blightbow

blightbow, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

In my work, when someone comes to me and assumes I or my team is screwing up because they “eliminated all possibilities at hand” 90% of the time, they screwed up and didn’t realize it.

Yeah, at that point the onus is on the person putting forth the problem to show their work. Start listing off possibilities that you've eliminated. You can have thirty years of technical experience and still be completely useless by assuming that you're just as smart as the person you're explaining the problem to.

"I did eliminate all the possibilities I had at hand"? Naw man, anyone dropping that line has only eliminated all possibilities that they can think of, and all of that supposed thinking about "all the possibilities" is worthless if they aren't going to offer it up as a starting point.

blightbow, 10 months ago

He's also being singled out because of the timing of it. If he becomes the President again, he becomes immune to prosecution. The biggest failure of all was a slimeball with a history of white collar crime in his periphery getting elected to begin with, because that's the real reason we're seeing all of this "unprecedented" prosecution of a presidential candidate. One who knew he was under investigation before he announced his reelection bid to begin with.

blightbow, 10 months ago

What feedback do you have on the first sentence, which is not hyperbole? Honestly curious. You appear to have very strong opinions on this topic, but you aren't replying to any of the comments pointing out 33 years worth of failed audits.

Is this most recent one particularly suspect compared to audits that have come before it, and more sketchy than ones that have failed during administrations run by the other party?

blightbow, 10 months ago

No, was asking you for your thoughts on this specific sentence, on its own:

Do you think the pentagon has EVER passed an audit?

Which you did eventually stumble into, but not before engaging in some mental gymnastics for the sake of accusing me of mental gymnastics. Thanks, sort of?

blightbow, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

which you seem to think is the case, and that it’s good, somehow.

Imagine licking the boot so bad that you twist two trillion dollars going up in smoke into a win

We seem to keep coming back to how I supposedly think or assumptions about why I was asking the question. Either you have confused me for the original person you were replying to, or you're jackhammering straw men onto anything they might stick to while making a conscious choice to be a tool about it.

As you were.

blightbow, 10 months ago

Ability to force anyone to objectively confront their own cognitive dissonance by maintaining eye contact.

Possibly too powerful. Some heads may spontaneously combust from a lifetime of preferring their own reality.

blightbow, 10 months ago

Ok but to balance it: it forces you to confront your own on the topic as well.

I was actually tempted to include that in the original, but I didn't want to belabor it. :)

I'm fine with this, and would prefer it that way.

blightbow, 10 months ago

A friend of mine does too.

I'm ready to form a supervillain league with the sole motivation of performing unethical research experiments on your kind. This power must be brought to the masses!

blightbow, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

He announced something even better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2y2bIlfbfI

(nsfw)

blightbow, 10 months ago

Unfortunately, I am not an adventurer like you.

blightbow, 10 months ago

desperately struggles to maintain character while responding again

turns purple in the face and vanishes in a puff of logic

blightbow, 10 months ago

This morning was intentional, see this thread that was commented on by ernest. The rest is folks not realizing that they need to click on the remember login button again.

blightbow, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

I wouldn’t want the Republican party to vanish and have nothing take its place. Having only Democratic party candidates to choose from would be bad.

I agree with the spirit of where you're coming from, but I don't think this is a realistic risk. More than two major political ideologies effectively exist already, but their coalitions are the parties themselves due to the limitations inherent in the US voting system.

The Democrat party already encompasses a broad spectrum of political philosophies, and they're not in the same party because they want to be. They are a de facto coalition of whatever the Republican party isn't. This is because the US leans to the right on the Overton window, and the two-party government of the US forces the role of the leftist party into being the kitchen sink coalition. This regretfully gets wallpapered over by the "radical left" narrative talking point that Republican media chestbeats over relentlessly, to the point where the average American never makes this connection.

If I were to wave my magic wand and enact voting reform that doesn't empower a two-party system, we have at least four parties worth of politicians in play:

• establishment liberals, neoliberals, etc.
• everyone in the democrat party who is to the left of them (who would realistically form more than just one party)
• non-MAGA conservatives (Republicans who jumped ship to Democrat already/are too indoctrinated to consider it, conservative politicians who don't agree with party leadership but maintain status quo for their careers)
• Far-right Freedom Caucus types. McCarthy would already backstab these guys in a heartbeat if his speakership was politically viable without them. The fact that Republican leadership cares more about ego than principles is what put them into this predicament. (largely a consequence of what safe primaries have done to political strategies, but that's another rant)

You can split this up even further by pointing out libertarians (ones that aren't really just conservatives who don't want to be Republicans anymore) and others, but it's enough to make the point. Let the Republican party collapse. Something else will immediately take its place, and as long as their replacement recognizes that the Freedom Caucus is what sank them, maybe they can steal enough of the right leaning Democrats to where they no longer need the far right crazies to be politically viable. A system that accommodates more than two parties would be better still, but congress critters are never going to vote in favor of something that weakens their own power. Voting reform will have to happen at the state level.

blightbow, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

“I’m not gonna get in trouble for this, I’m not gonna have to worry about a kid cuz I can make her abort it!” Ik that sounds retarded but I kid you not when abortions are made legal (where I live anyway) we will see a huge wave of young kids coming to get them as a form of birth control.

