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azertyfun

@ azertyfun @sh.itjust.works

Posts
1
Comments
537
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • The Male Gaze 👁️

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  • Even though the term has been somewhat bastardized into "sexual objectification" in general, "the male gaze" originally specificallt describes the trope of straight male cinematographers/directors literally framing camera shots differently for women.

    The whole point is that the director (traditionally always a man in mainstream movies) views the character/actress as an object of sexual desire, and the camera - and by extension the audience - sees the woman through that lens. Literally forcing the audience to gaze from a straight male POV. This is an inherently sexist and heteronormative, usually subconscious process.

    Now I do enjoy seeing Henry Cavill shirtless in a bathtub, but that's not the (fe)male gaze because the director wasn't imposing their personal bias, they were making a conscious statement. It's objectifying fan-service but not sexist nor heteronormative.

    I suppose you could argue that the female gaze does exist in media where the authors are overwhelmingly female, such as the boylove genre. But that doesn't apply here because Shen's character here is literally a presumed straight man.

  • The EU is a colossus. So why is it cowering before Trump like a mouse?

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  • Even when you account for offshore emissions the EU's carbon footprint has been going down since around 2010.

    That doesn't negate the existence of neocolonialism and it's nowhere near enough to fix climate change, but the EU's population is roughly constant, both it and China are reducing their manufacturing emissions, and economic growth in the EU has been slow and services-based. Like where would a supposed increase in emissions even come from? There's nowhere to go but down.

    I know good news feel unbelievable these days but this is one of them. Unfortunately this factually incorrect belief that emitting any less carbon is impossible without serious impact to QoL is why the european ecologist movements have lost a lot of steam in the past few years which is absolutely maddening because it's empirically incorrect.

  • This is not the US constitution; it used to be, but Article I, part of section 8, & all of sections 9 & 10 have been removed

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  • If fascists didn't make up the (near-) majority of politically active citizens like you're insinuating, then maybe your institutions wouldn't have immediately crumpled like wet paper.

    The rule of law is literally dead in the US. Trump's team has repeatedly brazenly broken the constitution and showed that no-one is willing to stop him. It literally couldn't matter any less what the constitution says, because the opposition is too chickenshit to do even the bare minimum to defend it, because there is no meaningful popular support for active pro-democratic action in the US and that's a hard fact.

    Overwhelming popular apathy is Putin and Xinping's key to power, and Americans are even worse because these inbred morons really unironically thought that the second amendment was meant to prevent tyranny.

  • xkcd #3124: Grounded

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  • You're mixing up feet and meters. The death zone is at 8 km, i.e. 26k ft.

    2100m is barely mountaineering, you can bring grandma and the newborn hiking there and at most you'll notice a mild shortness of breath.

    In fact normal cabin pressure at cruising altitude is equivalent to 7000 ft. Besides a lot of ear popping most people don't even notice it, though mild altitude sickness (i.e. a small headache) is possible, but ultimately harmless.

  • Imagine not being able to shower, because AI slop generator machines need that water!

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  • Well, it could work. If the local government gave a shit. Which they don't, because Texas. But the water going into a datacenter does come out... The main downside being that it's hotter (which is a limiting factor, you can't run it in a loop without some big cooling system, and rivers/lakes are by far the most effective way way to do that).

    The article I saw doesn't say what the problem is exactly. Is the datacenter pumping from an aquifer rather than a lake/river? Are they raising the temperature in ways that affect the environment negatively? Are they abusing the municipal water supply instead of pumping their own water, forcing the taxpayer to essentially subsidize their infrastructure? Lots that could go wrong, but it's all shit that should be fully figured out during the permitting process.

  • On Exceptions

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  • It's not that the datacenters don't "use" water (you'll find plenty of sources confirming that), but rather that the argument stretches the concept of "water usage" well beyond the limit of meaninglessness. Water is not electricity, it can't usually be transported very far and the impact of a pumping operation is fundamentally location-dependent. Saying "X million litres of water used for Y" is usually not useful unless you're defining the local geographic context.

    Pumping aquifers in a dry area and discharging the water in a field: very bad.

    Pumping from and subsequently releasing water to a lake/river: mostly harmless, though sometimes in summer the additional heat pumped into the water can be harmful depending on the size of the body of water.

    The real problem is that lots of areas (especially in the US) haven't updated their water rights laws since the discovery of water tables. This is hardly a new problem, and big ag remains by far the worst offender here.

