I’ll have to take your word for it

Goes back to email. Easier to create a machine that churns out digital messages than find humans to do the work manually. So you get increasing loads of spam and gibberish, attempting to out-shout one another in a digital space with no bureaucratic regulation or material limits.

That said, one thing that made early social media like Facebook and MySpace and Livejournal appear valuable was the degree of human interaction. What’s more, the interpersonal networks that formed between verified humans gave enormous value to communications across the platform.

Facebook did a pretty good job, early on, of limiting who could join based on authentication through college admin offices. MySpace had a large cohort of real human artists producing real human music, which attracted a real human following. Livejournal predated a lot of advertisement-by-blogging. After the Dot-Com bubble burst, this is where you could see green shoots of economic value in a digital space.

We’ve demolished all that chasing fictitious capital. How valuable it was in practice is debatable, of course. But it’s all gone now.

Reddit, very famously, used bot traffic at its inception to create the illusion of a community big enough to compete with Digg.

It was the OG “fake it till you make it” business.

As the company implements an increasingly draconian “ban every account that looks at me sideways” admin policy, I’m not sure if “2/3rds of the traiffc” isn’t lowballing it. There are entire threads - from initial post to bullshit bottom comment - that get created by bot traffic on the modern site. It’s a full blown hall of mirrors over there.

take a really long time getting to know someone

I mean, I’ve found 2-5 dates is a good measure. I’ve also seen 7 hours of social time, ideally within a week or two of getting to know someone, helps build up the chemistry before getting physical.

Idk about “really long time”, but there’s a dividend in accruing that sexual tension, especially if you can toe the line between flirting and fucking.

each ‘incident’ can v easily have been explained

You hear this from serial sexual harassers all the time. Every individual incident has plausible deniability. It’s the trend line that eventually catches up with you.

your type are to tightly wound up

My type being… big budget advertisers on YouTube?

AreWeTheBaddies.jpg

hed did a bad thing that one time

Far more than the one time. He had a whole routine about exploiting overseas labor to perform humiliating stunts.

I just feel old and stupid. I naively thought there could be something this time but they are all the same. I hate that I fell for it and couldn’t control myself.

I mean, what’s past is past. Absolutely no reason to feel bad because of a drunken hook-up. The stringing-along and ghosting seems more like a him problem than a you problem. More likely than not, this guy is just as insecure and flaky as he appears in hindsight.

It fucking sucks that we’ve got so many lemons in the dating pool. Your story is one I’ve heard a dozen different women of all different ages and experiences reiterate. A guy turns on the charm, you get swept off your feet, then he’s back to business as usual the next day and you realize he’s just a normal POS.

But we’ve got an urge for companionship, so we all keep putting ourselves out there. The struggle is real. Know that even if you’re lonely, you’re not alone. Lots of people feel this way and nothing you’re doing is bad or wrong, even if it feels frustrating.

One Night flings are rough precisely because you build a deep bond very quickly with someone who - in the long term - wasn’t going to work out. I’m not going to say “don’t do that” because people are horny and fucking is fun. But you can’t beat yourself up afterwards, because mixing guilt and horniness is miserable and ruins the fun part of fucking. Then you’re just left with this hollow urge divorced from the joy of sex.

I can say that finding love among friends (at least in my experience) tends to be more fruitful than trying to find friendship among lovers. Dragging someone out on a date a few times isn’t just about counting the encounters before hooking up, it’s about building a list of things you like to do together that you can do when you’re not naked.

And sometimes just going out and doing things you like to do, and meeting other people who do things you like to do, is the best way to find a long-term companion.

And if that’s going to parties and clubs - because you plan to keep clubbing straight through your retirement years - that’s great. But if you’re a golfer or a painter or a board game enthusiast or a mall rat, you gotta go find big groups of people doing this kind of thing and date from there. Cause the people you meet at bars are, more often than not, the kind of people who want to be at the bar for the rest of their lives.

If you want to pirate Brave Browser, I don’t think anyone will mind.

And why does it seem like they all hate Pewdiepie?

He took a fascist turn during Trump 1 and never really recovered his image. Got into a bunch of weird exploitative shit, not unlike Mr Beast. The most notable being when he tested the Fiverr service and paid five dollars to get Indian freelance actors to laugh and show a sign saying ‘Death to all Jews’.

After that, he started getting deplatformed and his following fell off considerably. So, like a bunch of other has-been YouTube starlets, he decided to get even more edgy and reactionary, further poisoning his image. It’s the same death spiral Russell Brand and Rob Schneider fell down.

If I haven’t beaten game one, it’ll be more than a month.

But synchronizing patch releases so you’re not bombarded with notifications would be nice, yes.

Linux guy whipping out the “Actually, it’s a feature not a bug” line is very funny.

There should be a law against OS updates more frequent than once a month

the volume of such posts surged from just under 2,000 per day to more than 6,000

I refuse to believe Twitter only had 2,000 anti-islamic posts a day.

Twelve years ago, when XP released, there was legitimately a decision to be made what with nine distinct versions of the OS available. That still hasn’t stopped even in the modern day. So I could see people discussing exactly which version of Win10/11 they needed and then recommending others based on their experience.

But it’s sort of like the BMW that comes with a subscription to heated seats and ABS. Like, why would you subject yourselves to this kind of abuse in an OS?

“How likely are you to recommend putting your hand up to the elbow in this wood chipper?”

Like, if you’re in the business of building PCs? I definitely understand swapping build tips with friends and colleagues. Even strictly within the “No Linux Allowed” space, there’s no shortage of online tutorials and consultants recommending this or that version of Microsoft.

But Win10 is going away and Win11 is so fucking bad…

Still feels like a hat on a hat. Unless you’re on bleeding edge hardware doing something truly novel with the OS, I’m not sure why a selective opt-in log of various bolt-ons and patches improves your experience.

Computers, at their heart, are still just a place you go to manage spreadsheets, email other people those spreadsheets, and pirate entertainment. So you’re always left asking the burning question “How will this patch improve my experience with spreadsheets?” And 99.5% of the time, the answer is “It won’t”.

“I’m on the bleeding edge of Linux! I get the most advanced features the distro allows! Yeah, it may periodically brick my home system from time to time, but its worth it when I can get…”

reorganizing the symlink layout of the NVIDIA firmware

“… which I literally cannot live without”.

Ah, the Peter Thiel Special

Being profitable so you can continue to exist does not mean you are motivated by profit.

I mean… it definitely plays a large factor. The idea that these organizations aren’t profit-maximizing is very different than claiming they’re net negative or hobbyist endeavors.

This is the same argument as “you hate capitalism but you participate in it.”

“We live in a capitalist society and must play by its rules” is merely an observation of the status quo.

I would more compare it to the complaint about a number of socialist states - China, Vietnam, Cuba, Venezuela - that wildly outperform their expectations despite flying in the face of Chicago School orthodoxy. “Well, but they’re cheating!” is an allegation made regularly.

Western AI data scrapping companies love to get mad at Chinese AI data scrapping companies for scrapping their data, for instance. American MIC love to bemoan foreign investment in cheap, efficient deterrents. American biotech companies are firmly committed to keeping anything developed in Cuba out of the hands of the American public.