SnotFlickerman

SnotFlickerman , 7 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

I too like to listen to the political opinions of Fenton Mulley from Home Movies.

https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/pictrs/image/67f7fa9d-bd5b-468f-8105-0e643feaee46.webp

(To be clear, this isn't a dig at Sam Seder. I loved him in Home Movies and on The Majority Report)

SnotFlickerman , 7 months ago

to a lesser extent the NYT

I think you may have misunderstood the question.

SnotFlickerman , 7 months ago

https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu

More than just a former Valve employee.

SnotFlickerman , 7 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

The NYT is pretty left leaning

I think you're living in an alternate reality, mate.

...I mean just look at their Lifestyle section. It's clearly aimed at the kind of person who owns "a summer house in the Hamptons." You can hardly call yourself "left" when your main audience is firmly the capitalist class in Manhattan.

The same NYT that is currently sanewashing Trump? The same NYT that sat on the story about the NSA spying on US citizens for over a year at the request of the Bush administration? That NYT? I say this with all sincerity and intend no offense, but what the living fuck are you talking about?

SnotFlickerman , 7 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

In 2020 his dementia hadn't progressed so far.

It would be really hard to run this guy in 2028 without having to hide him the entire time. He's slipping and even the sanewashing from the media can't really hide it all. It's part of why he's in hiding right now, they know he can no longer hold onto ideas long enough to make it through a speech. He was always relatively incoherent... but it's really become painful and out of control when he's in public speaking.

It's already elder abuse, and it would be a hard sell to make it happen in 2028, no matter how much his addled mind might want that because he simply cannot accept losing. Which is why he's dumped all his energy and money into cheating. It's also why the party dumped everything into a VP who will do what he's told, and hit Trump with the 25th amendment sometime soon after a "successful" election of Trump. They know it's Trumps last dance and he's out of control.

SnotFlickerman , 7 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

Great talk, but I'm getting a little tired of Doctorow's calls to action that result in nothing but crickets from the community at large. He's written/spoken numerous calls to action for various issues since the early 2000's.

It's not Doctorow's fault, I think it's rather that the majority of the tech community isn't listening. Doctorow can talk until he's blue in the face and it won't matter if the larger community doesn't actually give a shit about his ideas.

SnotFlickerman , 7 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

That's fair, but he has indeed been around a long time, and is even portrayed as wearing goggles and a hero-cape in tech-comic XKCD.

He was the main editor at zine-turned-blog BoingBoing in the early 2000's. I hope you enjoy finding out more about him, he's got good tech philosophies.

SnotFlickerman , 7 months ago

Well for one, change will never come from waiting for "leadership" to take control.

Change will only ever come from the workers organizing together from the ground up, waiting for someone else to give you the framework will always result in a framework that binds you.

SnotFlickerman , 7 months ago

Jony "It Doesn't Need To Work, It Just Needs To Look Cool" Ive strikes again.

SnotFlickerman , 7 months ago

I am altering the design. Pray I do not alter it any further.

SnotFlickerman , 7 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

Am I the only one who has noticed that direct-to-consumer sales are floundering and business-to-business sales are up?

They're just planning on bailing on the consumer market entirely. Expect things like your shopping to be more ad-supported than ever, because they know regular-ass-people don't have disposable cash.

Businesses on the other hand, have loads of money to spend, so we're seeing the economy twist itself into knots to just support businesses buying and selling to other businesses, with taking care of the humans doing the work as an afterthought to be handled by someone else (see: Walmart educating their employees on how to apply for Food Stamps). Why worry about making sales to consumers when businesses have boatloads of money to spend on "services." So many businesses farm out their "labor" to third party companies these days, everything from payroll to janitorial.

They already have a plan, they are in the middle of executing it. Our futures will be ad supported, much like One Million Merits of Black Mirror fame. Expect all four walls of your 'apartment' to be covered in ads you can't avoid just so you can afford an apartment. Expect ads and bullshit everywhere to "support" your life while closing doors to consumer access to almost anything. They don't like poor people having access to information, and right now the only thing they have to fight access to information is disinformation and misinformation. They'll drop those pretenses once the consumers are locked out.

"What will happen if their employees are too poor to buy anything?" Nothing, they don't give a damn that their employees are too poor to eat. They stopped marketing to consumers, they're marketing to other businesses which have money. They're genuinely not concerned with what happens to their employees.

