I’ll go first: r/kitty. One of the hundred grillion cat subs back on Reddit, the culture in this one was you posted a cat picture, and the only word allowed in the title or in any comments or replies was “Kitty.”

Someone is using that subreddit for covert communications, I just know it. Either on the level of “if u/PM_me_your_nostrils posts an orange cat, we attack at dawn!” or there’s some steganography going on with the pictures, but that subreddit was too stupid to be as active as it was.

  • Thrillhouse@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    My city has a local company that rents storage units and they have entirely too many locations relative to the population of our city such that I believe they’re a criminal enterprise. I believe they construct so many new buildings for money laundering purposes and to facilitate human trafficking and drug running out of them.

    Breaking news, I just googled them and one of the owners was convicted in his 20s of trying to sell poached falcons to Saudi Arabian royalty. The plot thickens.

  • CookieOfFortune@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    Insurance companies randomly deny claims just to see if you’ll fight it. If you don’t, they’ll know they can deny more if your claims in the future. This is illegal, but if it’s a “bug” in the software or “AI” than they get away with it. Actually it’s harder with AI since people are more skeptical and have already caught them doing it. However this may be due to the AI being trained on the intentionally buggy software.

    • michaelmrose@lemmy.world
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      They actually do use software to find deniable claims that would theoretically have to be reviewed by a doctor. The doctor pulls up a while page of to be denied claims and theoretically gives them the legally required review all at once in the 30 seconds before he hits the button. There is no reason NOT to feed propensity to accept fake denial into the equation. You could even white wash it by presuming that prior denials that stuck were indication of bad claims and assert you are measuring their proclivity for filing wasteful claims.

    • ultranaut@lemmy.world
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      I believe this based off my limited interactions with insurance companies. I was in a car crash that was 100% caused by the idiot who was fucking with their phone instead of looking at what they were crashing into. Their insurance company tried to stick me with months of rental fees from when my car was being repaired. I eventually filed a complaint with my state insurance commissioner and told their insurance company what’s up, they got right on it after that. Literally, that same day they had multiple people contacting me to say we’re all good now and apologizing about the misunderstanding.

  • GoofSchmoofer@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    Just posted about this in a different thread:

    The US senators: mitch mcconnell, ted cruz, and lindsey graham used fraud to win their respective seats in 2020. All three were in tight races according to the polls but all three won with bigger margins than was to be expected.

    This idea came from a few articles that were discussing this issue a few days after the election, then those articles all just disappeared.

    Maybe the articles disappeared because there was no fraud

    Maybe the articles disappeared because there was?

  • BonesOfTheMoon@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    Elon Musk is paying anti-immigration and anti-trans groups like the Tanron network to spread their rhetoric on social media.

    Oh wait that one is true. Filthy piece of shit.

    • Carrolade@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      I’ve always felt similarly. It’s a hustle most of the time, just pumping out content that’ll get a reliable number of views from a dedicated audience.

  • SkyezOpen@lemmy.world
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    I don’t think this is too far out there but I haven’t seen it around much. Epstein was a honeypot.

    He got an absolutely disgusting sweetheart deal for his initial conviction resulting in him being released for 12 hours a day for work and a 13 month sentence. Now the attorney that cut that deal (illegally, mind you) was Alex Acosta. He was nominated for secretary of labor in 2017 and faced scrutiny for that deal, to which he said he was told epstein “belonged to intelligence” and to “leave it alone.”

    Supporting circumstamtial evidence includes ghislaine maxwells father having known connections to MI6, mossad, and the KGB, though he died in 1991 so that doesn’t necessarily imply much. Additionally, the FBI has HARD FUCKING EVIDENCE including tapes which doubt less contain CSAM, yet nobody has actually been arrested as a result.

    The issue is that this relies on taking Acosta at his word, and he’s kind of a huge piece of shit. It could be possible that he was buddies with epstein and gave him a deal and covered up the evidence because he was involved too, and presumably enough powerful people in government were involved to keep everything quiet.

    Sounds crazy when spelled out, but it’s hard to imagine why else nothing would come of the mountains of evidence that probably followed the raids, or why epstein wasn’t closely watched after his initial conviction.

