Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

Techdirt

from the always-more-to-say dept

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is TKnarr with a comment about Elon Musk’s troublesome demands of Twitter employees, and those employees being encouraged not to keep written records:

This sounds like prime examples of a rule I’ve had for decades: if your bosses don’t want a written record of something, you absolutely need a written record of it.

In second place, it’s kallethen responding to a line in that post about Elon being “suckered into massively overpaying for the company”:

Let’s be real about one thing here… Nobody suckered Elon into this purchase but himself.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with Thad and a comment about not paying the rent:

When poor people don’t pay rent because they can’t afford to, they’re lazy deadbeats.

When rich people odn’t pay rent because they don’t wanna, they attract an army of Comment Guys constantly proclaiming them to be business geniuses.

Or, as I guess they prefer to be called, a “transition team”.

Next, it’s an anonymous comment about Twitter’s onerous new pricing for academic researchers wanting access to its data, responding to the claim that they have plenty of money to do so based on endowment totals:

Those topline numbers are meaningless. Nearly all that money is earmarked by their donors, so either you need an alumni gift specifically to research social media (or maybe supporting social studies projects generally) or a no-strings-attached gift. Inevitably the larger donors want their names on something shiny so most of the money goes into buildings, schools, financial aid, chairs, and speaker series.

Second, universities pay little to none of professors’ research budgets. In science you’re expected to pull in a nice NSF or NIH grant and that pays everything from PhD student tuition and stipends to your solvent stock, or else you’re researching out your own pocket. In social studies a donor paid for your chair but you pay your own research budget, and the big grants will get you a hefty $300 (yes three hundred dollars) and maybe a round trip plane ticket if it’s foreign. How that’s supposed to pay for $42k a month is trivial to answer: it doesn’t. You could hire 3 full professors for that price, and the department has maybe 10 of them to begin with.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is Thad again, this time with a simple response to the Heritage Foundation admitting the GOP will use KOSA to censor LGBTQ+ content:

oh no this article turned me trans

In second place, it’s Cat_Daddy responding to our post about Rand Paul’s call to use AI for censorship, and our description of “the government trolling the internet and taking down comments”:

Texas, Florida, and the Red States: “Write that down! WRITE that down!”

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with one more comment on that post, where Violet Aubergine enlisted some AI assistance:

Can I have a paragraph written in the tone of a paranoid conservative ranting about the dangers of AI

ChatGPT
Folks, let me tell you, we’re standing at the precipice of a technological abyss, and it’s time to wake up! This so-called “artificial intelligence” is nothing more than a diabolical creation that threatens the very fabric of our existence. It’s like a Frankenstein’s monster, lurking in the shadows, waiting to devour our freedoms and control our lives. These tech elites and their AI cronies are hell-bent on turning us into mindless drones, manipulated by algorithms and devoid of independent thought. They claim it’s all about convenience and efficiency, but mark my words, it’s a Trojan horse of tyranny! They’ll invade our privacy, monitor our every move, and even predict our actions before we’ve even thought of them. Our thoughts, our preferences, our secrets—all will be harvested by these soulless machines. We’ll become slaves to the whims of cold, heartless algorithms, losing our individuality and autonomy in the process. Don’t be fooled by their promises of progress; this is the slippery slope to a dystopian nightmare! It’s time to resist, my friends, and safeguard the future of humanity before it’s too late. We must stand against this AI juggernaut and reclaim our sovereignty, our privacy, and our human spirit!

At least we know it can mimic GOP word salad with no problems.

Finally, it’s wshuff with a comment about deleted tweets reappearing on Twitter:

I just read that Musk’s Neuralink company has been granted authorization to start human trials. The way Twitter is going doesn’t really inspire confidence, but who knows, maybe the test subjects will get their implants and suddenly start remembering things they’d forgotten.

That’s all for this week, folks!