Public companies have to account for the shareholdres’ expectation of, well, making money (and more money, and more money, and growing the numbers as much as possible). Shareholders have some degree influence on how the company works, depending on how many shares they own, e.g. they can vote for the CEO. This usually leads to the company to introducing more aggressive ways of making money off the users/customers, enshittification, etc., as it has to satisfy the shareholders and not so much the original customers.

Oh yeah, the death of an 88-year-old man who has been suffering from serious medical issues for months is so odd and unexpected that it is more reasonable to propose that the vice-president of the US personally killed him.

Tbh I find that they were always surprisingly lenient on piracy. There are multiple subreddits about piracy websites, some of which had their Telegram channels blocked multiple times in the last year or two, while having no issues on reddit, and even some subreddits where people directly link to pirated content.

No. Qanon stuff mostly happened on 8chan, and even then there’s no secret “historical” data to access. It was one or multiple obsessed and/or manipulative people spreading insane ideas anonymously, and idiots falling for it. There’s no secret inside some system out there, it’s essentially just organic stupidity. Some believe the guy who owned 8chan was “Q”, it’s not an unreasonable idea, but it changes nothing.

Considering all the stuff you’ve written, the let’s say philosophical and ambivalent conclusion there feels inappropriate. A society that puts random innocent people without trial into a death camp is not stable. It all comes off as if the system just restructured the violence (who does it to who and by what means), rather than being on the path of eliminating it…

But it’s an enlightening and valuable comment anyway, thank you. Do you know when was the deal with US made? I can’t find it on Wikipedia…

A candidate that comes to my mind right now: Laibach - Smrt za smrt (Death for death)

However, IMO much of the heaviness is based on the fact that the “singer” is reading a description of some sort of war crimes, in Slovenian D:

For classical music, I used to go every other week, these days I go much more rarely, let’s say once every month or even every two months. (But just last week I went to four because there was a festival.) For non-classical acts, I try to catch every performance of the bands I know, local or non-local, and maybe try something new and random just so, which usually amounts to 2-3 concerts a year.

I find articles and takes of this sort to be kind of “storm in a glass of water”, not really an issue if you just take a step back, and with somewhat made-up problems, e.g. pop songs used to go on for 3 or maaaybe 4 minutes, now the author complains they are just 2 mins - but the format never was conductive to “telling a proper story” at all.

If someone thinks Spotify is that bad, idk just stop using it? I’ve never used it and I’m doing just fine. There’s plenty of other ways of discovering and accessing and living with music.

I get the impression people of that sort have mostly ended up on RateYourMusic.

In an ideal society, IP laws would definitely not exist. The idea by itself is inarguably desirable.

But, more practically, IP laws should be abolished or reformed to accommodate the needs of the average creator and the average consumer. The two people who proposed this change are not average creators in the slightest, they’re looking to benefit primarily their own class, the consequences for the other 99.99% are irrelevant.

A reform of this type should start at the very least with small and realistic steps. Can we e.g. reduce the absurd duration of copyright protection (author’s life + 70 years)? Reducing it by just 20-30 years would be an incredible boon to human culture, and it would have zero serious negative consequences.

But they only talk about it in the most vague terms, no details or anything, and Dorsey doesn’t seem to have actually described any of those other ways of compensation. They’re just greedy megalomaniacs throwing ideas around.

The issue that the article raises is legitimate, but actually looking through their archives is baffling, they’re really just hellbent on shitting on WP. One of their most read articles says Wikipedia should attract more female editors by reducing the anonymity on the site and making it more like a social media platform. What the hell? https://wikipediocracy.com/why-women-have-no-time-for-wikipedia/

The iPhones must flow.

The way it does math is mostly as people have already assumed - approximating instead of doing it “manually”. It’s 2025 and at this point absolutely nobody should be surprised that AI “confidently describe[s] the standard grade-school method, concealing its actual, bizarre reasoning process”.

As for poetry,

Here, the model settled on the word “rabbit” as the word to rhyme with while it was processing “grab it.” Then, it appeared to construct the next line with that ending already decided, eventually spitting out the line “His hunger was like a starving rabbit.”

this is exactly how many poets write rhymed poetry too, it’s not even remotely bizarre.

Still, it is interesting and good to see some concrete advancement in the study of AI reasoning. Hopefully it will contribute towards reducing the mystification of the whole thing.

I don’t think piracy is legal anywhere.

It took them some time, huh?

Ehh sorry. I assumed/hoped you were talking about something more, that I wasn’t aware of. I know of these protests, but they were not nearly intense enough to disrupt the system. Much of the urban youth that might have led the protests has left the country in the meantime too, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the next round of recruitment is met with even weaker resistance…

Maybe I should just Google it but… do you remember any specific cases of this pushback?

The device knows what time it is at all times. It knows this because it knows what time it isn’t.

If it suggests a connection, that’s synonymous with it being evidence.

No it isn’t synonymous. Evidence is in principle unambiguous, whereas merely “suggesting” something could be more or less ambiguous. And I think that if you put down the raw facts on paper, i.e. described exactly what the document says, nobody could call that “evidence”, and some number of people would probably agree that it might be only a “suggestion”.

yes, my meme wasn’t 100% accurate

That heavily downplays its actual rhetorical effect. It’s not accurate, but it makes a big attention-grabbing dramatic statement. In other words, it’s in line with the usual methods of conspiracy theories based on bullshit reasoning.

