Amazing picture. Having a scientist as a leader is a rare thing and very much welcome.

new Pokémon just dropped?

Ok, that’s helpful for providing alt text for images inside the body of a post.

Bus what about image posts? When using the web interface I don’t see any opportunity for entering the alt text. 🤔

OBS Studio should be able to to handle that. You can set up hot keys for saving the buffer too.

It’s a valid question. I originally read about it in a physical book, then wrote the (misconstrued) headline from memory before finding a digital source that people could click on. I’ve corrected it now.

I mean he’s not the first to claim this:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/29/trump-russia-asset-claims-former-kgb-spy-new-book

It’s unlikely tho that the Kreml ever foresaw him becoming president. No-one did really.

Search engine optimization ruined the web. Change my mind!

¿Where is the hat coming from tho?

A lot of software is reliant on very precise timing. The world at large would notice immediately due to the many disconnects, glitches, bugs, desyncs, not to say anything of all the physical processes controlled by machines going wrong. As a simple example consider an industrial oven (or any process really) that is programmed to shut down at 4:39:20 but at 4:39:15 the 1 minute skip happens. An airplanes auto pilot that is suddenly missing the last minute of sensor data to. base its micro steering on. Any big internet service that has to deal with thousands to millions of clients trying to reconnect at once because their previous connection timed out. Bad stuff.

This would be immediate world wide chaos and likely panic as the cause for all the chaos would be unknown and forever would be. Economic crash likely.

Think of all the attention and effort the year 2k problem got, but this one is worse and there is no prep whatsoever.

Hmmm, it seems the modern way for autocracies to deal with elections is to control the information space. I don’t see election being called off, but major social media platforms boosting one side while attenuating the other goes a long way. We know Musk is all in on this and the other big players like Zuckerberg & Co seem all too happy to oblige. Tiktok is an open ended question at this point.

The crowd was literally chanting “hang Mike Pence”. Kudos to him for not going along with Trumps plan of overthrowing the election.

Yet still I can’t help but wonder whether he was secretly hoping for Trump to lose the 3rd election and the Republican party returning to its old ways somehow. Why? Because he’s been suspiciously silent ever since when he had the cachet and moral standing to be one of his greatest detractors (from the Republican side).

Hmm, if I remember my Zelda correctly, that’s a save point:

Ha, reminds me of how grassy lawns started out as a status symbol to show off that you were so rich that you needn’t use your land for agriculture or gardening.

According to the study 37% of participants verify information before sharing it on social media.

There you have it folks.

Disinformation campaigns don’t need to be super convincing with the latest tech or elaborate fake outs, although it certainly helps. For the masses (ie election interference) it’s easy enough to to establish narratives, vibes by users simply sharing headlines to fake or manipulative reports. The people that bother to deep check and cross reference sources you typically couldn’t convince anyway. Sadly enough, most users never read beyond the head lines (75% this Facebook study estimates).

Think of your own feed: how many head lines // posts do you just scroll by w/out ever opening them? Even if you don’t share actively it still can influence the your perception of the world today and shape your mood.

Social media is eating away at the fundamentals of Democracy 🫠, change my mind!

Oh I knew I had to check it out once I saw the artist name; he did a lot of the tracks for Unreal Tournament 1 from 1999.

As the saying goes: listen not to what politicians say, but watch what they do.

By his own previous public proclamation anyone cooperating with the extremist AfD is to be expelled from his party. If he had decency he would now self-expel.

Hmm this section sounds familiar:

The persecution drove hundreds of directors, managers and workers – including the author – into exile and/or imprisonment. In their place, the government appointed political operators, lacking knowledge and experience in the oil sector, who provided unconditional support to Maduro’s policies but damaged the company’s operational capacities, bypassing all control or accountability mechanisms.

That’s essentially what Trump admin wants to do. Fire civil servants en masse, replace with loyalists (proficiency for the job is optional).Then if something is goes wrong, and it will, just blame it on DEI, Biden, wokeness or something.

Honestly, there’s nothing wrong with career bureaucrats // civil servants per se. ¿Do you want to swap out every geologist, accountant, teacher, interpreter, ranger, manager, safety inspector, lawyer, technician, secretary every 4 years? These people literally run the country and by extension allow society to continue. And they are part of the idea that power and expertise are spread amongst many people.

Is it fair to criticize individuals, agencies, institutions. Yes. Is there corruption, mismanagement, incompetence? All the time, happens for any sufficiently large enough organization.

But no need to spin this into some bonkers conspiracy theory.

I’ve updated my initial comment.

This guy literally wrote a book about what he dubs “the executive branch deep state” including a list of high profile names he wants to target.

It’s all out in the open. Confirmation hearings are supposed to weed out people like him.

Edit: the way I previously worded my comment it might have been construed as me stating Patel was rightfully going after these people. Instead I meant to indicate that they rightfully resisted/investigated Trump.