Itty53

@Itty53@kbin.social
0 Post – 123 Comments
Joined 1 years ago

itty53 everywhere but twitter.

Actually Prigozhin is arguably waaayyyy worse. Putin is a ruthless warlord just like Prigozhin, yes. They have equally virulent ideologies, yep.

But Putin is a politician first and Prigozhin is 100% not. Say what you want of Putin but deep down he still gives a shit about projecting certain images of control, law, etc -- he still values the opinion of certain international communities. He is still the leader of a government, not just a battalion or an army.

Prigozhin doesn't give a shit about any of that, he is a simple and ruthless warlord without any pretense of governance at all, who only understands force and who has no qualms about being open in his toxic ideologies.

I think it's extraordinarily unlikely Prigozhin actually accomplishes any of his own goals towards Russia because he isn't a politician and he's just a thug, but I also think it's equally unlikely Putin's Russia recovers from this. Wagner was Putin's pitbull. They were virtually the entirety of professional real soldiers Russia had under its command. No more pit bull changes things dramatically. We can easily expect a social "downgrade" of Russia's status as superpower in the eyes of other nations. That leaves some big doors open for China, India, Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, and of course, the United States.

We may be on the cusp of a second break up of the USSR, further breaking Russia down into disparate nationstates. That possibility offers a lot of problems on its own. It's no longer a question of "rogue warlord gains control of russian nukes", now its "russian nukes don't exist, now those nukes belong to 15 new whatever-istan nations, each without any pre-existing relationships or treaties". That's scarier. Doubly so because in that big muck of former Russian states, Wagner could still be around in the middle of it with the biggest dick on the block. He'd predictably go Atilla, march through every one of them and conscript every dude over 16 to fight. And history tells us over and over just how those situations end: global-scale wars. Conqueror types never stop, they just keep conquering until they get stopped.

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I gotta be honest, I am all for world governments encouraging and yes, facilitating billionaires to hurt each other in one-on-one combat. Sell tickets and snacks why not. Pay per view. Just give the money to government services.

What with estate taxes, I would think it's potentially quite a valuable use of a goverment's time.

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Not enough people point out he has bot farms at this disposal.

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-04-12/musk-is-off-the-twitter-board-of-directors-the-tesla-twitter-bot-army-marches-on

Old news, predates Twitter. His popularity is wildly over estimated. It's inflated. It's fake. Always was meme.

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Yup. Remember this when they tout how threads "already has millions of users". They're all zombie accounts.

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No joke, start digging into the guys who made ancient aliens and not too long after you start seeing Nazi shit in their past. Like explicitly so, not tangentially related, not "neo" but actual Nazis. Historical revisionism is literally the basis of the show, so you shouldn't be surprised that the main players are Holocaust deniers.

Wanna know who wrote the book the show is based on? It wasn't Von Daniken. He only wrote the first, unsuccessful draft. Utz Utermann rewrote the second draft that actually became very popular. Guess where he was from? Guess what he was doing during WW2? Writing propaganda for the Hitler Youth and working as the editor for Nazi newspapers. I'm dead serious.

Ancient Aliens is just soft selling literal, actual mystic Nazism and it always, always, always has been.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm\_Utermann

That dude 100% deserved it. Not for anything he said but for being a tech career guy and wiring his house up so hard he couldn't open it without Alexa. He wouldn't have been able to open it without wifi either.

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https://wallethub.com/edu/states-most-least-dependent-on-the-federal-government/2700

That's a better study honestly. I won't be trusting an article written by a journalist with a mononym, thanks .. that article you listed puts California as the single most dependent state, and that's absurd. There's no study there, it's just the mononym journalist's very poorly organized citations..

And the study I linked does demonstrate that red states are more dependent on the federal government than blue states, by ten ranks on average.

Edit that's actually just a crappy blog and that journalist isn't a journalist at all, she's a video game blogger. Yeah.

Unreal. You must have gone to like page 12 of Google results to find one that gave you California as the worst owner, and without any irony at all that blog you linked is called "balancing everything". FFS talk about disingenuous "sharing a source".

His name is actually John Francis Bongiovi and at the time that's what he went by. It was 3 years later he formed Bon Jovi.

Only because I hate the "that guys name was ..." format.

Also fun fact, Bon Jovi is named such because John Bongiovi wanted people to pronounce his surname correctly, the exact same thing Chef "Boy-ar-Dee" Boiardi did decades prior.

