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mozz

@ mozz @mbin.grits.dev

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2 yr. ago

And the voices. "Billy..."

"You fucked the whole thing up."

"Billy, your time is up."

"Your time... is up."

  • Born in the USA Was a Protest Song

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  • Not really “anti American” but not completely establishment friendly. They had Rock the Vote, Beavis and Butthead, Monty Python including the nudity, Jon Stewart got his start there, they had Liquid TV and weird nonsense on the air, at a time when most TV was pure Tom Brokaw and all why bombing Iranians is cool all the time.

    Compared to now, it looks super establishment friendly, but for the landscape of television at the time it was pretty anarchistic. Now it is the narrative of course. 😕

  • Restaurants fight back against the FTC crackdown on 'junk fees' as diners balk at new charges

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  • Am I the only one? The whole thing of charging 4% if someone’s paying by credit card, because that’s what it costs to run their credit card, makes perfect sense to me.

    Maybe it is because I used to be involved with a business that paid credit card fees. What we eventually wound up doing was publishing prices that were nice round numbers that roughly included the CC fees, giving a discount below the published prices for cash payments, and including a separate 3% CC fee onto custom quotes that were itemized, if people were paying with a card. That seemed like a pretty solid system. But yeah I definitely get it if a restaurant wants to say that there’s a certain percent fee if you’re paying with a card.

    “Cost of living adjustment” can fuck off though

  • Born in the USA Was a Protest Song

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  • A lot of quintessentially American things are anti-American

    "Born in the USA," Bruce Springsteen in general, "Rambo," Mark Twain, "Monopoly," MTV, et cetera

    The arc goes:

    • US system is bullshit
    • Someone points it out in an artistic work
    • People love it and the thing they made gets popular
    • System goes "hey we love that you're buying this please do it more" and promotes it under a guise of it not being directed squarely at them, with some skillful edits
    • Thing gets even more popular with more exposure, in its edited (backwards) form, to the point that the original is often semi-forgotten

    Being against the bullshit is an American trait. Unfortunately, the bullshit has become more powerful than the against, hence all these problems we have now.

  • Amazon cloud boss echoes NVIDIA CEO on coding being dead in the water: "If you go forward 24 months from now, it's possible that most developers are not coding"

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  • Have you ever attempted to fill up one of those monster context windows up with useful context and then let the model try to do some useful task with all the information in it?

    I have. Sometimes it works, but often it’s not pretty. Context window size is the new MHz, in terms of misleading performance measurements.

  • What Was Your Experience Being Laid Off?

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  • He was a weird motherfucker in several different ways

    He had money though. That’s the great thing about money; you can just kind of motor around with whatever priorities you want and for the most part no one intervenes or tells you to stop

  • What Was Your Experience Being Laid Off?

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  • Weird angel investor took us all out to a fancy dinner and made a weird extensive speech about the importance of the future; kind of “Godspeed my young protégés I know you’ll do wonderful things.” Kind of sounded like he finally believed in us and wanted to let us know with a nice gesture. Idk. No one could make any sense of it.

    The next day his lackey informed us we were all fired. Oooh, that’s what that was about; makes sense, oh well, we have to get real jobs now apparently.

  • Why Mpox Vaccines Aren’t Flowing to Africans in Desperate Need

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  • I wonder what the racial makeup of that group of experts is, or how they would react if the virus was spreading in a community that included their families. Or what is the racial makeup of the people funding this whole organization and deciding what is and isn't some kind of "quicker than 2 years timeframe" emergency situation.

  • Georgia goes ‘North Korea’ with bombshell plan to ban main opposition parties

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  • Holy shit; I thought at first that this was about the US state

    And nothing about that seemed all that out of place 😕

  • Why Mpox Vaccines Aren’t Flowing to Africans in Desperate Need

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  • , as well as data from studies carried out once the vaccine was deployed during the 2022 mpox outbreak. More than 1.2 million people in the United States received at least one dose of the vaccine at that time, and studies showed it provided a high level of protection against mpox.

    Yet the W.H.O. did not open formal consideration of that research until last week.

    Deusdedit Mubangizi, the W.H.O.’s director of health product policy and standards, said that the organization’s group of experts would meet the week of Sept. 16 to consider the submitted data, and could issue a license as early as that week if they were satisfied.

