Four Threads

There have been several involved threads over the past couple of days that I'd like to share. Some are funny, or at least funny/outrageous, or just... part of the current hellscape.

First: These two guys from North Texas decided to invade an island off the coast of Port au Prince, Haiti:



They wanted to kill all the men, then rape and enslave the women and children. That sounds terrible, I know, and it is, but get this:

"Gonâve Island has a population of about 87,000." Two guys? They sure do dream big.
prefect.bsky.social

Guy who couldn’t even make it through Air Force Basic Training thinks he’s going to take on an island of 87,000 people.
 @jenne.myatproto.social

No, no, they also were recruiting homeless people in DC to help with the coup.
Eukaryote @eukaryotex.bsky.social

Will their defense be that they are too stupid to be guilty of the attempt to coup?
jayhawkshannon.bsky.social

Oh, to have the unearned confidence of a racist white man…
tawdryhepburn9.bsky.social

JFC. No wonder American women are saying "no" to this version of American manhood.
AnneC @annecw.bsky.social

cannot believe they were named Gavin and Tanner, cosmic writers room just phoning it in AGAIN
Paz Pardo @pazsays.bsky.social

They probably thought getting a point off Serena Williams was too easy. Wanted a challenge...
Forza Bahab

Then there's Elon Musk's attempt to label where tweets on X/Twitter originate from. This has been happening over the past day or so, and resulted in unmasking a lot of right-wing/MAGA accounts as coming from Eastern Europe, India, and just about every country except the U.S.

I'm not sure if the feature is still live or not. It sounds like it has come and gone and maybe come again, or maybe it only shows up for some users? Whatever. The results have been extremely enlightening.

I gather that Musk just accidentally made the mistake of revealing how many “MAGA” accounts are actually posting from outside the US.
Patrick Chovanec

im crying literally what was he expecting to happen. i don't think this shit even lasted an hour. that's how fast it backfired
 @7thdragon2020.bsky.social

X rolled out a new feature overnight showing where accounts are based. This network of “Trump-supporting independent women” that claimed to be “real Americans” are based in Thailand. The photos were stolen from European models and posts pushed pro-Trump lines while targeting Islam and LGBTQ people. [Screen snapshots included in the original]
Benjamin Strick @bendobrown.bsky.social

Twitter pays people based on engagement (views, retweets, comments, etc). It appears that many MAGA accounts are based abroad and they use AI technology to generate low-effort rage bait. My guess is that this will get worse as AI tech improves. For instance, fake videos of minorities doing crime.
derek guy @dieworkwear.bsky.social

The irony of these people complaining about the invented dangers of immigrants and then welcoming brain pollution from overseas hustlers.
Philip Bump

If I’m understanding this correctly, X is owned by a white nationalist who pays poor people of color in developing countries to pretend to be working class white Americans to scare other white Americans into being afraid poor people of color from developing countries are going to ruin America?
Max Berger

If you’re a journalist who’s still on Twitter, from now on in your writing you have to replace “the American people want” with “troll bots in Eastern Europe demand.” Being there makes your judgment suspect. I don’t care how savvy you think you are, you’re marinating in a disinformation campaign.
Kevin M. Kruse

Now for some comic relief, this morning there was a thread responding to a person who confused the term "open source" and "public domain," and also was not... very... well-read...

the faerie queene has answered "YES" with alarming enthusiasm to the question
Blue Eyes White Macron @antitractionist.bsky.social

On the other hand, copyright licensing may as well be of the fae
toadescope

i watched two movies and they both were about people falling in love. is that allowed?
fatty pinner

Clearly they haven't seen the Fae license agreement. Thank them the wrong way and they might own your baby.
Swarm of cheese @stoney.monster

Finally, on a more serious note, there was a short thread on our incipient bubble, due to be bursting:

NVIDIA earnings were a mirage. The market figured it out surprisingly fast. NVIDIA bump evaporated. I don’t know how this information can enter the system without exploding the bubble. But sometimes bezzles are visible for months before crash. AirBnB's CEO is calling it “vibe revenue”... The underlying cause of every bubble — debt masquerading as financial innovation — depends on not just short financial memory and speculative neophytism, but reinventing jargon of finance, like how each generation of kids has new ways to say same things.
Matt Seybold

Someone is going to have to write the thing about how “vibe” has become a substitute for meaningful theory in a world where the theory is so clear — grift and power — but we collectively refuse it because it isn’t sophisticated enough to generate make-work for empiricists.
Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social

I once knew a Federal bank examiner, and one time someone asked him why we had to KEEP inspecting banks over and over. He basically said every new batch of business school grads invents bank fraud from first principles.
Joyce Park @troutgirl.bsky.social