You’re being targeted by disinformation networks that are vastly…

Source: You’re being targeted by disinformation networks that are vastly…

TL;DR: You know that Russia and other governments try to manipulate people online.  But you almost certainly don’t how just how effectively orchestrated influence networks are using social media platforms to make you — individually– angry, depressed, and hateful toward each other. Those networks’ goal is simple: to cause Americans and other Westerners — especially young ones — to give up on social cohesion and to give up on learning the truth, so that Western countries lack the will to stand up to authoritarians and extremists.

And you probably don’t realize how well it’s working on you.

This is a long post, but I wrote it because this problem is real, and it’s much scarier than you think.

The best part? The very best part? Reddit is one of the biggest parts of the problem, and I don’t see anyone in the comments with either that realization, or the guts to say it. The site got used like a 3-dollar whore in the run-up to the 2016 election, in favor of Trump. Then they “fixed” that algorithm problem, and now the entire front page is almost always filled with posts about people being awful to one another, in various forms. It’s ALL hatred towards “others.” It’s ALL moral superiority over someone else. Just zoom out and look at it without being logged in. It’s kind of like junior high, but way, way worse.

You’ll Own Nothing, and Be Happy

If you’re wondering why house prices have DOUBLED in the past few years, this is why: private equity. That is, large investment groups, like Blackrock and Vanguard, which own substantial stakes in nearly EVERY US corporation.
 
These firms are buying up single-family homes, to turn around and rent back to us, paying WAY over asking price to snap them up. This lady points out that we knew it was happening, we just didn’t know how fast. And it’s bad. Really bad. TWICE as bad as we thought. In less than a dozen years, an average family will simply not be able to buy a house. Period.
 
“You’ll own nothing, and be happy,” say people at the World Economic Forum.
 
I blame private equity for just about everything bad happening now, but I’ll save the full rant for another time.
 
@tiffanycianci

Replying to @Gumie35 #greenscreen #PrivateEquity has acquired as much is 44% of all single-family homes in the United States in the last year, and we are on track to have a full-blown #monopoly of all single-family #housing in the next two years! And the politicians we trust have been taking donations from the same firms that are forcing out #workingclass #Americans from homes and rentals all across the US! This has exacerbated the #housingcrisis and the #wealthgap while all but ensuring they have the donations they need to get reelected and keep their donors happy!!! #lobbyists#lobbying#corruption#monopolies#ImFeelingFrench#boycottkelloggs#LetThemEatCake#eattherich#boycott#housing#housingcrisis#housingmarket#realestaterealestateinvesting@@OpenAI#blackstone#blackrock#vanguard#hedgefundkennedy24@@Robert F. Kennedy Jr#jeffjackson adamsmith@@cancelthisclothingcompany@@Tony@@Real Wicked Witch of the West

♬ original sound – TiffanyCianci

Pluralistic: You can’t shop your way out of a monopoly (05 Mar 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

That’s why the only serious competitor to Google is Bing, another Big Tech company (Bing is also the primary source of results on Duckduckgo, which is why DDG sometimes makes exceptions for Microsoft’s privacy-invading tracking):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo#Controversies

Google tells us that the quid-pro-quo of search monopolization is search excellence. The hundreds of billions it makes every year through monopoly control gives it the resources it needs to fight spammers and maintain search result quality. Anyone who’s paid attention recently knows that this is bullshit: Google search quality is in free-fall, across all its products:

https://downloads.webis.de/publications/papers/bevendorff_2024a.pdf

But Google doesn’t seem to think it has a problem. Rather than devoting all its available resources to fighting botshit, spam and scams, the company set $80 billion dollars alight last year with a stock buyback that was swiftly followed with 12,000 layoffs, followed by multiple subsequent rounds of layoffs:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

Source: Pluralistic: You can’t shop your way out of a monopoly (05 Mar 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

If you want to know why everything sucks, that was it, in a nutshell. Corporations are colluding to get to 2 or 3 per market, so as to avoid the strictest definition of a “monopoly,” so they settle for duopolies and triopolies. And then they work together to take ALL the profit out of the entire ecosystem, and do things like use that money to buy back stocks and then sell their options and put that money in their pocket. Good for the people at the top, with those options, I guess. Everyone else? In the entire world? Suck it.

An Extra 5 Weeks of Pain

Jumping into the middle of the story, I tried cortisone injections to help with my chronic pain, but they only seem to have made things worse. A friend at church gave me a whole new approach to try, but I needed a referral from my primary care physician.

