Barbarian

Barbarian, 3 days ago (edited 21 hours ago)

https://media0.giphy.com/media/YYfEjWVqZ6NDG/giphy.gif?cid=6c09b9529x70vtzbcwyzqrdlp80m8w4rrzegb24qtu4aops0&ep=v1_internal_gif_by_id&rid=giphy.gif&ct=g

Edit: I have officially voted. Hopefully there’s enough other sane voters to keep AUR away from any power at all.

Barbarian, 2 days ago

I’d vote for Volt in a heartbeat if they were large enough to be on the ballot here in Romania

Barbarian, 3 days ago (edited 1 day ago)

The Satanic Temple is by far the most famous from the US. They fairly regularly prevent attacks on separation of church and state by pulling stunts such as:

• Demanding a statue of baphomet be placed in any government building that has the ten commandments
• Doing satanic prayer before local government functions that do Christian prayer
• Doing after-school Satan clubs as an alternative to Christian Sunday school
• Using religious exemptions to get people abortions, as their tenets claim an individual’s body is purely their own to do what they will with

And much more. They’re a spicy bunch.

They like the stigma. They weaponize the stigma to keep separation, as they will and do use any opening Christians give them by weakening that separation to scare them away.

Barbarian, 5 days ago (edited 1 day ago)

Start looking now. Tell prospective employers that you’re working on the certification and include it in your CV (as a work in progress, ofc). Job searches take a long time, and the sooner you start, the sooner you’re out.

Edit: @MrBobDobalina has exactly the correct approach for getting it in writing. Keep it professional, emotionless, as close to an accurate summary of the situation and the decisions made as possible.

Barbarian, 5 days ago (edited 2 days ago)

I’m going to echo what seems to be the majority opinion here and say that defederation should not be taken lightly. The last big defed discussion here I was in favor of, but that was a very different case. That was a hatespeech instance with the barest veneer of “just asking questions bro”, run by a free speech absolutist who was a few sandwiches short of a picnic. Their daily posts consisted mostly of transphobic, islamophobic or anti-semitic rage-bait (or some combination of those). EDIT: Oh! There were also a lot of covid conspiracy posts there too, now I think about it.

There are some communities there I avoid, but that doesn’t merit defederation. In my mind at least, that should be reserved for instances that allow illegal content, pure unadulterated hatespeech, instances that have been overrun by bots so badly the admin can’t handle it (temporarily for that one ofc), or instances that regularly brigade and the admin encourages this behavior.

And besides, I’ve also had some pleasant and interesting conversations with .ml users. There are some problematic users and communities, but that’s why we have block buttons.

Barbarian, 6 days ago

It was near impossible to have an opinion contrary to the popular one

You’re wrong, and you should feel dumb and embarrassed for having a wrong opinion! Come on everyone, dogpile him! /s

Barbarian, 6 days ago

It’s a well known fact that advertising never works and is a waste of money. That’s why the entire industry died 80 years ago, and nobody ever published an ad ever again.

Barbarian, 6 days ago

Considering Ronald McDonald was a character primarily aimed at young children, I don’t think they were mentally capable of having personal responsibility at that age.

As for the parents who were pestered to buy happy meals by their children, there’s like 50 ways to answer this question. I personally think that in a mentally healthy adult, personal responsibility is a factor, but it’s not the only one and is balanced by social conditioning, genetic predispositions, mood in the moment, and a ton more factors.

The children who for one reason or another were brought up eating fast food are conditioned both socially and biologically to eat fast food, and breaking out of that addiction (as with any other addiction) can be very difficult, and is more complex than doing the equivalent of saying “git gud scrub”.

Wow, that turned into a wall of text, sorry.

Tl;dr: it’s way more complex than just “personal responsibility”.

Barbarian, 8 days ago

You’re conflating two different things here. Arabs are an ethnic group, Islam is a religion. In any religion, what it actually says doesn’t matter (or Christians would still be looking up the going rate of a slave in the bible), what people believe matters.

24% of the world is Muslim, and they are incredibly diverse. Ranging from people who want the heads of heathens on spikes, to wonderful open-minded people, and everything inbetween. To reiterate, Islam is bigger than just Arabs.

Generally speaking, Arab countries tend to not have the best track record for inclusiveness, to put it lightly.

Barbarian, 10 days ago

Heavily depends on what else you’re adding to the rice, but it’s not bad.

My question about this strange combination is how are you supposed to eat it? As soon as you cut the hotdog, all the rice is gonna be pushed to the sides, meaning you’re gonna have to reassemble it after it’s essentially turned into a very strange stir-fry.

