I'm beginning to suspect he might not be quite as smart as he claims to be
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@quinnnorton
Writer, migrant, burn out, cat servant. Trying to forget more about the internet than you'll ever know.
FYI I can't spell.
https://social.circl.lu/@quinn’s Tweets
I do not know why y'all think the Covid virus will just "run its course" and then become normal or disappear. Diseases do not do that. Small Pox, plague, typhus, cholera, etc. just killed and killed for hundreds to thousands of years. Half of all children used to die.
damn can you imagine running around a war zone re-connecting the net all the time? is there a playbook for this? is anyone following them around and documenting it?
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Telecommunication specialists are invisible heroes of our days
Hundreds of specialists of Ukrainian internet service providers repair, restore and organize communication in bomb shelters, basements, underground parking lots every day.
My partner has suggested everyone in Britain who can pay the 25 pounds should join the tory party and write in Lord Buckethead for the leadership election.
For people who think content moderation is easy, an example. The UK and the US are quite similar cultures on the global scale, with shared language, heroes, literary figures, and values. In one, "smoke a fag" means have a cigarette, in the other, murdering a gay man with a gun.
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Dear @elonmusk, @Twitter should develope a filter software. Every tweet should be allowed to be displayed after filtering. The software should have a dictionary of words that automatically prevent the tweet from being displayed on the display automatically,
"I got mine, fuck you" is why Americans have the shittiest lives of the developed world. No political will to make anything better if it benefits other people.
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I just paid off my student loans, and now Joe Biden expects me to pay off other people's. No thanks.
I'm amused that apparently Elon is locking down all the offices while looking for whomever is trying to destroy Twitter.
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People love to say "Don't look away!" then show you horror scenes of human suffering. As something of an expert on this sort of thing, let me tell you:
Look away.
The implicit story that we somehow respond to traumatic images/events with heroic action is just plain nonsense.
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Humanity put in a ton of work to stop all of these diseases, societies changed, architecture and infrastructure were entirely built around diseases. People changed everything about how they lived because of them. That's what made them go away.
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But folks are like, masks are too hard. Try lifting Chicago, asshole.
This fucking ghoul. (successfully) Fights the TRIPS waiver for low income nations, then says it's too late to vaccinate them and they should have other priorities.
this would be *hilarious* twitter.com/AnandWrites/st
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I've said it so many times and I know I will again, screaming into the void. If you provide universal services, then tax people with money, you just get universal services and a nicer society without the overhead.
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Biden campaigned on universal student debt reduction, but now wants to add a means-test; a layer of bureaucratic formalities to identify the "deserving poor." 1/
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Y'all are nuts if you think Putin will stop at Ukraine, or even bits of Ukraine.
Spend five minutes with a domestic abuse survivor, they'll tell you everything that's going to come next.
Imagine if justice system interventions had to go through the same kind of rigorous processes as medical interventions, instead of just being accepted as necessary no matter how much they fail.
I am deeply confused by the fact that when we talk about labor market tightness in both America and Europe, no one at all has bothered to mention the possible impact of millions of excess deaths over the last two years.
You don't solve "America's speech problem" without solving America's fucking dire education problem and you solve that with funding, standards, and showing up, and the only ones showing up right now are Nazi Lite types.
Godamnit.
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During his inaugural address in 2019, Zelensky told lawmakers: “I do not want my picture in your offices: the President is not an icon, an idol or a portrait. Hang your kids' photos instead, and look at them each time you are making a decision.”
From all the "you won't believe what happened while the queen was the queen" tweets I'm beginning to think none of y'all ever talk to old people. They're all like that, they all saw tons of amazing stuff, you just have to ask them about it.
I know everyone is trying to figure out how to reach their audiences now that social media is more a blocker than enabler, which seems like a really tough technology problems but there was a magic technology, built by the ancients, called "RSS" that once solved this.
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I want to say something about eugenics... apart from anything moral, it's just a bad idea. We don't know what traits, genetic, epigenetic, or cultural, we're going to need in the future. All that information is stored right now in diverse people.
Hug your Gen X friends today because we're all flashing back to the 80s and afraid the world is going to end in a nuclear winter, again.
you tell blue collar workers to work 20 hours a day for weeks or months without extra pay and they will literally go to war with you, not just fail to show up.
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Also, hello, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen? So many things more actually worthy of collective mourning than this one stranger.
What I wouldn't give to have a 10th of this man's confidence, and not a ounce more.
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And getting Omicron doesn't protect you from Omicron, in part because we got tired of naming new variants and decided they're all just going to be Omicron from now on, or something.
Is there any chance we can decide poor people are human and worthy of rights before we decide AI large language models are?
My daughter has been accepted to several good universities, and they've all gone to hard sell mode. It's so weird after living my life in worthless class to be watching them go breathless on how great it would be is *she* picked *them.*
...unlike babies?
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IDK, I thought Jon Stewart had ended his career back in '04 and now I take nothing for granted.
Nobody tells you how booorrring catching a Covid-positive is
*continues to sit around*
non-binary people and transmen can both deal with wanted and unwanted pregnancy.
