transcriptase (u/transcriptase)

transcriptase commented on Spotlighting the World Factbook as We Bid a Fond Farewell cia.gov/stories/story/spo... · Posted by u/mxfh

pjc50 · 4 days ago

Given how all that vanished once Trump won, the propaganda having served its purpose, it seems my decision to write it off as chaff was vindicated.

Remember "lock her up?" Remember how that vanished as well and there was not, in fact, any effort to lock her up?

(the problem of submarining stuff into Wikipedia is real though, and a by-product of it being the most trusted reference)

transcriptase · 2 days ago

How what vanished? The concerted effort to censor it on social media and dismiss it everywhere else as a hoax? 51 individuals in the “intelligence community” put their names to a letter saying it was Russian disinformation, which was used as evidence that it should be suppressed.

If you don’t realize now that you were lied to even though it’s trivial to confirm now that all the institutions that lied to you have since quietly issued retractions, corrections, or since wrote that they were misled…

Russia had 0 involvement. The laptop and all the controversial material and evidence of corruption on it were legitimate. Wanting to believe otherwise is doing yourself a disservice, even if it means conceding that those you disagree with aren’t always lying.

transcriptase commented on Washington Post CEO Will Lewis Steps Down After Stormy Tenure nytimes.com/2026/02/07/te... · Posted by u/jbegley

SilverElfin · 2 days ago

Is this actually a strategy that is more common now? Trump is famous for this - he does outrageous things and then throws someone under the bus. That person leaves, they take all the reputational damage, Trump continues. Maybe Bezos and other billionaires are looking at Trump and thinking “Maybe I should go that far as well”?

transcriptase · 2 days ago

Yes if there’s anything Trump has been known for since the 80s it’s his sterling positive reputation and putting others in the spotlight.

C’mon… there’s no reason to hallucinate information like ChatGPT circa 2022.

transcriptase commented on Spotlighting the World Factbook as We Bid a Fond Farewell cia.gov/stories/story/spo... · Posted by u/mxfh

shevy-java · 5 days ago

Hmmm. They do not mention Wikipedia, but the CIA book kind of had information about countries for a very long time. I get that Wikipedia would objectively make more sense; so while it may make sense to stop investing resources into the CIA book, I still think it would be better to keep tabs on the content of Wikipedia. Kind of like a secondary quality control. It may not be hugely important here, but if 100.000 other websites vanish, I still think it may be an indirect problem for Wikipedia, as all its presented facts may become increasingly more and more circular to itself - which is made worse by AI slop spamming down the global quality.

transcriptase · 5 days ago

As it stands you only need a few friends or likeminded journalists at a few major publications to repeat the same falsehood, and it becomes a properly cited fact on Wikipedia and in the public eye for as long as you need it to be. If it’s later proven to be a falsehood and the underlying sources quietly issue retractions it doesn’t matter.

How many people out there still believe the Hunter Biden laptop story, and all the politically damaging material on it was Russian misinformation?

transcriptase commented on Jellyfin LLM/"AI" Development Policy jellyfin.org/docs/general... · Posted by u/mmoogle

transcriptase · 12 days ago

I suspect the vast number of individuals in developing countries currently spamming LLM commits to every open source project on earth, and often speak neither the project or programming language are not going to pay much attention to this policy. It’s become a numbers game of automation blasting “contributions” at projects with name recognition and hoping you sneak one in for your resume/portfolio.

transcriptase commented on American importers and consumers bear the cost of 2025 tariffs: analysis kielinstitut.de/publicati... · Posted by u/47282847

JohnMakin · 21 days ago

I don't really disagree with this but my opinion is that basically no one is capable of winning a US presidential campaign in the modern era in a matter of ~100 days. The fact Harris was a uniquely bad candidate that weirdly refused to differentiate herself from Biden, just exacerbated that problem.

If Biden and his administration had not been so hellbent on hiding his decline and allowed a robust primary process to start a year earlier, we'd also probably be living in a very different world. There was an extraordinary amount of hubris involved. Hell, even the amount of time between the debate and Biden stepping down (and then initially refusing to endorse Harris) took an absurdly long time. Felt like the lesson with Hillary's campaign was not learned - they expected people to vote for Harris by virtue she was not Trump. Clearly that has not been working.

transcriptase · 21 days ago

That’s a good point. The fact that the administration and media spent nearly 6 months telling the world not to believe our own eyes did that campaign no favors.

