Rising Sun

Japan, like other democracies in the region, realizes that, despite the US talking about a "strategic pivot to Asia" for something like a decade now, it might well be on its own against China. (You know things are tense in the region if Japan and South Korea are speaking to each other.)

The latest step it's taking is legalizing arms exports, which should be an important source of income for the country, as well as making advanced arms available to nations like the Philippines.

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Manic Pixel Dream Girl...

That twenty-something blonde EMT chick who's a big MAGA fan and who runs an OnlyFans account on the side that you follow?

She's actually a dude who's a med student in northern India running a side hustle looking to build up enough cash to emigrate.

This is just the latest version of the Macedonian Social Media Political Rage Bait Hustle.

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Meme Dump!

The Start of the Killing Season...

If you read this blog, you almost certainly know that yesterday marked the 251st anniversary of the clashes between trained bands of militia and the Crown's regulars at the towns of Lexington and Concord.

Other notable events on the 19th of April include the start of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1943, the fiery denouement of the siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco back in 1993, and the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

This week also contains a number of notable anniversaries, and if there's anything both unhinged weirdos and terrorists both like, it's doing their mass casualty events on historically significant dates.

Keep an eye out and think about where you want to be for the next few days.

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Tab Clearing...

• High-resolution sonar images of the USS Monitor wreck.


• Russia's hacker unit known as Fancy Bear is behind the hacking of wi-fi routers.


• Panopticon-like surveillance isn't any better just because it's not the government doing it.

Memes to Kick Off the Week!

Tab Clearing...

• When you click that opt-out button on a website, have you really opted out? A new audit thinks not. That audit looked at web traffic associated with Microsoft, Meta, and Google and found they all failed to honor such requests.


• "How a Navy photographer snapped an iconic Artemis II astronaut photo" (As a fan of candid portraiture, that photo slaps.)


• The only ones qualified enough to shoot their partners.

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Meme Dump!

Remember...

“Beware that, when hating on assholes, you yourself do not become an asshole... for when you shitpoast long into the abyss, the abyss shitpoasts also into you.”

This message brought to you by Nietzsche Cheese Doritos, food for thought.

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Meme Dump!

QotD: Ticktockification Edition...

In a post on the lingering death of some of the bigger social media sites, I came across this deliciously laugh-out-loud paragraph:

"For zuckermuskian social media bosses, Tiktok became an object of fierce envy. Here was the ultimate Tom Sawyer robo-fence-painter, a self-licking ice-cream cone that motivated people to convince each other to make money for you. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter took a hard pivot away from showing you the things that the people you loved had to say, in favor of showing you short videos of people whose parents didn't give them enough affection in their childhood, desperately shoving lemons up their noses in a bid to win your approval (and a revshare split with the platforms)."

Remember that a social media site's entire business model is based on keeping you engaged on their site, not sending you away to follow links to blog posts or magazine articles. Every outgoing link you post on, say, Facebook lowers your hidden internal "social credit score" and causes your posts to be de-prioritized in other people's feeds, even if they specifically follow you because they want to see your stuff.

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Meme Dump!

A.I. Delusions

Suppose you were the sort of person who got a little obsessed with someone. Suppose you thought that this person was sending you subtle signals that they really wanted to be with you. Suppose you had a machine that would confirm those delusions, one that was, in fact, programmed to encourage you to think you were right?

We’ve identified at least ten cases in which chatbots, primarily ChatGPT, fed a user’s fixation on another real person — fueling the false idea that the two shared a special or even “divine” bond, roping the user into conspiratorial delusions, or insisting to a would-be stalker that they’d been gravely wronged by their target. In some cases, our reporting found, ChatGPT continued to stoke users’ obsessions as they descended into unwanted harassment, abusive stalking behavior, or domestic abuse, traumatizing victims and profoundly altering lives.

In other cases, the built-in confirmation bias of LLMs can lead otherwise intelligent people to think they were doing some serious "research" to their own detriment...

Though Dr. Marzbani didn’t know it, Joe was routinely asking questions about his cancer to several generative A.I. tools, which often struggle to give accurate medical advice. He told them to list the early signs of Richter’s, interpret his lab results and explain complicated research about the treatment his doctor recommended. He knew not to trust A.I. unilaterally. He often read the scientific papers the tools cited and — as best he could without medical training — tried to verify that they aligned with what the tools had said.

He came away feeling so confident in his understanding of the science that declining treatment seemed to be the obvious choice.

It can be a useful tool for some things, but it's important to get second opinions and reality checks. I know we think we're all way too smart to get trapped in a spiral like that, but...

YOU ARE NOT IMMUNE TO PROPAGANDA

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Meme Dump!

Memes to Kick Off the Week!

Tab Clearing...

• Fortunately, that will buff right out: Photos of a visibly patched-up KC-135 transiting through RAF Mildenhall en route back to CONUS for repairs.


• The Click That Cost $11,000: Google placing ads for various third party travel agency intermediaries above the links to the actual hotel is a perfect example of enshittification.


• Europe about to feel jet fuel crunch.

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WTAF?

I have no idea what's supposed to be going on in this AI slop picture. Is that Jefferey Epstein or Hunter Biden he's laying hands on?

EDITED TO ADD: Ell. Oh. Ell. This post took so much blowback from MAGA stalwarts that it got deleted.