Russian TikTok video: That lady is hilarious, and that’s hard to do in a second language.

Jaron Lanier: The real gem buried in this interview is at minute 14:00, when Jaron starts talking about the negative impact of Twitter on Trump, and the changes of Trump from the dopamine hits on social media. That made me step back and want to look at Trump’s election process differently. His ultimate point in the interview is correct, the silicon valley manipulation engines are fueled by the advertising model, where the end-user (you and me) is the product sold to the buyer (advertisers) which feeds into a manipulation for the benefit of a third party.

Once again, Didadct is right. Social Media is toxic. Eliminate the Social Media systems in your life. I dropped everything in 2015 and have found a vast supply of mental resources and creativity that I never realized was soaked up by it.

Wisecrack on SciFi & Billionaires: SNOWCRASH by Neal Stephenson is an interesting read. It has a lot of cognitive dissonances reading it now though. Like Ender’s Game, it accurately forecasts a lot of our current technology but has some idealism built into it that doesn’t match reality now. But I’m sure for its time it was quite a thrill to read. Hiro Protagonist was, I’m sure, a hilariously ironic name when it was published. I think this is also the one that chronicles the love life and sexual escapades of a 15-year-old skater girl with an Eskimo alpha male on a floating trash raft full of degenerate evangelicals… which is in retrospect exactly something that would appeal to Silicon Valley tycoons.

This Drybar with Ali Sultan is a riot.
“Mom, when was I born?”
“You were born when we got the cat.”
“When did we get the cat?”
“We got the cat when your uncle got diabetes.”
“That’s when I learned time is relative. And that relative is my diabetic uncle.”

RE Romania has fast internet Twitter burn:
I read a book called The Fall of Tyrants by Laszlo Tokes last year. He’s a pastor in the state church of Romania that stuck up for his local church. The church power structure couldn’t move him, the Party men couldn’t move him, and his courage started a while wave of change. First silent solidarity, then mass gatherings, then riots in the streets, then the running out and end of Ceausescu. Remarkable that a single pastor, sticking to his role as a shepherd, broke the back of the Party. He and his pregnant wife were divinely protected. Meanwhile, in 2021, churches all over the world shut down for covids and BLM… so it’s inspiring to see what a good man faithful to his calling can do.
And now, look! Romania has high-speed internet.

On the plus side, we can be reasonably sure that they are natural and unaltered as a result.