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Counter point: Fallout 4 has you searching for your kidnapped son. I'm a father, in actuality. So to me that's an imperative too, but it didn't stop me from building skyscrapers in the interim. There was no real death clock, so I really don't get your criticism there.

Shit, final fantasy 7 is one of the greatest games of all time and that asteroid will sit there in the sky as long as you let it. You're reaching hard. The more I think on it, nearly every open world game has some imperative story point and they'll happily wait for you to get there. You get tuberculosis in RDR2 and you will live forever as long as you avoid the last mission. This isn't uncommon at all.

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Still not free speech at all. You're pointing out the difference between being able to speak freely and being provided an audience. There are no nations in history or philosophers in humanity which supposed the existence of a human right to provide an audience to everyone.

But again, YouTube isn't a free speech platform. The public sidewalk is, YouTube isn't. They have no obligation to provide you anything at all.

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Tech startups of all kinds are being devalued the last 12 months. The tech sector was always heavily based in speculation and so as the markets recoil, the tech sector was going to feel it the hardest. People have been predicting that for years, literally.

The reddit devaluation falls in line with all that, not really the migration at all. Guys I hate to be the bearer of bad news but Fidelity's valuation experts don't give one shit about the happiness of the users, and only give half a shit about the number of them -- which, that number comes from reddit themselves on a "trust me bro" basis, like the user counts of any service. Let me even go one step further: the louder you complain about reddit, the more important you make reddit look, the more valuable you make reddit to investors. You have to re-frame your thinking when considering markets like this: users are not customers, they're products. "Look at the reaction of all those users" is what this migration boils down to, to those valuation experts.

On the exact same note you can bet on the rising popularity of any given celebrity by the number of their detractors. See a new starlet getting hated on by everyone on Twitter? They're going to sell more albums because of it. Every time.

Edit: Just like the trolls, your best bet to change the landscape of social media is to ignore the bad actors, including the social medias themselves. Don't engage with them and don't advertise for them by talking about them. Kbin's second largest magazine is RedditMigration. You're defining this place by the continued existence of reddit. Guys: Move. On. Let it die.

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"Fairly decent" is a bit of a stretch. Panels come up, features sold to you that won't work and will endanger your life. "Fairly" standard for luxury rides amiright?

"Decent". Hmph.

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For the record, OP posted the article title and not a question of their own.

They are absolutely no where close to a virtual monopoly. Anyone can upload and stream content online, and probably millions of websites allow it now, without exaggeration. What they have is a prefab audience. There are no considerations needed for free speech whatsoever.

If you want to influence their moderation habits, you need to be their customer or better yet, their shareholder. As just another leeching user, your voice means nothing to them and frankly that isn't problematic. 10,000 leeches won't influence them the same as one paying customer. I can guarantee that. And again, if you're just a leech then it really is no wonder why they wouldn't listen as a for-profit business.

There are troubling bits about lots of platforms and media outlets and companies, but that's not an excuse to twist up legal terminologies like monopoly or free speech in order to make weak criticisms. Doing so weakens the framework of law more than it does influence YouTube at all. Because that framework of law is only as valid as we use it. Countless examples of that problem abound - virtually the entirety of the Trump presidency is an example of why misuse of the law in common discussions among people is actually very dangerous. That's been a sticking point for me for a long time, and it's more important as years go by. So I'm gonna call it out, especially when it's happening on "my" team.

If you're gonna make accusations where we actually have legal recourse (like monopolies) then you need to understand them. There is no where close to a real monopoly in YouTube.

Or put biologically, virtually all fauna are just various advanced forms of flatworm.

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"Disrespectful" is absolutely the wrong word. I don't owe cops shit. Certainly not respect.

I act mature around them for my own benefit, not to satiate their need for "respect". What the average person gives cops isn't respect, its fear. I respect cops the way I respect guns, treat them poorly and shit you don't want will happen. That speaks far far less of police officers than it ever rightly should.

Fuck the police, I want to speak with an attorney.

Hold up, the problem with jailbait is it was scantily clad little children in sexuality suggestive situations. That was the problem. Whether it was technically legal or not it's irrelevant, it was intended to sexualized children.

It's "not a good look" because it's abhorrent trash meant to skirt child porn laws. Was it illegal? No. Was it just advertisers who had a problem with it? Also no. Users thought it was abhorrent too. There were user campaigns to ban the sub all the same, who do you think kept notifying the media?

