daltotron @ daltotron @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

That sucks, but I also kind of empathize with wiki mods, cause it's really hard to know when to cut stuff down. I remember seeing a while back a bunch of people that migrated out from wikipedia to some completely unknown new wiki nobody will ever hear about, because they were working on chronicling all the roads in america with screenshots and notes of location and historical details about it all. Wikipedia didn't really get it, as it's more like a kind of academic and news aggregate, and there was nothing really there to aggregate, it was just an infodump of a bunch of different stuff. If wikipedia was a 1-1 map of the world, then it would be the size of the world. Or bigger, if you include historical stuff. No way you're fitting all that on a 102 gig drive, or whatever the size of wikipedia is. Plus there's hosting costs to consider, so it's not like they could do that even if they really wanted.

A bunch of wikipedia sources are already archived on the wayback machine, anything cited to like pre-2010, online, there's a good chance it got taken down or changed in the last 13 years.

There's still good and plenty fuckery that can happen with citing books, though. Depending on the obscurity of the book, whether or not it's out of print, or just has been outright destroyed, it might be really hard to access a copy, and check the source, especially if someone doesn't have access to the internet archive or library genesis, i.e. digital scans of said book. There are reprints and new editions, sometimes not noted by the author of the citation (the author might have no way of knowing, depends), which can change or remove quoted passages. The internet also contains the ability to mass copy anything you want, and cite that copy, like what the internet archive does with the wayback machine, so if you have a citation of a webpage it's probably a good idea to copy that in time and then spread it around anyways just for the sake of posterity and accessibility, especially if it's obscure or is likely to be changed or removed. Same as you might for a book, except much easier, it's much harder to copy a whole book in context and spread that around compared to a webpage.

It's sort of the strength of rules which is the advantage of good, though. The advantage of evil, short term gains, is great. In the short term. The thing about fascists is that they really actually can't make the trains run on time, or sustain any level of state for any extended period of time, because they're incapable of actual coalition building without self-sabotage. It's why they keep having to move to beating on the most extremely marginalized in society. After trans people, I have no idea what the hell they'll scapegoat, because they're already scraping at the bottom of the barrel there. It was incredibly unpopular to overturn abortion, it will be the same with pretty much any other healthcare, or really anything that's actually core to what they want to do once they get power. None of this is to say that they shouldn't be feared, but we didn't stay in the great depression, and we didn't stay in the company towns, you know? People faced with nothing left to lose have every reason to fight establishment power, and fascists and fascism does nothing if not create people with nothing left to lose.

Most people think it's just kind of a free speech hellhole, but it's not, that's just the coat of paint the site took on/has always slightly had. Remnants of an idealized 1990's internet space where people thought everything would be free to use and free to access, and the storage would be infinite, ironically concocted by out-of-touch yuppies who didn't work on the pipes. In reality, free speech bullshit is always just a cover for admins to be able to enforce whatever totally inconsistent rules that they want without any form of repercussion, because obviously there are limits, even just legally, in terms of keeping the site up, and keeping it free from commercial spam, and having advertisers stay on. Most rules you can concoct have some sort of exception, or lack of clarity, or are too restrictive, so it really just falls down to some arbitrary decision as to what stays around and what doesn't.

With sites like 4chan, it isn't so much that "free speech" just inevitably leads to this tragedy of the commons where everyone becomes or is taken over by racists and incels, it's more that active decisions are made to turn these sites into shitholes by malignant actors, because sites like 4chan are the easiest targets, and have a kind of natural selection bias towards the type of people they want to recruit. They take advantage of this fact that "free speech" is obfuscating the actual moderation and enforcement of the site, and then use it to promote whatever ideologies they want, like a little internet meme terrarium, or maybe more of a virus cell culture. Then, this attracts other malignant actors, some of whom are even funded by different states, who work within the bounds of the site to advance it one step further, until you have a kind of horrible coalition of different ideas all stewing together.