This is a "trust me bro" argument. It doesn't contribute much to an online discussion because it's speculation that cannot be affirmed or denied based on the information you have presented.

What about rape? Silently putting the kid up for adoption is an option, no one has know and there are couples waiting to take kids in. Well what about women’s rights!? Well, what if I told you I don’t care. I only care about the babies right to life, if he/she wants to off themselves later on (which they shouldn’t and should seek help) then that’s their choice.

This, on the other hand, is useful to the rest of us. It regretfully informs us that you are very poorly informed on the subject of mental health, and aren't likely to be persuaded to invest the effort that would be needed to change your mind. You have already chosen the life of a potential child at all costs and the mother is an acceptable casualty of circumstance, because she gets a "choice" in what she does with the trauma from being forced to bear a child against her will, and the fetus having no agency precludes all further discussion.

The fact that you will likely read that italicized text and think that is a checkmate argument in your favor is the crux of the issue. I apologize for not being willing to invest the energy in convincing you otherwise, but I also thank you for being honest with it. Way too much time gets wasted when people pretend that isn't the core pillar of their anti-abortion argument.

Now, if the mothers life is in jepordy, as well as the babies then why not abort it and save the mothers life? Well there is a thing called c section.

There is also something called non-viable pregnancies. They tend to be conveniently ignored by policy makers and half-researched attempts to steelman a pro-choice PoV. (aka, what is happening here)

If medical practitioners are placed in a position where they can't provide preventative care without risking a lawsuit, then the mother gets traumatized by being forced to carry a corpse to term, and at worst both die pointlessly. The baby will never develop agency to begin with, and the mother isn't given any agency either because she's an acceptable casualty. This has happened several times in recent news already: one woman nearly bleeding out on the floor of a salon, and another being forced to bear a baby without a head.

By all means, let's allow politicians to make these decisions for us in advance of pregnancies instead of medical practitioners. Politicians are equipped with an infallible combination of medical experience and psychic powers that allow them to anticipate all medical scenarios ahead of time and prescribe the correct dosage of lawsuits to their constituents.

Lemme tell you a story:

Appeals to the fear of non-existence are not uncommon, and sympathetic to a degree. Non-existence is the shit that keeps a lot of us up at night. Fear of non-existence and ignorance of mental health unfortunately don't make for good policy making.

I will delete this account in a few cuz apparently this isn’t the instance for me, I think I might make my own!

Not gonna actually help anything, that's not how ActivityPub works. You're participating on lemmy.world from your account on lemmy.fmhy.ml. It does however suggest that you are in search of an echo chamber, in which case...best of luck.

blightbow, 10 months ago

@meco03211 is pretty squarely presenting the difference between "pro-choice" and "pro-abortion" branding. No harm in pointing out that some debates aren't worth wasting energy on until they're properly framed.

blightbow, 10 months ago

Even if he understands, it doesn't suit his narrative. He is a far-right politician who says what his owners (domestic and otherwise) want to hear on the cameras. It's a coin toss whether he actually believes some of the things that he says, but largely inconsequential at the end of the day because he isn't going to argue in good faith even if someone miraculously trips over a genuine belief that he holds close to him.

blightbow, 11 months ago

It's a common feature of any demographic that is convinced of their moral superiority. Once you've accepted that you and your leaders are on the side of justice and are presented a designated enemy, you cease having to look inward. Progress requires acknowledging that you are operating inside of a flawed system, and that you have to work with people from other systems who acknowledge their own flaws.

Tangent: "Enlightened centrists" acknowledge the flaws of both sides of an argument while failing to acknowledge that both sides have to play fair.

blightbow, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

And if they are scoped realistically.

