mozz

@mozz@mbin.grits.dev

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"X": Far-right conspiracy theorists have returned in droves after Elon Musk took over the former Twitter, new study says⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Every government in the world has good and bad in it, because every government is made of people. Different ones have different amounts; it's not like every country's government is the same or has equal good/evil levels. But sometimes people take it to the point of classifying "good ones" and "bad ones" and handwaving away the bad things that the "good ones" are doing. To me, that's not really a safe or sensible way to look at things. It's just not how things work. In my opinion.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It is very therapeutic to garden, though.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, that's why I included "per unit of land." It is in practice a little more complex, and a lot of times the smaller farms are more labor-intensive.

  My opinion is that modern farming is efficient enough that we can very obviously sustain the farmer, and sell the food at a reasonable price, and it all works -- the only reason this is even complicated at all and we have to talk about optimizing for labor (certainly in 1st-world farms) is that we're trying to support a bloodsucking managerial class that demands six-figure salaries for doing fuck-all, and subsistence wages for the farmers and less than that for farmworkers, and stockholder dividends, and if we just fixed all that bullshit then the issue would be land productivity and everything would be fine.

  But yes, in terms of labor productivity it's a little more complex, and none of the above system I listed is likely to change anytime soon, so that's fair.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It is very therapeutic to garden, though.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Fun fact: IDK about like a backyard vegetable garden, but small family-sized farms are actually more productive per unit of land than big industrial agriculture.

  The farming conglomerates like to enforce big farming operations because they're easier to mechanize and run at scale. But if your goal is just to produce food and have the farmers make a living, small farms are actually better even economically (in addition to like 10 other reasons).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"X": Far-right conspiracy theorists have returned in droves after Elon Musk took over the former Twitter, new study says⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Okay, just curious.

  I mean, yes, it should be a shockingly easy question to answer and I'm happy that you're against them. I've just gotten in the habit of asking people who display one view that's surprising to me if they hold other surprising views which might not appear initially to be directly related. Most of the time, they do, which is a very interesting result to me.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"X": Far-right conspiracy theorists have returned in droves after Elon Musk took over the former Twitter, new study says⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I didn't ask about how you felt about Israel's genocide. I'm assuming, based on what you already said, that you're against it. So am I.

  If you had to narrow down your feelings on the Uyghur internment camps to one of three responses, would it be:

  • I'm against them
  • I'm for them
  • It's more complicated than that

  And, the same question for the police response in Hong Kong.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Trump, Bashing Migrants, Likens Them to Hannibal Lecter, Movie Cannibal⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah. You could say he’s being sarcastic when he praises Lecter, and his actual point is that some of the people that countries are “sending” the to US, as part of their government immigrant-sending programs apparently, are cannibals. But that is also an insane thing to say so it’s really hard to tell.

  I think his brain is just falling apart and he didn’t care much in the first place whether what he says had any connection to reality, and so this is the kind of thing that falls out.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Trump, Bashing Migrants, Likens Them to Hannibal Lecter, Movie Cannibal⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  He didn't liken migrants to Hannibal Lecter. It's a little hard to discern exactly what he meant, but what he said was that he was a wonderful man, and then he called him the late great Hannibal Lecter, and then he told him congratulations.

  Here's the video; the relevant part of the transcript in context is:

