deathbird
@deathbird@mander.xyz
- Comment on Sympathy for their PTSD 4 weeks ago:
I hope these IDF soldiers wake up. You can’t kill people without killing part of yourself.
- Comment on Sympathy for their PTSD 4 weeks ago:
This is basically Objectivism.
Wouldn’t it be cool if people who committed violent acts couldn’t actually be traumatized by those acts if they were unambiguously immoral. If people who did Evil were always consciously aware of it. If there was a moral order to the universe manifested in our bodies and in our works. One could then be sure that anyone who committed an act of evil and reported being traumatized by it was really lying.
- Comment on Sympathy for their PTSD 4 weeks ago:
Everyone has a choice.
- Comment on Sympathy for their PTSD 4 weeks ago:
There’s no such thing as a “correct” people to erase.
- Comment on X's controversial changes to blocking and AI training saw half a million users leave for rival Bluesky in just a single day 4 weeks ago:
I hate Twitter, but I’m getting to the point where I want it to get better because if bluesky gets many more members we’re just gonna have Twitter again.
One thing I liked about the Muskification of Twitter was the scattering.
- Comment on Elon Musk’s X is now worth less than a quarter of its $44 billion purchase price 1 month ago:
I think you’re giving the guy too much credit. Sometimes things are as they seen. He just didn’t like the moderation scheme on Twitter, made a gesture buying it, fumbled a little bit and overbid, then after having been forced to acquire it tried to turn it into something closer to what he wanted it to be.
- Comment on Elon Musk’s X is now worth less than a quarter of its $44 billion purchase price 1 month ago:
Masnick’s post is well put, but also a disturbing reminder of how much power nation-states can exert over the Internet.
- Comment on ISPs tell Supreme Court they don’t want to disconnect users accused of piracy 1 month ago:
Because they’re also rich. Laws are for the poors.
- Comment on Despite tech-savvy reputation, Gen Z falls behind in keyboard typing skills 2 months ago:
The difference between clearly documenting features, and hiding or removing them.
- Comment on Despite tech-savvy reputation, Gen Z falls behind in keyboard typing skills 2 months ago:
First time I saw a Zoomer do that it hurt my soul.
- Comment on EE warns parents against giving children under 11 a smartphone 2 months ago:
This is actually a good take. Kids aren’t miniature adults, they’re kids. They’re not helpless or useless, but neither are they fully morally and emotionally developed. They need guidance. Plenty of adults can’t responsibly handle internet access. I survived early onilne porn and gore and social media, but it’s not like any of it benefited me in a meaningful way.
Some folks have an attitude that’s like “I touched hot stoves and I learned better”, but that’s far from ideal.
- Comment on Israel Is Buying Google Ads to Discredit the UN’s Top Gaza Aid Agency 2 months ago:
To be fair, at least as of this moment his prior post says Google is “manufacturing consent for”, not “actively supporting”. I believe that the former can be the latter, but is not necessarily the latter.
- Comment on Doctors Remove Woman’s Brain Implant Against Her Will 2 months ago:
I feel like maybe research on medical implants like this should be done by the state.
- Comment on Everything old is new again. 4 months ago:
An Uber will never pick you up and tell you “My credit card reader is broken” at the end of the ride after driving you in circles.
- Comment on Everything old is new again. 4 months ago:
Up front pricing is almost always going to be more attractive than metered pricing.
If you offer me metered pricing, I’m going to assume you’ll charge 20% extra.
- Comment on Everything old is new again. 4 months ago:
And a transparent price up front.
It’s annoying enough to get in a vehicle and not know how much it’ll cost by the end of the trip (would you do this on a bus? Would you let an airline change the price of a ticket mid-flight?), but there’s something viscerally galling about watching some asshole take a longer route just to pad out the fare. Last I checked, when Lyft or Uber gives you a price, that’s the price.
- Comment on Everything old is new again. 4 months ago:
Everyone has stories like this.
