When she finds out about this she can do an ama and be a superstar for one day

Why people have no tusks in story

I tried Gemini before. The problem was reliability.

E. g. I say “add an event to my calendar: tomorrow 2 p.m., doctor visit”, and it parses the voice perfectly. The regular assistant would then just create the entry.

But Gemini sometimes goes like: “Adding an entry to your calendar is easy! Do you have an iPhone? Then these are the steps: …”

His tone is quite different with Kim Jong Un and Putin.

I know the punisher only from the TV shows. But there, he fights bad guys and somewhat avoids harming the good ones, in a few instances even protecting them, right? So no, not at all like that, more like the opposite in all aspects. Lawful evil vs. lawless good. With “lawful” including everything government / society approved, such as war crimes, crimes against inconvenient protesters etc.

Fantastic insight! You obviously know more about the background and similar as well as competing cultural influences. I saw him as someone who knows right from wrong and considers it his duty to do something about it, but being a hyperbolic mirror of patriotism starting to go wrong is his way to help, to give them a chance to finally see the problem.

Now I realise that this might be more like my own personal fan theory.

That was the page I considered posting initially

Some surveys seem to support that this direction could have worked. As a German, I supported the course of the Democrats to go with a presidential candidate and policies that democratic conservatives could get behind. About half of the voters in the US want less democracy, more totalitarianism. For a chance to stop Trump, it seemed reasonable just get all supporters of freedom and democracy behind a single candidate. But maybe I was wrong.

I have my doubts that there will be an election in 2028.

Reminds me of this character in Watchmen. Calls himself the Comedian, but never makes “jokes” in a classical sense. He is cruel, overly patriotic, violent against protesters, seems to enjoy massacres in Vietnam. Only one other person understands that he is actually against these things and tries to show them this hyperbolic mirror of their own totalitarian views. But everybody else doesn’t understand it, they take it face value and admire his “patriotism”. He never breaks role until the last moment (or even then just in the movie?).

Idea stolen from wulrus, but the term is tusk, not trust. Then it work.

Why not wulrus at beach

German right wing party AfD had one just like this, but unironically

Do they just kick you in the balls then, repeatedly?

WULRUS WULRUS WULRUS

Wulrus has the utmost approval of this comment

My initial understanding was that it’s the cat that really got to go but the human did shenanigans with the toilet paper

I remember the “big movement” when Twitter turned into a right wing cesspool.

At first, the biggest problem was that there were TWO main alternatives: Mastodon and Bluesky. So those who left split into two groups, ending up with a dead timeline, missing out on news. (I and my “bubble” use it to keep up with Covid vaccines, politics, safety etc.)

I joined the Mastodon group, because it solves the problem of a single crazy billionaire potentially buying & enshittifying it. But I fully admit that it is not user friendly at all. People who are not in IT just want it to WORK, like Twitter used to. They don’t want to “educate themselves” about servers, fediverse and networks. The user experience clearly hasn’t even been a thing. It’s techies writing software for themselves. What it needs is a full analysis of the experience from the start: Who are you, user, why are you considering Mastodon, what are your expectations, what are the experiences in the first 30 seconds after entering “mastadon” (oh, you misspelled it?) or “twitter alternative” into a search engine, etc. “pick an instance” is already the passive-aggressive demand nobody wants to hear.

In the end, my instance was shut down without a fair warning, all the reconnected and new contacts lost, no option to move. Trying Bluesky now, but many stayed at Twitter (now X), moved to Mastodon with or without success (most onto my dead instance), or gave up on microblogging.

I think we need something simple again. I remember what SUSE did for Linux in the 90s. Linux users were all like: Only debian is even somewhat useable, but if you should really do LFS. Non-techies willing to switch for “political” or other reasons were hit in the face with “Pick a distro!!!”. SUSE has been called “the Windows among the Linux distros” by those people, but it did the right thing. It provided exactly the simplification we needed: “This is Linux, you simply buy it on CD in a retail store like your other software, you run the installer.” It was a good thing.

IRC is the one good old thing that still works great. When they tried to enshittify freenode, we just moved, collectively. Many non-IT channels & servers died after 2010, though.

I concur

Me too; it’s BECAUSE I’m so old that I appreciate a general rooting what this is all about.

Thanks for the unappreciated ELI2