@lord_tacitus@mastodon.social
@lord_tacitus@mastodon.social avatar

lord_tacitus

@lord_tacitus@mastodon.social

Just a creature, most vile and wretched, pay it no mind.

Deep love of #maths, #art, video #games, #film & #television (especially #animation), #FOSS, and #TTRPG's.

Anti-capitalist, anti-corporate, anti-colonial, anti-fascist, anti-religion, anti-bullying.
Pro-LGBT, pro-vaccine, pro-Ukraine, pro-Palestine, pro-choice, pro-science, pro-vocative, pro-crastinator.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

sundogplanets, (edited ) to random
@sundogplanets@mastodon.social avatar

Usually I tell people I study Kuiper Belt Objects, because that name is more easily recognized by the general public. But today I have learned that I can make Those People cringe just by saying the more proper name.

So, I study Trans-Neptunian Objects.

lord_tacitus,
@lord_tacitus@mastodon.social avatar

@sundogplanets
You mean like Pluto? Which we used to call a planet until we learnt more about it but there still some people too stubborn to update their nomenclature? Which scientists have come to understand that continuing to call it a planet would be asinine and ignorant of so much of reality?

Not sure why I felt to need to bring that up, of course you know all that, it couldn't possibly be a reference to something else.

eniko, (edited ) to random
@eniko@peoplemaking.games avatar

Really feel like mastodon's design doesn't prioritize protecting users from the actions of a malicious admin enough. If the pitch is "if the admin tries to burn things down then you can move" then for that pitch to work it can't be that an admin can torch everything before you have time to react

Yes, they can always take the instance down immediately and in its entirety, but thats not what I'm talking about. But hey actually, if that happens there should still be a way to recover and move your account

EDIT: "make backups" is not a solution because the most valuable part of a social graph is people who follow you, and those cannot be backed up

lord_tacitus,
@lord_tacitus@mastodon.social avatar

@eniko
I'm really starting to think that we should only be suggest instances run by nonprofit orgs. Many of the big, popular instances are run by individuals who can, on one bad day, do incredible harm to hundreds of thousands of people on their own instance and goodness knows how many more on other instances. If you thought Elon was excercising too much power then these massive instances run by regular people with no oversight should be alarming.

lord_tacitus,
@lord_tacitus@mastodon.social avatar

@fireborn @eniko
Bad idea. The problem isn't that we know now that stux can't be trusted, it's that we any person, any regular, fallible human can have a bad a day and can not be trusted with more people than a small city. You shouldn't be trusting your social graph to the hands a single person, it should be under a committee, a slow, deliberate commitee.

eniko, to random
@eniko@peoplemaking.games avatar

BREAKING: 40% of CEOs Complete Fuckwits, Study Finds

lord_tacitus,
@lord_tacitus@mastodon.social avatar

@eniko
Yeah, shut up @Njord.

HeavenlyPossum, to random
@HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social avatar

Regardless of Zach Snyder’s deeply fascist, deeply homoerotic, deeply ahistorical film 300, classical Spartan society was very shitty.

Sparta was a highly militarized, nearly-totalitarian slave state. A tiny hereditary elite devoted itself almost entirely to the production and export of violence, living off the labor of a large servile population, the helots.

Helots lived a bit like medieval serfs: they lived in their own villages, farmed their own fields, raised their own families. But each was owned by some member of the Spartan elite and owed a regular tribute of agricultural production to that owner, freeing the Spartan elites from manual labor and permitting them to focus on learning how to hurt people.

1/9

lord_tacitus,
@lord_tacitus@mastodon.social avatar

@HeavenlyPossum
This specifically reminds me of the concept of stochastic terrorism. Instead of being directly responsible for specific actions e.g. "hey you kill that homeless man", they are instead indirectly responsible for fostering and maintaining a culture and society where such types of actions are more likely to occur. It's a much more pernicious manner, difficult to detect and more difficult to direct blame.

lord_tacitus,
@lord_tacitus@mastodon.social avatar

@HeavenlyPossum
It's similar to what you said about chattel slavery vs. wage labour which boils down to a difference between "work for me or I kill you" vs. "work for me or I let you die". The perniciousness of it makes for a much more elegant and hard to uproot manner of control. It's easy to point to the oppressor using force but much harder to fault the one pointedly doing nothing and smiling.

torb, to Youtube

WARNING: YouTube have started to automatically assign nicknames to people based on your email-address. If said address is your deadname this means your YouTube identity might be deadnaming you right now.

