Aceticon

@Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨So um, america just started another war in the middle east. We're going to need a shit ton more memes to americans from the nightmare they are enduring. Thanks in advance...⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  It pisses me off this, for political point scoring, abusive misapplication of this specific philosophical question to a situation which does not at all match the criteria for it.

  This is not a trolley problem because:

  • It’s not a single decision after which there is no walking back on it, rather it’s a cyclical choice which happens every 4 years and a lot of what was done by the candidate elected in once cycle can be undone in the next (as the Republicans frequently demonstrate when one of their gets elected after a Democrat).
  • It’s not a single person making a decision, it’s millions of people all at the same time and it’s not even the average of their choices that gets executed (that would require Proportional Vote) but it’s done using a weird mathematical formula, so there are tons of situations were no matter what one’s choice is (or even not choosing at all) it makes no difference whatsoever.

  Portraying this as a trolley problem is misleading and manipulative.

  The closest philosophical or game theory example to an election is a cyclical “Ultimatum Game” between voters and politicians only it’s in the best interest of politicians that people don’t see it that way (as they would start punishing politicians for not dividing the pie in a way that favors people enough) so instead their propaganda has pushed for decades this falacy that it’s an “trolley problem” (and it’s companion, the idea that people must “chose the lesser evil”).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨UK police working with controversial tech giant Palantir on real-time surveillance network⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, I think I get what you mean.

  My own country, Portugal, has issues and around here there is a big tendency to look to Britain for inspiration, yet Britain in many ways is even more broken than my own country (certainly it’s a far less fair society, more stratified, way more violent amongst the lower classes and more fake amongst the upper classes) and which wealth-wise is mainly is just using the pile (of both money and infrastructure) accumulated during their time not that long ago when it was an Empire, rather than in the present day being a more productive country,

  People look up to Britain, copy what’s done there under the impression that it works, and then end up with similar problems but none of the good things because the “success” of Britain isn’t the product of what they do now, it’s just accumulated wealth and structures from almost a century ago.

  That said, I think the circus that was Brexit has taken the shine out of Britain in most of Europe, including Portugal, maybe more strongly so here because Portugal used to send a lot of emigrants over there and many came back following Brexit and the consequences of Brexit with a far worse opinion of Britain than they went there with, and they certainly shared that opinion with family and friends.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨UK police working with controversial tech giant Palantir on real-time surveillance network⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh, I don’t at all think that Brits themselves see any of that as ghoulish.

  In fact the local culture has a huge thing with a heavilly classist social hierarchy, “knowing your place” in the social hierarchy and looking up to the upper classes and seing them as more capable.

  (Their Monarchy is the wealthiest and most powerful in Europe and you’ll find plenty fawning coverage of it in the local media and a vast majority of Brits love the Monarchy)

  In my experience people traditionally tend to see it as the natural order of things and there really was only this period between the post-War times and maybe the 80s when amongst the working class there was this idea that the working class was as much entitled to rule things as the upper classes and a lot of that has been crushed along with Labour Unions, Industry and Mining in Britain and as most of the workers became white collar workers (who see themselves as Middle Class and look down on the Working Class even though de facto they’re Working Class) rather than blue collar.

  Most don’t really don’t recognize that stuff as unusual or strange because that’s all that they’ve known, same as for everybody everywhere all over the World - mostly it’s only people who have actually lived and worked abroad and hence seen things done differently, who can spot the quirks and negative aspects of society in their own country works.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨UK police working with controversial tech giant Palantir on real-time surveillance network⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  In my experience as an European who went to live there for over a decade, there are a ton of very subtle elements who can’t really spot from the outside, not knowing the details of how that country works and its culture, especially because they’re culturally extremelly big on image management (which I talk about below), which extends to managing the image that the country projects abroad (both via things like the Media they produce - for example their series and movies about Britain in the Victorian era vastly beautify the reality and almost like clockwork ever couple of years out comes a “Britain won WWII” movie - and their politicians practices both internally and on the international stage of grand symbolic announcements of objectives with in practice either no concrete action ever or even actions which do the very opposite).

