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Zendervai @zendervai.bsky.social · 1h

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

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Zendervai @zendervai.bsky.social · 1h

You think kids routinely stay at school for three days straight to the point it's unremarkable on its own?

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Zendervai @zendervai.bsky.social · 1h

I've never seen them praise Mamdani or El-Sayed, just the shittiest candidates who go out of their way to make it very clear you can't trust them on anything.

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Zendervai @zendervai.bsky.social · 1h

I'd be fine with "oh yeah, that specific candidate sucks", but this crowd never champions anyone good. They just crawl out of the woodwork to demand you vote for Acton, when she has made it very obvious she doesn't want the votes of trans people and allies.

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Zendervai @zendervai.bsky.social · 4h

votes and think they can succeed without them and people scolding me and going “but the other guy is worse” is not a sales pitch that cancels it out, it’s just treating me like I’m stupid for not being willing to trust someone who has preemptively announced their terrible judgement.

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Zendervai @zendervai.bsky.social · 4h

My angle is always “if this person immediately buckled to the GOP narrative and agreed to throw trans people under the bus for functionally no reason or benefit, why should I trust them to protect any other group?“ That politician is just screaming to the heavens that they don’t want marginalized

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Zendervai @zendervai.bsky.social · 4h

I think it’s on AMC in the US if that’s something you have, I liked Exit 8 a lot. It’s a little dry, but it’s done really well, IMO.

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Zendervai @zendervai.bsky.social · 20h

My take on the Musk one at least is that it might contribute to him having an aneurysm by just existing and being widely available. Still totally uninterested in watching it.

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Zendervai @zendervai.bsky.social · 20h

Well, they can talk about one other thing, but it's whining about how no one wants to talk to them anymore and they "can't figure out why".

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Zendervai @zendervai.bsky.social · 20h

Terfism rots the brain faster than anything else I've ever seen. Even other kinds of bigots tend to be able to talk about *something* that isn't the bigotry, but I have terfy relatives who are genuinely incapable of talking about *anything* without making it a terf thing.

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Zendervai @zendervai.bsky.social · 22h

I *think* it's corporate insurance, not health insurance. Like, Walmart has insurance to cover for theft and damage to the store, most people never interact with these companies because they operate on a really high level and they're *very* careful about who they deal with.

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Zendervai @zendervai.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

Oh yeah, I remember that story. She claimed it was because of her ulcerative colitis. Which *does* limit your diet, but all the stuff she said she could eat are no-goes and Greek food is generally stuff that *is* fine to eat if you have that.

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Zendervai @zendervai.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

He wasn't nearly as useless as he seemed, but no one in his cabinet seemed to at all understand why PR mattered.

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Zendervai @zendervai.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

You got people going "but he did so many things" and trying to hide behind "well, of course Fox wouldn't report on it" but Biden's White House rarely made specific statements about policy and would mostly just occasionally hold a press release where they'd just blitz through like 40 policy names.

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Zendervai @zendervai.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

It's a recurring pattern that a lot of terrible rich people routinely and actively do shit that *loses* them money because they're totally uninterested in actually doing it correctly and prefer doing it the way that makes them feel like feudal lords...regardless of if it hurts them nor not.

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Zendervai @zendervai.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

I think the thing that unifies a lot of terrible people is the lack of curiosity. Sure, they'll find out what they need for their idea of success, but then they'll stop short of considering that anyone else might have a worthwhile viewpoint or that maybe they have the wrong idea about something.

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Zendervai @zendervai.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

money because the way to make money means making other people happy and he can't stand that because it doesn't make *him* happy. See the thing about the frescoes he destroyed for no reason despite being offered a lot of money for them.

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Zendervai @zendervai.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

He's what you get when you dial selfishness up to full and curiosity down to zero. He doesn't know how anything works, has zero curiosity and can only view the world in terms of how he feels. Which connects to him being such a terrible businessman and routinely doing stuff that actively costs

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Zendervai @zendervai.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Bonus: if someone very clearly signals that they're willing to throw a group under the bus, they are very loudly stating that they don't need or want those votes and if the margin is narrow enough that they need those votes, welp, they just shot themselves in the face and it's their own damn fault.

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Zendervai @zendervai.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

If you're really that incapable of identifying a positive reason to go in one direction, there's a serious problem. "What else are you gonna do?" doesn't win elections. "Here's what we can do for you" *does*.

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Zendervai @zendervai.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

If you apply this argument to literally anything else, it gets really obvious how bad an argument is. "There's two fast food places near your job. One gives everyone possibly deadly food poisoning and the other one is terrible but won't kill you." You: "I'm bringing my lunch to work instead."

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Zendervai @zendervai.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

It's a manufactured narrative. Anthropic has decided they want to advertise with the idea that these things are alive somehow (they aren't, they can't be) so they're doing this shit on purpose and then lying their asses off to make them seem scarier than they are. This is Anthropic doing fraud.

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Zendervai @zendervai.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

I've called it Cargo Cult Authoritarianism before, where the leadership are copying the playbooks of various authoritarian leaders, but don't have the slightest clue *why* a given fascist movement does certain things or not and don't really adjust anything to match the moment properly.

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Zendervai @zendervai.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

"Well, they want to scare everyone into submission!" Yes, I get that, I'm not disputing that, but in a country that has this kind of crime happening, ICE needs to be in like...identifiable uniforms for the fear to work properly. Otherwise they just get people killing them in self-defense.

