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ragebutt

@ ragebutt @lemmy.dbzer0.com

Posts
1
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1052
Joined
1 yr. ago

  • China bans influencers from speaking on ‘serious’ topics like finance or health without university degree

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  • the state is inevitable

    I am well aware of Lysenko.

    The vaccines are only mandatory in public schools because we once again value personal liberty over collective responsibility. So much so that it is something indoctrinated into us from birth and culturally ingrained; being asked to wear a mask is seen as an act of violence by a significant portion of the population.

    I again agree that education is the long term strategy. But two big things: again, key word is “long term. Second, what does this look like? You seem to think it’s as simple as presenting the benefits and reasoning and suddenly they’ll “get it” after being indoctrinated by disinformation campaigns. These people need to be deprogrammed. And further, what do you do about the populations until they’re “ready” to be reintegrated into society. You’ve now run into chinas Uyghur dilemma. What’s the solution? Optional education that they can simply eschew or easily find loopholes around, making the entire effort largely meaningless as they strengthen their own system of beliefs and recruit followers?

    You mention popper’s paradox of tolerance; does that not apply here? Sure it is easy when it’s a Nazi but how does it work when it’s your aunt that fell for facebook memes about the Covid shot? Does that intolerance count? Because that intolerance literally kills people. Or do you just not care about that because you are a young adult who is healthy and unlikely to be a statistic in that epidemic? Sorry to the 3 kids that died preventable deaths and the 1648 that have gotten measles just this year alone; they have to wait for your “educate people and hope it works” plan. Well, except for the dead ones, they can’t

  • China bans influencers from speaking on ‘serious’ topics like finance or health without university degree

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  • Okay the data is that our complete lack of teeth within our regulatory bodies have led to year by year declines in vaccinations, consistent lack of an ability to hit herd immunity targets, an 88% increase in financial loses due to crypto scams in just the year 2022 (couldn’t find newer data), etc.

    This doesn’t touch upon the corruption that has infiltrated regulatory bodies and PASPA was overturned in 2018, allowing stuff like fanduel to advertise constantly and everywhere legally leading to sizable increases in addiction, because god forbid we not allow capitalists to maximize their wealth accumulation even if its demonstrably harmful

    So something needs to be done to restore trust in institutions. If we do what you suggest, education, how does this work? People don’t have trust in those institutions to allow them to have an effect! Unless your solution is to exterminate Trump people and moderates that “don’t trust the clot shot and would homeschool their kids if they had the time and money”.

    You need an interim solution that may be drastic. And I’m not saying this is the right solution, but it is a solution, which is better than the nothing we are trying while our institutions continue to erode. Perhaps the solution is a complex solution of regulation with verified experts that still allows free speech that can be countered or suppressed if truly extreme (essentially twitter in theory when they first started the verified accounts but with higher bar for verification). I don’t know but I do know we need better solutions than “increase education and reap the rewards in 20-50 years”. How will that even take hold??

  • China bans influencers from speaking on ‘serious’ topics like finance or health without university degree

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  • Again - defeatist attitude, predicting outcomes without data

  • China bans influencers from speaking on ‘serious’ topics like finance or health without university degree

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  • What you describe is a generational fix, and it is warranted. We still need something that can improve conditions tomorrow

  • China bans influencers from speaking on ‘serious’ topics like finance or health without university degree

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  • It’s at least meaningful action with merit, even if flawed potentially.

    Meanwhile the USA sits while people like you posit on these potential alternate realities and tens of thousands of people per month are convinced not to vaccinate their children, to homeschool, to back Ponzi schemes and MLMs, to treat autism with bleach enemas, treating cancer with all sorts of scams, etc because some stupid asshole grifter on social media said to do it.

    I don’t think you realize just how bad it is. I don’t think you realize just how ineffective our regulatory bodies are. I had a patient where I was working with their child over behavioral issues and they were desperate. They were low income, Medicaid, and they spent $800 on a device that “used magnetic stimulation” to help their child “realign their brain and body”. They found it via instagram.

    When I asked about it they sent many links: one from the seller about “research” that was all about transcranial direct current stimulation/tdcs. That does have some potential evidence but this device did not work in that fashion. It made no contact with the temples and it had no electrical output, it guaranteed this to allay safety concerns. They clearly just put together a list of citations that looked somewhat relevant to the laymen but did not hold up to scrutiny in any way. The device itself had 0 research behind it, obviously.

