• 0 Posts
  • 17 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 25th, 2023

help-circle
  • I’m not surprised. I know people who don’t even know what an ethernet cable is. I’ve worked enough IT to realize that a tangled mess of 6 cables can be as horrifying as a Predator to people. It doesn’t help that everything is slowly going to POE, POE+ and even ++ now so it’s doubling as power as well. In analog video days I could look at the back of a random device and instantly figure out it’s purpose. That’s rapidly becoming a rarity. For a worrisome section of the population, plugging in an ethernet cable is the equivalent of building a table or performing a back flip.

    And when it comes to hacking, good god nobody knows anything. I remember we had a dozen students in high school (around 2000ish?) get suspended for “hacking” and really it was just that a section of the student body found a network storage location without any password protection and were using it as a flash drive on school grounds. Literally they just suspended anybody who signed their name on the homework assignments stored there.

    The real crime was that drive had lunch pins for all the accounts in plain text to run their system, without a password!




  • I sincerely doubt they give a shit about it.

    I mean, they definitely won’t give a shit if you don’t vote. If anything it simplifies their math. If you don’t show up if you’re mad or sad you sure as hell won’t show up if you’re glad. So you can be safely ignored.

    Biden already gives a shit about ~20% uncommitted in Minnesota, ~10% uncommitted in Michigan in the last primaries. nope, uncommitted didn’t win but they’re freaking out high ranking Democrats. There are more uncommitted than the percentage he won by in some of these states. They didn’t win but now a LOT more politicians are struggling to dismiss Palestine. Hell Pelosi was out and out accusing protestors of being shills for China and Russia last week.

    Democrats are currently avoiding college campuses for appearances because they realize how unpopular this war in Gaza is.

    showing that there is a voting population that is unhappy carries weight, and it sticks around for years to come. It’s a record just like the census.


  • I respect that, but you can still make that known at the polls with write-in, with third party, or just scrawling “fuck all y’all” over the ballot.

    Even if it doesn’t lead to someone winning, every one of the above does get recorded. Every year mickey mouse gets a fraction of the vote, and lets be real, if Mickey ever got 5% of the vote, every candidate would be announcing their runs at Disney World with the hope they could attract just half that group.

    If you do nothing at the polls, everyone will assume you don’t care and don’t care back.

    If you do something at the polls, that doesn’t help either party, then the two other parties might actually be incentivized to get your vote doing things you DO care about. You at least show up, so you are someone they should care about.

    If for no other reason, it’s a record of someone flipping the bird to everyone in power, a small act of defiance that can’t make it back to you because voting is anonymous. If you’re really that powerless the process should only take 5 minutes because the lines to the polls will be short.

    vote vote vote. even if it’s “none of the above”






  • It’s because a person can crank out a deep fake in 3 hours, and a crappy one in one. It never cropped up because… well lets be real it was a couple of weirdos that were doing it, unless it bubbles up from the dark corners of the internet you risk the Streisand effect by bringing attention to it.

    AI can crank out 40 in a minute. 7200 in three hours. That’s an entirely different beast. The sheer mass and volume ramps up the odds of any image bubbling up from the dark corners of the web falling into the limelight and now this problem that wasn’t big enough to merit thought is rearing up it’s ugly head right in front of us.

    You can generate unique pictures of Taylor Swift faster than even Taylor swift can generate pictures of Taylor Swift. Within one hour of Taylor swift being seen with a man (and you have enough images of the man) you can create a dozen images of her on a date with that man and attempt to sell them to paparazzi.

    The problem is volume. Just like how email made everyone connected and allowed the Nigerian Prince scandal to occur.


  • Yeah, there is a large fixation on whether he did or did not pull the trigger and I genuinely feel like that’s not the straw that breaks the camel’s back, because ultimately he was told it was a clear gun.

    What matters is:

    • Did he know that there were serious concerns about gun safety on set?

    • Did he use his star power/producer role to silence those concerns?

    • Did he retaliate against people who raised those concerns?

    If he did any of those three things, then you have a rapidly strengthening case that he knowingly endangered the crew, and he should have known NOT to have aimed that gun at anybody. You made that gun unsafe and then the gun went off in your hands because you reaped what you sowed.


  • Secondly (more controversially), is a picture of a noose racist? I mean, it certainly has racist connotations and I personally wouldn’t have used it, but (bear with me) I’m not sure racist is the concrete conclusion. Lots of people have been hung throughout history, if you’re not viewing it through a racial lens then are you a racist or just very insensitive.

    I see what you’re saying… but it seems like a technicality that’s not worth exploring here.

    If instead it was a guillotine with a caption of “this year’s detention activity”… it’s really not any better. Like it’s no longer racist but… now it’s just purely about killing kids in a more equitable homicidal format. It’s very dark humor in a very public place.

    It’s a lot of time and effort and argument to debate “yeah this was terrible but it might not have been racist”. Does a definitive answer of “at least it wasn’t racist” make this appreciably any better? Does it make them any more likely to get a teaching job after this?

    It also doesn’t change the core argument the teacher is making in the story. “You lumped me in with a bunch of racists because I was white. I took down the image because it was offensive. Obviously. Why would I leave it up if it was offensive?”


  • It’s not just whether or not Biden would win.

    It’s “Can Biden and Trump stay coherent standing for 3 hours in an unscripted environment”? Does it matter if Biden wins if the match was predominantly two elders bickering over whether or not we should pull out of Iraq? Both of their ages are a point of concern and the complete lack of live, unscripted, hardball interviews does little to quell that fear.

    Polls have never been this bad for a returning president in decades. Historically support for third party candidates have decreased as election cycles get closer but at the same time, you’ve never had candidates this hated. Third parties are absolutely going to eat up votes from both parties this election year, and a horrid debate performance, even if a win, will make the issue worse.