Please take make sure you're safe if you're in a location or situation where your deadname becoming visible you be dangerous for you!

lord_tacitus,
@lord_tacitus@mastodon.social avatar

@torb
Isn't that just telling the whole world what your email is? Huge privacy/security risk. Get ready to be spammed by scam emails I guess.

miriamrobern, to random
@miriamrobern@dice.camp avatar

During WWII, the French called American soldiers “les sommobiches” because, well, that’s what they said all the time.

In the Hundred Years’ War, the French called English invaders “goddamns” for the same reason.

When Vikings seized Normandy and settled in 918, vociferously adopting Catholicism and shouting “bi God!” to prove their piety, the French called them bigots.

“Bigot” means and has always meant “an asshole whose shallow piety is only a rhetorical device for cynical validation.”

lord_tacitus,
@lord_tacitus@mastodon.social avatar

@miriamrobern
[citation needed]
Why on earth would norsemen in france be speaking english?

aeva, (edited ) to random
@aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

opinion: "je ne sais quoi" is an english idiom that means "I am emotionally compelled to speak in french now"

lord_tacitus,
@lord_tacitus@mastodon.social avatar

@aeva
It's more than that though, the phrase just has a certain... I don't know what

aeva, (edited ) to random
@aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

how do i install woke linux

EDIT: apt-get install anarchism, apparently

lord_tacitus,
@lord_tacitus@mastodon.social avatar

@aeva
pacman -S linux linux-firmware

eniko, to random
@eniko@peoplemaking.games avatar

I want fewer videos about how socialism is the answer to all our problems and more videos on how neoliberalism is going to be the ruin of us all

lord_tacitus,
@lord_tacitus@mastodon.social avatar

@eniko
Person: "I want to have gay marriage"

Neoliberal: "That's valid"

Homophobe: "I think gay people shouldn't exist"

Neoliberal: "That's equally valid... Somehow"

lord_tacitus,
@lord_tacitus@mastodon.social avatar

@eniko
Honestly, I much prefer the out an proud bigots. While scary, at least you can spot them easily and they're a huge turn off for the middle section. It's the guys who're "just asking questions" that worry me because they hide behind a thin veneer of plausibility and innocent curiosity. They're the ones who'll actually spread harmful ideology to people who would've otherwise never encountered it.

PaulWay, to random
@PaulWay@aus.social avatar

I love how so much of the AI debate is on things like:

  • Will AI take people's jobs?
  • Will AI destroy creativity?
  • Will AI take over the world?
  • Will AI be used to make people poorer?

And not:

  • Will corporations that use AI get rid of people's jobs?
  • Will corporations that use AI destroy creativity?
  • Will corporations that use AI try to take over the world?
  • Will corporations that use AI make people poorer?

Because these LLMs and machine learning systems and so forth aren't just wandering around randomly out there - they're owned by corporations. The corporations are the ones putting them to use. The executives that run those corporations are the ones making the decisions to pay people less, to increase their profits, to make creative people act as subeditors for LLMs.

It's the corporations, and the ethics-free systems that govern them, that cause these things. They're the ones pushing to have more AI.

The rest of us would be happy just having a bit more humanity in the world.

lord_tacitus,
@lord_tacitus@mastodon.social avatar

@PaulWay
Just the same as people complain about immigrants stealing jobs instead of complaining that employers exploit immigration to devalue labour.

aeva, to random
@aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

I was late for an appointment last week and it was my own fault for trusting google map's time estimates. So I gave myself a whole hour instead of the recommended 20 minutes, and the train has been stalled for like 20 minutes now because of "an unauthorized person on the tracks" 🙃

lord_tacitus,
@lord_tacitus@mastodon.social avatar

@aeva
Would the train have kept going if it was an authorised person on the tracks?

aeva, to random
@aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

I wanna make a Zelda fan game called "Whoops! All Water Temples!"

lord_tacitus,
@lord_tacitus@mastodon.social avatar

@aeva
B-But comp sci is liberal arts

aeva, to random
@aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

Every time I see "Electric Keese" in I keep hearing "Girl! I wanna take you to a voe bar! I wanna take you to a voe bar!" 🎶

lord_tacitus,
@lord_tacitus@mastodon.social avatar

@aeva


Danger! Danger! High Voe-tage.
When we touch, when we keese.