    I stand by my assessment

  • Why Mpox Vaccines Aren’t Flowing to Africans in Desperate Need

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  • TL;DR no one gives a shit because they aren’t white people and they have no money

  • Lapid: Netanyahu was briefed on dangers ahead of Oct. 7, ignored ‘all red flags,’ must go

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  • He didn’t ignore them. He thought “oh sweet, this will be the perfect pretext. I can’t wait.”

    It’s the same reason he keeps blowing up peace deals that would bring the hostages back.

  • NASA will decide Saturday if Boeing's new capsule is safe enough to fly 2 astronauts back from space

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  • Yeah, but they can’t leave the airport. The precise definition of an emergency is when you can’t say “You know what? This is too dangerous, let’s not fuck with it.” They’re still up there precisely because if that was the scenario, with them on the ground at the airport, they would clearly choose not to fuck with it, because a key component is busted.

    Better analogy if you wanted to be precise about it would be: There’s some serious problem with the plane which prevents safe landing. Broken landing gear or similar. They’ve got plenty of time, plenty of fuel, they can fly around and figure things out for as long as they need. But, they need to land, and the safety of the landing is not assured once they commit to whatever best plan they can come up with.

    In that scenario, it is never the engineers on the ground or the controllers who dictate the solution and the plan. There’s a book of procedures to follow, there’s input from the engineers which carries a ton of weight, but at the end of the day the crew is responsible for making decisions, because they’re the ones who will be dead if it doesn’t work out right.

    The company doesn’t have a meeting of top directors and then radio the pilots what to do. Because, even if the directors of this theoretical company didn’t have a history of blowing up airplanes through their negligence, they’re just not the ones who are supposed to make those decisions, honestly. NASA management getting “input” from the engineers and then escorting them out of the room so they can meet and make decisions has killed quite a few astronauts at this point.

  • NASA will decide Saturday if Boeing's new capsule is safe enough to fly 2 astronauts back from space

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  • I mean I won't say you're wrong in the abstract or don't have a point, but NASA management's consistent history of making dogshit decisions as regards safety is also a highly relevant factor here.

    Generally in civilian aviation, if you're on the one on the plane, you get to make the decisions, because ultimately it's your ass on the line. In emergency situations nobody gets to override you and say you have to do it this other way instead even if you don't like it. Even if NASA management makes a perfect decision based on the information available to them at the time, and something goes wrong and the astronauts die, that's still a bothersome outcome to me. Like, it's their life. Let them have the responsibility. Hopefully there's one overall probably-right answer, and management and the astronauts would both evaluate the same information and come to the same conclusion anyway, but even so I still feel like it'd be a better situation if it was the astronauts deciding about their own life and death. Then if something does go wrong, everyone's hands are clean and there's no second guessing.

  • NASA will decide Saturday if Boeing's new capsule is safe enough to fly 2 astronauts back from space

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  • How many of them were involved in overriding the engineers as regarded launching the Challenger?

    (I would recommend "Riding Rockets" as a pretty good book to read for a general overview of the safety culture in NASA management and the reasons I don't trust them to make this decision. Honestly, for all I know, things have changed radically since then -- but given that NASA management were the ones that sent them up on a Boeing spacecraft in the first place when years ago I was already able to see that Boeing was no longer capable of doing safe engineering of even civilian commercial air travel, I kind of doubt it.)

  • NASA will decide Saturday if Boeing's new capsule is safe enough to fly 2 astronauts back from space

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  • Incorrect

    Administrator Bill Nelson and other top officials will meet Saturday. An announcement is expected from Houston once the meeting ends.

    Engineers are evaluating a new computer model for the Starliner thrusters and how they might perform as the capsule descends out of orbit for a touchdown in the U.S. Western desert. The results, including updated risk analyses, will factor into the final decision, NASA said.

    The article makes a specific point about “top officials” being the ones at the meeting, and makes a distinction between those engineers and “NASA” who is the one making the decision.

  • NASA will decide Saturday if Boeing's new capsule is safe enough to fly 2 astronauts back from space

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  • I think the astronauts should decide.

    What is gained by taking the responsibility away from them, and handing it to some other person? I could maybe see it if I trusted that other person to be more qualified, but if they are NASA administration, then I don’t.

  • Locked

    How do you make someone understand that being drafted by force and ordered to invade another country is not a good thing?

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  • Do you see any scenario where the IDF can allow itself to truly stop Innocent people? A soldier is being fired at from a school, should the soldier allow himself to get killed in such situation?

