phatskat

I’m still in the mines but I don’t know for how long. Part of my performance evaluation for the year will include a section on using AI, so I’ll be biting the bullet and using copilot for glorified autocomplete like I did when it was still in beta.

I’m also perusing for shops that aren’t necessarily “anti-ai”, but where lack of using it isn’t seen as a negative

Right? It feels akin to people who oppose social welfare and things like UBI because “people just don’t want to work.” The reality seems more like “people want to work, they mostly want to have a say in what that work is.” How many people working service jobs didn’t have access to higher ed, or couldn’t afford a guitar, or accidentally wound up taking care of a family before they could research algae, etc etc.

Personally, I’d be knitting and crocheting things for other people with most of my day if I didn’t have to worry about money, or I’d help my neighbor with the website she wants for her business venture, or I’d teach kids how to code. These are things I’d like to do, that I can’t readily do while having the overhead of a full time job unless I run myself ragged and tbh, I’d rather not.

I disagree on the “nazification” point, your main point, because fascism is the kind of insidious thing that can’t be allowed a foothold. To your point 2, even if the Nazis were allowed in to be the butt jokes, it’s still allowing them in and tolerating them.

If an establishment is aware of Nazis in their ranks and they aren’t condemning them, then they’re supporting them by way of not removing them. It’s the paradox of tolerance at play.

I don’t want to really derail into different aspects of communism, just want to say that most communists I’ve met or been exposed to only believe in violent revolution if peaceful revolution isn’t an option. Again, this isn’t, to me, an equivalent to the violent beliefs of Nazism.

1) I did say “obvious Nazis”

2) letting a Nazi be at your bar is decency imo

3) “most” is doing some heavy lifting, and even so, you are showing the shades of communism. Nazism expresses an ideology of hate and racial superiority, it’s a completely different beast. (And yes I know that communism has been party to some ethnic cleansing such as in Stalinist Russia, however, that belief system of ethnic superiority is not inherent to communism)

That’s a false equivalence and imo disingenuous - Nazis are understood by the broad majority to be “bad”. We, the public, don’t want nazis around - period. If I go to a bar and there’s a handful of obvious nazis there, I’m leaving because said bar has said “we’re ok with Nazis” and that’s a Nazi bar.

Most communists don’t hold abhorrent beliefs such as “Jewish people should be eradicated” or “the world belongs to the aryan race”, but a Nazi is a Nazi, there’s no grey area there.

That’s a wild take tbh. In a different comment I did say that ideally the community would’ve taken action before MS had to step in. I don’t want to make the world “foam padded”, and in particular when it comes to fascism it should be stomped out wherever it appears, point blank. It’s a bummer that Microsoft came in and threatened to blacklist the server, and at the same time if you have a nazi in your bar and you don’t kick them out, you own a nazi bar.

Yes, my kids will run in to nazism in the wild, and I can’t control that, and if they ran into in a Minecraft server we’d talk about that and maybe even make an effort to clean it up ourselves - that’s what I think that community and frankly any community that doesn’t want to be a nazi community should do.

That said, I think it is inevitable for any anarchist server that gets large enough to end up in this exact situation.

Agree, and I think it’s the community’s responsibility to decide what is and isn’t tolerable - even within anarchy. Forget MS, the (imo) proper response should have been the community actively choosing to deface and destroy the nazi stuff, or outright ban it from the moment it became a thing.

This topic touches on a lot of the themes in [How to Radicalize a Normie](https://youtu.be/P55t6eryY3g).

Sure, kids will encounter a lot of things, but there’s a difference between coddling and having conversations when the time is right (well, better - there’s rarely a correct time in any exact sense with kids).

Our kid is old enough now to have a good grasp on “world war 2 was bad, nazis are bad”, and if they were to hop on this server and then we have discussions surrounding ie the “obsidian swaztikas” mentioned above, I think it would go alright.

This kid is also smart, and emotionally aware, and actually a pretty cool dude. They can swear around us, and never in anger towards someone, and tbh they’ve said “oh shit” once while playing a game with us because they got spooked and last night during a run on Marathon they went “hey phatskat, I might use a swear word”. I asked what they wanted to say and why they were hesitant (since they know the rule that it’s ok generally), and they explained that swearing makes the “queasy” lol. A couple minutes later they went “ok, I’m gonna say it. Fuck yeah!”

