Excrubulent
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net
- Comment on be more like dogs 1 hour ago:
Police dogs are, very much so. Like, not consciously. They don’t understand what they’re doing and it’s their owners that are ultimately responsible for using them essentially as prejudice amplifiers and probable cause generators, but the racism they get taught absolutely does harm.
- Comment on If I wanted to, hypothetically, guarentee that I shit my pants 2 to 6 hours from now, how should I do it? 2 days ago:
Based on the answer you got we need to consider that everyone answering has become complicit in, if not crimes, at the very least japery.
- Comment on hot dog 2 days ago:
It was a train conductors’ meeting, they hold it on board a moving train, which is scary because all the conductors are at the meeting so nobody’s available to actually drive. Entire generations of conductors have been lost this way.
- Comment on We can do all three things at once 4 days ago:
Thanks, I could’ve worded it less like I was calling you dimb, sorry about that.
- Comment on We can do all three things at once 5 days ago:
I wasn’t trying to insult you, I am honestly just angry at how our society has poisoned everyone’s thinking into this bizarre quasi-religious faith in technological miracles so it can sell them fantasies, and I think the Actual Machines / Fucking Magic distinction is an entertaining way of making the absurdity of it very clear.
- Comment on Good news and bad news 5 days ago:
I did what I had to do to stop that slippery fucker disappearing again.
- Comment on We can do all three things at once 5 days ago:
The important part here is “if we built”. If we built a net-gain fusion reactor our energy problems would be solved too, but we’re not doing that.
There are significant problems with breeder reactors and development has largely stopped on them.
The problem here is the AM/FM distinction: Actual Machines vs Fucking Magic.
Fucking Magic is great if you’re writing scifi, or trying to sell snake oil to investors. The Hyperloop and FSD are examples of Fucking Magic. Sure, they could, in theory, exist, but they don’t, and we don’t know how long they would take or even if they make sense in the long term.
There’s nothing wrong with working on new technologies that may as well be Fucking Magic until they do become viable.
However, if you are making plans for how to proceed with your policy goals, you need Actual Machines. Actual Machines can’t do miracles and fix all of our problems overnight like Fucking Magic can, but they have the benefit of existing. We know their actual benefits and their actual drawbacks. We know that they won’t present some brand new problem that makes them impossible to work with, because they are mature. Trains and bicycles are Actual Machines. Wind, solar and hydro power are Actual Machines.
If breeder reactors are going to become a technology we can rely on to solve our nuclear fuel and waste issues, then they need to make the transition from Fucking Magic to Actual Machines, and that could take decades or more of further research, and yet more decades to actually build the things. Sure, that could come in time to extend our nuclear fuel reserves before they run out in around a century, but it might not. We just don’t know. It certainly won’t come in time to make a difference to climate change.
- Comment on i don't get you 6 days ago:
Can confirm, I used to have a partner that was conditioned to accept gaslighting by their narcissistic father. They had a terrible memory for his abuse. Like he’d say these flagrantly horrible things, and I’d try to talk to them about it later and half the time they just… wouldn’t remember it.
It was really easy to accidentally railroad them too. Like I had to learn to be hyper aware of anything I said that might unconsciously contradict what they wanted, because they would just self-edit to remove the contradiction.
It’s what ended the relationship really, because even though they didn’t always consciously remember the abuse, they did expect it, and it was impossible to have a conversation about a difficult issue without them perceiving abuse and sidestepping it. The conversation would go in circles. When I got good enough at anticipating the ways they would sidestep topics, they had another strategy - just dissociate and blank out, so I’m left standing there going, “Hello? Can you hear me?”
Gaslighting is real, and it does serious damage to people.
- Comment on Are we the baddies? 1 week ago:
DNC
I mean if we’re going to call them out, nobody elected these fucking parties, either one of them.
- Comment on "PSN isn't supported in my country. What do I do?" Arrowhead CEO: "I don't know" 1 week ago:
Oh thanks for reminding me!
Anark | Liberation in Action Playlist
It used to be really hard to give a good list of these sorts of movements, but this series by Anark just puts it all in one place.
The first video is him just reading off a list, but this is the list in written form, which I find much easier to parse: docs.google.com/document/d/…/edit#heading=h.p04t7…
- Comment on "PSN isn't supported in my country. What do I do?" Arrowhead CEO: "I don't know" 1 week ago:
We haven’t done nothing. There’s Rojava and the EZLN building whole competing systems. There’s loads of people doing mutual aid or building cooperative economic structures all over the world, and those movements are gaining a lot of traction as people are waking up to how shit things are.
You don’t usually hear about all these projects, in the same way you may not notice termites hollowing out a structure until it’s far too late to save it.
- Comment on Breaking the news 1 week ago:
If they can’t handle you at your Boeing whistleblower obituary they don’t deserve you at your… um…
I don’t actually know you so I can’t complete this. Idk, maybe you’re good at tongue stuff.
- Comment on The choice is yours 1 week ago:
- Comment on We can do all three things at once 1 week ago:
The problems with nuclear power aren’t meltdowns, but the facts that it often takes decades just to construct a new plant, it creates an enormous carbon footprint before you get it running, it has an enormously resource-intensive fuel production process, it contributes to nuclear proliferation, it creates indefinitely harmful waste, and even if we get past all of that and do expand it, that’s just going to deplete remaining fuel sources faster, of which we only have so many decades left.
