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Most nerds became collateral damage from society's attempts to contain something much darker: something we mostly forgot even existed, and only fought through outdated traditions. We meant well when we tore out those countermeasures, and we did end that collateral damage. But we no longer remembered what we were keeping at bay, and so we also set the darkness free. The monsters at the top are only part of the problem, and might not even be the biggest: they have plenty of counterparts at the bottom who are in some ways even worse.

Now we have to figure out a new way forward. We need a way to put what needs chaining up back in its chains without harming the innocent weirdos. I don't have an answer. There might not be one. But it is the challenge.

Most nerds became collateral damage from society's attempts to contain something much darker: something we mostly forgot even existed, and only fought through outdated traditions. We meant well when we tore out those countermeasures, and we did end that collateral damage. But we no longer remembered what we were keeping at bay, and so we also set the darkness free. The monsters at the top are only part of the problem, and might not even be the biggest: they have plenty of counterparts below who are in some ways even worse.

Now we have to figure out a new way forward. We need a way to put what needs chaining up back in its chains without harming the innocent weirdos. I don't have an answer. There might not be one. But it is the challenge.

This is true, but there's an extra nuance: mogging isn't just dominance, but effortless dominance (or at least seemingly effortless). Incels use this to justify their aversion to putting effort of any sort into anything: if other people don't have to try, why should they?

Servo v0.0.1 9 months ago

Yeah, after the appropriate layers of VPN/Incognito/Tor/muted phone/etc I braved the link, and it turns out it's actually real, but that is still not a hostname I want connected to me in anyone's access logs more than once.

Humanity is having to learn all over again that you cannot expect good results from people who do not understand the work that they are doing. But instead of expecting these things from people, now we're expecting it from next-token prediction algorithms. I suspect that a lot of very stupid things will have to happen before we figure this out.

In this case I'd say it's more like 99/1, only even more so, to the point where using numbers doesn't even make sense. Spies are way more trouble than they're worth, except when they're not. But when they are not, they're worth literally everything.

This is true as far as it goes, and yet, there are people in this world who will not grow up and function except in the face of overwhelming social pressure. They will not be taught, nor learn on their own -they must be broken- and if they are not, well, this kind of thing is what happens. The answer isn't to stop excluding them, but to strip away the new enablers.

True, but honestly, with so many people clearly after him, I'm not sure we can assume any of them got him. His psyche had clearly been cracking for many weeks now: I got as much sadistic pleasure as anyone else out of watching him basically flat-out break down and beg the judge for a chance to flee. We already know he'd tried to kill himself once before any of his long list of enemies could get their hands on him. If he was indeed "found dead", then yeah, it's fun to joke that he was clearly hanged 37 times by the CIA, the Clintons, Hollywood, MI6, MIT, the Russians, Trump, and at least two alien species, but I don't think we can discount the possibility that he simply siezed on the next opportunity to beat any of them to the punch.

He should have gotten that horrible 24-hour naked suicide watch thing that Manning got, all the way until trial. Certainly he demonstrated better need for it.

What a waste. May none mourn this creature's passing, but his particular case represented too many valuable opportunities for him to be allowed to die before trial.

Whoever allowed enough of a lapse in his suicide watch that the concept of him being "found" at all even makes sense should be fired and sued for gross malfeasance.

I didn't propose replacing the GPIO, or the camera port, or the other display port. I'm talking specifically about the other ports around the sides of the device, which are already used for more traditional computer-y things. Of course the Pi needs to retain its built-in low-level I/O, but it has another side to it too, and that's the side I'm talking about using Thunderbolt with.

If a Pi is capable of this already, why not replace the Ethernet, charging, micro-HDMI, and USB ports with a boatload of type-C Thunderbolt ports (plus support for the HDMI 1.4 alt mode)? Would 8xUSB-C cost that much more than 1xUSB-C+1xEthernet+2xMicro-HDMI+2xUSB3+2xUSB2 (with no PCI Express), in exchange for a considerably more flexible device?

This makes sense to a certain degree, but "just ignoring it" only goes so far: even seeing it is corrosive to a certain extent, and by the time you've even registered it enough to ignore it, a lot of the damage is done.

Perfectionists undergo a similar phenomenon, I'm told. After all, the modern "Do it badly" movement was itself a response to the corrosive effect of the "'Good enough' isn't" message permeating all of society. I'm not unsympathetic. In solving one problem, it didn't exactly create another -we've always had perfectionists to some extent- but it made that problem much, much worse than it had once been. But the fact is, it was done to solve a real problem in its own right, and that problem has not gone away.

What it comes down to is conflicting needs. The all-pervasive "'Good enough' isn't" came about because some people genuinely need it, and they genuinely need it at that level. The same is true of the now-pervasive "Do it badly": it is genuinely needed, and at this level. And you can't balance them, because they inherently undermine each other. So what do you do?

I really wish I could stop seeing this everywhere I went. I get that there are people who need this kind of advice, but for someone like me, this advice is poison. For everyone who needs to be carefully and constantly reminded that you can't let the perfect become the enemy of the good, there's someone else, maybe several someones, who need to be carefully and constantly reminded that "good enough" is almost never good enough. And this latter group, when left unchecked, tends to do a lot more harm than the former.

Not too shabby.

- Performance is great. I'm already using it pretty much everywhere.

- Ad blocking is about to become Firefox's killer app, and it was a major PR mistake to release a preview without enough extension support for ad blockers to work. They should have delayed the release, if necessary.

- I wish the QR code reader had been released as a separate app (and on iOS too), but I'm actually quite glad to see Mozilla doing one. I look at my app store for QR code readers, and I'm confronted with a sea of questionable permissions, ads, obvious fake reviews, and tainted makers. I welcome a free QR code reader from a source I know and trust, but you can't build something like that into a browser without either bloating the browser or limiting the reader. It should be spun off into its own app, then allowed to grow.

Looks like they're partnering with the makers of Axe to do this. Which seems strange to me, because they've had an XBox-themed fragrance out for years now. It's called Axe.

Good. This will make an excellent test of the ability of Mastodon servers and users to ostracize malicious actors, and a solid driver for new features in this area of development.

In a society that does not put enough pressure on people to grow up and function, it is tempting to look at this as a possible solution. Coupling it to government power, though, is an outright horror. Any social credit system needs to be run independently, by society, not by the state (not least because of people's unfortunate tendency to remember that there is a difference).

8chan Explained 7 years ago

Not much to explain. Many moons ago, SomethingAwful was founded by a bunch of people that nobody wanted around. Some years later, 4chan was founded by a bunch of people that even nobody at SomethingAwful wanted around. Some years after that, 8chan was founded by a bunch of people that even nobody at 4chan wanted around. It's the dregs of the dregs.