Uriel238 [all pronouns]

FOSS works on the premise of an angry engineer, that someone finally got pissed off about a problem enough to write a solution.

This so tracks.

All we need is for the communist government to say we like what you’re trying to do. Here’s an allowance for expenses!

I use my context menu key as the chording key to control any keyboard macro profiles, so that I can terminate, reload, summon for editing or summon a help file as needed.

There are VPNs that operate in stealth mode so they don’t look like VPN traffic as they’re being used.

Still illegal, but not detectable. No riskier than being a political activist antagonistic to the state.

Removed by mod

How cheap does X have to get before it can be bought by a non-profit, turned into a co-op and renamed twitter?

Advertisers are commercial.

Commercial interests are capitalist.

Capitalist interests are hierarchical.

Hierarchical interests have to retain their structure either through deception or by power of force.

As a Venn diagram its a bunch of concentric circles.

The internet spreads information like California wildfire, which nullifies false notion about the failure of capitalist equity.

So yes, fascist rhetoric, disinformation and obstruction of internet interconnectivity are the last recourses of commercial enterprises.

ＥＮＳＨＩＴＴＩＦＩＣＡＴＩＯＮ

If a given form of data sharing is illegal, then you shouldn’t be able to consent to it, especially now that we have awareness of dark patterns used to pressure people to consent to surrender their rights away.

The same reason a click-wrap TOS cannot be binding (as of 2020, I think) because it’s too easy to run a contract by customer the length of Richard III and the end user give up and click without reading (or comprehending).

By responding with judgment (e.g. your charitable donations are invalid ) Unity is showing how other devs can expect to be treated when they try to negotiate with Unity on a case-by-case basis.

This shows Unity is looking for bad faith reasons by which to justify rejecting exceptions to the fees. It’s a bad idea to expect exception to the new fees, even in the face of bankruptcy.

Godot as an alternative raises some interesting questions. Are there substantial benefits to Unity over Godot? And how many outraged software developers would we need to bridge that gap?

See this guy in the picture? He did it. No one else. Aim for him. You want that face in the recticle. The rest of us didn’t see nuthin. Please watch for blow through. Thx.

In the early 1980s, a teacher refused to let me word-process my homework (my penmanship was shit) on the grounds that I shouldn’t be able to produce a paper at the touch of a button.

Upper management look at AI end results and imagine a similar scenario: they don’t see the human effort behind the dumb-waiter and imagine a clerk can just tell an LLM to make me a sequel to Dumbo without getting very specific and then having a team of reviewers watch hundreds of terrible elephant films to curate the few good ones.

But what is telling is how our corporate bosses responded to the prospect of automated art. Much like the robot pizza company who did not automate the process and pass the savings on to you! (his offerings were typical pizza at typical prices and he kept all the savings for himself) our senior execs imagine ways to replace workers with cheaper automation rather than producing better stuff or cheaper movie tickets for their customers.

So maybe we should growl at them and change the system before they figure out how to actually pay fewer people while keeping more profits.

Yeah, I just moved into a place with a Nest preinstalled. I’m terrified the thing will, any day now, become part of a zombie botnet.

I need to get it DMZ’d

🪢 Heave-ho! Thieves and beggars!
Never shall we die! 🏴‍☠️

Both Cracked and Wisecrack have done videos on the phenomenon. I suspect the reason it doesn’t affect the job is because the immunizing effect is general while the promoting effect is specific. Coca-cola wants to boost Coke, even if in so doing, they weaken all future promotions of everything.

In the eighties, it was acknowledged that since the fifties the viewing public are more resistant to commercials and marketing, outpacing their new techniques (more commercials, engaging commercials, obnoxious commercials, product placement, having whole shows that are one big commercial, etc.)

One factor is as marketers hard-sell middle age men, they’re also immunizing their kids and grand kids who grow up skeptical of anyone saying anything nice lest they’re trying to sell something.

This also likely figures into the attendance crises experienced by religious ministries as old parishioners age out and new ones realize they don’t have time for spirit or money for tithes.

When I was just a lad looking for my true vocation
My father said "Now son, this choice deserves deliberation
Though you could be a doctor or perhaps a financier
My boy, why not consider a more challenging career?"

It’s a subset of dark patterns.

When I tried the early free upgrade from Window 10 to 11, half my games wouldn’t work, and I couldn’t fix the UI to what was comfortable. Also all the control panels had another layer of simplified facade before it would let me see the Windows XP control panel window.

Also the games that worked had a significant framerate drop.

I swtched back after a day of frustration and every once in a while my Windows 10 nags me to try upgrading again because Win11 is much better.

I need to stop being a coward and make my switch to Linux.

I’ll need to find an equivalent to Autohotkey though. I’m left handed and depend on keyboard profiles to play games.

I’m reminded of a phenomenon in the 70s and 80s the computer is never wrong in which pricing mistakes and bank errors were expected to be impossible since there was a computer involved.

As an aside, I wonder if this is in any way related to the rush of patents in the 90s and aughts, for things humans obviously do, but on a computer or on the web like transferring money or making transactions. We still have lawsuits like that.

Also related, the predictive policing software that some US counties bought, unvetted, and is used to justify longer sentences for poor and nonwhite convicts so that no judge has to attach his name to bigoted rulings.

We humans seem to imagine that since there’s a magic box involved in the computation of our answers that the answer is automatically more precise. Perhaps it’s related to the notion that were considering more factors, but that only works if we’ve properly measured those factors and applied them appropriately to the model. Otherwise, as the saying goes (also from early computing) Garbage in; garbage out.