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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)JG
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169
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2 yr. ago

  • I understand that people, especially children, are malleable into believing and doing horrible things, and it's a fact that this will happen to many under Hamas or as a consequence of the ongoing conflict regardless of Hamas, but it's also unfair to those hostages to assume that they're already murderers. It's a tragedy waiting to happen for multiple dimensions of reasons for many people involved in this entire conflict (wouldn't you be radicalized if you saw your entire family covered in rubble or being treated like trash by other groups of people?), and it's extremely unfortunate, but we can't just instantly label them all as bad apples for something that may or may not happen to them, or that may or may not describe them currently. They're still children, we can't cast the dice on them, or we're no different from those radicalized beyond common civil morality.

  • On one hand, animals are animals, so one should either object to eating all or not object to eating any.

    I feel like this is a sort of ironic dichotomy we humans find ourselves in due to our evolutionary development that lets us reflect on our actions, along with our empathy stemming from our understanding of suffering of life in general.

    On one hand, we are omnivores, we eat plants and animals, it's not that we decided to eat animals, it's that we've evolved to do so. Vegan diets end up relying on supplements and lots of hoop jumps to achieve the same results an omnivores diet would have. That, while commendable on those who try, shows us quite clearly that we're going against our most fundamental evolutionary traits.

    On the other hand, we understand we are causing suffering to other beings in order to sustain ourselves. No matter how humane out treatment of such animals may become, it's still something that we will struggle to accept, or that we will ignore outright to not have to struggle with the thought.

    It's a terrible situation to find ourselves in, because that's literally the solution life itself has come up with, we steal nutrients and energy from other life, period. Yet we understand we are denying other life forms their chance to life, and a lot of the time they suffer while being denied that chance. But what other solution is there? We haven't come up with better solutions, and we may never do so. We defined a certain threshold for what we deem acceptable, some of us move that threshold, but none eliminate eating life entirely, because it's not possible. Plants are still alive, fungi are still alive, bacteria are still alive, insects are still alive, and we never ever stop to think about them like we do our farm animals, we only stop to think about life that resembles our own. And that's, unfortunately, necessary to not starve ourselves out of the equation.

    I wonder if we will ever solve this riddle for ourselves. Will we simply accept this forever as a given that some animals just have to suffer for our sake? Will we start growing our own meat, and declare the threshold to be "organisms without a complex neural system"? Will we be able to forego depending on other life entirely and develop our nutrition in factories or through biological modifications without even relying on other cellular organisms? Where will we draw the line next, and will we be able to satisfy our moral qualms?

    I can't be for or against any of this, all I can do is hold my own actions to my own moral line and accept that everything else is just how things have to be due to the cruel reality of being alive. I'm unable to kill, and I'm convinced I'd first die than kill even a chicken to survive (or if I do, the guilt will eat me alive), but I eat chicken every day and I will continue to do so until the day I die, even though there's a strong cognitive dissonance there, since I can't really do much about it without compromising my own nutrition in some way, I can't go against the very rules of life. It's truly a cruel joke that life has played on us, forcing us to depend on taking life from other organisms to stay alive, while also allowing us to empathize with other life forms and enter such a dissonant state of mind. That's just the torture of life, I guess.

  • I'm too retarded to understand SMART values so, I 100% have read errors on them, I have no idea what the numbers mean, though, so I can't say how bad it is. I don't see critical failures or unrecoverable errors being reported on them, so I don't sweat it too much.

  • Surely you can see how this also isn't a fitting solution. Just... Go down the age brackets and see how increasingly uncomfortable it all becomes to tolerate this. There's already been cases of AI porn of highschoolers made by highschoolers. We can keep going down the victim age line, or up the perpetrator age line. It gets bad pretty fast regardless of how ubiquitous this might become in the future.

  • We can agree about piracy being detrimental for sure! We just disagree on how detrimental it is vs corpo's own actions.

    Regarding the donations, it's "give whatever you want, even 0, and inly when I say we need new gear", so I wouldn't say it's lost revenue since barely anyone donates and it all goes directly to covering part of the cost of new hard drives. I've asked for donations twice so far, and none of the times have seen enough donations to cover for 100% of equipment expenses. Just thought I'd clarify on the "donations" thing :)

  • I'm personally dying to see the DMA do its magic. If there's even a dreamy chance of not having to have the big messaging apps installed on my phone in order to talk to people on these platforms, then I don't want to stop dreaming.

  • They're called donations for a reason, it's a contribution to keep the service growing (not going since I'm personally invested in keeping it going for as long as possible) and nobody is forced to give a dime if they don't want to.

  • At least for piracy of streaming content, I believe what should become apparent to everyone is that convenience drove down piracy and greatly increased gains for everyone, and once corporations got greedy and started rolling out new platforms and fragmenting content between them, everything started going down the drain. Even without accounting for piracy, convenience was lost, multiple platforms mean more fees to get the same content that was originally in one platform, so less people willing to pay. Less income per platform drives down investment in content and drives up cancelations of ongoing projects. Less income than was originally observed when a single platform had condensed content means there's greater incentive to drive ads and increases prices on all platforms, thus also potentially driving down users subscribing to said platforms.

    None of that factors in piracy. If we do factor in piracy, it's a fact that before fragmentation, subscription rates were high, and after fragmentation, there's a lot more incentive to pirate content. In some instances, platforms shoot themselves in the foot even further by further charging rental fees or purchases of individual content, as well as region blocks and ads.

