Brother Ali is also an excellent option in that genre, although his most directly political tracks are not his best IMHO.

Honestly bad article. Author can’t even accurately describe the thing they claim doesn’t exist.

I like people in theory

The above poster at least brought a reference. Here’s another covering the backfire effect in general https://psychotricks.com/backfire-effect/

People are a tricky problem. They don’t often work the way one would think, and certainly not the way we might wish. I think it’s a fair position to take that the social media environment, and the way people with opposing views interact there, has had a non-negligible impact on the rise in extreme views. That definitely includes trolling.

But here I am offering a differing opinion with a reference in support of the backfire effect, which is some next-level irony.

I guess if you wanna go off at people like that, I have to go through your links and point out that

1. Providing services to a cyber warfare organization does not make one a cyber warfare company. I bet they contract out their cafeteria services too. The article specifically states the contract is for data analysis.
2. Doing data analysis for target selection also does not make one a cyber warfare company.
3. Data analysis is not cryptography. Also, my personal computer is encrypted. Am I a cryptographer?
4. Receiving data from your customers does not make you a data collection company, and the article points out that the data is being collected by Oura. Compare that with the NSA who for example have internet backbone splitters installed at the major telcos, or put cell spoofers in cities.

Why is doing data analysis for unethical ends not enough?

Palantir is a data analysis company. Data analysis is just one part of what the NSA does. Other important functions of the NSA include cyber warfare, cryptography, and data collection. I have not read that Palantir does any of that.

If different people with similar visual characteristics have similar behavioral characteristics, doesn’t that imply that perhaps we can judge a book by its cover?

Haven’t read the book, but the title suggests things could have been different. That something happened to make things bad. If that’s the argument, it is completely wrong. Israel could have turned out no other way. Extermination is the only possible outcome of a colonial ethno-state.

Imagine explaining to a patient they have permanent neurological damage because they wanted to sniff their video games.

I have a hard time believing that Gore would have made a difference on preventing 9-11, but I’m sure the response would have been different. Maybe no Patriot Act, maybe no Afghanistan War, almost certainly no Iraq War. That’s a big enough difference for me.

I’m used to AP titles being pretty dry, but they have started putting some bite in them.

I’m having a conversation with a family member. Somehow the topic of firefighters comes up. She pauses, looks very thoughtful for a moment, then asks, “Do you not like firefighters, either?”

“What? Why would I not like firefighters?”

“Like how you don’t like police.”

She knows me well. I boggle at how my distaste for cops could be this misunderstood.

I think it kinda doesn’t matter. If they can catch 95% of all users, that’s pretty close to total victory. Well more than enough to shut out access from Linux systems for most things without causing public backlash.

Apple, Microsoft, and Google account for roughly 95% of all human user systems.

Did any of these outfits actually produce quality tech journalism? In my mind CNET and the like were all marketing pieces about the next smart TV. I do use Tom’s Hardware when I’m shopping for PC parts because they seem to do a good job with their benchmarking. The all-time great hard tech news site was Anandtech, and that’s been gone for years.

Yes with one quirk. I don’t use the right shift, just the left. Not sure why I’ve ended up this way, or if it’s a common variation.

EDIT: looked it up. It’s very common

Does anything other than the style of the skull and crossbones of his ex-tattoo suggest that he is in any way a Nazi or fascist?

Now that is an interesting idea. Don’t know if you’re joking, but has anyone tried using an LLM as a TTRPG character or DM?