Just another Reddit migrant, not much to see here.

I subsist on a regular diet of games, light novels, and server administration.

  • 3 Posts
  • 23 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Supervillain is giving him too much credit. I’ll grant you that he’s a cartoon character, but cartoon supervillains have more complexity than him.

    Kanye and Musk embody a nearly identical archetype and we’d have the exact same problem if they ran for president and succeeded. The cult of personality that follows shitty celebrities is a self-perpetuating one. It’s rooted in nasty people admiring how important people can be nasty like them but without tangible social consequences. They form a mob around their cult heroes for that exact reason, strength in numbers. A safe space for the trash of humanity.

    People in politics and business find Trump useful because he’ll open doors for them in exchange for attention. They get cozy with leading him around by the nose with that attention until they forget that he will backstab them when they stop giving him that attention or there is more value in betraying them. Musk does the exact same shit, so again, I don’t think that Trump himself is worthy of being viewed in the light you’re giving him. Similarly shitty celebrities are drop in replacements for him, and worse, they might be more intelligent in their cruelty.



  • having people go out for original research is basically saying “Let people make up bullshit.”… not a good idea.

    Yeah, I’ve seen what this does to fan wikis. There is a certain type of personality that thrives on having their version of reality be what is reflected in wiki articles, and they will revert any and all attempts to excise their personal theories. If admins step in to break up the edit war, it’s clearly “favoritism” and “admins should only exist in service to the users and have no say in content”. Some of these wiki addicts go out of their way to become the wiki equivalent of Reddit’s supermods in order to ensure that they have the upper hand in these content disputes.

    “No original research” is one of the core pillars of your ability to push back against delusional nonsense. If you’re determined to live without it, you need to have very strong content standards in its place to decide the difference between objective fact and someone’s conspiracy vomit. Good content policies save you from having to waste a bunch of time on bad faith arguments about why the content of your wiki pages have to abandon fact for massaging someone’s ego.

    (Somewhat of a tangent, but if you’re bored you can look into a brief history of AlexShepherd’s crusade against circumcision in the Silent Hill fandom. He’s not the only person I’ve seen thrive on wikis who don’t adopt an original research policy, but definitely the most entertaining read.)


  • I’m also here to expose bad excuses.

    Not being able to help someone who is refusing to provide technical detail is a pretty damn good excuse in this industry.

    If your goal is to expose the bad excuses of others, step one is to put in as much effort as you’re expecting from others. :P


    Edit for good measure: (links fixed, forgot about direct linking comments from outside of a lemmy instance)

    • Your instance was not federating with lemmy.world. [1]
    • You assumed that the blame had to rest on lemmy.world because you had “eliminate[d] all the possibilities [you] had at hand”. [2]
    • You made this post to vent about a bunch of unrelated nonsense and refused to provide technical detail that would assist the admins in troubleshooting. It’s a given fact that your privacy is your choice, but it’s also a given that you shouldn’t be a dick about it if you choose to withhold details, even from PM. For the record, the information being requested was the bare minimum for an instance administrator to troubleshoot network interactions with a remote instance.
    • A random (but cool) third party identified the issue with your instance not federating. [3]
    • Instead of apologizing, you proceeded to act like you were entitled to that solution from the admins you wrongly accused. [4] You are not god’s gift to the internet and they are not technical support for your instance.

    There’s no room for niceties here, you are either an asshole in denial or some brat who is too young to know any better. Sleep on it. Come to terms with that fact and make good on it, or don’t. You aren’t worth anyone’s energy, and I’m only bothering with this summary for everyone else’s sake. Your problem is fixed, it was never on lemmy.world’s side to begin with, and somehow you are still acting like the failure of the admins to figure out what was busted with your shit is some Sherlock gotcha moment.

    I am unaffiliated with lemmy.world and my toxicity does not represent the opinions of the admins. (but they’re probably thinking it)


  • In my work, when someone comes to me and assumes I or my team is screwing up because they “eliminated all possibilities at hand” 90% of the time, they screwed up and didn’t realize it.

    Yeah, at that point the onus is on the person putting forth the problem to show their work. Start listing off possibilities that you’ve eliminated. You can have thirty years of technical experience and still be completely useless by assuming that you’re just as smart as the person you’re explaining the problem to.

    “I did eliminate all the possibilities I had at hand”? Naw man, anyone dropping that line has only eliminated all possibilities that they can think of, and all of that supposed thinking about “all the possibilities” is worthless if they aren’t going to offer it up as a starting point.


  • She should be punished for mishandling classified information, as much as Trump should be punished for using an unsecured phone for his presidential duties. As we keep saying in this thread, it’s possible to have a consistent opinion in all of this.

    Next you have to prove that her servers were handled that way for the purpose of tampering with evidence in a court of law. Y’know, like people are trying to do right now with Trump? The problem here is the matter of proof. It’s unfortunate for Trump that his lackeys were caught trying to destroy evidence and, y’know, left behind evidence of trying to do so, but that’s what it takes to prosecute someone for that particular crime.