- Comment on The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax 4 months ago:
It is kinda weird that real estate gets taxed just for existing and being held, but stocks, which supposedly represent a fraction of a mass of real wealth too, don’t get taxed while just being held.
- Comment on [Meta] Did we drop the "what are you playing" monthly thread? Also, mods haven't been active for a while, should someone take over? 5 months ago:
Playing Disco Elysium for the first time and it’s really good. Reminds me a lot of Planescape: Torment. Really a breath of fresh air after Fallout 4.
Fallout 4 had fun gameplay, but my god did the writing suck. There were a few good bits, but overall it was garbage. The 4-options-only dialogue system blew anyway, but the options were always “Yes”, “No”, “Meh/Sarcastic Yes”, and “Tell me more!” It was terrible.
At least in Skyrim you were a nobody that everyone wanted a piece of, you lack of internal motivation was understandable. The conflicts were between the groups were rooted in a history you woke up in the middle of. There were literally chaos gods (daedra) fucking shit up. For the love of god Bethesda, please just make the next Fallout game an actual RPG.
Oh, and I also need to circle back around to Dave the Diver now that the Godzilla DLC is out.
- Comment on Uber's new shuttle service sounds a lot like a bus route 5 months ago:
It’s not a brilliant new idea, it’s a good old one. Jitneys are back baby!
- Comment on The cost-of-living crisis is so bleak that some Gen Zers genuinely fear becoming homeless 6 months ago:
So many folks at or just over the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid that even Forbes can see them.
- Comment on Proton Mail Discloses User Data Leading to Arrest in Spain 6 months ago:
Isn’t the old bit about organized crime how they always have a second set of books? After all they do want to be able to track their finances.
- Comment on How to opt out of the privacy nightmare that comes with new Hondas 6 months ago:
Or at this point, the one whose tracking is easiest and safest to avoid or circumvent.
- Comment on How to opt out of the privacy nightmare that comes with new Hondas 6 months ago:
Also mind that soon these new cars will be used cars with the same bullshit.
- Comment on A YouTuber let the Cybertruck close on his finger to test the new sensor update. It didn't go well. 6 months ago:
Yeah. No one ever gave me AdSense dollars for nearly busting my fucking head.
- Comment on Somebody managed to coax the Gab AI chatbot to reveal its prompt 7 months ago:
They’ll tolerate arguments over precise economic policies that amount to discussing how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, but hold far tighter to what amount to cultural arguments. “USA bad” means “Russia good” because Russia is against USA so if Russia does bad then it’s good actually or else no it didn’t happen.
- Comment on Somebody managed to coax the Gab AI chatbot to reveal its prompt 7 months ago:
Gab is for the friendiest of the right wing. And people often cluster disparate ideas together if they’re all considered to be markers of membership within their “tribe”.
Leftists, or at least those on the left wing of liberalism, tend to do this as well, particularly on social and cultural issues.
I think part of it is also a matter of not so much what people believe as what they will tolerate. The vaccine skeptic isn’t going to tolerate an AI bot that tells him vaccines work, but maybe generally oblivious to the Holocaust and thus really not notice or care if and when an AI bot misleads on it. Meanwhile a Holocaust denier might be indifferent about vaccines, but his Holocaust denialism serves as a key pillar of an overall bigoted worldview that he is unwilling to have challenged by an AI bot.
- Comment on Kids Are Watching Brain Melting AI-Generated Videos on YouTube Without Parents Realizing 8 months ago:
Wasn’t that AI generated?
- Comment on The Terrible Costs of a Phone-Based Childhood 8 months ago:
Yeah, give kids easy to use pocket computers to access social media curated by algorithms designed to increase anxiety/engagement and “games” that are single-player gambling simulations, all of which harvests their data just to better learn how to manipulate them, and wonder why kids feel anxious, isolated, or depressed.
This hurts the over-25s too, just to lesser degrees because their brains are fully developed.
- Comment on The Terrible Costs of a Phone-Based Childhood 8 months ago:
Generations are (mostly) made up. So of course they’re going to shift around a bit while we all try to figure out what major world event or collective experience defines a particular cohort.