Works for floors!

Blink-blink-blink. Blink. Blink. Blink. Blink-blink-blink.

No, I don’t have something in my eyes, I swear I’m fine looks nervously at boss.

scum-masters

Best typo ever.

I’d say OS and driver programming is also in that category. It is the deep magic.

But seriously, are there really women who talk about men in those terms?

Yes. Personally, I see it as the mirror image of the “tradwife” thing where toxic men see their partner as a subservient maid. Seeing men as primarily an income source comes from a similar place imho.

Absolutely. Fdroid is awesome.

I hate the fact that there’s no simple, free, ad-free note-taking app either inbuilt or on the app store. Just something simple and local to take a quick shopping list or a name or something like that. Fdroid has me covered for that.

Ublock origin isn’t the only ad blocker out there. If you like Ublock origin, use Ublock origin lite. It’s fully V3 compliant.

There are lots of people who will never update if asked to update at their leisure. I think it’s far better for user security to have updates be forced by default, with the option to schedule them yourself.

This seems to be the earliest article about Vasile Gorgos, and it seems to be missing a lot of details from this retelling. I think this means that a lot of these details (wearing the same clothes, the same train ticket he left with, the mysterious car speeding off) were all added later.

EDIT: In the video, they actually show the train ticket. It’s from 2021, from Ploesti to his home village, and his daughter-in-law says a friend of his picked him up from the train station after recognizing him. Also, unlike this version, he didn’t say he’d been at home, he said he wanted to go home. He does look and sound very visibly senile.

Also, unlike this version, the original does not give him a clean bill of health. It specifically says he has neurological problems and can no longer recognize his son or his son’s wife.

If you’ll allow a bit of speculation, my guess is the guy abandoned his family, went off and lived life, the police never really took the missing persons case seriously and never really looked for him. Decades later, he starts becoming senile. A befuddled old man, still with his unchanged ID card, gets picked up by a good samaritan who drops the old man home. gets a train ticket home and gets recognized at the train station.

separately, it would be a travesty to say that the so-called “tribes” […] were “given to us by chance”

What I meant by that is that you don’t decide where you’re born or who your parents are. That is “by chance” from the point of view of the individual.

Humans are a tribal species. Whether we’re talking culture, ethnicity, nationality or any other method of defining who is inside or outside the group, the fact is we have an ingrained tendency to separate “us” from “them”.

Modern psychology says that the process of becoming more and more inclusive and tolerant is the process of expanding your mental map of who your “tribe” is.

This means that to truly accomplish our goal here (you and I seem to 100% agree on that goal), we need to expand people’s mental model of their tribe to encompass all people.

While I do hope that eventually we get to one humanity-sized tribe, until then humans still seem to want smaller tribes. While trying to convince people to see all humans as part of the same tribe, we can simultaneously try and improve the smaller arbitrary tribes we were given by chance.

Modern Romania isn’t totalitarian. Thankfully, these days the old ladies just snoop on everyone to gossip and complain passively aggressively, not to report to the state. I’d argue that’s an improvement.

Deadly serious. By the end of communism, they had over a million informants. You had to make the assumption that everyone you talked to and every old lady on a park bench was an informant.

Funny story, I know someone who was recruited to inform on her colleagues at work, but after the third time in a row she told them everything is wonderful, everyone is happy and productive, she was promptly fired (as an informant, not from the factory).

So, I watched that third link in its entirety. It was pretty interesting. I think the core idea is that NK isn’t some absolutely insane bizarro land, which I actually agreed with beforehand. It did not disprove the fact that NK is an authoritarian dictatorship. The only thing it did prove (which again, I knew about beforehand) is that western media likes to exaggerate the faults to hyperbolic levels. I honestly think that the average north korean would live a better life without the Kim family (or any other family regime) ruling over them. This doesn’t mean that they force people to have specific hairstyles at gunpoint or execute politicians for slouching during speeches (as the video joked about), but they still direct a large portion of the states wealth towards friends and family.

I think you should really honestly consider the fact that two wrongs don’t make a right. NK and the USA do terrible things. Instead of litigating which one is worse, maybe we should focus on how to make better alternatives, like you’ve done with this alternative to Reddit.

It’s actually a bit deeper than that, at least from my Romanian perspective. Our old ladies were literally hired by our security services to monitor and report on everything going on in their neighbourhoods. They were essentially human CCTVs, facial recognition and behavioural pattern matchers all rolled into one while being paid pennies.

That specific BBC article is what I was talking about. It’s not publicly available testimony, it’s information gathering by the SK state about NK from defectors.

To all of those stories, they seem like strawmen. I’ve not heard anything that ridiculous. Just that NK is an authoritarian regime that rewards friends and family of the regime at the expense of the well being of the populace. Kinda like a red veneer over Saudi Arabia, similar system.

So why aren’t you asking why the US is allowed to participate when they commit far worse atrocities?

I didn’t even ask why NK isn’t allowed to participate. Why are you giving me an argument I didn’t make?

1st link:

Defectors can expect to receive the six-figure payout if they cross the border with intelligence that helps enhance South Korea’s security.

That… is actually very reasonable, and does not support or diminish your argument.

2nd link: I’m sorry, but DPRK news room doesn’t exactly scream unbiased.

3rd link: The tone and channel name seems comedic at first glance, but I’ll watch it and get back to you. Plenty of comedians doing real journalism these days anyway, so that shouldn’t be a mark against him.

The people who manage to escape NK are a pretty good source. Also, 2 wrongs don’t make a right. It’s perfectly possible for both the US and NK to be in the wrong.

pi ends with the digit 9, followed by an infinite sequence of other digits.

That’s a very interesting use of the word “ends”.