Back in the early 90s we were told in school that 'The total number of LGBT per capita is less than 10% and that makes it unnatural'
One of the grunge kids raised her hand and said 'I don't think that number is accurate, plenty of states still accept the 'gay panic' defense for murder.'
Teacher gasped like a fish for about 3 mins.
Fuck you Mrs. Saunders, you bigoted piece of shit.
For those that want the Full chain:
The past: Acacia ants protected acacia trees by biting elephants that threatened the tree, living in a symbiosis where the tree feeds them for their guardianship. Lions use acacia trees as perches to hunt and cover to hide in.
Now: Bull headed ants have done significant damage to native ant populations, leaving the trees unprotected. Elephants strip the bark and damage the trees, now they are no longer suitable for perches or hiding. Bull headed ants being invasive do not form the same relationship with acacia trees as acacia ants do.
The result is harder hunting and shrinking hunting grounds for lions, an already stressed species.
This is one facet how authoritarian behavior is unsustainable.
You can only punish victims for so long before those victims pick up a rock and bash their abusers heads in.
Unfortunately it can sometimes take centuries to get to that point.
Good fucking point. Next time I'm out I'm getting a prepaid burner to stick in the bag.
Thanks for the advice.
This is a common problem with dictators: One man's arbitrary gut feelings on 'how society should function' being so ridiculously wrong and dangerous that it never achieves the goals set for it.
Like when China started a campaign to get kids to kill sparrows for 'being lazy and living off the farmer's work', when in reality they were keeping the bug population down and their virtual eradication caused several seasons of crops to be lost to insect voracity.
The high minded ideal of a corrupt and out of touch leader who did not understand ecosystems killed hundreds of thousands of his own people due to misplaced ideals and lack of knowledge.
This happens here too. How many more people would have survived Covid if a certain orange twice-impeached seditionist shitstain didn't convince half the country that wearing a mask was unpatriotic.
Just because we're old don't mean we're wrong.
I remember the first ever popup I got and how it made me fear for the future of the web.
My friends roflcopter'd and said 'it's only a popup'
Now look the fuck where we are now...
As a progressive Christian who hates everything MTG stands for, this is kind of disheartening to hear...
It's not 'insanely paranoid' when it is correct.
Even the really big boys have shit security and almost no one invests in it.
I was called 'insanely paranoid' for not wanting any IoT things in my house even though I am an IT guy.
I told them 'I don't want IoT things in my house BECAUSE I'm an IT guy and know what I'm talking about.'
They ignored me of course, even companies that paid for my opinion and services.
And some paid the price, but funny enough that didn't stop them from insecure practices, it just made them choose another brand of insecure IoT devices to replace the old.
People who only ever know the internet through smartphones will NEVER understand our pain.
They accept the modern ultra-cluttered short attention span theater moneygrab marketplace as 'the norm' and it fucking makes me ill.
Some would argue they were early pioneers of it, basically became a daughter killing factory after the 1child policy.
Honestly I feel that trans boys and men are underrepresented.
I mean trans people are underrepresented in general but I feel that trans men get the worst of it, ESPECIALLY for medical info.
Good job Biden, don't stop now.
Well, back in the day you'd have a series of different services, usenet, irc, email, and for articles (at the time usually scholarly articles) you could use Gopher or follow certain usenet groups to find FTP sites hosting the docs.
So if we didn't have a unified web browser, and those technologies advanced at the pace of other similar services, here is how I see it:
Most services would be accessed by discrete apps, one for your email, one for your chat, one for your remote and local documents.
We wouldn't see the proliferation of siloed services, platforms like Facebook that offer all of these services but only within their subscribers. They just simply wouldn't be able to compete with the established services or add nuance or extra value.
Discord would also likely have come into existence a lot earlier and unified some of those services, but again if they chose to silo it as they are doing now, they wouldn't gain market dominance over already existing wide communities.
Without the profit incentive, existing services have no reason to tie their users to their platform or inhibit cross platform interactions.
Streaming services would still come into existence and fragment and silo like they are now, but that's only because of the cost of providing reliable HD video content isn't easily dispersed across unsiloed userbases.
Web advertisements would be non-existant but you'd still get spots in podcasts and videos.
Frankly I think it would be a better internet than what we have now.
Capitalism...
I never understood this
iPhones are fashion accessories before anything else.
Samsung for some fuckdamn reason just copycats everything Apple does.
The curved glass was a stupid, expensive, and failure prone attempt at capturing the fashion accessory market.
All it did was piss off eight years of customers.
It really is amazing how companies with ridiculous amounts of money for research and product testing and they hang on to an abject failure like this for so long.
WoTC might not sell its DND IP but Hasbro could easily sell the entirety of WoTC to Tencent if they wanted to.
I have tried to switch my daily driver to linux for more than 15 years now, Linux desktop just isn't ready.
Full disclosure: I am an IT admin with near 3 decades of experience, including administrating linux servers, so this isn't a skill gap.
audio ads sampled at max volume that multiplied every time you tried to close them...
They are the reason people started making products like ublock, and why for most of the 90s I browsed the web with javascript off unless I trusted the site or needed the service for the moment.
Now nothing renders if you do and you need 3 extensions just to not constantly be mobbed by ads
The only platform regressives embrace is built on the pillars of bigotry, hypocrisy, and self-centeredness.
They will say anything to turn the situation to their advantage, and there is no truth in them.
This is not actually true at all, you could train very good LLMs on public domain only info, especially science oriented ones.
But what people want is a chatbot that can call on current events, and that is where the cost comes in.
I have worked IT for 2 Fortune 500 companies and let me tell you NONE of them took data security seriously.
Neither has 90% of any of the other sites I've worked on.
In my experience so few companies bother spending appropriately on it because IT is considered a cost center instead of a needed service.
