wizardbeard

wizardbeard, 10 days ago

Not every protest is met with direct force. There’s plenty that are dismantled from the inside using tactics developed in the sixties to divide and weaken idealogical movements! Shit literally documented in intelligence agency standard procedure documents for dealing with large scale idealogical movements and breaking them apart.

Then you just sprinkle some direct force here and there as a treat!

Occupy Wallstreet was poisoned in its crib through infiltration by external forces causing confusion, internal disent, and loss of direction. That is the one “conspiracy theory” I don’t think I will ever be able to let go of.

Intersectionality and identity politics were long overdue, but there’s no way in hell that their rise from the ashes of OWS was a coincidence. Give the socially concious public something else to latch onto for a while so the 1% can shore up their defenses and power structure while the people at the bottom squabble over very important but far less impactful things.

As important as everything else is, the largest determinant of life outcome is money, almost entirely overlooked in most discussions about gender and race.

wizardbeard, 11 days ago

Wow, meme necromancy

wizardbeard, 11 days ago

There’s some security researchers that have done this before as well, and some “grey hats” that reportedly used this technique to get Google to route traffic away from them during their commute by spinning up a whole bunch of phones in their car like this.

wizardbeard, 1 month ago

Hey guys, I’m having an issue with the US tax agency, so I should file a complaint with the UK right?

wizardbeard, 1 month ago

And let’s not ignore the absolutely batshit bananas bonkers price tag. $250 for one new mode in an existing game?

I need to know where the execs that greenlit this get their cocaine. They must be getting amazing prices to get enough to make that seem like a reasonable idea.

wizardbeard, 1 month ago

God that makes me feel old. Yeah, Garry’s Mod is literally named that because it’s his mod. He started making it as a teen, released it for free for a long time, and then leveraged it into a job and company (FacePunch, they also made Rust a lot later).

I think Garry’s Mod 10 was the first paid release, and he and his team have just been updating the paid version since.

The game’s official site used to just be his blog, and I believe he still posts semi-regularly about game development, running a company, and life stuff. Always seemed to be a real stand up guy.

wizardbeard, 1 month ago

As a counter to the post putting it rudely, I’m going to try to say what’s helped me more nicely. Arguably could be summarized similarly.

If you can, get medicated. It’s not a fix-all, and it may take time to find the medicine and dosage that works for you, but I have a lot more success in “adulting” when my brain chemistry is functioning closer to “normal”.

Beyond that, try to start accepting any headway as headway. If you can, force yourself to do one thing that will take less than five minutes, and do it right now. Even if it’s as small as putting one piece of dirty laundry in the dirty clothes hamper, it’s something. Do your best to stop the internal negative self talk that it’s not enough. If the alternative was you paralyzed doing nothing, then doing even a small thing is a positive step. Whenever you start spiraling about everything in between where you are and where you feel you should be, try to stop yourself and do one thing that you can do in five minutes or less. No one just leaps to the finish line.

Any progress is progress. If you’ve ever seen Gurren Lagann, to be cheesy, every small turn pulls the drill forward just a little further.

It’s not easy, but if you keep trying you will eventually build habits. They will be far harder won, and far easier to lose, but you can. Most importantly, even if you don’t, you will still be in a better spot for trying. Any progress is progress.

And if you mess up, you just messed up. It’s not some grand failure in a chain of failures that somehow defines you. That’s just negative self talk. There’s plenty of people out there managing life worse with far less exacerbating circumstances, I guarantee it. Just keep trying.

Again, far far easier said than done. But just start with any small movement forward you can muster. Then do the next tiny movement forward that you can. And the next. When I’m in a bad state I really really try to focus on the smallest things.

I ate within an hour of when I should, even if it was junk food. I put one glass in the dishwasher, so that’s one less dirty one lying around. Etc.

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Anecdotally, something I’ve identified in myself and numerous others I’ve known with ADHD is the terrible trap of comparing yourself to an idealized concept of yourself.

“If I could just get my shit together, I’d be like this. So I need to work to be like this. But I’m not like this because reasons reasons reasons spiral spiral spiral”

“I know, tomorrow I’ll start fresh and tackle all of this as the idealized version of myself that doesn’t have motivation/focus/executive processing issues”

If you lost an arm, you wouldn’t make plans to take care of things tomorrow with both hands. So don’t assume you’ll be worthless, but also don’t assume you’ll magically be motivated to do everything all at once tomorrow. I fall into this trap all the fucking time.

Stop. Take a deep breath. You aren’t competing against yourself in perfect conditions, with all your shit together. You aren’t competing against your peers and the idea of how they work through a filter of your own eyes where you can’t possibly know everything about their situation and internal thoughts.

You’re competing against yourself as you are right now. As you were five minutes ago. As you were yesterday. Try to take time and figure out how you specifically work. Identify your limitations and struggles, doing your best to self reflect honestly, without the added failings from depression speaking, and without the added ideas of how good you “could” do. You. As you are. Now.

Then try to structure things in ways that work for you. Not the rest of the world, not how your parents thought things should work, for you and the way you operate right now.

Accept your flaws and personal quirks instead of fighting a constant head on push against them. Work with them, around them.

Then eventually you can start working as often as you can (once a week, once a day) to scoot back the edges of those limitations inch by inch. A lot, maybe most, you’ll be stuck with and have to find ways to live with and around over time. Some you can overcome.

But the most important thing is to just try to do something small you can do right now, and accept that any progress is progress.

wizardbeard, 1 month ago

It’s pretty much an “open secret” that he’s a pedophile who abused a number of the female stars of Nickelodeon shows.

