Schadrach

Nobody has direct evidence of the shooter’s motivations or political affiliation today. Nobody.

From the texts between him and his roomate that have been publicly released. Source: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/16/charlie-kirk-shooting-prosecutor-utah

“Roommate: ‘Why?’ Robinson: ‘Why did I do it?’ Roommate: ‘Yeah.“’ Robinson: ‘I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out.”

So, we have his direct statement to his transwoman roommate as to his motive, either you can take that at face value or claim it’s some carefully crafted lie intentionally meant to deceive us as to his real motives. You do you.

Likely based on his texts with his transwoman roommate.

“Brianna Wu is a fucking idiot”

Ahh, I remember when saying anything less than utterly complimentary about Wu was considered transphobic and misogynistic.

She got an awful lot of free passes and clout from “these people are mad at me, and they are mostly right wing” about a decade ago.

And holy fuck was her game terrible. Like bad enough that when I got to try it at PAX East it stood out how awful it was, to the point that when she popped up in other contexts my immediate reaction to the name was “the dev behind that terrible mobile game from PAX”. You always expect some indie stuff to not land with you, but usually that sort of thing is at worst forgettable. But this one was so bad it circled all the way back around to memorable, but in the bad way.

Meh, no process is perfect and sensitivity and specificity are often enemies. Basically, in a lot of cases the more sensitive you make a test to detect something, the more likely it is to accidentally catch false positives.

Sounds like they’ve vastly improved it’s ability to detect, hopefully that didn’t come with false detections for people running unusual hardware or software combinations.

Actually truth social would be the perfect example, but again, how many people do you hear talking about how much they enjoy truth social? It’s true nobody wants to be sued by Trump, but that’s not really support as much as fear and its own form of censorship.

Truth Social is always there if you want it, but is it really censorship that keeps more people from using it or is it to some extent capitalism working?

Truth Social wasn’t subject to the same pressures and attacks, largely out of fear of Trump. It’s mostly Trump and his fans that are why anyone cares, but most of the sorts attracted to a site like that came rushing back to X post-Elon.

If you have a truly free market people will just go to another platform bc there’s no reason they have to use X, or Truth Social, or Mastodon, or BlueSky unless one person (or a group of oligarchs) buys all of them and controls the market. If one of those platforms fails, can you really blame it on censorship?

There isn’t, outside of network effects. But the ones being barred from Apple devices, and only able to be sideloaded on Android (at least until Google removes that feature, which they’ve announced is coming) aren’t operating on the same footing as the others, and not because of a failure to draw an audience, but by being restricted by, well, a bunch of oligarchs…

Musk bought X bc he claimed he wanted to have free speech and to get rid of all the bots, but he did neither. Now that place is mainly a bot fueled echo chamber. It’s just not an enjoyable platform to use anymore, and most users have switched to an alternative like bluesky.

The range of rhetoric that won’t get you banned from the site has certainly expanded, even if most of what is actually there is deceptive bullshit. Probably 1 in 10 current Xitter users would be banned for saying unacceptable things under pre-Musk Twitter.

Apple and Google didn’t want to lose business by associating with something the majority of people found off-putting, but is that really censorship?

Tech oligarchs cut a competitor to other tech oligarchs off at the knees to control the span and spread of online discourse - this is the kind of thing that supporting feels like supporting the face eating leopard party.

Again you’re relying on an existing platform to take on supporting your messaging instead of just promoting it yourself. Couldn’t you just rely on a user base sharing a link to download an app rather than putting it in one of the stores?

Build your own entire tech stack from the hardware up, got it. Those leopards do seem hungry for faces though.

But that is also why so many users or instances block instances like .grad and to a lesser extent .ml, and some people do argue they should be de-federated.

I don’t think that’s really necessary. I’m glad to have the ability to talk to and interact with people I don’t agree with on everything. There’s .ml users here that have been very helpful with things nobody else was able to help me with. (I’m actually glad we’re able to have this conversation we’re having.)