My PCP wouldn’t do the referral over email. She insisted that I needed to make an appointment, and that it had to be a 30-minute one. Because of the length of the appointment, I couldn’t get on her schedule for FIVE WEEKS. But I thought, hey, I have other requests. Maybe because I’m seeing her, she’ll address them.

I just had the appointment. She was 15 minutes late to a 30-minute appointment, and only used 10 minutes of the time. She told me she wouldn’t address my other concerns, and pushed them on the referral. She agreed that this was a good next step, but added 5 weeks of unnecessary extra time to my journey.

Obviously, I’m in a bad mood, and there’s just literally no comfort or rest to be found. Excuse me while I order a pizza, and stick my head inside a video game until I’m exhausted enough to go to sleep.

Programming Language Gatekeeping

Great. Just, great.

Programming language gatekeeping, from the government. As if “the government” knows anything about anything, let alone technology created in the last 50 years, let alone programming languages specifically.

This guy gets it. As usual, it’s governmental interference to impede free markets for literally anything and everything, to protect campaign-contributing incumbents in a segment, and guarantee re-election funds.

Nevermind that VB.Net compiles to the same bytecode as C#. That’s officially off the list. Feels like Microsoft is getting the feds to pressure people away from a language that is still popular, but which they don’t want to support any more.

I can hear it from the decades-behind-the-curve gatekeepers in my Fortune 250 now: “Sorry, Dave, but Ruby isn’t on the government’s recommended languages list, so you can’t use it.”

Ex-Call of Duty Black Ops designer starts new studio BulletFarm – Polygon

BulletFarm is developing a “new and ambitious AAA game, built in Unreal Engine 5 and set in an original universe with an emphasis on co-operative gameplay,” according to a news release. BulletFarm and parent company NetEase Games say the new studio’s untitled project will be a “more intimate and relatable experience while offering a fresh take on first-person gameplay.”

Source: Ex-Call of Duty Black Ops designer starts new studio BulletFarm – Polygon

I knew the success of Helldivers 2 was going to change the direction of the entire industry. I ran with my first rando on HD2 the other night, and it was great. We’re going to be seeing more press releases about games with co-op at the center.

Reddit Knows Programmers

I “use” Reddit to look at subs for ESO and Fallout 76. That’s it. When I’m bored, I sometimes click over to the “popular” tab, and just have a look. It’s more of an anthropological experiment than an interest in reading what’s there. Sometimes, I can’t get past the front page, because, most of the time, Reddit is just a living monument to people being awful to each other. Sometimes, I make it to the next page. Sometimes, I make it to a gem. Most of the time, I see Reddit’s twenty-something, white, middle-class, male, under-sexed, under-employed hive mind on full display, like this.

“He,” here, refers to Elon Musk.

Reddit. ‘Nuff said.

This guy thinks “backend and fullstack” programmers “know shit about OSes and PC in general.” And, as of 13 hours of being posted, deep in the thread, has 84 upvotes. (On a post with 2200+ votes.)

I’ve been programming since I was 12, on a Vic-20. I’ve been doing it professionally my entire career, for about 30 years now. Even the people who I would consider “casual” programmers know how operating systems and PC’s work. I’ve met some posers, but they wash out. To blithely say “most” programmers “don’t understand computers” is utter nonsense, and, frankly, weapons-grade cope.

Welcome to Reddit, I guess. “Enjoy” your stay.

Reddit just made a deal to sell their “content” to Google, to train AI. Good luck with that. With what we’ve seen over the past few days with their AI product, using Reddit seems like a really good fit.

I weep for the future.

AI can now master your music—and it does shockingly well | Ars Technica

A few weeks after our conversation, Apple released version 10.8 of Logic Pro, its flagship digital audio workstation (DAW) and the big sibling to GarageBand. Stuffed inside the update was Mastering Assistant, Apple’s own take on AI-powered mastering. If you were a Logic user, you suddenly got this capability for free—and you could run it right inside your laptop, desktop, or iPad.

Source: AI can now master your music—and it does shockingly well | Ars Technica

Keep in mind, they’re not talking about mixing, but mastering, which are two very different things. I’ve tried a service that did this a few years ago, and, it did really well, even back then. If you’re not semi-knowledgable about this space, it might scare you, but there have been hardware versions of this sort of thing for decades. It’s more science than art. There’s just no amount of listening on various speakers and in different rooms that can dial in whole-mix EQ so that it sounds right on everything these days. The process is, in fact, very mathematical, and can be automated. In short, “nothing to see here; move along.” This is just the next logical step.