This is a vine from one of his former stars. I don’t see any way to interpret that except as a cry for help with the thinnest fucking veneer of hiding behind comedy.

Beyond that, of what I understand to be the openly verifiable stuff, he’s openly a sex pest with a foot fetish as he has had a number of incredibly out of place scenes involving shots of underage female stars feet in the shows he has overseen, and he also tried to start a trend of getting (mostly underage) fans of his shows to write messages on their feet and post the pictures to twitter. I think it was “supposed” to be some sort of campaign to bring a show back?

Man is at absolute best a disgusting fucking creep preying on the underage for his foot fetish. Tons of circumstantial evidence that he’s much much worse than that.

wizardbeard, 1 month ago

There’s also Peazip, which handles more formats. I believe both are open source projects.

wizardbeard, 1 month ago

By working to make changes within the current structure, generally yielding faster results and far less cost in human lives.

There’s no magical “erase history and start completely fresh” button, even if society crumbles.

wizardbeard, 1 month ago

Yep. To add on, this is exactly what all the “AI haters” (myself included) are going on about when they say stuff like there isn’t any logic or understanding behind LLMs, or when they say they are stochastic parrots.

LLMs are incredibly good at generating text that works grammatically and reads like it was put together by someone knowledgable and confident, but they have no concept of “truth” or reality. They just have a ton of absurdly complicated technical data about how words/phrases/sentences are related to each other on a structural basis. It’s all just really complicated math about how text is put together. It’s absolutely amazing, but it is also literally and technologically impossible for that to spontaneously coelesce into reason/logic/sentience.

Turns out that if you get enough of that data together, it makes a very convincing appearance of logic and reason. But it’s only an appearance.

You can’t duct tape enough speak and spells together to rival the mass of the Sun and have it somehow just become something that outputs a believable human voice.

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For an incredibly long time, ChatGPT would fail questions along the lines of “What’s heavier, a pound of feathers or three pounds of steel?” because it had seen the normal variation of the riddle with equal weights so many times. It has no concept of one being smaller than three. It just “knows” the pattern of the “correct” response.

It no longer fails that “trick”, but there’s significant evidence that OpenAI has set up custom handling for that riddle over top of the actual LLM, as it doesn’t take much work to find similar ways to trip it up by using slightly modified versions of classic riddles.

A lot of supporters will counter “Well I just ask it to tell the truth, or tell it that it’s wrong, and it corrects itself”, but I’ve seen plenty of anecdotes in the opposite direction, with ChatGPT insisting that it’s hallucination was fact. It doesn’t have any concept of true or false.

wizardbeard, 2 months ago

If you have it in you, please recreate your previous subreddit here in the fediverse. There’s less tools, but also far less users, and plenty of room to make tools.

A ton of niche communities didn’t make it over here during the “exodus”. Any little bit helps.

wizardbeard, 2 months ago

Good journalists go back, edit their original review to call out the bait and switch of hiding the microtransactions from reviewers, and adjust their score accordingly with microtransactions taken into accout.

And release a follow up “article” just letting people know what happened and that they’ve updated the review, so it doesn’t fly under people’s radar.

Seriously, reviewers need to stop softballing when this shit happens. It’s one thing for review copies to maybe be missing the final coat of polish. It’s something completely different to completely leave out a feature known to be contreversial in an attempt to pump up scores, then turn it on after the initial wave of buyers can no longer return their purchase. Not like they spontaneously developed this shit since review copies went out.

wizardbeard, 2 months ago

Yep, there’s already horror stories about other implants where the patients were left high and dry when the company that made them went under.

wizardbeard, 2 months ago

Not if it’s for legal compliance.

Oh, sorry. I meant to say “Haha, Windows sucks! Am I right guys? Updoots to the left!”

wizardbeard, 2 months ago

I’ll never forget one of my first campaigns, where a few sessions in, the one “edgy” character in our crew of demented murderhobos decided that he didn’t want to go in a cave that the rest of the party were going in. Nothing could move him on this.

Every 15 minutes or so through a multi-hour session while the rest of us explored the cave and fought beasties, the DM would ask him what he wanted to do, as a kindness that turned into a running joke by the end. His character was determined to use his abysmal crafting skills to try and make caltrops from stones outside the cave. I think that when the average rolls were calculated out over the time it took, he crafted something like three poor quality caltrops.

The player insisted that he was fine with all of it, seemed to have fun just hanging out, and it did technically fit his character. Still, it really cemented the importance of being flexible with your RP to not kill game flow.

A session or two later the DM gave each of us a “joke” magic item of questionable utility. Edgy got a pouch of infinite stone caltrops. The DM then learned a hard lesson about the cheese potential of “joke” magic items.

wizardbeard, 3 months ago

I was in martial arts in highschool, and the star student got in a fight. Advanced levek blackbelt, teaching lessons himself, winning regional competitions, wanted to do mma and teach it shortly before it really became a known thing, think he actually does that now.

I had recently watched this guy hold his own sparring against the lead instructor of our “dojo” and the lead instructor for the state. They came at him one at a time, but it was one contiuous match.

The star student did not initiate the fight at school. He could have broken the kid who attacked him in half without much effort, but he didn’t even attempt to block. He knew the zero tolerance rules and didn’t want anything to come back on him.

If I recall right, the attacker broke or sprained the star student’s arm. School admin still came down on him. It took intervention by state level people in our martial arts org and numerous others for them to let him back before the attacker.

This sounds like some adolescent power fantasy, but it’s not. Just absolutely fucking absurd.