FaceDeer
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FaceDeer

@FaceDeer@kbin.social

Basically a deer with a human face. Despite probably being some sort of magical nature spirit, his interests are primarily in technology and politics and science fiction.

Spent many years on Reddit and is now exploring new vistas in social media.

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Content warning: this is a rant from a teenager who has strong opinions.

Okay...

However, it holds a monopoly on software.

You don't know what a "monopoly" is.

they could just go “Boop! You’re gone!” and there’s nothing I could do about it other than move forges.

Yeah, nothing you could do about it, other than moving to one of the many other git hosts. Monopoly!

And then after listing off a whole bunch of alternative git hosts...

Centralization is not bad by itself but it’s bad when there’s no other option. There just needs to be ways to contribute to code without having to use Github.

You have plenty of ways to do that, and you know that because you just listed them. Github is not a monopoly.

Also, I don't see the concept of open source mentioned at any point in this rant.

Russian autopsy shows Navalny locked self in Siberian gulag, poisoned self (www.thebeaverton.com)

“MOSCOW – Officials from the Kremlin, under the close supervision of Russian President Vladimir Putin, have concluded an autopsy of Alexei Navalny, concluding that the recently-deceased opposition leader spontaneously sentenced himself to 30 years in a remote Siberian gulag before then ingesting his own poison that he...

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This is the second Onion headline in two days that I only realized was an Onion headline after I clicked the link.

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And so we pat ourselves on the back for not falling for the "capitalist propaganda," not recognizing all the propaganda that we have fallen for. I'd mention some examples but of course that would garner downvotes and disapproval, and thus the cycle continues.

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I must admit, "Linux becomes the refuge of luddites" was never on any bingo card I could have conceived of for 202X.

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Being invaded by Russia.

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My POV: nursing is not a calling but a job.

Well, if you think of it that way and your bosses are telling you to do a certain thing, you should do that thing. If you're not doing the thing your bosses are telling you to do then maybe you're not doing your job.

Sorry if that's not what you wanted to hear, but I don't see what other reasonable interpretation there is here.

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Don't worry, a key part of toxicity is the dosage. If you're following a prescription from an actual doctor instead of taking handfuls of horse medication at the behest of extremist politicians you're fine.

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What are these "other country" things you mention? You mean the place where war happens and immigrants come from? I didn't know they had computers there.

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I would imagine that anything that's in an airtight sealed container, such as chip bags, would be fine. That would also include cans. Your refrigerator and freezer, also, would probably count as a sealed container.

Smoke in a building fire can contain all sorts of weird chemicals from burning plastics and whatnot that could get deposited onto stuff, so even if you can't see any soot in your apartment I wouldn't dismiss all concerns. How tight is your budget?

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Chauvin was not sentenced to be stabbed 22 times. As awful a person as he likely is, I would rather not see extrajudicial killing be praised.

Performing extrajudicial killing is what got him behind bars in the first place, after all. Quite rightly so.

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There are species of seals who actively keep holes open in the ice to use as breathing holes, allowing them to hunt fish even in frozen-over bodies of water.

They're all ocean-dwelling species in the arctic or antarctic oceans, so this isn't the answer to your specific question, but I just think they're neat.

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To be fair, the bug report was utterly useless too.

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A laser that is powerful enough to hurt a human target (especially a human target with body armor) is going to be powerful enough that it'll be ionizing the air to some degree. It'll be like a lightning bolt, there'll be flashes of light and sharp cracking sounds. That's also ignoring the fact that the random bits of terrain that the laser is hitting will also be exploding. Someone under "suppressing fire" from a laser weapon would be quite aware of the fact.

YouTube Says New 5-Second Video Load Delay Is Supposed to Punish Ad Blockers, Not Firefox Users (www.404media.co)

Firefox users are reporting an 'artificial' load time on YouTube videos. YouTube says it's part of a plan to make people who use adblockers "experience suboptimal viewing, regardless of the browser they are using."

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Given that Google's been talking about switching Chrome to a new plugin format that would limit the ability of adblockers to function on Chrome, and given that Google owns Youtube and profits from the ads Youtube displays...

Nope, I'm not connecting the dots. Not sure why Google would be wanting people switch from Firefox to Chrome at this time.

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Misleading. Ad blocker installations also rose. This isn't people leaving adblocking, this is people changing to better ones.

