unfortunately, if ever there was an era of truth, we are now well into a post-truth era. the world is full of, is run on, and is continually generating more: utter bullshit.

Not only does “pics or it didn’t happen” no longer have any meaning, neither does the stock market or the SEC or any of this rule of law or liberty and justice for all horseshit we were fed as kids in school, or any of that trickle down Reaganomics horseshit our parents and grandparents were fed. AI is only the latest in a long line of advancements in the manufacturing, repackaging, commercializing, re-distilling, and the redistributing of greater amounts of complete bullshit than ever before.

It is Bullshit 2.0. It is New Bullshit. Crystal Bullshit, if you’re more a bepis fan. Bullshit Classic was what got your parents and their parents riled up in the aftermath of 9/11 – Fox News and all the other things Rupert Murdoch infected. Now, we can get custom, personalized bullshit for each of us parsed through whatever moral lens ChatGPT is paid to have (or, worse, parsed through whatever moral lens Elon Musk gives to Grok). We have “people” acting as little more than a sausage casing for an OpenAI/Claude API key churning out more infuriating bullshit on the internet every waking minute of the day (and some of them, I’m almost certain, automate some of this during the night while they sleep). And in any form you like – text, audio, video – we have bullshit generators for any and every sort of media you like. Whatever makes the narrative they want to push just that little bit more believable to the gullible.

what a wonderful world indeed.

It does have a kind of “I’ll show you what I think of your bullshit awards” energy

I’m pretty sure I got TM 32-201-1, the master blaster’s training manual, the improvised munitions handbook, and a handful of others from archive.org.

Less reputable sources are available in all sorts of dark corners of the web, and certainly people could upload tampered versions to IA, but it is generally best to stick to resources that have… some kind of pedigree, when dealing with things that go boom when you look at them wrong.

Not that I’d ever do anything of the sort.

yup. at the moment if you want a truly private, properly useful local AI agent you basically have to set one up correctly, manually, yourself. Having one come as part of the OS already largely set up for the user would be a massive W.

but yeah, If.

the fact the world functions at all while running on matryoshka doll levels of bullshit and duplicity is equal parts impressive, terrifying, and depressing.

Think about this for a moment.

We made bullshit generators that ingest all the actual knowledge we feed them and manage to vomit out bullshit that’s so close to perfect most of the time that we now need a second bullshit generator to re-bullshit that output into a more palatable form of consumption for us. And it’s being sold to us for an additional $4.99 a month.

Fuck me.

my objection is not coming from somewhere you can throw justifications or “gotchas” at to refute. Morally distasteful it would certainly be (at least to me), but what I say mostly comes from the simple truth that wiping out entire populations indiscriminately – doesn’t matter who, Iran, Israel, w/e – especially with a nuclear weapon in the middle east, would be an irreversible and stupid decision that would have far-reaching, long-lasting consequences regionally and across the world, both easily anticipated (i.e. radioactive fallout) and unforeseen; ergo is not something to be treated with the same cavalier attitude Donald Trump has towards the idea. That he has the actual power to do so and clearly has the same “act now, think of consequences later” attitude some of you do is fucking terrifying to me.

Think of the unforeseen consequences Trump’s little poorly-planned foray into Iran has had, that had him backpedaling fast enough to win the Tour de France in reverse. Some of them we haven’t even gotten to yet, I’m sure, as it’s still an ongoing debacle. You want to tell me, with a straight face, that glassing Tel Aviv and the aftermath thereof is going to be less messy than… well, gee, just about any course of action that does not involve doing that?

Can you walk me through it? The aftermath, I mean. Because sure, I can see a lot of problems you might think would just go away with Israel vaporized, but I somehow really doubt they’re all going to be wrapped up nicely with a bow. But perhaps I just lack vision.

no, I do not believe that indiscriminate mass murder and wanton destruction is an acceptable solution for any of the world’s problems. If you do, I’d suggest seeking therapy.

Now I’d never normally be in favor of kicking dogs, not even robot ones; however…

[reads username]

not every showerthoughts-worthy post is necessarily envisioned in a shower

Also, if it’s been more than a few days, take a shower for me, homie. If you won’t do it for you, do it for me. Depression is a fuck.

It had much less to do with the attackers race, and much more to do with the fact that prior to 9/11, aircraft hijackings were primarily done for ransom, not to use the plane as a weapon for a mass casualty event.

This is the same JD Vance that repeatedly falsely claimed immigrants were eating cats and dogs in his home state, is it not?

I’m not saying a nuclear suicide vest couldn’t be done. I’m just saying, JD Vance has claimed lots of things.

the commercials themselves predate me, but you seem like you might enjoy Nostalgia Critic’s series on old commercials if you haven’t seen it already.

Also, holy shit, there were only five episodes of this last I checked, there’s like twenty of them now.