All that is to say, I don’t feel like they’re coddled, and they also aren’t just going to grow up like I did in the Wild West of the 90’s internet. I saw a LOT of things I shouldn’t have, way too soon, and I also grew up in an environment where hiding that from my parents was the safest option. So yeah me and my friends swore and made off color jokes around each other because the adults would get mad, despite us learning a lot of the crude stuff from them and then Something Awful et al. In hiding it, I felt like the harder topics were absolutely not able to be broached with my parents, and looking back on it that sucks.

The way my partner and I are approaching it is to be up front and have the conversations we can at the kid’s level in a way that makes sense (eg age six: war bad, age ten: World War Two was a war about…).

There’s a middle ground between coddling and bootstraps, and it’s the kind of parenting I want to encourage others to do if they can.

Indeed this was a pleasure to read!

For someone who’s biology schooling largely culminated in a high school presentation of “how a virus works” rendered in a pirated copy of 3DS Max, it felt both accessible and informative without coming off as boring - actually I’m quite excited about the possibilities of continued research.

The fact that Hagino’s boss considered her research a waste of time, and both her and Zehr’s comments on unexpected results from seemingly banal work, tangentially makes me think of how UBI and science aren’t often mentioned together. But, there are people who, given their basic needs met, would happily throw their free time at the pursuit of science.

Last thought - I’m typing this on mobile and needed to look up the researchers’ names again. A quick google of “nitroplast” returned some top results that seemed like decent write ups but one didn’t mention either of them (nor the third researcher mentioned, Coale), and I realized that tying this article to a more human level really felt _good_. I think that it’s easy for articles about science to disregard that element - and to be fair, Nitroplast is more than these three people - but this form of writing and the way the journey was delivered felt really quite nice.

Huh. Arc had an interesting AI use where pinned tabs would get renamed automatically to be more informative - about 50/50 in my experience. The best part of this though was the ability to opt-in on a per-use basis - pin the tab, click to rename and just delete the default name and _then_ AI would try.

I would counsel not using the word "meaningful" in the context of BI. We already have a way of evaluating "meaningful", it's called "money". If society gets to judge what is meaningful or not, well, that's the system we currently have.

I’m also going to take issue with this interpretation of “meaningful” - I’ve known several amazing crafters and artists who have had an incredibly hard time doing their craft simply because the demands of capitalism prevent them from putting the time and effort into honing those skills, finding a market, creating a portfolio, etc.

If anything, I think BI is just as likely to add meaningfully to society as it is to give people the option to do meaningless things.

Ooo ooo don’t forget the US’s hand in the South American drug trade, or toppling numerous South American governments because we didn’t like who was in charge, even if it had been done democratically!

To think “the west” could make so many messes and not worry about cleaning up after ourselves - the absolute hubris!

People who failed so spectacularly that the country became the rape capital of Europe and has more crime than El Salvador today.

the rape capital of Europe

I’ve read that this is because Sweden changed how rape is counted - instead of multiple votes instances within the same relationship being counted as “one rape”, each instance of non-consensual intercourse is counted individually.

and has more crime than El Salvador today

I couldn’t find any reliable data here other than Sweden’s homicide rates are a little higher than historically, but still pretty low. And the comparison to El Salvador is off the mark in general because the murder rate there has fallen dramatically from where it was historically.

They should! It’s genuinely nice. I know to some this all probably comes off as corny and to that I say: I hope those folks can hug a tree someday, it’s nice.

What bullying? The forum banned the user and DMCA notices removed the content, seems fine to me and an actual reasonable use of DMCA.

I wanted to drop some of my favorite bits about sovereign citizens here, but honestly most of what they believe requires a lot of explanation to really grasp. A quick glance of this seems a good place for the curious: https://www.sog.unc.edu/sites/www.sog.unc.edu/files/Sov%20ci...

Do they have a choice?

Obviously one choice is “just don’t participate” but for anyone that _will_ participate, the choice is pretty much to tolerate it.

I’ve never once given a second thought to declining the “opportunity” to upgrade to Netflix 4k - nothing I want to watch requires that kind of quality because none of that content is necessary to begin with. We’ve been considering axing some subscriptions and Netflix is on the top of the list already - I can get my baking show from the highs seas and stranger things is done

Right, this is the only reason I’d go for one if I ever had a reasonable opportunity. My Bravia is a nice TV, it’s solid in many respects, but the UI pushing ads and generally being unstable makes me not enjoy it.

It’s wild to think people can pay $2000 for the pleasure of seeing ads whenever they turn on their television (even in “apps only mod”), not to mention, I never have and will never enable the mic on the remote because fuck that, Google.

Tbh, Google TV may be one of my least favorite and most insidious Google products.

I feel like the long dashes in comments as dividers is something I’ve seen more in machine-generated code, eg templates, WYSIWYG editors, etc. No doubt I used to be pretty l337 back in my day, and I think I’ve seen it more from tools.

I wonder if AI training sets have some bias towards the way the “peers” wrote code.

I was, as was gp, confused by “complacent” as I haven’t typically used it or thought of it to include a smugness and immediately went to the ol’ Google only to find that “smug” appears in Oxford Language’s* definition as well. The key though is “smug or uncritical”, so while smug may not be typical for some it does make sense now that I have that added knowledge.

And iirc “gauche” had more than just “socially awkward” in the correct answer but speeding through it again I didn’t get gauche as a word. That said, something gauche, to me, has always been something glaringly “not ok” in a social sense so again, that tracks. Oxford Language defines it as

lacking ease or grace; unsophisticated and socially awkward.

Which is closer to the quiz’s definition and again, tracks with my internal thinking of the word’s use.

Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia

Was just plain fun - as soon as I saw the “fear of long words” I was like of course that’s it

*I mistakenly put “Merriam Webster” the first time around - while MW doesn’t include the word smug itself, the 1.b definition is simply “self-satisfied”

I’ve done this both on and off psychedelics, and both are lovely experiences.

I also dated someone who wasn’t a particularly “crunchy” hippy type, but she did like to randomly hug trees on our walks to show appreciation. I do it now too, there’s something oddly calming and connecting about it - it may look weird, but that’s par for the course for me as it is

It doesn’t need to be profitable if it’s cheap - political manipulation by unsavory parties is worth a cheap botnet if it means they can keep power and keep grifting.

I will agree with a sibling up there that the political part is pure speculation, and I’d guess anyone running a moderately sized botnet is open to use for any nefarious purposes if the price is right.

There’s not much to back this up, at least that you’ve included as reference.

The bigger issue that comes to mind and that you can actually look in to is the practice of teaching police departments about “Killology”. This is (or was) a kind of seminar that taught departments this mindset of “everyone that an officer interacts with is a potential threat”. Add this to the “super criminal” bs that was popular in the 80s/90s, the constant right-wing fearmongering about dangerous criminals in blue cities, and the militarization of police, and it feels more like they’ve been primed for violence from the power structure more-so than any actual threat from the public.

The answer to immigration, for those that view it as a problem, is to make the places people are leaving more desirable to stay: social welfare, sustainable energy, affordable food and housing, and security - both physical and financial. The US has been trying hard to make itself undesirable for immigrants (suddenly, after decades of turning a blind eye in exchange for cheap labor), instead of focusing on helping to make the living situation in south America more tenable.

It’s kind of what we get for completely wrecking the global south tbh - the number of democracies we overthrew, the drug cartels we propped up, the damage we did is finally coming to bear fruit and it’s just as sour as the soil we tilled.

Yep, and even when the majority of protests don’t turn violent, the media does an amazingly good job of making it seem like they did. I remember multiple family members posting about, and even talking about in our group chat, how multiple US cities were on fire and essentially war zones in 2020.

It seems more like you’re exhibiting “redditor behavior”. Ostensibly, the comment you replied to was about TFA, and you replied flippantly with a statement of fact “you can’t walk to a data center” when the discussion is about an article related to a data center in a residential area. They didn’t pull a “gotcha”, you got got by your own ignorance of the topic at hand.

The average user might see a Siri-AI + Spotify integration as “I can ask Siri to make me a playlist”, while under the hood, Spotify would have access to _all_ of the user’s data and the ability to act upon installed apps. I can understand wanting to have better privacy controls in place before allowing that - will Apple do it is the question.

As far as the backup software, the analogy doesn’t hold for me: there’s an expectation that it will have access to your hard disk. There’s also an expectation that you can disconnect your internet and still back up your hard disk - can’t exfiltrate data if you’re offline.

That’s how I read this too - I specifically use Apple because I can get what I need to done with little hassle, I can routinely use the same phone for _years_ and not even think about upgrading (my last upgrade was “forced as my iPhone was stolen), and I have a much higher confidence in Apple not being crappy with my data vs Google.

I know there are alternative phones that are more open, and I recognize that the level of ease and comfort I get from a big name phone requires some of those trade-offs. Linux was my desktop of choice and probably would be again if my employer allowed it, but I don’t necessarily want to deal with all the tiny sharp edges of Linux on a mobile device.

I personally would never have thought to go the Domain route, so I suppose you technically -can- have a local user but they don’t seem to surface the option.