  Venezuela just announced and it had a new number was 67 now it's 72% 72% they're down in crime because they took their gangs their gang members they took a lot of their criminals and they moved them into the United States of America jail populations all over the world are way down and these fools back there the press the fake news they don't want to report it you know why they're down because they're sending people in their jails into the United States from Africa from Asia from all over the world they're emptying out their jails into the United States they're emptying out their mental institutions into the United States our beautiful country and now the prison populations all over the world are down they don't want to report that the mental institution population is down because they're taking people from insane asylums and from mental institution you know what the difference is Right an insane asylum is a mental institution on steroids Silence of the Lambs has anyone ever seen Silence of the Lambs the late great Hannibal Lector he's a wonderful man he often times would have a friend for dinner remember the last scene excuse me I'm about to have a friend for dinner as this poor doctor walked by I'm about to have a friend for dinner but Hannibal Lector congratulations the late great Hannibal Lector we have people that are being released into our country that we don't want in our country and they're coming in totally unchecked totally unvetted and we can't let this happen they're destroying our country and we're sitting back and we better damn well win this election cuz if we don't our country is going to be doomed it's going to be doomed so I took hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs and taxes and fees from China and other countries also not just China everyone rips us all of them the European Union is brutal they all are brutal because they were dealing with people that didn't care they had no business bent they were politicians that didn't want to rock the boat European Union treats us very badly they learned they learned we did a lot of things with them uh Macron of France good guy's a friend of mine but he loves France and he was going to put a tax on All American Business a very substantial tax 25% on American businesses in France and my people went I gave it to Steve Mnuchin

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"X": Far-right conspiracy theorists have returned in droves after Elon Musk took over the former Twitter, new study says⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Random question, what's your opinion on the Uyghur re-education camps? Or the treatment of the Hong Kong protestors and how it compares with the treatment of US protestors of aid to Israel?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"X": Far-right conspiracy theorists have returned in droves after Elon Musk took over the former Twitter, new study says⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  But at the same time, it has helped radicalize and inform so many in the ranks of Gen Z, amongst other generations.

  I know when I think of people I know who get most of their news from TikTok, I'm like "damn that person is super well informed and I'm always happy when I talk to them about politics and world events"

  Out of all the platforms, every single other one of which including the one you're on right now and the elephant one and Usenet and ZMag and Hackernews and all the rest

  I do not know which reality you inhabit where TikTok invented people knowing about Gaza, but I promise you that there are better platforms, where you're allowed to talk about drugs or alcohol or use the word "blood", or "Uyghur"

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gabe Newell, the Man Behind Steam, Is Working on a Brain-Computer Interface⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah. I was around in the games industry way back when the big publishers had a total stranglehold on the whole arena, and Steam was this magic thing that enabled non-AAA games to actually break in in a big way and achieve sales above the double digits, and on top of that I generally like Valve's games. I was sort of wondering if this is a "live long enough to see yourself become the villain" type of thing, where my good feelings towards Valve aren't warranted anymore in the present day.

  But, judging by what I saw when I grabbed one of this person's assertions at random and held it up to the light to examine in it detail for objective truth, I don't think it's based on a reasoned and objective basis. What it is based on, I have no idea.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gabe Newell, the Man Behind Steam, Is Working on a Brain-Computer Interface⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I hadn't heard of most of this, and it's sort of an avalanche, so I picked out one particular part to check out in a lot of detail and see if it held up.

  The controller was stolen IP

  Looks to me like they had buttons on the back of the controller in some way which infringed on one of 105 patents that SCUF holds on specific parts of controller design, and they sued Valve a year after Valve had stopped using the design anyway.

  I'm not qualified to say whether SCUF actually invented something no one else would have thought of, and then Valve deliberately copied them on the buttons, but I'm skeptical. I lean a little more towards the side of "SCUF patented something somewhat obvious, and then wanted Valve to pay them rent in order to set their buttons up in a sensible fashion."

  But at the very least, saying that it's demonstrated that it was "stolen" is, to me, not accurate.

  and is still currently fighting the lawsuit

  This part is objectively not true, unless there's some glacially slow appeals process I'm not aware of. It looks like the whole thing finished in 2021. Am I missing something?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gabe Newell, the Man Behind Steam, Is Working on a Brain-Computer Interface⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah. Gaben has a strong track record of bringing technology to the market that works, from a company that wasn't already around and doing things better overall before he got involved with it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gabe Newell, the Man Behind Steam, Is Working on a Brain-Computer Interface⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah. I've been out of the loop apparently, because today was the first that I heard of it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Elon Musk’s Neuralink reports trouble with first human brain chip⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  How in the WORLD had I not heard of this

