Skip Navigation

InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)T

Tiresia

@ Tiresia @slrpnk.net

Posts
0
Comments
397
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Theoretically speaking, if one wanted to sail the seas while being not very tech savvy – is using a VPN (Mullvad) enough? I would never, of course… but theoretically?

    Jump

  • Mullvad is good, but it's not enough to make piracy safe.

    An adblocker like ublock is essential, not just for blocking ads but for blocking malware.

    Streaming piracy is about as safe as sketchy websites always are, which is pretty okay these days.

    If you download anything, check the file type before opening and whether the type is safe. For example, .exe is extremely unsafe, .pdf is somewhat unsafe, and .mp3 is safe. Generally audio and video file formats are pretty safe because they're very locked down in what they can do, while interactive formats are dangerous. Someone might call audio by a misleading name to troll, but it shouldn't put your device at risk.

    If you download .exe s, do not run them unless you are very confident the source is trustworthy. This means a trusted account posting on a trusted website claiming that a trusted person made the exe. I haven't caught this guide in a lie yet, but when it comes to exes double- and triple-check everything.

    The more tech savvy solution would be to run .exes (or all pirated files if you're being paranoid) in a virtual machine so even if the virtual machine is pwned the rest of your computer wouldn't be.

  • Americans on vacation

    Jump

  • Have you ever been outside the US? Plenty of American tourists like that here in Amsterdam, and presumably in other tourist destinations too.

  • Americans on vacation

    Jump

  • I see plenty of American conservative-looking tourists in Amsterdam, on bike tours too.

    Not rednecks, but the kind of suburban chuds you see on TV holding up anti-abortion signs and driving squeaky-clean SUVs.

  • This close 🤏 to getting it

    Jump

  • I know people who have a fetish for human body grossness. Smegma, the dirt between toes, that sort of shit. So maybe there are podiatrists out there having the time of their lives scraping off calluses and gunk.

  • I wish I could...

    Jump

  • Suppose I would really like to learn to throw knives well, so I go to a schoolyard and try my best to throw a knife at a log without hitting the children running around behind it.

    Am I responsible if my knife hits a child? I genuinely tried my best and failed.

    You can't prepare for every eventuality, but parents are definitely capable of negligent or deliberate recklessness even when they try their best in the moment.

    I understand if people decide to have children when oppression means choosing between that and submitting to economic genocide. But those people should then acknowledge the violence the system inflicts on them and their children, so they should be radical leftist.

    It is fine to have children in a suburban hellscape if you participate in trying to overthrow the system so your neighborhood can legally be redesigned to allow your 8 year old child to safely explore the outside world without adult supervision. If you support an economic and legal framework that forces your child's dependence on you, you are culpable in that oppression.

    I also understand if people decide to have children in traumatic material deprivation without underlying oppression. Rare now, but it used to be more common and with climate change it may be again. The same logic applies and parents should participate in trying to improve their neighborhood's material conditions.

  • We don’t have room in the carbon budget for a world war.

    Jump

  • We are witnessing the end of modern civilization, which will end just as fast as it arrived.

    So it'll take 10,000 years?

    Civilizations and cultures survive the loss of >30% of their population all the time. The black death, the columbian disease exchange, the mongol empire, the collapse of the western roman empire, etc.. Losing billions of people will be terrible, of course, but the billions that survive will still exist and work to survive, and they will be people worth fighting for.

    Current food production is over 10 times what is necessary to feed everyone on the planet, with the vast majority of it being wasted on the meat and dairy industry that we can just stop. Food forests require more labor per calorie but are far more resilient to climate change and require far less land area, allowing the remaining agricultural land to rewild and act as a carbon sink.

    The AMOC (atlantic current) is "making Europe livable" by making it warmer. Helpfully, climate change will do the same. In pessimistic scenarios, Europe returns to the current average temperature after a decade or two. Again, yes, in this scenario >90% of current human habitation would probably have to be abandoned and human population may dip below one billion, but those hundreds of millions of people still deserve the best chance we can give them.

    If our best efforts mean we can only keep a billion people alive, it would be worth it.

    If our best efforts mean we can only keep a million people alive, it would be worth it.

    If our best efforts mean we can only keep ten thousand people alive, it would be worth it.

    Every kiloton of CO2 we stop the emission of is a life saved, and the vast majority are emitted in the US, Europe, and China. If you live in any of these regions, there is so much you can do.

  • 8 accused of antifa ties convicted on terrorism charges over shooting at Texas immigration facility

    Jump

  • To be fair, a movement is not its name. National socialists aren't socialists. Antifa in practice is far-left, as any sane person should be.

  • Professors Say AI Is Destroying Their Students' Ability to Think

    Jump

  • It clearly teaches children how to learn in a way that serves the ruling class: uncuriously, only on command, and not beyond specifications.

  • AI Agents Can Autonomously Coordinate Propaganda Campaigns Without Human Direction

    Jump

  • The truth has the advantage of objective evidence and the disadvantage of needing to be more complicated to incorporate objective evidence.

    When it comes to news from out of town, there is no objective evidence, only appeal to authority. The few people willing to personally travel somewhere to testify that it is real can be written off as paid actors (or as AI-generated if you aren't seeing their testimony live).

