Sad thing is from what I understand, Spanish language news commonly available in the US (Unavision I believe?) basically fed Latinos a straight up false version of the guy, the description I read sounded even less accurate than Fox.

The overwhelming effectiveness of widespread media manipulation is the real story (and human tragedy…) here.

Dope, detailed writeup, thank you!

Oh, also - largely with you on Robux. I mean I don’t have a problem with it in principle, ideally it lets kids (through their parents) effectively choose which games and creators to support, and there have lately been some big games with big frequent updates that kids have found to be super enjoyable. Like, content updates at rates traditional games would be embarrassed by.

But like all things involving $, I’m sure there’s lots of eventual exploitation. And manipulation of kids to want to buy is definitely bad. But then again, by my measure, kids need to be instructed on recognizing and resisting precisely that from a young age. That manipulation is everywhere and getting worse all the time.

You’re probably right, I’ve once or twice (from an older account) asked a user to elaborate or give specifics, after they’d made some wild claims about safety, never gotten anything.

I do know of at least one truly hideous group of people using the platform as communication and recruitment to some really horrendous (life ruining) stuff, maybe this article references that too. But again, that’s a problem of sufficiently large user bases (especially of kids). Among millions of users it’s mathematically not realistic to prevent every possible group in the size of dozens from congregating to attempt their awful shit. Motivated humans are good at overcoming even well-designed systems.

We’re certainly right to care about safety though, and I do want to know if Roblox is less safe than I imagine.

Roblox chat is so restrictive that it routinely makes it difficult to talk about normal things. My daughter has spent a ton of time on Roblox (while being prohibited from many other things including unfettered YouTube, for context) and I really don’t see what the fuss is about. I’ve played with her on and off for years, it has always struck me as a generally safe platform, and I’m both sensitive and clued in about the topic.

Anything with user numbers like Roblox is going to attract the darkest corners of the internet, that’s unavoidable. It doesn’t strike me that there’s anything particularly dangerous about Roblox beyond that fact, they seem to manage it well and actually the platform seems pretty safe all things considered.

Seriously dangerous! I like your analogy, it’s even a little worse though, it’s like doing that but also the planes have an engineered preference to steer towards the worst places.

Right, this is simple stuff - for a 4 year old, content of any kind must be curated, and I’d argue that stays true in different ways for quite a while.

Yeesh. Before ever turning over entire decision-making power on a very uncontrolled platform to a kid, ya gotta help walk them through stuff and spend time curating / selecting content together. And also wait for them to grow up some and demonstrate readiness.

And certainly never trust YouTube’s curation, ever, agreed.

4 yo rawdogging modern AI slop YouTube shorts, solo, is wild.

I have a 12 year old. I considered YouTube unsafe for her unsupervised, when she was growing up (and largely still do, we have a healthy teamwork approach to it). The place is just magnitudes worse now. And yep, parents are super ignorant (and have been), they have no idea what the kids are even watching, many don’t really restrict the time they spend at all.

YEAH MF, congrats, now your brain is malwared to fuck, you shouldn’t have looked at it dead on. Limewire is best treated like a Medusa… whose effects show up later.

Guaranteed 10 years earlier dementia onset at a minimum, probably some strokes that leave you “revealing” family secrets invented out of whole cloth by the w4r3z in your now-compromised, botnet brain.

Sorry, Limewire was a wild ride. Could just be the way memories work, but looking back, I think Limewire delivered what I actually tried to download <50% of the time, maybe <30% by the time I stopped using it.

Napster was super dope (and, oddly enough, accidentally produced a solid way for me to buy drugs from the hood, lmao), and Soulseek was absolutely delicious, but - alas.

Yeesh. I’ve been (blessedly) away from MS for a bit now so I’m kind of catching up / watching the carnage from afar.

When you jack up veteran user workflows so much that it makes the OS feel alien…you’re really just daring people to jump OS. I know it’s not that simple for work environments, but I can’t imagine administering this sloppy mess has gotten any easier, so…gonna be fun waiting for the suits to eventually catch up I guess.

I’m really starting to wonder if they just might fuck up their products so badly it fucks up their insanely strong market position enough to be replaced.