• Gabe Newell, the Man Behind Steam, Is Working on a Brain-Computer Interfacefuturism.com ↗
  Submitted ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩ to ⁨technology@beehaw.org⁩ | ⁨24⁩ ⁨comments⁩
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"X": Far-right conspiracy theorists have returned in droves after Elon Musk took over the former Twitter, new study says⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Musk is a useful idiot. He ruined Twitter and the US government quietly thanks him for it because it no longer serves as a tool to see unfiltered events happening on the ground (like Israel murdering Palestinians). So mission accomplished there

  Yeah. Twitter back in the day actually used to be a usable substitute for print journalism, without the editorial bias and selective coverage. If you paid attention to who to follow, you could actually get a lot better picture of the world from Twitter than from almost anywhere else.

  I don't think the US government is alone in wanting that gone so they can control the narrative instead, but they're definitely one party that was happy about it.

  and now the new target is TikTok

  And this is where you went straight off the fuckin deep end.

  I do not know a single person who gets their picture of the world from Tiktok whose viewpoint isn't reliably dogshit takes on literally every single issue. (Specific e.g. antivax and "BLM protestors are just running around beating people up, they have to be stopped.") Maybe there's an accidental alignment of pro-Palestine-protestors news from Tiktok right now, but it's not like that viewpoint is just un-heard-of in any MSM news or other social media. The whole landscape at this point is Palestine flags as far as I see, and the other platforms are usually a lot more nuanced and informative.

  I don't know why you'd object to an algorithm controlled by Elon Musk or the US government or just a lawful-evil alignment to sell advertising and hook people to dopamine loops and nothing else (all very good things to be suspicious of, yes), but all of a sudden when the Chinese government's involved, you're like "finally someone trustworthy to put in charge of public opinion, no way this can go wrong."

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"X": Far-right conspiracy theorists have returned in droves after Elon Musk took over the former Twitter, new study says⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I think a large part of this is that X is the only major social media which has no dedicated team for detecting and banning the propaganda bots / troll farms.

  I have no idea how much of the Q / antivax / conspiracy material on social media is deliberate campaigns to destabilize American politics in general (as opposed to perfectly organic homegrown nuttiness which the US has always had plenty of anyway), but I know it's not 0.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Never Forget⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  He committed the idealist's perennial sin: He thought that because the system is bullshit, it's okay not to play ball with it.

  "Hey this is a bunch of crap. I can be guilty or innocent, and the right move is always to plead guilty even if I didn't do a damn thing wrong, because if I try to fight the case they're gonna tack on a ton of new charges and they almost always win and I might go away for most of my life."

  "Preach."

  "I'm gonna plead not guilty because I didn't do anything wrong."

  "No no no no no that is not the way to reform the system no no no that is a bad mistake"

  Aaron Swartz was a fuckin hero. Read his posthumous book, it is wonderful. But the same idealism and faith that led him to the good thing he did in his painfully short time here, also led him not to understand how to engage with the US federal government and keep your skin fully intact.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How ‘Putin’ Will Test Audience Appetite for AI⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It isn't even a realistic effect in the thumbnail

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Elon Musk’s Neuralink reports trouble with first human brain chip⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Honestly I kinda agree. I don't think Elon Musk has demonstrated the good judgement that means a company he's in charge of should be in there fuckin with people's brains, but reading the article it sounds pretty frickin cool what they're doing. I hope it works out and good things come out of it.

• Elon Musk’s Neuralink reports trouble with first human brain chiparstechnica.com ↗
  Submitted ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩ to ⁨technology@beehaw.org⁩ | ⁨30⁩ ⁨comments⁩
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"Grow up. These are my movies, not yours": George Lucas Won't be Happy How Star Wars Fan Group is Illegally Saving the Original Trilogy⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Preach

  This is why it's actually a little unsafe to have two people flying an airplane where one is way more senior than the other. Because the guy with only 1,000 hours of experience or whatever will hesitate to say "Hey I think you're bein a moron, we need to do X Y Z instead," and there's not a person on earth who's exempt from being a moron sometimes.