  Britain is has long been setup to preserve the power of the old wealth and always had Fascist tendencies (for example, there are pictures of the old queen when she was young being taught by her uncle, the then King, to do a Nazi salute) and British elites always sided with Fascists and White Colonialists, such as Pinochet in Chile, the Afrikaaner Apartheid government in South Africa and the Genocidal Zionists in Israel, plus they themselves commited several Genocides in their Empire and historically even relentlessly exploited the local lower classes (with things like Indentured Servitude - which replaced Chatel Slavery but you’ll only ever hear from the British that they were the first to “end” Slavery and nobody mentions Indentured Servitude - and Workhouses).

  At the same time this is a country with an extreme cultural tendency to put managing appearances above all else (upside: they have the best Theatre in the World) which is worse the higher the social class one is from, so for example the children of the wealthy are taught to tell people what they want to hear and always show a positive image (not positive cheerful, but rather “flawless” and “impeccable”) and are shunned and emotionally attacked by their peers if they display any kind of weakness (can’t let others see that they’re sad or even sick) and even attend private schools (curiously called “Public schools” over there because supposedly “anybody who can afford the [very high] fees can send their children there” though even that is de facto false for many such schools) which amongst other things teach them discourse techniques (basically how to deceive without outright lying), so most of them as adults have only one mode of relating with other human beings - an unemotional, highly managed posh façade were empathy, in both diretions, is suppressed.

  To preserve this Power structure whilst avoiding rebelions by the masses their “Democracy” is more Theatre than a system for the masses to control how the country is run, set up from the very start to be “managed” via multiple “backdoors”, such as the Monarchy having real power (the King can bring down Laws, but traditionally does not use that power directly but rather quietly threatens to use it to get concessions), the voting system is First Past The Post to guaranteed that only two parties can ever govern (hence capturing the top politicians in those parties guarantees control of government), the country has an unelected 2nd chamber of Parliament which has seats which are literally inherited and it has no written constitution so it works entirelly on Laws passed in Parliament by a simple majority (and given their FPTP votting system, a mere 30% of the vote is enought to get a simple parliamentary majority) and legal precedent as established by higher courts (and almost 100% of High Court Judges in Britain are people who attended the previously described, expensive “Public” Schools that only the children of the elites attend).

  In such a system, control of whatever little Power is left in the hands of the “lower” classes is done in two ways:

  • Constant, relentless but subtle Propaganda backed by direct and indirect control of the whole Press by the elites (for example, the board of the supposedly independent BBC is entirelly made up of people who attended “Public” Schools). You can see this in action in how, for example, the BBC will give over 30 times more attention to Israeli deaths than Palestinians deaths or how certain words, such as “brutish” are only ever used for Israeli deaths and various other words are used hundreds of times more often for Israeli deaths than Palestinian deaths - the British Press was Manufacturing Consent long before the American Press started doing it.
  • Surveillance to detect and stop any civil society movement that might become an independent Power based on the power of large numbers, together with incredibly broad laws and biased Judges (who as I pointed out, pretty much all hail from the elites as shown by them having attended exclusive expensive schools as children) that are used to, using State Violence, crack down on and stop those movements under the cover of “Justice”. This is how for example Environmentalists who were planning to do a demonstration which would block the main London ring road were given 10 year prision sentences and how the leadership of the Green Party (a small party which is maybe the only left-of-center party over there) has been under surveillance since at least the 80s.

  There was a period when the UK wasn’t as bad in this sense following WWII, as in the post-War period millions of the “plebes” had military training and managed to claw a lot of power from the elites to the masses (creating things like the National Health Service and Social Security, and even causing a golden age of the Arts in Britain as working class children such as Michael Cain and David Bowie actually had real opportunities to go into things like Music and Theatre) but that has been progressivelly reversed since Thatcher went into power hence why nowadays elements of the Surveilance state have become so extreme that even the highly managed British Media is starting to discretly question it (though they would never, ever, ever treat is a a structural problem in how Power is approportioned in Britain and will always portray it as a single instance of mismanagement in the Police which is mainly a middle and working class institution)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨UK police working with controversial tech giant Palantir on real-time surveillance network⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Back when the Snowden Revelations came out, the UK turned out to have even more pervasive civil society surveillance than the US, and whist in the US the result of the revelations was some walking back of the surveillance, in the UK they just passed a law to retroactivelly make the whole thing legal, quietly kicked out the editor of the newspaper who brought out the story and the press never talked about it ever again.