    The whole concept is bankrupt. An IDF soldier is being fired at from a school because he is on Palestinian land, occupying it by force to maintain the land that was stolen from the Palestinians and facilitate the taking of more.

    There are degrees. If he’s sniping schoolchildren, then that will inflame the conflict more and promote more October 7ths. If he’s “only” firing back at the school, so “defending” himself… well, it’s “better” I guess, but if you break in my house in the middle of the night and I attack you, you’re not “defending” yourself even if you limit yourself to fighting with me and not hurting my wife.

    And vice versa, considering what you know about setlers in Israel, do you really think that they will not get even more violent in the west bank if they know that their actions has no cost?

    Their actions don’t seem to have a cost though. Or rather the mechanism of retribution is so indirect and random that I don’t think that Hamas’s counterattacks make all that much difference to their calculus of what they can get away with doing to the Palestinians. I could be wrong, but that’s my impression.

    And don't get me wrong, I wish for Hamas to vanish, and I wish for the IDF to kill only militants (even that definition is not clear), just like you. But I don't see any realistic scenario (considering the human spirit) that this can happen. Not in the current political situation.

    Like I said, even “killing only militants” leaves Israel in the position of the war criminal. They are invading and stealing homes, farms, anything they can find and pushing the Palestinians into a vanishingly small series of refuges which they then invade in turn. Why would “militants” not fight back in that scenario? What should they do instead?

    I do agree with your take on how unrealistic peace is in the present climate. It needs to be imposed from outside by force in order to happen, which won’t happen, because the US would need to be actively involved in making that happen and the US likes things more or less as they are (or at least as they were before the counterattack after October 7th got so genocidal that it started causing political issues for leaders in the US).

  • Locked

    How do you make someone understand that being drafted by force and ordered to invade another country is not a good thing?

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  • I don’t know a single person who was in the military who has good things to say about it.

    After training, sure, they’re all for it. After doing the job for real (combat or not) and getting out, not a single time that I can remember.

  • Venezuela’s Supreme Court certifies Maduro’s election win claims

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  • Fuckin serious up

    Imagine to yourself what the Venezuelans should do about this, to safeguard their future. Let Maduro win and hope for the best? Peaceful protest? War? What should they do? Really think it through, with the comfortable objectivity of distance and safety.

    And then, get fuckin ready. We got 3 more months. My best quick recommendation is, allies. Allies in the real world who are marching, working, voting, putting time in. Solidarity will help you resist, and if the resistance fails, they’ll help you survive.

    Also: Vote. Are you registered? vote.org

  • Iconic Wow! Signal May Finally Have An Explanation (It’s Still Not Aliens)

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  • It’s never aliens 😢

  • Technology @lemmy.world
    mozz @mbin.grits.dev

    Stop KOSA - New tech censorship bill

    www.stopkosa.com
  • Today I Learned @lemmy.world
    mozz @mbin.grits.dev

    TIL about SearXNG -- search like the old days where you get relevant results instead of a page half full of weird nonsense

    searx.envs.net
  • sdfpubnix @lemmy.sdf.org
    mozz @mbin.grits.dev

    How to get feedback on visually-impaired accessibility for web apps?

  • Technology @beehaw.org
    mozz @mbin.grits.dev

    The True Story of How GPT-2 Became Maximally Lewd

  • Videos @lemmy.world
    mozz @mbin.grits.dev

    Pop-up tents work in a really clever way

  • Today I Learned @lemmy.world
    mozz @mbin.grits.dev

    TIL about "America Against America," a fascinating book on US culture and institutions by a Chinese investigator looking in from the outside in 1988.

    www.astralcodexten.com /p/assistant-dictator-book-club-america
  • Linux @lemmy.ml
    mozz @mbin.grits.dev

    Mosh: Like ssh, but better (e.g. local echo and persistent sessions across sleeps / network changes)

    mosh.org
  • World News @lemmy.world
    mozz @mbin.grits.dev

    Serbian opposition leader left partly paralysed by attack, say family

    www.theguardian.com /world/2024/jan/11/serbia-opposition-leader-left-paralysed-by-attack-say-family
  • World News @lemmy.world
    mozz @mbin.grits.dev

    Covid infections rise in Sydney as JN.1 variant drives cases across Australia

    www.theguardian.com /australia-news/2024/jan/11/covid-case-numbers-rise-sydney-jn-1-variant