• 3 Posts
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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: April 24th, 2024

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  • I have despised twitter since basically its inception.

    1. The character (original) character limit fundamentally means you are strongly encouraged to limit conversation to basically soundbites, slogans, and pithy comments. Even though this was changed later, it still created a culture that generally mocks anything long winded.

    While its true that brevity is the soul of wit, wit is not the same thing as a detailed and nuanced discussion of a complex topic.

    It thus lends itself to being an optimal tool for political slogans, celebrity gossip, and direct corporate advertisement.

    1. Twitter is far, far, faaar too open ended, as in one to many kind of network connections. Its a dream come true also for narcissistic, attention seeking individuals who want to win Twitter.

    2. Twitter blew up before Facebook completely shifted (enshittified?) their entire model from being focused on actually connecting friend groups, and directly pushed Facebook toward just being an unmitigated firehose of ‘content’ from every which way, which just became the norm for ‘social media’ design.

    Of course X now is even fucking worse, but I am so glad its dying.

    The way I see it, Twitter contributed heavily toward destroying the older, more personal formats of social media, it helped destroy the old forum culture of the net where people had communities and a measure of intellect, privacy and respect.

    It took the sincerity out of online discourse, and was foundational in shifting the internet from a ‘place’ with lots of weird locales, into some kind of Eldritch god’s sick joke of a species level omni-mirror, reducing online humanity to a popularity contest of political slogans, narcissistic clout chasers, gossip mongers, and corporate sloganeering and brand worship… and giving all of this to us in an undifferentiated constant flow.




  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddle_point

    Basically, its a mathematical function where if you start at 0,0, you might falsely believe you are at the (or a) maximum or minimum of the function, as the slope at 0,0 is 0.

    But, if you go any direction in the x axis, your function value rises, any direction in the y axis, your function value falls.

    Thus a saddle point is an illusory, false impression of being at the extreme extent of a function, when in fact you are not.

    The idea is that there is more to determining if you’re truly at a global max or min of a function than only finding a single point where the slope is 0.




  • … Its a Korean beauty contest. The country with the highest rates of cosmetic plastic surgery in the world.

    I… I get what you’re driving at, that people in general shouldn’t be so driven toward perfection in outward appearance.

    But its a beauty contest, in a society where over 25% of women under 40 have had some kind of plastic surgery. and a huge cultural emphasis on perfection of physical appearance, where using AI enhanced filters is also hugely prevalent.

    I’m not saying this is good, I personally don’t like beauty contests, I don’t like widespread unrealistic beauty standards… but I don’t see how this question, absent its fumbled lingo adding overt sexual connotations, is surprising at all.

    It’s like being a vegan who is confused and angered by someone asking contestants at a hot dog eating contest how they prep before the contest:

    Why isn’t the issue of meat eating being addressed at this meat eating contest?

    Context should answer your question of ‘why do people at a beauty contest get asked how they would improve their beauty?’




    1. God is punishing us all for allowing the gays and the trans and abortion to exist, and not mandating bible study in k-12.

    2. General misdirect toward incompetent government bureaucracy being the culprit, therefore we should get rid of more of it and privatize more stuff.

    3. Its all because of private and public DEI hires of illegal immigrants who also don’t work and get too many benefits thus bankrupting us

    4. Secret deepstate illuminati cabal runs everything, we need more sweeping authoritarian powers to stop them

    1 - 3 basically are the talking points they’ve used since the 80s, 4 has always been there but is now openly used for about a decade.