"You'll own nothing and be happy" is a threat, just not in the way stupid right-wing capitalists think it is.

Example: NVIDIA is making way more money selling fleets of GPU's aimed at AI processing to businesses than they are selling video cards to the consumer gaming market. Gamers are like "when will GPU prices ever come down?" They won't, gamers are not the key market anymore.

SnotFlickerman , 7 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

https://i.giphy.com/D3OdaKTGlpTBC.gif

A techbros familiarity with Charles Dickens is about on the level of Philomena Cunk's familiarity with him.

SnotFlickerman , 7 months ago

Harvey Birdman 'members.

SnotFlickerman , 7 months ago

I'm pretty sure Michael Reinoehl is well aware.

SnotFlickerman , 7 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

Musk is a real Shooter McGavin so I bet he does eat pieces of shit for breakfast.

https://media.tenor.com/qvgvSlMGzlYAAAAM/happy-gilmore-adam-sandler.gif

SnotFlickerman , 7 months ago

At the time, they also wanted to go after Quakers for terrorism charges, one of the only religous groups who are exempt from being drafted involuntarily into the military because violence is strictly against their religion.

SnotFlickerman , 7 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

I'm not sure I really buy the argument that this could be better for several reasons.

1. The implicit guardrails these companies are going to add which will complicate things.

2. Numerous game-breaking states because you're risking a more traditional Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master problem where your party somehow has failed to ask an NPC the right kind of questions or even consider that they might have information relevant to the campaign. How do you get this information across if the player isn't somehow prompted to attempt it?

3. Baldur's Gate 3 only came out about 4 months before this article. It exists as a counterpoint to the idea that pre-scripted dialogue can reduce replayability. Only if you approach it like Bethesda and you refuse to block your players off from content. I don't think Todd Howard realizes how that philosophy hurts replayability because you can always complete every questline every playthrough. While in a game like BG3, large amounts of the game are locked off based on your character, class, party and choices you make. Certain things you have to replay the whole game to access. There's mountains of replayability in their world of pre-scripted dialogue. It's rather no other company has been willing to put the kind of time, money, effort, and production quality that something like BG3 demands.

I think this AI stuff is a cheap cop-out that uses way too much energy for a weak result. Instead of making better games the system spec requirements will either become insane or all games will be delivered via streaming platforms. They've maxed out graphical fidelity but still need excuses to use "better" hardware. Better game design achieves the same result without the vendor lock-in and absurd hardware/power demands.

SnotFlickerman , 7 months ago

Tech Giants: Don't you want us to bleed your society dry? You're a bad person if you don't.

SnotFlickerman , 7 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

Fucking finally.

I hope this leads to at least the US trying to actually force some kind of regulations on these giant pollution machines.

The Baltimore disaster happened because these vessels essentially always operate in international waters, and it seems like the companies who own them are really reluctant to actually do regular maintenance on them. Instead, they're more than happy for the ships to die in whatever port they're stuck in, and then make that the problem of whatever country/port that ship is in. The ship hit the Baltimore bridge because it was having massive problems staying online.

One could say "Maybe we shouldn't allow broken down ships to port to begin with" but that can become cruel and unusual punishment for their crew. What follows is an example of such a horrific situation.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-56842506

"How do I feel? Like I finally got out of prison. I'm finally going to be rejoined with my family. I'm going to see them again."

It marks the end of an ordeal which has taken its toll on Mohammed's physical and mental health. He was, after all, condemned to a life without power, sanitation or company.

It began in July 2017, when the MV Aman was detained at the Egyptian port of Adabiya. The cargo ship was held because it had expired safety equipment and classification certificates.

It should have been easy enough to resolve, but the ship's Lebanese contractors failed to pay for fuel and the MV Aman's owners in Bahrain were in financial difficulty.

With the ship's Egyptian captain ashore, a local court declared Mohammed, the ship's chief officer, the MV Aman's legal guardian.

This poor man had to live on a ship with no power or facilities for four years.

Anyway, somebody has to start making these companies culpable instead of essentially letting them dump their rotting carcasses of cargo ships wherever they end up stopping. Here's hoping maybe the FBI can make a dent.

