DomeGuy
@DomeGuy@lemmy.world
- Comment on [deleted] 1 day ago:
Why should abelsim be given latitude that we wouldn’t extend to racism, sexism, or anti-Semitism?
My opinion is that embarrassed bigotry in private is still bigotry. It’s good that those with such feelings recognize the harm that they bring (or at least the public shaming that they can suffer), but it makes for a simpler life to just excise such hatreds whenever you can.
- Comment on Sooo... This is happening on Imgur 5 days ago:
The same folks sending “the left are subhuman!” to the right aren’t also sending “the right are Nazis!” to the left. That would be a duplicate signal and inefficient.
Instead, they’re sending “both sides suck” to the middle.
- Comment on Sooo... This is happening on Imgur 5 days ago:
Because right-wing propaganda is “become Nazis, the left are all sub-humans” and the left wing propaganda is “what the fuck, the right are all Nazis!?”
It’s hard to spot propaganda when it’s just the truth spoken loudly.
- Comment on America Has Become a Digital Narco-State - Paul Krugman 6 days ago:
A mere casual endorsement is not an appeal to authority. If you don’t like the guy that’s fine, but it’s not a logical fallacy to, for example, describe a late night comedian as “a kinda funny guy.”. (A logical fallacy would require that someone assume Krugman is RIGHT because of his record, not that he’s merely worth reading )
How is dismissing someone because of where they worked NOT an ad hominem attack?
How is splitting hairs over which awards given by the swedish government are and aren’t “nobel prizes” NOT a distinction without a difference?
- Comment on America Has Become a Digital Narco-State - Paul Krugman 6 days ago:
You didnt attack any of his actual credentials, though. You just said that he should be dismissed because he wrote for a particular newspaper and the award he was given by the Swiss government was not one of the awards given by the Swiss government funded by the gift of a 19th century arms merchant.
If you want to rebut my statement that Krugman “has a pretty good track record”, please do so! But you didn’t, and haven’t, and instead asserted your own biases as fact.
Which is obviously your right to do but, again, is a really weird response to a “who is this guy” post.
- Comment on Is there a mechanism in the USA to undo presidential pardons years later if political corruption has been proven as motivation to give these pardons? 6 days ago:
Go read the actual text of the US Constitution . The answer is a quirky technical “well, theoretically yes but practically no.”
constitution.congress.gov/browse/…/clause-1/
The President … shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.
That last emphasized line means that if the US Congress were to impeach and remove a president for bribery or a criminal conspiracy, they could also negate any pardons given to POTUS’s collaborators.
Of course, since no US President has ever been removed from office by congress’s impeachment power, and it’s uncertain if a post-term impeachment and conviction would itself pass the inevitable SCOTUS appeal, this is even less likely than the US Congress awarding a no-majoroty electoral collage vote to the other major party.
- Comment on America Has Become a Digital Narco-State - Paul Krugman 6 days ago:
An ad hominum attack and a distinction without a difference is a hell of a response to “who is this guy”.
Do you want to show the class where on your wallet the Keynesian model of economics touched you? (Or do you perhaps have a “Krugman sucks and you shouldn’t listen to him” link you’d like to share?)
- Comment on America Has Become a Digital Narco-State - Paul Krugman 1 week ago:
Paul Krugman is a nobel-prize winning economist who used to have a column in the NY Times. He has a relatively impressive record of predicting terrible things.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Krugman
And while I certainly don’t want to push back on the difference between heroin and other opium derivatives, it’s worth noting that legally speaking they’re both exactly as illegal when not used as prescribed for the treatment of pain or disease.
It’s not a blog post about heroin or opiates, though, so quibbling over the imperfections of his analogy is kinda missing the point. Please give it another read if you have a few minutes; the analogy is fairly apt, though very depressing as an American.
- Comment on How much money's out there? 1 week ago:
Value for resources is also highly subjective.
If I have zero water and $50, but you have 50 waters and $0, I would value one of your waters more than one of my dollars and you would value one of my dollars more than one of your waters. And so we would trade, and both be happier for it.
- Comment on Everyone in Seattle Hates AI — Jonathon Ready 1 week ago:
Eww. It’s a LLM travel agent.
- Comment on Everyone in Seattle Hates AI — Jonathon Ready 1 week ago:
So, the people in companies pushing and making this AI slop treat it like toxic waste, and the author thinks that they’re the problem?
I suddenly want to look at his AI map thingy and see how bad it is.
- Comment on YSK negative views about homosexuality remain common in many countries 1 week ago:
Is this a graph of “report negative opinions about homosexuality”, or “think homosexuality should be illegal.”
The former is just freedom of speech (“freedom to say something dumb and bigoted”), while the latter is a public policy concern.
- Comment on what would happen? 1 week ago:
Excluding clone-troopers and only in live acted Star Wars, Stormtroopers (sometime from off screen) have hit:
- All kinds of rebels on various planets in "Andor"
- A whole bunch of rebels in "rogue one"
- A bunch of rebels on the Tantive IV
- Leia (with a stunner) on the Tantive IV
- All those poor Jaws, plus Luke’s family.