    Piracy surely is a problem all throughout the history of streaming services (something that could still be argued as not actually something to worry about because those pirates were never going to be customers in the first place, and Netflix was still booming enough to incentivize other companies to roll out their own platforms), but it becomes a symptom of another problem later down the line due to lack of convenience. Even so, the current state of streaming platforms wouldn't be much different if piracy wasn't happening. People would simply consume less content due to budget constraints or due to being annoyed at lack of conveniences.

    I personally hate depending on a platform that on a whim may decide to remove content I watch. There's specific songs that have disappeared from my Spotify playlists for no good reason (a lot for geoblocking reasons), there's shows that just get removed from Netflix, there's all of game of thrones on prime which I couldn't watch due to geoblocking and ended up having to pirate it even though I was paying for a platform which had the show. It's a lot easier, a lot more convenient, to pirate. The content is yours, instantly, until you decide to delete it from your computer. I didn't mind paying for Netflix for years, and since they incentivized account sharing, I shared the account with 2 other friends and we split the cost. It was super convenient. Now, I have a plex library nearing the 50tb mark with about 40 people watching content on it, everything automated and everyone can request whatever they want, and I simply ask for donations to buy more drives. It's still more expensive than subscription services due to energy costs, donations not being enough for the equipment needed to store content and run services, and costs of internet, static ips, and domain names, but I'm not planning to stop as it's overall more convenient, not just for me, but for 40 other people.

  • I don't know of a country there that allows private ownership of firearms

    Well, we do allow private ownership of firearms, just, AFAIK, a very limited number of models provided by a very specific entity rather than just about anywhere. I wouldn't be surprised if most countries in the americas allowed some degree of firearm ownership (don't care enough to look it up).

    I didn't mean that when I said "privately owned militias". I meant the banana companies which dealt with strikes by sending privately owned troops on privately owned ships to these countries in order to reign in their poorly disguised slavery.

  • Fuck off with that attitude, do you think bill gates personally farms all that farmland? Do you think he even has to know anything about it to own it and put it to use? What the fuck kind of argument is that, when the owner is a tech billionaire and not a farmer? How can you give him a free pass for that solely on the grounds of him being a billionaire, but criticize me for daring to say he maybe doesn't need all that land?

    Also I don't have to be personally given anything from any single billionaire. We could try redistributing all that wealth from all billionaires between everyone and we'd all end up with like tree fiddy (well, more like less than 300 us dollars). That's really not the point of criticizing obscene wealth accumulation. With that money they all get power, and they use the power to bend everything to their will in order to hoard more power. They don't need any of it, but they keep hoarding it, at the cost of everyone from their own employers, to competitors, to everyone's information, to the very legal systems and infrastructures of entire countries. And, as someone pointed out, they absolutely can and do occasionally turn part of that power into pure money for whatever reason they might need to, such as, oh idk, buying a 44bn dollar tech company as their personal toy. If that money, or that land, were in hands of non-profits or governments, you'd see very measurable results in quality of life improvements for societies all around the world. Maybe not flying car futuristic utopias like the Jetsons promised, but maybe, just maybe, we'd avoid looking like blade runner or cyberpunk dystopias.

  • I'm a proper American, from the Americas. You know, one of those countries your country likes to fuck around with every now and then with a little coup or private militia invasion. With those guns you guys worship so much. That kind of American.

  • He's a whiny piece of shit with an ego the size of the planet he wants to own, but sadly, he is a tech leader. Right now he controls the biggest EV charger network in the americas, most NASA contracts go to him, he's got our skies covered in his satellites, and he owns [read: complete took a massive dump on] one of the primary social media platforms on the internet. He also did Kickstart the EV craze, probably influenced the price of solar in some way, and definitely influenced the price of lithium batteries. I hate him as much as anyone else (maybe more because I was a fanboy before the cave incident), but he's, quite sadly, a tech leader.

  • Because it compliments existential dread quite fittingly. Check out exurb1a if you want more [very poetically narrated] existential dread [with a few bong rips or bottles of alcohol in between]. His last video, published hours before I wrote that, sort of touches on some of the ideas I wrote about (I watched the video afterwards, idk), but a lot more beautifully.

  • It's been said before, and it's the kind of comment that essentially implies this community shouldn't exist, but it's extremely ironic for a community called "enough xyz spam" to essentially spam everyone's feeds with posts about xyz. Imma go ahead and block this community, don't take it personally peeps, I just actually have had enough of musk spam.

  • Right? I feel it's really snobby and disingenuous to just snap back and say "just ditch that and use so and so messaging app", as if messaging platforms didn't require your direct peers to also use them. As long as messaging platforms operate as walled gardens, we have little say on what apps we use. We're at the mercy of the general populace and that's all there is to it, at least until the DMA changes things. I really tried to make people jump ship from WhatsApp to telegram during what seemed like a mass exodus from even businesses (yeah bad choice but I didn't know back then), ended up back on WhatsApp some 3 months later with my tail between my legs, nobody stayed on telegram even though a ton of people downloaded it and jumped in. Now imagine trying to get them all to use a privacy-focused app that gives them a hard time using it in multiple devices. Convenience is the reason why Meta, Apple, Google, MSFT, etc. are on top. You can't expect the general populace to sacrifice it for privacy, not after continuously giving up freedom and privacy for the sake of convenience for decades in the digital space.