SnotFlickerman

SnotFlickerman , 1 day ago

Police hate this one weird trick!

VEHICLE RESOURCE NOT FOUND

SnotFlickerman , 1 day ago

https://c.tenor.com/94DIDB5fRooAAAAC/tenor.gif

SnotFlickerman , 1 day ago

Literally nobody is pretending it wasn’t a stunt. They discuss it in the article. It’s been used several times.

SnotFlickerman , 10 hours ago

Linux has a BSOD kernel panic screen now too sooooooooo

SnotFlickerman , 1 day ago

…I spend a lot of my time thinking while waiting in the drive-thru.

SnotFlickerman , 1 day ago

What you have to consider is the possibility that God doesn’t like you. Could be, God hates us. This is not the worst thing that can happen.

SnotFlickerman , 1 day ago

Blame Canada!

SnotFlickerman , 1 day ago

It’s the same shit with offshoring. They do it because they can pay people less.

It’s always fucked with me.

Because no, no human is worth less than others based on geographic location or local economy or where you came from originally.

If you’re educated enough to do the same job as a US citizen, and you’re working for a company based in the US, you should get equivalent pay to your US counterparts. You’re not worth less as a human because you’re from a different area.

It’s fucking disgusting, I’ve thought it was disgusting my whole life. It’s nothing but exploitation.

It hurts people in the USA by driving down wages and it hurts people internationally because these companies pat themselves on the back for “lifting up” these people and economies when the real reason they’re doing is they’re cheap fucking bastards. If they really wanted to lift up those economies, they’d pay people equivalent US wages in the local currency.

If that means you make a society of local millionaires overnight, oh well. This whole paying people less because their local economy is smaller is fuckstupid hateful hurtful bullshit.

See also: how orchard owners don’t pay minimum wage to harvest, they pay “by the tree” to skirt minimum wage laws.

SnotFlickerman , 2 days ago

Harry Haller’s Records: For Madmen Only

SnotFlickerman , 2 days ago

She has a substack, and is a bit wavey around the details sometimes, but she writes about coming to terms with it.

lindatirado.substack.com

The NPR article is also far more detailed.

npr.org/…/linda-tirado-journalist-shot-police-202…

SnotFlickerman , 2 days ago

https://i.makeagif.com/media/7-31-2015/IARFj5.gif

SnotFlickerman , 2 days ago

Wait, I’m supposed to choose my favourite of the three shells?

Is that how they work??

SnotFlickerman , 2 days ago

https://c.tenor.com/zciYksSI5dcAAAAC/tenor.gif

SnotFlickerman , 2 days ago

Yes.

SnotFlickerman , 2 days ago

Just a mild burtation.

SnotFlickerman , 2 days ago

People forget the most important bit. The clapback to Semmelweiss from other doctors was “A doctor’s hands are always clean!”

Humans are irrational fucking idiots and we prove it daily. The number of us who are willing to protect our own in-group over things they don’t deserve to be protected over is too damn high.

SnotFlickerman , 2 days ago

We aren’t even capable of caring for one another

It’s the part that drives me the most wild. We’re all stuck on this shitty rock hurtling through space together, literally the bare minimum we could do to make it bearable is to be kind to one another and supportive of one another. We can’t even be fucked with bare minimum.

SnotFlickerman , 2 days ago

Don’t tell Nestle!

SnotFlickerman , 3 days ago (edited 3 days ago)

Because belief is intrinsic to humanity even if we don’t believe in religion.

I believe in a lot of human concepts, including kindness, altruism, democracy and humanism. They are all still effectively made up human ideas.

I also believe when I sit down that the chair below me really exists but I cannot truly trust my own senses 100% either. So effectively I “believe” what my sensory organs and brain interpretation tell me, but the reality is the brain and its interpretations can be wrong.

Look at the USA, the founders of the nation are often treated with a reverence akin to that of religious figures.

People have all kinds of delusions. People worship all kinds of weird things. Religion is just one of many.

Finally, someone like Ayn Rand shows that a human can have pretty reprehensible and hypocritical beliefs even if they are an atheist. She promoted bullshit “great men” theories of humanity and argued that selfishness could be used for good.

She also died penniless and on government benefits while spending her whole life preaching against things like government benefits.

People are deeply irrational even without religion.

SnotFlickerman , 2 days ago

I like to say “Humans aren’t rational creatures, humans are rationalizing creatures.”

We can rationalize nearly anything and justify it, in our own minds.