It’s not a good long term solution. I agree we should keep working plants running, but we can’t do that forever, and we still need renewable alternatives - wind, hydro and solar.
And it wasn’t some nebulous group of NIMBYs that worked against nuclear power, it was the fossil fuel lobby. I don’t know why people keep jumping to cultural explanations for what is clearly a structural issue.
Also there is good science on why we actually can switch to entirely renewables: theguardian.com/…/no-miracles-needed-prof-mark-ja…
- Comment on What a deal! 1 week ago:
Wait… zooms in
Oh my god it’s plywood isn’t it?
- Comment on Peace was never an option 2 weeks ago:
It’s the wrong sort of goose.
- Comment on It's called "social jet lag". Yes I know about sleep hygiene. 2 weeks ago:
You can fall within a neurodivergent category and also be just you and valid regardless of a diagnosis.
Two things can be true at the same time.
What’s not true is blanket claiming that every person who thinks they’re neurodivergent is automatically wrong.
- Comment on As a long-time user hearing YouTube wants to play ads when I pause a video 2 weeks ago:
That’s definitely a good point. I looked it up and found a few places saying it was about 38% of users using adblock on the internet in general: techjury.net/blog/ad-blocker-usage-stats/
Although apparently the most adblockers are in Indonesia with over 50%.
So that would suggest that if there is a tipping point where increasing ads backfires, we’re not actually that far away from it, and in some places it may have already happened.
Although the analysis that “if you add 10% to the cost and lose 5% of customers then it’s worth it” is definitely true. This is why there’s a bottom to every market where for instance some people can’t afford even the basic necessities and become unhoused.
- Comment on Trust issues 2 weeks ago:
I haven’t seen it in years, and it was honestly great. Got a good jolt of adrenaline and then laughed my head off.
I may not be quite right in the head.
- Comment on You can travel just a 100 thousand years at the speed of light and already gross the galaxy. The Andromedan mind cannot comprehend 2 weeks ago:
I really do prefer my hopeful speculative fiction much more these days, this is the one that sticks out the most to me recently: It Could Happen Here | CZM Book Club: The Lost Roads by Sim Kern, as well as the game Terra Nil. There’sa really healing quality to seeing someone else’s imagination of a better world.
Satisfactory is fascinating though. At first I was wondering why it was such a beautiful game. They made a stunning alien world.
Then as I slowly decimated the landscape and covered it in brutalist industrial architecture the message became clear about how the drive towards infinite growth is so destructive. Nobody made me do it, but to advance according to the company’s incentive structure I had to. I try to compactify and grow vertical, and offshore my big structures, and that’s arguably better, but then the vistas are always marred. You can actually use geothermal energy, but in order to get there you need petroleum for plastic for computers, and the byproducts of that basically guarantee you will be fossil fuel dependent by that point, and even then geothermal can’t sustain your whole operation. It’s an incredibly well constructed ludonarrative.
Also you can’t sleep. At all. There’s a bed but you can’t use it, you just work all through every night. I’m pretty sure the company has augmented the character with cybernetics to make them the perfect worker.
Then I saw that galaxy and I was like oh… oh no. We are the universe-eating scourge civ that Fermi was theorising about. We will destroy everything in our path.
- Comment on Does wb get any money from sales of adult swim published games on steam? 2 weeks ago:
It’s fair to assume they won’t be getting updates, which are the big reason to buy rather than pirate anyway.
- Comment on You can travel just a 100 thousand years at the speed of light and already gross the galaxy. The Andromedan mind cannot comprehend 2 weeks ago:
I honestly admire your optimism.
On a related note, the game Satisfactory is a sci fi factory building game set on an alien planet, and there’s a big ass spiral galaxy in the night sky. When I saw it I had to stop for a minute and think about the lore implications. Either this is millions of light years from Earth at least, or billions of years in the future.
Either way the fact I’m playing an indentured servant practically owned by a mega corporation hell bent on rapaciously expanding their factories throughout space is fucking bleak.
Now, maybe the artist just put it there because it’s pretty and spacey, but the devs are clearly massive nerds and I would 100% believe that they intended that implication.
- Comment on You can travel just a 100 thousand years at the speed of light and already gross the galaxy. The Andromedan mind cannot comprehend 2 weeks ago:
Are you telling me Star Trek Voyager lied to me?
- Comment on Trust issues 2 weeks ago:
WUB NAJD
- Comment on The rules just don't apply to me tbh 2 weeks ago:
Stephen Segal is the off-brand Steven Seagal except instead of worse he’s just a nice humble dude with a black belt who never brags about it and is not a human trafficker.
- Comment on Let π = 5 3 weeks ago:
“Assume a spherical cow, which for our purposes can be estimated as a cuboid.”
- Comment on Free drinks 3 weeks ago:
.https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/64f2591a-fb80-4265-a06e-118fd834a426.webp
- Comment on Boil 'em, mash 'em, stick 'em in a stew 3 weeks ago:
Fair lol.
- Comment on Showing appreciation for hard work. 3 weeks ago:
And did their CO ever do anything that landed him in the history books besides yelling at them for this historical prank? You are welcome, sir.
- Comment on The Eurobean Mind Cannot Comprehend 3 weeks ago: