Pretty sure many of them are LLMs by bot factories with an interest in the US tearing itself apart, and the prompt is, “Write a reply to {post}. Agree and amplify what is said, but make more racist and divisive.”

The modern fascist terraforming plan is:

Step 1: Flood the zone.

Step 2: Population gives up and tunes out.

Step 3: Remove all remaining checks to power.

Step 4: Purge all political and social undesirables.

The funny thing is, Stephen Miller and the rest realized they can do the steps in parallel, each one reinforcing and normalizing the others.

The most valuable and hardest thing we can do is not give up resisting. But pace yourself, find some good in the world and give it some of your attention every day. They’re relying on wearing us down.

Hmmm, I have been skeptical of AI, but it looks like it’s getting smarter.

Thank you for submitting your final exam for AP American History. ChatGPT 5-TeacherEdition graded your Llama 6.3o answers to be 25% incorrect. This determination is only appealable by confirming an error in grading with a Gemini X-5-level grading-appeal service, with a Standard Reliability rating of 7.5 or higher. Our system notes from your records that this service is not available to your income tier.

Your future profession is selected as: Meat packer.

Have a nice day.

ChatGPT would never make those capitalization errors unless you specifically added to your prompt, “Capitalize words like you’re a brain-damaged capuchin.”

Yes, but you see, now they can “read” the outline, and end up with just enough memory of it to reference the work in a condescendingly authoritative opinion about it.

Yeah, this post started as a reassurance that Tailscale wouldn’t enshittify. But it turned out to just be an argument about how to avoid enshittification that boiled down to two principles:

1. You shouldn’t make your product worse because it’ll eventually harm the company; and
2. Founders are magic and need to never turn over control of the company to others (be it new CEOs or VC) to resist enshittification.

Both are partially right and partially wrong.

For #1: Yes, making your product worse eventually harms the company. No, you can’t expect CEOs to accept that as a reason to not make their product worse because even if it harms the company, short-term incentives that lead to enshittification are eventually going to become irresistible. His comment about reaching “zen” with leveled growth and profit will never stop VCs from calling in demands and favors.

For #2: Yes, founders typically “get it” more than their VC- or failure-initiated replacements. No, that doesn’t mean founders are uniquely resistant to enshittification. This is your point too, and it’s why I don’t believe this person - they lose credibility here because they don’t acknowledge they aren’t special. Every tech bro out there thinks they’ve cracked the code to permanent tech hegemony. That exceptionalist thinking turns into enshittification, since the product-worsening or overcharging is easier to justify as temporary/necessary/not-a-big-deal (until it isn’t).

And all of this doesn’t explain why Tailscale specifically gets immunity if the principles are true.

So interesting post, and a lot more self-awareness than most founders which is still a little reassuring, but a lot of warning signs too.

Edit: clarity

That’s some quality conspiracy thinking!

But there are too many people who could have been early adopters and have any number of random motives for this to be “likely.”

Heck, I was watching Bitcoin when it was like $0.002 a coin and someone spent 10,000 (presumably home-CPU-mined) BTC to buy a pizza. There were a ton of people there at the beginning, the barrier to purchasing a ton was very low, and unlike me, a lot of them certainly had $20,000 to spare and believed in it enough to buy.

Is it just me, or is this graph (first graph in the article) completely unintelligible?

The X-axis being time is self-explanatory, but the Y-axis is somehow exponential time but then also mapping random milestones of performance, meaning those milestones are hard-linked to that time-based Y-axis? What?

Even if any of them believe they are praying, their “faith” is a sham in support of their real religion: power. To Republicans, “politics” is the religion founded on increasing personal power through performative speech and conduct.

They are hollow, nihilistic simulacrums of human-like virtue, expressing themselves only to drain the actual human value and agency from the public.

Don’t forget to bathe in raw sewage.

Don’t worry, I’m sure the FTC will investigate this obvious and pernicious false labeling bait-and-switch scheme!

I switched to Rust Desk after I got repeatedly flagged for commercial use of Team Viewer and access disabled. I was doing nothing of the sort, but it happened after I accessed my personal computer on my personal phone while at work. They must have IP address checks that are extremely aggressive.

I followed their process to “verify” I was non-commercial, which was invasive and insulting, and then was flagged again.

Rust Desk works great, no problems, never using Team Viewer again.

I’m like, “Is this what normal people in 2025 watch?” I feel like an alien on earth, except the planet changed and not me.

Tried this on a private window, and yes, that’s what it looks like. Thought I’d click on Shorts and let the first 3 seconds of the opening auto-play video play. Then back to the home page and wow, full of absolute trash.

All very good points.

He keeps trying. He seems to think that can be done by just putting his thumb on the system prompt, and then we end up with obvious nonsense like that South African white genocide preoccupation. It’s fortunate the Musk isn’t smart enough to figure out how to do it subtly.

Here is the 2016 Adam Curtis documentary referenced in the article, by the same term we use to describe what’s happening: Hypernormalization.

It was a documentary I’d highly recommend when I saw it in 2017, during Trump’s first term. Now I think it’s required viewing, which is depressing since almost nobody has heard of it, despite living in the exact demoralizing and uncanny reality it describes.

The article says an iOS app was released to testers.

That’s some real cognitive dissonance between the anti-Semitic and the racist parts of her brain.