MS used to be more careful with the corporate/ enterprise side. Some notable exceptions of course, the tiles-only “mobile-tap-first” interface of 8 was rough on users, but forcing that on their server 2012 OS was an abomination.

But the stuff outta MS lately is just nutso.

I played a buncha Vampire Survivors around that phase lol, just need one hand for the controls. Football cradle baby, hold bottle in that same hand (does require some wrist flexibility), other hand & arm free.

That hold doesn’t help with wiggles of course (and maybe you already use it) but at least you can pause VS.

And it’s about as “broad spectrum” as it gets, going from literal shortwave radio (very active for this weapon), all the way up to the most sophisticated AI we have at the moment I’m writing this,

And every possible communication technology between those two extremes is also used for this purpose.

The crazy part is I think for all of the sophistication, it all just boils down to a numbers game. Reach enough people with enough bullshit enough times and their minds change. It’s flat out that simple.

Smart observers will realize this saga is a story about the effectiveness of modern media at distorting reality. Americans aren’t just magically, uniquely shitty people. We had a coordinated disinformation engine, truly a superweapon, trained on our population for a long, long period of time.

Shit works pretty great, and the world will see more of it.

Edit: strongest bit of evidence is probably just how the target group got their world views completely rewritten. Hard to really document properly, ya kinda just have to witness the dramatic shift firsthand. People got reprogrammed within a single generation. The same folks who raised us on “two wrongs don’t make a right” and “treat others how you want to be treated” behave completely unrecognizably today. The disinformation engine is so effective they were tricked into completely rewriting their own internal values.

Goddamn inflation…

Yeesh, you’re exactly right that this is the right way to think about it and thank you for pointing it out that way. Absolutely disgusting, I can’t believe we all allow this. I’m pretty fuckin good at math and those timescales and numbers are just not intuitive, I’m always surprised with figures like these, even though I’ve seen em before. If people knew, really knew this stuff, I have to believe it would change.

Anyone “earning” like this while the people (and their families) propping up these fiefdoms sacrifice and struggle the way they’re forced to - anyone doing so is de facto amoral. I’d go so far as to say deserving immediate death, no further evidence needed.

But maybe that’s the 4 beers my old ass had tonight making me feel spicy, lol.

Same for our family. To be clear I saw their “inclusivity” for what it was, but I’ll still reward that over its absence, because I want to see more of it in the world regardless of motivation. My wife was all in, the stereotypical Target-loving mom who liked them a LOT and would visit sometimes just to kill time between other things.

But she has principles, so she hasn’t shopped there since all this stuff, and we won’t be going back.

Folks, give your money to Costco! There’s no ethical consumption under capitalism, yes, but Costco has been a standout in the industry just for how they treat their employees, for a long time now, probably decades by this point. And they read the room wisely (or just actually mean it, but probably not) and vocally retained DEI efforts.

Guarantee this prick is furious over this, don’t worry. Like, probably even more upset than you or I would be for getting fired unfairly. These people have their entire identity and ego wrapped up in this stuff, their brains are broken.

And the only way election reform happens is if we get the corporate Dems who like things the way they are (AKA roughly all of them) out of power. It’s damn near hopeless.

I’d commit grave sins to be able to inhabit and play in Reynolds’ Revelation Space universe. The bizarre post-human factions alone, so alien and horrifying in the best way. Could legit make for a really dark MMO. I’d have to go Ultra, though, no question.

The extreme timescales, the highly personal, self-driven body modification, culminating in a truly unique, grotesque sort of personality to one’s own body…one which can’t help but physically, visibly project the creeping, gibbering paranoia nurtured by millennia spent slowly becoming so estranged from every other lifeform once called kin, making one’s journey through time and space utterly, irreversibly alone, even when traveling with others…

For sheer thrill and a tight looter-shooter game, on the other hand, I’d be SO stoked for one using his Revenger universe. Ohhhh to crack those baubles, each a potential Pandora’s box of hilariously dangerous relics involving hideous and long-forgotten exotic physics…not to mention, who knows who or what has been lurking just beyond perception, waiting for you to do the risky dirty work of extracting some particularly nasty doodad…

One can dream.