samwise

"Question every narrative, but don't question these things. Don't show bias, but here are your biases." These chuds don't even hear themselves. They just want to see Arya(n) ramble on about great replacement theory or trans women in bathrooms. They don't think their bile is hate speech because they think they're on the side of "facts" and everyone else is an idiot who refuses to see reality. It's giving strong "I'm not a bigot, "<" minority ">" really is like that. It's science" vibes.

"Our product is so bad, WE won't even use it."

As for Brendan’s political affiliations, most users couldn’t care less. He might as well be a furry but if the product is good, it is good. Stop acting like you’re sure all the things you use throughout the day aren’t made by people with doubtful leanings.

1. People do care about Eich's beliefs, or this discussion wouldn't even be happening.

2. There's nothing wrong with being a furry, and trying to compare it as though it's equivalent or worse than being a shitbag bigot is bullshit.

3. If you know that the people who run a company are bigots and you continue to use their products and services, you are giving your explicit approval to who they are and what they do. "if the product is good, it is good" absolutely fucking not. Goods and services don't exist in a vacuum.

Firstly, there's no technological reason for this. It's all rent-seeking bullshit. But the thing is, there's no version of Office that this point that works without a subscription, which also assumes you're probably always online, so it's honestly moot anyway.

It's so tiresome. Big tech really doesn't want people to run, own, or operate their own systems independently.

Whenever I see replies like this I read either

"I have no ability to think through, or no interest in considering, the ramifications or evaluating risks before evangelizing a piece of tech"

or

"I'm too selfish to consider anyone else but myself"

Yeah, cable was and is really awful. The amount of ads makes it literally unwatchable. And the shitty thing is that when cable TV was first introduced, the whole idea was that there wouldn't be ads like broadcast because you were paying for it. And then they moved the goalposts. Something that Hulu in particular was very guilty of. In the beginning, only the free-tier had ads. And there was one paid tier with no ads. Then that started showing ads, and they created a higher paid tier with no ads.

To me, one of the best things about streaming was timeshifting. You didn't have to wait for Sunday at 9:00pm to watch a show, and maybe miss it, or have to DVR it, and maybe the recording didn't work. Or whatever. You didn't have to schedule your time around TV. You could watch what you wanted, when you wanted. And now that's gone too, with weekly releases of shows, or half a season now, and the other half a month later, and so on. They're bringing back scheduled TV and it's fucking bullshit.

Another promise was that we'd be able to basically have access to every tv show or film, and that evaporated very quickly when all the studios decided they wanted to gatekeep everything so they could charge even more for it, and then now we have them disappearing so many things that have been out there just because they don't want to pay royalties to anyone involved.

So much culture is being lost because of greedy fucking execs who want to use the things you enjoy as an extortion tool. Going back to cable isn't the answer. It's a failed model and needs to die. But we need a massive overhaul of the streaming scene to figure this out. Because right now, it's so much worse that what came before.

Any job that can be WFH should be WFH.

Any job that can't be WFH that requires sitting at a desk all day should give each person an individual office. The open office plan has been an absolute nightmare, and only benefits micromanagers. It's a productivity disaster, and makes for a miserable experience, and only exists for the sake of surveillance. However, I doubt there are many jobs that can't be WFH that require such a situation.

The real issue here is an intentional mis-framing, imo. Why must people get back to a traditional office setting? The only people who want this are employers who think that Butts In Seats = Productivity, and the only way to ensure it is to intensely surveil your employees. I also don't give two shits if some real estate company goes bankrupt because business tenants stop renting their properties. Boo fucking hoo.

I've been working for a remote-first company now for over a year, and I won't ever got back to working in an office. There is literally nothing about what I do that needs me to be physically present in any specific place. The problem isn't "productivity" or "collaboration", the problem is entirely based around a work culture that is fundamentally punitive, puritanical, and antithetical to life balance.

People have been using country TLDs as cute URLs for years, and somehow it almost always ends up as a problem, or it furthers harms against the countries who own the TLDs (.io for example). Sure .tv or .io or .af sound fun, (anyone remember del.icio.us?) but it's just not worth it.

Everyone should be completely free to explore their gender and sexuality as they see fit. Questioning one's situation should be seen as good. And if in the end of that questioning the answer is "I'm cis" or "I'm straight" then that's totally fine too. And shouldn't be seen as a problem. It doesn't mean queer identities are invalid.

