Monday, March 17, 2025

That's interesting...

Sometimes, you end up watching new stuff on Youtube and learn things that are good to know, even if they might never affect you.

For example, I've never been particularly drawn to reading Dostoevsky, and The Brothers Karamazov in particular, but now I know (from watching a guy talking about one star online reviews of classic books) that the very common reaction for modern readers of Karamazov is that nothing happens for the first 300 or so pages.    (It's a lot of talking, setting up the different brothers' views and philosophies, apparently.)

I also didn't realise that no one accuses him of writing particularly realistic characters - they are all somewhat over-the-top in a theatrical kind of way.  Again, apparently. 

I also enjoyed a video from Business Insider making the case that I always suspected was true:  that 5G networking was massively oversold and may never be as significant as they claimed.

Meanwhile, what's the latest stupid thing Musk did:

Early on Friday, Elon Musk shared a post written by an X user about the actions of three 20th century dictators — then quickly deleted it after it sparked a backlash.

The post falsely claimed that Joseph Stalin, the communist leader of the Soviet Union until 1953; Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazi party in Germany; and Mao Zedong, the founder of the People’s Republic of China, didn’t cause the deaths of millions of people under their watch. Instead, the post said, their public sector workers did.

Mr. Musk shared the post without any other comment. He removed it soon after users on X criticized the post, saying it was antisemitic and dismissive of genocide. Historians have widely chronicled that millions of people died under Stalin, that millions of Jews were massacred under Hitler during the Holocaust, and that millions of Chinese were displaced or killed during Mao’s cultural revolution.

 Bizarrely, that post that he deleted sounds like an argument for the exact opposite of what Trump wants - an independent public service that won't follow the appalling orders of the leader if they are immoral and/or illegal.

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