You keep calling it “rage bait” to quote him, but I think that’s missing a big aspect of this. The man was very intentionally phrasing these things in ways that he knew would upset people who didn’t agree with him. There’s a whole culture around that on the far right, where you’re supposed to say things that would enrage “the left” because that’s how people know you’re “based” and not “woke.” And obviously he’s not worried about people being offended because anyone who would be offended isn’t his target audience, while people who are his target audience will get a dopamine hit from hearing him offend those other people. It’s win-win for him. So with the thing about the pilots, he knows full well that the standards are the same, but he also knows that his audience are going to be sympathetic to the idea of being uncomfortable around black people, so the facts be damned, he’s gonna pretend that’s a rational argument against DEI.

So I don’t think it’s the clip videos that are the “rage bait” here. I think that’s part and parcel of the whole Charlie Kirk idiom.

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/your-password-must-contain-the-following

I made a neural net from scratch with my own neural net library and trained it on generating the next move in a game of Go, based on thousands of games from an online Go forum.

It never even got close to learning the rules.

In retrospect, “thousands of games” was nowhere near enough training data for such a complex task, and if we had had enough training data, we never could have processed all of it, since all we were using was a ca. 2004 laptop machine with no GPU. So we just really overreached with that project. But still, it was a really pathetic showing.

Edit: I switched from “I” to “we” here because I was working with a classmate, but we did use my code. She did a lot of the heavy lifting in getting the games parsed into a form where the network could train on it, though.

This suggests a whole new kind of D&D alignment chart.

Maybe punished for incitement, on the grounds that it was “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action”? Tough to prove in court but as a bystander I’m frustratingly unsurprised the one thing followed the other.

Don’t forget that he paid for and directed a music video specifically to make fun of Kapoor. It’s called “Bean Boy.”

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8XOQ6DbXXOo

What I think is that to learn someone has attempted a deadly attack, then learn that their voter registration is with a particular party, and conclude that this tells you everything you could possibly need to know about the motivation of the attack is bizarrely reductive. I asked if you thought fascism was the motivation for the attempted Trump shooter’s actions because your previous reply had shifted the conversation to fascism and I was trying to understand what you perceived as its relevance to the conversation. I was not, in any way, attempting to defend fascism, and I’m kinda troubled to have given anyone that impression.

In any case I think this conversation is getting unproductive. I’m sorry I got you riled.

Are you saying that you think being fascist was his motivation for shooting at Trump?

It’s because, for the most part, it doesn’t actually have access to the text itself. Before the data gets to the “thinking” part of the network, the words and letters have been stripped out and replaced with vectors. The vectors capture a lot of aspects of the meaning of words, but not much of their actual text structure.

What I said was that he didn’t appear to have much identifiable political motivation for the shooting, which is largely supported by that article. The person I was replying to asked if he was MAGA, which it does not appear he was. I mean, I suppose you could assume that every registered Republican at this point must be MAGA, but I feel like the fact that this guy took a shot at Trump kind of calls that assumption into question.

Basically I don’t think “he was a registered republican!” says anything more about his motivation than “he donated to a progressive get-out-the-vote program in 2021!” which was a big talking point on the right-wing news at the time. People are complicated and he wasn’t disinterested in politics, but it seems like the main reason he tried to kill Trump is that he wanted there to be more political assassination attempts in general and decided to be the change he wanted to see in the world.

The one who clipped his ear didn’t seem to have much identifiable political motivation. He googled a bunch of politicians from both parties and found Trump was closest.

The one who shot at him on the golf course appears to have been motivated by the war in Ukraine, maybe?

Neither had any big democratic manifesto or anything.

I don’t think we actually know the motivation of Kirk’s shooter either. I think these folks are just assuming a Democrat did it because that’s who they already wanted an excuse to start killing.

Tourist visits.

Yeah, it’s a total fascist shitshow here right now.

Yeah, drinking from the hose was a lot less problematic than just breathing the air, which was full of tetraethyl lead.

I’m pretty sure gnutrino was making a different, second joke. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoonerism

https://www.npr.org/2025/09/02/nx-s1-5525984/venezuela-trump-drugs-caribbean

M-x psychoanalyze-pinhead

Introducing the new Amazon Ring Defender–the only doorbell with a live video feed and live ammunition! Don’t like what you see happening on your doorstep? Now you don’t have to be home to defend your castle!

I think my top pick has to be Ijon Tichy: Raumpilot. I gather it’s pretty well known in Germany, but in the US pretty much no one has heard of it.

It’s a sci-fi comedy, based loosely on The Star Diaries by Stanislaw Lem, who is one of my favorite authors. The first season was all web episodes made on a shoestring budget; the spaceship is just the main actor’s apartment for the interior, and a coffee press for the exterior. There’s also a lot of use of puppets and amusing costumes. It’s just incredibly creative. The stories involve things like Tichy’s navigation system malfunctioning, so he accelerates out of control around a gravitational anomaly and starts experiencing time slips. Which could be kind of convenient, because fixing the navigation is a two-person task, but the first time his future self asks for his help he thinks it’s a dream, and the second time he knows it’s real but won’t help because if they actually got it fixed then obviously his future self wouldn’t still be coming back in time to get his help, so what’s the point? etc. I know Lem isn’t the best-known sci fi writer these days, but it’s criminal that this show hasn’t gotten more attention.

I think the choice of a hospital in particular may have been influenced by the 1994 show Riget, directed by Lars von Trier, which was brought to English-speaking countries under the name The Kingdom (not to be confused with the 2014 show about MMA fighters someone else mentioned in a thread here). It’s a horror show set in a hospital, and also kind of a soap opera, and also it’s kind of supposed to be funny sometimes? That show…I guess I felt like it tried very hard, but also that conspicuous effort isn’t a good look for something that’s supposed to be unsettling. Which is kinda the feeling that Garth Marenghi’s Dark Place takes the piss out of so effectively. I dunno, maybe it’s my imagination, but I can’t help but see them as connected.