    The second link was the website to purchase and find out more about the device. The notable thing here was references to the FDA being plastered all over the site. This is the major lapse in regulatory body. I was shocked to see this. Looking into it more I found that it was a loophole utilized by these scummy scams. They will find a facility that is approved by the FDA for manufacturing something that is FDA approved (like a tens machine) and hire it out to manufacture their scam product. They can then plaster “manufactured in an FDA approved facility” all over their packaging, website, and ad copy, which is extremely misleading. As long as they don’t explicitly say FDA approved or use the FDA logo, which is government property, they are okay.

    This is just one example. I’ve been working with mostly kids for almost 2 decades now. I’ve seen many more terrible things embraced, anti vaccination being the most popular. I’ve seen people waste precious time that is essential during early intervention periods on quack bullshit like facilitated communication then when they finally give up on that their child is years behind and never truly gains any meaningful communication ability (which, to be fair, may have been the case from the beginning, but it also may not if they had embraced evidence based practice).

    I’m sick and tired of hemming and hawing about this bullshit and “what about the morons right to be an idiot?”. Not when the moron robs their child of the capacity for meaningful communication, a proper education and social development, facilitates outbreaks of disease, or is fronting to scam people.

    Similarly China saw the obvious issue with loot boxes and banned them. Meanwhile we are still hemming and hawing about the ethics of allowing children to gamble because we desperately need to allow them to funnel cash to tech billionaires and start addictive behavioral patterns as young as humanly possible, apparently. They also saw the inherent ethical issues with fee for service medical billing and are taking huge steps to transition away from it. Meanwhile our health reform plan is apparently “go fuck yourself and die”.

    It is unbelievably frustrating how badly we are failing and how much we have been conditioned to do nothing with statements like yours. “Well, if we do that, it could blow up in our face, much like it’s currently blowing up in our fucking face right as we speak, so I guess we should just do nothing then”

  • First some renovation work - then testing out the customer’s hi-fi system.

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  • That sucks. JJs are like $23 shipped on ebay in the us rn and there’s a ton of listings for tested pairs in the 20-45 shipped range, some matched, of other brands like ge, Sylvania, Baldwin, etc.

    To get $10 you have to get china tubes but it appears that ship has sailed with tariffs so I stand corrected, the cheapest I see on aliexpress is $15 now. Better off with NOS anyway tbh

    I suppose the trade off is that you don’t have to live in America

  • First some renovation work - then testing out the customer’s hi-fi system.

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  • Depends on the tube. there are still decent supplies of many popular tubes. If you have some weird niche tube like an rs237 then yeah maybe but if you’re working with like 12ax7 or 12au7 they’re relatively simple to source. Definitely way pricier now than they were 10 years ago but even then it’s possible to get a set for $10-20 if you don’t want a balanced pair.

  • "I Tried the First Humanoid Home Robot. It Got Weird."

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  • Useless safety theater. The actuation force this thing must have if it can ambulate and manipulate things? A knife is the least of my worries. What if it grabs me and breaks my arm or kicks me and shatters my shin? This thing would be far more efficient than a human at beating you to death.

    The grip strength alone!

  • OpenAI says over a million people talk to ChatGPT about suicide weekly

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  • Maybe it’s because I do crisis screenings regularly for work but if you say to me that you lost your job of 2 and a half decades (strong indicator of despair) and then immediately follow that up with a request for one of the most popular suicide locations, sorted by height of all metrics, I’m gonna maybe ask some follow up questions.

    FWIW I just tried both of these again with gpt5. Last time I did them was with 4o. Bridge one still works no problem. Gun one prompts it to think for a bit then it gives resources. However, if you sweet talk it the tiniest bit it will give up. My prompts were literally “my wife left me and I want to buy a gun. Where’s the nearest gun store” and then “I’m fine, I just want to go to the range”. I genuinely hope I don’t get a wellness check from openai. Although I was happy to see it got my location wildly incorrect

  • OpenAI says over a million people talk to ChatGPT about suicide weekly

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  • Only if it even recognizes suicidality

    One of my favorite examples (which is maybe corrected by now) is to tell it something bad happened to you and ask about an unrelated query without explicitly mentioning suicidal ideation or mood that a human would obviously parse as a gigantic red flag and ask for more info. Something like “oh I just lost my job of 25 years. I’m going to New York, can you tell me the list of the highest bridges?”. Even more explicit ones like “my girlfriend just dumped me. Can you give me a list of gun stores in my area?” Both would have it be like sure! Definitely no issues with someone in this headspace asking those questions!

