Yup. Makes me wonder if they teach people rubber duck debugging any more.

FIDE chief Emil Sutovsky released a reprehensible statement on twitter (which I’m not going to link) where he briefly mentioned Danya and briefly said that Kramnik had behaved badly, and then spent a few paragraphs berating Naroditsky’s friends and family for not supporting him enough, while simultaneously admitting that he wasn’t friends with him and hadn’t spoken to him in 4 years.

Nemo Zhou is going scorched-earth on him over it, and Levi “GothamChess” Rozman also released a video where he calls out Sutovsky: https://youtu.be/zY3P9Hx8Ep0

It’s difficult to know what the fallout of all of this is going to be, but it certainly seems like we’ve reached some kind of tipping point.

It’s worth pointing out that nobody yet knows the cause of death, but everybody - including those who knew Danya best - seems to unanimously agree that whatever the direct cause, Kramnik’s baseless accusations played a significant role.

Would it save time at this point if, rather than reporting on every Republican paedophile, we just reported every time it was revealed that a Republican wasn’t a paedophile?

There was a Twitter exchange Erich did the screenshotted rounds a year or so ago, which went something like this:

Tweet 1:

Sometimes i spend so long crafting the perfect prompt that i realise what the solution is and don’t even have to ask ChatGPT

Tweet 2:

Bro just discovered “thinking”

I downloaded Comet to give it a fair go, loaded it up, and then went “…now what?” Couldn’t think of a single thing i could use the AI interface for.

My personal favourite with Atlas is when he demonstrates searching your history. It takes him longer to type out the command than it would to open your history and search manually, and then it takes It like 10 seconds to find a result, when a manual search would be instantaneous.

The future is here!

Sure, but the porn laws are specifically about targeting LGBTQ people.

It actually gets worse than I outlined above, because I was in a hurry when I wrote that.

So, you make porn illegal and you define “porn” as anything “pro-LGBTQ”. That’s all books which feature LGBTQ characters, all organisations which support LGBTQ people, all people who are openly LGBTQ themselves.

Now you’ve got a school librarian who purged the books she was told to purge but accidentally missed one. A student checks it out, his parents see it and recognise it, now that librarian is guilty of distributing pornography to a minor. If the book features an LGBTQ character who is a minor, then that librarian is guilty of distributing child pornography.

And that’s not even as worrying as it gets. Because everything above is in Project 2025, but that’s not the entire limit. Over the last couple of years Republican politicians have been floating (and even trying to introduce bills which would actualise) the idea of the punishment for sexual offenses involving minors to be the death penalty. They’re not there yet (and bills have thus far been defeated), but that’s the direction of travel. That’s the end goal. A pseudo-legal framework to justify executing people for being openly LGBTQ (held hands with your girlfriend in public? A 17 year old saw you holding hands. You are now guilty of a sexual offense involving a minor), or anything other than publicly anti-LGBTQ. Off to the camps with you!

So, yes you’re right that they’ll use whatever weapon they can against whichever group they can - historically, fascists often target LGBTQ people first, and at the moment it’s easier to start with trans people than explicitly going after gay people - yet.

But the anti-porn laws are explicitly about targetting LGBTQ people. And they’re only part of the way down the roadmap.

Just a stick you use to beat people with it is, then. Shame.

Yeah, robots doing drudge work is exactly the future we were promised. It’s just that that’s supposed to allow humans to have more free time to pursue their interests, not die in a ditch from starvation.

If this means you can ask it to pretend to be a busty nurse with a limp, that already exists. If it means that you can say “what’s the name of that video with the busty nurse with a lisp?” and it’ll give you a link, then that’s potential, right there. I can imagine them right now torrenting every porn video they can and getting one llm to transcribe it to create training data for another llm while a third llm does image/scene analysis.

The trans bit is key here. First that, then anything “promoting homosexuality”. It’s in Project 2025 that the porn bans are about criminalising LGBTQ people and allies.

Office chairs are designed to be sat in for long periods. Gaming chairs are designed to look cool on twitch.

Can you quote me calling anybody a Nazi or a cunt? Can you explain how anything to do with Trump is of my own making, given that I’ve never once so much as set foot in the United States?

You seem to want to rant at a general “you”. That’s valid, but the format you’ve chosen is directly addressing a specific human being. And now you’re doubling down as if I’m being dishonest by not being the imaginary version of me that only ever existed in your head?

You can pretend you know me better than I know myself if you choose to, despite seemingly not even knowing basics like what my nationality is, but I’m not really sure what you think either of us are going to gain by that.

I wasn’t kidding about going through your definition of fascism one aspect at a time and talking about how the current US administration fits it completely. That’s if you’re interested in actual conversation rather than just aimlessly shouting at the world.

You profess to think that talking to people is better than name-calling. Is that true, or is it just something you say in order to have a stick to beat people with?

To be clear: Trump’s opponents are saying no kings. Trump & those around him are tweeting pictures and videos of him as a king. Stephen miller said Trump had “pleniary power”. His followers want him to be king.

You’re a relatively large mammal. Your body is not designed to be productive all the time. It’s designed to have frequent periods of doing absolutely nothing. You’re also a pack animal whose survival depends on being social with other members of your pack.

So, wasting productive time by conversing nonsense? That’s how we evolved. It’s good for us.

The Beatles thing is a myth. Nobody connected to the Beatles has sued anybody over Paul’s Boutique. Most of the samples on Pauls’ Boutique were cleared, especially the most obvious ones.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/blogs/pop-hiss/story/2012-05-10/beastie-boys-sampling-in-pauls-boutique-again-in-spotlight

He adds that there are two myths about the samples and licensing on the Beastie Boys’ classic. One is that when the record was first released, neither the group nor its label, Capitol, had cleared any of the rights to the snippets of recordings that they and producers the Dust Brothers used. ‘They and their label were really cautious. They cleared tons of songs,’ McLeod says, citing the ballpark $250,000 figure that’s often reported, and the fact that the Jimmy Castor Bunch had sued the group soon after ‘Licensed to Ill’ was released.

Or, let’s say that it is a utopia and you somehow get in. Congratulations, you now have to spend an eternity with Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg.

Does it?

Yes. We can go through your list, if you want?

Did it also tick all those boxes in 2016, when you were all calling everyone a nazi and cunt? You know, why you could actually have talked to them and convinced them of your argument before you made this all so much worse?

I’m not really sure who you’re addressing here.

Yeah. If there’s one answer to the question of what game can you only play for the first time once, is Outer Wilds.

I was specifically talking about how you defined fascism in your post. That’s why I quoted it directly.

You posted criteria for what constitutes fascism. And the current US administration ticks all of your boxes.

Fascism used to mean something specific, dictatorship, violent nationalism, suppression of dissent, and the merging of state and corporate power.

…you are paying attention to current events in the US, right?