Mike Knell

@db0 u wot m8

@mawhrin To misuse an old engineering joke, is an LLM a Turbo Confabulator?

@gnomicutterance There’s also a handy-dandy map there showing how in the “developed” (I use the term advisedly, as usual) world the English-speaking countries are obvious outliers.

@gnomicutterance @VirtualOdour Well, exactly. For the benefit of Mr Odour here, I’m in Austria (that’s the one without the kangaroos) where although physical punishment of children was first made an explicit offence in 1989 the “right” of parents to hit their children was removed from §145 of the Allgemeine Bürgerliche Gesetzbuch in 1977. Here’s the 1811 text that was deleted. Happy now?

@Tar_alcaran @V0ldek That’s why you need the good guy with a hammer!

@raoul Strong “that kid at primary school who took a few weeks of karate lessons then told you he could easily kill you so he had to be careful not to lose his temper now” vibes.

@strangebirds @V0ldek I’d like to think that every human cryo facility has a “Days Since Last Accidental Thawing-Out” sign. Or maybe “Days Since Last Midnight Dumping of Several Lumpy Sacks”.

@corbin I can’t believe I’m defending this odious guy, but this kind of “don’t interfere in our internal affairs, foreigners” stuff is exactly the same playbook that countries like Russia and China and Iran roll out when they get criticised for, you know, declaring LGBTQA+ folk to be terrorists or sending people to labour camps because they’re inconvenient. The guy has the right to express whatever shitty opinions he wants about the US, but that doesn’t mean anyone has to listen, and the real problem here is that people in the US right are so willing to use this guy as a useful idiot in exchange for a bit of attention and the occasional wad of cash. This is exactly what you see from the above mentioned countries - “look, these foreigners agree with us, stop being mean about us!”.

Hell, Russia and Iran both have entire TV networks (RT and Press TV) dedicated to this kind of useful idiocy but in their cases they’re intended for foreign consumption. The US equivalent is Fox News - but that’s aimed at the US market, which is kind of an interesting difference.

@froztbyte How many US citizens actually renounce their citizenship, though? It’s been deliberately made into a difficult and expensive process, especially under Trump, because they have an obsession with the idea that the only reason any US citizen would want to stop being one is to evade tax.

And as a UK citizen who hasn’t lived in the UK for 15 years UK domestic policy still very much affects my life - not least a few years ago when the lunatics pushed us out of the EU and my family and I lost a whole load of basic rights in the country in which we now live. And I reserve the right to critique any government I want if it’s behaving in a shitty manner - why should the US be immune from criticism while it’s perfectly acceptable to slag off awful regimes like Saudi Arabia, Iran and yes, even that in our next door neighbour, Hungary? The US isn’t immune from criticism just because they wear clean shirts while mistreating marginalised folk.

@averyminya @swlabr It’s funny because it’s racist!

@swlabr @skillissuer Not sure what a Bill Burr is but that’s a traditionally idiotic statement. Doping in cycling isn’t about steroids and hasn’t been for decades - it’s an endurance sport so these days when it occurs it’s all about the blood doping, all EPO and transfusions and stuff to get your red cell count as high as possible. This is a really dangerous thing to do if you want to avoid joining the list of young cyclists who dropped dead of mysterious heart problems in the last 20 years, and if you suddenly start saying *that* is okay there will be a lot more kids having cardiac arrests because their blood resembles Heinz Cream of Tomato Soup.

@gerikson @skillissuer They also completely misunderstand a whole aspect of this (surprise) – nobody who’s won an Olympic gold is going to come out and say “Woohoo, it’s the doping games for me!” because top athletes actually care about their reputation and their legacy in a way the likes of Thiel would never be able to parse.

Doping is something to be _ashamed_ of doing, which is why people who get caught doing it fight so hard to get let off. Appear at these games and your career as a legit athlete is over. No Olympics, your sponsors will abandon you, no sporting dreams any more. Your record will be tarnished and anything you won in the past will have a “possibly doping” asterisk next to ot in the records. Nobody will sponsor this, there’ll be no lucrative TV rights. It’ll just be like a grim track meet at your county stadium.

They might manage some grotesque spectacle where over-the-hill mediocrities will dope themselves up in order to compete because they didn’t win anything significant during their actual careers, but it will not be any kind of sporting spectacle.

@dgerard Thought you were having a go at the RNLI there for a moment. Just remember what happened to the last guy who did that.

@gerikson “Adraste wishes to send a private message to Beroe, but suspects that Erebus is intercepting their scrolls…”

@dgerard Eric the Arthur B.?

@Soyweiser Must be the earlier discarded version of Newspeak where instead of compressing the vocabulary to make nuance impossible to convey they did the opposite. It worked okay until a Party member was heard by a 10 year old Junior Spy describing Big Brother as “a doubleshit maxipompous arsetalker” and was last seen being beaten senseless by the Thought Police.

@gerikson Not just right wing. Orwell abuse is pretty much universal - I have a rule of thumb that anyone who describes something as “Orwellian” has either never read any Orwell or read 1984 once many years ago and remembers that it had cameras in it or something. It’s popular because it’s seen as an argument-stopping intervention - a more intellectual version of making Hitler comparisons. Reductio ad Orwellium?

@self So basically it’s like a science fiction novel, except that they haven’t realised that it’s one of those novels where the author develops an entire society based on some weird totalitarian cult just so they can spend the rest of the plot demonstrating how nutso said society is?

@dgerard Oh, the Antiversity! I remember that. I think it was one of the first Lovecraftian horrors I was exposed to when I first started to take an interest in this particular rabbithole of weird.

@dgerard me: what is an urbit
wikipedia: look, you really don’t want to know, but if you insist…
me: 🙀