There seems to be a correlation between being wealthy and being a thoughtless sociopath.
Who’da thunk
It’s almost like pathologically hoarding wealth and power far beyond any personal practicality correlates with specific mental defects and personality disorders!
Sociopathy isn’t a specific personality disorder, it’s just a slang term for ASPD used by people who want to sound smart by using big words. That’s why the writers of Sherlock loved it so much.
Sociopathy isn’t a specific personality disorder
It’s arguably encompassed by the “mental defects” part, though 🤷
It’s not a specific mental defect either. It’s just a sophistic appeal to plausible sounding psychology speak. Psychobabble.
Psychology experts feel the same way hearing “sociopath” as engineering experts feel hearing “quantum capacitor” or “chronometric transistor”. It’s like when a hacker on TV says they’ve decompiled the mainframe.
Some psychologists have been charitable and decided the pop culture understanding is close enough to ASPD that it might as well mean ASPD, and I think they’re wrong. If laypeople want to be understood they should use the correct words. Using the wrong words has serious consequences when we’re talking about mental health.
I once watched two idiots online argue between using sociopathy or psychopathy to describe a fictional character. Is there a difference? yes, kinda. Does it matter? no. It was mostly harmless, but psychologists avoid actively to use either term ever, both in discussions of cases and official reports. We stick to the definitions and terms on diagnosis manuals, and we focus on describing symptoms mostly. Diagnosis are long winded and arduous decisions that require observation, tests, logical argumentation about applicability of criteria. The goal is to help the patient, diagnosis is but a tool not the end goal. Either term appear exactly once on the DSM-V, and they appear together on ASPD.
But people love to argue online about asinine topics.
The equals aren’t part of the emails actually, they’re from bad decoding (probably by the govt) https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2026/02/02/whats-up-with-all-those-equals-signs-anyway/
That is the biggest grift of all. Being a billionaire doesn’t require intelligence, it requires you to be a ruthless asshole willing to exploit humanity for your own self interest.
The “Great Man Myth” was founded by people trying to justify their theft going back as long as we’ve had currency.
And having rich parents to get a huge head start.
Every time someone pitches the argument that billionaires got there through sheer intelligence and hard work, I want to scream “Have you seen anything this person has wrote or said in public? They are barely coherent! If you asked them where they are right now, they probably wouldn’t know because they pay someone to babysit them through their day.”
The richest guy I know (I know two people who own majorities of companies worth over a billion, although one recently sold and he’s not quite a billionaire) they both have personal assistants who do all their work for them and write emails etc. which leaves them free to talk to people. And I’ll be honest, they are on business all the time, they’re obsessed. Even if it’s someone else’s business.
You know who I know who write their own emails and are great communicators? Lawyers. I know a few lawyers. They’re exhausting, but they actually have great work ethics usually.
There is a non-zero chance that this is due to them having enough money to constantly be on their drug(s) of choice without consequence, though.
I can’t imagine myself living that shamelessly
Even people who can’t afford it spend their lives completely self-medicated out the ass until the day they die, it should be self-evident that people with no limitations are going to just spend their days zonked out on the deck of their boat instead of working on helping others.
Real talk. I was unfortunately like that for about 15 years.
This makes me so happy to see how based Chipzel is. For those who don’t know, Chipzel is a really awesome classically trained chiptune musician. She’s in a bunch of videogame soundtracks, check out her albums!
I was wondering if it was the very same Chipzel.
Profile pic is her on a gameboy, what do you think? :D
Back in the day the super rich couldn’t bother to write any better, but at least they had the decency to hire a secretary so their messages were even somewhat legible. Seems like the habit of dictating your messages has all but vanished, even in professional contexts.
Maybe the 14-16 year olds they now “hire” are too young to write professionally, compared to the 18-20 somethings of yesteryears.
Hey hello there I had never heard yesteryears and it is exquisite.
Thank you very much
I think I encountered it first in (old school) Runescape, where one of the songs in the soundtrack is named yesteryear. That was back before the old school distinction, when I was still in elementary.
It’s one of the first tracks you hear when you start playing, in case you’re not familiar.
And for anyone who doesn’t know, you can experience Runescape as it was in its heyday via 2009scape!
The best part is, they offer XP multipliers (by default you can select 1x, 2.5x or 5x XP in case you have a job and responsibilities) its also a super active project with a brilliantly healthy official server to play on, and completely free to play with optional singleplayer!
Cries in sea shanty 2
Everybody is so worried about the environmental impact of LLMs…has anyone stopped to consider the etymological impact?
Not to mention the entomological impact (because this whole thing is really bugging me)
Many people consider these things. On microblog fedi, I see threads (long posts, effectively) about this regularly.
