Materialist Gnostic
@walmsley.bsky.social
4.8K followers 1.1K following 22K posts
Programmer. Trying to enjoy arguing on the Internet less. He/Him. Sometimes post pictures of food or thoughts on books I read.
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walmsley.bsky.social
now it may be true that Elon unbans Nazis who harass people on his site, but he also makes it harder for journalists to share their work there, so you have to think about the pros and cons of continuing to use it
walmsley.bsky.social
aiui he basically buys in as a producer to get roles and just has incredibly bad taste in projects
walmsley.bsky.social
listening to a guy taking a meeting like three desks away from me and trying to remind myself that this is Management's fault for not provisioning enough meeting rooms for the number of people in the building
walmsley.bsky.social
I think that we will probably win. I do not think that Trumpism qua Trumpism can win. but the range of plausible outcomes keeps widening and widening and I don't like it
walmsley.bsky.social
and what I have come to realize is not that they are wrong but that if you are not a revolutionary that moment is *existentially horrifying*, because everyone else can see their new worlds too
walmsley.bsky.social
you will sometimes see leftists talk about "the revolutionary moment" where the space of possibilities opens up and you can see the new world in a vista before you
unavaleable.bsky.social
i do firmly believe in the end, we will win, but the dread and the loss of watching this nightmare unfold is really something. These assholes are undermining everything we've taken for granted as a democratic and open society (however imperfect) with such vile hubris
unavaleable.bsky.social
SCOTUS killing VRA would really be the culmination of a Second Redemption
walmsley.bsky.social
also, like, I'm willing to say a lot of bad things about Hitler but I think he probably was smart enough to figure out "kill people and take their stuff" without worked examples
walmsley.bsky.social
having disinterested, passionless sex with my fuckbot out of a vague sense of obligation
walmsley.bsky.social
I did find an adblocker that Google hasn't disabled but it's definitely worse than adblockers used to be (primarily it does not seem to block all the "please disable your adblock" stuff some sites do)
walmsley.bsky.social
common "hammer and sickle usernames" blocklist W
walmsley.bsky.social
I think this is probably some kind of afropessimism
walmsley.bsky.social
the thing that is striking to me about this is the way the "slur" here is clearly intended to operation through implicit association with blackness
walmsley.bsky.social
this is attempting to dismiss racist beliefs by making a racist analogy to presumed antisocial behavior by black people
nathantbernard.bsky.social
the "kids" were mostly 30+ years old and said they love hitler
walmsley.bsky.social
tbh I think even if you accept the Popularist framing (which I generally don't), identity politics is just the wrong target for moderation. if you put me in charge of it I would pick guns, because there are a lot of single issue voters and we can't do anything anyway
walmsley.bsky.social
I don't understand how it stays a milkshake if it's hot
walmsley.bsky.social
Google finally figures out the Principle of Equivalent Exchange and cancels Gemini to bring back Stadia
walmsley.bsky.social
tbh with the biotech advances we've seen protein folding might just be the thing to do generally
walmsley.bsky.social
oh, yeah, that's fair. I've had a lot of different people mention using WhatsApp (though I keep forgetting Meta owns it)
walmsley.bsky.social
unironically I think MattY misunderstands his own idea when he says "moderate a little on everything". no! moderate a *lot* on one thing so you can crow about it in a way that gets through to the guy who thinks NFL commissioner is a cabinet position
walmsley.bsky.social
I think there's going to be a huge boom of Hacker Stuff around the models and cheap GPU compute and I am modestly optimistic about it figuring out something useful to do with LLMs in the medium term
walmsley.bsky.social
also I think people underestimate how much you can get done with multiple Joes Manchin. even if they're all shitty they're shitty on different stuff and you only need a subset for any particular bill
walmsley.bsky.social
I think that's basically fine as long as we have the votes to neuter the Senate. the thing that is unsustainable long term is the intense minoritarian rule it creates
walmsley.bsky.social
also it only has to be generalizable to Google's internal workflows
walmsley.bsky.social
the guy who, being married to an Indian woman with whom he has multiple children, is willing to publicly defend "normalize Indian hate" has to be saying some absolute nightmare shit in private