immigrant with no due process they can ship anyone they want out of the country. They could grab you off the street, ship you to and El Salvador torture prison intentionally or by mistake (as they have already admitted to) and there’s nothing you can do about it.

I think the only explanation is that the endless lies coming out of his mouth allowed many uninformed people to build their own Trump in their heads out of all the possible lies they liked the most. They then simultaneously believed everything they didn’t like were the actual lies. A kind of choose your own adventure.

That and term 1 Trump really was basically what was left of the Republican establishment running things while Trump did his reality TV show presidency.

So people wrongly assumed the same people would be there to stop him from driving the country off a cliff.

That’s part of it, you can certainly optimize your profile for better chances but the medium is the message.

Most things that women find attractive in men are not things that are easily highlighted via a few photos and a bio unless you’re in the top tiers of physical attractiveness. And outside of dating apps women don’t generally prioritize physical attractiveness to the same degree men do. But dating apps put that front and center as the main criteria for matches.

I’m happily married to someone I started dating after almost a year of being in the same game night group and there’s no way we would have ever connected over the apps, because you’re not going to easily connect over shared humor and compatible personality on the apps.

I have never met a romantic partner anywhere but through an app.

And I’ve never met a romantic partner on a dating app. If you’re suited to app dating good for you but most men aren’t going to appear as attractive through the app as they actually are in real life.

This lawless administration has already admitted to putting innocent men in a torture prison. Our felon president was convicted of more serious crimes than anyone they sent to El Salvador to rot.

The only word to describe these actions is evil.

“Land of the free”

The average person spends less than 5 minutes a month consuming news content and assumes important information will just fall into their lap. People in general are just not paying all that much attention.

Trump’s secret sauce is exploiting this from every angle.

Like if the president had posted that “now is a great time to buy DJT” 15 minutes before announcing the pause?

This is basic economics that the administration refuses to understand.

Trade allows you to consume beyond your nation’s manpower and resource constraints.

And it’s even stupider when you’re putting tariffs on raw materials like Canadian lumber. So not only do we need to magically find millions of workers to work in these new factories we also need to find a bunch of lumberjacks and start cutting down our own trees? We’re at 4% unemployment, who’s going to do this work?

We literally don’t have the people to make this work.

This is the key point. Even if tariffs did everything Trump claims they will (they will not) no one is investing billions to build factories in America for tariffs that will not be there in a few years.

Turns out that governing based on the whims of the executive has downsides.

The best models are not GitHub’s support bot (Microsoft isn’t even creating their own models) or Google’s AI summary.

If you haven’t used Claude 3.7 extended thinking to write code or ChatGPT Deep Research to investigate a topic you are not seeing what the capabilities are at the cutting edge.

https://aider.chat/docs/leaderboards/

None of it is perfect, obviously, and it’s not going to take everyone’s job next year. But people are not updating their thinking properly if they haven’t used the latest paid models.

People are really over indexing on current AI capabilities.

We’re barely 2 years on from ChatGPT’s initial release and we’ve gone from “this thing can put words together in a semi-coherent way” to “this thing produces undergrad level research papers on anything you ask about”.

Where will we be in another 2 years? Probably not at AGI, but there’s no sign this is slowing down.

Back in my day we copied and pasted random stack overflow answers until something worked like real junior devs

My previously mostly sane center right family members have all been spouting Russian talking points after the blow up in the Oval Office.

I think the information environment of most Americans that do not actively seek out true information is just cooked.

If possible you need to refactor before getting to that point.

Claude has done a good job refactoring, though I’ve had to tell it to give me a refactor plan upfront in case the conversation limit gets hit. Then in a new chat I tell it which parts of the plan it has already done.

But a larger context/conversation limit is definitely needed because it’s super easy to fill up.

This is the key point, most of the waste comes from contractors who can navigate the insane contracting process and the fact that we’ve brain drained the federal government to the point that the Feds just take whatever contractors say as gospel.

Cutting federal employees further isn’t touching the primary problem at all.

I imagine the calculation was “people are not buying new iPhones because they can’t get TikTok on their new phone”

And where is the United States government directing any of this? Nowhere.

Even your own source says

“Despite the censorship documented in this report, Meta allows a significant amount of pro-Palestinian expression and denunciations of Israeli government policies.”

Just because you dislike the way CNN is covering a conflict doesn’t somehow mean the shadowy US government is pulling the strings behind the scenes.

The Intercept is also an American news organization that is clearly not being censored on this topic, so I’m not sure you’re really making your point here.

None of those threaten US national security - that's what the supporters of this ban are claiming is at stake. US social media companies nuke topics that the US doesn't like, that's not news.

Read the last paragraph of my comment again and you’ll find your answer.

How do you feel about US media suppressing opposition of the genocide happening in Gaza? Where should US citizens express those views if every popular non-US owned/aligned platform is banned on the grounds of national security?

This isn’t a reality that exists. Did you spend any time at all on Twitter in the last year? You literally could not go a day without hearing about it. It was front page news on US news sites constantly. Protests against both Biden and Harris were constantly in the news and all over social media. The student protests were all over the news and social media. I don’t know what world you’re living in where you think Americans can’t talk about Gaza because it’s all I’ve been hearing about for a year. And here you are, talking about it on an American social media website.

Why is it bad when China (supposedly) creates propaganda on tiktok but it’s good when the US creates propaganda on facebook?

Because this imaginary world where the US somehow equally controls Facebook on the level that China directly influences TikTok isn’t one that exists?

This low resolution view of the world is grating. “Facebook is a US based social media company so it’s exactly the same as China and TikTok” is completely devoid of the context of reality.

Not only does Facebook actually have 1st amendment speech rights with a judicial system empowered to enforce them. But even the slightest appearance that the US government was attempting to influence speech on Facebook would be a career ending scandal.

Compared to TikTok where the CCP literally has a seat on ByteDance’s board by law and has for its entire existence had its algorithm nuke political topics that China does not want discussed.

It’s not the same thing.

This is exactly it. If China allowed fully uncensored American social media to operate in China I’d had zero issue letting them do the same in the US.

But the CCP wants to have their cake and eat it too. Fully repressive social media lock downs and censorship for their citizens but exploiting the west’s values of free speech and debate.

TikTok has repeatedly shown to nuke political topics on TikTok that China doesn’t like.

Videos about Tiananmen Square, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet all get black holed by the algorithm.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/25/revealed-...

Why would we wait until we're as oppressed as the people of China before we speak up? By then it's going to be too late.

Why would we wait for TikTok to continue to have greater and greater social influence before we cut off their propaganda tool? Do we have to wait until Taiwan has been leveled by China? And TikTok is being used to push the narrative that the US must not come to the aid of a peaceful nation being brutally conquered? By then it’s too late.

Nothing blew my mind like watching my first girlfriend reset her password every single time she wanted to log into anything because she never remembered a single password.

God hope she never gets logged out of her email.

I haven’t had an issue with it but I’ve heard other people do depending on the speed they’re walking.

I actually find walking to help intensify my focus for coding if I’m deep in the flow of a problem. I find reading PRs while walking to actually be the more difficult thing vs coding.