SnotFlickerman , 2 days ago

Also, it can depend on certain other factors.

My partner and I had a difficult conversation recently about how we plan to handle her brother when her mother passes.

Her mother is obviously religious and raised him religiously Christian.

He is a sweet man with a severe developmental disability. Things literally take a very long time for him to learn. He still acts like a teen and he’s pushing 40. That’s not his fault, that’s just life. We love him.

The thing is though…

We don’t believe in religion, but we also think that when his mother finally passes, it would not be wise to try to turn him from Christianity.

He struggled and still struggles years later due to the passing of his father. The idea of being able to see his father in heaven is big to him.

At one point, he panicked because he was playing DOOM 2016 on his game console, and he asked my partner (his sister) if he was going to go to hell for playing it. She reminded him that the Doomslayer kills demons and loves bunnies and reminded him the themes of the game say demons are bad, even if the game itself is violent.

We don’t think it’s worth it to try to break his brain when he’s over 40 and his mom finally passes. Hell, she’s in good health, he could be over 50 when it happens. He has a learning disability and it would literally be unfair to him to try to force a change in belief on him at such a late stage with such a disability.

It’s not worth it to wreck his mental health so we can feel better about being “truthful” with him. We’re focusing on trying to relate healthy interpretations of Christianity to him.

SnotFlickerman , 3 days ago

Kids in the beat kids on the street!

Beat Kids!

SnotFlickerman , 3 days ago

Probably because a lot of it is real fucked up, and makes people uncomfortable.

Like female bedbugs not having vaginas and so males have a sharp penis and literally stab the females with it often resulting in death of the female, because it’s literally just an open wound.

Further, male angler fish only exist to find the female, touch her, get stuck to her, and get absorbed by her body until all that’s left is the testes, now absorbed by and part of the female. The female can hold multiple testes of multiple males inside of her and choose to self-impregnate whenever she chooses.

Don’t even get me started on felines and spiny penises so the female can’t escape once the male has entered.

Like a huge amount of animal sex is rape.

Yeah I don’t spend my time reporting it because all it does is remind me how lucky I am to be human and be able to have a consensual, loving relationship with another human.

SnotFlickerman , 3 days ago

Okay the idea that animals are somehow just mindless automatons that have zero idea of what is happening… that’s a take all right.

A take that would send people who study animal cognition into a binge drinking session.

SnotFlickerman , 3 days ago (edited 3 days ago)

I understand your position and I get what you are going for, but…

I submit to you Ayn Rand.

Atheists can be giant pieces of shit, too.

She used her atheism to argue for the benefit of selfishness and promoted dumbass “great men” theories of humanity. She was not Christian but ascribed to similar belief in the need for bullshit heirarchies with lazy fucking losers stealing the value created by labor sitting at the top.

Like her daddy before communism. Waaah so sad for daddy’s violently fascist supporting little girl.

So I don’t think it would solve as much as you think.

Humans are not rational creatures. We are rationalizing creatures and we can rationalize and justify almost anything to ourselves for any reason, religion isn’t needed for it. Rand and many others are fine examples of it. She rationalized it because she was a rich kid who had her riches taken back by workers and she didn’t like that.

Humans are bullshitters, removing religion won’t change that.

Like does anyone think Donald Trump is seriously, actually religious? Anyone? A guy like him would exist with or without religion.

SnotFlickerman , 3 days ago (edited 3 days ago)

Come on, we all know Republicans only make laws for little people. The people in charge are “good” people so they shouldn’t be punished for “minor indiscretions.”

Rules for thee, not for me. In group that laws protect but do not bind, out group that laws bind but do not protect. Etc. etc. etc.

SnotFlickerman , 3 days ago

And Republicans will selectively apply it, yes, exactly my point.

These “gotcha” bills from Democrats really don’t understand that the “hypocrisy” of Republicans are actually expressions of power.

“I have the power to sign this bill into law that should and would totally apply to me, but I’m going to make sure I never face consequences under such a law. I have a team of good-old-boy judges who will stand in the way and accept any and all appeals from me.”

They will never, ever see consequences of such laws. Look at the fucking lawfare every person in the Trump admin has thrown at the wall. It takes fucking decades for any of these chucklefucks to see any comeuppance. Look at Ken Paxton, the AG of Texas, who was under Federal Indictment for nearly a fucking decade and that case collapsed like a flan in a cupboard.

Further, he’s opening the door to allowing Republicans to begin to claim that LGBTQ+ are sex offenders for existing in front of children, giving them carte blanche to start Alan Turing the shit out of the entire LGBTQ+ community.

