Our News Team @ 11 with host Snot Flickerman
Yes, I can hear you, Clem Fandango!
*laughs in AMD
(I know they’re not that much better but they’re so much more well supported in Linux it’s absurd. NVIDIA only started getting more support that was focused on AI, which is cool and all, local AI is all right, but no very useful in everyday context.)
The main thing I remember about Tim Cook was him making me realize how wealthy white cisgender gay men were hardly different from wealthy white cisgender straight men.
The whole article has always been really worth a read, seeing how a techbro tried to turn a classic magazine into a tech company somehow. Besides that though, these passages always stuck out to me, because it feels deeply like these wealthy men exploit their sexuality to justify avoiding critique of their actions outside of their sexuality.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/inside-collapse-new-republic
In 2014, Hughes’s personal life and business life became increasingly intertwined, in ways that would coincide with changes at the magazine. His husband, Sean Eldridge, was running for Congress in a district that spanned the Catskills and the Hudson Valley, but his political campaign was not going the way he had hoped. Eldridge and Hughes had bought a two-million-dollar home in a district in which neither of them had ever lived, and Eldridge began investing in local businesses in what was widely seen as a transparent effort to influence the race.
Ioffe dates the abrupt change in mood to late summer, shortly after Foer’s birthday party—the period when, as many current and former T.N.R. employees noted, Eldridge’s expensive campaign to win a congressional seat started looking hopeless. “We all liked him; he seemed to like us,” she told me. “Everything was going great. Then, in the summer, something snapped, and he started talking to me about money and how we’re losing money and he’s tired of it. And then he became just downright contemptuous and hostile toward us.”
Hughes’s eroding relationship with the staff took on an ideological edge. On the morning that Tim Cook, the C.E.O. of Apple, announced that he was gay, MacGillis wrote a note to “the Plank,” T.N.R.’s internal e-mail listserv for writers and editors. “I see the celebration of his announcement, while entirely justifiable, as another sign of what’s happened to liberalism today, where rights/identity liberalism trumps economic liberalism,” he wrote. “This is, after all, a guy who embodies so much of what’s amiss in the age of inequality—pulling down $378 million in 2011 alone; Apple skirting taxes more brazenly than anyone else—yet those revelations have caused barely a stir.”
Hughes responded to the note six minutes later: “I think those are valid issues, although Apple has acted squarely within the law,” he wrote. “The law itself is fucked up. But I don’t think you can underestimate the difficulty of his decision or how tone deaf that argument would be today.”
The other editorial employees on the list were surprised by the response. It was an internal listserv for writers and editors, and the staffers didn’t realize that Hughes, who had relinquished his title as editor-in-chief when he installed Vidra, was on it. MacGillis responded by saying that he would hold off on writing, but added, “Just for the record, though, it is not so clear that Apple acted squarely within the law. The law’s a mess, but Apple pushed the bounds of it more than anyone.” He pasted text from a piece in the Times that questioned some of Apple’s practices.
It’s just a bit silly considering how these companies have been leveraging publicly available information and how automated most of their systems actually are. It’s part of why customer service at many of them (not Apple so much I guess) is absolutely abysmal and they basically do their best to try to avoid to having a human being in the customer service loop at all. Automating almost all software and removing the human element has literally been the name of the game for 20 years at least.
I wish this was talked about more. So much hay being made about this on the assumption that Google maintains their own database of locations instead of pulling from sources like GNIS like they actually do.
Fuck Google, but we don’t need to make shit up to hate them. In fact, making shit up makes us seem crazy and hurts our position.
I’d personally suggest Tuta over Proton simply because of the sketchiness of the Proton ownership and their conservative, business-first, citizens-second views.
Aegis is tits and it makes it easy to transfer TOTP codes back and forth between Aegis and KeePassXC.
It’s near the bottom but Tarn Adams notes the same thing, that it has been happening far longer than just starting when LLMs became popular.
“It’s been going on forever. That was before AI—or this form of AI,” Adams says, before lamenting: “They took the letters from me! I have to talk about dwarf behavior now. I can’t even talk about dwarf AI. It doesn’t exist. It’s dwarf behavior, and they misbehave sometimes.”
I mean, presenting themselves as just standing for the common man and wanting to tear down a broken system and don’t have ulterior motives is one hundred percent on brand for fascists.
Also “waahhh, my penthouse is too nice, my job is too boring, I get paid too much and I’m a bored white man” is the narrator, the man Tyler was covering up, a weak man’s idea of a strong man. “I look how you wanna look, I talk how you want to talk, I fuck how you want to fuck.” He is literally a manifestation of what the narrator, a weak person, thinks a strong person is.
He wants to return to a glorified past that never existed by tearing down the current system, a return to where everyone is living off the land like early humans (“climbing the vines growing along the Sears tower”). He promotes the idea that men must return to being warriors, and something about the modern world has made them “weak.” He promotes that such strength must be used to dominate, and claims it can be used to improve people’s lives, as he claims with Raymond K. Hessel (whom Tyler threatens to murder if Hessel does not follow his dreams), despite the fact that Hessel is most likely left devastated with trauma and unable to move forward due to fear of being murdered. We never see Hessel’s outcome, so Tyler gets to pretend he “helped” by completely traumatizing a person (reminds me of Trump bragging about “lifting people off of food stamps” when he actually kicked them off and made them more hungry, his followers don’t see the outcome so they just believe the lie). Tyler captures the attention of disaffected, alienated young men and brings them under his wing to become part of their in-group, making them more likely to go along with extreme demands because now they have found family in Project Mayhem. He literally beats the living shit out of one of his men, destroying his pretty face, and yet still commands the respect of his men while disfiguring one of them potentially permanently. With Project Mayhem he intends to bring about his ideal world by force.
So we have numbers 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, and 13 of Umberto Eco’s 14 features of Ur-Fascism in Tyler and Project Mayhem, in my opinion.
But sure, he’s not a fascist.
Why does everyone always miss the point that Tyler Durden is a fucking fascist.
Really changes what this meme means.
Glad I’m not the only one who remembered pantyhose in little easter egg containers.