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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 10th, 2023

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  • Like .ml admins cracking down on people suggesting that Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” was catastrophe because it forced a political will ignorant of economic reality on a society violently robbed of the ability to resist, even terrorised into meeting their quotas at any cost? Or the fact that purging and suppressing all dissidents in the first place was cruel and authoritarian, a brutal abuse of power of the same kind as Stalin’s and (in this one aspect, at least) Hitler’s?

    I’m a leftist to the bone, I recognise that a revolution without bloodshed wouldn’t have been possible at the time (and maybe never will be) and that a hard hand forcing fundamental changes to the political and educational system may well be required, but .ml has a well-known Tankie problem and they’re all too eager to follow in the steps of the boots they so love to lick.


  • Had one guy apply for a job in my field saying “My experiences in different field> will help me as <job title>.”

    There is very little overlap in hard skills (soft ones obviously do help). Not like that matters a whole lot - their actual list of past jobs and skills would have landed them an interview at least, because we already expect it to be a learn-as-you-go type of deal. Bro would have been better off leaving it out and I would have just assumed they’re trying to strike out in a different direction.

    (I told HR to invite them for an interview anyway, because fuck cover letters - I’m not gonna hold anyone to a higher standard there than I’d like to be held to)


  • I mean, the minimum you need is some authentication mechanism, a secure certificate, an authenticated endpoint to send a live data feed to, an endpoint to query a given live data feed from, maybe a website to serve the whole thing for people that don’t have their own tool for reading and playing back a live data feed…

    …and the infrastructure to distribute that data feed from ingest to content delivery. Easy.

    (Note: easy does not mean cheap. Even if a live data feed ingest and delivery was easy to implement (which I doubt it is), you’d skip buffering (to reduce memory demands) and only used a single server (to spare such stupid things as distributed networks, load balancing, redundancy or costs for scaling cloud solutions), you’d still have computational overhead of network operations and of course a massive data throughput.)


  • If you include the global south […], most of the world sides with Russia.

    I don’t know if the global south really sides with anyone so much as watching from the sidelines. Not honoring sanctions isn’t the same as actively fighting.

    It’s a proxy war the Western Imperialists via NATO but under the hegemonic control of the US in particular, is waging against the rising challengers of that hegemony.

    i.e. Eastern Imperialists - let’s call them by what they are. This isn’t some noble quest to liberate countries from US control. It’s a maneuver to secure more power in the space before the red line of nuclear deterrence.

    This isn’t freedom vs. imperialism, it’s just imperialism. The People’s Republic China has always been its own hegemony. Russia lost much of its sphere of influence during the collapse of the USSR, but it has made a solid effort to reclaim it since, e.g. with Belarus, Chechenya, Georgia and now Ukraine.

    Neither the US “interventions” in the Middle East nor Israel’s “Operation Swords of Iron” against Palestine nor Russian “special operations” nor (PR)China’s claim to Taiwan (ROC) nor all the other power grabs I won’t bother listing (or don’t even know about) are anything but imperialist ambitions. There are no saints among the leaders in this global standoff.

    But ultimately, it’s the people that pay the price in all of these conflicts. Human suffering, oppression, exploitation transcends all borders. We may have different leaders, different cultures, different experiences of life, but we’re united in the fact that we both will be the victims of this.




  • A lot of data throughput and buffer just for ingesting and distributing the live streams themselves, technical and business administration to keep things running, moderation to ensure compliance with content laws and data protection regulation, and then there’s still all the other fancy features major platforms offer if you want to compete for users.

    Multiple resolution options with server-side rescaling for users with slower connections? Graphics computing power.
    Store past broadcasts? Massive amounts of data storage capacity.
    Social features? Even more moderation.

    And we haven’t even touched on the monetary issue of “How do you pay for all that?” and all its attached complexity. You could be running the nicest platform in the world, but without any funding, it won’t run very long.