In the USA, the loneliness epidemic is compounded by isolation. A large portion of our society has moved into suburban communities that are largely impersonal. There is very little in the way of in-person community outside of churches or political movements that only certain kinds of people want to be involved with.

With the Internet giving us the ability to interact with our chosen niche with little effort, we are willing to accept this still-impersonal alternative to our stagnant communities.

I have found that, as a city-dweller, I benefit from separating myself from social media and going out into the world looking for more personal connections, but this is somewhat of a privilege afforded to those people who live in more densely populated areas. Even then, my distance from social media can sometimes be a handicap when you interact with people who are still reliant on it to coordinate everything.

For most people, the social opportunities that existed in the 70's through the 90's simply doesn't exist anymore. If you aren't using social media, you're practically being anti-social, but there is something inherently anti-social about social media to begin with, so you're screwed if you do and screwed if you don't.

> the social opportunities that existed in the 70's through the 90's simply doesn't exist anymore

Does it have to be that way?

Is there a way to bring back "the social outdoors" of those days? To recreate it?

1. You don't deport millions of undocumented people, you find a way integrate those who are willing to work (most of them) into your society.

2. Obama and Biden didn't get the same level of attention because they weren't being publicly antagonistic and racist, or using deliberately cruel tactics to accomplish their goals. Or breaking the law / violating the constitution to meet their ends.

Example: Kavanaugh stops. Racial profiling is now legal thanks to our Supreme Court.

Trump referred to Somalis as "garbage". If that's not publicly antagonistic or racist then what is?

Okay, but then what? Host your sites on something other than 'www' or '*', exclude them from search engines, and never link to them? Then, the few people who do resolve these subdomains, you just gotta hope they don't do it using a DNS server owned by a company with an AI product (like Google, Microsoft, or Amazon)?

I really don't know how you're supposed to shield your content from AI without also shielding it from humanity.

Don't have any index pages or heavy cross-linking between pages.

None of that matters. AI bots can still figure out how to navigate the website.

The biggest problem I have seen with AI scrapping is that they blindly try every possible combination of URLs once they find your site and blast it 100 times per second for each page they can find.

They don’t respect robots.txt, they don’t care about your sitemap, they don’t bother caching, just mindlessly churning away effectively a DDOS.

Google at least played nice.

And so that is why things like anubis exist, why people flock to cloudflare and all the other tried and true methods to block bots.

I don't see how that is possible. The web site is a disconnected graph with a lot of components. If they get hold of a url, maybe that gets them to a few other pages, but not all of them. Most of the pages on my personal site are .txt files with no outbound links, for that matter. Nothing to navigate.

how? if you don't have a default page and index listings are disabled, how can they derive page names?

Good luck. Americans won't even differentiate Washington State and Washington D.C. Even the AP guidelines say that "Washington" is ubiquitous shorthand for "Washington D.C." and recommends against shortening it to "D.C."

The most hilarious thing is that I learned recently that when they applied to be a state, the people from WA requested to be the state of Columbia. But a Kentucky rep said that would be too easily confused with the District of Columbia, and Congress changed it to Washington.

> when they applied to be a state, the people from WA

Western Australia?

Yes. Little known fact, it was renamed Washington by Congress.

Americans do! If you are west of the Rockies, Washington resolves to the west. If you are east, it’s DC, and you have to say “you know, where Nirvana is from.”

Don’t get me started on east coast dumdums pronouncing Oregon as “Orry-gone.”

AI-generated music is novel, but like images and videos, I think of it almost exclusively as a novelty. I haven't heard any AI-generated music that I like in a real way. Just stuff that sounds like something I like.

The real value AI has for music is discovery. I've been using Gemini and ChatGPT to build playlists based on music I already like, and discovering lots of fun new tracks. I can be really specific about what kind of music I like and don't like. I can show it a playlist I already made, and ask it to make one like it, but with completely different artists. It's insanely useful!

But these kinds of tools would just expand how many different artists Spotify has to pay from my streaming, and that doesn't do the same thing as shoving cheap mass-produced slop down our throats, so it isn't surprising what they offer us.

The people who really want to stop paying for streaming are going to turn to piracy, don't worry. Physical media will still be accessible for people who are willing to pay with space instead of money.

"We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem" - Gabe Newell

He'd probably be flattered, Mao was one of histories greatest influencer of minds after all.

Of nothing else, he was impressive at melting down.

My thoughts exactly! The "You can pick your friends, but you cannot pick your family" mantra is a good one, but this guy is talking about a cartoonist he likes. Scott Adams isn't your friend or a family member; he just draws Dilbert comics!

Enjoy Bach's music all you want, but when I read his biography those difficult details better be in there, and if that ruins his music for you that's on you.

It takes a lot of privilege to ignore a person's overt racism and only remember a person's more agreeable qualities. Whitewashing a person's legacy in this way is a disservice to all of the people that person directed hatred at, as if it didn't really happen.

He was a racist person, and the people he was racist towards would prefer that people not forget that, even in death, because the problems that Scott Adams embodied at the end of his life did not die with him.

I'm black, and I can ignore Adams' "overt racism", because I understood the context of his words, and I can empathize with him. Please don't speak for an entire group of people.

Unlike Scott Adams, no struggle sessioner cares what black people actually think. They’ve been promised lordship over other men and today line up at his wake to collect.

Confused between morality and ethics, their true use is in driving passive alienation, which serves those in power. I think white leaders learned from the Civil Rights movement to keep their distance from blacks and won’t make the same mistake twice.

I'm not sure the comment is saying to ignore the racism.

"...you don’t get to edit out the parts that shaped you before you understood what was happening. The racism and the provocations were always there, maybe, just quieter. The 2023 comments that ended Dilbert’s newspaper run were unambiguous."

Can you clue me in? I only knew about Dilbert, and “drilbert”