aeva, to random
@aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

I'm getting a standing desk tomorrow! I used to hate the concept because it smelled like yuppie bullshit to voluntarily stand during your full time job, but apparently it's good for your spine if you stand up periodically because being reminded that it's excruciatingly painful to stand for more than 10 minutes makes your spine more appreciative of the privilege of being seated while you toil away over a hot unreal engine.

lord_tacitus,
@lord_tacitus@mastodon.social avatar

@aeva
Used a standing desk at my last job. Can confirm, they're brilliant, only good thing about that job really.
Being able to frequently stand up straight is a must to avoid feeling stiff and sore and hunchbacked. Especially if you spend your working day sitting infront of a screen, hunched over a keyboard only to go home and spend your leisure time sitting in front of a screen hunched over a keyboard.

eniko, to random
@eniko@peoplemaking.games avatar

I've turned off cw's entirely because they're so frequent that having to keep opening posts i have no problem with becomes an annoying chore, which does lead to me getting a face full of spoilers or unanticipated nudity every so often. Not a fan of that

lord_tacitus,
@lord_tacitus@mastodon.social avatar

@eniko
This is the problem with over using a useful feature, it becomes useless. Same thing on Reddit when people use the spoiler tag to hide any reference to a film etc. or the NSFW tag to as a joke.

CW should really only be used for things that are actually, genuinely traumatic. There are some other fringe cases, I think, e.g. marking a very long post but innocuous things being marked just degrades the value of the CW tag as a whole for everybody.

eniko, to random
@eniko@peoplemaking.games avatar

Tfw you read a summary about a promising covid pancoronavirus vaccine with sterilizing immunity and get all excited but then the last two words are "in mice" 😔

lord_tacitus,
@lord_tacitus@mastodon.social avatar

@eniko
Relevant XKCD
https://xkcd.com/1217/

nerdybutcute, to ChatGPT
@nerdybutcute@horrorhub.club avatar

a lot of ppl are responding to the story about the lawyer who used to write his brief by saying that he "fell for it" or "didn't know" about how bad is

here's the thing

i don't even read a lot of news. and i'm certainly no tech expert. but the discourse about AI, LLMs, and ChatGPT has made the limitations OBVIOUS. i got the full story w/o even trying or having any expertise.

i have a hard time believing any functioning adult doesn't KNOW that ChatGPT is just fancy autocomplete

lord_tacitus,
@lord_tacitus@mastodon.social avatar

@nerdybutcute
A lot of people have actually fallen for the industry's marketing. I was talking to my mother yesterday about this case and she thought it couldn't be possible for ChatGPT to make up fake citations because 1) she thought it trawled through the internet to find the answer and 2) it was supposed to be super accurate so how could it be that wrong. She bought into it being "AI", it's not, we really should be calling it generative ML.

anderseknert, to random
@anderseknert@hachyderm.io avatar

It seems many people still aren’t aware that they literally don’t have to see any cookie / GDPR / consent popups — at least not in their desktop browser. Get uBlock Origin and then in the settings there’s a bunch of filter lists to choose from. “EasyList annoyances” alone will block like 99% of them, and it just works. Only downside is that it’s pretty much impossible to use a browser without it after.

lord_tacitus,
@lord_tacitus@mastodon.social avatar

@anderseknert
The problem I have with both EasyList's and FanBoy's annoyances lists is that they both block RSS icons/links/buttons for some god forsaken reason.

eniko, (edited ) to random
@eniko@peoplemaking.games avatar

Are you limiting your participation in indoor activities in public due to covid?

lord_tacitus,
@lord_tacitus@mastodon.social avatar

@eniko
It's not like I actually did any indoor activities before Covid, so... No? Can't limit what never happened.

gamingonlinux, to random
@gamingonlinux@mastodon.social avatar

Should go without saying but seems I need to: if you reply to me with any bigot views and anti-trans shit I will fling you into the scorching sun.

lord_tacitus,
@lord_tacitus@mastodon.social avatar

@gamingonlinux
Now this is journalism I can get behind.

aeva, to random
@aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

my finest creation

lord_tacitus,
@lord_tacitus@mastodon.social avatar

@aeva
"Mid game"... I stumbled across it by accident when going "ooh what's that" several times.

lord_tacitus,
@lord_tacitus@mastodon.social avatar

@aeva
Hmmm, very lossy compression, should consider a different algorithm 🙃

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