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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • We need to look outside of social media. Doesn’t mean the media we consume don’t play a role in shaping opinions. The short attention spans and highly simplified messaging encouraged by endless scrolling on social media platforms play right into the hands of populists who trade in slogans, scapegoats and easy solutions. The algorithm takes care of the rest. Once you’ve expressed an interest in politically edgy content, you will be served more of that, to the point where your perception of reality will be completely shaped by that.


  • It is a very good game and makes an admirable job of showing you the branching paths and impact of your decisions. Presumably creating incentives to replay, but personally I was just satisfied to get my own story and knowing how it could have gone different in many ways. Also well written, they tend to get flak for their writing, but compared to most video game writing it’s pretty good.




  • It’s become more efficient to get basic info on virtually any topic by just asking an LLM like ChatGPT and that could be a serious threat to Google Search. People might form the habit of asking AIs for everything and then go to Google Search only when they want to dig deeper / find relevant articles etc. So I assume they added their own AI right into Search in an effort to continue being the first (and perhaps only) place one goes to for information.




  • The amount of anti-Russia comments on account of a known issue in competitive sports is disturbing. Does everything nowadays have to be about either “Russia bad” or “China bad”? Can’t it be about how exceptionally talented young people are pressured into doping because of ever increasing and often impossible to reach performance standards? I feel we have collectively lost a sense of measure in our response and have replaced a global outlook seeing global solutions to global problems with a nationalistic and sectarian us vs them attitude. And shudder to think that inside those countries it is exactly the same in reverse, possibly worse even.




  • Exactly. As a liberal myself I feel strongly about certain things and am all too aware of that supposition of moral superiority and self righteousness that have been very characteristic of western liberalism. In the meantime, many countries in the “free world” are inching closer to authoritarianism by the day. Sure, Putin bad, but leaving some room for nuance would go a long way. The idea that one need only get rid of “bad actors” is flawed. Especially when at the very same time western powers are enabling what more and more people see as genocide in another part of the world. And the country that has brought a case against that in court is South Africa, The world is changing, the global south is rising, China is rising, Russia is also seeking to extend its influence and global cooperation is needed more than ever.





  • I think you will do well to do with less certainties and interrogate the very essence of the concept of the “free world”, a term introduced in the Cold War to demonize communism and basically any challenge to US hegemony. Unfortunately todays polemical and self righteous western liberalism plays right into the hands of the alt-right and fascists in more ways than one. I personally worry more for what is happening in the West right now than what is happening in Russia/Ukraine, because the West is a lot more powerful and is itching for a larger military confrontation, while liberalism continues to fail more frequently back home except in minor wins on identity politics. In this climate I find it disturbing when people dig up Cold War terminology to creat camps and draw lines in the sand.