It’s a dumb game to play and the Democratic senator should be ashamed for playing it.

SnotFlickerman , 3 days ago

You can just assume it is every US company because it is.

This stuff doesn’t happen in a vacuum.

CEOs talk to each other about this kind of shit and plan together.

Just like how “AI” has been shoved into fucking everything by everyone even though it is useless and makes a lot of people upset.

Expect all of them to do it so you don’t have a choice and they all did it to “stay competitive with each other.”

Making sure there isn’t another option is one hundred percent part of industry plans.

Just like how trying to replace fast food workers with automation and touch screens has been in the works since the 80’s at least. The tech is just finally cheap enough is all.

SnotFlickerman , 3 days ago

Maybe she found a pube on her can of coke.

SnotFlickerman , 4 days ago

They realize it’s a service issue, they’re trying to corner the market so that they don’t have to care that it’s a service issue.

YouTube pretty much has that market cornered. It would take a lot of capital to start up a viable competitor, especially one that didn’t resort to ads and had some other kind of monetization scheme to support the sites existence and pay for all the storage servers.

SnotFlickerman , 4 days ago

Lemmy is generally too small for it, but I liked the small regional subreddits like states, counties, and cities.

I know there is a Lemmy instance focused on Atlanta and Atlanta news but that’s about it.

SnotFlickerman , 4 days ago

Holy shit it’s been so long I had completely forgotten about KarmaCourt.

I think the reason we don’t is that Karma/Votes aren’t really tracked the same way over here?

SnotFlickerman , 4 days ago

I used to miss my local city sub more, but the current mods have basically turned it into a reddit version of Nextdoor.

10 years ago it was mostly punks and weirdos on the sub, then all the normies came and even the fucking local sheriff.

The local sheriff finally fucked off after he got called out for trying to hire a murderer from a neighboring jurisdiction.

I feel like if Lemmy could get big enough, we could get back to where the interesting people are all in one place again.

SnotFlickerman , 4 days ago

Right, but I thought the thing they were suing each other over was like whether they were Karma farming? It’s been so long I’d honestly have to go look it up to be sure. Memory is foggy.

SnotFlickerman , 4 days ago

Well thanks for your service at keeping a regional instance running! It may not be my region, but I’m glad it exists at all!

I hope it eventually becomes a “if you build it, they will come” type situation. It will just take time and growth.

SnotFlickerman , 4 days ago

I dig the heck out of this. I’d sign up.

SnotFlickerman , 4 days ago

The majority of users are surely from the US, and so questions that don’t specify origin but whose answers may be more properly dictated by knowing their origin end up getting answered by the majority US user-base, even though the original person asking the question isn’t from the US.

It’s fair that people from elsewhere shouldn’t always have to specify they’re from elsewhere because the entire internet does not exist just in the USA, the USA just has an outsized influence on the internet. I can see how that frustration could arise and why European-based communities would be helpful. It’s the same issue on reddit, if you’re not on a country-specific-level-sub, the default answers are from US users.

It’s genuinely an issue, and I say this as an American, mostly because I’m guilty of it myself. We absolutely dominate the online discourse and usually default to assuming questions that don’t specify where they are about must be American. It’s a very Amerocentric view of the world and the internet.

+1 for good UK/European communities.

SnotFlickerman , 4 days ago

Further, unlike at the outset of reddit, people are now really familiar with how thankless and time-consuming being a moderator is.

I’m not eager to have to manage a bunch of communities. If there’s a community that I wished existed, but I don’t care deeply enough to want to manage it, I’m not going to go out of my way to create it, which leaves the community non-existent. So I think having some ready-made communities from people willing to take on moderation duties is a good thing. Fewer people are willing to make the jump to be a moderator these days, and for good reason.

SnotFlickerman , 4 days ago

Tonight at 11, Japanese company centers japanese media in its media showcase.

SnotFlickerman , 5 days ago (edited 5 days ago)

The next forty years will look like absolute hell and the lack of proper services for the explosive number of diseases in the millennial cohort will directly contribute.

