i think a pretty good, pretty accurate, way of explaining to less news-obsessed people what’s going on is Trump and Musk are turning the US into a “shithole country”, as the man himself once put it.

@admitsWrongIfProven@qoto.org 20:30 UTC / 21:30 UTC+1 https://interfluidity.com/office-hours/

everyone should be in favor of a democratic people’s republic. seems obvious.

from https://xcancel.com/lexfridman/status/1887587308087427072

we should have understood there’s no real moat around LLMs when Musk was able to stand up a near-frontier model so quickly. only the myth of Musk’s specialness allowed us to ignore homegrown evidence.

i guess what the election decided is before we rise from the ashes, we will be ashes.

“The idea that ‘fascism = strength’ is just a piece of propaganda unwittingly reproduced by critics of the fascism thesis.” #JohnGanz https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/lets-get-real

austerity is not the same thing as efficiency.

in fact, often the correlation is inverse.

This post is valid for 24 hours.

why does Microsoft "deactivate" your Skype credit if you don't use Skype for 180 days, but let you (and force you to) reactivate it to get it back? what good does this extra flow and hassle do anybody?

without comment.

once a coup has proceeded to a certain degree, it becomes difficult to distinguish putting down the coup from a coup on behalf of different interests. once control of the state is up for grabs, what faction can claim to be above factions? all, of course, will try.

“A power-mad president possessed of radical theories of executive authority and convinced of his own royal prerogative has given de facto control of most of the federal government to one of the richest men on the planet, if not the richest, whose own interests are tangled up in those of rival governments and foreign autocracies as well as the United States.” @jbouie https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/05/opinion/trump-musk-federal-government.html ht @hilzoy

“So many of these things are so wildly illegal that I think they’re playing a quantity game and assuming the system can’t react to all this illegality at once” https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/02/04/elon-musk-government-legal-doge/

@Phil https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/dec/16/elon-musk-government-security-clearance

his kids don’t have anything.

@landley i don't think social-democracy-ing harder is the same as capitalismism-ing harder, though i agree everything looks very hard right now.

was today seriously or literally?

@landley we have new tools. back then only King George and the billionaires could levy taxes.

so i'm confused now. were the people who believed he would do what he repeatedly and forcefully said he would do get it right, or did the people who presumed he was bullshitting?

@freemayonnaise @Phil @Harald_Korneliussen okay then.

@Phil @freemayonnaise @Harald_Korneliussen we'll disagree that that's the best way to go. i still want a state that can, say, participate credibly in alliances. tbf, we've fucked it up pretty badly already.