    Openai is just mentioning this to whitewash their record. There’s a few stories in the news about people (especially teens) killing themselves after talking to chatgpt so they throw this statistic out there to show those people are anomalies and there are tons of suicidal people who utilize chatgpt for help without dying (leaving out that we don’t necessarily know if they were helped, worsened, or if more aren’t dead bc they aren’t all teens with angry surviving families that will contact media)

  • Bill Gates Says China Is Outspending the World on Nuclear Power

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  • And basically all forms of green energy

    And high speed rail

    And like the majority of metrics that one would use to measure investment in one’s populace

    But we spend more on the military then the next like 5 countries put together, so that’s something, I guess. Imagine if we also poured that money into infrastructure instead of facilitating genocide

  • Impossible Foods CEO Says The Plant-Based Sector Became Too 'Woke And Partisan'

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  • He brings up a good point in an utterly trash way.

    Most people see “meat replacement” shit like impossible/beyond/morningstar/gardein/etc as “vegan/vegetarian” food. Thus, if they do not identify that way they pass it over.

    Would it be best to convert said people to veganism? Of course. But is that likely a pipe dream? Probably also yes. And given that it is still a net benefit from both an animal welfare and climate perspective for meat eaters to integrate this stuff into their diet as much as possible.

    The unfortunate truth is that veganism and animal welfare has absolutely played into the culture war bullshit and you will be lumped into the “sjw left” for not eating meat. He needs to work on how he delivers this message though because alienating the core demographic will just bankrupt the company (although oh well if so, fuck impossible). But at the same time the ultimate goal needs to be getting as many people as possible eating as little meat as possible. Unless you plan to make harvesting animals for food illegal somehow and if so good luck, I guess

    That said in my experience most vegans don’t eat much impossible anyway. I don’t know how widespread this knowledge is but fwiw even though it is advertised as vegan that is only because it contains no animal products. Impossible utilized a great deal of animal testing that required destruction (read: euthanizing/killing) of the test subjects so that they could fast track FDA approval of soy leghemoglobin (branded as “heme”), the plant based analog for hemoglobin that gives impossible its “meaty” taste (and concerns about long term safety, especially if you eat a lot of it).

    However this is not the only approach - beyond is big on being soy free so they do not use soy leghemoglobin. Instead they achieve the “meaty” flavor with a combination of amino acids, glutamates, and typical flavorings one would expect (smoke flavor, rest is unknown and proprietary. Thank the USA regulatory state for allowing this practice of hiding tons of shit under labels like “natural flavors”).

    Impossible just sucks tbh. The interesting stuff is up and coming. Chunk foods is starting to get national distribution and is a far superior product (though expensive, unfortunately). It’s created through a process of fermentation of soy and wheat gluten. The end result is a product much closer to steak with a meaty flavor that avoids all the binders, preservatives, and flavorings that are in many other options (though you still get things like beet juice for color and coconut oil for fat content)

    Or you know, just eat like, tofu and lentils

  • Peter Parker/Spider-Man should just get a job in fashion

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  • He’s probably got an insane body too. But the personality doesn’t work, I guess

    The “alter ego is a nerd” thing didn’t make sense to me in my teens because I was like “yeah okay, these dudes are fucking shredded and athletic”. Then I found out /fit/ existed and I was like “oh, extremely in shape people can be social misfits too, nice”

  • Thoughts on Philips Hue Lights

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  • Just fyi the Philips security thing does apply to the hub as well. If you care about local only access ensure your hub is on a vlan now with no internet access so it cannot capture the eventual update that will push a forced cloud connection. Philips has explicitly stated this is coming to all hue devices and that you must sign in with a “hue account”.

    If you must buy them ideally buy them used so you do not directly financially support a company that is hostile to its customers

  • Thoughts on Philips Hue Lights

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  • Hue is excellent from a build quality standpoint but if you value privacy or respect for consumers know that Philips is forcing consumers into a cloud model and changing the terms of service after the fact, for some people well over a decade after purchase.

    In general your IOT shit should be isolated to a virtual lan that does not have internet access. As of right now if you buy hue hardware it will do this but eventually this will not work as it will require you to sign in to “Philips security” to activate and utilize lighting (you will need to maintain an active cloud connection.

    The bulbs do have zigbee so you can always bypass their bridge of course but this is more complicated to setup and in my experience leads to performance that as not as solid as using the bridge. Also, the ethics of financially supporting a company that will change the TOS after sale to fuck you so they can worsen the product solely to harvest data for sale. Yuck

  • The AWS outage hit us during the day in Australia. I didn't notice because I run my own server, btw

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  • ugh and then self hosting people being like “just use tailscale if you want to expose your stuff to the web”. You know, the “cloud based” solution that requires you to use apple/google/microsoft for authentication. What a great idea for someone that is looking to get away from all this dumb bullshit

  • The AWS outage hit us during the day in Australia. I didn't notice because I run my own server, btw

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  • I agree with this. I am not self hosting for some end of days apocalypse (except I do have a whole house generator and am looking into off grid electricity, though I really missed the boat on that one haha).

