SatanicNotMessianic @ SatanicNotMessianic @lemmy.ml

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4

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930

Joined

2 yr. ago

Get a shroom you two.

The irony is that I’m a biologist with mild but very real mycophobia. I want to watch that fungus documentary with Bjork.

I did this kind of work for a bit. I really do think this was more of a 9/11 slash Pearl Harbor kind of thing. It has that feel all over it. I think it was an epic and world (or at least region) changing fuckup.

I do not doubt the current government of Israel has used Hamas as a cat’s paw. I think the constant low level violence cost them little and produced huge political returns for the most far-right government in the history of the country. But I think this was unanticipated in scale and scope, and that both the attack and the response were far beyond what anyone - Israel and Hamas included - would have intended.

There will always be the Monday morning quarterbacks who will quite rightly point out that the information was just there. Looking backwards, we can reverse-solve the problem and say that we could have (or even did) know about Pearl Harbor, 9/11, or Oct 6. The truth is that we know shitloads of things, all the time. We have a constant flow of information, from all corners of the world. We even have constant fire hoses of information from our allies and even our own citizens.

The paradox of the panopticon is that when you’re looking everywhere, you’re really looking nowhere. There’s not ten thousand people in a bunker in North Dakota watching monitors. There’s a few thousand people in cities like Langley around the world who commute to work and get there around 9, and read through what happened yesterday and overnight, and write up summaries that themselves get summarized. If they have too many sources of information, it’s all processed algorithmically first, but it’s still a process of sorting the wheat from the chaff.

We need to fix that. We cannot surveil everything, even with our best and brightest working on technical solutions. But at the end of the day, these are human in the loop systems, and sometimes people fuck up. Sometimes they fuck up royally, and they lose the playoffs or they start a war.

I think it’s done at this point. The system fucked yo, and now a lot of people are going to die, afraid and in pain, because that’s what we do and we just don’t have it in us to stop doing that kind of thing quite yet. I quit the business and know others that did, but at the end of the day there’s still people who think other people need to be killed, and a second group of people who buy the argument and are good with doing it.

I think that the conspiracy theories will continue to fly as they tend to do, but this really just smells like a colossal fuckup in which 20-30k civilians are going to die, and it’s just a train that doesn’t have the ability to stop at this point.

If my client supported DMs I’d be so up in Stamets’ business that he would know I was a fun guy.

You would need

1. A database of all of the videos a particular user watched
2. A database of many other users and everything they’ve watched, so you can build profiles
3. A database containing metadata about the videos so you can organize and recommend topically and based on things like recency

I could put something like that together, but it’d take a lot of people and a lot of work, and we’d probably have to pay for it either with advertising or by charging a fee for users who don’t want ads.

That’s exactly how it works. That’s why it’s called “universal” basic income. Let’s say we set the UBI to $10k per year, just to make a number up. I know that’s not a living wage, I just want an easy number. If someone has $0 income for the year (because they had to stay at home and take care of their parents), they get $10k. If someone made $500k as a banker, they also get $10k. Now, the banker is going to be paying about $250k in taxes while the carer would pay $0, but they’d both get the same amount of money.

Alaska and some countries do this out of an oil fund. The idea there is that the oil in the ground belongs to the people, who must be compensated for its extraction. I think the Alaska fund is around $3k or something like that. UBI would be the same but funded via taxes on individuals and companies.

If it’s less than you can live on, you’d still need to work and it would supplement your income or pay for a vacation or something. If it’s enough to live on, you could do what you like (including making more money by taking on a job, or go off and paint, or just go fishing or whatever.

Oops - it just moved. Here’s the ad you just clicked on though.

I am not a baseist. Some of my favorite algorithms are base-2.

Linear algebra.

Getting fucked over by god is very different than being “sexual acquaintances.”

Just ask Mary.

I’d be pretty surprised if people like Cory Doctorow aren’t on here, but most celebrities engage for a reason (eg to be seen and maintain their brand). It’s happening somewhat on Mastodon and on Threads, but even on Reddit it was limited to the occasional AMA for the most part. If people were participating, they were mostly using aliases.

I don’t think we have enough organic users yet to make an AMA kind of thing happen regularly with random celebs, and I suspect most of them aren’t yet drawn to the content and format we have so far.