There's also the fact that many detransitioners do so because of social for familial pressure, not because they aren't actually trans. If you come out as trans, and your entire family and friend group decided to shun you, or your work isn't supportive, etc., and you face massive amounts of hate and ostracism, you might decide that going back into the closet is the way to go so you don't have to deal with that.

It's all a nightmare of a situation that shouldn't have to exist

It's not an issue, it's an intentional and important feature.

Don't want to be defederated? Don't let chuds and bigots on your instance. It's pretty simple.

Horrific painful death from liver failure when the books lead people to eat the wrong mushrooms

Destruction of ecosystems by people unfamiliar with how to responsibly forage

Flooding of wrong and plagiarized information, drowning out experts and actual real, correct information

There's literally no positive side of this. At all.

Technology is not apolitical, because humans are not apolitical. Anyone who says they are or claims to be "neutral" or "centrist" simply means their ideals align with the status quo.

This is a problem with all sectors of tech, but especially in places where algorithms have to be trained. For example, facial recognition systems are notoriously biased against anyone who isn't cis and white. Fitness trackers/smart watches/etc. have trouble with darker skin tones. Developers encode implicit biases because they are oblivious to the fact that their experiences aren't universal. If your dev team and your company at large aren't diverse, that lack of diversity is going to show through in your product, intentional or not. How you shape the algorithms, what data you feed it to train it, etc. are all affected by those things.

We have destroyed our public spaces, removed places for people to gather, made it illegal for youth to be unaccompanied in many public places, created helicopter parents and insufferable busybodies that call the police if a child so much as wanders outside the home, and have made any kind of IRL socialization either impossible or extremely difficult.

We have influencers and brands flooding social media to show you how worthless you are and how you need to look better, act different, dress this way or that. It creates a sense of anxiety, self-loathing, and hopelessness.

Especially if you're young, you look around at the state of the world and wonder what fucking hope you have for any kind of future: loans for college that will be a boat anchor around your neck for basically the rest of your life, a climate catastrophe in progress, a fascist coup in progress, the absolute impossibility of home ownership, a job market that's being torn apart by grifters, and rising inflation and costs of living without any increase in salaries.

The major social platforms are all dominated by algorithmically generated "content" that feeds on rage-baiting. Outside of YouTube, none of the platforms allow for any kind of long-form posts, so you're limited in what you can say on a given topic, so you reduce it to the most distilled and condensed version. Something is mildly upsetting? Well, 280 characters isn't enough for nuance, so rage-posting it is. And the more inflammatory, the more engagement it gets, which gets it in front of even more eyeballs.

YouTube actively pushes users down the alt-right rabbit hole.

So you're already isolated, alone, separated from any kind of sense of community, and you try to find a replacement in social media. But it's not the same. You're already feeling hopeless about the world and the future. And this algorithm you've been swallowed by is fed by, and rewards, the worst impulses.

It's not a "kids these days are so addicted to their phones these days and it's making them depressed or violent" kind of issue. It's an interconnected web of shit that's feeding back and forth making everything worse. We've made a fucking awful world, and then the place where people are taking refuge is exacerbating all of it.

I do understand the overall point they're trying to make here. As someone who's been around the web and internet since the early 90s, there was a certain magic to the chaos of those early days.

However, this bit:

A couple of imageboards still exist, who remind us of a different time. You may not like it, but even 4chan is such a place and i am happy that dumpster is still around.

really makes me wonder about OP. 4chan/8chan/et al have caused incalculable harm. The the world would be a better place if they were completely eradicated, and would have been an even better place had they never existed at all. Sites like those aren't indicative of a different time, they're indicative of the true depths of hatred, toxicity, and sheer chaotic evil people are capable of when given an anonymous platform and no moderation.

The company is run by Brendan Eich who is a hateful POS who spent millions trying to strip people of their human rights, the browser is a chrome reskin contributing to Google's domination of the web, it crams crypto bullshit in your face, and they’re now testing out AI features to add to it.

Then it shouldn't exist.

This isn't an issue of fair use. They're stealing other people's work and using it to create something new and then trying to profit from it, without any credit or recompense.

