Spread flat earth theories, get influencers to question if sunscreen is actually harmful, etc. Spread enough contradictory information so that gradually, people don't have any idea what to believe, and then they become susceptible to political misinformation, or just become completely politically disengaged.
It is not a sign of a healthy society at all, it is a disease.
People have been pointing out that various european fringe groups got funded by Russia for a long time. Like, they have actually been caught at it. I always thought it was a weird theory, why would they even bother?
That was until the morning after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia. Because that morning, a huge proportion of the most popular european conspiracy, anti-vaxxer and alt-right twitter accounts started pushing the same 5 kremlin talking points. It was way too crudely done to be organic, they had clearly received their marching orders.
“Talking points” for one man is simply the truth for another man. When you look at everything through a conspiracy lens, eventually the truth can become “talking points” and you end up in an island of delusion (I hope everyone still remembers the “vibecession” we had…, the inflation is not real actually, etc etc).
We seriously need to evaluate this “talking points” accusation lol. Propaganda accusations in general, they’re mindless and kills actual discussion.
No I mean literally a specific set of iirc 5 points, that none of them had ever used before, that they all did with very little variation, at the same time, one morning. They didn't all just independently end up with the same subjects they needed to talk about at the same time.
It made lots of people who had previously believed in their bullshit wake up and take notice.
Ok…so they read the same article or watched the same video that went viral. And people repeat what’s in the article or video because it makes sense. It’s a very very common phenomenon in the internet. People do it all the time. Does not imply conspiracy.
> HN never seemed to be very full of joy or whimsy to me (the culture seems to afraid of "being like Reddit")
Reddit is full of the same hundred jokes being endlessly recycled in slightly different variants, along with people desperate to come up with a good pun to make their life complete.
And HN is full of the same hundred low-effort circular arguments, logical fallacies and pointless fence-painting debates being endlessly recycled in slightly different variants, along with people desperate to come up with some witty retort or outlandish extrapolation in order to appear intellectual and ahead of the curve.
It's basically the same picture, and if we're talking about the spirit of the "old internet" that everyone seems to miss, Reddit hits it far better than HN.
> I'm of the opinion that, if your solution requires perpetual majority control of legislative, executive, and judicial branches, your solution is in fact a campaign slogan.
You mean like overturning Roe v. Wade? Can't ever happen, right?
LLM content immediately distracts my attention to the fact that it is LLM content, and I focus immediately on that "meta" issue to the exclusion of whatever the content is.
And generally I find that the content isn't that high quality. You're getting someone who superficially appears like an expert and looks like they've thought through the problem, but if you know anything about the problem, you'll find that the articles are usually weak (Gell-Mann Amnesia).
> According to Windows Latest, the high memory consumption is due to the fact that Weather is not a fully native Windows application. Instead, it is essentially an MSN Weather web app built on Microsoft's WebView2 framework. Task Manager shows multiple Chromium-based subprocesses running simultaneously, which contributes to the unusually high RAM usage.
If you have Edge or Chrome open (or anything else that similarly uses Chromium) then the incremental increase in RAM usage from the Weather app is likely much smaller than the headline 1GB.
2009 pandemic H1N1 was not severe, and was called a pandemic.