I'll give you a little more nuance than the previous reply. The intended purpose of hearings like this is as a prelude to legislating. A congressional committee brings in experts of various sorts so that representatives can ask questions and gather information. From there, they would presumably go about crafting legislation to address a problem. It is true that in modern times these hearings have mostly devolved into theater, a way for representatives to haul someone into a public setting and yell at them to score political points, or to draw attention to a particular pet issue. Legislation still often follows, but the legislation is more likely to be theater itself, what are referred to as "messaging bills." Representative X gets to tell their constituents that they care about an issue, brought those responsible in front of congress and gave them a piece of the reps mind, and then proposed legislation to tackle the issue, but it was held up by the other party, but you should vote for me because I am taking action on this issue you care about.

It is also worth mentioning that Congress also has an "oversight" function to serve as a "check" on the other branches of government, the executive and judiciary. In that capacity, Congress can get records and demand testimony from the executive branch (they usually don't go after the judiciary) about things the executive is doing, mostly to draw attention to bad behavior to put pressure on the executive to change, though Congress does have some tools like legislation and particularly budget controls they can use force executive policy changes.

This particular hearing was in front of the House Oversight Committee, so the "purpose" was to conduct oversight of the military and CIA over their handling of UFOs or whatever. One of the questions the "whistleblower" was asked was about how this secret alien tech reverse engineering program was funded - Congress sets and controls all of the federal agency budgets, so in what way has the military or CIA or whoever been able to move money Congress appropriated around such that they could fund this super secret program? Of course, our "whistleblower" totally knows the answer to this but just can't actually say right now for "reasons." Presumably, if Congress cared and actually believed this shit, they could include language in the budget bills to close whatever loophole exists and/or require the Pentagon or CIA or whoever to disclose information about this program.

But watch them do nothing, because this was probably more of a stunt to rile up the conspiracy minded than it was anything substantive.

Interesting piece. Definitely worth a reading the whole thing, but here is Bing AI's summary:

Reddit’s decline: The author argues that Reddit is becoming less relevant and more generic as it tries to squeeze its users and moderators for profit. He compares Reddit to a dying mall that is losing its cultural middle class to decentralized platforms.

Enshittification: The author explains the concept of enshittification, which is how platforms attract and then exploit their users and businesses. He gives examples of how Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, and Google have followed this pattern.

Moderators’ resistance: The author describes how Reddit’s volunteer moderators are obstructing and sabotaging Reddit’s attempts to enshittify the platform. He says that moderators are the ones who create and curate the content that attracts users, and that Reddit is losing their trust and cooperation.

Fediverse’s rise: The author predicts that Reddit’s users and moderators will eventually migrate to the Fediverse, which is a network of independent and interoperable social media sites. He says that the Fediverse offers more freedom, authenticity, and sanity for online discussions.

The problem with this theory is that they could have done two tiered pricing. Reddit could have charged TPA developers one price and the LLM trainers a much higher price for API access. In fact, I believe that is exactly what Reddit is doing, they just haven't been public about what they are trying to charge the LLMs. The Verge asked Spez about whether the LLM folks are biting on this and what that price would be, he just responded that they are "in talks."

If Reddit didn't want to kill TPAs, they also could have given them a year or so to figure out their business models, rather than the 30 days they were given. Hell, Reddit could have backed down at any point and extended the time period for implementing charges.

If Spez thinks he's going to make money off LLMs, I think he's delusional. The OpenAIs, Googles, and Metas out there have already used the Reddit data to train their models. That ship has sailed. The focus in the LLM world now is making better models, more compact models, refining their answers and making them more accurate, etc. The days of throwing vast amounts of random data at these models is probably over. For GPT 5, OpenAI is probably not looking to spend 50 million on new Reddit comments. Instead they will spend that to hire experts to revise GPT 4s outputs and use that as training data.