I find a certain irony here, given the instance you come from and the instance I come from. Yours has defederated from ~95 other instances, including some for being too left and some for being too right. Mine has only defederated from one, an instance essentially abandoned by it’s admins that was posting spam and actual csam.

But, I’ve also been blocked from .ml communities without any warning bc I shared images of Xinnie the Pooh. So, i’m sure there are some people on the left who willingly identify as tankies, and would enjoy a completely separate dedicated safe space on the internet for communism or leftist authoritarianism. If they made one, it would very likely end up running into the same issues as Gab/Parler, but I still wouldn’t believe that censorship is to blame for its failure.

Far left fediverse instances exist, and can moderate as strictly or not as they please. No third party is actively preventing you from connecting to one with an appropriate client, including client devs. Let alone tech oligarchs cutting them off from major platforms entirely.

It’s just difficult to create a market for a very niche and exclusionary product that a lot of people find off-putting due to extremist content.

Yet, their problem wasn’t not being able to get members organically. Gab was doing pretty well until it got big enough to be noticed and it was forcibly cut off from the mobile market by Google and Apple, migrated their backend to Mastodon as a way around that, and then had Mastodon client devs block them at the client level. At the time of migration, they were the largest Mastodon instance, so it wasn’t a matter of lack of interest. That’s kinda my point - the barriers they faced aren’t organic or a lack of interest but coordinated moves against them.

If some alien species asked you to draw part of it’s anatomy that can move into a wide array of configurations, but you are required to do so based only on pictures the aliens sent you that they tell you shows that part among other things, would you do better?

Like, what you said is specifically why it’s bad at hands and table legs and the like - they can appear in many different ways and it’s only reference point for them is pictures of them it’s seen. You understand hands and think logically about them mostly because you have a not just wider but deeper set of experiences to work from. Even then, 4 fingered hands have been common in cartoons because even having hands, being surrounded by other beings with hands and in a culture that makes heavy use of hands a lot of artists have trouble doing them quite right.

It’s not magic.

It’s closer to black magic than tracing. It’s really closer to sculpting. You take a machine, show it a few million pictures of dogs to teach it what dogs look like, then hand it a big block of white noise and ask it to show you a dog. It then carves away all the parts it doesn’t think look like dog, repeats until the result doesn’t change much and shows you the dog it essentially hallucinated out of the noise.

A surprising number of people don’t know that it’s essentially Twilight fanfic with the names changed to protect the author from being sued.

It’s also important to remember these models are trained by sampling (imitating aspects of) images they don’t have the rights to use directly.

So is basically every human artist. Basically any artist out there has seen tons of other art prior and draws on that observed corpus to influence their own output. If I commissioned you to draw something you didn’t know what was, you’d go look up other depictions of that thing to get a basis for what you should be aiming at.

The way AI does it is similar, except that it’s looked at way more examples than you but also doesn’t have an understanding of what those things actually are beyond the examples themselves. That last bit is why it used to have so many problems with hands, and still often has problems with writing in the background or desk/table legs.

Now lie detectors don’t work at all…

Meh, they do work. They just measure stress response, not truthfulness. The idea being that you’ll have a heightened stress response to a question you are lying about the answer to, which may or may not be accurate depending on individual and situation.

Breath analyzers aren’t exactly accurate. There’s a bunch of things that can give them false positives, they often aren’t properly calibrated, and the science behind them is kinda shaky. They got challenged often enough in certain states that in at least one state if an officer has you breathe in a machine and that machine produces a number higher than the legal BAC limit, that’s proof of DUI regardless of what the machine may or may not do to result in that number.

Homelander, from the comic then Amazon Prime series The Boys. He’s basically Superman, if Superman were raised in a lab by a literal Nazi super-soldier program, then used as the face of a giant corporation with massive influence in the media, biotech and social media spaces, to start with that also buys up contracts with the highest profile superhumans (and also on the sly are responsible for creating them). Then just think what the realities of that would look like. And yes, he is at least as horrible as you think.