All I can think of when he talks about how "X will be an app for everything" is:

Welcome to Zombocom, you can do anything at Zombocom, Welcome to you. Anything is possible at Zombocom. The infinite is possible at Zombocom. The unobtainable is unknown at Zombocom. Welcome to Zombocom.

Tor can be used for any internet browsing you usually do. The key difference with Tor is that the network hides your IP address and other system information for full anonymity

Also, this isn't true. MANY sites and services block access from Tor, including major ones that people use everyday.

Stein has always been either a useful idiot or an active Russian dis/mis-info candidate

Because they are.

We have a puritanical idea burned into our society that you have to suffer to live, that you have to work your fingers to the bone to deserve even the most basic necessities of life, and can't imagine a non-capitalist society where we just provide everything people need to live and not force people to do bullshit busywork just to prove they "deserve" the basics of life

Might be neat. Might check it out. But devs really need to stop asking me to install things by curling a script and piping it into my shell. There are better ways to do this. Doing this leaves a massive possible attack surface.

• "Why not just ..." is always said from a place of ignorance (innocent or willful), and completely dismisses the complexities of the system in question

• Someone has to have final say. You cannot just accept any PR/MR that comes in. There has to be a design, architectural, and philosophical vision guiding a software project, and contributions need to adhere to those. There have to be review processes, testing processes. And if you don't like it, and you feel you have the resources to fork it so that your vision is the one in control, then go right ahead.

• As an actual currency, it's functionally useless. Even if every retailer on the planet were to accept it, the overhead for making the transaction is just a non-starter

• Because of that, it's entirely just funny money. Even further, since it's entirely a virtual asset, if the power goes out, your wallet goes with it

• The environmental impacts are horrifying. This fact alone means that it should all be eradicated. Destroying the planet for Internet funny money isn't an acceptable proposition

• For a decentralized currency, people sure do love centralizing under large exchanges, and the massive losses, thefts, fraud, etc. have shown that no matter how "decentralized" it's supposed to be, it's still susceptible to the same bullshit as any other currency

• Its high profile association with grifters, scammers, malware, and dark web shenanigans has completely soured its image in the public mind

• It's entirely a speculative investment scam now. There's no way to decouple it from that.

The way social media companies just chase each others features is ridiculous. They can't be content with being unique or offering a specialized feature set. No, they all have to do image posts, then stores, then video, then short videos.

However, anything that helps kill the trend of every goddamned thing being a video even when it doesn't need to be is a very welcome change

What remains as methods of protest after this?

Deleting your account and leaving the site. Reddit clearly doesn't care about the users, and hasn't for a very, very long time. Remaining there justifies their actions.

Yeah, it seriously takes a toll. Living in FL and trying to keep up with it all left me at a point where it was hard to get out of bed each day.

The problem is that now you're relying on a platform that's entirely centered around being a bastion of hate speech. You would be doing the same thing if you based yourself on 4chan or Truth Social. Every moment you stay there and drive traffic through there, you have blood on your hands

100% agree.

I would also add our Individualistic and Puritanical culture to the mix of causes. We're told all of your problems are 100% in your control, and that if you're not working 100% of the time that you're a worthless piece of shit that doesn't deserve to live, that no structural issues exist, that there's nothing you can't 100% overcome with enough individual determination. It's so unbelievably toxic and unhealthy, and causes people to not only not have sympathy or empathy for others, but to see empathy as a negative trait, as a weakness.

The whole Adobe creative suite. The options out there absolutely are not replacements, either in functionality or usability. Most of them are UX nightmares and feel actively hostile to the user

It's not just specific to Clackey, but I really hate when sites hijack the right-click menu, either to remove options, or to modify it for "theme". I get that it looks pretty wrt to the site's theme, but seriously, leave browser controls the fuck alone.

We urge policymakers to instead draw on solid scholarship that investigates the harms and risks of AI—and the harms caused by delegating authority to automated systems, which include the unregulated accumulation of data and computing power, climate costs of model training and inference, damage to the welfare state and the disempowerment of the poor, as well as the intensification of policing against Black and Indigenous families. Solid research in this domain—including social science and theory building—and solid policy based on that research will keep the focus on the people hurt by this technology.

