Joined the Mayqueeze.

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • You’d need your private data center, a video model, and skills with video models. I think all publicly available models don’t do more than minutes at a time and will probably not accept fucking with copyrighted material. But if you ran your own operation you could probably do it in a month or so. You shouldn’t though for a laugh because you’ll be personally responsible for killing a polar bear family.


  • Gold in large quantities is still a bet. You’re betting that society and the economy will collapse or suffer huge trauma, which will wipe out a lot of wealth. But you’re also betting that the economy will come back alive soon enough because without it all you have is a heavy pile of metal. Gold is also not an easily transferable asset. In societal and economical collapse, gold is not as useful as stuff you need to stay alive. It also ties up a big amount of wealth in one item that may be difficult to separate into smaller currency to use on a black market. And if people know you have gold, even if everything is fine in your neck of the woods, you’re a target for theft. Gold is a good idea if you don’t know what to do with some of your second million in assets. But it would be inadvisable to put all your savings into it. Diversification is the answer.


  • I mentioned that I do understand why she did what she did. You add more information to this story that only increase understanding as far as I’m concerned.

    Let me turn this into an extreme example for comparison’s sake. If a parent shot their child’s rapist and murderer, we all get it. Nobody will say “I have no idea why they would do such a thing.” A lot of us outsiders would look at that case and even be glad about this outcome. And at the same time, the mother or father would end up in prison. Because you cannot take the law in your own hands and expect not to be punished for that. There will be mitigating circumstances, they won’t go in for life. The punishment might just be exactly the time they spent in custody before their trial. But there will be punishment because we have rules about that. (Obviously, this example is not the same as this case of bullying. I’m only using it to compare consequences.)

    Was this self defense? She was just defending her digital privacy? I’m not a lawyer. As a layman, I’m going to say this does not meet the legal criteria. Morally? Absolutely.

    We can meter out appropriate punishment to everybody else here: the school that maybe responded badly. The parents of the dipshits who got their hands on an undress app. The fact that there are undress apps available to middle schoolers or anybody really. Etc. But we also have the benefit of hindsight.

    You and I get why she threw punches. We might even go as far as cheering her on, in our heads, had we somehow been there. Go get those bastards, black eyes for all of them. My point was merely that if you resorted to violence like that you cannot expect not to be punished for it. Like in my extreme example, there are mitigating circumstances. Plenty of them. All should be considered. But there will be something on the record. In this case the suspension/probation, which I hoped is the punishment for every fight.

    She got suspended and he didn’t (yet, as we find out halfway through). The headline of the linked article in the post implied that this was the outrageous part. My criticism was aimed first and foremost at the writer/editor of that article.


  • Let’s take a moment to realize that 95% of you hadn’t heard of cafe mom as an outlet until just now. And that the article’s headline is misleading/tabloidy at best. And while the rest seems well researched, it’s clearly misleading a bit. If you start beating a kid on the bus and ask others to join in, it’s not a surprise that you get suspended. Yes, she’s also the victim of terrible bullying and felt let down by the faculty (who - understandably - may need more than hearsay before they start taking action). You can still not beat people up. Nobody doesn’t understand that she did it. And indeed even the police looks at all of this as mitigating circumstances. And she’s back in school and on probation and that’s hopefully what they do with all kids who start fistfights. The buried headline is that the other kid is under police investigation, which has the potential not only to get him suspended after all but will have even more serious consequences. From what I read here, the system works as well as it can but the story is written to cause outrage.

    I understand that victims of bullying like this or sexual assault in general face an uphill battle they never wanted to fight. And with the details in this story I can totally understand why the girl snapped. And I wish her nothing but the best and appropriate punishment for the kids who circulated the images. And still, you can’t resort to violence and expect not to be punished for it. We are not talking about self defense here.



  • The Dutch and Irish levers this writer envisions sound like paper straws to me. It would be in everyone’s interest to make Ireland less friendly to the tech giants. But Irish butter is not going to make up the losses if they sour the tech milk. It’s also unlikely that The Netherlands would be willing to take one for the team here without a price tag. One whose amount will be shrinking fast as Chinese companies backwards engineer their chip making techniques by hiring former engineers from that company. Don’t hold your breath that the EU will get the needle out. The US may have to go it alone.



  • I have started running an Instagram account for a niche thing that after the heat death of Twitter shifted its attention to Insta. I was one of those insufferable Facebook leavers in the mid teens and had deleted my own FB and Insta accounts. So I created a new one. But I’ve never accessed it without a VPN. To get all the functions I’m running the app on an old phone under permanent, dead man switch VPN connection. And crucially it’s a phone that never had Insta installed on it before when I was using it under my main driver account.

    And I’m using it because the interaction is there. In the decade I wasn’t on Insta it has turned to shit. And it’s no longer the app to share pictures. If you want people who appreciate just good pictures, maybe try Pixelfed instead.









  • I find none of these arguments convincing. You have the right to vote. Unless you’re in Australia that means you can just not go vote also. That’s your choice.

    Voter turnout has an influence on the vote share the extremes of the political spectrum get. If you’re on the extreme, you tend to go vote for your cause because you found your calling. So if enough people in the middle choose not to participate, you’ll end up with difficult majorities and/or more extreme governments. The latter is also true if either extreme is convincing many of the people in the middle. And that’s where tactical voting comes in. That’s why I would personally lean towards a “go vote and vote for the best of the worst if nothing fits well” approach. But I wouldn’t elevate this to the level of an ‘electoral imperative’ because it is a personal choice.



  • I don’t think OpenOffice is an apt comparison here. Every other browser with a modicum of market share is Chromium based. When even Microsoft folded, there is basically only Firefox. And the libres and the waters who piggyback on it. If Firefox is gone I think we’ll soon be in a complete monoculture of Chromium based browsers. No one should want this.

    You don’t have to like what they do (I don’t either btw). You can predict all the opt-ins will be opt-outs (although I don’t necessarily buy into that). You can switch to any other browser. On desktop they ask for your feedback when you uninstall it so give them a piece of your mind. If you call for a crusade against Firefox you have to put more meat on the argument bones than the half-baked stuff in this overshared post. And if you can’t do that, kindly change your browser privately, is all I’m saying.