On reddit you'll see reply counts reflecting replies of any user, including shadowbanned ones. You won't see shadowbanned comments though. That's why you see 3 count but not the comments. Chances are those comments are from bots who were shadowbanned.

But it's silly crap like that that matters to advertisers. NSFW actually is the word "fuck", "asshole", etc. You might be able to say that at work, not everyone can without repercussion.

And that's not a stretch at all, it's why network television won't let you say either of those words either. Not next to their Ford and Samsung advertisements.

The entire premise of NSFW is silly to me. Like no one has an obligation to make sure YOU are safely browsing at work. Get back to work.

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Laugh all you want but programmers have just been glorified "people who can Google really well" for years now, that's exactly what we're already describing here. And we do get paid well.

Fun fact, Michael Crichton (that one) coined that, Gell-Mann amnesia after Murray Gell-Mann, who had nothing to do with it.

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Given the climate (pun) of politics at the time he was alive and playing that role, and given that hindsight has taught us An Inconvenient Truth was more political than it was based in science, and given that Crichton's argument was that environmentalism had to be apolitical in order to ever be effective .... yeah I'm not a climate change denier but neither was Crichton.

Crichton was a Democrat. And he was right, Al Gore's movie was about fear-driven politics, not actionable goals and plans.

Go look at how climate scientists described that movie. "The basic truth and it's inconvenience remains" one researcher was quoted saying. Tacitly admitting everything beyond the basic truth of the film was inaccurate. Go on, check out what retrospectives have to say about it. There's a lot of em.

Again, Crichton was right, and he was absolutely not in denial of climate change. He was against using social problems with scientific solutions as political ammunition in the fear cannons.

Bottom line is any time someone insists a complex problem has a solution as simple and clear cut as "vote Democrat", they're wrong. More wrong than they are right, especially given any timeline longer than 4 years. And that's exactly what you're doing here. "Crichton deviated from the party line on the environment ergo he's just a 'denier'". There's far more nuance in this life than that.

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I named two outstanding open world games recognized as being in the top 5 games of all time that utilize the exact same plot mechanic, either the criticism applies to them (and you aren't) or its invalid criticism.

You bring up immersion... rdr2 is considered the most immersive game ever. Rightly so. You still have imperatives you can ignore.

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I think there's definitely some room for interpretation here, some games suffer from basically being brigaded, and this OP actually points that out. Some games are cool to hate. CP2077 was one of those. Skyrim wasn't. People forgave it for a lot because it wasn't cool to hate.

Look at Horizon Zero Dawn. Same story. That game has incredible game play, some of the most creative and new ways to do it. But certain people - ahem - brigaded reviews and made it cool to hate. Which sucks because that game has an amazingly unique combat system. Really nailed an action based trapping and hunting instead of just overwhelming force or stealth.

Conversely people adored MGS5 and to be completely honest it was generic at best. Go figure it featured a hot naked woman with jiggle physics who couldn't speak and would die if she put clothes on.

I just can't fathom buying a luxury car and coping with "well it works and gets me where I need to go". If I'm spending that kinda change on a car, and also paying for its services in ongoing fashion apart from the car payment itself ... it better do more than just "get me there".

A fake person affected public opinion by interacting with real people, which is only made possible by society's current relationship with social media. This was done presumably to incite and rage bait for the opposition and supposedly by an outside nation actor, making this an act of cyber warfare. One of many we've seen, and more each day. And guess what? The way you combat that kind of information war is by informing the public, especially that circle of people who actually build these technologies (soooo this sub, pretty much).

It is absolutely not redundant to call it a technology topic. How society interacts with and is affected by technology is an exceedingly important topic within technology and it's continued development it we want it to be for the betterment of humanity and not the enslavement of it. Technology isn't just how the electrons move, that's literally only a teensy tiny part of it.

That game is like the gold standard of fps for me. There isn't a better game yet. That level, you know the one, the first time you play it is something kind of magic.

Just an inbox that forwards to Elon so he can laugh at inquiries. Jokes aside, they moved on this one because she was caught as a fake in big and loud fashion (WaPo) and if Twitter didn't, they couldn't keep up any appearance of bipartisanship. WaPo would've just beat the drum louder. This way Twitter hardly even has to comment, and they can deny they promoted the account.

Did you know there are books? They're alright. Nothing terribly earth shaking about em but they're fair.

Alcohol solvent can make this worse depending on the adhesive. It can just spread the stuff and thin it out. Someone else suggested oil, that's the ticket. Bit of olive oil on a rough cloth brings it right up. Wd40 was also suggested, same idea. You want it to move easily, not dissolve.