This is honestly the first I’d thought about it…but language has always been dynamic and organic. Rapid communication has already led to rapid evolution of language and distribution of slang.
Then you get LLMs slurping up all this content and condensing it and adding their own language into the pile.
Eventually the majority of what they intake will be the output of all the other LLMs, and then it’s a feedback loop.
Sure, but a lot of that is holdovers from back when you had to put pieces of dead trees into a cryptographic mangler just to tell your secret lover that y’all’re gonna get your freak on that motel by the movie theater.
Nowadays, anyone can type “U up?”
damn them billionaires be typing during earthquake 💀🙏🏻
they simply don’t have to care. in a similar way where jobs was wearing jeans and black shirt while everyone around him was saluting in suits. he didn’t have to.
also these messages were supposed to be private, lot of our signal/whatsapp chats also look less professional than work emails.
Were these emails encrypted? I thought that regular email is basically public, like sending a postcard. Or is that not the case anymore?
Most of the internet, nowadays, is encrypted on transmission.
Some things are end-to-end encrypted, some things are only encrypted for transmission, and rarely (nowadays) things are not encrypted at all.
Emails are encrypted for transmission.
That means, your email is readable on your computer, on your email server, on their email server and on their computer. Your email is not readable by your router, their router, your ISP, their ISP, or anyone operating a machine over which the transmission happens.
There are end-to-end encryption for email but you would know if you would use it.
Emails are encrypted for transmission.
no. they may be and probably most of them are, but they are not by design. mx to mx can still go in plaintext.
Are you aware of any mail server or client that is not using encrypted channels by default?
that’s not relevant question. people are running old software and people are running software in other than default settings. so while the mail can be encrypted on the way, you can’t count on that.
that is technically correct, but the point is they still not expected them to be published. in a similar way where you don’t really care what the postal clerk will think about grammar on your postcard, while you might pay bigger attention to some text you know you will present publicly.
iirc it’s tls secured between client and server and again between servers. So no e2ee, but if you trust your provider, everything should be good.
iirc law enforcment regularly forces providers to reveal content of client’s mailboxes.
but if you trust your provider
Which you should never do. They might look good and safe today, but all it takes is a subpoena or a change in management and they will spill all the secrets. Most likely past and present.
Basically, don’t do illegal shit over unencrypted forms of communications. But the billionares are not the smartest people, or Epstein thought he was protected enough that keeping a record of his co-conspirators and their crimes would protect him.
Or, if you do want to do illegal shit over unencrypted forms of communication, use your own encryption layer on top, so you can actually be 100 % sure that there’s real E2EE. This is the way e-mail encryption was meant to work, before someone added TLS to the “standard” and everyone thought it’s OK as they trust the e-mail service provider.
Yep, the issue is that the server stores the messages centrally in plaintext, and most email users nowadays assume that the server always has a copy. That’s why we have PGP and ring-of-trust, and why there used to be a lot of push to use that with especially E-mail. Especially with the preparation to post-quantum era, any communication you actually want to stay secret should be encrypted with (symmetric) keys you exchange in person. That way there’s no log or key exchange that someone can see or store, and thus break in the future.
Unfortunately people in general deemed the centralized solutions “good enough”, and for “more secure” contexts we got the abysmally horrible solutions like Secure Mail. PGP’s problem was, that the trust needed to be established in a distributed manner outside normal communication which the layperson found confusing. It also was problematic in corporate contexts, as proper client-side encryption meant that the company could no longer scan through employee messages.
It’s still the best way to make e-mail safe, though.
Yeah and you know all these assholes were protected by the cops at all levels
His provider was GMail, who nobody should trust.
This is why they think AI writing emails for them is revolutionary, isn’t it? Because they’re too fucking stupid to articulate a coherent thought.
The rich aren’t better they are just better positioned.
If I write a crappy email, I get reprimanded by the boss, or I lose a contract, or people just stop emailing me.
If a billionaire writes a crappy email, their correspondent still wants their money.
Yeah but it’s also that they’re better positioned, yet definitely worse.
I can’t tell if it’s an encoding issue or just spastic.
It is an encoding issue from older mail servers.
well, some of it is, like the =, but he also misspells tons of stuff, adds spaces all over the place, doesn’t capitalize anything, etc
Yes, but that’s pretty standard for business people.
It’s encoding. I read a detailed explanation the other day, but can’t find the article anymore. = and =n\ are new line indicators that have been truncated by incompetent text replacement by the handlers.
The ID10T encoding scheme
I’m caught between thinking it’s a really stupid billionaire flex (interpret my unfiltered gibberish, peasant) and thinking he was actually just sub-literate.
I’ve known some pretty wealthy people. It’s for sure a mix of both but mostly the latter.