    Let me reframe the question for you. Do we think Hilary and her aides should be prosecuted if evidence supported targeted tampering instead of incompetence? Yes. If it was deliberate, is it a shitty thing that she and her staff were not prosecuted because there was insufficient evidence to support a conviction? Also yes.










  • “I’m not gonna get in trouble for this, I’m not gonna have to worry about a kid cuz I can make her abort it!” Ik that sounds retarded but I kid you not when abortions are made legal (where I live anyway) we will see a huge wave of young kids coming to get them as a form of birth control.

    This is a “trust me bro” argument. It doesn’t contribute much to an online discussion because it’s speculation that cannot be affirmed or denied based on the information you have presented.

    What about rape? Silently putting the kid up for adoption is an option, no one has know and there are couples waiting to take kids in. Well what about women’s rights!? Well, what if I told you I don’t care. I only care about the babies right to life, if he/she wants to off themselves later on (which they shouldn’t and should seek help) then that’s their choice.

    This, on the other hand, is useful to the rest of us. It regretfully informs us that you are very poorly informed on the subject of mental health, and aren’t likely to be persuaded to invest the effort that would be needed to change your mind. You have already chosen the life of a potential child at all costs and the mother is an acceptable casualty of circumstance, because she gets a “choice” in what she does with the trauma from being forced to bear a child against her will, and the fetus having no agency precludes all further discussion.

    The fact that you will likely read that italicized text and think that is a checkmate argument in your favor is the crux of the issue. I apologize for not being willing to invest the energy in convincing you otherwise, but I also thank you for being honest with it. Way too much time gets wasted when people pretend that isn’t the core pillar of their anti-abortion argument.

    Now, if the mothers life is in jepordy, as well as the babies then why not abort it and save the mothers life? Well there is a thing called c section.

    There is also something called non-viable pregnancies. They tend to be conveniently ignored by policy makers and half-researched attempts to steelman a pro-choice PoV. (aka, what is happening here)

    If medical practitioners are placed in a position where they can’t provide preventative care without risking a lawsuit, then the mother gets traumatized by being forced to carry a corpse to term, and at worst both die pointlessly. The baby will never develop agency to begin with, and the mother isn’t given any agency either because she’s an acceptable casualty. This has happened several times in recent news already: one woman nearly bleeding out on the floor of a salon, and another being forced to bear a baby without a head.

    By all means, let’s allow politicians to make these decisions for us in advance of pregnancies instead of medical practitioners. Politicians are equipped with an infallible combination of medical experience and psychic powers that allow them to anticipate all medical scenarios ahead of time and prescribe the correct dosage of lawsuits to their constituents.

    Lemme tell you a story:

    Appeals to the fear of non-existence are not uncommon, and sympathetic to a degree. Non-existence is the shit that keeps a lot of us up at night. Fear of non-existence and ignorance of mental health unfortunately don’t make for good policy making.

    I will delete this account in a few cuz apparently this isn’t the instance for me, I think I might make my own!

    Not gonna actually help anything, that’s not how ActivityPub works. You’re participating on lemmy.world from your account on lemmy.fmhy.ml. It does however suggest that you are in search of an echo chamber, in which case…best of luck.


  • I wouldn’t want the Republican party to vanish and have nothing take its place. Having only Democratic party candidates to choose from would be bad.

    I agree with the spirit of where you’re coming from, but I don’t think this is a realistic risk. More than two major political ideologies effectively exist already, but their coalitions are the parties themselves due to the limitations inherent in the US voting system.

    The Democrat party already encompasses a broad spectrum of political philosophies, and they’re not in the same party because they want to be. They are a de facto coalition of whatever the Republican party isn’t. This is because the US leans to the right on the Overton window, and the two-party government of the US forces the role of the leftist party into being the kitchen sink coalition. This regretfully gets wallpapered over by the “radical left” narrative talking point that Republican media chestbeats over relentlessly, to the point where the average American never makes this connection.

    If I were to wave my magic wand and enact voting reform that doesn’t empower a two-party system, we have at least four parties worth of politicians in play:

    • establishment liberals, neoliberals, etc.
    • everyone in the democrat party who is to the left of them (who would realistically form more than just one party)
    • non-MAGA conservatives (Republicans who jumped ship to Democrat already/are too indoctrinated to consider it, conservative politicians who don’t agree with party leadership but maintain status quo for their careers)
    • Far-right Freedom Caucus types. McCarthy would already backstab these guys in a heartbeat if his speakership was politically viable without them. The fact that Republican leadership cares more about ego than principles is what put them into this predicament. (largely a consequence of what safe primaries have done to political strategies, but that’s another rant)

    You can split this up even further by pointing out libertarians (ones that aren’t really just conservatives who don’t want to be Republicans anymore) and others, but it’s enough to make the point. Let the Republican party collapse. Something else will immediately take its place, and as long as their replacement recognizes that the Freedom Caucus is what sank them, maybe they can steal enough of the right leaning Democrats to where they no longer need the far right crazies to be politically viable. A system that accommodates more than two parties would be better still, but congress critters are never going to vote in favor of something that weakens their own power. Voting reform will have to happen at the state level.


