What officials actually say doesn't make a difference anymore. People do not get bamboozled because of lack of facts. People who get bamboozled are past facts.
Off topic from the video AI thread, but to elaborate on your point: people believe what they want, based on what they have been primed to believe from mass media. This is mainly the normal TV and paper news, filtered through institutions like government proclamations, schools, and now supercharged by social media. This is why the "narrative" exists, and news media does the consensus messaging of what you should believe (and why they hate X and other freer media sources).
By the time the politician says it, you've been soaking in it for weeks or months, if not longer. That just confirms the bias that has been implanted in you.
If anything I'd say the opposite. Look at the last US elections, a lot of the criticisms against the side that lost were things people "thought" and "felt" they were for/against, without them actually coming out and saying anything of the like. It was people criticising them for stuff that wasn't actually real on X, traditional TV, and the like that made voters "feel" like that stuff is real.
And X is really egregious, where the owner shitposts frequently and often things of dubious factuality.
You say offtopic, but I think AI video generation is the most on-topic place to bring up the subject of falsified politically charged statements. Companies showcasing these things aren't exactly lining up to include "moral" as one of the bullet point adjectives in a limitations section.
It's not impossible, but of course they're not homegrown.
Putin's apologists always demand he be given the benefit of the doubt. That's akin to convicting a spy beyond a reasonable doubt. That standard is meant to favor false negatives over false positives when incarcerating people. Better to let a thousand criminals go free than to imprison an innocent person.
If we used that for spies, we'd have 1000 of them running around for each convicted one. Not to mention that they have a million ways to avoid detection. They rely on their training, on the resources of the state, and on infiltrators who sabotage detection efforts. The actual ratio would be much higher.
In the case of opinion manipulation, the balance is even more pernicious. That's because the West decided a couple decades ago to use the "it's just a flesh wound" approach to foreign interference.
The problem is that we're not just protecting gullible voters. We're also defending the reputation of democracy. Either democracy works, or it doesn't. If it doesn't, then we're philosophically no better than Russia and China.
But if it was possible to control the outcome of elections by online manipulation alone, that would imply that democracy doesn't really work. Therefore online manipulation "can't work." Officially, it might sway opinion by a few points, but a majority of voters must definitionally be right. If manipulation makes little difference, then there's not much reason to fight it (or too openly anyways.)
Paradoxically, when it comes to detecting Russian voter manipulation, the West and Putin are strange bedfellows. Nothing to see here, move along.
My sense is that the "hivemind" is, in a symbiotic way, both homegrown and significantly foreign-influnced.
More specifically: the core sentiment of the hivemind (basically: anti-war/anti-interventionist mixed with a broader distrust of anything the perceived "establishment" supports) is certainly indigenous -- and it is very important to not overlook this fact.
But many of its memes, and its various nuggets of disinformation do seem to be foreign imports. This isn't just an insinuation; sometimes the lineage can actually be traced word-for-word with statements originating from foreign sources (for example, "8 years of shelling the Donbas").
The memes don't create the sentiment. But they do seem to reinforce it, and provide it with a certain muscle and kick. While all the while maintaining the impression that it's all entirely homegrown.
And the farther one goes down the "multipolar" rabbit hole, the more often one encounters not just topical memes, but signature phrases lifted directly from known statements by Putin and Lavrov themselves. E.g. that Ukraine urgently needs to "denazify". The more hardcore types even have no qualms about using that precious phrase "Special Military Operation", with a touch of pride in their voice.
It's really genuinely weird, what's happening. What people don't realize is that none of this is happening by accident. It's a very specific craft that the Russian security services (in particular) have nurtured and developed, literally across generations, to create language that pushes people's buttons in this way.
The Western agencies and institutions have their own way of propaganda of course, but usually it's far more bland and boring (e.g. as to how NATO "supports fosters broader European integration" and all that).
Would we have the same kind of hivemind without Putin? There's always some kind of a hivemind -- but as applies to Eastern Europe, it does seem that the general climate of discourse was quite different before his ascendancy. And that it certainly took a very sharp, weird bend in the road after the start of Special Military Operation.
What are you talking about? News media LOVE twitter/X, it is where they get all their stories from and journalists are notoriously addicted to it, to their detriment.
Not a rhetorical question. Often the goal is the functional minimum. If that's your gig, it's hard to appreciate code quality maximization, and vice versa.
If you do maximize quality, I'll one-up the suggestion in the article. Treat your first write as throwaway code. And your second. Up until the point where the rewrite would be roughly identical.