Literally how many times have you brought up one simple typo

No more and no less than twice. Once in my very first comment, and second time in the previous comment. I mostly tried to ignore it, and I brought it up again to underline your general carelessness in treating of the issue. (And it’s not a typo, it’s a factual mistake, as you’ve said.)

you justified your lack of investigation into the CIA while also making statements about CIA history

There’s a few issues here. I haven’t simultaneously claimed to be a leftist and that leftists should be experts in world history and economics, while you did, so this contradiction is only your own. I don’t think I’m an expert on history and I’m afraid I never will be. However, since I have indeed not investigated the history of CIA, that’s exactly why I’ve made only minimal statements about CIA history, statements that should be correct regardless of various other information on its history. I said that: CIA supported some Hungarian dissidents in 1963 (as evidenced by the document in OP), and that CIA spread some radio programs in 1956 Hungary in order to stoke the revolt (as is widely accepted and found on Wikipedia). Everything else I wrote is conditionals based on reasonable assumptions and general knowledge that I am aware is not backed by more precise info on my part: yes, it seems perfectly reasonable that CIA has supported anti-communist movements (I haven’t read about that in any detail but I’ve heard of that happening and it seems to be widely agreed on, so I didn’t problematise it), and it could also be that it has done the same in 1956 Hungary (correct, as it has turned out).

This is simply intellectual carefulness. I’m not appealing to my expertise or wide knowledge, I’m appealing to reading the actual text carefully and extrapolating what can be reasonably extrapolated from it.

I have to be exactly right about everything

In your position, yes you kind of do (even you said: “If you’re a leftist, you have to be an expert on the history of the entire globe, as well as economics and all sorts of other fields.” - high standards!). In general, I think everyone should strive to be maximally correct if they make a claim that hundreds of other people see and take for truth.

Try to approach this discussion with a bit more focus on the arguments and the actual words, and less on me and your own perspective in it. At every turn you’re attacking me, making a stereotype out of me and claiming I’ve said things I haven’t said in order to make our positions seem more symmetrical (you’re trying to argue about what CIA did or did not do, but I’m trying to argue about whether this counts as proof of what CIA did), and conveniently ignoring my key point even when I spell it out in bold letters. Do you find that I’ve done the same to you, have I ascribed you statements and ideas that you haven’t actually previously expressed? (Aside, of course, from the instance where I explicitly announced I would do it by ascribing you the position of those leftists who deride NYT, and in retrospect I shouldn’t have done that because it was nothing more than a pointless jab.) At the same time, you seem to be very emotionally invested in this, downvoting me even while absolutely nobody else is reading this dialogue anymore. Cool it down, you don’t have to respond to me, just please reflect on your own thinking/reasoning process once more, maybe sometime later when you have some distance from all this.

So you’ve at least silently dropped the accusation of my denial of CIA’s involvment in anything. Good, that’s some progress.

What an incredibly stupid line of argument.

Indeed, I did literally declare that it is based on stereotyping as a response to your making a stereotype out of me…

I saw something that suggested there was a connection between the CIA and the uprising

It sure might look like it if you ignore that the uprising happened 7 years earlier and that the organisation CIA supported wasn’t based in Hungary. But it looks like you ignored that while reading the document, so the connection seemed much stronger than it really is.

and how compelling I considered the evidence to be

This is literally no “evidence”, you yourself said it just suggested a connection, it isn’t even close to evidence of it, and your meme straight-up says it was admitted.

If you understood it was an analogy, then nitpicking that the date used in my analogy “wasn’t even in the same decade as my source” is utterly irrelevant.

That’s simply not the point I was going for, you’ve misread it or I should’ve been more clear. My point was this: your analogy used a time and place where the event is nigh impossible to be ascribed to any other entity than KKK and similar; on the other hand, the event of CIA supporting Hungarian dissidents that is described in the document did not happen in the time and place that is the focus of your theory.

but also, there is other evidence that does prove it. So my process seems pretty reasonable.

No, it is not even remotely reasonable to provide mere indications, weak proof, or non-proof, while you have easily available and already generally-accepted proof at your disposal.

criticizing me for not doing a thorough enough investigation into Hungary

Lol, “thorough investigation”, that’s not what I asked of you (again, my first comment: “Can’t you just Google one or two key words?”), you didn’t even check Wikipedia and couldn’t get the year of the revolution right, and, as I said above, made your whole conjecture while likely ignoring the actual content and context of the letter.

If you’re a leftist, you have to be an expert on the history of the entire globe, as well as economics and all sorts of other fields.

But you’ve just justified your lack of investigation into the topic by saying that you don’t have any connection to Hungary, while simultaneously also making a statement on Hungarian history…

And in principle the discussion of whether something did or didn’t happen has little to do with whether one is a leftist or a liberal or anything else. If I’m wrong about something, my politics matter fuck all, I’m simply wrong, and the actual facts will speak for themselves.