    Then there's the raw materials in the supply chain... and like not to downplay it but water use is not exactly at the top of the list of environmental impacts there. Concrete is hella bad on CO2 emissions, electronics use tons of precious metals that often get strip mined and processed with little to no environmental regulation, etc.

    Frankly putting "datacenter pumped water out of the river then back in" in the same aggregate figure as "local lake polluted for 300 years in China by industrial byproducts" rubs me the wrong way. These are entirely different problems that do not benefit anyone from being bastardized like this. It feels the same way to me as saying "but there are children starving in Africa!" when someone throws away some food – sure throwing away food isn't great, and it's technically on-topic, but we can see how bundling these things together isn't useful, right?

  • On Exceptions

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  • You can also be right for the wrong reasons. You see that a lot in the anti-AI echo chambers, people who never gave a shit about IP law suddenly pretending that they care about copyright, the whole water use thing which is closer to myth than fact, or discussions on energy usage in general.

    Everyone can pick up on the vibes being off with the mainstream discourse around AI, but many can't properly articulate why and they solve that cognitive dissonance with made-up or comforting bullshit.

    This makes me quite uncomfortable because that's the exact same pattern of behavior we see from reactionaries, except that what weirds them out for reasons they can't or won't say explicitly isn't tech bros but immigrants and queer people.

  • Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down, but Valve says payment processors 'specifically cited' a Mastercard rule about damaging the brand

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  • Weird, either there's some backroom drama with Interac or now might be the time for you to ask their support about it.

  • Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down, but Valve says payment processors 'specifically cited' a Mastercard rule about damaging the brand

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  • They already support local payment processing schemes such as Bancontact, iDEAL, JCB, Pix, etc. A good chunk of their international customer base already isn't dependent on the big American payment processors.

    The way towards undermining Visa/MC's power is for more governments/Central Banks to push for indigenous alternatives which abide by local regulations rather than foreign puritanism. This is already a desirable goal for most both from a geopolitical POV (reduce American control over world finance) and a financial one (VISA/MasterCard charge outrageous transaction fees).

    American consumers are fucked whichever way things go though, it's not like the regime is going to make a move to break up the monopoly nor to push for less censorship in media. If Valve somehow goes through with this and makes deal with all major American banks, they'll be done just in time for the Save The Children From Pedostanic Video Games Act or whatever the fuck that will force them to purge all thought crime from their platform.

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  • Did you even read the article? Even under the VERY GENEROUS interpretation of contract law that contracts can't be predatory (which is not a particularly popular philosophical stance outside of cyberpunk fiction), AWS MENA fell short of even their typical termination procedures because they accidentally nuked it while doing a dry-run.

    I don't know where you work but if we did that to a paying customer, even IF there was a technicality through which we could deny responsibility, we would be trying to make it right.

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  • The author put it well:

    What if you have petabytes of data? How do you backup a backup? What happens when that backup contains HIPAA-protected information or client data? The whole promise of cloud computing collapses into complexity.

    Multi-region cloud computing is already difficult and expensive enough, multi-cloud is not only technically complex but financially and legally fraught with uncertainties. At that point you're giving up so much of the promise of cloud computing that you might as well rent rack space somewhere, install bare-metal infra, and pay someone to drive there to manually backup to tape every 3 months.

    This level of technical purity is economically unfeasible for virtually everyone, that's the whole point of paying a vendor to deal with it for us. And you know who doesn't need to put up with the insane overhead of multi-cloud setups? That's right, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, who will be getting paid for hosting everyone else's multi-cloud setups while they get to run their huge infra on their own cloud without fear. The last thing GAFAM competitors - especially OSS projects - need is even fewer economies of scale.

    Stop with the victim-blaming, this blunder is squarely on AWS.

  • Seven bikes take up less space than a single SUV

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  • On a personal level, get theft insurance on your bike. Costs me like 150 €/y for a 2000 € ebike, although some insurance companies do not cover street parking in some cities.

    On a societal level, there are things law enforcement could do to make fencing less lucrative. Giving a shit about theft reports for one. For two, my city pays to get everyone's frame engraved with their national registration number, which will get my bike back to me if the cops find it and it makes the bike a bit less valuable because most people aren't looking to buy a clearly stolen bike.