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"American companies" smh, let me introduce you to "The City of London", not to be confused with London the city in England.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/City\_of\_London

The UK has a metropolitan region called "The City" (of London) where banks get to basically play without rules. It is for that reason the financial capital of the entire world.

The UK has a square mile dedicated to white collar crime and fraud and it exists because the international wealthy were more powerful than the monarchy ever could be, let's not pretend Americans are the ones who gave up. This is a very long, very old battle - older than America the nation itself.

Any kind of tag you use to convey "sensitive content that may be offensive" will always become a meme. That's how human nature works and history proves it over and over.

Examples abound. Skulls and cross bones, the nuclear / atomic symbol, X ratings becoming XXX tags in porno titles, Parental Advisory Explicit Content .... this list keeps going on the closer you look. If a symbol, or a meme, is used to denote a warning, it will be co-opted by a subset of folks who will use it in ironic fashion. NSFW tags, "trigger warning" - all of these in the end are doomed from the very start to, at least in part, fail and have the exact opposite effect.

There's an interesting problem for nuclear researchers these days: how do you label a thing as dangerous in such a way that societies in ten thousand years will still recognize what it means? Because some of the shit they're toying with will be. They gotta think about it. Like even today the image of a skull means something very different depending on the culture that image is from.

Not every open world game needs to be infinite, right? There was no base building mechanic... but why would it need one? There was one in Fallout 4, but it was pretty much entirely ignorable and only offered annoyance. A subset of people wanted to play the sims. There was no base building in GTA games either. Most open worlds don't have such a mechanic.

What I found it has is replay value. You can play that game multiple ways and it is markedly different. Same thing with Witcher 3, there's no infinite game mechanic. You start over and try different things. People loved that game and frankly CP2077 followed exactly the same framework, just "with guns". Why is it a problem with CP2077? Couldn't possibly be because there's a prominent trans character, or a pretty girl who won't sleep with your male character ...

I think the near clone that Cp2077 is of Witcher 3 really drives home the point. People didn't have a problem with the game, but certain groups have made it cool to nitpick one and not the other.

Nothing. But Weinstein produced all his movies, and Weinstein makes money every time they stream. He owns the IP, not Smith. And more are in the works. All the while Smith is downplaying his association with the guy. That kind of thing happens all over. It's just people making opportunity out of catastrophe, a very time honored tradition in human society. The fact is Smith cares more about continuing to make his money playing the same character he has since the 90s - despite a sick, disgusting rapist profiting from it every time - shows just how out of touch with the way businesses and money works that most people are. When he goes on stage and calls Weinstein a rapist gargoyle and nods along with the crowd, keep all that in mind. He's still actively working to earn that gargoyle money because it earns Kevin Smith a lot of money as well.

We like to think we're the ones in touch with reality, but realities aren't mutually exclusive. When we say wealthy people live in a "different reality" we're not saying they live in something that isn't reality. It is. For them. Not us. And understanding that is key to empowering us to change those realities.

This doesn't at all line up with the rumored initial plans of it being a Sony exclusive ...

It used to be. It isn't. He was pointing out that it's irrelevant today, and he's not wrong.

There are no solutions to climate change that are contingent on a particular party being in power in a single nation when the problem isn't confined to a single nation. Making the environment about Democrats over Republicans is wildly dangerous because it breeds contentment: people think they did their part in electing the "right" person and stop giving a damn. Politics isn't going to offer a solution to climate change, but they'll certainly tell you they've got em.

Tell me you're okay with being lied to in order to be made afraid, tell me you're okay with science being misrepresented for political brownie points, and I'll tell you you're no better than a grubby politician yourself, because that's all that standpoint serves. Political brownie points. It's "ends justify the means" logic. "Its fine to fear monger and lie and misrepresent facts as long as you're doing so on support of the right ideology" is wildly stupid and dangerous reasoning.

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Morrowind and Oblivion don't get enough credit. Skyrim stood on the shoulders of giants.

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Nah, the art of being stubborn and not giving a shit will just come back to the fore. It's a lost art. So many people think it's an activity, not giving a shit, but it's the exact opposite. Its just a state of mind. There's a lot of Christians out there that would laugh just as hard at this as anyone because they know Hobby Lobby isn't their church in the first place, and they recognize people who treat it like one are being blasphemous already.

That's fantastic, good for you.