Absolutely not. Sometimes you say something stupid, and people make you feel bad about it. That’s healthy, that’s good.

Sometimes you say something unpopular but correct… You need to recognize that it’s unpopular, and learn to package the idea in a more palatable way or approach the topic less directly.

You should feel bad for rage baiting… Even if you’re unambigiously right, you need to read the room and meet people where they are if you want to change minds. You don’t need to change your views, but you need to adapt your framing or you’re just rilling people up

Negative social responses are a good thing, it’s required for a community. Social rejection hurts so bad because we so rarely feel it, and that’s sickness. Most people can have few or no negative interactions, because when money is involved, people will smile and take your money

It’s such a little thing, but it’s a very gentle form of rejection… Avoiding it is not good, and so from a public health perspective we should default to showing it

I like the idea. I’ve even experimented with some on device algorithms by basically weaving together feeds, even something simple like makes a noticeable improvement

I follow laws mainly because of my own sense of morality - I don’t kill, I steal only when I feel I need to, and I don’t commit fraud because these things are obviously generally wrong.

I follow stupid laws (such as needing insurance, paying income taxes, or not speeding) out of fear of punishment. These are issues I’ll basically never have, because I’m good at driving and don’t make enough to affect state level operations

Yes. Because all my life, we’ve been frogs in a steadily warming pot, and the heat has been cranked up to max

People are angry. People are protesting, doing vandalism with a prison sentence longer then murder, people are raging at their futures being cut off

Everything creates a reaction. The worse is gets, the faster it gets worse, the larger the reaction.

The best future is the one where people get so angry we stop. That’s all it takes to kill the game - if enough people, even for a short time, stop playing - it all stops

The world is robust. Humans are robust. If we stopped killing both, everything could recover shockingly fast

Things will get worse, things are very bad already, but it’s not over. I feel lighter every time the stock market drops, because it’s imaginary but the hurt is real.

The more and faster the hurt, the more people will wake the fuck up and stop this

Yeah, and there’s children starving in Africa

I want artists to eat, and I also want everyone to have more access to expression. Me finishing my dinner doesn’t help the kids in Africa, and if I made a comic I’m not stealing food from the artists mouths

If you want systematic changes, you need systematic solutions. Empty moralizing won’t fix anything

It’s not a zero sum game - the real problem is when it’s competing with paid work

Commissioning an artist to do this is imaginary work - there’s no money to be made here, who commissions a political comic? If you can’t draw, you wouldn’t be doing it

There’s a problem if you’re mass producing slop, or companies are using AI art to avoid paying artists… But this was a clear, human created message delivered by using a fancy tool

And what’s more, this is an important message to spread ASAP.

Can you name a better situation to use Gen image AI, or do you just hate it because of what it is?

Why? This is a political comic making a point.

Being able to draw doesn’t mean you have good political takes, and vice versa

LMAO XD I thought that was a typo, nah cows are herd based, I don’t think they even truly have territories the same way

But yeah, crows are dope

I don’t know of any documentaries, there’s probably some stuff on YouTube. It is really interesting learning about crow social structures through, we’re looking at it from the outside, but it sure sounds like some form of basic government to me

Yes, it should. Artists should be able to live without justifying their existence to the economy, everyone should… And then they could make money on their creations, and if someone came along who could use their characters better, then oh well… They still get to eat. But the original creator is usually be better at making their OC… And companies are the ones who usually hold the copyright even if a single employee made it

So fuck it, I’d rather make sure everyone can eat and have a home first, but if we did it in the opposite order the damage would be minimal to individual artists

Language is an interesting one… It seems like everywhere we look for language, we find it

And not just signaling systems or rudimentary understanding - everyone has a name, there’s animals in the wild that are bilingual across species, and this is symbolic abstract language. There’s animals out there with governmental systems - like crows, they have fucking trials and negotiate territory

Not just impressive… Like, unique and so OP a group of humans could take out a lion. Large cats are the most OP things on the planet, and at best they can pick off isolated humans…a group of humans with just random rocks can kill anything on land. And we also make things to throw

And this is like our secondary skill - we’re persistence hunters and skilled omnivores first

True, but the second you can’t buy enough food at the grocery store it all goes poof

If we stop, even for a couple weeks, the system collapses. If a third of people stop showing up for work, if a third of people steal their food rather than pay for it, if a third of people stop paying rent… It all just melts away like a snow flurry

Money means the value assigned to it - if it can’t feed you, it means nothing. If it stops moving, so does ‘the economy’. It’s so much more fragile than it seems

I think orcas are up next, they’re the smartest and have the most wrinkley brains on earth. Maybe why they started sinking yachts… Because we’re too smooth brained to to it

Like a year ago some high school kids were riding one of the motorized scooters around a store, and I turned down the isle and saw them. I just smiled and shook my head and kept shopping

One of them got scared and asked “are you going to tell on us?” I shook my head and told him "everyone does it at some point in their lives*. He scooted off to his friends and said I was really cool

I’m hanging onto that forever

I mean, yes and no. They just capture device info for a location, which can often be tied back to a person, but they just grab the info the phone sends to the tower. These days with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi you can even do something similar with just your phone

I don’t love that it exists for obvious reasons, but it’s a far cry from looking through your phone

I mean, the cell providers already sell your location info to anyone (including LEO, which is unconstitutional without a warrant as far as I’m concerned), as can Google, apple, and all sorts of apps - so this is a niche thing

FWIW, you can defeat that pretty simply… Just leave your phone behind and/or in a faraday pouch. No signal, no signature, no location data (from your phone at least). It won’t necessarily stop the NSA, but it’ll protect you in a protest where your just another face in the crowd

Rather than locked down, they’re basically a black box - I think they have their own firmware and hook into the OS and hardware in weird ways (part of the reason why Linux phones are so difficult to make work)

If the NSA wants to ping your phone location or even turn on the microphone, they can, supposedly even when the phone is “off”. If they want to side channel load in a rootkit, they probably can

But NSA surveillance comes in two main flavors - broad and focused. If they think you’re a terrorist or of strategic interest, there’s a lot they can do… But that means actual humans are interested in you, personally.

But for everyone else, they’re not going to sift through ten million phone storages - that’s way too much data to be useful, and they already have long collected way more than they could make use of. The broad stuff is about flagging people - the most effective is to look at networks of people. If you have connections to a terrorist, you’re a potential part of the network, and so you’ll be flagged as more interesting. I’ve heard rumors that certain keywords might be flagged on calls too, who knows. Too many flags and they might devote some man hours to looking into you personally

But generally, they’re very protective of their tech. They don’t use the good stuff widely, because it’s not useful, and it increases the chance for discovery and countermeasures. My understanding is they won’t share their surveillance systems either - they might put notes or flags on shared LEO systems or tip someone off, but they really, really, like to play it close to the vest. Even with other 3 letter agencies

So yes, this possibility exists - especially with llms to help filter through this information ocean - but there’s no shot they’re sharing capabilities with border control agents

The NSA doesn’t generally give access to agencies on the ground like that - at most they flag individuals in the interdepartmental system, they don’t hand over what they have easily

But, if you have physical access to a device, there’s always a way in. Border control or a police department can buy tools to do it or hire contractors

Yeah we do too… Just for some reason we never got around to making that actually illegal. It’s just frowned upon

Days after exposing himself as a fake poser of a gamer, Elon has conveniently (again) reminded us he’s also a fake poser of a programmer