🔗 Who Goes MAGA? | Techdirt:

It is also, to an immense extent, the disease of a generation—the generation that grew up online, that learned to mistake engagement for truth, that confused being heard with being right. This is as true of suburban millennials as it is of rural boomers. It is the disease of the algorithmically poisoned.

Sometimes I think there are direct digital factors at work—a type of media consumption, a pattern of social validation, and a form of tribal identity that has produced a new kind of citizen with an imbalance in their nature. They have been fed rage and filled with grievances that are beyond their capacity to process rationally. They have been subjected to forms of propaganda that have released them from the constraints of empirical reality. Their emotions are vigorous. Their reasoning is childish. Their civic education has been almost completely neglected.

I had missed that Matt Johnson had put out a new The The record last year.

While I have always appreciated Johnson’s albums, I have tended to hold them at a bit of a distance. I don’t need to music to always be comfortable and make me feel good, but there is an aspect to his music that feels like someone working through their own mental and emotional issues. While that is obviously pretty common in music, there is something about the way Johnson does it that I find vaguely unsettling.

I think I mostly have the web radio project in a good place for the moment. I’ve made some tweaks to the styling and layout over the last day or two, but am resisting the urge to add more features.

I had been considering maybe doing more with integrating Mastodon-based discussion into the site, but I feel like it’s better to have that just stay on Mastodon and keep this site simple.

🔗 ongoing by Tim Bray · The Real GenAI Issue:

The business leaders pumping all this money of course don’t understand the technology. They’re doing this for exactly one reason: They think they can discard armies of employees and replace them with LLM services, at the cost of shipping shittier products. Do you think your management would spend that kind of money to help you with a quicker first draft or a summarized inbox?