Especially when it became so untenable to continue the lie that they had to implicitly admit to it along with falsely accusing everyone else of misinformation.

transcriptase commented on American importers and consumers bear the cost of 2025 tariffs: analysis kielinstitut.de/publicati... · Posted by u/47282847

Glyptodon · 21 days ago

Much like I think if any Dem other than Hillary Clinton ran against Trump for his winning term 1, I think if the Dems had a proper primary process for this last election they'd probably have picked somebody who'd also have won.

That said, I'm not sure being a woman was worse than being from CA or black with a solid chunk of the electorate. (I'm reminded of how some of my own relatives seemed to want to avoid visiting us in CA growing up because they had such a strong notion of how "communist," "liberal," and dangerous it ostensibly was.)

In some ways this also illustrates that propaganda likely had a significant role, too, IMO.

transcriptase · 21 days ago

They didn’t even have a proper primary with Hillary. She was anointed by the DNC to start and the party itself worked against other candidates any way it could to make sure she “won”. Completely ignoring the fact that she was the opposite of any candidate that might snag a single vote from the republicans, and unlikable among most dem voters themselves. Throw in the fact that they were so convinced of a victory that Trump flipped blue states by virtue of showing up versus ignoring them on the basis of “who cares, they’ll vote for me anyway”, and it was a recipe for disaster.

Had the DNC allowed Bernie Sanders to win, or had Biden not picked his running mate on the basis of a Berkeley focus group where the participants were trying to out-virtue each other, we would live in a very different world.

transcriptase commented on Wine 11.0 gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wi... · Posted by u/zdw

radarroark · 22 days ago

Anyone have experience with distributing win32 programs for Linux and/or MacOS by bundling wine? I take it that statically linking is out of the question, but I am guessing you could make an AppImage binary for linux that includes wine, and for MacOS you could include wine in the app bundle. I haven't tried either though. I'm interested in this so I can use win32 as a cross-platform desktop GUI library.

transcriptase · 22 days ago

That sounds antithetical to the “never just works” philosophy of Linux software.

transcriptase commented on San Francisco to offer free childcare to people making up to $230k theguardian.com/us-news/2... · Posted by u/darth_avocado

normie3000 · 24 days ago

Am i missing the joke? ChatGPT tells me 3% of 100 is 3, not 0.18.

transcriptase · 24 days ago

You’re missing something if you asked ChatGPT that.

transcriptase commented on San Francisco to offer free childcare to people making up to $230k theguardian.com/us-news/2... · Posted by u/darth_avocado

bsimpson · 24 days ago

That sounds like a good way to keep moms out of the workforce.

I know a lot of couples who feel like the wife's job is a hobby, because after taxes it barely covers childcare (especially if you also value spending time with your kids).

Free childcare could free those households up to decide which parent(s) work when. Instead, by capping it below a common dual income, it incentivizes the least earning parent to continue to stay out of the workforce.

transcriptase · 24 days ago

So basically a return to what was the norm from ~300,000 years ago until 1975?

Sound the alarms.

transcriptase commented on Anthropic blocks third-party use of Claude Code subscriptions github.com/anomalyco/open... · Posted by u/sergiotapia

cma · a month ago

They've added this change at the same time they added random trick prompts to try and get you hit enter on the training opt in from late last year. I've gotten three popups inside claude code today at random times trying to trick me into having it train my data with a different selection defaulted than I've already chosen.

(edit 4 times now just today)

transcriptase · a month ago

More evidence the EU solved the wrong problem. Instead of mandating cookie banners, mandate a single global “fuck off” switch: one-click, automatic opt-out from any feature/setting/telemetry/tracking/training that isn’t strictly required or clearly beneficial to the user as an individual. If it’s mainly there for data collection, ads, attribution, “product improvement”, or monetization, it should be off by default and remain that way so long as the “fuck off” option is toggled. Burden of proof on the provider. Fines exceeding what it takes to get growth teams and KPI hounds to have legal coach them on what “fuck off” means and why they need to.