1. Milliennials by and large don’t have enough money to retire, and they are experiencing in striking numbers high rates of immunodeficiency and cancers. (I was personally diagnosed with cancer at 42. You know, the ultimate answer to life the universe and everything…) This will mean they will need more elder care and sooner… and they won’t really be able to afford it.
2. No Child Left Behind has properly fucked US education for the foreseeable future, and US education was abysmal before that already. The elderly are going to be being taken care of by adults who may be functionally illiterate and when you’re functionally illiterate, you can become anti-vax even if you got hired as caretaker for the elderly. (Not all will grow up to be functionally illiterate, but if we’re to take teachers at their word, the gap between the struggling kids and the smart kids is wider than ever. As in C students functionally don’t exist, only A students and F students, and the F students are the larger group who are being passed on to higher grades just to hit numbers.)
3. On top of education being gutted and there being a dangerous future of incapable people being put in these jobs because there’s no one else to do them: The collapse in birth rate because nobody can afford to have fucking kids will also make this problem worse as fewer and fewer workers will be available to take care of more and more elderly and infirm people.
4. Most of the places that take care of the elderly are being bought up at rapid pace by investment groups, private equity, hedge funds, and the like, and all they do is cut services, make things worse, and cause more suffering and death so they can wring more money out of people suffering at the end of their lives. How many of these businesses will even still exist in 20 years? Many of them are shutting down constantly because the numbers just don’t add up, or because the private equity group that bought it has finished hollowing it out and there’s simply no money left.
5. Because of all of this, we will see an absolute explosion of homelessness in the elderly.
6. You can bet your ass fuck-nothing will be done to prevent any of this. Especially if Trump wins in November, then we’re dealing with this process outright accelerating at a breakneck pace.
7. Oh and just for “fun” we can expect to see a lot more police violence against poverty-striken old people. “STOP RESISTING OLD MAN!”

EDIT: Oh yeah, and that’s not even counting climate change, finite amounts of topsoil left, potential pandemics, and the fact that most of the world doesn’t even have access to clean water. I try to keep an eye on neat, simple engineering projects from poor countries because we may need to rely on similar options soon enough ourselves.

EDIT II: Get involved in Mutual Aid Groups. We all have skills. No one is coming to save us. No government or political party or corporation. We have to save each other, and that will be very difficult to achieve. I forget the writer, but she said something like “No dictator is ever going to bring about the revolution. It will always have to come from the bottom organizing together.” The only thing we can do is help one another. It will not be easy or fair or entirely successful.

SnotFlickerman , 5 days ago (edited 5 days ago)

It’s the trouble with attributing it to any specific generation. It’s like people forgot that Gen Xers grew up reading the same dystopian sci-fi that we did that predicted this corporate shithole world. Neuromancer was written in 1984, when I was three years old. People forget that the cynicism of Gen X explicitly came from being such a small generation compared to the Boomers that it was just always a given that they wouldn’t ever have much political influence. Hell, it even affects a lot of Boomers, because this has been going on for a long time.

Gen X gets forgotten, but they were honestly the first to really bear the brunt of this disease that’s eating at all of us, and thus it’s sad that they get forgotten. Cheers mate, and I hope you find that skill and succeed in your goals.

SnotFlickerman , 5 days ago

Stop making it a generational battle. That only serves to divide the working class.

That’s difficult when a lot of the news media is owned by *checks notes… the Capital class… and they have vested interest in keeping the conversation about a generational battle.

But yes, 100% agreed. The problem is we’re all commenting on news articles that will never stop presenting it that way.

SnotFlickerman , 5 days ago (edited 5 days ago)

Someone else could write news then?

Well exactly, it’s an uphill battle, sadly. I’ve been upset at how weak our media has been since the Bush years, when I was working in local television for an NBC affiliate. I got to see all the behind the scenes of the beginnings of the War on Terror and how much our media purposefully pumped up both the war in Afghanistan and in Iraq and how they helped promote the outright lies of the Bush administration. It was eye opening as a twenty-something to say the least and made me incredibly distrustful of government overreach that was being exhorted by patriotism and nationalism. “Spy and snitch on your fellow Americans to prove how patriotic you are!” It was also part of the beginning of dropping the facade of “racism being over” because holy fuck did brown skinned immigrants all get put in the “dangerous radical Islamist” basket, no matter their real nationality or religion. It deeply colored my view of mainstream media as consistently right-wing, even back then, because of how often they would capitulate to Republican lies to support wars intended to enrich a small elite.

I’ve been wanting to see more independently successful media organizations most of my life, but most of what I have seen is media consolidation, and it’s certainly not like I have the capital to get into the business myself. It’s brutal.

