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The Discourse is a Distributed Denial-of-Service Attack
In September 2016, the security journalist Brian Krebs had his website knocked offline by a botnet called Mirai. Hundreds of thousands of compromised devices, mostly cheap webcams and DVRs manufactured with default passwords that nobody ever changed, all simultaneously requesting his homepage...
A Distributed Denial-of-Service attack works by exhausting resources. It doesn't need to be clever. It just needs to be overwhelming. The target's defenses are simply overrun. The server can't distinguish between legitimate requests and attack traffic because, in a sense, all the traffic is legitimate. The attack succeeds when the system has spent so much energy processing requests that it can no longer serve its actual function.
You're trying to think carefully about a genuinely difficult problem. Maybe you want to understand the actual tradeoffs in housing policy, or AI, or figure out what you believe about consciousness // immigration // Fallout Season 2 // Iran. This takes time. It takes holding multiple ideas in your head simultaneously while following chains of reasoning and sitting with uncertainty long enough to let clarity...well, for lack of a better word, emerge.
William James, writing in 1890, called this "the effort of attention." He noted that sustaining it was one of the hardest things a mind could do. The effort of attention could only be maintained for a few seconds at a time before the mind wandered off to do something else. Sustained concentration was really a series of these efforts, renewed again and again, each time pulling the mind back to the object of focus.
Now imagine trying to do this while someone shouts a new outrage at you every four minutes.
