A fellow Zitron appreciator.

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Labour hasn’t been anywhere near the left since Tory Blair became leader

Well, there was that brief bright moment with Corbyn. But then he got the Julius Caeser treatment for siding with the Radical Islamist Extremism of the anti-genocide movement.

now they are hostile to the working class and the poor

Okay, but have you considered all the new AI they are helping create.

They did the thing they were supposed to do. They voted for the Ultra-Far Left Woke Labour Party.

Those remarks suggest Tencent is not finding it easy to find customers who pay for its AI services.

:-|

However the vast majority of human knowledge isn’t current events.

Broadly speaking, everything was a current event at some point. As Wikipedia calcifies, it loses the ability to capture and collate new information as it is produced.

Even if Wikipedia were to never get updated again it is still extremely useful.

In the same way as any dated encyclopedia, sure. I’ve got a copy of my dad’s childhood encyclopedia, dated to 1954. Lots of interesting factoids in there, assuming your interest in the world is satisfied by an English speaking editor’s ability to consolidate the information available to his firm at their publishing deadline.

I’m sure you read it pretty regularly

I’ve found it less and less capable of keeping up with current events. Enshittification truly comes for us all.

It’s easy to focus on the negatives and miss what an absolute treasure it still is.

As a historical artifact and a demonstration of the potential for open-sourced editing, it’s a milestone. But we’re clearly in the twilight of the Wikipedia era.

The real future of the Library as we know it. Everyone’s just going to be asking Grok “Is this true?”

I’m generally more annoyed at how the early enthusiasm of participation on the site has died out in the face of paranoia and moderator mania. There are so many gaps in both the modern and historical backlog of citations and categorizations. But do I want to invest dozens of hours contributing to a site where a few admins are just going to tear all my work back out again on a bureaucratic technicality?

It is a site that’s alternatively being strangled to death by admins fearful of malicious actors and tore apart by wave after wave of sinister propagandists and hostile agents.

On its face… maybe? Until the Foundation falls into the hands of malicious management, anyway.

But do I trust that a public website can’t have their security breached by malicious actors? Of course not.

The only rational decision, given the cost associated with a poorly defined and maliciously enforced legislative code. I wouldn’t trust the UK courts to fairly adjudicate an alleged breach of the law, particularly if Reform Party gets into office and decides to punish Wikipedia’s management for “Wokeness” or whatever.

I don’t know why news outlets do this.

Cause click-bait. Also, very likely, because the term has been abused with such frequency that AI headline generating tools are slapping it on posts with abandon.

No one cares if it’s “exclusive” or not.

In theory, long-form interviews and other deep-dive investigative journalism offer a more comprehensive look at an individual or event. And so an “exclusive interview” is noteworthy because it provides so much more content to the subscriber.

In practice, the term’s been flogged to death for so long and so routinely abused that it has lost all meaning. So “no one cares” because nobody trusts the signal that the headline prefix is supposed to convey.

I mean, damning with faint praise when you’re a CEO.

But it’s still crazy to see how Trump has sabotaged domestic chip fabrication, then taken his rage out on the guy who replaced the guy who got fired just a few months ago.

Americans expressing their decidedly non-tankie tendencies

I mean, I wouldn’t call it “useless”. There’s almost certainly a benefit to the science and technology that can move people to Mars safely and transform it into a habitable place.

But “We’re going to Mars!” as a mission is a fantasy. “We’re going to keep investing in blue sky research until we have advanced enough technology to make Mars a feasible destination” is where the money is at.

Hard to say with the irregular shape, but they’re close.

What really gets me is how small Mars is relative to Earth and Venus.

I don’t think people can raise kids as well today as they could 40 years ago because the world is falling apart

I mean, I can’t imagine telling a survivor of the Great Depression “Yeah, sure, have six kids. Now’s the time. Because in a century we’re going to have cheap energy and enormous food surpluses and highly advanced industrial machinery and we won’t be book-ended between World Wars or have a smallpox or syphillus or polio epidemic.”

Like, sure, fuck capitalism. But we’ve had capitalism for 400 years.

My parents raised me on an acre in a house that my parents built with them both having reasonable salaries.

I mean, if your parents built a whole house by themselves, that’s incredible. My parents just bought a new home way out in the Houston 'burbs, which forced my dad to spend hours commuting every day when he wasn’t overseas on contract.

I’m in a smaller house inside the loop and I’m paying maybe 2-3x as much for a postage stamp of space, but my commute is 15 minutes. If I’m feeling crazy, I can even bike to work. That gives me far more time to spend with my son.

That’s not even to say there aren’t expenses and struggles. Daycare is looking like it’ll run me a full second mortgage payment. If we weren’t both professionals, it likely wouldn’t be worth the cost of care to keep up two incomes.

But you don’t need a acre to raise a child. My mom grew up in a smaller house than I own, and she had four sisters.

These are, fundamentally, decisions we’re making driven by cultural expectations.

More just staring at the endless expanse of mowed lawn and wondering who is doing all that manual labor.

No one outside of high school has six friends.

Me, a guy with maybe a dozen friends I hang out with on a weekly basis, whistling past the graveyard of loneliness

There’s a reason this is called a “dream”.

One trick to living in a cul de sac with six of your closest friends is to meet your neighbors and become friends with them. I’ll say that COVID really helped me with this, personally, because during the peak I was just out on the driveway or walking the local trails trying not to go stir crazy and… so was everyone else. Pretty soon we were doing impromptu parties on the driveway and yoga on the lawn and whatever else we could to avoid the isolation of a pandemic.

But you don’t need a killer virus to wave to your neighbors, say hi, and strike up a conversation. And there’s a compounding effect. When two people are out talking, you’re likely to pick up a third. When five people are hanging out at the end of a day, it can quickly become ten or more.

If it’s an instinctual response to wish for this kind of thing, it shouldn’t be hard to imagine people gravitating towards these relationships IRL.