lennivelkant @ lennivelkant @discuss.tchncs.de

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1 yr. ago

I think the point of the character is to be over the top annoying. In that case, hamming it up is good acting, because making the character even more annoying is exactly what you want.

Basically, they did a great job acting an awful character, which is a compliment.

Dammit, it was right in the post, why did that take me so long?

On one hand, that's how a criminal standard of justice should work, to prevent wrongfully convicting the innocent.

On the other hand, that would require the system to be functional and fair in the first place, rather than being slanted towards who can afford the better lawyers, but that's a whole can of worms I don't think I need to crack open here - we all agree on that anyway.

given free eggs to everyone

I'm torn between "big poultry", "commie" and vegan jokes here.

"He's just trying to get us all addicted to eggs"
"There's no such thing as free eggs, bloody commies"
"Eggs? So much for the libs and their veganism"

Use the intervening years to vote in local politics, primaries, whatever else you have. Take action, don't just wait for the next presidential election to make a vacuous point of non-participation. Boycotting votes does no good, and in a top-heavy system, handing over control of the top to the still objectively worse side is too much of a gamble, but building progressive support from the ground up is not just safer, it may also make the bend-overs worry about their own dominance enough to start at least holding the rope and make life a little harder for the other side.

Also, support whatever measures you find to abolish FPTP. It's the reason the whole thing is a tug of war in the first place. Just about any alternative is better.

Maybe he can get scared enoug at shadows for his burger-fattened heart to give in and do the job without landing anyone in jail.

As for Vance, that one might need more... convincing. Maybe we can find a couch with some novel and deadly STD for him?

Oh you're absolutely right, I just felt like spelling out the subtext of "Musk isn't in it for the right wing mentality, just for the power" that I thought you were hinting at but left unsaid. I wasn't trying to contradict you at all, but rather to expand on your setup.

The issue is that the difference is clear to us, but not to everyone else. Even at the periphery of the tech world, I've met people generally aware what source code is, but not of the specific concept of "Open Source" and why it makes a difference. We should avoid falling into the bubble trap where we assume that what's familiar to us is familiar to everyone else as well.

Damn cats are lucky I love them.

The shit cats get away with by being cute...

I think that, vocal complainers aside, he's still overall fairly popular. A popular white man saying wise stuff is a great opportunity to signal how committed you are to science without having to put actually significant amounts of money on the line or entering the minefield that is angering the anti-"woke" crowd. He's a safe investment in public appearances.

Doesn't mean they'll have to listen to him. He gets a more sombre version of the Jester's Privilege that allows him to say whatever he wants, they'll nod and applaud and perform all the gestures of approval, but they won't actually change anything.

 

The other half of it is probably the Internet Outrage culture that sees inciting content get more engagement and boosted visibility in a self-perpetuating cycle of upset. Legitimate criticism drowns in a sea of bullshit, everyone's pissed off and we're all easily swept up in the current of emotion. If we're not mad at one person, we're mad at the people pointlessly or excessively mad at them. If we try to stem against that, we're dogpiled by loud complainers while quiet agreement leaves an upvote and moves on.

When your whole identity is consumed by boundless, baseless, joyless hatred of "the other", yes, you're gonna be negative.

I don't believe Musk is controlled by any of that though. He might share in it, but it doesn't quite dictate him as much as it dictates those in actual misery. For example, he isn't actually opposed to letting immigrants in, if they'll make him richer. He's motivated by greed and grift, and no small helping of pride.

I suspect he just doesn't want people criticising him and his cronies. Particularly when they inevitably start enacting policies that affect their base negatively (we've already seen our share of face-eating leopard voters shocked to find out that their face isn't off limits), social media could help pissed off people realise how many others are pissed off too. I don't think I need to spell out why that could be dangerous for him.

Better to quell dissent entirely. If nobody can complain about the government, it's harder to organise against it. Suppress criticism, censor the media, manipulate what you get to see to shape your view...

Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

(Obligatory note that calling a dictatorship communism doesn't make it less authoritarian than a capitalist dictatorship. Red boots hurt just as much as any other color if they step on your neck, no matter how tasty they might be. That has nothing to do with the topic, I'm just bracing for tankie whataboutisms.)

I'm not the smart person you replied to and I don't know for sure, but given many modern circuits have become very fine and compact, I'm not optimistic about your chances to repair it. It would depend on the nature and extent of the damage, of course, but if you're an amateur, I think you're better off replacing (though you might get away with replacing just a part instead of the whole device).