  So there is zero surprise that they’re doing this and this is probably not even the whole tip of the iceberg, but the tip of the tip of the iceberg given the scale of surveillance over there.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Wikipedia Pauses AI-Generated Summaries After Editor Backlash⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Somebody tried to build a bridge between both groups but they ran into the conundrum that to get to the other side they would first need to get half way to that side, then get half way of the remaining distance, then half way again the new remaining distance and so on an infinite number of times, and as the bridge was started from the science communicators side rather than the mathematicians side, they gave up.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Shooting an unarmed woman who was just trying to walk home: just LAPD things⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The purpose of Hollywood is entertainment and helping out manufacture consent (not necessarily in that order), not raising awareness on subjects were people’s increased awareness would threaten the power of the elites, so when it comes to the minions of the elites it’s pretty much all either “Heroes of Justice” or, at most, “Most are Good Guys but there’s a few bad apples”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨An LAPD helicopter claimed to have ID'ed protesters from above and threatened to "come to your house"⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  One wonders just how viable the Ukranian strategy would be to take out LAPD choppers (when landed, of course).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨VPN Registrations Increase by 1,000%, less than Hour After PornHub Blocked France From Accessing its Website.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The only way the sovereign nation of France can ban VPN companies not based in France is to block the IP address of every single entry point of every single VPN company and keep doing so as they add new entry points (I bet the response on the VPN company side would be to start having some kind of dynamic VPN server thing).

  And then, as somebody else already pointed out, any technically inclined person can just rent a VPS anywhere in the World and fire up their own VPN server on it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨VPN Registrations Increase by 1,000%, less than Hour After PornHub Blocked France From Accessing its Website.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Reminds me of the running joke I had with a French bloke in a place were I worked in about how Jacquie-Et-Michelle (NSFW) was a part of French Culture which none of our other colleagues seem to - or at least admitted to - get.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Four NYPD officers converged on one woman on a bike because she smiled at them, then detained her because she wasn't carrying ID.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  What’s really shocking is that a woman detained in the US for not having ID wasn’t delivered to ICE immediatelly and deported to El Salvador without due process.

  I mean, the whole point of not having due process is that if you can’t right then and there prove you’re not an illegal immigrant you can be assumed to be one and punished for it with no recourse.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Far-right websites got hacked and defaced; 6.5 terabytes of data got leaked.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Nice neoliberal propaganda picture.

  The actual Leftwing solution would be to remove the fence.

  Also you’re “curiously” bypassing the whole “deeming people victims or oppressors based on the genetics they were born with rather than actually being victimized or victimizing others” part of my argument, which just so happens to be the core of it.

  Leftwingers (and Humanists) help people based on their actual need, fight against any unjust treatment (not just for some identities but not others) and force the actual aggressors to compensate the actual victims for what they did to them, not give excuses for the aggressors or ignoring the victims because of their respective identities (unlike what’s so poignantly illustrated by the way the Democrat Party in the US has treated aggressors and victims in the Gaza Genocide).

  So even in that propaganda picture of yours were the Ticket-buying Inducing fence stays up, the person on a wheelchair would get help under traditional Leftwing thinking because they have an actual need for it, not because of, say, being old - if they’re old but have no such need (say, a very wealthy person who had a very good life with proper food and living conditions so they did not end up on a wheelchair) they don’t get a wheelchair ramp merely for being old - and similarly a person who is not old (and hence not in an identity deemed in need by Identity Politics) and yet is on a wheelchair also gets a wheelchair ramp under Leftwing thinking because they too have a need, which is all that matters, not whatever identity label has been given to them.

  So even in the Capitalist environment where that fence stays up, Leftwingers would help those who need help because they need help, whilst the Identity Politics warriors would be deciding if they would at all get help and how much help those who do get help would get, based on their identity rather than their actual personal need.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Far-right websites got hacked and defaced; 6.5 terabytes of data got leaked.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The transformation of Powerfull vs Powerless way of fighting inequality into a miriad of split identitarian fights which claim that people’s victims or aggressor status is wholly defned by the genetics they were born with (rather than, you know, actually being victimized or chosing to victimize others) which naturally ended up with the oppressed fighting amongst themselves as competing “identities” for the crumbs from the Powerful absolutelly is a modern phenomenon.