  • noughtnaut@lemmy.world
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    So many people believe that Covid was a way to scare us all indoors, so they could change batteries in all the birds.

    That’s preposterous.

    Birds use rechargeables, that’s why they’re always sitting on the power lines. Like, duh, wake up sheeple.

    • bi_tux@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      no, you don’t understand, the feds invented the perpetum mobile, birds only sit on power lines to confuse people like you!

  • Stern@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    Personal reddit conspiracy theory as to why image hosting is on site:

    1. r/fatpeoplehate exists, does its thing (hating fat people)
    2. They get some images removed from imgur, the image host du juor of reddit at the time.
    3. They go on the offensive and start harassing fat imgur workers.
    4. The subreddit gets banned.
    5. Under a year later, reddit puts in image uploading.

    My theory is that 3 resulted in imgur hitting up reddit and threatening to block the site if they didn’t reign in fatpeoplehate. Reddit did, by 4, because the alternative was no images and that would absolutely fuck reddit up. This in turn leads to 5 to prevent that powerplay again.

    • andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works
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      Probable. And Reddit didn’t want to do so initially because, of many reasons, this way they also offload the liability on Imgur.

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    6 months ago

    Despite being one of the highest earning movies of all time, no body watched James Cameron’s Avatar.

    • FourPacketsOfPeanuts@lemmy.world
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      I have never seen so much money spent on something so boring and predictable. Don’t get me started on Avatar 2, that was a 3 hour water simulation that still somehow managed to be naff because of annoying cartoony characters.

      My pet (very) silly theory is that both were a cover for military investment in fluid dynamics simulations and they had to hide hours of 3d renders and water simulations in plain sight.

    • Brewchin@lemmy.world
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      I was dragged along to see it at the cinema in the (then) new 3D format (versus the old red/blue glasses).

      Took me 10 minutes to realise the story is Pocahontas, so I’ve always thought of it as Pocahontas Smurfs. And the 3D, while a cool novelty, gave me motion sickness something fierce.

      While clearly no money was spent on the script, it did move animation technology and adoption along quite a bit.

      Gobsmacked a sequel was made.

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      I watched it in theaters six times. I love that movie. Sure, it’s the same story as like 6 other movies, but it’s got big sexy blue aliens.

    • kamenLady.@lemmy.world
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      I never watched Avatar, because i know how it will be. There’s only a certain amount of special effects that can keep me focused on something that lacks in all other areas.

    • CheeseNoodle@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      iirc last check it was about 50/50 people vs bots. The problem is people running bot farms or AI generated channels know exactly how to tailor content to the various algorithms used by big social media companies and thus actual human content is actively burried.

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    6 months ago

    Conspiracies like flat earth are put in the spotlight to make real conspiracies look stupid.

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    6 months ago

    That covid hijacks people’s brains with a parasite that makes them act like it doesn’t exist or isn’t a big deal if it does.

    I don’t actually think it’s true, it’s just that if it were, nothing would be different.

  • hperrin@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    They build our houses specifically to be inefficient at staying cool, then they sell us AC units and power to cool down our inefficient houses. They must be stopped.

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      6 months ago

      I’m sure my grandpa who built my house didn’t have a clue on climate efficiency lol. Nowadays in the country I live in, it’s mandatory to build efficient buildings

    • bi_tux@lemmy.world
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      Not in my europe (that’s because even our modern houses are at least 50 years old)

  • RegalPotoo@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    Not mine, but there is a certain compelling logic to this: https://bruces.medium.com/the-mysterious-visit-of-mr-babbage-by-bruce-sterling-2017-7c941028c4d8

    tl;dr - accepted history is that Charles Babbage designed a series of mechanical computers in the mid 1800s, and the underlying theory behind them would go on to influence work a century later when the technology had caught up to the idea, but they were never built. There are a bunch of coincidences and unexplained meetings that suggest that maybe he sold his plans to Italy who then built one of his designs in secret. This is also supported by modern attempts to build a computer from his plans - there was 1 measurement wrong across tens of thousands of parts, and it worked perfectly. Babbage was a skilled engineer but to get all that correct, on the first go, entirely from theory is maybe a bit much