Now now, they innovated by turning Facebook from the way you could see what your friends were doing on your feed into algorithmically determining exactly which batshit insane ‘news’ stories from cranks and posts from crazy people would be the most effective rage bait to specifically you once they figured out that anger and rage are the most effective way to cause retention and engagement.

They basically scientifically perfected trolling, and figured out how to monetize it.

Sure it widely proliferated dangerous anti science nonsense, bigotry, racism, sexism, homophobia, fostered the Q Anon insanity mind plague and facilitated it going mainstream, but hey, hate sells.

I was born and raised in the PNW and first saw the LaRouchies at the UW, with a large display of Obama with a Hitler mustache… though I did not spit at them lol.

Other posters have already come up with Huey Long, Charles Coughlin, Joe McCarthy, Lyndon LaRouche…

No American Presidential candidate before Trump has been so widely popular whilst also having a cult following of people who basically believe in an entirely different reality whilst also being so brash and brazen about it.

There have been demagogues before, with cultish followings, but they’ve not been anywhere near as popular as Trump.

To attempt to add a few:

Technically, Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism, attempted to run for President back when Mormons were basically what we would now call a domestic terrorist group, and when most non Mormons viewed them as a dangerous cult.

He was assassinated by a mob, who stormed the jail he was in whilst awaiting trial for treason and other charges, before the election took place.

Also, you might be able to consider the fairly brief existence of the Anti-Masonic party at least somewhat akin to the living in a totally different reality attribute of MAGA people.

Basically, following the inciting incident of the Morgan Affair, where a William Morgan was apparently planning to publish a book outlining the evils of a Freemason conspiracy to control government and business in the US, but he was jailed, a bit of a circus trial ensued, and then he disappeared.

The Anti Masonic party was the US’s first third-party and basically it was built off of what we’d now call conspiracy theories stemming from the Morgan Affair, and called for Masons to renounce their fraternity or to be uprooted from positions of prominence.

Much like the modern MAGA movement, it was full of highly religious conspiracy theorists, but it didn’t really coalesce into also being a cult of personality around any of their more prominent members the way such reverence exists for Trump.

Personally I’m a fan of Smurf Juice brand colloidial silver.

I used to know sooo many people that would justify this, a cryptoscam, shilling literally any outright fraud or vastly overpriced bs on their social media.

‘They’re just getting their bag, you’re hating cuz you broke!’

This is the cyberpunk dystopia.

Millennial here: I think what Gen X and Boomer authors mean when they say ‘GenZ is more tech savvy’ is basically just that they use social media apps on phones and play video games, and that more of their culture derives from such things.

Maybe tech-immersed would be a better term.

As far as actual tech competency goes?

Yeah I agree with you. Phones and apps are generally reliable enough now that there’s far less need to figure out anything under the hood, unlike in my day where you kind of had to learn more about a system to do what is now common, and you had to type on a keyboard.

Not sure about his rejected screenplays but uh well he has definitely written a book or two with comically offensive depictions of black americans, and well now he got his dream come true in the most insane way possible and produces movies that are astoundingly tasteless like Lady Ballers.

In terms of containerized solutions for apps/programs?

Better than the alternatives.

In general?

I feel like they’re exes for Linux, and would greatly prefer to not have multiple different installations of the same or slightly different versions of dependencies wasting space.

Followed by 65 year old Moms whose children haven’t spoken to in a decade making Facebook memes with a Minion with Trump’s toupee and 8 clones of the same exact frame of Pingu atop an Iceberg, next to a crop of the American Flag from Apollo 11, with an oil rig in the background.

Upper Text: Happy Feet Tariffs: The Final Frontier!

Bottom Text: Trump and Penguins Agree - LOVE America!

Shockingly similar to Ben Shapiro, who seems to have wanted to be a concert violinist and later screenwriter, but had his screenplays rejected and found more luck telling the world that basically all Arabs and Muslims are savages and deserve to be collateral damaged.

At this point I wonder if Rush Limbaugh secretly wanted to be a painter but was rejected from art school.

Wait, the Sonic Hedgehog protein is named such because it was originally associated with your brain not developing into two mirrored halves, often causing a large or deformed head.

I… I would have figured it had something to do with speed, fuck.

