Morning, I hope everyone had a nice weekend. Let’s start here.
I also tried the Google one out myself and couldn’t get the Trump thing to show up, though it’s possible it location based. There’s nothing new about this kind of thing happening, it’s been a thing with many stories for probably around 10 years. One of the differences now as opposed to then is there are more ways to access the information and not all of the providers of those access points are ideologically aligned. It isn’t necessarily that the companies as a whole are pushing or blocking one side of a story - or in this case just wiping an historical event - sometimes it’s just who’s in control of the lever. That could be a specific department who have groupthink or an individual activist who pushes an update no one notices for long enough for it to be effective. These people most of the time believe they’re doing the right thing, being good, keeping others safe, even if that comes from a massive certain smugness. They rarely think beyond that self righteousness and consider what’s down stream of them perverting their responsibility for people’s access to reality outside of what they see with their own eyes. Most normies don’t know they have to be careful and you betray their innocent trust when you lie to them.
That things like this happen is why open source is more desirable. If you can see the code, there is always an autist somewhere who will point out if something sketchy is happening. You can then look into it yourself and decide if you want to change your access point or not. This system isn’t perfect and trusted sources can become untrusted sources, it’s a constant process to keep things updated. For example at the moment I’m using an AI called Venice, it’s open source and so far has been pretty decent for what I need, you’ll see in the video that once I’ve entered the question with my mong typing, it gives me what I need. It won’t be the only place of course, you just have to be aware that this is a thing now.
As usual, weak leadership leading to poor outcomes. My current understanding of this is that it’s a single individual who lodged a complaint that the ‘Crusaders’ nickname was offensive. I’m sure I’ll get the real gen on this soon, as we - SEG - have people within this SQN. They have their own custom Hanged Man shirt, one of the guys served with me in 2 Para before he transferred over. This is actually a similar story to the above, it’s an erasure of history. Deleting something that is no longer convenient, but actually tells a story about why we are where we are today. Do I need to mention the old adage about repeating history? The British armed forces have been around for a very long time, we’ve done some incredible and some sketchy things, that’s all militaries. But because we do our best to record that history and tell those stories to new members of units, in the same way you know your family history, they understand what has gone before them, what the standards are, what they must live up to. Both of the units I was part of have very short histories in British army terms, The Parachute Regiment is just coming up to 80 years and SFSG is about 18, but we still have events and deeds that draw a line of acceptable behaviour. That’s incredibly powerful and one of the reasons our military is as effective as it is. Any time Regimental histories or that Regimental system in general is watered down in this way, even through amalgamation, that system becomes less effective. I’d go so far as to say, regardless of who this individual is, removing this part of the SQN’s history is more damaging than removing the individual making the complaint. You can bin the ‘leader’ making that decision also, unsuitable.
I’m pretty much in agreement here, that looks like AI. Zoom in on the faces of the crowd. In case you’re unaware, even things like Photoshop can do something called ‘generative fill’ now. So in this case you’d take the photo of the old people stood by the car, erase the area you want to change and then tell the program what you want to put there. It’ll then generate a fill for that area based on your prompt. If you don’t like it or it’s not exactly right, you can continue to make different versions adapting your prompt until it’s a workable result. Now I understand that many people of a certain age or professional experience will absolutely understand this, but that’s not who it’s aimed to fool. It’s the Facebook boomers, they fall for this shit every time. They’re basically cannon fodder for AI generated images and due to them still being a massive voter block and captive (FB) audience, they’ll have this shit fired at them all day and it’ll effect their vote.
Now this is a pretty crap version, but what’s available now will fool most casual scrollers and that’s all that matters. We’ve repeated this ad nauseam in Horizon Scan, you MUST develop the ability to notice this stuff, or you’re going to end up effectively blind. You’ll have no idea what’s real and that’s going to cut you adrift from being able to confidently manoeuvre in the world. Of course it’ll get to the point where as a layman you really can’t tell what’s real, but tools will be developed to help do that. The main point is to become comfortable with the knowledge that the world has changed, it’s harder to feel the seabed under your feet - you know when you’re wading into the sea and a wave lifts you off your feet, as you come down your feet are searching for that sand so you know you won’t be carried off - you have to be comfortable in that floating feeling, the sea floor is there, you just need skills and tools to access it - you need to learn to swim.
👆🏻Jacklyn Krol, cannot swim yet. This story is a perfect example of differing cultures, I’d say ‘internet’ culture and ‘normie/NPC’ culture. The first post implies that Elon was either stupid for not knowing it was AI altered or malicious in doing so deliberately and the second outright accuses him of something illegal. But ‘the internet’ knew it was a joke and treated it as such. Elon has taken sides in this election, he’s supporting Trump, so you maybe do have an argument that by sharing it he’s propagating fake news, but that’s where it’s interesting. Elons’ assumption is that this is so obviously fake that if he shares it, people will see the humour (hence his 😂 - a known signal of humour) and since he’s already expressed his personal opinion about Harris he’s not trying to trick anyone. As I said above, you need to be on team internet culture if you want to thrive - read Network State for more on this as it applies to the future.
We live in wild times 😂
Enjoy your day.
Is there more to the name change? This seems to have been done very quickly, at a "relatively" low level of command? Seems drastic for a single complaint.