  You need multiple perspectives

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"Grow up. These are my movies, not yours": George Lucas Won't be Happy How Star Wars Fan Group is Illegally Saving the Original Trilogy⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Fun story: George Lucas's ex-wife had a huge hand in writing a lot of the original blockbuster trilogy.

  There were some odd choices in some of the early drafts; Han Solo was at one point a weird fishy creature, there was a malevolent energy called "The Bogan" that served as a counterpart to the force, Ben Kenobi was called "Owen," and the dialogue was straight-up odd.

  Luke is attacked by Tusken raiders just before he meets Ben; they leave him handcuffed to a giant spinning wheel. Kenobi approaches with a “good morning!”

  “What do you mean, ‘good morning’?” Luke responds. “Do you mean that it is a good morning for you, or do you wish me a good morning, although it is obvious I’m not having one, or do you find that mornings in general are good?”

  “All of them at once,” replies Kenobi.

  It’s a great laugh line. It is also lifted, word for word, from "The Hobbit." J. R. R. Tolkien’s work was so widely read by the 1970s that Lucas could never have gotten away with the theft; it vanishes in the fourth draft.

  So, there was always this sort of hidden uncertainty about, how much of the undeniable quality of the final script came from George Lucas and how much came from his wife.

  Until we got the prequels, and found out the answer.

  (More about the weird stuff in the drafts)

• Amazon illegally interferes with an historic UK warehouse electionpluralistic.net ↗
  Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩ to ⁨technology@beehaw.org⁩ | ⁨0⁩ ⁨comments⁩
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨please tell your husband hello⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Seal: "You made a statement in public for all to hear. Are you unable to defend the statements you make? Or simply unwilling to have a reasoned discussion?"

  Cat: I said I was sorry please can we let it alone

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why does the government of the USA stand by the country of Israel?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:
  1. Historically, almost any US politician who didn't give full enthusiastic support for whatever war crimes Israel wanted to commit would lose their job because of AIPAC. That doesn't seem to be true anymore but old habits die hard.
  2. The Mideast has a bunch of oil and we like to go on little military/covert operation adventures there that coincidentally end up with leaders in place who want to sell it to us for cheap. That means it's pretty useful to have a no-questions-asked stable ally on the ground there; we have some others, but they're not as reliable or permanent or beholden to us as Israel is.
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨checkmate, big geology!!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I like how the diagram contains an illustration of one of the flaws in the plan

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨arthropods⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That is incredibly charming 😃

• Singleboard Alpha: ESP32 powered full featured computer with a capacitive touch keyboard all on one PCBa.singleboard.computer ↗
  Submitted ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩ to ⁨technology@beehaw.org⁩ | ⁨1⁩ ⁨comment⁩
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨arthropods⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Before: All phyla differentiated but all the creatures are soft and blobby and sort of unremarkable
  After: All of a sudden there's trilobites everywhere, they can see and some of them hunt, and all creatures everywhere suddenly have all this armor and mobility and a lot of them have spikes

  I don't really know (even enough to talk about what might be the competing theories), but it seems like it fits and it doesn't seem all that farfetched. That said, it kind of seems like all the scientists think me and Andrew Parker are wrong though, so IDK.

  (Also - I didn't know about this before as it's semi-new, but apparently Anomalocaris also had eyes and hunted, so star power of the trilobites aside maybe those guys were involved as well. I have to say though the timing of the way it's written in Wikipedia makes a little more sense if the sequencing is: Cambrian explosion -> some species turn into predators, as opposed to the other way around)

  What humans are doing to the natural world right now is a global extinction event (not much different from has happened a handful of times). It's happening too fast for anything to adapt to except in the most short-term emergency ways. Mostly stuff is just dying. If we stay around for millions of years doing this same thing then I would expect the biosphere to develop defenses and then rebound into a new equilibrium with defense measures included against what we tend to do to it, in exactly that same way, but I don't think that we'll be around doing the same stuff for that long. I think once the current extinction pressure is gone (one way or another), there'll be quite a while of re-colonization of all the niches we wiped clean during the time when we were killing everything, instead of any lasting adaptation to us as a long term thing.