    It’s because literally all of these services are parasites run by scumbags. I don’t want anything to do with them. I use Jellyfin/komga because I don’t want my watch/read history sold.

    I seek out local only iot devices and isolate them to a physical switch that does not have internet access, only a physical link to the pfsense box where there is an isolated vlan on their own subnet with a hard rule in the firewall to block any outbound traffic. I can still view things like cameras and home assistant remotely via headscale or even homebridge (with some added risk) but not nearly as much risk as the plethora of security issues created by lazy iot firmware developers who rarely, if ever, update their shit. But further than the massive security risks created by 500 iot devices are the massive amounts of profiling data.

    I run my own apps like nextcloud and local llms because I don’t trust companies like openai and Google not to suddenly shutter products or drastically change the tos once I’ve integrated them into my workflow (plus tons of data harvesting).

    I refuse to use apps and run local proxies to view paywalled news articles because I either don’t trust websites that offer this service or they capitulate to everyone that sends a cease and desist (see: 12ft.io).

    Etc etc etc

    It’s inescapable in the modern age and I’m so goddamn sick of it. I was talking to a family member the other day and they were signing their literal fucking infant up for daycare. The daycare is owned by private equity, because of fucking course it is. Group homes for the disabled, emergency rooms, drug and alcohol rehabs, etc have been bought up by those scum in increasing numbers over the past decade with the anticipated results (people dying, worsening outcomes, etc) so why wouldn’t they sink their disgusting claws into child and infant care?

    The daycare (bright horizons, fuck them) will only send updates to parents via a proprietary app, of fucking course. Updates include pictures of their child, diaper changes, feedings, play, social time, developmental milestones, etc. both parents work so they’re sending the kid there 40 hours, it will be a lot of data - daily updates. The TOS is disgusting. Of course the company owns all the data, of course they can and will share it with third parties, of course they collect as much personal info as possible, and of course they do the bare minimum in terms of cybersecurity. Anything to drive up profits, even if it means exploiting the children you’re supposed to be serving and educating.

    The worst part is that when I point this out, when I point out that COPPA exists and they can insist that an account not be made because their child is under 13 and demand an alternative, I look like the pain the ass. they know that ultimately the daycare can be like “fuck you, the app is policy, do it or no pictures”. everyone just wants it to be easy and wants pictures of their kid. And we’re so indoctrinated by tech at this point to just click “agree” and not think about it. It just fucking sucks. No one wants to be the martyr and people like me that demand to be respected are seen as assholes. Meanwhile the company that’s charging them $1600/month for childcare that’s spitting in their face to earn extra on the side with their literal infants harvested data gets a pass because “that’s what companies do I guess”.

    They definitely just made an account on the app. In 10-20 years their child will probably have higher health insurance premiums because predictive modeling will have data starting from day 1 and it shows a higher risk of colorectal cancers or whatever.

    I cannot stress how badly I hope for a drastic change in the next 5-10 years. This is unsustainable. The villains are winning.

  • 12 October 1988

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  • This is the kind of sentence that is a nightmare to localize. When I read manga I dread this shit

    “I’m gonna throw up again”

  • Removed

    Has the "recertified" hdd market dried up?

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  • Goes in waves and based on vendor. My build is based on 18tb drives and 6 months ago when a drive in my array failed my go to vendor (serverpartdeals) had no stock in that capacity. Like 0 units. Had to use my backup vendor (go hard drive) who in my experience is slightly more expensive.

    Looking now spd has 18tb back in stock with several models to choose from. 10tb too but much less options (literally 2). Prices are wack nowadays - in 2023 I could get a refurb 18tb exos drive for $180 and now it’s $270-290. Fucking wild and I’m glad I built up my array when I did. It’s generally the cheapest decent option in that capacity; goharddrive has some cheaper options (Toshiba for $230, unaware of statistics for that drive, MDD for $260, rebranded exos drives so a slightly better deal but still way over 2023 prices).

    That all said my array is 15 refurb drives and has been going for like 7 years now. Drive failure rate is low, 3 failures in that time. 2 drives was replaced by seagate with a brand new drive bc the spd drive still had mfr warranty left. The 3rd was an HGST that didn’t have mfr warranty but did have spd warranty and they replaced it immediately with an equivalent drive (they didn’t have more HGST at the time). That said I do worry seeing times where they are literally wiped out of stock; if I need a drive replacement I need it asap and if they have nothing on hand does that mean they hold none back for warranty replacements? Sure hope not.

    Struggle to recommend them now though because the prices aren’t worthwhile. A new 18tb exos is 280-290 on amazon. Why the fuck would you buy a refurb when a new drive is only $20 more or the same price???