Looking good lemmings

Gen X in the firing line. Bring it on mfs, I’ve survived far worse and now I’m pulling the ladder up.

I remember talking to an ice-cream seller in Egypt and he asked me what I do for a living. When I told him I was an engineer he said ‘so am I’. The predatory behaviour of Egyptian street sellers made more sense after that exchange but it never stopped grating. I think the best way deal with it is engage with the people in a friendly way and have a laugh. Most of the time people just need acknowledgement, that goes a long way.

5G causes Corona virus is a favourite. Most of the biblical claims but those are too obvious. Excluding religion and conspiracy theories, expensive speaker cables produce sound quality that is superior to cheap cables. Turning a phone off in an aircraft improves safety. My daughter’s teacher confidently informed me that bicycles are more dangerous than cars. That was probably the most depressing and stupid.

Good call. I can’t remember if kahneman talks about it in the book but there is a fascinating experiment on people who have had a procedure that severs the connection between the left and right hemispheres (epileptics). They exhibit the impulsive tendency to explain away sensory evidence that contradicts their previous statements. The theory is that speech centres inhabit the left brain and in the absence of a measured analysis by the right hemisphere they just make something up without apparently thinking it through.

It’s ofcom but my phone desperately wants it to be Offcom for some reason

Offcom has been drinking, came home in a blackout and committed domestic abuse of 4chan. Does Offcom even internet? Alternative plot twist, Offcom is trolling 4chan.

I wanna say that Offcom is doing a good job and trying to protect British people in good faith but I feel like they are being used as a cudgel by the British ruling class to advance an anachronistic agenda. Don’t forget, they fired their expert drugs advisor for telling them that MDMA is comparable to horse riding in terms of safety. They want certain things to be true, regardless of the scientific accuracy.

But is it better than a big carrot? You can’t snack on silicone.

Dildos

Just torrent that shit while the streaming platforms get their house in order. It’s not acceptable to be racist to Linux.

This is a sane way to use LLM. Also, pick your poison, some bots are better than others for a specific task. It’s kinda fascinating to see how other people solve coding problems and that is essentially on tap with a bot, it will churn out as many examples as you want. It’s a really useful tool for learning syntax and libraries of unfamiliar languages.

On one extreme side of LLM there is this insane hype and at the other extreme a great pessimism but in the middle is a nice labour saving educational tool.

I once used a laptop in a coffee shop to write a screenplay. I had ornate facial hair and wearing a beanie. Shit was tight af. Later on I clogged their toilet.

Capitalism prevailed during the rise of the internet but correlation is not causation.

Rockets were sent into space and capitalists would surely love to claim that achievement too, unfortunately it was first fascists followed by communists with the capitalists getting the bronze medal. Should we now decide that space flight is fascist-communist? No. Only scientists and engineers know how to do that. Why didn’t Genghis Khan invent the internet? He didn’t have enough capitalists, surely that was the problem.

We can claim anything we like and also retract any statement except when a user claims to be 14. That person remains at age 14 for all time. Is this the logic? What about all the ‘damage’ that was done before they discovered the underage user? Somebody should look into that, they might find themselves face to face with a 51 year old who takes a prescription stimulant every day.

Got banned from the stims community after satirically commenting ‘I’m 14 and what is this?’

The moderator demanded that I submit identity documents. I pointed out that the account was twelve years old but they couldn’t back down at this point. I think they were trying to do a good job and were at least active but it was another nail in the coffin. In theory, an unpaid mod could be more objective because there’s no profit motive but the reality is that many are ideologically biased or dumb or controlling and none of them are trained. That any single individual wants to be in charge of the narrative is suspicious. Scale that ambition up to hundreds of thousands or millions of people it’s a red flag. Reddit is completely cooked these days, I haven’t returned since finding Lemmy.

This question is redundant. Evil people choose the evil option, normal people choose the other.

You could make the same argument about almost anything that is created under our present economic system, it’s void of content. I paid my gas bill so now I can tell my friends that I’m responsible for North Sea gas extraction. People imbibe Joe Rogan’s billionaire koolaid and forget where all this stuff we take for granted comes from.

Capitalism has lifted billions of people out of poverty and that is a minor miracle. Now it is eating itself like an ouroboros. People are upset and it’s not a good time to defend big capital, ask TPUSA and United Health.

Fat Americans out here standing in the world’s largest glass house hurling rocks with gay adandon.

You could make the argument that nothing can be achieved without being able to dedicate the time required. That was the miracle of the agricultural revolution, we could do something with our time other than gather food. If you said ‘we got the internet thanks to farmers’ that would be indisputable, everything flowed from that. I don’t see why an internet couldn’t emerge in other economic contexts because internet technology depends on physics and those laws transcend any and all economic systems. We already know this because almost every jurisdiction has the internet.

The influence of capitalism on the internet has been a mixed bag. e-commerce: good. App ecosystem: ranging from good to addiction health crisis. Walled gardens and enshitification: bad. Misinformation and radicalisation of political groups: dire, potentially an existential threat.

We got internet thanks to scientists and engineers. No amount of capitalists, politicians, managers or business people can create an internet. They say ‘here’s some money to make stuff’ and that’s the limit of their involvement.