I almost forgot today was April Fools day. I feel like since Covid, the national mood (TM) was such that Google and co stopped doing April Fools pranks, and/or if they did them, they were so safe they were groan inducing.

Looking around at the roundup links for 2024, there aren't many that happened this year, from the looks of it. So I wanted to post this one, because it's the rarest of rare - one that I thought was really incredibly well done.

Excuse me! I would never buy a thinkpad.

This was a longstanding fediverse complaint, which was quite remarkable to me. It was described as a "missing" feature even though you never had this ability anywhere else let alone the fediverse.

If you get a new email address, it doesn't bring your contacts or your history of emails with you. If you make a new twitter account, same thing. And of course, don't even think about trying to port, say, your facebook stuff into a youtube account. But if the fediverse can't, then it's a dealbreaker.

If you truly want to channel the limitless depths of human creativity, give a Comment Section Skeptic (TM) every fediverse feature they say they want. Then wait and watch as that creativity goes into action, as [insert new feature] is now the new dealbreaker. It is and always will be an endless game of whack a mole.

Not quite. That was the second of my two sentences. What was the first?

I learn from the best!

That wasn't my question.

You've been wrong literally every step of the way about everything you've said and you still want to do this?

The data referenced in the report was recorded from 2021. Your link requires a login so I can't see what it says, but if I was as much of a wreckless 💩 poster as you, I would just say securitytrails is fake and just making everything up and say "nobody cares".

Okay, the next step in the playbook is "no one cares". I don't know, I think online disinformation has emerged as one of the major international issues characteristic of our time and will go down in the history books. So I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that no one cares.

I'm sorry that calling you out on your 💩 means I'm a debate bro. But the flip side of the same coin is that you're the one spewing the 💩💩💩.

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You started out by saying was no evidence, except there was. Now you've moved the goalposts and are debating the nuances of the evidence instead of saying that none was presented.

You derailed with whataboutism, you made a blanket generalization based on an unrelated story. Are you just going down the playbook, one derailment tactic at a time?

Five posts from now you will be saying "well yeah, maybe they proved the IP was from Russia, but the guy from Russia generated a fake site with 17 fake authors because he cared so much about journalistic integrity!"

So in your opinion is DC Weekly (mentioned in the article) in fact a legitimate american news source? I want to understand more about what specifically they are projecting.

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Go ahead and make your own thread about those if you like. I don't understand why you would bring them in to try and change the subject in this particular post unless you're purposely whatabouting.

Please even just read so much as one paragraph of the article and post anything related to that, anything at all. I don't feel like that's asking too much.

Yes and no. That story was bad for a reasons specific to that story that were uncovered and sourced from other credible reporting. You can't proceed from that to a blanket generalization over everything else in New York times reports without any additional supporting evidence.

Also it's sourcing and quoting other sources, so you'd have to explain if you believe that the New York times made up those sources.

I mean if you are looking for a serious answer, it's this. You may be able to find equivalences between US and Russian media, at the level of one instance for one instance. What you can't find is an equivalence in magnitude. For every offense you find in the U.S., you can find the same in Russia but ten times as much, and ten times worse.

And to me, a test of whether you're a serious person is whether you have the information literacy to understand that kind of distinction instead of whatabouting and Gish galloping it into the ground.

I think there's a steelman version of that same argument that makes a legitimate point about how Russian disinformation does contribute to the escalation of tensions both in the United States and around the world, and I feel like not only are you not engaging with it, but you're intentionally not doing so.

I say that because you appear to only be willing to address yourself to the completely watered-down version of the caricature argument, even when you're in a thread that directly links to an article that makes some pretty direct points about the reality of actual Russian disinformation.

Like if you could just talk normal for a second, you might say something like, "oh in paragraph three of the article it says this. But actually that's not true and here's my source for refuting it." Or even "well these are all true but I feel like it's emphasizing the wrong things and here's my argument for emphasizing a different thing." Like just any signal, any signal at all, any whatsoever that shows that you're in touch with the same set of facts. But you can't go there, and so you're chasing caricatures instead.

I love the implication that reading books is bad

other than limiting exhaust, or is that it?

Gee, when you say it like that, it makes extinction-level events sound not so bad! It is That Bad, so that would be the most direct answer.

The important thing to note is that even though some electricity is generated from fossil fuels, EVs eliminate the path-dependency that ties transportation to fossil fuels.

Wow, I actually believed in this one. Is there a short text version of what the videos are explaining?

I don't think this is actually a myth. I think there's an extreme version of the statement, but it nevertheless is true that there are specialized taste buds and that they aggregate on sections on the tongue.

And I think there's a whole rabbit hole here, of overeager "corrections", that are not in fact corrections but just someone engaging in bad faith with a statement that's close enough to the actual truth. It's actually more wrong to categorically dismiss it, then it would be to note the difference between it and the truth, which is to say while they are not strictly regions, they're nevertheless as attested to be the NIH:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8956797/

There is undoubtedly a spatial component to our experience of gustatory stimulus qualities such as sweet, bitter, salty, sour, and umami, however its importance is currently unknown. Taste thresholds have been shown to differ at different locations within the oral cavity where gustatory receptors are found. However, the relationship between the stimulation of particular taste receptors and the subjective spatially-localized experience of taste qualities is uncertain. Although the existence of the so-called ‘tongue map’ has long been discredited, the psychophysical evidence clearly demonstrates significant (albeit small) differences in taste sensitivity across the tongue, soft palate, and pharynx (all sites where taste buds have been documented).

In my opinion, the more interesting phenomenon is understanding how these facts, and the temptation to correct, challenges our ability to sustain nuance and to carefully differentiate between degrees of truth, instead of just making blanket denials.