  If you want to see the old style, just look at how traditional Unions still left in positions of relative strenght operate: they don’t fight for different salary and work condition improvements for people with different genders, skin colors or sexual orientation, the fight as all the workers vs the bosses.

  Everyone being equal sounds great and all. Show me a left wing country that’s achieved it.

  Show me a country were Identity Politics has merelly just reduced Inequality (as defined by the Gini Coeficient) since it became fashionable (so, the last 3 decades).

  From what I can see, the countries with the most and loudest Identity Politics are the ones going in the exact opposite direction - higher inequality, collapsing social mobility - like the UK and the US. It’s “curious” that after the powerless fighting as a group against the powerfull were fragmented into different “identities” based on their genetics, each fighting for their “own” group rather than all together, the powerful have managed to capture an ever increasing share of the wealth and the median quality of live has even started going down.

  As for your quoting tankies as examples of “left”, well, tankies are fucking authoritarians, so if you’re expecting they’re following the actual principles of being Leftwing rather than mindlessly parroting some Soviet slogans or whatnot and thinking Stalin was a great man, you are seriously deluded or ill informed.

  It’s funny that people like you defending Identity Politics have a view of what is Leftwing that is basically the Red Scare. You’re helping prove my point.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Long Dark gets a big free visual enhancement update out now⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s a great game with great gameplay and which is surprisingly replayable in survival mode if you go a year or two between plays.

  It’s also one which, IMHO, doesn’t need visual enhancements - their choice of visual style was masterful (it works and is a lot cheaper in terms of 3D modelling costs that something more realistic would have been) and it’s the gameplay (which is pretty much all emergent gameplay in survival mode with no fixed set-pieces) that makes it a great game.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gives a mom a reason to live 5/5⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Sometimes you win by coming second.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Far-right websites got hacked and defaced; 6.5 terabytes of data got leaked.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Mate, the basic principles of Equality and Fairness of the Leftwing naturally include minorities having the same rights and treatment than everybody else.

  The artificial slicing of Equality into “one group at a time ‘Equality’” is exactly the strategy by which the Left was divided, distracted away from the biggest inequality and descrimination of all (that of Wealth) and made to fight each other and whatever rage-baite du jour served by the far-right populists to their muppets.

  Whomever in some Neoliberal Billionaire-Funded Think Tank who came up with that perversion of Equality deserved whatever massive bonus they got for such a brilliant strategy of convincing people that are all being victims of the many that it’s people like them but of a different ethnicity/gender/sexual-orientation that are their real enemies.

  You’ve been had and made into a footsoldier in a fabricated war were the working class got divided into “groups” by ethnicity, gender and even sexual-orientation and turned against each other whilst the people doing the most damage and causing the most suffering keep on pillaging to their heart’s contents and, worse, it’s been done via preying on your qualities as a human being who desires a fairer world.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Far-right websites got hacked and defaced; 6.5 terabytes of data got leaked.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s no class war, at least not in a country like the US: the billionaires have been into the pillaging stage of their conquest for decades and they’re just making sure the riff-raff remain out of their way.

  Things are well beyond the “elites” merely taking an unfairly outsided cut of the growth and well into taking from the rest that which they and their parents accumulated, hence why quality of life for the majority has been going down for a while now and the last two Generations are set to be worse off than their parents.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Far-right websites got hacked and defaced; 6.5 terabytes of data got leaked.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ll give you a hint: billionaires don’t buy newspapers, social media and TV channels with shitty-shit Returns On Investment (if at all profitable) to make money from them - what they’re really buying isn’t the business, it’s an audience for “opinion making”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If they where only reprogrammable....⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Short datasheet for the curious.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Germany Is Using AI to Erase Pro-Palestinian Speech⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, I for one did nazi that coming…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Plex now will SELL your personal data⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The more services you have depending on a 3rd party which can do whatever the fuck they want, either directly or by changing the rules when the feel like it (i.e. not bound by rules they cannot change, such as root DNS providers are) and then doing it, the less your system is actually self-hosted, IMHO.

  For me the whole point of self-hosting is exactly being as independent as possible of 3rd parties that can just fuck you up, be it on purpose (generally for $$$) or because they go bankrupt and close their services.

  This is why I’ve actually chose to run Kodi on my home server that doubles down as TV Box even though I can’t easilly use it from anywhere else (it’s possible but it involves using a standalone database that is then shared, which can only be safelly down with custom ssh pipes) rather than something like Plex.

