I completely disagree. Meme's are a basic form of psyop, and are being using by intelligence agencies, the military, old media and new media, to warp our brains, and make us biological robots. Comedy is used much the same.
It's the other way around. Psyops are just memes. You should view everything communicated to you as a meme - a complex, semantically rich packet of information that implies the content and the intent arising from the agenda and context of the communicator.
Everything from a simple wave hello by random passersby to pseudonymous manipulative poasting by nation state actors in service to secret purpose is a meme. Understand the actors or you will never be able understand the memes.
AI is, for now, a tool. It's a powerful tool, a potent force multiplier, but there is no agency there. AI labs and governments and big tech companies have agendas and the ways in which they manipulate the output of AI tools is a meme modifier, so you should understand the ways in which different entities want to change the output of the tools you use, in order to correct for anything that deviates from your own intent and understanding.
Psyops are just a particular configuration of meme scale within a culture; if your model of the world is correct and has reliable predictive power, you can correct for things that attempt to warp reality. Understanding how and why different entities warp their communications, whether it's intentional or endemic, is crucial to a reliable model.
It wasn't always this way. Comedy has deep, deep roots as a channel for speaking truth to power. Only in recent decades does it seem we've discovered that you can flip the parity on both aspects and run it in reverse.
This is the wrong attitude to take to the problem.
While I grant there were many who were disposed to be irrational skeptics, lots of skepticism was generated by dishonest messaging, coercive mandates, and punitive limitations on dissenting speech. Institutions took an end-justifies-the-means strategy, and many smelled a rat.
Even now, online, you see right wing users continuing to lament over vaccine injuries, and on the left, long COVID. Ironically the injuries are often similar. They are, of course, both right.
Completely wrong about the facts. Long COVID is real and not restricted to those on the left. Right wingers constantly "lament" over all sorts of bogeymen, rarely anything from personal experience. Most talk about vaccine injuries is based on misuse of VAERS.
> lots of skepticism was generated by dishonest messaging
Yes, from right wing media ... which you are echoing. Dead bodies were overflowing and public health officials were acting in good faith to try to deal with it. Right wingers and good faith are complete strangers.
The use case I always think of is the developer experience for regular hobbyist and workaday devs writing their apps with local-first sync.
Apple comes close with CloudKit, in that it takes the backend service and makes it generic, basically making it an OS platform API, backed by Apple's own cloud. Basically cloud and app decoupled. But, the fundamental issue remains, in that it's proprietary and only available on Apple devices.
An open source Firebase/CloudKit-like storage API that requires no cloud service, works by p2p sync, with awesome DX that is friendly to regular developers, would be the holy grail for this one.
Dealing with eventually consistent data models is not so unusual these days, even for devs working on traditional cloud SAAS systems, since clouds are distributed systems themselves.
I would be very happy to see such a thing built on top of Iroh (a p2p network layer, with all the NAT hole punching, tunnelling and addressing solved for you) for example, with great mobile-first support. https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh
Something like 15 years ago I once went to a Less Wrong/Overcoming Bias meetup in my town after being a reader of Yudkowsky's blog for some years. I was like, Bayesian Conspiracy, cool, right?
The group was weird and involved quite a lot of creepy oversharing. I didn't return.
Starting strength is good but Rippetoe is very old school and the community has some cultish vibes. He is totally inflexible about any slight variation like high bar squats and trap bar deadlifts, which are great exercises and often better. His forums are not particularly friendly either. (Example: https://startingstrength.com/resources/forum/mark-rippetoe-q...)
I think stronglifts is generally a better program for beginners:
Been powerlifting for 15 years and I strongly disagree.
Stronglifts basically aped Starting Strength with minimal tweaks to justify separate branding, and only caught on over SS because of the slick app. Rippetoe has been coaching strength for many decades and was a competitive lifter himself, with his all-time PRs for squat and deadlift being a little over 600. He’s trained a network of coaches who command crazy prices for training because the cert is prestigious and incredibly difficult to earn. He was a key contributor to powerlifting and weightlifting components of CrossFit, until he (justifiably, imo) became disillusioned with the franchise. The Starting Strength book is an incredible resource for powerlifters, going into extreme detail into how to do the lifts, why, how to avoid getting injured, how to do your programming, and how to tell when you’ve outgrown Starting Strength. The forum you linked is actually an incredible resource where you can get free form feedback and general advice from the actual coaches (and Rippetoe), with no analog in the stronglifts community. (Is there even a stronglifts community?)
Mehdi, on the other hand… is some guy who made an app. He’s not even a particularly impressive lifter, and was a decidedly unimpressive one when he launched SL.
On the programs themselves: 5x5 is inappropriate for beginners. In no time at all you will hit a progression wall, and your workouts will take forever, where 3x5 could have continued without a hitch, for no upside. And despite the suggestion that more reps means more practice, the fact is that ESPECIALLY for beginners, doing a zillion reps in a state of fatigue is a great way to get hurt.
Barbell rows are such a poor substitute for power cleans that Rippetoe no longer recommends them at all, and the newest edition of the book expresses remorse for ever having made the suggestion.
But even putting all that aside, the most important part of SS is that it is essentially complete and will carry you for 6-9 months with no modification. Because as the commenter up the chain said, fuckarounditis is the most popular way to fail at getting strong. All the common complaints (“waah my biceps aren’t big enough”) are trivially addressed at the intermediate stage, once you’ve built a base of strength and a habit of training. This is why they are “cultish” about variations: you can do all that once you’ve run out your beginner gains. Until then, you don’t know what you’re doing and shouldn’t mess around.
Leangains is a relic of time. Martin Berkharn(the guy who made it) was a VERY prolific poster on the bodybuilding.com forums around 2005-2012 or something like that. The tone of his entire brand is born out of that forum and style of communication. You had to fight for your life on there if you wanted to communicate.
Leangains is a great resource. Do not let the tone distract from the content. The content there went mainstream much later(IF) especially so he was ahead of the curve.
An IF protocol with a daily energizer routine worked wonders for me.
Bigfoot comes to mind.