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Back in 3rd Edition D&D there was a spell called "Holy Word" that could kill non-good creatures within a 40 foot radius of the caster, if the caster was sufficiently high level relative to the creatures. Good creatures were completely unaffected.

When tightly packed you can fit about 2000 people into a 40-foot-radius circle (total area is 5000 square feet). So one casting can deal with the population of a good-sized town. My gaming group speculated for a while about a society where it was a routine ritual to round up all the peasantry and nuke them with Holy Word to keep the population clear of evil. Never incorporated it into any campaigns, though. It's a bit of a sticky philosophical puzzler.

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The "now" of this comic is actually 2014, almost a decade ago.

Wonder what the actual "now" cell would contain today. I guess a screenshot of this comment about it being a decade old.

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This is part of the classic The United Federation of "hold my beer, I got this" post chain. It's definitely part of my headcanon, if only in general spirit instead of literally that's-what-happened. It conveniently explains so much about why these shows focus so much on humans. It's like reality TV, it's pointless to focus the camera on the well-adjusted ones.

Edit: I should mention that my headcanon extends humanity's hold-my-bear mad science bent to the social sciences. Why else do you think we so rarely see other multi-species governments, or when we do it's just a boring old "boss species conquered a bunch of subordinate species"? Humans were probably warned by the Vulcans that different species tended to have incompatible governing interests and doctrines and the humans thought "but what if we gave them all a vote anyway and see what happens? Maybe a Federation will go twice as fast!"

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This is superficially funny, of course. But I've seen it before and after thinking about it for a while I find myself coming to the defense of the Torment Nexus and the tech company that brought it into reality.

Science fiction authors are not necessarily the best authorities when it comes to evaluating the ethical or real-world implications of the technologies they dream up. Indeed, I think they are often particularly bad at that sort of thing. Their primary goal is to craft captivating narratives that engage readers by introducing conflicts and dilemmas that make for compelling stories. When they imagine a new technology they aren't going to get paid unless they come up with a story in which that new technology poses some kind of threat that the heroes need to overcome. The dark side of these technologies is deliberately emphasized by the authors to create tension and drama in their stories.

Tech companies, on the other hand, have an entirely different set of considerations. Their goal isn't just to recreate something from a sci-fi novel for the sake of it; rather, they are motivated by solving real-world problems. They wouldn't build the Torment Nexus unless they figured that they could sell it to someone, and that they wouldn't get shut down for doing something society would reject. There are regulatory frameworks around this kind of thing.

If you look back through older science fiction you can find all sorts of "cautionary tales" against technologies that have turned out to be just fine. "Fahrenheit 451" warned against the proliferation of television entertainment, but there's been plenty of rich culture developed for that medium. "Brave New World" warned against genetic engineering, but that's turned out to be a great technology for curing diseases and improving crop yields. The submarine in "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" was seen as unstoppable and disruptive, but nowadays submersibles have plenty of nonmilitary applications.

I'd want to know more about what exactly the Torment Nexus is before I automatically assume it's a bad idea just because some sci-fi writer claimed it was.

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Can I bring my dog to that office? Will it have my fridge there, and my kitchen? I'd also want a teleporter so that there's zero commute time.

I think we're a bit beyond just rebelling against the "open office" concept.

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Nothing "went wrong" with it. It was simply never possible. Reddit controlled whether those 3rd party apps could function, and Reddit wanted those 3rd party apps to cease functioning.

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A lot of users use the official app and are on new Reddit, and the only "disruption" that they noticed was the protests themselves. They have no idea the damage Reddit has done to moderators and may not even notice the resulting decline in content quality as the smaller subset of people who post and moderate the most wander away to newer pastures.

But over time, they will notice. More and more subreddits will become the domain of uninterested powermods and repost bots. It takes time for a giant to fall, Digg didn't turn into Reddit overnight.

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I'm betting it's going to be either overrun with protest content and Lemmy advertisement, or it'll be so heavily locked down and curated that it'll be an obvious shell of its former self.

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To some degree it's hard to be sympathetic, because the people complaining about this are seriously lacking in sympathy themselves. They just wanted to see the content that those users produced for them, they didn't care about the difficulties or preferences of the users themselves. So when those Spez-opposed users took their ball and went home the Spez-friendly people got angry at them for taking their comments away with them rather than at Spez for having driven them to that in the first place.

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