t3rmit3

@t3rmit3@beehaw.org

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bang!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I consider someone anti-life that argues killing is basically okay if you think it’s okay. It’s a made up comic and not one of us really knows what the bad guy did.

  The point of the comic is that many stories in comics and other media try to introduce a last-minute moral dilemma in which the good guy stopping a bad guy is made out to be as bad as the bad guy. Often it’s a lazy mechanism that doesn’t work from a writing standpoint because the reader/viewer has experienced the entire story solely from the protagonist’s POV, empathizing with and seeing the victims of the ‘bad guy’, and never the bad guy’s view, and suddenly asking them to empathize with the ‘bad guy’ at the last moment with this lazy argument doesn’t actually work. That’s what this comic is about.

  But the reason this is likely resonating with more people right now outside of commentary on literary tropes, is that people are experiencing a world in which many governments have broken the social contract to execute justice fairly and protect their populaces, and sided with companies and wealth-holders in allowing them to harm said populace. Given that backdrop, and recent reactions by billionaires and CEOs (e.g. Flock’s CEO’s recent call for “compromise” in which he gets to keep surveilling people), this comic may feel for many people very personal.

  I would argue that we badly need to find ways to prevent mass shooting instead of being okay with killing the shooter.

  Sure, but that is dodging the question of whether you accept that killing someone may be necessary to prevent them harming others.

  As for crime in general… The more civilized society is the one without the death penalty.

  I agree 1000%, because a government can never be trusted to actually serve the interest of its constituents. It will always be pulled towards accumulating and protecting power. That’s the nature of Authority.

  Ultimately, you can’t claim to believe in preserving life above all else if you refuse to stop something that is threatening life. The “pro-life” reaction to a Hitler is not to refuse to intervene in a Holocaust. You can personally choose not to take action, but you don’t get to dictate to others when and what the line is between pro- and anti-life actions.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bang!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  You consider someone anti-life because they refuse to stand by idly while someone kills others?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Burnham announces plan for new UK center to fight disinformation⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Is it going to be called the Ministry of Truth? Or did they at least have the self awareness to come up with something less on-the-nose?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Engineer says Claude Code has made his job "soul-sucking" as workers spend 12-hour days pressing enter⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  We’re way beyond usage statistics. That’s for startups trying to get a Series A. OpenAI and Anthropic are playing at the Fortune-100 level already, influencing elected officials and making deals for government contracts. They’re not rolling up to the DoD with their MAU counts.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Stem cells reverse stroke damage and restore movement in mice⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Fetterman’s chance to cure his conservatism!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Squirted Glock comp that doesn't suck⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  As someone with no 3d printing experience, but a lot of firearm experience, I’m surprised d that PLA holds up as a comp. It’s one thing to have a printed frame of course, but comps are right past the barrel and get the worst of gas and heat (by design). Hell, I have a very heavy comp on my HK P2000, and it gets absolutely scorched.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Engineer says Claude Code has made his job "soul-sucking" as workers spend 12-hour days pressing enter⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Sadly, they exist irregardless of our little projects. Financially supporting them is one thing, and if your own ethics prevent you from using a weapon of the enemy, as it were, that’s fine, but abstention is not actually doing anything to oppose them.

  The water consumption of any LLM compute time I’ve used is almost assuredly less than a single bath, and I’ve certainly skipped more baths in my life than I probably should have. :P

  And more importantly, an hour of Netflix uses SIGNIFICANTLY more water than an hour of text LLM generation, so most people are not actually having the impacts on water consumption they likely think they are.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Engineer says Claude Code has made his job "soul-sucking" as workers spend 12-hour days pressing enter⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s another type, which is like me, who develop as a means to have a tool I need.

  I wanted a better way to manage my cross-device libraries (desktop, laptop, NAS), and the multi-pane file managers like didn’t work great for me, so instead I used Claude to build one that has native per-pane ssh support, streamed video and music preview clips, etc etc.

  Capitalism is always gonna Capitalism, doesn’t matter what type of tools are at play.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ShinyHunters claims FBI hack: 'This is NOT financially motivated'⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  As someone who works in security, you should be extremely skeptical of their stated reasons, or even the validity of the data.

  There were a LOT of divorces following that leak, citing the hack as proof of infidelity, but the reality is that the leakers could have added people to the data explicitly to facilitate uneven divorce settlements (e.g. adding a woman to the site in order to give the husband a means to demand no split of assets).

  As much as it would be great to imagine hacktivist crusaders going after cheaters, there was a lot of money moved on the back of that leak, and in fact one of the problems with Ashley Madison was that prior to the hack it was used to essentially extort non-users, because anyone could create a profile with any email, but if someone created a profile of you, you had to both verify yourself with your ID (which they saved), and pay them money to delete it (which the leak revealed they didn’t actually do anyways).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Flock Offers Employees Buyouts as Customers Flee⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Most people aren’t aware, but Axon already does AI-assisted surveillance software too.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Smart devices can testify against you: How home robot data is being used in court⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The first thing I did when I moved into my new place is disable all the Ring surveillance crap the previous tenants installed

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's With All These 'Fly Brain Simulations'? The Viral Jokes And Memes About A Fruit Fly's Brain Being Mapped Explained⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  And I thought I was chronically online…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'Won't back away': Hanson's partial apology to Indigenous Australians and Albanese⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Mmm… Bop.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Discord Is Bringing Back Age Verification for Millions of Users⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  “Minor by default” is not a shift in how companies treat minors online, it’s a shift in how they treat everyone online.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record (2026)⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Throughout history we’ve generally moved towards ever more ephemeral storage media. Stone tablets > clay > paper > etched vinyl > magnetic tape > hard disks > solid state memory, and a bunch more I’m not remembering or not aware of (and there are some that have made extremely long lives their purpose, but they’re not generally in common use, see the etched gold records in Voyager I).

