If Pangaea was administered by Americans they’d be all like “yeah but it’s just too big for trains!”.

100% totally is.

Kanye West doesn’t care about black people

Yes they are that lazy. The average office worker also has the attention span of a gnat. Write shorter emails with fewer questions if you can.

“You could imagine a world where…”

Sure, I can imagine a lot of things, and a lot of them will never materialize.

Can an LLM do something similar despite having never seen anything that isn’t a word or number?

No.

Read the book “bowling alone” if you’re interested in someone’s attempt at researching why we went from collectivism to individualism as a country. There are a large amount of factors but if I were to take a crack at it, I’d list a few: TV, the Internet, smart phones, air conditioning, capitalism, and (last but certainly not least) racism. Racism is foundational to the country and its history.

As far as the stupidity, some of the same factors apply, but there are also additional ones like environmental factors (US citizens eat more microplastics than any other major country since like 2020 and we lead poisoned ourselves for a century), a deep-seeded anti-intellectualism, and we’re a large part cultist/religious idiots that see everything through the lense of “some guy” being the best thing ever and the source of all truth.

Is that what the “you can’t download your shit anymore” is really reaching at?

I had a meeting with a young person who had to have the concept of a directory structure explained to them for a half hour…and they’re in charge of designing a file browser. 🤦‍♂️

I don’t think the exercise was even successful.

I believe you, but this is also a very left-leaning site that pretty much filters out all of the conservative idiocy from it. The general public doesn’t seem to give a shit and when I go out and about in the world it’s like nothing has even changed. I suspect it will be this way for a while even if eventually there is full-blown fascism with a world war and death camps. I remember reading remarks by people who were around during the formation of the Third Reich in Germany and I remember them writing something like all the shops and everything were open and people were going to work like normal for a large portion of it. There was even a person that didn’t realize how crazy the country had gotten until he saw his small child imitating Hitler and saying antisemitic shit about Jews.

The feeling that nobody else really gives a shit is what does it for me.

Other people actually giving a damn enough to do something other than post about it. I protested in the past and absolutely nobody gave a shit and it had zero effect. I don’t even think the protest was covered on the news.

I suspect that for any average American (or even a single digit percentage of them) to bother getting involved things are going to have to get extremely bad.

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It took me looking at unfamiliar programming languages and realizing that I could read most of them without really knowing them for me to realize I probably could learn to at least read another language.

It’s been years since then and I’m still probably shit at Spanish, but just like programming languages regular languages were made by humans to communicate with other humans, you’re capable of understanding any of them given a reasonable amount of time and guidance.

Social media is doing everything in the establishment’s favor

For about half a second, people used social media to organize. Then the fascists saw how to manipulate and control it, and jumped at the opportunity. At this point social media – especially billionaire controlled social media – is just part of the fascist apparatus.

To a lesser extent, as this article talks about, the coping mechanism of posting through better platforms allows you to vent enough to prevent you from having the discomfort necessary to actually do anything. It’s not nearly as harmful, but it’s not good either.

Is signal not good enough or something? I basically switched to signal.

100000000% agree

They want you to forget what they did so they can do it again.

Another day another issue that completely doesn’t matter at all to distract from the fact that our politicians are incapable of actually fixing any of our problems.

The thing about dei initiatives is that they don’t even work. All of this bullcrap and none of them were even close to hitting their targets anyway.

It’s like the Paris accords. We’re in the Paris accords, then we’re out of the Paris accords. Then we’re in them again, and then out of them again…and the whole time the world is burning record breaking amounts of fossil fuels.