The contraction we're seeing in the tech space this year is in large part a consequence of venture capitalist funding. A significant portion of tech sites were being funded at a loss, with the idea that profitability could be achieved after establishing a userbase. Rising interest rates pushed the VCs to put pressure on the companies they invested in: "no more free lunch, realize our gains now". This is why you see a rash of tech sites abruptly restructuring (Discord) or completely collapsing (gfycat). Reddit falls somewhere between the two, because it's likely they're seeking an IPO and they don't care about the fate of the website once they cash out. Twitter is ruled by an emperor with no clothes. Facebook can't make as much money as it did prior to the added government scrutiny, and the Zuck has been frantically trying to diversify his company these past few years.

This is a long-winded way of saying that ernest deserves a lot of praise here for being realistic and up front with the operating costs of running the largest kbin instance. lemmy and kbin draw inspiration from the social media platforms that came before them, but can't budget for growth the same way that their predecessors did. It's not going to be cheap, they aren't going to get the free lunch that prior social media platforms had, and ernest needs to proceed with the well-being of both himself and his project in mind.

blightbow, 11 months ago

Basically another Eternal September. Yes, I'm going to keep linking to it in these threads like the lazy bum I am.

blightbow, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

Yeah, your original comment came up when I did my research immediately prior to leaving a note on a niche lemmy.ml community that I subscribe to. ...Which immediately federated over to the original instance, because I missed this developer comment and the other admin didn't reply to the thread you were quoted in until several hours later. Based on the timing of the older comment I don't think it has anything to do with your post, but you can pretend you didn't see this. ;)

In any event, it's dealt with. I think it reinforces the need for proper backchannels between the highest population ActivityPub instances, but I wouldn't be surprised if some of the politics is acting as a barrier to this since both lemmy.ml and kbin.social are directly run by their respective software developers.

I've seen a few offhanded references to how kbin originated as an alternative to lemmy without the tankie implications, but I haven't found any links to posts from ernest himself that support this. By actions alone I would say that he strongly favors interoperability over politics, but who's to say what thoughts the developers have for each other. :)

blightbow, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

That assumes they were using an expression based filter in the webserver config itself. If they were extracting user agent strings containing the word "bot" from their webserver logs and adding them to a static list of user agents to deny (particularly if it's an external file referenced by the config that strings can be easily dumped into), it's a plausible explanation. I can especially see this happening if they did a blind sort by log volume and only inserted the 20 biggest results or somesuch.

Even if this was the case, was someone in a position to observe that one of those strings contained "kbin"? Yes. Was it possible they still didn't notice? Yes, especially if shell pipelines are involved. Was it possible for someone to notice but assume that this wasn't the kbin software itself, but a third-party tool that someone else wrote? Also yes. Still possible that all of this is bullshit? Still yes!

Full disclosure: I've worked in the webserver and webapp adjacent spaces for a long time, and I have a lot of appreciation for how much damage one person's stupid change without peer review can do in massive production environments. :) I am admittedly biased toward applying Hanlon's razor in these situations.

blightbow, 11 months ago

Like I said, a blind sort by volume of the top n user agents in their logs containing the word bot would be enough to do it. Drop the output of that sort into a text file or a hash table, then create a user agent filter in the nginx config that blocks the specific strings seen in that file.

It is very much the sort of thing that a single admin can do by accident, and the exact sort of problem I would expect to see with rapidly growing instances operated by a very small number of tech enthusiasts.

blightbow, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

Thanks for the link! Your take is pretty much the same as mine. Nothing for me to expand on, you've pretty much nailed it.

PS. This is apropos of nothing, but I've seen you around and never stopped to tell you. You have just the coolest username and I love it.

lol! It's borrowed from the name of a character I made for Guild Wars 1. As the internet got bigger my older nicks became more hotly contested, but somehow this edgelordy one is never taken. :) The downside is that I can't easily feign ignorance about stupid things I've said in the past, but at least most of the evidence got nuked along with my entire Reddit history.

blightbow, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

There are plenty of high volume, non-malicious bots that do. robots.txt is a thing for a reason, and we can see here that lemmy.ml has implemented it. Not all bots that ignore robots.txt are malicious though, just poorly designed. You can basically lump them into three categories:

• Well-behaved bots that announce that they're bots in the User-Agent header and obey robots.txt (note that they may still slam the server even if they obey it)
• Mediocre bots that announce that they're bots in the User-Agent header but ignore robots.txt (or vice versa)
• Bad bots (malicious or otherwise) that announce their User-Agent as other things, often pretending to be other software.

Their logs told them they had a lot of traffic from stuff identifying itself as bots. Throwing that traffic out wouldn't break lemmy but would help them deal with the capacity problems that all of the mainstream lemmy/kbin instances had to deal with shortly after the Reddit exodus began. They fucked up and tagged kbin in the process, which definitely would have been one of the highest volume ActivityPub consumers matching their criteria.