It's basically early refactoring, but with the code at its freshest in your mind. Coding it the first couple times implicitly maps out the problem domain.
You also leave no internal technical debt on the table. A surprising amount reveals itself right after you wrote it in. It gnaws at your ability to proceed. Subconsciously, it splits your attention in two: how the code is and how it should be. With each "fail" your attention spreads out and thins out.
Finally, this habit makes you more fluid in the language. Quality-maximized code takes longer, but your actual typing rate ends up being much faster.
People breathe, so you need outdoor air to replenish the oxygen and get rid of the carbon dioxide. That's "fresh" air.
Unfortunately, outdoor air has particulate and ozone pollution. Filtering it gives you "clean" air.
In winter and summer, you also heat or cool the indoor air for comfort. If you just pump in outside air, you effectively also pump out the indoor air. This wastes the energy that had gone into heating or cooling it.
These systems save that energy by transfering heat between the air that's getting pumped in and the air that's getting pumped out.
Not sure if SJ was to blame, but your sentiment about the commoditization of software engineering is right on target. It was industry-wide.
It's true that teams had to grow in size as software got more complex. Was commoditization the best way to do it? It certainly aggregated power in the hands of management. That was probably an intended consequence.
One unintended consequence is that tech leads and staff engineers became increasingly selected more for political than technical merit. That in turn decreased the per-capita merit of the workforce as a whole.
Post-ZIRP and post-AI, a lot of layoffs are still ahead IMO.
The point of the market is not for you to do better than anyone else. The point is to price things right so that the market as a whole makes money. By picking stocks, you're either a gambling monkey or a more conservative gambling monkey.
True, though right now, the markets are set up such that anyone with positive net worth and consistent income can easily do vastly better than anyone with negative net worth. The more positive your net worth, the more leverage and risk you can safely afford, and you get rewarded for that.
The rich can afford the risks associated with leveraged crypto and AI stocks, the poor can only afford VOO or (worse) Treasury bonds because their life would be on the line if they lost money.
If you actually have money to throw away, you'd be an idiot to not have a pile of BTC right now. If you don't have money to throw away, BTC is dangerous as fuck.
The markets are designed to continually widen the gap between rich and poor.
There are a variety of simple market simulations one can come up with where--despite every participant being equally skilled--the final outcome is always one rich guy and everyone else poor.
When you combine some of these simple models with an adjustable "redistributed back by tax" function, you get results which resemble the various countries of the world.
> you'd be an idiot to not have a pile of BTC right now
I do agree with your overall take that there is a recent trend towards de-democratization of investment opportunities. The invention of the stock market was a huge deal because it massively moved the needle towards democratization.
BTC ain't it, however. Good luck proving the hypothesis that BTC is not tulips.
Personally, I see two major outcome sets. Either Russia "conquers the planet" or it doesn't. If it does, BTC is no longer any use to Russian-aligned oligarchs to bypass sanctions. If it doesn't, the West will eventually wisen up and hamper BTC transactions to the point that the alternatives win out.
Those are two likely crashpoints. There are 10000 possible others. Musical chairs always ends, it's just a matter of when.
Just for reference, in the US there were protests after protests in late 2016 and early 2017. The only difference they made is tiring out the participants.
Korea also saw almost nonstop protests since Yoon came to power - TBH I think there was always some part of Korea protesting the government, since forever. But you can't just kick out a president for being hugely unpopular - they must do something so drastically and flagrantly unconstitutional that the majority of citizens must say "Yep that's unconstitutional, we have to drag him down because our Republic is at danger."
Whether you like Trump or not (I don't), Trump of 2016/2017 did not meet the threshold. (Half of America had just elected him, what would you expect?) I think Jan 6th clearly met the threshold, and Biden should have seen that Trump ends up in prison. He somehow didn't - I get that precedents are important in politics and America had never seen an ex-president in prison, so would have been very controversial - but I think it was a wrong decision and America is now paying the price.
In 2016/2017 there was much more awareness of Russian interference than there is now. The protests were more about legitimacy than about disagreement or dislike.
By 2021 the Putin/MAGA forces had accreted so much power that it was safer for Republican senators to bend the knee and acquit in the impeachement trial.
Putin is playing with fire manipulating elections that put borderline fascists in power. Especially in the US. He might be in for a dissapointing surprise. We shall see.
The only way to win against the US is to divide it from within and/or obtain its non-involvement. By the time they send a carrier strike group, or worse, troops, it's game over. So that's what the Kremlin is doing: the thing that wouldn't have worked during the Cold War because the commie agitators would have either ended up in prison or being constantly harassed.
The original study: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4375620