- The hull of the millennium falcon (to no effect)
- A bunch of rebels on Hoth
- C-3P0 in cloud city
- Luke’s lightsaber blade in cloud city
- Leia on endor’s forest moon
- R2D2 on endor’s forest moon
- At least a few ewoks on endor’s forest moon.
- Din Djarin’s beskar armor
- A bunch of other mandaloroans and extras
- Some of those turtle-riding aliens in a distant galaxy in "Asoka"
- A bunch of innocent villagers on Jaku
- Poe’s parked X-wing (to great effect!)
- Poe in the arm
- Rei’s lightsaber blade a bunch of times
- The hull of the millennium falcon (again, to no effect)
I think stormtroopers are more effective than Klingons, federation red-shirts, or the borg.
- Comment on Why do cops and soldiers get more media attention than the average citizen? 2 weeks ago:
Because the killings are targeted actions that are arguably justifiable in the face of tyrannical action.
If a story broke about a criminal gang who all wore identifiable colors and claimed the right to stop anyone you saw and bully them to the point of death, you’d demand that effective (violent) action be taken to stop them. But because the gang is “the police” and nominally controlled by elected officials and the courts, there is a public policy reason to treat both their misbehavior and the public reactions thereto as something categorically different.
(I’d be all in for abolishing police costumes and requiring them to act only within the bounds of permissable behavior for the rest of us, FWIW )
- Comment on The Death of Listening 2 weeks ago:
I got all the way to “as I’ve been writing about for years …” before I clocked this as something I won’t bother to finish.
Humans as a species have never listed as the lead quote implies. We’re a shallow species whose interpersonal communication is far more of a handshake than a learned debate. If you go against someone else’s notions you may, at best, get them to remember a short phrase. (And if you’re really lucky and repeat a phrase a few times, it may even be one that accurately reflects your position!)
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
So, you’re a (1) university student (2) in a fraternity who encountered a fellow student (a) who is verbally and emotionally abusing an intimate partner.
(1+2)*A = you are a member of two distinct organizations which have some form of code of conduct, and have at.the very least an ethical responsibility to inform about the presumable violation of said codes of conduct.
Do not begin an intimate relationship with either “Beth” or “Ben”. Especially not out of anger.
Your fraternity and university both should have someone you can talk to about reporting unethical actions, who can refer you to people far more knowledgeable about the rules, responsibilities, and laws that apply to you than pseudo-anonymous strangers on the internet ever could.
- Comment on People who trade their time for money without saving up to buy back their freedom and time should be called voluntary slaves, not employees 2 weeks ago:
“slave” means someone who cannot choose to stop working for another. If you can seek alternate employment or even just choose to stop working there, you’re not a slave.
It’s common practice to use the noun in a poetic sense, such as “wage slave” or “corporate slave”, but such usage doesn’t rise to expanding the definition of the word.
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
The article is about decentralization of assignment of IP addresses,.not CDNs or social networks.
It’s like "imagine if you and your friends could just make your own phone system by making up your own numbers without having to rent them from telecommunications companies "
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
Whatever device you’re using to post to Lemmy can easily handle “thousands of transactions per day”. You’re off by several orders of magnitude before transaction processing is a scaling concern.
CDNs exist to reduce lag and optimize media file delivery. They can be decentralized, and internally essentially are, but having a neutral clearing-house helps solve the “leech” problem that thinks like BitTorrent suffer from.
- Comment on What the leaked AI executive order tells us about the Big Tech power grab 2 weeks ago:
He can try.
Each of the fifty states literally has its own legal system, which are as a rule very particular about the separation of powers.
If Trump signs an EO directing the FCC to declare AI a.“telecommunications” product.that states aren’t allowed to regulate, there’d be that same week ten to fifty lawsuits by the states asserting that the EO was unconstitutional and had zero effect.
What the AI oligarchs want is for the FCC to decide this on their own without an EO, or for Congress to pass a law. (Although Scotus has made noises about lifting what can be done without Congress in other areas …)
- Comment on Why are love potions always romantic in nature? Why hasn't anyone made a non-romantic variant? 3 weeks ago:
You mean, instead of an eros potion it’d be a portion of agapa, philia, or xenia?
Most likely because “be nice to strangers” or “don’t defile the dead” can be easily enforced with violence without being rapey.
(And, worth noting, modern anti-depresssnts are kind of a philautía potion already, since they help with “love of self.”)
- Comment on People who say 'the rich get richer, the lazy live for free, and the middle class pays for it all' don't realize how expensive it is to be rich and how close middle class is to being below the poverty line. 3 weeks ago:
Yeah thats the “middle class”. They aren’t part of the working class (serfs) but also arent the hereditary owners of counties (nobles.).