My friend brought him over to the stacks and suggested he might like Anne McCaffrey, pulling out one of her more obviously sci-fi books, iirc. The guy explained that he read exclusively male writers. Without missing a beat, my friend ah, you'll want Andre Norton, then.
Maybe this is the sign we've all been waiting for to restart our blogs and RSS readers.
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The good news is that the infrastructure is so broken down you can just head out during the next 18 hour to two day blackout.
A short tweet story especially for the people saying 75% of the staff is gone and Twitter is fine, so who needs them, just the "hardcore" people will be fine. You know, like .
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May I just add that we already have a means-tested method for clawing back money from people more well off after college?
It's called "taxes"
I love that "seeing things from the people I chose to follow" is now a category I must re-enable every time I come back to Twitter.
I cannot even imagine a business case for this. It's just nuts. Even if it's somehow sinister, it's also nuts.
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I JUST FIGURED OUT THE ADVANTAGE OF TAKING CHERNOBYL uuuuuuuuuuggghh
You can park your missiles there and fire them and no one can shoot back.
This whole thing is just cartoonishly evil. It could never be fiction, it's totally implausible.
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Ah, time for my daughter's favorite meme
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People exposed to violent or traumatizing events will response with fight, flight, or freeze. That's not a moral failing, it's just straight up the mammalian nervous system. None of those are useful when you're in a position to either learn about an issue or render aid.
I'm just going to put forward that the problem isn't buying twitter, it's that we live in a society where he can.
I'm just amused by all the forecasting of neat and terrible tech things for the next decades that in no way account for the failing infrastructure or economies that come with climate change.
I'm done. I tried to like the blockchain, but it's just fucking nonsense at this point. They should have left the whole thing at pushing proof of work on email spammers.
oh no, deep fakes means we're all going to have to learn about contextualizing media and paying attention to its provenance oh how shall we ever live with this basic requirement of media literacy.
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Because they're not real it's impossible to ever "do" them, to ever satisfy the demand. Nothing will ever be enough, and they're an eternal excuse for everything, right up to genocide.
The craziest thing about the state of the world is that for the first time we have enough for everyone, we have the ability to fix most of our problems, we know how to create a wonderful and equitable society, but we're just going off the cliff for fun I guess.
🤦
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Brief update on hospital admissions with COVID-19 in England:
Admissions are going up quite sharply - and in all age groups and in almost all regions, led by the SW. 1/2
I just want to say when we crazy 80s kids started inventing the internet and its zany culture it was supposed to be just us losers talking to each other and you guys have blown it waaaay out of proportion.
Please stop saying "Everyone should read this!" and then linking to things behind paywalls. It's shitty and weird.
The most uncomfortable part of living outside America as an America is watching Americans make everything about America, realizing it's incredibly annoying and harmful, and suspecting I did it too for decades.
Ok, you're responsible for your security, like you are personally responsible for making sure you don't get Covid, because apparently America doesn't believe in public infrastructure, regulation, or doing the barest minimum to keep its people alive, safe, healthy or productive.
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Covid is still killing ~500 a day in the US. Who knows how much globally, but if you straight extrapolate it's about 10,000 souls a day. But sure, let's say the pandemic is over. It's over for the them, I suppose.
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"Give me a little and maybe I won't take more" isn't exactly new either. There's no satisfying the abuser, they're not in it for satisfaction. There is no enough, there is no point where they are made whole, there's only exhaustion, that's when they stop.
I'm going to say this, and I just don't think I'll be heard, but the US is heading for a crisis not seen since the civil war. But there's just one side forming up, and they've been working on this for much of the last 20 years.
My god, I'm going to spend the next 10 years just telling people "it's gone, it's never coming back, you need to let the beforetimes go."
At least I told my kid in the endless March there would be no return to normal, that we'd spend years finding a new normal.
my god the 🔥🔥🔥
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"They'll track you everywhere!" sure but if the towers and grid are down on the regular, all the agencies' computers are ransomwared and your tech center just washed away in a flood, good fucking luck with that
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All these layers of human information exist in the non-human world as well, and they're all incredibly powerful. eugenics isn't just icky, it's lobotomizing your society.
I don't know if it deserves the title of first internet war, but I'm beginning to think the Russian-Ukrainian war might be one of the first wars were internet media might be decisive? Maybe I just hope so, but the next days and weeks will tell.
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I have done this regularly my whole life and let me tell you it comes in handy. Old people *know* things, guys, they've seen shit. Not just the queen, the old people around you have lived through amazing things. Just ask them.
A lot of people are bringing up the fact that a lot of places are in conflict as bad as Ukraine, and no one is talking about them because, you know, toxic whiteness. I see the point, but also, we were talking about most of them, but they're not new and shiny anymore.
Doggerland's lookin' brutal good thing it already sank I guess #windevent
If you're more outraged about Ukrainians being turned away at the border than you were about Syrians, Eritreans, Afghans, Libyans, etc. you want to look closely at that, because it's racism. I don't mean this as "burn in hell, racist" I mean this is a moment of useful reflection.
