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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: March 5th, 2024

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  • SocialAI comes across as sort of a joke, or maybe some kind of meta-commentary on the concept of social media and cheap engagement, particularly after creator Michael Sayman helpfully explained: “now we can all know what Elon Musk feels like after acquiring Twitter for $44 billion, but without having to spend $44 billion.” He also says it’s “designed to help people feel heard,” though, and is ostensibly a way to help people avoid feeling isolated.

    Mike gets it. This is only the next logical step in social media. Why risk losing the ad revenue of users who feel more isolated using social media if they stop using the platform? Solution: ai sycophants that tell you you’re pretty.



  • I streamed it while I was working on other things but I thought it was pretty hilarious. Kamala seemed to be intentionally pushing Trumps buttons to derail him and he just could not accept that he is not universally loved.

    Honestly though, given how Trump lies and Kamala was putting on a show the whole thing seemed so cynical and pointless. I’ve watched every presidential and vice presidential debate since Bush Jr.‘s second term even in the "good ol’ days" when it wasn’t just a sound bite circus very rarely was a president even able to achieve the lofty goals they pitched the American people on.

    The whole thing is farcical in 2024. The lack of shared reality the Trump era has ushered in makes it next to impossible to trust anything a politician says. Kamala had spunk and moxy and was very down to earth and likeable, but policy wise she made a lot of statements the presidency doesn’t have the power to deliver on. Even with the insane power the supreme court gave the executive branch a few months ago.

    Trump was Trump. It’s pretty clear how much his brain has rotted when you compare this debate with the one he had with Clinton. But otherwise you can’t trust a single word he says. His position on any matter is irrelevant because he’ll retcon it later if it’s inconvenient. Meanwhile Kamala vowed to continue helping our frenemies do some ethnic cleansing and spent most of the debate posturing for the idiots to stupid to already have an opinion.


  • That’s why we have police in the first place. After the civil war the South, in order to covertly recapture as many recently freed slaves as possible, created vagrancy laws, sundown towns, and armed police. In Alabama, where the video is set, the state made it illegal for black people to leave a job, once they took it. The police in the south, especially in Alabama and Louisiana, arrested thousands of former slaves and leased them out to local businesses, in some cases victims of that system would be put to work at the same place, for the same people where they were enslaved prior to the emancipation declaration.

    It’s one of the most fucked up and evil things America has done. It’s made even worse because the practice has been in use for over 200 years and no one, outside a small percentage of Americans even care.

    Private prisons and work-release programs need to be ended now.



  • Software, 1,000%. I love linux and daily drive it. But when I have videos to edit, photos to rework, or collateral to design I have a windows laptop with professional grade tools to do the job.

    I’m sorry, gimp is hot garbage. There isn’t a pro-grade, open source video editing tool or anything close. Inkscape is useable in a pinch. Scribus is useless.

    Not everyone is a multimedia creative professional, but most software on linux never quite have the features you need, are no longer maintained, or will be useful in ten years.

    That said, I’d still rather break out the laptop when doing client work than daily drive MacOS or Windows 11. Either way the barrier for most users is that linux almost works.


  • The theoretical benefits of Gentoo or Arch are completely negated by the fussy nature of those systems. You have more control, but to get it you have to do a lot more work. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, just that’s the main difference between arch, gentoo, and a more streamlined distro.

    Really it depends on what you want out of your distro. If total control is what you’re after, then gentoo is only the beginning of a deep k hole that ends in LFS and a ricing habit. Personally I like using my computer as a tool to do other stuff so anything more hands on than debian stable just gets on my nerves or turns me into a ricing addict. But I had to install gentoo to figure that out.

    Gentoo is a filter. You either love it and continue diving or learn you want something else from your OS.








  • On a technical level, no. You’re right. It would not be possible to capture the protocol entirely. But meta has serious cash to spend on marketing Threads. If they can capture enough of the ActivityPub market and were to collab with Bluesky and use their protocol (I forget the name), or make their own, it’s only a matter of time before the drop activitypub and force users either to join threads or lose access to their users.

    Threads and Bluesky are kind of an existential threat to ActivityPub given Meta and Twitter’s track record with Open Graph, bootstrap, and public api’s.





  • 100% yeah. I guess I mean that OP is already frustrated by noise in their news sources, rss doesn’t solve curation, which is what it sounds like people think rss does. But if every story you’re shown needs to be relevant to your interests rss isn’t going to fix that.

    Even the perfect news outlet that OP describes is going to have tons of boring stuff. Social media tried solving it with algorithms and will probably move on to AI driven feeds in 18 months, but their profit motive spoils the effort.

    Then again I’ve thought about curation vs. aggregation maybe a bit too much.


  • There are millions of blogs and news sources to browse off the beaten path. It really depends on how the site is built. A Wordpress enterprise solution has a default rss feed, but it can be turned off should the site choose. A medium or ghost based site has the same toggle. For a more bespoke solution it is extra dev time not all sites opt for anymore because so few people use rss these days.

    Back in 2010 at the height of Google Reader’s popularity rss only accounted for 10% of traffic and depending on how the feed was configured it might consume 30% of the non-money-making bandwidth. There was a push to try to monetize rss, but it kinda backfired and the technology faded into (relative) obscurity for the average person.

    There are tens of thousands of absolutely amazing blogs and news sources online today with no support for rss.


  • Megan is Missing (2011) is one of the most horrifying films I’ve ever seen. Fair warning though, the last ten minutes are excruciatingly painful to watch. It is not for the faint of heart.

    In the gore porn genre Cannibal Holocaust (1980) and Hostel (2005) are vile, but so pointlessly gorey the actual horror (the brutality of men) is almost entirely lost.

    Funny Games (1997), or the 2007 American remake for those who don’t love subtitles, is another unnerving portrayal of ultra violence. It’s not gore porn, but is graphic. The original version’s pacing will make you squirm in your seat.

    Hush (2016) and Creep (2014) are two of my movie-night-with-friends films. Still very much about the human monster, but not overly graphic and prefers to build by making the viewer a partial participant. You have to be a certain level of broken to enjoy some of the others on my list, but these two are disney movies compared to Cannibal Holocaust.