Rich fucks who have more money than anyone else and yet bitch about how hard they have it has literally always been what “middle class” means.
Washington and Jefferson was middle class. FDR and JFK were middle class. King George, Queen Elizabeth and King Charles are not
- Comment on People who say 'the rich get richer, the lazy live for free, and the middle class pays for it all' don't realize how expensive it is to be rich and how close middle class is to being below the poverty line. 3 weeks ago:
The rich 1% are the middle class. America discarded the hereditary upper class when we banned titles of nobility.
In our free society there are only two classes : those with enough money that they never have to work again, and those without.
- Comment on Why is ethanol so tasty? 3 weeks ago:
Potable Alcohol is tasty for much the same reason fat and carbs are tasty – it’s calorically dense.
It’s also habit forming, much like caffeine or nicotine or THC,.in that it causes a temporary but enjoyable alteration of our neurochemistry.
(It can also be addictive like nicotine, in that regular use can lead to illness-like withdrawal symptoms.)
And, it’s also a solvent with distinct properties to water, allowing for preparations with distinctly different tastes from other foods. Which makes alcohol also slightly like salt or spices, in that it changes how other foods taste.
- Comment on Microsoft AI CEO pushes back against critics after recent Windows AI backlash — "the fact that people are unimpressed ... is mindblowing to me" 3 weeks ago:
As has been said elsewhere about everything Microsoft is pulling:
If your LLM was worth using you wouldn’t need to force anyone to use it.
- Comment on Maybe there was a cure for human cancer, but it didn't work at all in mice. 1 month ago:
We know a bunch of ways to kill cancer cells. Unfortunately, we usually want to avoid killing the non-cancerous ones, which is considerably harder to do.
- Comment on Does it get windy in New York City? 1 month ago:
Yes, it absolutely gets windy in NYC.
Remember that Manhattan is laid out in a very regular grid. This is equally useful if you are a poetic zepher of wind or a becaped superhero, as these long passages make it really easy to (traffic allowing) rush forward at full speed and little chance of hitting a wall.
- Comment on How much more progressive are European views as compared to progressives in America? 1 month ago:
Political parties are creations of the electoral and governmental systems in the nations they exist in
“Most European nations” is an imprecise way of saying “dominant parlimentary unicameral legislatures”. To use the UK as an example, all sovereign power is asserted by the lower democratically elected chamber of parliment. Neither the house of lords nor the king counter the assembled majority of parliment,.who from its own members appoint those who direct the government day to day. While there is a sub-national distinction, these are essentially creations of parliment and have no inherent power on their own.
Since the only thing that matters in national UK politics is parliament, all of the political energy is focused there.
In the United States this is not at all the case… national power is split as I described before, and a similar pattern repeats at the state level with distinct difectly-elected legislators and executives. The national government was historically a creation of the states, and each state has substantial ability to act in defiance of congress’s preferences.
Since there are so many different things that matter, the value of a third or fourth party is dramatically reduced. When minor parties start to win elections on their own, the major parties either adapt or die quickly. (I have remarked elsewhere that in American politics “there is no prize for second place”, and a worthwhile collolary here would be “and there are so many games to play.”)
You are technically correct in that if God came down and reworked all of the USA into distinct european-style nations with separate languages we would likely have similar party arrangements, with both the Democrats and the Republicans splitting into multiple parties. But if God also remade Europe into a single USA-style mega-nation made up of states with similar governments who shared a single first-language, European parties would likely congeal until there are only two.
As a practical matter, of course, neither is not a useful observations. And simplified observations of the differences between “Europe” and the USA like “the USA is far to the right of Europe” were part of what led the UK to devolve into a place where you can be threatened to silence for accurately describing a rich transphobe.
- Comment on How much more progressive are European views as compared to progressives in America? 1 month ago:
Your analysis completely ignores the impact of the US Senate’s wonky “cloture” rule, which is a compromise from the prior practice of the US Senate filibuster.
As depicted in way too many movies, the filibuster let any single senator (or small team or senators) essentially veto any piece of legislation by putting the whole thing to a halt. The modern rule instead (in essence) requires any act.of Congress to clear a 60% vote threshold in the Senate.
There hasn’t been a time in my entire life when the modern democratic party held the presidency, a majority in the house, and 3/5ths of the Senate. (Clinton had a party with segregation-era racists still in power; Obama had “blue dogs” who were nearly Republican, and Biden had a coal baron and a green party scam artist in the Senate )
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
GoG actually implements something the rich tool* behind steam once said: “piracy is a customer service issue.”
Broadly speaking, folk only private games for three reasons: either the DRM limits how they can play their game, they don’t want to make such a purchase sight unseen, or they haven’t the funds to purchase the games they want.
There’s very little that will turn the third type into paying customers, but the first and second can be converted by some combination of.the straight removal of DRM and a generous return policy.
It’s also worth noting that pirates of all three groups will on occasion make a game purchase, due to a desire to support an especially liked game or studio or behavior.