https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/06/technology/elon-musk-grok-sexy-chatbot.html

Yeah, because everything was fine and everyone got soft and complacent.

Like it or not, we’re coming to the end of that, we’ve not even scratched the surface of how bad it’s actually going to get. The people and communities that smarten up will (sometimes) survive, and more and more, the ones that do not will not.

Elon Musk: We’re gonna need the goon AI, get to work on that

Also Elon Musk: WTF it would never! Fake news

Sam Altman:

Yeah. It sounds cliche, but “listen with your heart” is really accurate. She’s saying she misses the old days when America worked. That’s not wrong (I mean for white people it’s not, I would recommend not to go down that rabbit hole lol). A lot of it isn’t about what you say to her, it’s how you say it. If everything you say sounds cold and factual and correcting her, of course she’s not going to want to listen and it’s just going to be a hostile interaction.

It is tough. My experience with stuff like this is that they just live in a whole different reality, so it is hard to get a foothold. I had to work really hard at having conversations with people for whom the tone of voice and emotional intent is a huge part of how they process the information (which I think is most people). That’s not how I operate, so it was hard to keep it in mind without coming off as fake or condescending, but if you’re genuine about what you mean and focus on sort of the core of why you came to your beliefs (not the facts but the reasons why you care about the facts so much), a lot of times it comes across better. And then on top of that, you’re dealing with someone where their factual understanding of the world is off in la-la land, so it’s hard to not just lecture them or tell them what’s what.

Like that kind of thing about Reagan, my first reaction to the answer is “Yeah, and have you wondered why that hasn’t ever happened since then? Why everyone was doing okay until the late 80s and then it all went to hell and hasn’t come back? Honestly that’s what I want, is to get back to when working people had a fair shake and people could make a living. Don’t you want that? It sure as hell is not happening now under Trump…”

But again, it’s not the words, it’s the intent behind them. If you’re reasonable and you care, then it’s hard for her to take your statements hostile even if she doesn’t agree with them (honestly I can guarantee you that one conversation or even several about it will not change her mind.) But you can sort of plant seeds and then she’ll come around on her own, or if she does not then oh well.

If she is being overtly hateful on her own then it’s different. IDK what you can even do then. But mostly in my experience it is people who are so twisted up that they think the Democrats are so hateful that of course things X, Y, and Z make perfect sense and are the only humane thing to do. Mostly.

I can’t really offer specific advice on this situation. I don’t know. But I will say, in general separating from the person who’s victimized by propaganda just helps the propaganda spread. A lot of this stuff actually has deliberate features and habits that it tries to instill into people, to make it drive away people who might talk sense into them and make it harder for them to hear sense if someone does say it to them.

I think you should view your MIL as a victim of propaganda, similar to a drug addict or a person with significant trauma in their life. A lot of them are victims. Of course, if she’s telling you “I’m glad they’re snatching all those US citizens and deporting them to hellish nightmare prisons in other countries just because they’re Hispanic,” then maybe you want to shun her. But usually what’s happened is that they’ve gotten so twisted up in their perceptions that they think that what they’re saying and supporting is something really good, and everyone should support it. The stuff that she is victimized by is incredibly powerful, it’s not surprising to me that a lot of people get taken in by it.

Like I say it’s hard to give general advice about what you should do. But this may help you to be more gentle with her even if you are aware of the hatefulness at work in the stuff she was victimized by and have some understandably big feelings about it.

The whole model is just absolutely stupid. I mean, I get how it was what Aaron and Spez came up with back 20 years ago, but the fact that nobody bothered to make anything fundamentally better at any point since then is just fuckin’ weird.

There are quite a few honestly. Team Fortress and DayZ are obvious examples, I also quite liked Natural Selection.

Yeah. I do see the point, Reddit moderation at this point is hilariously bad so I guess I shouldn’t assume that this person did any little thing wrong.

The whole moderation model which depends on volunteers with unlimited power and allows any random idiot to create an unlimited number of alts, is broken. Reddit devs and moderators have made a good go I guess of trying to make it work, but all they have done is demonstrated that it is not the way.

Yeah, it’s fair. I know the moderation on Reddit has gone entirely off the fucking rails at this point.

1. I am suspicious of your perfectly innocent story sir or ma’am
2. Modern web sites are very good at this sort of thing. From hearing from moderators on the small scale, it’s fairly easy to tell when someone who has been banned comes back, simply because they almost always start doing the exact same stuff that got them banned. At that point you don’t really need to do exact fingerprinting, you just look at the relevant dates / behavior / rough device fingerprinting and you have about 99% confidence that this is the same person. But, also, there is a whole technology of figuring out who people are on the web at this point, and it’s pretty comprehensive. Even if you change devices and IPs, your browser’s tracking cookies probably link your Reddit session with your other big-web-site accounts pretty much instantly and there is definitely some kind of API that shares that information back with Reddit. I’m honestly not sure even what I could recommend as a working way to do ban evasion on Reddit.
3. Bro why Reddit? I still read it periodically because there’s neat stuff there sometimes but there are far better federated social networks than modern Reddit out there, I think.

