100%.

I agree with the assertion though. These are the two biggest egos in America, and there’s no way they get along for long.

They should keep Alex Jones and leave the broadcast completey unchanged.

Wala. A parody site.

The article itself muddies the waters even more:

Today we celebrate a new addition to the Global Tetrahedron LLC family of brands. And let me say, I really do see it as a family. Much like family members, our brands are abstract nodes of wealth, interchangeable assets for their patriarch to absorb and discard according to the opaque whims of the market. And just like family members, our brands regard one another with mutual suspicion and malice.

All told, the decision to acquire InfoWars was an easy one for the Global Tetrahedron executive board.

Founded in 1999 on the heels of the Satanic “panic” and growing steadily ever since, InfoWars has distinguished itself as an invaluable tool for brainwashing and controlling the masses. With a shrewd mix of delusional paranoia and dubious anti-aging nutrition hacks, they strive to make life both scarier and longer for everyone, a commendable goal. They are a true unicorn, capable of simultaneously inspiring public support for billionaires and stoking outrage at an inept federal state that can assassinate JFK but can’t even put a man on the Moon…

Its is a parody post, but also real, but also The Onion. It’s a shining, throughbread Onion article, but also not.

We need !sortoftheonion

I’d posit the algorithm has turned it into a monster.

Attention should be dictated more by chronological order and what others retweet, not what some black box thinks will keep you glued to the screen, and it felt like more of the former in the old days. This is a subtle, but also very significant change.

I believe the calculus is “A even more extreme MAGA diehard will take my place.”

Which is 100% true.

Still extremely self-serving, but kinda reasonable in a Machiavellian way.

What do these chodes expect to happen after 2028?

Uh, nothing bad? Just like after screw-ups doing COVID-19?

America collectively has the attention span of a flea, and an even shorter term memory. No one even cares about what happened in 2016-2020 anymore

Collins and Murkowski hate Trump, they’re two of the last surviving Republicans that openly do so. I bet they won’t:

https://www.axios.com/2024/10/27/senate-collins-murkowski-harris-trump

They’re rightly scared of not being re-elected for daring to oppose him. Or worse.

Mark my words, you are going to see a LOT of railing against rebel Republicans from Trump. Or what few are left, anyway.

The “dirt” is not being re-elected because they dare question Trump.

On the other hand, the track record of old social networks is not great.

And it’s reasonable to posit Twitter is deep into the enshitifiication cycle.

Beat me to it.

Still perfectly runnable in kobold.cpp. There was a whole community built up around with Pygmalion.

It is as dumb as dirt though. IMO that is going back too far.

I know every generation says it, but I really think there was a “peak” generation that grew up on the old web, and learned critical thinking the hard way. The Internet is a lie.

Those that never leave apps and their feeds? Not learning that lesson.

People still run or even continue pretrain llama2 for that reason, as its data is pre-slop.

The facebook/mastadon format is much better for individuals, no? And Reddit/Lemmy for niches, as long as they’re supplemented by a wiki or something.

And Tumblr. The way content gets spread organically, rather than with an algorithm, is actually super nice.

IMO Twitter’s original premise, of letting novel, original, but very short thoughts fly into the ether has been so thoroughly corrupted that it can’t really come back. It’s entertaining and engaging, but an awful format for actually exchanging important information, like discord.

This is called prompt engineering, and it’s been studied objectively and extensively. There are papers where many different personas are benchmarked, or even dynamically created like a genetic algorithm.

You’re still limited by the underlying LLM though, especially something so dry and hyper sanitized like OpenAI’s API models.

Don’t kill me, but I actually registered as a Republican so I can vote in their primaries and other elections, and have a say in who gets elected instead of choosing the Democrat that will get voted out of my Republican state.

Of course, recently, I’ve always voted blue unless the Dem is a massive jerk for some reason. Registering as a Republican doesn’t stop me from doing that.

To add to this:

All LLMs absolutely have a sycophancy bias. It’s what the model is built to do. Even wildly unhinged local ones tend to ‘agree’ or hedge, generally speaking, if they have any instruction tuning.

Base models can be better in this respect, as their only goal is ostensibly “complete this paragraph” like a naive improv actor, but even thats kinda diminished now because so much ChatGPT is leaking into training data. And users aren’t exposed to base models unless they are local LLM nerds.

I don’t know when the goal post got moved

Ken Paxton, at least?

Always has been.

Problem is their “gut” feelings are now from conservative radio/podcasts and facebook feeds, instead of a mix of papers and friends like before.