Solar Bear

When people recognize they were wrong about something, as smugly satisfying as it may be it’s not actually helpful to tell them that they should have been correct sooner.

There’s 102 people mentioned in that commit and two of them happen to meet in the comments of a meme thread on Lemmy of all places. I love the Internet.

I don’t know, that sounds like hard, thankless work that will take years of consistent effort, dealing with countless setbacks and losses but not giving up, before finally achieving our goals of making real and meaningful change. What if instead if that I just don’t buy Starbucks, will that work?

Plants aren’t sentient. When we say they “feel pain” and “communicate” we don’t mean like sentient creatures. We just don’t have better words to accurately convey the mechanics at play here. Computers also “communicate”.

I don’t support anyone. I oppose the worst outcome, and seek to steer our course away from it. Only narcissists and hobbyists hyperventilate about who they are “supporting”.

I engage in politics as a means to an end and nothing more. I take the best option available and I move on to the next task. To do otherwise is to value the self above the collective, and as a communist that is not a luxury I’m afforded.

One of those two will be president no matter what you do. They will then be in a position capable of inflicting great damage. Trump will use that position to hurt more people than Biden. The math here isn’t complicated, and it continually astounds me how many people on the left cannot actually solve the trolly problem when faced with it for real. It really shows which people are engaged in politics as a means to an end rather than as personal expression or a hobby.

We’re supposed to be better than them. Countering their misinfo networks by creating our own misinfo networks isn’t being better than them.

Greyzone is an op. We need another source.

Never ask ChatGPT to write code that you plan to actually use, and never take it as a source of truth. I use it to put me on a possible right path when I’m totally lost and lack the vocabulary to accurately describe what I need. Sometimes I’ll ask it for an example of how sometimes works so that I can learn it myself. It’s an incredibly useful tool, but you’re out of your damn mind if you’re just regularly copying code it spits out. You need to error check everything it does, and if you don’t know the syntax well enough to write it yourself, how the hell do you plan to reliably error check it?

These are scripts that manage stuff on a few hundred user endpoints and a few servers. They were doing basically everything manually until I got here, and the only way I could get them on board with my slow introduction of automation is to let them see it. I have to ensure things don’t get too long, complex, or hard to explain, or they start getting nervous.

I write a lot of fairly simple scripts in Bash and PowerShell that should be easily understood by anybody else with moderate experience in the language, but I leave a lot of obvious comments because my coworkers don’t write any code and are extremely skittish about my automations. I add them basically to quell their fears.

If you actually believed this, you wouldn’t work. You don’t really believe it, though.

Every government is authoritarian by its very nature. The government derives authority from having monopoly on legalized violence.

For goodness’ sake, can we not do this? I’m an anarchist, I know this. I oppose the state on a conceptual level for this very reason. I’m speaking to you like a normal person using language that I know you understood the intended meaning of. There’s no need to engage in academic fartsniffery here. Just be normal.

The only reason there is the illusion of freedom of speech is due to the fact that mainstream views are carefully curated.

The owners of our media have a vested interest in maintaining their own control. They are not compelled to act by outside force, they largely act of their own free will to maintain their position in our corrupt system. Understanding this distinction is crucial to being able to fix it. This is the true insidious nature of our system, at this point it is maintained by people pursuing their own interests rather than by an overarching plot. There’s no need for one anymore, it is self-sustaining and perpetuating, like a cancer.

When people talk about censorship, they usually mean of media. Yes, I’m aware that the US government is an evil institution that targets activists and whistleblowers. You’ll never believe me, but I actually despise my government and nearly every person in it. However, authoritarian regimes also strike down those people, but additionally censor the media on top of it. So to say that state censorship is worse here and now is just asinine. There’s no need to make things up to seem worse than they are when they’re already very bad, it just leads to people swinging at ghosts.

What I said was that people in the west are subjected to orders of magnitude of western propaganda, and perhaps should worry about that first.

I’m capable of worrying about two things. Perhaps even three on a good day.

Chomsky even pointed out recently that censorship in the west now is even worse than it was in USSR.

Media being bad because capitalism pushes them to do evil to further their own ends is not the same thing as censorship enforced with state violence. These are both bad things, but uniquely bad in their own ways. I’m sad that Chomsky’s age has caught up to him and he can no longer distinguish the two.

Imagine thinking any large state isn’t constantly injecting propaganda into the Internet. Couldn’t be me.

People are fine. Hierarchy turns man into monster. Destroy the hierarchy, destroy the beast.