The eponymous Boys are a group of normies trying to take down superhumans, with the main POV character’s inciting incident being when A-Train (think the Flash) runs through his girlfriend directly in front of him.

That and their cops are paranoid as fuck and would rather overspend than risk getting a scratch.

Police can get decommissioned military equipment on the cheap, so long as they can basically write a grant proposal justifying why they want it.

Why did nobody just make an exclusively right wing alternative to mastodon?

…but they did, and were broadly prevented from growing organically. See Parler and Gab.

Gab actually changed it’s underlying backend twice. They started with their own thing, Google and Apple cut their app off from the app stores so they switched to something that was a common protocol rather than a dedicated app and moved to Mastodon as a way to route around censorship. Most Mastodon servers promptly defederated them for being right wingers, and several of the major Mastodon clients built in client level mandatory blacklists causing their client to refuse to connect to Gab (in some cases Gab was the entire blacklist) - you can see which ones because they have some older store reviews about “refusing to connect to the largest Mastodon instance” because for a time that was Gab. Later on, they moved to something involving crypto somehow, I’m not really sure about the details.

Parler appeared, got big fast, got kneecapped by Google, Apple and Amazon and by the time they recovered had lost most of any momentum they ever had.

They even produced their own Reddit-alike, spread across several .win domains - that was a thing that happened in response to the biggest Trumper community getting banned from Reddit. That original community migrated to TheDonald.win and later rebranded as Patriots.win.

Truth Social is basically what Gab/Parler wanted to be, but big Tech doesn’t want to fight against Trump because he’s exactly the kind of petty asshole to fuck them over for considering it. Truth Social is of course Mastodon under the hood with federation disabled.

But if we presume fediverse apps are a protocol rather than a proprietary product (which is usually how they are sold to users, making analogies to things like email or the web as compared to a proprietary system) why would you need to reinvent the wheel? No one is arguing that we need an exclusively communist alternative to email or the web.

Did they actually build their own alternatives that anybody wanted to use,

Right wingers functionally excluded from major platforms more or less until Musk bought Twitter actually did create their own spaces. Several of which got made functionally inaccessible from mobile devices, or removed from search engines or otherwise actively prevented from growing organically, many of them eventually being quietly put back after any buzz around them had died down. Think Gab, Parler, various .win sites that are reddit-like, etc.

Hell, at one point the largest Mastodon instance was literally one such space that had had it’s own app banned from the app stores for being an uncensored far right space, and then several of the major general Mastodon clients made their clients refuse to connect to that specific instance at the client level as well. If you’ve ever seen a Mastodon client on say the Play store with negative reviews saying that it couldn’t connect to the largest instance, that’s because at the time the largest Mastodon instance was technically Gab.

I was thinking more or less the same thing - if you are here illegally it’s probably both cheaper and easier to pay you $1k per person and a free flight back whence you came than to track you down, go through the legal process, and remove you against your will.

…and yet the elevator pitch “Seth McFarlane wants to be Picard” sounds like it would be awful. But it works.

They don’t give a fuck if murderers and armed robbers get away with their shit.

They care if murderers and robbers get away with their shit, they don’t care if murderers and robbers get away with your shit. Important distinction.

Vote Blue No Matter Who means they don’t need to find a good candidate, and are free to ratfuck as much as they’d like during primaries. After all, the alternative is a republican, what are you going to do, convince 70 million other people to all vote for the same third party?

Criminal charges require proof beyond a reasonable doubt. An accusation alone is not that. You paint it as assuming women are lying, but you instead want to treat their word as damning proof unto itself, while people like Crystal Mangum, Tracy West and Wanetta Gibson (to name some who got media attention) thoroughly leave the reasonable doubt in place.