Thus, most of the people who run the site nowadays are white supremacist dicks, funded by a hands-off japanese internet techbro libtertarian, and toy company "Good Smile".

Which is all kind of tragic, because, like that one guy said, it's responsible for a novel mathematical proof, the revival of a british indie rock band, the beginnings of anonymous, probably some other cool stuff I can't remember. Lots of early classic internet memes, of course. It's not all bad, really, it's just the lowest hanging fruit of web forum. Sometimes that's shitty, but then sometimes you get draw*** threads, where artists will go in and take low-pressure requests or concoct some sort of forum-game. Idealized, it's sort of like pub bathroom graffiti, or something. Which isn't really nefarious, is never serious, is sometimes charming, and very very occasionally is beautiful, useful, or novel.

I think the main smartphone market is kind of like the market for cars. The only people that can afford to buy them, can afford to keep up heavy consumer traffic, are the ones who are convinced they need to swap to the top of the line model with some sort of trade-in payment plan, where they want every new trendy thing, and every piece of bullshit technology that's not going to last even to the next flagship model. Basically, stupid people who are rich and are insecure about it. I'm certainly vulnerable to that to, just as I'm vulnerable to the unbearable lag on even just like a 6 year old phone, which should really not be that old, and then security updates and support are always a concern, I suppose. I think maybe the solution, individually, might just be to root my phone, or install some linux alternative operating system, cause I don't wanna keep up with this bullshit anymore. I'm trapped in a world of large 19:9 and 21:9 smartphones, unusable with one hand, and with screen space that's useless 90% of the time. I'm stuck without aux ports, and without any physical style keyboard, no nothin. I also want stuff like the DS stylus port and the flip camera they had on the zenfone 7, that shit is cool.

You know I wonder to what extent that is about people having old electric stoves that have bang on bang off resistive electric coils rather than like, a tuned consistent current coil that heats up and stays hot at a temperature. Cause the bang on bang off coil is probably going to have more thermal inertia, or, you'd want more thermal inertia, for a more consistent heat. I dunno about the thermal inertia of the coil in general, though, I've definitely cooked on shitty enough electric stoves that just an egg, butter, and a nonstick pan will cook for like 3 seconds, go back to being off for a minute, and then the coil will heat up and cook the egg for another 3 seconds, which is fuckin crazy, that shit blows.

Also popping in to say you might get some mileage out of a book like The People's Republic of Walmart, it's neat, barring the stinky economist bullshit that pops up from the fucking cato institute as soon as you look it up on google.

Everyone's gonna be like, oh the USSR, or venezuela, or whatever type of fully nationalized country that's got embargoed to shit and has either gone under or has gone the way of cuba and just kind of lives with it. And I'm not gonna waste your time trying to convince you about how all those countries are actually great or yadda yadda ya. Instead, I wanna turn you on to a couple neat things. First, would probably be the Zapatistas, who are a pretty cool kind of anarchist group that tends to function well mostly independent of the mexican government. Kind of hard to find information on them, but they're neat and I think outside of the general preconceived notions that people have against the idea itself, it's hard not to empathize with opposition to the mostly corrupt and totally fuckied mexican government. There's also, for your consideration the Mondragon Corporation, a co-operative that employs 80,000 people and rivals the size of probably a mid-sized country. If you're just taking issue with power structures themselves, rather than the monopoly on violence or the borders said to define a country as different from a corporation, than that's kind of an interesting counterpoint to like, global capitalism. Kind of ironic that they're, you know, a corporation, but then the structure of the corporation is different enough as to call into question whether or not the insane wealth disparities of corporations that americans are generally used to are required. But then, the surrounding stuff also has some problems, because the corporation itself has been criticized for employing contract workers, much like a state might employ immigrant labor or outsourced labor, reaping the rewards but giving none of the benefits, kind of creating an internal sense of "nationalism" in the corp. But then, I suppose, let us not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.