If you want to lay the hotdog on top like that, I think it’d be better pre-chopped, so you can grab a forkful of everything.

Barbarian, 10 days ago (edited 2 days ago)

There’s an upper ceiling on capability though, and we’re pretty close to it with LLMs. True artificial intelligence would change the world drastically, but LLMs aren’t the path to it.

Barbarian, 10 days ago

Ah, I misunderstood then, sorry. But still, even with all the investment in the world, LLM is a bubble waiting to burst. I have a hunch we will see truly world-altering technology in the next ~20 years (the kind that’d put huge swathes of people out of work, as you describe), but this ain’t it.

Barbarian, 10 days ago

In terms of boredom, it’s a healthy thing! Boredom is what pushes people to learn new skills, find new hobbies, and just generally do things. I think the demonization of boredom is very bad for society.

In terms of disaster relief, that sucks. If you have to use Reddit for that, then so be it. People getting the help they need in an emergency is more important than sticking it to spez.

Barbarian, 11 days ago

For Americans, it seems like the easiest way to do insider trading is to first get elected to Congress. Then you can do as much insider trading as you want!

Barbarian, 11 days ago

You can be a member of a party without being a politician. As far as I understand it (I could be wrong, not American), the process for signing up in the US is a state-by-state thing, not at the federal level.

Barbarian, 11 days ago (edited 11 days ago)

That’s currently being scheduled.

The complication is that he’ll never spend a day in Romanian prison, the UK has requested extradition. As soon as the trial is over, he’s headed to the UK. From that point, it’s Britain’s decision as to what happens next.

On the plus side as a Romanian, him becoming a convicted criminal here means that no matter what the UK decides, he can’t come back.

Barbarian, 12 days ago

Yugoslavian communism: there’s dinos and toys on the shelves, and people keep buying them to smuggle over the border

Barbarian, 12 days ago

It’s kinda funny that the whole Vanya - Viktor trans thing in S3 Umbrella Academy had his siblings behaving pretty similarly. The vibe was pretty wholesome. Basically “I don’t really understand it, but you’re my bro and we’re trying to save the world. On with the plot!”

Barbarian, 12 days ago

I thought Umbrella Academy would be the obvious comparison due to the fact Elliot plays him

Barbarian, 13 days ago

I went and tested it with copilot.

The vast majority of memes like this get patched as soon as they become viral. Some developer somewhere very likely manually entered a list of fruits ending in “um” and got the LLM to refer to it when asked.

Barbarian, 15 days ago

The “captain’s daughter” was a euphemism for the cat o’ nine tails. So in other words, that line meant give the drunken sailor a lashing as punishment.

Barbarian, 14 days ago (edited 14 days ago)

Think about it inside the context of the song. Every other line is a type of punishment:

• Shave his belly with a rusty razor (painfully pull chest hair out with a dull blade)
• Put him in a long boat till he’s sober (put him somewhere uncomfortably cramped on his own)
• Give him a dose of salt and water (probably the nicest variation of the song, make him vomit)
• Stick him in a scupper with a hosepipe on him (scupper= hole in the side of the ship, so stick his head in a hole and hit him with a hosepipe)

There’s also loads of other variations on the song with tons of different punishments for the drunken sailor.

Why would this line suddenly be different?

Barbarian, 14 days ago

Having one line about sleeping with the captain’s daughter might have been even more amusing (and thus more catchy) because of the double meaning.

Very likely, probably why the whole captain’s daughter = captain’s whip thing took off as sailor slang to begin with.

your average deck hand singing sea shanties isn’t thinking metaphorically when he’s singing about getting drunk and laid.

I never claimed it was a metaphor, it’s slang. Similarly, the “gunner’s daughters” were the gun barrels midships on gunships.

And insisting that the one line in the song isn’t about fucking is feels like wishful thinking

I mean, no skin off my nose if you believe that, but it seems pretty clear judging from the fact that the captain’s daughter is a well known slang term for a whip in a song about punishing a drunk that that is extremely likely the correct original intent. Of course anybody can interpret anything any way they want.

Barbarian, 15 days ago (edited 12 days ago)

Sofas are just rebranded comfy benches

Barbarian, 15 days ago

I feel like comparisons like this don’t generally get made because capitalism is the default organising principle of the modern world, while feudalism (depending on where in the world we’re talking about) hasn’t been a thing for 150-800 years. People generally draw comparisons from what they experience and the experiences of those around them, not usually from history books.