The real tragedy about this thing is that when the right aligns itself so heavily with the “white genocide” narrative, it delegitimizes real problems in South Africa among liberals and leads them to side with the government of SA.

The ANC is an extremely corrupt political party which has seriously mismanaged South Africa. They do, in fact, weaponize government against white South Africans, seizing land and redistributing it to black South Africans. They scapegoat them in order to distract from their own corruption and economic mismanagement.

This does not rise to the level of “genocide” as Elon Musk would put it, but many people in the west sort of implicitly assume that the South African government is righteous because it’s run by the party of Nelson Mandela, but even black south Africans have started to become fed up with them and gave them a large electoral blow in the 2024 elections. They are still the leading party, but at less than 50% of the vote, so they now have to cooperate with coalition partners

What OS?

When I worked for a company that was constantly pivoting and rebranding like this, it was the writing on the wall that indicated the ship was sinking. It was sold to a competitor at a major loss a year later

It’s insane to me that there are basically no good options for a secure and private phone from a major manufacturer. All commercial options have some caveats, even Apple. It seems like Google Pixel + Graphene is the only option but you have to do that yourself and it still ONLY supports Google Pixel (for technical reasons, I understand). Literally any laptop can be made secure and private by installing Linux, but with phones your options are severely limited by hardware

shut down a pro-Palestinian student occupation of the campus’ Butler Library

I don’t understand, though. Were they expecting not to be arrested? I thought that was the point of civil disobedience. What was the point of occupying the library if not to instigate a response from police or campus police?

I said a good keyboard. Plus the OSs are garbage

Every single one of those people should have their licenses suspended. AI, which is inherently a misrepresentation of truth, belongs nowhere near a courtroom. They should legitimately be ashamed of themselves for allowing such an abortion into a courtroom

It happened BEFORE sentencing

AI should absolutely never be allowed in court. Defense is probably stoked about this because it’s obviously a mistrial. Judge should be reprimanded for allowing that shit

You’re talking Cable TV? I don’t have cable so I can’t see it but Cable is going the way of the dinosaur

10 years ago, Republicans were the party of big business and Dems stood for the little guys, but today the tables have completely turned.

Bro I mean come on, this is literally an endorsement of the republican party. I don’t know how more explicit it can get. You’re asking people to not believe their own eyes here. Even worse:

By working on the front lines of many policy issues, we have seen the shift between Dems and Republicans over the past decade first hand. And that’s a missed opportunity for Dems, because by and large, support for cracking down on corporate monopolies is popular on both sides of the political spectrum. Unfortunately, corporate capture of Dems is real and in the end money won. It is hard to see how this changes, and Republicans are likely to lead the antitrust charge in the coming years

He decries the “corporate capture” of the Democratic party while completely failing to address to much larger and more immediate threat of an outright christo-fascist movement capturing the entire Republican party and all 3 branches of federal government. Like he thinks that “the democrats didnt move as fast on this thing as I wanted them to” somehow compares to “the president is kidnapping people with a personal army of gestapo and disappearing them to a black site in El Salvador”.

And you may say “well he’s not interested in immigration policy; he’s interested in technology policy”. If you are in the business of privacy and security, then you should not be putting yourself in the corner of a political cult with zero respect for the law, zero guiding moral principles, and which is only motivated by using any means necessary to crush their political enemies. Yen is supporting a wannabe dictator because he’s willing to weaponize the federal government to destroy his competitors.

If all he said was “good pick by Trump, look forward to working with them”, I’d accept it as a politically neutral statement that you often see from business leaders and even democratic politicians sometimes. But he went out of his way to demonize the democratic party and somehow hold the Republicans up as the defenders of small business

It’s such an unbelievably bad take (which he dug in on like 5 times even though he could have said nothing and waited for it to blow over) and completely tone deaf as to be unbelievable. Like I literally don’t believe that he doesn’t know what he’s saying; I think he, like many tech CEOs, is simply a conservative who’s too ashamed to admit it.

Why should I care why republicans wanted to break up tech monopolies, if breaking monopolies is anyway something that I consider a positive change?

Because they’re not interested in breaking up monopolies; they’re interested in threatening their political enemies with breakup so they can control speech on those platforms. Mark Zuckerberg is kowtowing to Trump now to avoid being broken up.

You think the Republicans are going to break up tech and create a more diverse online publishing ecosystem that’s harder for any one party to control? No, they’ll crush their enemies and bolster their allies, so we’ll end up with even fewer choices

Man sometimes I see teenagers walking around with their shoes untied. I’ll tell them “hey your shoes untied” and they look at me like “… yeah, and?”

Advertising hasn’t been that psychological since cable TV. These days, almost no work is put into advertising creatives. The goal is simply to spam and inundate you with messaging so the product is in your mind at all times. People have incredibly short attention spans thanks to smart phones so advertisements need to be virtually instantaneous in delivering their message.

Its really all about statistics these days. Very little thought or effort is put into advertisements.

He endorsed the republican party. He said we should clean house of democrats. Is that not declaring party loyalty? It was also a completely unnecessary comment, in response to nothing. It was shortly after Trump’s election when every CEO went out of their way to kowtow to the new regime. Its transparently a loyalty pledge to the new boss

I fucking hate touch screens personally, and will always prefer a good physical keyboard. Don’t like mobile OSs either

Academia is a universe unlike anything else in the world. Academics will not prepare you for a job in the real world; it will prepare you to climb the academic ladder

Tell me why I’m wrong

Calling this an “us vs them” is disingenuous. Republicans are actively shredding the rule of law in the US by the day. Democrats are weak on some policy points (though not tech policy, by the way). The two are not the same at all

If a person signals loyalty to a criminal government which is violating the rights of its people daily, why would I trust them not to cooperate with that government when they ask for a backdoor to be installed? Conservatives are simply not trustworthy. They’re lying, backstabbing, and manipulative. They have no principles at all and will say or do anything to acquire more power and money