Goldkin @Goldkin@awoo.space

Awhile back, I vaguely recall a friend (@mawr, I think?) saying they were glad Google+ hadn't succeeded. Because Google would be much more competently evil with that data than Twitter was.

Anyway, I think about that a lot now.

No, Gemini, I do not want you to read and write my emails for me. My crippling anxiety over being precise in what I send will not be improved by you pretending you know what you're talking about.

Also, I still remember the mic drop thing.

https://bsky.app/profile/cythrin.bsky.social/post/3lk33qrj2f22z

Tbh, I miss Miitomo. That whole era of inventiveness, innocence, and shitposting felt so genuine.

I'd say I miss Miiverse and Swapnote too, but those were revived via Homebrew! And tbh, they're just as great as they were when Nintendo ran the service.

Idk if folks feel strongly about card spoilers being tagged or hidden, but this seemed worth sharing.

Ah, but who among us is not a

Literally the one saving grace in all of this is these assholes are neither attentive nor detail-oriented. And I won't split hairs, it's going to be pretty fucking bad with just that part.

But it's also incredibly brittle, and I think we have a good chance at seeing this fly apart. The aftermath will take a lot longer, but right now the focus is just getting there.

My purpose of sharing this, in any event, is to give framing to the chaos, so we can understand how to live through it.

And I'd say:

1. If you can avoid it, absolutely do not fly into the US. The trafficking bit is only just starting, and it's gonna be bad.

2. Don't underestimate the courts because "lol, nothing matters". Watch how those play out.

3. Expect a lot of scattershot power grabs and factional in-fighting, with opportunity to turn these assholes against each other.

The thing is, there's a reason why even nominally authoritarian regimes put up even a pretense of lawfulness and legitimacy: it keeps people in line. These fuckwits can't be bothered, and they're trying to speedrun fascism to get us right to what they think are the good parts (for them).

I... okay, I don't want to come out and say that it won't work because I don't have that kind of crystal ball. But history says this does not work out well for the sovereigns when they try this.

Put in that framing, it makes sense to push for a government that tries to act as extrajudicially as possible, seeing people at the border not just as business, but as a business opportunity. For them. To traffick for cash.

Scary as hell, I know. But it also means they need to operate outside of the context of the law for this all to work. Expose these fuckwits to sunlight and they scatter, claiming no sovereign or authority.

We're seeing this with "DOGE", too.

What we're seeing is a full court press of fascism here in the US, but understanding it through that lens is still missing what's happening. This isn't an organized fascist putsch, it's one haphazardly falling together from parties trading favors with each other and stumbling over each other in the process.

It's a smoke-filled room full of evil people, trading their worst ideas, with the terrible impunity only wealth and sovereignty buys you. In other words: Epstein Island.

Some posts on Bsky starting to call the US government what it is at the moment: a trafficking ring pretending to be a government: https://bsky.app/profile/nycsouthpaw.bsky.social/post/3lko3ogcims2e

This framing is powerful for understanding what's happening, what's coming, and how to stop it. Because their theory of power being "Epstein Island, except the federal government" is simultaneously scary as hell and paper-thin brittle.

I wonder what the bofh (for those that don't know, that's the "bastard operator from hell", a fictional snarky IT and devops guy best described as chaotic neutral) would do with this knowledge.

Ngl, that so many businesspeople consider overconfident wild-ass word salad to be expert advice says more about their lived experiences than whether an LLM can do any of that.

I wonder if anyone has tried A-B testing this with real vs LLM input in their workplace in, say, standup or status emails. To see just how much of a typical job has literally no critical thought or feedback behind it.

If that's where most of the value is: plausibly automating busywork, then, well.