  • Battlefield 6 will be a unplayable on Linux systems due to the anti-cheat

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  • I haven't looked at technical proposals or anything, but I'll bet that they will propose the equivalent to the Google Play Integrity.

    Your anticheat software won't work unless you are booting Windows from supported hardware with a working TPM2 module and an unmodified kernel signed by Microsoft.

  • Infighting

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  • Ranked-choice voting is a decent choice for uninominal elections.

    Proportional elections are a popular alternative, and they are arguably fairer than even RCV because they are not susceptible to gerrymandering or votes otherwise being weighted by geography (i.e. your vote still matters just as much as anyone's if you live in Redneckville, Mississippi). They do have other downsides though.

    Unfortunately here in Belgium we do proportional voting and the Prime Minister is nonetheless a far-right separatist in charge of a right-wing coalition so, uh, maybe FPTP is not the only thing that stands between the citizenry and a communist utopia lol

  • City of Helsinki goes a full year without a traffic death

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  • Eeeeeh. I mean sure, we do have stricter requirements, but not nearly as much as fantasized by Americans. My grandpa still has a license that he got where the whole test was saying "I solemnly swear that I can drive". Here in Belgium the country is extremely car-dependent so license suspensions are actually vanishingly rare, requiring you to get caught red-handed more than 40 km/h above the speed limit (50 in practice due to radar correction), and even then the suspension is only temporary; I have never heard of anyone who lost theirs permanently. Most people here do consider driving to be a right. Until a few short years ago temporary license suspensions could even be scheduled only on weekends and holidays!

    Another angle to see this problem: I see Dutch people driving in Belgium daily. And they're absolute menaces. But they're so chill when they drive in Holland! What gives? Well most roads around here have more in common with American roads than Dutch ones... Give a dutchie in a BMW a wide straight line and he will do 75 km/h in a school zone without a second thought before changing lanes without signalling, then barrel through a roundabout while ignoring right-of-way. They aren't better drivers, they just have such good road infrastructure that forces them to drive one very specific way: slowly and carefully.

  • City of Helsinki goes a full year without a traffic death

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  • It's multifactorial. Cities like Helsinki and Amsterdam are poster children, but Europe also has plenty of areas (especially suburbs) that are as car-dependent as equivalent US cities.

    However traffic deaths remain much lower than in the US thanks to less idiotically-designed streets.

    Step 0, by far the biggest impact-to-cost ratio, is narrow the damn streets. Take the biggest road-legal vehicle allowed on that street, mark down the path of travel, and put some plastic bollards a few inches on either side. Watch as everybody instinctively slows down even though the flow of traffic is not even impeded or redirected in any way. This policy - by itself - doesn't even reduce car dependence! If you do it as part of the regular road repair schedule, it's literally free.

    America's wide-ass roads constantly astound me with their profound stupidity. There's literally no tangible gain, and so many downsides to public safety. I understand (though I strongly disagree with) the usual refrains for why the US is car-centric, but making streets too wide is simply inexcusable and unconscionable.

  • Graham: Israel should ‘do in Gaza what we did in Tokyo and Berlin’

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  • That is... not the threat that you think it is.

    I highly recommend watching Fantasies of Nuremberg. Be warned, it is extremely heavy to watch. But it is absolutely essential framing to keep in mind when talking about Genocide.

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  • People on the more spiritual side of things thought that being photographed meant trapping a part of your soul into the camera. It was a more existential creation than we give it credit for. Before then, nobody had ever stopped time.

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  • A computer-generated "Van Gogh" is not art any more than a mass-produced coffee mug is artisanal, no matter how "realistic".

    This has all happened before. Take photography. People thought it was the end of visual art. If anyone can take a photograph, why would anyone spend years learning to paint?

    Artists answered by pushing the medium beyond the limits of realism. Impressionism. This did not make photographs go away. But when I see a picture of someone's cat, I don't usually go "art!" – even though 200 years ago the mere existence of a photorealistic picture would have implied very impressive artistry.

    The work that clankers are very quickly taking over is that which does not require art. Visual filler. Lorem ipsum. Corporate communications. Out with artisans, in with industrial machinery. This is the same story that has already happened to almost every artisanal trade, from scribery to pottery to smithing. Visual artists and writers thought themselves exempt from the industrial revolution; they aren't. It will be a worsening socio-economic crisis. But it won't "end" art. Clankers definitionally cannot, and will never do art. Not until they gain a conscience of their own.