Rogan's been a dickhead for decades. Here he is appearing on Alex Jone's show Infowars back in 2010. According to Alex Jones, him and Rogan are great buddies and talk/text all the time.

Note, the podcast I linked is called KnowledgeFight and is two comedian types covering Infowars. Just letting you know if you listen to that you won't be exposed to a straight feed of Infowars nonsense, you'll have the filter of two smart and funny guys giving context and breaking things down in between clips.

In 2006 I was named Time's Person of the Year. Today I selected to moderate my first subreddit.

This describes me as well, curious about the fedaverse, but not so much that I'd actually go through the trouble to look into it, especially with the, in retrospect completely inaccurate, comments on reddit dismissing mastadon/lemmy/kbin as "too complicated." The blackout got me to break my reddit habbit and create a lemmy account. Now I'm trying out Kbin.

What I think is really important is that Kbin/Lemmy are fun and exciting new projects. I didn't just find a Reddit replacement, I found something new with a vision and that people are invested in and are actively building from the ground up, and I feel a desire to contribute what I can. For the first time in a long time I am excited about new thing on the internet. I didn't realize how much the corporate consolidation of social media had turned it into a drag. I used to be active on Reddit in various communities, but in the last few years had turned into a lurker, mindlessly scrolling repetitive content to kill time. But being part of the Kbin/Lemmy communities is actually fun. Maybe its just me, but I think that might be a big part of Reddit's eventual downfall. If Reddit and Kbin/Lemmer were simply equivalents, I could imagine eventually going back to Reddit. But their not, here real people are talking and building communities, on Reddit corporations are trying to make money off bot farmed content and the illusion of open communities. I just can't imagine myself going back to the latter.

Twitter blocked links Mastadon for a hot minute calling them spam or unsafe or something. IIRC they backed down after a couple of days. Reddit has already been getting shit press for the last couple of weeks, tech journos are watching this all unfold closely, is Reddit dumb enough to take an action that is blatantly censorship and anticompetitive? It would be totally unspinable.

If they do that, it'll tell you a lot about reddits thinking here. Spez current position is that the people complaining are a small minority and this will all blow over soon. If Reddit really believes that, then they best course of action is to let the complainers post their Lemmy/Kbin links, avoid a fresh round of bad press, and the lemmy/Kbin users will be gone in a couple of weeks and the reddit user base will remain largely intact. If Reddit views the risk of a mass migration to be a real and existential threat to their business, despite what they are saying publicly, then blocking Lemmy/Kbin links would make sense as a last ditch effort to keep their user base of casual users ignorant of popular alternatives, bad press being a necessary cost worth paying to try to retain the user base they need to sell for their ipo. All for that assumes Reddit is behaving rationally though, which Spez has shown isn't a safe assumption.

Some More News, the podcast and YouTube show, has a great episode on this called "Are Rich people OK?". Basically, they dive into all the research suggesting that getting rich basically breaks people's brains. As relevant here, rich people tend to believe that they are rich because they are super smart, and that leads to them thinking any decisions they make must be correct because how could they be wrong?

The Some More News episode discusses this study which stuck with me

One experiment by psychologists at the University of California, Irvine, invited pairs of strangers to play a rigged Monopoly game where a coin flip designated one player rich and one poor. The rich players received twice as much money as their opponent to begin with; as they played the game, they got to roll two dice instead of one and move around the board twice as fast as their opponent; when they passed “Go,” they collected $200 to their opponent’s $100.

In various ways — through body language and boasting about their wealth, by smacking their pieces loudly against the playing board and making light of their opponents’ misfortune — the rich players began to act as though they deserved the good fortune that was largely a result of their lucky roll of the dice.

At the end of the game, when researchers asked the rich players why they had won the game, not one person attributed it to luck.

“They don’t talk about the flip of the coin. They talk about the things that they did. They talk about their acumen, they talk about their competencies, they talk about this decision or that decision,” that contributed to their win, Piff said in an interview with host David Brancaccio.