Halo 3, Modern Warfare, Mass Effect, GTA4, Super Mario Galaxy, Rock Band, Assassin’s Creed, and Portal all launched closer to the original Sonic the Hedgehog than today.

27%

He has statutory emergency authority which can be checked by Congress if abused, except, what Congress?

(Also the tariffs are enforced by CBP, an executive agency.)

Might be your settings. When I flip the front page to “Active” most of the posts have hundreds of comments (though I prefer setting it to “Top Six Hours”).

In retrospect, I think the rise of smartphone-based, algorithm-driven social media circa 2012 will be seen as the information-age equivalent of lead poisoning that quietly brainrotted society. It greatly increased the power and reach of disinformation and radicalizing propaganda while destroying the ability of mainstream news sources to moderate or even alert people to the damage being done. There’s a staggering gap in attitudes between people who get their news from social media apps vs. newspapers or even cable TV. And so much of the maliciousness is below the surface, distributed across millions of unique newsfeeds and “for you” pages that the public writ large has very little insight into. If some shell company were airing neonazi recruitment ads on national television, people would be shocked and outraged, but slip it into the feeds of vulnerable people and you can poison an entire generation with hardly anyone noticing until it’s too late.

To be fair, that’s all they have to go on. If a picture’s worth a thousand words, how many pages is a lifetime (or even a childhood) of sight and sound?

At least it’s not pulling up mostly Motorhead-related content like it used to…

Yep. (Google Translate link)

I think I read that brains like these are basically normal in terms of structure and number of neurons, just compressed by the extra fluid pressure.

It had been crossposted to TheOnion community on another instance, but the story is real.

I feel like a good test of any supposed AGI would be to hook it up to a feed of a classic 3D platformer like Mario 64, give it input control, and see how long it takes to progress through the game. We’re seeing sparks of this with Claude Plays Pokemon, but any self-respecting superintelligence (or even human-equivalent) should be more than capable of learning the control scheme, navigating the 3D environment, solving puzzles, and generally playing through as competently as any 10-year-old seeing the game for the first time.

I voted for Sanders in the 2016 primary. In hindsight, he would have been obliterated, McGovern-style. Clinton and Biden treated him with kid gloves, but in a general election all of his questionable past – his unemployment, his wife’s involvement with that college financing thing, his honeymoon in the USSR, the rape essay – would have come out and been hammered relentlessly by Republicans (and a good chunk of Democrats).

In my experience, a lot of them aren’t dead, just slow. If you do post something, it still gets circulated to everyone subscribed and typically gets a decent amount of votes and comments.

I feel like doing that automatically would just encourage instances to defederate if their larger communities didn’t like the cut of another instance’s jib. The culture clash would be harder to tolerate if content were mixed by default like that.

Maybe an easier way for end users to do it themselves? Like making a feed of multiple communities under one topic.

something something Tiananmen Square

I could see them maybe using a custom version of Deepseek for that second tier. Could be a boon for them if the inference costs are a lot lower.

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It’s actually pretty rare for dictatorships to have only one legal party. Even North Korea is nominally a multi-party state. Such minor parties are just token controlled opposition ofc, but they serve to give a flimsy “democratic” veneer.

America’s trajectory rn is aiming closer to the illiberal/managed democracy of Hungary under Viktor Orban, where there are true opposition parties with an actual chance at winning, but the media, government, and electoral system is strongly biased against them.

More accurately, it traps any web crawler, including regular search engines and benign projects like the Internet Archive. This should not be used without an allowlist for known trusted crawlers at least.