Finally, just as you said, we’re competing with Twitch and TikTok and a lot of these issues really require text documents and references that can be checked more easily than needing to sift through a three-hour-Youtube-video of the issue. The problem is we’ve raised a generation that really doesn’t want to read much at all if it isn’t a subtitle for a video. That’s… distressing. (But not to act like it was much better in my generation, it’s not, it’s part of why we have so many shitty kids: their shitty millennial parents who shove a phone into their hand like Boomers shoved us in front of TVs.)

I wouldn’t even know where to start on how to fix it. I’m with Marshall McLuhan, we’re spitting out new communications mediums before we’ve even really understood the social impacts of the previous mediums. He argued we still didn’t understand writing and we had already jumped headlong into radio and television… Well, look at us now baybeee, shit’s spiraling with the internet, McLuhan. Maybe he’s spinning in his grave to match.

SnotFlickerman , 5 days ago

Cause fuck it I can’t save anyone.

You’ve done your best. It’s definitely not personally your job to save anyone anyway. If we can’t figure out how to do it collectively, well, maybe we just suck as a species. Thanks for doing what you could and can and don’t bemoan yourself for your inability to fight a broken system on your own. I don’t expect engineers and scientists and doctors who have been telling us this shit needs to be done for years to have any fucking patience for it anymore. You’ve all done your bit.

Also, thanks because I’ve just been assuming as much has been going on behind the scenes for a long time. I’ve been saying for years the entire nation gave up on any idea of long-term maintenance of anything in the 90’s. We’ve had failing infrastructure grades for bridges all over the country since at least 2010, if not earlier, and fuck-all has been done. I’m not even close to being an engineer, but I’ve helped some friends with some basic construction and I’m just floored at how many corners are cut on so many things in our country. It’s prevalent everywhere, it’s part of why there’s so many data breaches in the tech sector. They don’t want to pay to update old systems to bring them up to compliance. We’ve literally built workarounds in the form of Virtual Machines just so people can run outdated software on modern hardware so insecure outdated software can simply keep being used despite its age. So yeah, feeling vindicated that it’s not all just in my head.

SnotFlickerman , 5 days ago

Our dreams of technology didn’t meet with the realities/limits of materials science/engineering except for computing and the internet.

SnotFlickerman , 5 days ago (edited 5 days ago)

I don’t know how many times we have to keep saying this:

BECAUSE LLMS HAVE NO INTENTION OR ABILITY TO TELL TRUTH FROM FICTION SO WHEN THEY APPEAR CONFIDENT, THEY ARE BULLSHITTING EVEN WHEN THEY ARE CORRECT.

Even a bullshitter can be correct sometimes, it doesn’t make it suddenly not bullshit. Even when LLMs get it right, they’re still bullshitting.

This isn’t complicated. They don’t think. They have no concept of truth. They just fabricate sentences from previously copied sentences, there is no intention, no thought, no planning, no reflection.

The groups producing these LLMs are just sourcing the entire internet, they don’t care how much of it is lies. There seems to be very little curation going on.

Anyone who expected anything other than this outcome is an idiot who isn’t paying attention.

SnotFlickerman , 5 days ago

If we survived Tipper Gore’s “Explicit Lyrics” warnings on CDs, I think we can survive this.

Everyone wanted the explicit copy, it made it more desirable.

But, as a counterpoint, traditional media is just as bad, if not worse, because it is desperately trying to stay relevant by selling fear.

“If it bleeds it leads” isn’t exactly new. Maybe all media needs these warnings.

WARNING: This media conglomerate is owned by people who have vested interest in profit over truth.

SnotFlickerman , 6 days ago

Somewhat. Hugging yes, snuggling no, playful wrestling when certain friends are particularly drunk.

Yes, I do wish it was more socially acceptable

Frodo and Sam should be fucking role models, especially the book versions who were even more deeply close than the films.

I mean, honestly, for fantasy, the entire Lord of the Rings series is replete with strong men expressing emotion in healthy ways to deal with the horrors of what they were facing. They sing deeply loving songs for fallen comrades, notably Boromir even after he makes a grave mistake, already forgiven, while giving him the best of funerals they can (In their song for Boromir, Aragorn even calls Boromir beautiful[^1]). They cry for one another and feel great distress at the suffering of those in their fellowship. They carry each others’ burdens up to Sam literally carrying Frodo up Mount Doom. Anyway, they weren’t unwilling to show physical affection or speak highly of another’s beauty.

[^1]: “His head so proud, his face so fair, his limbs they laid to rest,” In every context of Toklein using the word “fair” in LOTR, it has been taken to mean “beautiful.”