SnotFlickerman , 7 months ago

https://i.giphy.com/ocmOXiD6xPDos.gif

SnotFlickerman , 7 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

I mean, hasn't that been evident since January 6th, 2021? When nothing was really done in response, this was a given outcome. It nearly worked before, so why not try again? Haven't numerous loser Republican candidates screamed "rigged" non-stop since then?

Just like how DHS was found to be trying to create terrorist groups out of nothing for Trump, it's pretty clear that large parts of the administrative state will just bend over and start enforcing fascism because it "won." The few people who would resist will quickly be replaced.

SnotFlickerman , 7 months ago

Steve Buscemi as Starscream

https://c.tenor.com/193fJh1_TlsAAAAC/tenor.gif

SnotFlickerman , 7 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

We've got movie sign!

---

Megabyte's voice is just as soothing as I remember.

SnotFlickerman , 7 months ago

Also the Supreme Being in Time Bandits!

SnotFlickerman , 7 months ago

I feel like it's very riffable, but it needs to be done by some folks who really love the series.

SnotFlickerman , 7 months ago

https://c.tenor.com/SC14wFp3uUUAAAAC/tenor.gif

I'm sorry this flew over so many heads here, it was well played.

SnotFlickerman , 8 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

Knowing about how deeply police intimidate, manipulate, and gaslight inmates/people in custody to get these confessions, both confessions should be under deep scrutiny.

"Criminals" intimated into confession is literally just the police refusing to do their actual jobs and using emotional and mental manipulation to "crack the case." They didn't find the killer, they just bullied a plausible suspect into "admitting" they did it.

Fucking sickening.

SnotFlickerman , 8 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

The whole idea that ‘it should have been introduced at trial’

It's almost as if the entire "justice system" is designed to protect a certain class of person while fucking over everyone else. Cue the people so shocked that this "justice system" can easily be abused by people acting in bad faith to enable fascism. People have been brainwashed into believing that the USA isn't just Diet Fascism. Fascism with a pretty face, fascism with "free speech" so the plebes have a steam valve to release their frustration while also being told that protesting is too disruptive so they need to stick to "free speech zones" miles away from what they're protesting. Wild that it's so hard to put together when the original Constitution only allowed land-owning white men to vote.

SnotFlickerman , 8 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

Those moments when you can't decide if someone's username means they're a science nerd or a Venture Bros. fan.

Me_irl:

https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/pictrs/image/ed3b4929-00ac-4150-b4f7-99a1ea66acbd.webp

SnotFlickerman , 8 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

That won't push me to use yt-dlp to just download the fucking video and watch it locally or anything, completely giving up on using their shitty fucking site. VLC has no ads on pause.

SnotFlickerman , 8 months ago

I still am struggling to find articles that actually delve into the technical details of how they're blocking and if it's any more complicated than a DNS-level block or if they're also demanding to block that IP range or what. I want to know who the third parties are and what kind of services they're offering that allow it to be routed around. Damn not being able to speak Portuguese, that's on me.

SnotFlickerman , 8 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

How easy or hard is it to hire a Hitman?

That's the man right there, Officer.

SnotFlickerman , 8 months ago

It’s called Hitman.

There's also a series of science-based, 100% hitman simulator video games of the same name.

SnotFlickerman , 8 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

While I know we all love dunking on the dipshit Musk... the data from Open Secrets isn't exactly compelling that these people deeply materially support Harris over Trump. So they've spent a bit more donating to Harris... the amounts are honestly a drop in the bucket compared to the full budgets of these campaigns and I'm like 90% sure that a number of them are donating to SuperPACs instead so they can donate beyond their max individual contribution. So, personal opinion, misleading and not necessarily indicative of anything at all, as much as I would love to guffaw and point to it as more evidence that Musk is out of touch with even his own workforce.

SnotFlickerman , 8 months ago

they seem to be betting that enough American voters in enough swing states agree that it would be better to be broke than integrated.

That's sadly not a bad bet to be making. It could easily pan out for them.

SnotFlickerman , 8 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

Not even middle America.

I grew up in Eastern Washington state, a place with a lot of farms and farmers. Due to that also a lot of immigrant labor.

I grew up in the "progressive" Pacific Northwest with lots of local businesses that had "English Only" signs, making clear to immigrants that they're not really welcome in such establishments. It hasn't really gotten better.

