“By the end of his term, Trump had accumulated 30,573 untruths during his presidency — averaging about 21 erroneous claims a day.”

source

Anyway, those numbers are kinda impressive… in the saddest way possible… But I don’t think I’ve ever heard of any politician coming even close.

Yep. That’s about the same level of amazing that I used to bump into on a daily basis. So, are we about to have another season of “you never imagined this would happen, but here we are”.

😂 OK, that may as well happen. What’s next? Evil magic zombies wouldn’t surprise me.

Say what now? It’s not even Trump season, and I’m still reading stuff that is so absurd it should be a joke. During Covid times, it was common to read the weirdest things and think: “yeah, that might as well happen”. This time though, I really have to ask if that really did happen.

If you learn Bash, you can do some proper command line magic. If text files are more like your thing, consider looking into Vim.

We need to test this with some sleeping pills and caffeine. Open wide!

TV has proven that people are willing to tolerate an amazing amount of ads too. I wonder if you could crank up the ads to posts ratio to something like 90% and still have enough users.

Things need to be really bad at Reddit before most people would consider leaving. On the other hand, Lemmy would need to be amazingly good to produce the same effect. Neither of these have happened yet, so only few people migrated.

There are lots of places like that. So many, that the number of people randomly visiting them and coming back feeling unwell was not insignificant. That’s why r/eyeBleach was invented. If you need a place like this, it really tells you something about the kinds of subs people never thought would exist.

It’s a horrible idea if you assume that flying cars would be made using the technology currently available to us. Imagine what it would be like to own a computer the size of a house. At one point, that was the only kind of computer there was, so it was pretty obvious nobody would want one. Also, the UI was horrible, power consumption was ridiculous, capabilities were very limited etc. If technological development had gotten stuck at that level, computers and the internet would not have become very popular.

However, many things have changed since then, carrying a personal computer in your pocket became possible, many of the old downsides were eliminated, capabilities were expanded, many use cases were invented etc. What was called a computer back then and what we use the word for today are only vaguely related.

Similarly, what we think of as a flying car today, is a complete disaster, because we’re thinking about it in the context of modern technology. In order to make that dream a bit more realistic, we would need to many breakthroughs in many different fields.

Hmm… That’s an interesting result. Makes sense too. When more and more people have access to the internet, they can form more and more specialized niche groups with each other. Just in Reddit alone, there’s already a sub for anything you can think of and also many things you would never think of in a million years.

I think that was in documentary about Darpa net and how it evolved into the early internet. It contained interviews of some of the early pioneers and they had interesting stories to tell about what the atmosphere was at the time. So, that was around the time when they were still developing the communication protocols and hardware needed for running a large network. What we think of as the web, didn’t even exist back then.

Confirmation bias is one of those special features of the human mind, that don’t always help. It’s like a mental shortcut that can be useful, but the modern world isn’t the kind of place where the mind of hunter gatherer is at its best.

Totally agree. It’s an improvement, but there was a lot of hype around it, which lead to inflated expectations. As a matter of fact, nowadays we have similarly silly expectations about AI. History repeats itself…

I still have some papers around, but I don’t really need any and of them. If they all burned tomorrow, my work wouldn’t be affected in any way.

That’s basically how innate tribalism manifests in a modern society. That used to be a killer feature to have in a human brain when you’re mostly surrounded by predators and wilderness. Being part of your local in-group was a matter of life and death, so tribalism wasn’t really optional.

Turns out, having the facts is only a partial solution. If people don’t want to take them as facts, you’re still going to have stupid debates about anything and everything all of the time.

We’ve fixed the information availability problem, but human psychology hasn’t changed one bit.

Speaking of utopias, have you heard that the internet was supposed to bring people together and ends pointless debates?

The idea was that people would be exposed to opposing viewpoints since everyone could communicate effortlessly with everyone. Information would also be easily available to everyone, which would make it clear who is right and who is wrong.

Yeah, that worked out perfectly…

As I look at this thing from the inside of the fedibubble, it looks like it’s going to be the best thing ever.

Next up: a racing game where you can’t drive any of the cars. Should be a pretty unique experience.