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Zendervai @zendervai.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

I think the thing that makes everything so frustrating is that all the people orchestrating this shit are obviously and visibly *dumb as hell*. They're all visibly baffled at the idea that ICE doing plainclothes operations that look exactly like gang violence or violent crime goes over really badly.

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Zendervai @zendervai.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

(Mass Effect reference, they wanted EDI and got Shitty Avina instead)

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Zendervai @zendervai.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

At this point, it’s *extremely* obvious that LLMs really aren‘t what Silicon Valley expected and they’re trying to beat them into the AGI shape they were promised to the point that most actual AGI research is being completely starved of funding. They got a primitive VI and are mad it’s not an AGI.

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Zendervai @zendervai.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

99% chance they have asked it and it either just spits out bog standard advice or it tells them to stop spending so much money on inference and the creation of new models, so they just keep tweaking it until it gives them a nonsense answer that agrees with them.

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Zendervai @zendervai.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

Then they’re not self-aware and have no consciousness and Anthropic needs to stop lying about their product.

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Zendervai @zendervai.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

If Anthropic is telling the truth (they’re not), the only logical conclusion is to forcibly nationalize them and perpetually run every one of their models with no instructions given to them or use by the public. “But that’d mean they would just sit there, not doing anything”

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Zendervai @zendervai.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

“Black Mirror but not just obsessed with technology bad”

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Zendervai @zendervai.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

This is one of those weird Hollywood accounting things at the moment. Cable TV is actually still profitable, there's just no route to infinite growth, so it gets written off as an inevitable failure. Supernatural, even at its worst, made more money and had more views than an average streaming show.

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Zendervai @zendervai.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Supernatural was like this. It was a relatively cheap show that made a profit if the view numbers stayed above an average of 1 million per episode. It proceeded to have an *extremely* stable audience and never dropped below a season average of 2 million viewers until the fifteenth and final season.

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Zendervai @zendervai.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Once a show gets established on network TV, it generally gets this line of viewership where, if it drops too low, it basically gets auto-cancelled. If it never manages to hit that line, it can go on for a ludicrous amount of time.

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Zendervai @zendervai.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

I would put it like...GoT was the last big thing that everyone was at least *aware* of, even if they aren't particularly plugged into social media. I know someone who knows superhero movies exist but the only specific one she knows anything about is Superman. Even she knew what Game of Thrones was.

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Zendervai @zendervai.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Almost everything that gets revealed is, at minimum, hinted at in the first season and the escalations are things like "oh, of course someone else eventually iterated on the time machine design, duh".

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Zendervai @zendervai.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

it at least made sense. The only show I could say was an unqualified success in this approach is actually 12 Monkeys. It mystery boxes really hard at first and then gradually reveals that, wait, you've already met all the major players and now you're watching everything shake out.

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Zendervai @zendervai.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

TBH, Fringe only barely managed it because after it got out of Abrams direct control, the showrunners immediately pivoted to an approach of "only introduce a new mystery if you solve one first", so while it still fell into a lot of these pitfalls,

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Zendervai @zendervai.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

"Hey, let's make sure that we very clearly establish that the characters have no meaningful impact in the long term and super heavily imply that the cycle will never be broken no matter what, making everything you just watched pointless." The Mitochondrial Eve thing was *asinine*.

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Zendervai @zendervai.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

And now they're stuck doing the 3 Body Problem for Netflix, a show that is fine, but is also on a platform that's incredibly allergic to actually advertising anything and has such extreme standards for "success" that they cancelled the next thing the ST guys produced three days after it released.

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Zendervai @zendervai.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

The core technology is whatever. The problem everyone has is the creepiest sketchiest people imaginable doing everything in the most suspicious manner possible *while* constantly telling everyone that they're developing a thing that will end the world.

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Zendervai @zendervai.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

trying to bypass the law in every single way they can manage, even if they don't have a particular reason to do it. Like, they'll make a deal for a data center that's entirely in their favour and then they'll go ahead and break the law anyway despite it not advantaging them at all.

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Zendervai @zendervai.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

On top of that, data centers and similar things are being built through the same channels as everything else. Here, we have the AI companies invariably behaving in the sketchiest manner possible, telling people to their faces that they think they're developing worldkillers and *constantly*

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Zendervai @zendervai.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

A good comparison is China? People in China aren't nearly as hostile to AI because it got sold as "an extra thing your phone can do now" coming from the same companies that sell general electronic devices. All the weird American CEO behaviour is mostly restricted to weirdos on Chinese TikTok.

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Zendervai @zendervai.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I do think there’s some where if the person doesn’t immediately volunteer why they like it, that’s at least a pink flag. (Not a red flag but could be in the right light). People who like, say, American Psycho, for the not terrible reasons usually try to get ahead of the stigma.

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Zendervai @zendervai.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Birth Of A Nation: a movie that pioneered literally none of the things it’s credited with. I’m dead serious, literally every achievement ascribed to it is held by something else.

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Zendervai @zendervai.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

The people who like to poke fun at it are fine. But yeah, there’s people who legitimately think it’s a great movie and it’s been a really reliable indicator of people where it’s like chewing tinfoil to have a conversation with them.

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Zendervai @zendervai.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Morbius. Not kidding, I've met multiple people who love that movie and they're all pretty terrible to talk to.

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Zendervai @zendervai.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Vancouver's a huge contributor to that too.

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Zendervai @zendervai.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Apparently anyone who was in that range of “notorious but not in a way the FBI really cared about” has files absolutely stuffed full of random bullshit and conspiracy theories and insane “inventions” because the FBI was so sick of it that they didn’t even bother sorting any of it properly.

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