If you put a couple of scrunchies or a tiny sweater on the snake, it works better. Also, snakes aren’t particularly food motivated unless they’re really hungry, so if you’re intending to use a mouse or something to lure the snake to the other end of the tube, it would be best to prepare by not feeding the snake for a prolonged period before attempting the cleaning. Also, plain water or a non-irritating mild detergent are all you should need to use - remember, if it stings your eyes, it will sting theirs!

Okay, but have we ever tried the opposite? Like an abortion clinic that gives full information and support for whatever decisions are made, but fronts as an evangelical pregnancy crisis center?

I’d donate to that.

Trust me when I say that I always vote for the best option on the ballot. If Bernie or Liz Warren is there, they’re getting my vote as well as my donations.

But as a member of Team Rainbow, I also have an obligation to myself and my community to do my best to make sure we do not become illegal and persecuted. I will choose fucking anyone over someone who will promise to do actual harm. I feel the same about abortion rights and health care. Those are the bills we need to be ready to die on - and by die on I mean voting for whoever is going to not make it illegal to be gay or trans. I’m old enough (barely) to remember Anita Bryant, who worked to make it illegal for gay men to teach in California because of “grooming.” They called it “recruiting” back then.

I’ll take 40 years of Bidens and Clintons before I take four of the Christian and racist radicals that currently make up the entirety of the gop. When we elect an entire slate of democrats - when they can run the table - we can make things happen like in Michigan. We need enough of a margin of error that a Sinema or Manchin (or Lieberman) can’t hold us hostage.

One of my first computer jobs was working in a student computer lab at my undergraduate university. This was back in the mid 90s-ish.

We had three types of computers - windows machines running 3.1 or whatever was current then, Macs who would all do a Wild Eep together when they rebooted en masse, and Sun X Windows dumb terminals that were basically just (obviously) unix machines for all intents and purposes. This was back when there were basically like 5 websites total, and people still hadn’t heard of Mosaic.

So everyone wanted the windows and Mac boxes, and only took the xterms when there was nothing else open. I was the primary support person for them since none of the other people wanted to learn Unix and I was the only CS major.

The X boxes suffered from two main learning hurdles. One was that backspaces were incorrectly mapped into some escape key sequence, and the other is that it would drop you from (I think) pine into emacs as a mail editor as soon as you hit it. 90% of my time was telling people how to exit emacs. It was that, putting more paper into the printers, and teaching myself more programming than I was learning in classes.

There is a cultural phenomenon called schismogenesis - the tendency for one culture to define itself by how it differs from other cultures around it. Even in cases where the culture Y approach is “better” by whatever metric, culture X people will reject it because it’s a Y thing and not an X thing. I see the US rejection of the metric system under Reagan being the most glaringly obvious example of this, but the time thing is probably part of it, too.

I just really wish we hadn’t gone with the whole base 60 system in the first place.

I believe I read that they were sued to stop using the name Prager University as it was considered false advertising, so in typical conservative fashion they grifted long enough to get their name out there and then just hoped no one would notice.

Given every election that’s happened since 2016, this is exactly what every single Democratic candidate needs to hang around the neck of every single Republican. No more blue state moderate republicans. Link them all to 100% supporting a national abortion ban, outlawing marriage equality, and forced Christian prayers in public schools. Anti-civil rights, pro-child endangerment. Every single market should get this message, and it should be clear and consistent across the country.

Moses is believed by historians (including biblical scholars) to have never existed. There was no Moses. There was no Abraham. Most of those characters were fictional, and those that were not were fictionalized. There was no great nation of Israel. There were some small nations that occasionally were united under someone and then fell apart after he died, and they were conquered and occupied several times. They were polytheistic and then henotheistic, with Ashera worship occurring into 2CE as I recall.

I’m sorry - I just have a pet peeve against people who espouse that a character of legend actually existed because his legends (and it’s usually a he) sound a bit like the legends around another legendary character.

There’s also something like 35 fingers between two people.

We have reached the point that they don’t care anymore. The point is to make headlines. If they spend a few million defending it against a constitutional test that they ultimately lose, they don’t care. They’re thinking that they can get national (or at least state level) political points out of it, and they really don’t have anything else to spend their money on that’s worth more than that.

Obviously we all think (and hope) that this kind of thing will be overturned, but they just don’t care.