Also a good point. Personally, I'm not willing to extend the charity of Hanlon's Razor to corporations well known to be malicious. In this event, I'd rather be wrong than off-guard, if that makes sense?

The meta verse and apples AR flop cost them a lot of money as a result.

I think this is more of a case where the mandate to always increase profits compelled them to take calculated financial risks and hope to be the vanguard of a new boom. Well, maybe the calculations were more estimates, but I assumed they figured out they could afford the loss if it flopped, but would make major gains by securing a foothold in a new digital space if it succeeded.

Consider how occasionally niche technologies once mocked later turn out to be hits. I remember once reading somewhere that QR codes were a fad, had died out and were basically useless, for instance, and I bought it because I myself saw decreasing use of them. At the time, I think QR code scanners weren't built into smartphone camera apps, and smartphones weren't as ubiquitous either, so unless you downloaded dedicated (and in retrospect sketchy) apps for it, they remained useless.

Now, I see QR codes everywhere. My company has them on meeting rooms to check their occupation and book them right from your phone without needing to remember or manually enter the room number. Our printers have QR codes for email templates to report errors to IT that include technical details for the printer. Restaurants have QR codes for digital ordering, invoices for automatically scanning the payment details from your banking app, the list goes on.

Obviously, the financial scale is far different, but that's the example that came to mind just now seeing a QR code in my train for digital schedules including current delay. I'm sure there are better examples I could think of, but it's eight in the morning and my long-term memory won't come online for another hour or so.

My point is that it's sometimes hard or impossible to predict whether something will succeed, but the nature of corporate economics in the tech sphere compells taking risks on new innovations because the potential payoff is immense. And if they can afford to take it - they're not exactly short on money and not particularly worried about their users running away over it - I don't know if they can afford not to. Who knows what new tech people might surprisingly latch on to?

I do think you're right, but I don't think it's the only reason for doing things we think are stupid. The tech sphere in particular has a lot of survivorship bias, but while small companies might disintegrate over a failure, a giant corporation can take the hit and keep trying for the next gold rush.

To see if the backlash is really that bad, to see if there are specific issues people object to, to see if there are certain demographics more strongly opposed, to desensitise people for when they try it next time ("ugh, again?" instead of the full outrage), to give people the illusion of control (look, online complaints work!)...

There are a lot of possible reasons, but I doubt it's an entirely ignorant decision coming from a company known to be good at manipulating it's users.

That's a feature with poetry all over: twisting grammar to make the content fit the line. "Some of those that work on the police forces" just doesn't fit as well. It gets the point across anyway, so what's the issue?

Oh no, I recently saw someone shitting on it still. They exist!

Most have just wisened up and moved to a systemd-less sphere, I assume, rather than fighting a lost battle on a niche hill.

There should be an open communication standard that all robots use to communicate with each other.

Yes!

And it will only be used for good and nothing nefarious.

Oh no

Ads is from advertisement, not adds

Aren't they fractions rather than floating point decimals?

if you dont do exactly what I say the way I say it then you are basically voting for trump

Welcome to a world where FPTP has managed to create a binary choice, and one option is clearly worse. It's not even "do what I say" or "voting for trump", it's failing to oppose him. Everyone that advocated against voting for Harris is complicit in the damage Trump will do that Harris wouldn't have. Trans kids, abused spouses, victims of labour safety violations, all their blood will be on the hands of those that said "I don't care".

Like you.

I dont play those dumb centrist hostage games

So you're going to let the hostages die? How noble and enlightened.

I didn't set it up. I don't agree with all of Harris' views. But the General Election isn't the place to make that point. Local elections, primaries, protests - great! But for all that it sucks, the General Election is a hostage situation. And unfortunately for the hostages, it's not a "game", it's fucking life-or-death and you found "death" acceptable. Their death, namely.

No anger for them eh?

I've been plenty angry at them, as I am at all enablers of this fucked-up dilemma. But I can be mad at multiple people for different reasons.

Just for the slaves who didnt mind the whip and support the genocide?

Right, and who was the anti-genocide candidate?

Oh right. Neither. Because this election wasn't about supporting or opposing genocide.

It was about all the points in which Trump and Harris are different, all the things you don't care about, those "hostages", which you'll gladly let die for the sake of feeling good about doing nothing.

You let people die in the name of pretending to save people. That's the hypocrisy.