Notices by Peter (peter@thepit.social), page 5

billions and billions of dollars have been poured into this technology, and at **best** LLM-based search engines are able to return correct information ~40% of the time. unfortunately, they also sound really confident about it, which means most people won't even notice they have completely wrong information. https://www.cjr.org/tow_center/we-compared-eight-ai-search-engines-theyre-all-bad-at-citing-news.php

everything else aside, it sounds like Trump is simply not in control at the White House. we're in a very serious situation where the president has dementia and is not actually able to understand what's going on around him, much less lead. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/07/us/politics/trump-musk-doge-power.html?unlocked_article_code=1.2E4.f8eL.HfFykWbEEPJx&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

huh, look at that list of email addresses.

EDIT details on provenance etc.: https://bsky.app/profile/esqueer.net/post/3ljpyyjzfis2l

hell yeah. we are on week 5 of the Trump administration. Trump take nest egg.

they are going to announce some bullshit bailout around midday and the markets are going to breath a sigh of relief because the people who studied finance in college are actually dumber than average.

lol i was off by about 24hrs but yep! people keep saying Trump has an elaborate plan to use tariffs to enforce loyalty, but this just looks like an ad hoc scramble to keep line from going down. https://www.marketwatch.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-s-p-500-and-nasdaq-in-line-for-rebound-amid-volatile-trading

depending on how mad the Mad King gets, he is headed for a showdown with the people who think they really run things in the US (big business). although, pretty interesting how quickly Trump folds when these people apply just a tiny bit of pressure, might not be much of a fight.

it occurs to me that the left/liberals face a permanently uphill battle with algorithmic social media because the ideology of the right is based on anecdotes, and algorithmic social media provides them with infinite anecdotes they can use to generate outrage or apathy.

anyone who's ever argued with a conservative before knows how this works: you bring a stack of studies and investigative reports from scientists and journalists, they bring the one thing they heard or saw that one time. and it's genuinely fucking impossible to dislodge that one thing from their brain, it doesn't matter how many facts you have to the contrary.

so, you bring a mountain of evidence that immigration is, in fact, good for everybody. they bring that one time they saw a Moroccan cat-call a white lady.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

and now algorithmic social media makes it **infinitely** easier to find and surface these anecdotes. that's Libs of TicTok's whole thing. Fox News too. they can **always** find one crazy trans person or one comment taken out of context or whatever, and boom, now it's an anecdote stuck in the brains of millions of people who are just kind of casually interested in content that confirms their priors.

anecdotal knowledge is the opposite of scientific knowledge, so it makes sense that these people have also turned against science in general. with people who think like this, you can get them to casually believe in literally anything. angels? sure why not. flat earth? maybe! horoscopes? lol it's just fun, but seriously, what's your sign. the Holocaust? eh, probably exaggerated.

western civilization is collapsing into a knowledge vortex. hundreds of years of epistemological edifices built since the Enlightenment are on the verge of collapse.

genuinely ashamed and embarrassed to be an American right now.

Zelinskyy did what he needed to do though. the whole world can see who Trump and Vance are. if the members of the Five Eyes didn't make provisions before, they must be cutting cables with axes right now.

I know the GOP doesn't care about misogyny and sexual assault, but the Tate brothers are pornographers. that's what they were doing in Romania, recruiting (some would say trafficking!!) cam girls to provide whack-off material to guys online. this isn't even alleged, they talk about it openly.

@Infoseepage H5N1 is not 100% lethal, very much less than that. what you are describing is possible but in the sense that it's possible for two people and a dog to all die from falling off ladders at the same time.

@Infoseepage the dog too??

fuck, Gene Hackman died, along with his wife, classical pianist Betsy Arakawa, and their dog. sounds like carbon monoxide. and https://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/sheriff-gene-hackman-wife-found-dead-in-santa-fe-home-no-foul-play-suspected/article_2ea8855a-f4b8-11ef-b501-73232a2b5213.html

:dril: