I’m not sure where to start here, so here are two equally important building blocks.

First, aside from other reasons the Nazi/minority is wrong, you are comparing a label somebody gets for existing the way they were born with a label somebody gets for actions they take that harm other people.

Second, some kind of mishmash of the terms “social contract” and “paradox of tolerance.”

So are we living in some kind of Bizarro Eternal September?

Where instead of being flooded with normies, a few dozen thousand of us are walled in behind barriers to entry that the greybeards of old could only imagine.

It’s like a social experiment that would be unethical if we weren’t all self-selected to be here. Will we flourish or will we go mad?!?

Given my experiences so far, I’m gonna ride this thing as far as it takes me. Just today I was inspired by a fellow lemming to format my entire hard drive just to switch to a slightly different Linux distro. On my work laptop! :>

Thank you for this post!

For me, getting into self hosting was nice because of the privacy and tinkering yes, but a huge part of it was just having my stuff work reliably and without enshittification.

I just set up my Home Assistant server and new Zigbee network in the past few weeks and it’s pretty awesome. Was already using Jellyfin despite having a lifetime Plex pass. Feels good man.

hopes that society will become more accepting of AI, or what Nadella describes as “cognitive amplifier tools.”

Ok well this is a simple train of cause and effect that even Mr Nadella should be able to understand.

Make an actual tool that is so damn good and so universally useful that early adopters who pay attention would consider calling it a “cognitive amplifier.”

Keep in mind that I have seen the term “second brain” used for note taking apps, usually easy to use and sync between devices. (I’m using AnyType free)

That is how poorly the “market” views your “tech demo with a price tag” product! It loses the brain title to a small collection of conveniently stored text files. Congratulations.

Wilhoit’s law:

“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

In looking up the exact text, apparently it is often attributed to the wrong Wilhoit, lol.

Ah yeah good edit, I wasn’t even considering that you could have meant it that way.

I decided to go look up the rules in order to contribute something more useful to this discussion, and it turns out that the mere presence of offspring does not disqualify one from the award!

Given their reasoning, I think Kirk would qualify. And given that his whole brand was about spreading stupid dangerous ideas to everybody’s kids including his own, and then he died in a spectacularly ironic and public way, I think he should actually win one!

https://darwinawards.com/rules/rules.children.html

This isn’t a movie plot we’re talking about here, nor is it some small far-away regional conflict that could never affect you.

I’m in the US but even if I was on the opposite side of the globe in a decent and closely allied country like Australia or NZ, I think I’d still be worried about these psychos being in control of the 800 pound gorilla.

That sentence from hbomberguy is a work of art.

I’m a parent too, and that’s exactly why I am glad his disgusting voice was silenced in the most public and ironic way possible.

That sounds pretty difficult to do in the modern world.

In contrast, I like the idea that before he croaks he could know that his name will be cursed and his grave pissed upon for generations.

I appreciate your concern for the quality of your contributions, and I think this place has a higher proportion of that type of user than just about any other platform.

This place is small and it’s generally friendly and inclusive. Most comments won’t get any replies, but the ones that do will generally be constructive. The users here are into the whole idea of the social contract and that we can have something nice if we are just excellent to one another.

I repeatedly say “generally” because this is an open platform and assholes are allowed to join. The assholes can even have their own instance dedicated to asshole topics! But fortunately the instances and communities are generally moderated by actual decent humans who are much like the users!

So let that knowledge help you comment more, not less! Even if you get no comments and like 5 upvotes, it actually feels like something of value even if it’s just a nod from a few decent people.

Edit: part of the conclusion was supposed to be that you can consider comments more like a discussion with people and not some strict message board.

This is so stupid that it makes me think maybe the “great filter” (the reason we don’t see space-faring civilizations everywhere) is actually that life forms who evolved by fighting for survival and going through natural selection cannot psychologically handle a post-scarcity society. It’s like when the threats disappear everybody forgets they exist even if they are well documented historically.

Related: if you don’t know about how horrifying a disease is, go search for some articles and copypasta about it. Congrats on being one of today’s (un)lucky 10,000!

American here, and I was a little boy scout like 30 years ago so I actually learned some of the rules of the US flag code.

Ever since then I have constantly noticed many of the people who most need to display their patriotism also being ignorant of the official rules for showing respect to their favorite flag.

And to be clear, I don’t care about the rules surrounding the flag. It’s just amusing and/or sad to see how superficial people can be and how little effort they put into learning about anything, much less something that is core to their identity. See also: rules in the bible.

Ah, yeah it’s affected everything across the board. But with the US context and you talking about giant vehicles, $60K vehicles, and 3 rows, I thought we were focused on the larger end of the population as a whole.

I bet the crash safety design of the current honda civic was definitely influenced by the truck regulations and that whole market driving the large end even larger.

Funny enough, I am eagerly awaiting the official announcement of the 2026 MX-5 of all cars.

Who would have thought that the Orphan Crushing Machine was just a stock Ford F-150 this whole time?

Is it really the safety standards? I thought it was a combination of all the stupid “truck” exceptions and our equally stupid culture where the iamverybadasses choose their 3-ton grocery and kindergarten shuttles out of fear because they want to “win” any collisions.

Highly educated USian here.

I would cry tears of joy if I woke up and found that President Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho was having his inauguration parade exactly as shown in the image.

To make it interesting, ignore the figurehead and any global elite child sex slave trafficking ring they may or may not have been a part of. Consider the background characters instead.

In this image you have Luke Wilson playing a character who is known to be the smartest person on the planet, and who saves lives with their knowledge by teaching the people how to do things like water their crops, AND who got dragged into the position rather than being a cutthroat ambitious asdhole.

In a similar image of the real world you might have somebody like Stephen fucking Miller.

That has traffic-flipping vibes of the upgraded Agency Supercar from the game Crackdown. I like.

Thanks for posting this, because I started getting bummed thinking about how much of a great resource the full reddit history would be to just have online, were that whole thing not ruined gut bad reasons by bad people.

But then you reminded me about the good people.

I found the helpers, Mr Rogers!

You inspired me to do the same!