You’re not wrong, I just don’t think it’s the whole story. I really do think there was a media campaign of different kinds (podcasts and other “intellectual” media) for a period to create an intentional public image. I mean maybe his rise in the public awareness was organic, I just don’t think so anymore.

I am fairly sure a campaign like that was used to elevate JD Vance, there was also this Eric Weinstein guy that was appearing a lot in stuff I saw for a while, those two both closely associated with Peter Thiel. I can probably come up with other examples. I think Musk had a similar “look how smart and great this guy is, everyone!” campaign, and I think the difference is Musk had enough money that he could afford not to rely solely on that image, and he had enough ego that he could never not be himself online for long.

I’m in a similar boat. Seems like there was a big marketing / branding push for him to be seen that way in those years, or maybe it was just media doing media stuff (regurgitating and iterating on successful content). And then I stopped paying attention to him, and then he made weird ass comments during that cave rescue situation, and then it’s been just rapid fire incidents ranging from embarrassingly childish to shockingly brazen leading to today. Apologies if I’ve misremembered the timeline, but I seem to remember that as my “wait wtf” turning point with him.

Went from thinking “huh, smart driven guy working on difficult problems few others will” to realizing he’s among the most threatening forces working against humanity today, while also a thin-skinned man-baby. Pretty crazy swing. If he’d have kept his crazy under wraps…like…just literally didn’t spew it on social media constantly, that one change alone…we’d probably never have realized.

Wait those are distinct?! Holy shit. And since Microsoft owns GitHub, that’s even less clear. Unbelievable.

Interesting, I posted a top level comment to you but you’re already doing some similar things to what I posted.

I like to ask candidates to tell me about a design pattern, or a framework, or a coding principle that they really appreciate and which changed how they think about or write code. It’s an open-ended way to show me they care about the craft.

People who find the field interesting and somewhat fun (AKA not just lucrative) usually have these kinds of preferences or paradigm-shifting moments / learnings. People who can’t come up with anything for this question tend to be real junior or just in it for the wrong reasons. Or so I tell myself, anyway.

Doing this exact thing, right at the moment I’m reading this. Oof. Time to get my shit together lol.

First time I’ve ever seen him referenced anywhere outside where I learned of him! Best dude, what an inspiration.

I think Lenovos are kinda renowned as good candidates for Linux laptops, though I’m not knowledgeable enough to talk models and such. Go for it!

You’re great and you should feel great!

FWIW I shifted my monthly Wikipedia donation to The Internet Archive recently and recommend others do the same. Just a few bucks a month, please, it matters. Zero hate for Wikipedia, it’s a critically important piece of human culture, but they’re plenty good on $ and we need to be fostering backups of shared knowledge and historical records. This is important! No one will do it for us, only we who care can do it!

If there’s any new Lemmy users here, coming from Reddit (feel like I’m opening a seance), and if you’re wondering what else you might decide to change during this era of change -

Try Linux! It’s easy now, and frankly just better :)

Thanks for pointing this out, I had no idea. Removed it and left a review complaining.

These are great, but let’s also add and be vigilant in watching for Embrace, Extend, Extinguish type attacks! Let’s always advocate against integrating with any of their services / instances.

Thiel’s company, Palantir, is making inroads at many fed gov agencies to manage their data. I’ve seen it happening myself. That’s bad.

Fair enough, I can imagine that pretty easily.

I get lots of mileage out of Hanlon’s Razor, and I acknowledge the rampant incompetence that suggests its applicability, but digital security seems like about the least appropriate place to apply this rule of thumb.

I’ve been falling in love with Plasma lately and I really enjoy these updates / notes!

I’m just thankful it’s fritted, can you imagine?

Probably time to start spinning up some shit like that, actually. Keep an eye on a broad index of salient search terms / hashtags, watch for dropouts.

What are your thoughts on suburban chicken ownership? I’m wholly uninterested, I need another creature to keep alive like I need another hole in the head, but my wife and daughter are really into the idea.