  It’s kinda funny to see people into self-hosting still doing the kind of mistake I did almost 3 decades ago (fortunatelly in a professional environment) of trusting a 3rd party to the point of becoming dependent on them and later getting burned when they abused that trust, and which led me to avoid such situations like the plague ever since.

  Mind you, I can understand if people for whom self-hosting is not driven by a desire to reduce vulnerability to the whims of 3rd parties (which includes reducing the risk of enshittification) and is instead driven by “waste not” (for example, bringing new life to old hardware rather than throwing it out) or by it being a fun challenge, don’t really care to be as independent as possible from such 3rd parties.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hot in the car today⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It was supposed to be a fart but it came with friends.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨VCs are starting to partner with private equity to buy up call centers, accounting firms and other "mature companies" to replace their operations with AI⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It only works until the inevitable costs from the accumulated problems due to AI use (mainly excessivelly high AI error rates with a uniform distribution - were the most damaging errors are no less likely than little mistakes, unlike with humans who can learn to pay attention not to make mistakes in critical things - leading to customer losses and increased costs of correcting the errors) exceed the savings from cutting down manpower.

  (Just imagine customers doing things that severely damage their equipment because they followed the AI customer support line advice and the accumulation of cost as said customers take the company whose support line gave that advice to court for damages and win those rulings, and in turn the companies outsourcing customer support to that “call center supplier” take it to court. It gets even worse than that for accounting, as for example the fines from submitting incorrect documentation to the IRS can get pretty nasty)

  I expect we’ll see something similar to how many long established store chains at one point got managers who started cutting costs by getting rid of long time store employees and replacing them with an ever rotating revolving door of short term cheap as possible sellers, making the store experience inferior to just buying it from the Internet, and a few years later those chains were going bankrupt.

  These venture capitalists’ grift works as long as they sell the businesses before the side effects of replacing people with language generators haven’t fully filtered through into revenue falls, court judgements for damages and tax authority fines and it’s going to be those buying such businesses (I bet the Venture Capitalists are going to try and sell them to Institutional Investors) that will end up with something that’s leaking customers, having to pay mass8ve compensations and having to hire back people to fix the consequences of AI errors, essentially reverting what the Venture Capitalists did and them spending even more money to cleanup the trail of problems cause by the excessive AI use.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Realtek's $10 tiny 10GbE network adapter is coming to motherboards later this year⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Example of an ISP providing 10Gb/s in Portugal here and at 15 euros a month it’s pretty cheap too.

  That same ISP is from Romania and is also in Spain though curiously in this latter thri Net Only 10Gb/s costs €25 per month,

  Personally I don’t see the point of it form myself at home, but for a small business I can see it making sense.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨53% of Israeli public opposes aid entering Gaza, new poll shows⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Or put another way, over half the Israelis are in favour of Holocausting the Palestinians in Gaza using starvation to mass murder them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Some people have it worse⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  “There can be only one”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The fact that some dogs are used to the groomers and some aren't is wild.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Here’s a theory:

  • Dogs are born with already some marbles lost, and it’s different marbles for different dogs hence why different dogs have different things that make them go insane.
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The U.S. Just Ran a Solar Storm Emergency Drill. The Real Deal Would Be a Catastrophe⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh yeah, a large enough solar mass ejection in such a direction that it would directly hit planet Earth would be extremely bad.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The U.S. Just Ran a Solar Storm Emergency Drill. The Real Deal Would Be a Catastrophe⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  With a high enough voltage the air will ionized and the power will literally jump over many protection mechanisms. Also it can cause certain dialetrics (electrically isolating materials).

  An extreme enough event can be way beyond even the biggest of tolerances of safety systems, even if only because it can jump around the system through the air from the external side to the internal and supposedly protected side.

  So it makes sense that when a massive electromagnetic storm is inducing electric currents along tens or hundreds of miles long wires, the only guaranteed safe system is to not even have a cable from the grid coming into your house.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The U.S. Just Ran a Solar Storm Emergency Drill. The Real Deal Would Be a Catastrophe⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There are powerbanks with solar cells and even in a day which is not sunny, those things will slowly charge the powerbank if you leave under natural light for a few hours (from what I read you get roughly half the rated power from solar cells in a cloudy day).