  Arguably, what actually survives is only what a civilization values enough to go back and put into its longer lifespan storage media, it’s only really in the modern era of mass-production and mass-media that the desire to preserve everything has popped up.

  I’m very nostalgia-driven, and I still consume a lot of the media I did as a kid, but my Jellyfin and Kavita servers aren’t meant to represent things I believe should be preserved for others, just for myself.

  I’ve visited the Internet Archive several times (I used to live on 3rd and California, so it was a 5 minute walk), but I think their original purpose of especially preserving the “old internet” blogs and forums and whatnot has somewhat lost its purpose now. It doesn’t archive the mediums where most internet interaction takes place now, like Discord, and it hasn’t for a while (even twitter in its heyday wasn’t being backed up unless you manually requested a tweet be saved).

  There are micro-cultures that absolutely are going to disappear entirely from our cultural record once they become defunct, but that’s always been true, and I don’t think the kinds of cultural records this article is about are really part of our larger “culture” in a meaningful way. MTV News? Gawker? How about SubSim.com and NoMutantsAllowed (2 game-specific forums I’m part of)? Does our proverbial Library of Alexandria really need to remember those existed?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘We’re plausibly close to crossing the line’: are warnings of uncontrollable AI coming true?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  More like, they need you to believe it’s dangerous so they have another thing for the police state to take away your rights to “protect” you from.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨FTC sues Amazon, accusing the e-commerce giant of "secretly and systematically overcharged" misleading advertisers on its platform by manipulating its pricing and auction systems.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Unironically, yes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Americans are cheering for vigilantes who take down Flock cameras | The surveillance cameras have become another flashpoint of growing bipartisan anger against tech industry excess.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m glad they’re calling them vigilantes, because a vigilante is someone who punishes crimes outside the bounds of the law. Good to see media acknowledging that Flock cameras are criminal.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ads and tracking infiltrated TVs. Now they're coming for monitors.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Stage 1: You pay for it, it is the product

  Stage 2: It is free, you are the product

  Stage 3: You pay for it, you are the product

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sony Reminds PS Users They Don't Own Digital Games⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  How old are you? Because no, there is no key to recommend for a UMD.

  The fact you apparently are so young you aren’t aware things used to be different, is proving the point here.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sony Reminds PS Users They Don't Own Digital Games⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  No, it’s literally not. Sony can take away your license for a digital game for any or no reason. They cannot take away your license for the physical good outside of very specific cases (and they will require a court order to do it, unlike revoking a digital license).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Uber hit with a nearly $1 billion fine for automatically deactivating drivers in Europe⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Imagine living somewhere that brings suits against companies for hurting workers, without the workers themselves needing to pay exorbitant fees to bring a class action.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sony Reminds PS Users They Don't Own Digital Games⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Not in this way. I can literally still play my UMD games on my old PSP, and Sony can’t do shit about it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Flock CEO calls for ‘compromise’ as surveillance company faces growing backlash | TechCrunch⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  “I’ll maybe hurt you a little less, and I’ll keep doing the bad thing” isn’t a compromise; a compromise has to benefit both sides, and not being harmed is just the default expectation, not a benefit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Quantum Computer Solves a Problem in 15 Minutes That Classical Methods Can’t Practically Compute⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Here we go boiiiiiis!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Unwinding the Great Tech Power Grab⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  This is why I have such a hard time trusting any “only war is the class war” pusher. Pretending that all will be well if we give one group what they want reeks of a desire for power rather than a desire for liberation, and you know that those people are not going to either 1) share any power they gain with people they worked with to get that power, who have a different idea of what the post-revolution society should look like (e.g. the USSR banning other Socialist factions), or 2) actually ensure the society they build does not recreate the same social issues (specifically, the ones that didn’t affect them personally).

  WRT the tech backlash, I’ve been pushing myself to have a fully offline-capable tech ecosystem. I’ve been sharing that (though it’s seen only marginal adoption) with my family, who are long-distance, and I’ve been really really happy with how much I find myself actually using it versus using ‘online’ media. I don’t know if that fits into the models of interaction that the movements mentioned in the article are advocating, though, or if they’re going more “use tech less”, rather than “use tech that serves Capital less”.

  I’m not telling anyone else to do this; it’s definitely my version of reclaiming time and money and attention from Big Tech, but I guarantee that if you find a way to decouple from a major corporate-run platform you rely on, you will realize just how unenjoyable those platforms are.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ChatGPT, LLMs, and Automating the Fun Out of Roleplaying: Don’t let billionaires poison the beautiful creative collaboration at the heart of TTRPGs⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah, it pulled a Christopher Nolan!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mozilla’s CTO thinks AI should be built like the internet⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, self-hosting and small-group AI hosting needs to be legal, accessible, and feasible.

  Despite the pessimistic (and largely technically incorrect) takes here, the internet is actually an incredible feat of human collaboration; the most distributed, interconnected, democratized, and resilient communication system ever built.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mozilla’s CTO thinks AI should be built like the internet⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  “organizations need alternatives to proprietary AI systems to gain greater control over their data and infrastructure”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘Nightmare fodder’: Roku’s AI slop channel is even worse than expected⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s 0% porn. It’s corporate-approved and safe AI slop. So not even something you can fap to in self hatred.