considering there were reports that Iran warned Qatar and the US base long before the attack … and that the attack did very little except use some US ordinances to intercept the missiles, and the reports of the US attack not doing much to Iran …

seems like Iran showed an equal but probably much cheaper show of force.

Is he the guy from Facebook or Palantir given a commission for paying for the parade ?

Or is he one of the non-mega-wealthy guys that got their commission through that “service” stuff?

always trust your audience

more leftist garbage

eventually they will want a dna sample

Free marketing for a game you would have prolly missed

So they can’t afford to keep the land they have in trust so it is all the landless peasantry that should labor for the land holders because kindness ?

/checks for dolphins flying out of the oceans

Mega-wealthy US Americans want a war to kill off at least a third of the US American population. There are too many of us to rule with despotism.

This is how they are going to about making it easier for them to control the US Americans. Create a war to kill them off in a 21st century Somme.

Denuclearizing worked out so well for Ukraine.

The internet is growing more hostile to humans. Google results are stuffed with search-optimized spam, unhelpful advertisements, and AI slop. Amazon has become littered with undifferentiated junk. The state of social media, meanwhile—fractured, disorienting, and prone to boosting all manner of misinformation—can be succinctly described as a cesspool.

It’s with some irony, then, that Reddit has become a reservoir of humanity. The platform has itself been called a cesspool, rife with hateful rhetoric and falsehoods. But it is also known for quirky discussions and impassioned debates on any topic among its users. Does charging your brother rent, telling your mom she’s an unwanted guest, or giving your wife a performance review make you an asshole? (Redditors voted no, yes, and “everyone sucks,” respectively.) The site is where fans hash out the best rap album ever and plumbers weigh in on how to unclog a drain. As Google has begun to offer more and more vacuous SEO sites and ads in response to queries, many people have started adding reddit to their searches to find thoughtful, human-written answers: find mosquito in bedroom reddit; fix musty sponge reddit.

But now even Reddit is becoming more artificial. The platform has quietly started beta-testing Reddit Answers, what it calls an “AI-powered conversational interface.” In function and design, the feature—which is so far available only for some users in the U.S.—is basically an AI chatbot. On a new search screen accessible from the homepage, Reddit Answers takes anyone’s queries, trawls the site for relevant discussions and debates, and composes them into a response. In other words, a site that sells itself as a home for “authentic human connection” is now giving humans the option to interact with an algorithm instead.

The company announced the feature last month as an improved “search experience” that pulls “information … from real conversations and communities across all of Reddit.” Reddit Answers includes links to those conversations, which users are free to click, read, and comment on. Even so, using Reddit Answers is a demoralizing experience. It’s streamlined, yes: The AI responds to questions in bulleted lists, with bold headings followed by summaries of and brief quotes from actual Reddit discussions. But these answers lose the messy, endearing excess of any good Reddit thread. They appear like takeaways instead of teasers, final answers instead of entry points for further discovery; you are unlikely to fall down a rabbit hole of posts from here. Nor are you encouraged to unfurl a thread of people debating, reviewing, and building upon legitimately useful advice. Instead of a Redditor, you feel like you’re just here to peck meat off of some bones.

Consider, for example, requesting tips for traveling with a baby on an airplane. Reddit Answers generates a list of ideas—perhaps “Pack Essentials” or “Board Early”—decontextualized from the parents who gathered this wisdom, the fun horrifying and hilarious anecdotes in their original posts, and the heartwarming support and tips in additional responses. Perhaps the greatest value of a good Reddit thread is the informed disagreement on best purchases and practices—what really were the best earbuds of 2024, and for what reasons. The chatbot’s bulleted summaries steamroll that back-and-forth. The AI answer isn’t even clearly more efficient or useful than reading answers yourself. Aside from the specificity, caveats, and elaboration unique to human conversations, many Redditors already format their responses in digestible lists. (In one thread asking for tips for flying with a baby, the top comment is a list in which every other bullet reads “snacks.”)

For less pragmatic matters, it’s hard to imagine any advantage to using Reddit’s AI. Asking the chatbot for music recommendations will return a boring, unwieldy list. The Reddit thread “What’s a dead giveaway someone grew up as an only child?” has some fantastic responses—doesn’t immediately know which half of a sliced cake is bigger, can’t roughhouse, leaves rooms without announcing where they are going—while the AI answers are bland: “Difficulty Sharing,” “Difficulty in Relationships.” Why would I ask an AI about the odds that the New York Mets re-sign Pete Alonso, what makes focaccia in Liguria special, or the annoying thing about transplants to New York City? Reddit, for its part, seems to understand the limitations: When I reached out to ask about this product, a spokesperson told me over email that in part, “Answers simply summarizes redditors’ existing posts and conversations without presenting an opinion or perspective of its own” and directs users to relevant discussions.

The site exists as it always has outside of Reddit Answers, but the embrace of generative AI feels foreboding. This is a trend across much of the digital and now even physical worlds, as tech companies stuff the technology into apps, smartphones, and glasses. AI can legitimately make life easier—helping more quickly summarize complex topics, write computer code, or edit photos, for instance. But many applications of AI remain limited and frequently superfluous. Google, instead of organizing humanmade information, is blending the web through frequently flawed “AI Overviews.” Apple is touting an Apple Intelligence service that has sent fake-news alerts (a problem that the company solved by temporarily turning off this part of the feature altogether) and that strip mines texts into “lifeless summaries,” as my colleague Lila Shroff noted. Mikey Shulman, the CEO of Suno, an AI music start-up, recently said that making music is “not really enjoyable”—his product can do that work instead. Algorithms, instead of helping bring you to humans, are being pitched as the web’s start, middle, and end point.

All of these generative-AI applications, of course, are only as good as the content they draw from. (Reddit has long been prized as a trove of high-quality AI-training data.) Without human answers, there is no Reddit Answers—and so, should the feature really take off and Redditors stop engaging with one another, the chatbot will be drained of biological intelligence, and soul as well. Such is it with any AI tool seeking to synthesize, summarize, and boil portions of the web to their essence: eventually, the pot will burn dry.

Let me copy and paste that secondary title for my re-reading it when reviewing my comments later:

“Or, how access journalism is used by the U.S. intelligence community to divert narratives away from their covert activity.”

thank you

edit: honestly i had long thought that TOP GEAR’s international episodes were part of the British espionage network.

who exactly are you calling the rabble ?

Where are all the people that said calling the MAGA people NAZIs was disregarding the history of “real NAZIs” ?

Where are all those MFers now ?

I’ve Farquaad my network stack!

i am personally sick of shiny rectangles. physical keyboards are the buttons on your cars dash instead of the shiny rectangle on your car’s dash.

I thought that was a joke. Not a joke.

Adultery used to be a criminal offense.

trying to hold a cop accountable can be a very dangerous game with terrible outcomes.

QFT

that said if you are a woman and know a corrections officer often times they are willing to trade violence for sexual favors.

Just recently it has gotten worse. The good thing is that I don’t watch TV at all any longer because I used youtube. Now I’m watching less youtube AND no TV so win win for my free time.