SnotFlickerman , 8 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

I've lived all over the country, and that distinction means nothing to anyone outside of the Northwest. Sure, it's correct to call it that, if you're being real pedantic, but if you go down South for instance, "Pacific Northwest" means Washington, Idaho, Oregon, and they still consider that region a whole lot more liberal than it actually is.

Secondly, having also lived on the west side of the Cascades... that's less of a distinction than really matters. Like everywhere, it's actually the cities that matter, and outside the cities its as racist and backward as anywhere else.

So I feel pretty confident in calling that the Pacific Northwest in what most average Americans would think of when they considered it. Not to say most Americans suck at geology and geography (that's actually exactly what I'm saying) but I wouldn't think most would be able to point to the Cascades on a map, let alone understand the distinction between the two.

So you're correct in your quibbling, but also in the context of my response to OP, we're talking about a reluctance to call middle America what it is: racist. I would think quibbling about saying "we already knew demographically that they're not progressive" kind of misses that point.

SnotFlickerman , 8 months ago

You know they won't.

SnotFlickerman , 8 months ago

Im surprised he allowed it to get community noted... He will probably have the community note removed because he's such a soft bitch.

SnotFlickerman , 8 months ago

Soon the predatory loan industry will just be the loan industry because poor people won't be able to afford food without one.

SnotFlickerman , 8 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

Vote!!!

...and then have lawfare ratfuckery and the Supremes hand it to Trump anyway...

We gotta be doing way more than just fucking voting. They sure are.

We need to be standing vigilant protecting election workers and the process, too.

SnotFlickerman , 8 months ago

cursed

SnotFlickerman , 8 months ago

Eww, no.

SnotFlickerman , 8 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

The most sinister part of the chaos that Trump brews, honestly, is the deep apathy and antipathy towards politics that seems pervasive in society. Everyone was already tired by capitalism, but post-COVID the grind and the demand has spun ever higher while Trump keeps orchestrating chaos from, well, not even the fucking shadows but more like the toilet at Mar-a-Lago.

It breaks a lot of people, and its fair, they're just scraping by, worrying about their own. They have their own serious problems, medical issues, sorrow, loss, you name it, people are suffering. It's validly hard for anyone to find the time for it and they become disconnected and disoriented.

It's fucking maddening that it works. It feels like humanity never actually left the dark ages.

Anyway, quality Mother Jones article, good breakdown on why a lot of people's memory of the past seems to forget the worst excesses. Explains a lot about the Bush administration, too, really.

SnotFlickerman , 8 months ago

A roundhouse kick to the neck!

SnotFlickerman , 8 months ago

I mean, hasn't it been pretty clear for at least a year now that this is the plan.

They have no other plan, they are just letting Trump go down in flames acting like a fucking idiot because they know they don't plan on not contesting anything. From here on out, every election is going to be lawfared to death (if there even is a real one after this).

SnotFlickerman , 8 months ago

Do Republicans really hate America this much?

It's been over 10 years of this. When hostile foreign nations are constantly angling to hurt Democrats and support Republicans, how can you honestly tell yourself that you're on the right side of this issue.

I'm no fan of the fucking US government, especially because they do the same kind of shit to other countries, but that's the damn point, we're trying to fucking do better and the people who maybe could do better for us are being ratfucked by hostile foreign governments who always suspiciously support Republicans. I get that a lot of Democrat senators and house members are scum, too, but that leaves a whole large swath of the party (especially at the local levels!) who are not.

I just feel like if it was clear nations that had vested interest in our nations failure on the national stage was always supporting Democrats, I'd be a little skeptical of it. The fact that Republicans aren't screams volumes.

SnotFlickerman , 8 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

The audit details and whitepaper details are far beyond my capabilities to understand. Can anyone with knowledge of the field tell us about the findings? If you would be so kind, please and thank you.

Good on them for getting an audit and making the code publicly auditable, but I really would like to hear an opinion from some folks who are more involved in cryptography on whether this is Discord being genuine and doing the right thing, or is it Discord trying to use Public Relations and weasel words to make it seem like they're doing the right thing.

It's just hard to trust a private company's motives sometimes, but that doesn't mean they're not capable of doing the right thing. Thanks to anyone who can give some input on this.