YES

I don't think Ai Is going to go skynet. I know it's going to be used to disenfranchise Black people, destroy creative fields, and generate mis- and disinformation because it's already doing it

https://tamouse.github.io/blog/politics/2019/10/02/why-is-the-io-domain-problematic.html

"Just learned about this company that's led by a raging bigot who has used his wealth and position to try to oppress others and strip them of civil and human rights, and I fully support that and am now a proud supporter"

It already should have that. 8 GB is the absolute bare fucking minimum for most computers these days, but unless you have 16, it's a generally unpleasant experience.

"We need to return to a time when women had no agency, no real personhood, were essentially slaves in their homes, treated as property, and bore literally all the work of the home and family."

...

"Wow, this is oppressive."

These people have no thought that the situation women were in 50+ years ago was forced. They didn't have a choice. They couldn't even open a bank account on their own. But want to paint that time as some sort of heyday that we need to return to.

Further, I'm convinced that the tradwife movement isn't in any way genuine, that it's entirely white supremacist, patriarchal propaganda. Maybe there's a handful out there that genuinely want this. But otherwise I think it's entirely a pushback against modernity, and bigots and white cishet men trying to claw back their cultural hegemony.

One of the biggest problems with IP law, the DMCA included, is that it's all built on a foundation of presumption of guilt. Unlike the rest of our legal system that presumes innocence by default, IP law does the opposite. Once an accusation is made, guilt is presumed, and the target must prove they aren't guilty, with punishments being enacted first. Get a takedown notice, and you must comply, THEN you can challenge it. But in the meantime, your store, your video, your song, etc. is offline if-and-until you can prove the takedown is wrong. All assuming you CAN fight it, that you have the resources to do so, and that the platform you're on has sensible avenues of recourse.

All of it protects the wealthy and powerful who can lob takedown requests with impunity since few are going to be able to fight back. We need a complete overhaul. We need to change the presumption of guilt in IP law. And we need to allow people to fight back and defend themselves before their shit is taken down.

Two major problems:

1: very very few sites offer an rss feed anymore

2: the ones that do either only offer the headline and then just a link to the web story, or if they give a full feed, inject ads into them, where you don't have an adblocker to stop it

I spent the better part of a month trying to curate an awesome rss feed and in the end, it's still so actively hostile that it renders it's barely usable

Don't get me wrong. I want rss to come back and be as usable as it was years ago. But it's a shadow of what it used to be, and active hostile

Anakin and Padme image macro

That extra money will go to the writers and actors right?

The first downside is in the use of it exactly the way you're using it. In this case, a company may decide they don't actually need technical writers, just a low-paid editor who feeds tech specs into a prompt, gets a response, and tidies it up. How many skilled jobs are lost because of this?

Think of software devs. Feed a project spec into the prompt: "Give me a Django backend and Vue frontend to build an online calendar" and then you have just a QA dev who debugs and tests and maybe cleans up a bit. Now, instead of a team of software devs working to make sure you have a robust, secure and properly architected app, you have one or two low-paid testers who don't understand the full architecture, can only fix bugs, and don't understand the security issues inherent in the minimally viable code the bot spat out.

Think of writers. Just ignore actual creatives. Plug an "idea" into the prompt and then have an editor clean up any glaring strangeness and get it out the door. It can, and already is, flood the market with absolute drivel driving actual human creatives out. Look at the current writers strike. The Hollywood execs are fucking champing at the bit to just replace them all with an LLM and say to hell with the writers.

The core issue is: the people at the top with money only care about money. They don't care if the product is good. Quality is irrelevant if they can crank it out at a tenth of the cost and at 1000x the volume. And every time you use it, you're giving it training data. You're justifying its use. And its use is, and will continue, to destroy entire industries, ruin web search, create mis- and disinformation, and endanger the sharing of actual human creativity.

Yeah, it essentially makes it a state issue, and each state can ban, or not, and choose to recognize marriages from other states, or not. So if you got married in Washington that might allow same-sex marriage and respect marriages from other states, and then you move to e.g. Tennessee that banned it and didn't recognize out of state marriages, your marriage essentially wouldn't exist there. I also imagine for the case of emergencies and whatnot, if you were traveling through such a state, you wouldn't be recognized as spouses, making it literally a life or death issue for travel.

It's very, very bad.