I have a dumb reason I like Zelensky. He's a short guy (I am also quite short btw) who surrounds himself with, like, enormous dudes. He's just always flanked by people who look like they break him in two, and he always looks calm and comfortable with them. It's quite good.
this man needs to be hauled before the Hague. In chains. By sysadmins.
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That is the opposite of what people do to each other on social media, because we think the only way to change the world is subjecting ourselves and each other to mental trauma? It's nonsense, and it's causing more damage, not mitigating the evil situations of human suffering.
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He's sitting next to me looking over my shoulder and saying "I'm for full mayhem, I want mayhem."
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And of course whether it's police violence, human rights abuses, or a literal war going on right now, people on social media think the most important thing they can do is watch or make other people watch horrible things on digital devices, and then feel things.
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What me, a broken down, wrecked ex-techie, thinks Twitter will look like under Elon Musk:
I'm so genuinely confused by this debate. It's like if society all of the sudden just started doubting that locks on door keep people out of buildings, & having big debates about being pro or anti locks, & people cited times locks didn't work as proof there's no point in locks.
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I feel like there's going to be some rambling speech from Putin and Zelenskyy's going to reply by saying "ok boomer" Russian.
I'm so confused by people who are angry and derisive of the idea that human decision making with all its emotions, psychology, desires, and flaws plays a part in geopolitics. Do you think it's all machines iterating game theory? No messy humans with human drives involved at all?
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I've listened to several diplomats and journalists talking about how Russian demands like de-nazification and protecting Russians speakers are the easy demands to meet, because obviously those things aren't real issues. Those aren't accidents or misunderstandings.
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It's a layer cake model, or if you prefer OSI layers for biology, storing information in people's bodies, families, and communities, etc., and each approaches function in different and diverse ways, which change as situations do. Without diverse information, systems are fragile.
Original Antigenic Sin at work. Catching an earlier Covid could make you immune response worse than not catching it at all.
I do absolutely want that mattress tho
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It's one of the reasons I also tell people to not watch snuff videos on social media unless it is part of their job and they are on the clock when they're doing it.
To deal with an emergency or extraordinary situation well you need to compartmentalize emotion, not fall in.
It's not just the cruelty or insanity of all these things right now. It's that we could, you know, just not.
We have everything we need to make life perfectly lovely for everyone in the world and fix the planet and just not kill each other and we just... don't.
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We did not evolve for media. We react to what we're sensing right now as if it were real and happening to us. Fun in a movie theater, not so much when suddenly watching human being suffer or die without any preparation for being in that situation.
MIT absolutely did not want the charges dropped, they pushed ahead hard. After he died, they did an internal investigation and exonerated themselves. I was interviewed for it, the conclusion was always foregone. Don't ever let MIT off the hook.
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People with hope act, people in fear react, and usually not in very useful ways. People on social media see too many horrible things. Educate yourself (preferably in text) and take action, don't traumatize yourself or let other people do it with a click.
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look he was born Meatloaf and he died Meatloaf, why can't Elliot Page do the same
My baby's at her first real protest on her own, for CCSF in San Francisco, and I'm so proud. 😁
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The odious idea that there's no demand in Africa, they don't care, where some schools have been closed for two years solid, where they're fighting to reinvent mRNA vaccine technology because Whitistan won't share, it's absolutely blood curdling.
I'm learning about #QuietQuitting.
In France it's just called "having a job." It's fine, everything works ok, sometimes you have to wait a while for something to happen or be available, but honestly, it's totally fine.
And I say this as an American who just survived August.
Just want to remind everyone how hard Bill worked to make sure the rest of the world couldn't produce their own vaccines in his dogged mission to ensure the safety of IP everywhere rich people may own it, no matter the cost to the lives of the poor.
I will never understand why Americans settle for all this bullshit.
Some workers just discovered a WWII-era unexploded bomb near my house and are evacuating the area close to it in what is definitely not a giant metaphor for anything. #luxembourg
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When you narrow that diversity, you lose that information. That's true if it's a gene that helps you handle high heat or low O2 or survive AIDS/Covid/etc. but also epigentics encodes information, more socially than genetics do.
It's not even a herd immunity strategy anymore, it's just straight up eugenics at this point. t.co/czL207E3YW
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America is headed for permanent minoritarian rule, completely legal within the framework of the Constitution. (Because it was a minoritarian rule document) And there's nothing within the existing legal framework that can stop the GOP from accomplishing this.
Hey my fellow Americans, I want to show you something. It's a bill for an MRI of my spine. It's not a partial bill, or after insurance, it's just the bill. I pay it, and my European insurance pays the money back to me, minus a few Euros to keep me honest. 1/14
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Also love the show of hands, but apparently Bill Gates is the only person on the stage. My god, can we put him and Kissenger in a rocket and shoot it at Jupiter?
I'm beginning to realize that the US left has no idea how late we are in the game. And maybe the world, the world has no idea how far down the road we are.
Innocent people need lawyers even more than the guilty ones do.
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