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Cake day: July 21st, 2024

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  • Proton’s official Reddit account posted a now-deleted comment stating that “Until corporate Dems are thrown out, the reality is that Republicans remain more likely to tackle Big Tech abuses.”

    Within hours, Proton deleted its response across social media accounts, stating that the post — which started with the words “Here is our official response” — was in fact “removed because it was not actually an official statement.” The reply went on to say: “Our policy is that official accounts cannot be used to express personal political opinions. If it happens by mistake, we correct it as soon as we notice it.”

    https://theintercept.com/2025/01/28/proton-mail-andy-yen-trump-republicans/

    I sure hope someone was fired for that blunder!

    (he wasn’t)



  • You’re welcome!

    When you make an account on any social media moderated by someone else, you’re putting them in a position of power over you. We haven’t yet figured out a technology for social media without these hierarchies, and until we do, the only choice we can make is who to give power over ourselves.

    People want you to make an informed and measured choice on who to give power over yourself.






  • Affective empathy is the ability to understand someone else’s feelings. Cognitive empathy is the ability to understand someone else’s thoughts.

    Cognitive empathy is really useful for lying, because you can anticipate how someone will think about what you tell them. It’s also good for social deduction and interpersonal problem solving. You might use it at a job interview to intuit that your potential employer values modesty, so you understate your accomplishments to win her approval and get the job. Poker is all about cognitive empathy, the goal is to read the value of your opponents’ cards on their faces. It can help you to recognise unwritten rules and to absorb information by cultural osmosis. If you want to bend a rule, cognitive empathy will help you gauge how the relevant authority will react, and whether you’ll be allowed to bend it.

    In short, cognitive empathy is one of the most essential skills to living life as part of a society in a world full of people who don’t always say what they really mean. Which is an accurate description of nearly all neurotypicals.




  • There are disabilities that involve reduced empathy. Autism for reduced cognitive empathy and ASPD/NPD for reduced affective empathy. They both seriously impair relationship skills. People with ASPD often have criminal records because they did something stupid like shoplift breath mints and then punch out the cop who caught them. Empathy is a form of intelligence, and if you can’t imagine how people are going to feel when you do shitty things, then you’ll tend to do shitty things and get in lots of trouble for it.





  • In Contact Harvest, Truth learns of a new species that has been discovered, and apparently the old Forerunner scanners say the humans have a lot of holy Forerunner artifacts that are indicated by this symbol:

    Truth goes to talk to the old Forerunner AI kept prisoner in the basement and says “You guys didn’t provide a legend with your scanners, what’s this thing?”

    Mendicant Bias the Forerunner AI explains, “Oh, that’s the symbol for Reclaimer. Reclaimers are the people my old bosses chose to inherit our empire after they all kicked the bucket.”

    Truth says “Wait, you’re saying this is a planet full of demigods?”

    Mendicant Bias is like “Yeah, haha, I guess if you insist on worshipping my creators as gods, then you’d better start worshipping these people instead from now on. They’re supposed to be your new bosses.”

    Truth says “No, absolutely not. I worked much too hard to become a space pope and I’m not letting the second coming of Jesus get in the way of my plans. I’m going to declare a space jihad against these new aliens so nobody finds out they’re demigods.”

    Anyway, the new species were humans and the Covenant declared a holy war and nearly wiped humanity out. Truth also ordered a genocide of the Sangheili after the Sangheili generals started asking a few too many tricky questions like “why are we having a space jihad against the humans they seem nice”