This isn’t new news as such, but people keep being surprised by it, so it’s worth repeating. Substack hosts, profits from, and promotes explicitly Nazi content, and if you are adding value to that network, you are helping them to do so. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/feb/07/revealed-how-substack-makes-money-from-hosting-nazi-newsletters
the fediverse was using the term PDS first!
via https://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/socialweb/XGR-socialweb-20101206/#State
A fair response to this is "what the hell are you talking about?" to which I can only answer that this is one of those things that appears on the fringe of sleep
I doubt this has any actual value at all, but maybe it could be a fun paradox-preventing plot device for a sci-fi story that needs oracles/crystal balls or something
@emaytch anyway, despite whatever the guy downthread is saying, we are in active contact with multiple ex-twitter people who can recount shambolic tales:
one of the core organizers was concerned about opsec and was being very exclusive and then nervously told his manager during his 1:1 that he was organizing a union, who promptly arranged a meeting with HR
and
excluding people because they weren’t “nice enough” definitely happened. a few of us were very vocal about what bullshit it was.
[Alice] and I each said some variation of “are we having a dinner party or trying to take on one of the richest guys in the world? the fuck is wrong with all of you”
and
they reached out to me asking if i wanted to join. on work slack.
@fromjason The "No Kings" style of protest isn't about disrupting; it's about networking. (...to oversimplify a bit.)
...and wow, I still can't decide if Thiel is honestly delusional or understands very well the manipulative BS he is spewing.
@woozle I've heard the networking framing a few times. I can buy that for sure. Networking is important. Building contacts is important.
But that's not what No Kings is advertising. I've never heard them even mention it. In fact, the only networking it encourages is giving them your contact info so they can market to us.
So it seems a bit like painting a bulls eye around the arrow.
The Olympics are incredible to watch and also a system that takes four-year-olds, puts them through extreme physical training they can't consent to, wraps it in flags and inspirational music, and then acts shocked when they're broken by 25. the rates of depression, eating disorders, and PTSD among elite athletes are brutal. and "but some of them love their sport" is not a defense of the system. some people survive all kinds of harmful systems. that's survivorship bias in a leotard. we can admire athletic achievement AND acknowledge that the pipeline producing it is deeply, structurally fucked up. both things. same time.
new 🏴 still didn't get the memo: #seahawks defense is not horsing around. Maye has the best if the grid, enjoying the sacks.
This #SuperbowlLX is ours!
We can continue doing goals on every offense, we continue winning
. #Seahawks 6 - Patriots 0
Iffy take: The "march for billionaires" was, contrary to consensus, a major triumph. A handful of nobodies with incoherent far-right politics produced a major media spectacle smack dab in San Francisco. Another win for fascist creep in California, facilitated by corporate media
What can be observed in the "march for billionaires" is the reproduction of a cycle that, repeated ad infinitum, has done much to get us to here:
- Fascist mimicry - the parodic perversion of leftist strategy
- Media compliance - the press shows up and performatively sneers at the "pathetic" turnout. But they're the real puppets, because they were again goaded into platforming fascism and turning it into a national story
- Social media reception - Progressive/rational people laugh at the clowns. Absolutely no one should be laughing at this point. Aided by the repetition of this kind of cycle, those clowns have, superficially speaking, won everything
If you had a universal basic income that was enough to cover your basic living costs (food, rent, bills etc...).
What would you do with your time ?
@quixoticgeek I'd put more time into my projects, including the monetized ones. Maybe try to get the next novel properly published. Make more things that add value to the lives of others.
And I'd find a different day job that better suited that goal.
A machine that could answer arbitrary binary questions about the future might lead to paradoxes. An alternative formulation: upon being asked a question, the machine stimulates two versions of the universe, one in which it answered 'true' and one in which it answered 'false'. It chooses one of these universes at random to base its answer on.
This results in no paradox: the answer can never be dependent on itself, because it has been sampled from a fair distribution of outcomes.
A surprising thing that pops out of this thought experiment: the more you try to create a universe in which the subject of the question is in a specific state, the more the answer you originally got from the machine becomes more likely to have been random in the first place. The machine remains more accurate for questions in which acting upon the answer does not encourage a change in the answer.
A fair response to this is "what the hell are you talking about?" to which I can only answer that this is one of those things that appears on the fringe of sleep
Is it just me or are the commercials pretty woke?
Rebellion Themed TTRPG Campaigns: Guerrillas, Freedom Fighters and Pirates
I've been wanting to get back into writing campaign settings and ideas down, so thought I would once more blow the dust off the blog. Yesterday I encountered some really interesting blog posts about trying new ways of writing D&D to avoid some of its western and colonial tropes. The general idea that has been kicked around for, well, pretty much forever at this point is that D&D is about killing things and taking their stuff, and that is generally a bad idea with a lot of really unfortunate parallels in real-world history; many much more well read people have already written about this, so I don't think I need to go into that further.
@Canageek do you fuck with podcasts at all? i feel like Friends at the Table might be of interest to you.
It's crazy how much these superbowl commercials are just beautifully rendered vingettes tied to core human emotions and needs like community or family or confidence or agency and they just stick a logo in there, hoping our little pattern-making brains will associate the brand with our core needs and the ads cost like a million dollars so I guess it fucking works.
lol its still so stupid that ppl in the tech industry didn't want to unionize when they had all the power
@emaytch I guess it's interesting to hear from some of the replies that yes, unions tried to form but the union-forming leaders weren't all that great at actually getting it formed, and the tech leadership's HR knew how to quell it quickly (you can hire external consultants that will kill unions)
So now I'm hearing about so-called Open Source projects closing PR contributions from the outside world because it's easier to "generate the code" from within their org just based on people's bug reports or whatever.
**Mask off moment.**
These people never cared about #OpenSource or #LibreSoftware. They just cared about marketing & free labor. Now that they can get "free labor" from slop machines faster, they'll do that.
🙄
Folks, we need real community now more than ever.
Stop. Dance party!
The Olympics are incredible to watch and also a system that takes four-year-olds, puts them through extreme physical training they can't consent to, wraps it in flags and inspirational music, and then acts shocked when they're broken by 25. the rates of depression, eating disorders, and PTSD among elite athletes are brutal. and "but some of them love their sport" is not a defense of the system. some people survive all kinds of harmful systems. that's survivorship bias in a leotard. we can admire athletic achievement AND acknowledge that the pipeline producing it is deeply, structurally fucked up. both things. same time.
lol its still so stupid that ppl in the tech industry didn't want to unionize when they had all the power
The double luge seems like someone has just persuaded another person that something that doesn't exist exists. Oh no it's totally real just lay on top of me, mmmm, that's good, just like that, now we slide down this long bumpy tunnel hnnnnrgh don't mind that, that's all part of it. Look at their faces!
@TheBreadmonkey I feel like it started as a ruse to get a guy’s unqualified friend into a college via athletic scholarship, and there’s some sort of 80’s style college hijinks comedy about it’s inception.
Feeling underdressed for the Super Bowl? Get tonight's Low Quality Ad, this SPORTS! Hat so you don't embarrass yourself next year too.
https://collabs.shop/kolwmg
@lowqualityfacts Nayh, I want a SPORES hat.