    So in almost all scenarios with this technology, the truth would have the disadvantage but not the advantage. An arms race between pro-truth and anti-truth AI would be the anti-truth AI winning because it can tell the more convenient lie.

    My hopeful take is that it will make proper citation an essential life skill, with everyone who believes stories without citation getting scammed until they know better and everyone who doesn't cite sources being disbelieved. And that, as such, people will organically build up transparent citation networks that they rely on for information, meaning they can more effectively filter out advertisement, propaganda, memes, and lies.

  • Gimp 3.2 is officially released. The game has changed. Adobe just got punched in the face.

    Jump

  • So you don't tell them to calm down, you just stay away. Hm.

  • Age verification is the new digital ID

    Jump

  • It's not even a conspiracy, it's just corporations and politicians behaving according to individual incentives and communicating about it publicly with a basic level of indirectness to avoid outrage.

  • Yep...

    Jump

  • Autism got rolled in because the child abuser, disbarred doctor, scam artist, and fraudulent researcher Andrew Wakefield claimed vaccines caused autism and just about the entire Anglophone mainstream media spent years framing it as a dramatic story of a defiant doctor speaking out against the tyrannical scientific community. Often accompanied by videos of autistic children being overstimulated by the presence of a camera crew and being made to melt down for the camera the tragic horror of having to raise an autistic child.

    This massively boosted antivax conspiracist subculture to the point of it being a significant electoral demographic. Billionaires then paid grifters to align them with greater alt-right conspiracism culture so they would vote far-right. Autism naturally slots into the untermensch role, with vaccination being analogized to blood libel.

    So ADHD wasn't skipped, fascists just didn't have an ADHD-hating subculture to court.

  • 'Realities of war': UK minister refuses to call US massacre at Iranian school a war crime

    Jump

  • Skill issue, legitimately. If you don't understand how you can discount that kind of slaughter, you're probably already doing it.

    That said, disregarding the obvious evil of massacring over a hundred children, for civilian deaths from bombardment to be a war crime, it has to be the deliberate targeting of civilians. Mistaking a civilian building for a military one and bombing it is not a war crime. Killing civilians while using the most accurate means available to aim at military targets is not a war crime.

    War crimes were codified by western nations using western standards for what sort of behavior is sportsmanlike in warfare, with those standards informed by the sort of horrors those nations tend to commit.

    Like with regular crime, we should get used to not using "crime" as a word to denote moral judgument. It's just a word for doing something the state doesn't like. All good people are criminals.

  • 'Realities of war': UK minister refuses to call US massacre at Iranian school a war crime

    Jump

  • Well, one of them is currently invading Iran.

  • Exceptional” atmospheric rivers that brought record rainfall and widespread flooding to western and southern Europe in February should draw more attention to climate change

    Jump

  • The people working to build the GGW are doing more than their fair share. Minimizing climate change is going to take everyone "tinkering at the margins" at the same time. As well as industrialized nations stopping shitting the bed.

    Climate change could overpower the GGW if it gets bad enough, sure, but until then it's food security, carbon capture/retention, biodiversity preservation, etc. It is worth the effort.

  • signal w

    Jump

  • Oh, so your system guarantees that at all times at least one of those thoughts is "collaborate with fascists"?

    If one person collaborates with fascists and the rest do nothing to stop it, then the fascist still gets what they want as surely as if the entire group had collaborated. You can list as many people who didn't personally collaborate with fascists as you want, as long as they didn't stop collaboration they are complicit.

    So thank you for demonstrating "pride in a state that collaborates with fascism" for the class.

  • Ukraine Receives Phantom MK-1 Humanoid Robots for Testing

    Jump

  • Weaponized insectoid robots are called drones, they've already been buzzing around killing people for over a decade.

    As for why they aren't using insectoid/centaur-like frames for infantry models, I'm guessing the training data. There is a decent amount of human motion capture data, and an unfathomable amount of video of humans moving that could be converted into motion tracking data through AI image processing.

    As such the AI that runs these robots could be trained on huge amounts of virtual information based on real life scenarios, vastly reducing the time the AI needs to pilot actual robot frames to get any good. That is the primary bottleneck, so it makes sense humanoid robots would appear before centaur ones.

    Still, there are undoubtedly parts of the military-industrial complex making centaur robots or different body plans, they're just not being rolled out in combat scenarios yet.

  • Is there a spreadsheet that doesn't mess with the data I enter?

    Jump

  • I was going to complain that clearly "spreadsheet" derives from paper-based tabular data editors. But apparently that term was only used consistently after 1906, while digital spreadsheets that aided calculation were conceived of in 1961. Meaning that it has meant a digital calculation aid for longer (65 years) than it only meant a tabular data editor (55 years).

  • Exceptional” atmospheric rivers that brought record rainfall and widespread flooding to western and southern Europe in February should draw more attention to climate change

    Jump

  • Food forests capture and retain water, and at scale affect the climate to increase humidity. They are actively being used to prevent the desertification of the Sahel region - see the Great Green Wall project.

    They do need some water, but as an anti-drought measure they are indispensible.