The loudest sign of a weak character is the inability to take responsibility for fuckups.
Tencent already has Larian and they did a great job with BG3 so what's your issue?
As long as they don't try to turn it into a microtransaction hell like only being able to play the classes you bought in their store, it's going to be no different except Tencent has a ton of money for funding.
Not until jr. high when we moved.
Lasted for a year and a half till I finally fought back, of course I got the worst of the punishments and called names like 'psycho' and 'spaz' for the rest of my time at that school but FUCKING NO ONE tried to step to me again.
That is how you deal with bullies, you hurt them publicly, in front of their friends.
You hurt them bad enough they know never to fuck with you.
I spent a year and a half listening to my mother, being compliant, walking away, turning the other cheek.
Then when I couldn't deal with it any more I took my father's advice and smashed my bullies nose flat at lunch.
So much could have been avoided if they had just left me the fuck alone but no they had to push and push and push and push until they had to bleed.
I hated doing it, I hate violence and think it is the worst solution in every case, and in a rational world there are always alternatives.
But this isn't a rational world.
Told this to my nieces and nephew: The moment they start bulling you, even if you are outnumbered and might get the worst of it, fight back and aim for the face and nuts.
I love this personally. The admins had a vision for the future that was not based in any form of reality, but rather the same wealth extraction tactics that have collapsed so many other services.
Anyone who remembers the Digg exodus, there are reflections of that in reddit's stittastic new policies.
Just more proof that enshittification isn't a slow erosion of quality over time but rather direct actions taken by a profit-seeking leadership.
If you go back now and look in older technically complex threads it is a wasteland of [Deleted] and various account scrubber script Lorem Ipsum as a good chunk of decent contributors have left and burned their accounts.
Good.
Looking forward to the day that they don't prop up google anymore.
Serious Question: When an artist learns to draw by looking at the drawings of the masters, and practicing the techniques they pioneered, are the art students respecting the intellectual property rights of those masters?
Are not all of that student's work derivative of an education based on other people's work who will never see compensation for that student's use?
I think the younger generations are finally shrugging off the apathy that plagued GenX and Millennials.
They're engaged, interested in broad ranges of subjects, are more aware of other cultures.
I also see a greater sense of kindness and community.
Being born into a shit world that has only gotten more shit, instead of just making sarcastic jokes about it they protest and organize, plan and research.
I like this and wish it wasn't so long coming.
Great job younger gens! Sorry you got the worst of this but I am more than willing to help put it all right once the boomers die off.
Palworld and Dwarf Fortress, swapping between them when I get bored.
And getting my Elden Ring char ready for the (hopefully) incoming DLC
Sorry no, objective reality is objective.
I would be especially thrilled if it turns out that republicunt's inhumane treatment of LGBTQ people turned out to be what tips voting out of the hands of the conservative party.
Sure they can gerrymander along racial lines, lets see them try that bullshit along sexual identity.
I know its a funny meme but up until Gamergate, the only way for the conservative party to grow was having more kids (hence the jabs at birth control and abortion).
Unfortunately now they have a chunk of edgybois that have been radicalized just in time to vote for cheetolini.
And it actually has damaged some families.
So its less 'devastated by your kid coming out as conservative', and more 'horrified that your kid came out as a white nationalist'.
My father is in a relationship with my deceased mother's sister.
I don't know how to feel about this.
Firstly: Ew
Secondly: He's really old and has never been able to take care of himself, so I'm glad that someone is there with him and my aunt really is a kind and sweet person who also is single and both are really too old to date, so maybe it's a good thing.
Thirdly: Ew Ewewewew EW ew
Not me, this will lead to malware installed in the brain.
You think popups are bad now?
Wait till you get them in your dreams.
That's only because the ruling emperors of moral absolutism are so fuckdamn lound and persistent.
It creates the illusion that there are so many more of them than there actually are.
Do you remember the Westboro Baptist Church from a few years back? Constantly all over the media shouting their bigoted hate?
Yeah, it was a group of less than 100 people doing it mainly as a source of income.
But they managed to get themselves in front of every camera for like 5 years in a row. Turns out they didn't even really believe their hatespeech and just found that suing people who tried to interfere with their horrid protests was super profitable.
It may be though 'green flashes in the sky' following deep red sunsets I think is more a ufo thing
Most nights I fall asleep wondering what a world where most people were like that would look like.
A shitton better than the one we have I'll say that right now.
And D&D and ICP and so many other things wonderful to me
They rail and they rally and burn books you see
"We must protect kids in the Land of the Free"
I wouldn't go that far...
Maybe it makes me a monster but I feel we would have been a lot better off with a higher mortality rate, and I say this as a person who has had covid twice.
We are allowed to have nuance, nothing is inherently good or bad. A knife can wound or make dinner.
Trying to reduce nuance lessens the public discourse, do not be tempted by lowest common denominator memery.
Whether anyone likes it or not LLMs are here and even if we strictly regulate them there will be organizations and governments that do not.
WHAT WE SHOULD be focusing on is how to prevent low effort AI content from just basically overtaking the web.
We are already mostly there.
Rage and clickbait.
This is essentially a civil case turned into something bigger because the person who got hit with a rock was a cop.
Had it just been another protester, there would be no call to undermine the 1st amendment.
And if SCOTUS goes that route, they will lose a lot of support from their politicians.
I mean of course since current SCOTUS is mentally deranged and highly partisan, they may of course still do it.
And I have a protest bag already packed and waiting if they do.
Remember the important supplies: Bottled water, masks and rags, first aid kit, baking soda to dilute to treat pepper spray
Leave your phone and IDs at home
This isn't hyperbole, you have SEEN what SCOTUS is doing and it is time to rattle their rafters with a unified voice.