Uriel238 [all pronouns] @ uriel238 @lemmy.blahaj.zone

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2 yr. ago

A character in my cyberpunk dystopia novel I'm not quite writing yet, (working name Garden Gnome ) has realized that most of the clerical staff are bullshit jobs or the general clerical pool doing bullshit assignments, and realizes everyone's just courtiers or garden hermits, and so develops a run of performance routines (running to the copy machine just as it's finishing a job; standing on her tippy toes on the stepladder to access the high files, not getting jokes but saying something even funnier, etc.) as way to meet-cute her way into the upper-management secretarial pool.

If you're not in the office for actual work, then (for good or ill) you're there for your character.

This sounds like the kind of flirting I'd expect after seeing '80s and '90s teen angst movies. In retrospect screenwriters just don't understand how humans interact, or rather they just don't care and go for madcap antics instead.

I'm way neurodivergent, and was completely unaware of human interaction, so I was looking at Pretty in Pink and St. Elmo's Fire (etc. etc.) trying to decipher how all that works.

I became sexually active at 26 after folks from the kink community noticed my nerdy vibe, and they schooled me in some basic human interaction. (Note that I matrix-dodged a barrage of incel-to-fascist pipeline bullets thanks to some amazing strokes of fortune.)

After the fact, in recollection, I realized then that a lot of women in my young adult life were signalling me and I never knew.

I also realized my aunt was totally hitting on me when I was sixteen. That's all sorts of awkward to reconcile.

This meme illustrates by example one of the key failures of capitalism:

Upper management doesn't see itself as responsible for overseeing staff to maximize their productivity via data-driven methods (e.g. let them have human lives while they work)

Upper management sees staff as their courtiers and garden hermits there to emphasize how important the execs are.

Hence RTO mandates rather than letting them telecommute or giving them sweet workspace at the office.

There are literal eldritch horrors we do not comprehend. It is why the sun has all the material features of god, yet we see it as a (very large, implacable, thankfully consistent) object, and we don't think about how we must refrain from looking at the sun directly, only that it burns our eyes.

Bertrand Russell's attempt at reducing all of mathematics to a perfect system of logic (until this was proven by Gödel to be impossible) broke him, much the way professors at Miskatonic would go mad trying to model the universe by pondering quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore.

Myself, I was already pretty mad (diagnosed) when I saw lines being crossed in the US that pointed towards a fascist autocratic future and a purge campaign, and so I took to studying moral philosophy and the Holocaust, specifically the human mechanisms that justified the engagement of and participation in evil. Consequently, I broke my brain even further. Nature, human or otherwise, can be unflinching and ruthless in its efforts to exploit or consume us, which is why we need reciprocal ethics in the first place.

I do not imagine the universe is incomprehensible, only that we are small and still pretty simple, imagining the moon closer and bigger since we see models drawn to disproportionate scale. And so the layperson doesn't understand how difficult it is to launch a probe from one speck so that it drifts for months or years, to fall into an orbit around another speck. It's difficult to imagibe that the stars in a single galaxy, each teeming with satellite objects, are uncountable like the grains of sand on a beach. We know it's a number, but still have to estimate its value with a wide error margin.

It's not forbidden knowlege. The parabolic manifold in which the pillars of R'lyeh stand can be computed, but our hominid brains have to bend a lot, or chain together analogies and metaphors to understand them.

It's like a dog chasing a hyperball, possibly to its peril.

It's also very squishy.

At the point you already have a tense paramilitary operation clashing with protests in what is escalating towards lethal violence, I'm not sure finding wideband jammers will be the priority of responders in the area, at least not the first few times.

Though in times of peace and order, wideband jamming is, yes, a big no-no.

IMSI spoofing is a product of wireless telephony being an ancient (way-pre-internet) technology, and we're long in an era where law enforcement (or in this case law-enforcement coded) investigators don't have to obey laws, such as assuring due process, and unreasonable searches disqualifying evidence. Instead they're hunting political enemies, and every prisoner of the United States is now a political prisoner.

It also means we don't have to obey the law, and can start using all-frequency jammers in and around protests and ICE actions to level the playing field. (It will also interfere with regular infrastructure, but it's not like ICE or the current regime gives half a fuck about that.

All-frequency jammers are older tech and easier to build than IMSI spoofers, and are highly illegal since so much of our commerce and communications depend on radio. But the current [FCC] has also been captured and is failing to do its job.

Any Amateur Radio enthusiast will know how to make a jammer. And current battery technology would assure you could make a handful that are portable and powerful enough to shut down blocks and blocks of municipal communication. This is playing pretty hardball, but then ICE isn't playing by the rules.

Well this just wrecked my evening.

But this is an ongoing, recurring story. Thief 2014 was a mockery of the original titles.

The Swasticar gets more swastika?

Expose him to Baby Shark.

Then the Badgers song.

Lather, rinse, repeat until he latches onto a song you can tolerate.

We can talk about specific Jewish figures in Hollywood but that absolutely doesn't make them a unified front.

Behind the Bastards did a two-parter about How The Liberal Media Helped Fascism Win noting that liberal Jewish-owned newspapers sided with NSDAP against their Jewish working-class brethren, because the newspaper owners were more aligned with the ownership class, and the Nazis were anti-communist and anti-unionist already.

In psychology, it's called attitude polarization, where we ignore data that conflicts with an ideology while accepting data that confirms it. It's a known common human bias.

Scientists train themselves to accept new data as challenging old presumptions (that maybe the old model is false, or simplistic and some unconsidered noise is affecting observed data)... at least when they're doing real science. Failure to do so, and to cling to older models, is how old dudes get tagged as hidebound reactionaries. And even Einstein couldn't square his feelings regarding Heisenberg probability models of quantum dynamics.

TIL about prompt bleed, and that it has a name.

Isn't Grok the LLM that recently had a crisis over white power conspiracy theories that it inserted randomly into responses?

The thing is what I wish for immigrants and refugees, I wish for absolutely everyone.

But I see fascism, autocratic tyranny and the hoarding of wealth and power as sickness rather than character flaws.

Remember the meme about everyone could have a 32 hour work week and three-day weekends (and a productivity boost) but the billionaires are opposed?

Well everyone could have post-scarcity communism but the billionaires are opposed.

Meanwhile 77 million Americans really let the Djinni out of the bottle in November.

Maybe every story is Pandora's jar.

As we quickly learned during the George W Bush era, no news media agency can be trusted. To counter this, check reporting of the same incident from multiple news agencies and find the consistent facts. Everything else is suspect.

In a hurry, see if Reuters or AP has covered it, but verify when you have the time.

Done this way AJ is perfectly viable as a source for news, in that the bias can be filtered out.

FOX and OANN are known to lie or misrepresent facts entirely, but that gets filtered through cross-checking.

Trust, but verify.

Obama campaigned on getting past it. ( Hope amd Change ) but then he didn't. Corporations got their bailouts. OWS was cleared violently with the cameras off. BLM notice law enforcement kill a lot of people. The disposition matrix was a thing. The IWOT went on and on. The mass surveillance state was a thing. The economy was better but 88% of households were in precarity, and a lot of people were homeless.

And then Trump won by the EC.

So Ive been waiting for things to get better for a long, long time. I've just stopped expecting the suck to ever reverse, or even ebb.

I just use LGBT+ since it was LGBT for a long time (it was GLBT but the Ls earned their place at the front during the AIDS crisis) then it became LGBTQ, then a bunch of other letters were added while the community was recognizing is profound variety before it turned into LGBTQ+

Q+ has a nice ring to it, but since I'm an unusual form of NB, I fit squarely into the catch-all variety of Q.