  • It’s a common feature of any demographic that is convinced of their moral superiority. Once you’ve accepted that you and your leaders are on the side of justice and are presented a designated enemy, you cease having to look inward. Progress requires acknowledging that you are operating inside of a flawed system, and that you have to work with people from other systems who acknowledge their own flaws.

    Tangent: “Enlightened centrists” acknowledge the flaws of both sides of an argument while failing to acknowledge that both sides have to play fair.


  • The cycle of social tech becoming mainstream and conversational norms being dragged down to a least common denominator predates modern social media. The earliest example I can think of is Usenet (newsgroups):

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

    During the 1980s and early 1990s, Usenet and the Internet were generally the domain of dedicated computer professionals and hobbyists; new users joined slowly, in small numbers, and observed and learned the social conventions of online interaction without having much of an impact on the experienced users. The only exception to this was September of every year, when large numbers of first-year college students gained access to the Internet and Usenet through their universities. These large groups of new users who had not yet learned online etiquette created a nuisance for the experienced users, who came to dread September every year. Once ISPs like AOL made Internet access widely available for home users, a continuous influx of new users began, which continued through to 2015 according to Jason Koebler, making it feel like it is always “September” to the more experienced users.

    It’s the same cycle. Social tech starts off being used by a smaller number of technically inclined people. Communities are smaller and normalized civility is more commonplace. Peer pressure holds people to those norms. Once a social tech balloons from mainstream interest, the norms (or zeitgeist if you prefer) shift toward the incoming population because they outnumber the early population and exert more peer pressure. The new norms become a compromise between the norms of the incoming mob and what the community moderators are willing/able to enforce.

    It’s tempting to put a label on the incoming demographic and use it in a derogatory way, but removing the label from the equation doesn’t change the source of unhappiness; the memory of what once was and the knowledge that it can’t last when cultural dilution sets in.

    (no, I’m not providing any solutions to the problem, this is just rambling that might provide more insightful people with a starting point)


  • It regretfully doesn’t matter how intellectual they are if the two-party system forces them to let their anti-intellectual minorities run the party. Once a governing body decides that keeping power away from “the other team” is more important than their principles, they cease to have the merit of those principles. Middle of the road negotiation simply ceases to exist. Either you have an overwhelming majority and don’t need the other party’s consent, or you have a narrow majority and policy making gets held hostage by the most belligerent minority faction within the party. When that belligerent faction is anti-intellectual, the result is the current shitshow.

    Since American politics are right-leaning on the Overton window, that makes both parties more susceptible to getting kneecapped by their most right-leaning belligerents when they hold a narrow majority. A narrow Republican majority gets kneecapped by the Freedom Caucus, and a narrow Democrat majority gets kneecapped by the likes of Sinema and Manchin.


  • It is possible, but a major US election requires a massive burst of popularity to avoid splitting the vote of the majority candidate having “less shitty than the other guy” policy positions. Failure to breach that threshold hands the victory to the majority candidate with the shittiest position on policies.

    The simple test is this: has your third-party candidate achieved a realistically high margin of popular opinion behind them? I’m not saying be a slave to polling, but it isn’t rocket science either. You will know if a third-party candidate has momentum behind them. They have charisma that sucks people in. They are somehow getting attention regularly driven to them despite the majority candidates pumping much more money into the news media.

    If the third-party candidate doesn’t have something bordering on a revolutionary ideological movement backing them, they aren’t going to make that cut in a nationwide race.


    Edit: I’m not saying give up. Donate to causes you honestly believe in. Volunteer. Do what you can to make a difference. Support local government efforts to implement ranked choice voting in your state, which can and will break this system. (look at Alaska) But when it comes to casting that final vote, be realistic, even if it means voting against all the hard work you just put in. Sunk cost fallacy at the expense of giving away victory doesn’t help anyone.



  • Because it’s what we’ve come to expect from large corporations suddenly joining the table of any FOSS project that is adjacent to their financial stakes. Coexistence is possible if they can profit from the software without assimilating it, but it also stands to reason that they will be pushing for new interoperability standards that benefit their own business model at the expense of users in some way.

    The lowest hanging fruit would be something that allows them to associate Fediverse accounts with users whose marketing data already exists in their database, or providing a service to third parties that helps them tie their own databases back to Fediverse users. This would require some sort of hook that encourages the users to either associate their Fediverse accounts to an existing Meta service, or otherwise volunteer common PII such as email address that can be cross referenced. Maybe some kind of tracking cookie that accomplishes the same.

    Keep in mind that this is just an example, it is not necessarily the exact angle they are pursuing. I’m not in the automatically defederate camp, but a healthy amount of skepticism is definitely warranted.

    ——

    Edit: Also worth a read: https://kbin.social/m/fediverse@lemmy.ml/t/83284/How-to-Kill-a-Decentralised-Network-such-as-the-Fediverse