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Joined 9 days ago
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Cake day: February 2nd, 2026

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  • Let’s flip this argument on its head: family is potentially the best place for political discussions, as it’s one of the few places in life where bonds should be tightest, respect should be mutual and all actors should act in good faith. It should be the safest of spaces and, if intact, should be able to easily withstand disagreements on things outside the family, such as politics. If it doesn’t - like in this case, apparently-, doesn’t that tell us more about the family in question, and/or the state of political debate in our country?











  • I will admit that YouTube is the strongest vice in my life, I just can’t get enough of it.

    Well, do it like everyone trying to shake off a vice: if you feel you can’t go cold turkey, switch to a less harmful surrogate. Ditch the YouTube app and switch to something like Newpipe or FreeTube that both give you access to YouTube’s content, but at the same time comes with more functionality (background playback, downloads), protects your privacy (accountless subscriptions and playlists) and also fucks with Google’s bottom line by blocking ads.

    Google’s got my data by the balls. I think it’s a bit too late for me.

    I get this post-privacy fatalism a lot, but luckily for you, it’s patently false.

    Big tech’s business model - at least for now - is to profile you and sell this image of you off to advertisers and other businesses for personalised targeting (and possibly other shenanigans, but let’s not get into that). In order to be valuable to them, this profile must be accurate and up-to-date.

    Now, luckily, people aren’t static beings. We change as we grow, not just older, but as human beings. We change jobs and even careers, social circles and places of residence. We change our marital status (hopefully only once ;), the number of people in our family (hopefully only incrementally ;) and the people we want to spend most time with. We change contact details and bank accounts, brand preferences and spending habits. We change our beliefs and habits, political convictions, our outlooks on and goals in life. Just try to picture the person you were ten years ago, and, I hope for you, you’ll see a Venn diagram that may have some overlap, but also some pronounced areas of difference. As time goes on, these differences will become larger and larger, until the profile of ‘old you’ is entirely worthless to any advertiser because it gives them little to no idea who ‘present you’ is and how to target them.

    You may be right that the best point in time to untether yourself was yesterday. But the next best is today.





  • A talk on LLMs I was listening to recently put it this way:

    If we hear the words of a five-year-old, we assume the knowledge of a five-year-old behind those words, and treat the content with due caution.

    We’re not adapted to something with the “mind” of a five-year-old speaking to us in the words of a fifty-year-old, and thus are more likely to assume competence just based on language.