And then what they found was that to be more effective was to mix up the suggestions for late term pregnancy / early childhood products with basically random nonsense…

… because if its too obvious that they are highly statistically confident that they know things about you that they shouldn’t, people get weirded out and are less likely to buy something so specifically targeted at them.

They know an insane amount, and they do not want you to know that they know that much.

In case people forgot:

https://variety.com/2023/digital/news/active-listening-marketers-smartphones-ad-targeting-cox-media-group-1235841007/

https://www.404media.co/heres-the-pitch-deck-for-active-listening-ad-targeting/

They (basically any large online retailer or advertiser) are, in fact, listening to everything you say near your phone, near your alexa, your echo, your smart device.

Linking heard words and phrases with your known shopping activity + a gigantic dataset + statistical analysis = they can predict all kinds of things about you, with shockingly high accuracy, and thus aim products at you.

You know how archaeologists and detectives can make a decent profile of a person or group’s daily lifestyle by analyzing your garbage?

Welcome to the cyberpunk dystopia version of that.

The game had a whole system of ranks and qualifications based off actual Army ranks and skills.

You had to do pretty comprehensive medical training before you could be a field medic, you had to qualify as a marksman to be able to use a DMR, you had to pass the SERE school before I think night time missions and NVGs could be used, had to complete parachute training before levels you’d paradrop into, etc, and these would become available as you reached a certain number of kills or successful missions or what not.

Basically, it had a persistent progression system, and it was quite in depth…

… And if you did things like tons of team killing, or killing the instructor, not only would you end up in the brig… you’d have basically all of your progress reset.

Its about as close as you can get to permadeath in a round based, pvp shooter.

I remember a story making the rounds about that as well, waaay back.

Its not implausible. The medic training was pretty thorough compared basically any other video game ever, and if all you’re really trying to do is stop massive bloodloss ASAP, knowing how to dress a wound and apply a tourniquet absolutely can be the difference between dying before the ambulance arrives and not.

Do you remember when people figured out, on certain maps… stand exactly here (in spawn), fire a grenade launcher at this exact pixel in the skybox, and 80% of the enemy team is now dead?

A few things about America’s Army:

It may (I am 90%, but not 100% sure of this) have been the first PC, online, FPS to feature ragdoll physics for dead players.

It employed a… rather baffling way of doing team conflicts:

You are always on Team America, and the opposing team is always Team Generic Terrorists. (With 80s/90s movie era costumes for the bad guys, dependent on map location)

What this results in is… you have your M4. You are shooting at bad guys with AK74su’s. But… from the opposing team’s POV, its the same.

So, if you kill someone… you can now pick up an AK74su. Even though from their POV they dropped an M4.

And so on, with rough equivalents as an SVD and an M110, an RPK and an M249.

These ‘picked up’ weapons would basically morph into having the ballistics of the Eastern Bloc weapon at the point they were picked up.

Very weird, I’ve never seen another game do that.

The game also had a good number of training courses, many of which were initially bugged as all hell.

I remember the SERE course failing me consistently, showing that I had been detected by guards who are apparently able to see through boulders or 30 feet of a hill (the camera would show you how you were spotted like a ‘deathcam’ and it was quite obvious it was often total bs).

Also, in certain training missions it was possible to shoot your instructor.

This would result in you being sent to the brig: Log in to your account, and for a week, all you get is a view from inside a prison cell, no game menus or options at all, rofl.

Oh, final thing: I am pretty sure this was the first online PC FPS that modelled that M203 projectiles must travel a certain distance before the explosive charge will detonate, so taking out someone with an M203 round to the face, non explosively, became a way to humiliate people, as you either had to be pretty skilled to do it , or your opponent had to have very poor situational awareness.

Please, please, sue the World Bank Mr. Musk. I am so sure that will go well, and totally won’t result in anything bad for all of your massively debt financed businesses.

Expanding on this concept: Do any of these programs aimed at architects have a capability of easily exporting to blender, such that they could be imported into Unity or UE?

And if not that, then the inverse applies: People who end up the wealthiest and most powerful do so by being the best at exploiting other people and systems.

There’s a reason there are more and more sociopaths and narcissists the higher you get in a corporate structure, and its because such people truly do not care about the harm they cause, unless they get caught.