You don’t

• Went to army surplus store, got various stuff, also got peace buttons and a headband, took all my hair down (long hair), and wore the military gear all unbuttoned and disordered. There wasn’t really a plan for the costume beyond that, but people partway through the night decided I was Ron Kovic, which seemed like it fit even though I had no wheelchair. I had a photo from that night for a while with a friend who was going into the navy, who was dressed up as some kind of special forces man with a big hunting knife, with us standing together him looking like a psychopath and me smiling doing a peace sign. We were the before and the after.
• The day I cut off my long hair, I invested in a super-sharp suit, and went before work to get it all cut off and get a super-sharp short hair haircut instead. I showed up to work in full suit and tie, neatly shaved, looking like a completely different person. My coworkers kept getting startled because they would look over at my desk and see this suit guy sitting there for some reason instead of me.
• When I was in my mid 40s I dressed up as an old man. Powder in the hair, glasses, old man clothes, and moved around all slow and careful and looked over my glasses at things. People were alarmed a little bit by how effective and accurate it was lol… like “I don’t want to see you this way, stop stop doing that.”

Those three I all enjoyed quite a lot.

1. “Rubber” bullets are a massive metal ball wrapped in a thin sheet of rubber. They carry about half the kinetic energy of a bullet, they can still crack your skull or destroy a part of your body that they hit. There is a reason people started pushing for the terminology “less lethal” instead of “nonlethal.”
2. That said you actually raise kind of a good question I think. I suspect that a lot of the reason is nothing more than that the guns that shoot “rubber” bullets effectively are big and cumbersome. You can’t run fast while holding one, carry one around on your belt and then pull it out in a fraction of a second, et cetera. They actually do try to do what you’re talking about with Tasers, there’s a whole process, except that Tasers are unreliable so they have to have a second cop with a gun drawn most of the time.
3. Replacing guns with “rubber” bullets… a lot of the time when they are shooting they are thinking in terms of a gunfight with an armed suspect, so they don’t want to be in a situation where the “rubber” bullets aren’t penetrating a car but the bullets coming back at them are penetrating their car, something like that. If it is deadly force involved they don’t want to be at a disadvantage.
4. Replacing Tasers with rubber bullets… IDK, I think “rubber” bullets are probably more lethal than Tasers and you’re definitely going to fuck somebody up any time you hit them with one. The vast majority of the time, the Taser just sucks and then you take the probes out and you’re done, you don’t have any cracked ribs or destroyed eyeballs or anything. Most of the scenarios where they would be using a “rubber” bullet, US cops at least will use a 40mm “beanbag round” which won’t cause nearly the same type of injuries.

I won’t say your suggestion is automatically a bad idea but I think those are some of the reasons you so rarely see them except in “crowd control” type of scenarios where some of the existing nonlethal options aren’t viable, and also where they have some additional desire to cause injuries in the people they’re "control"ing. Basically you can choose a Taser which is unreliable, pepper spray which is short range and will fuck you up too sometimes, or a 40mm or rubber bullet which needs a big cumbersome launcher (and the “rubber” bullet may cause significant injuries anyway).

I mean yeah lol. That’s why I said “mostly.” But my point was, more or less, that modern power tools can do stuff that you simply can’t do with C, but C is still a venerable tool to me. I like it. The old pros can make fantastic custom cabinets, they do framing almost as fast as someone with a nail gun, it’s just that it’s not practical for most people to try to get skilled enough to be able to make solid stuff (and of course you can never make a skyscraper with just hand tools.)

Once you start finding yourself using malloc() all that much, you’re probably using the wrong tool, and it’s also just objectively less secure than other safer languages. But clean C code has a kind of beauty to me that is hard to replicate in the more powerful languages.

In my analogy, the tool is the programming language, and the worker is the programmer in that language. Mostly.

C is the old carpenter, who can drive in nails with three strikes of the hammer and never forgets his tools.

C# is his friend who just uses power tools instead. He is fine too. He goes home early whenever he can.

Python is the new guy at work who thinks he’s super smart. He actually can do the job really well, but for some reason nobody likes him all that much.

Javascript is the boss’s son who got the job since he agreed to stay off pills but he does not. He is useful to be friendly with, maybe, but avoid him any day that you can. Typescript is his weird fiancée. She is significantly less stupid but much more rarely useful, and also best avoided.

Go and Rust are tight-knit friends who get shit done. They are extremely capable but also not friendly, they tend not to talk much.

Clojure does mushrooms on weekends, and seems to believe he has key insights the rest of the crew is too dim to understand, but he also makes frequent simple mistakes on the job and forgets things. Also avoid.

Java only has the job because he’s known the boss since they were kids. He was never that good, but now he is old, and frequently drunk. Avoid at all costs.

🪗

🚢🦜⚓

You can throw some money at artists periodically, some random $10 donation to whatever their fan site or on merch will probably net them more than a lifetime of listening to their stuff on Spotify, since streaming revenues add up to roughly five atoms of currency per stream or so.

Yeah. Life is a fuck

If anyone ever tries it, MCA shows up their house with a few of his people.