InfoTeddy
1yr ago
The janny volunteer popup dialog seems to be in light theme even if you're using dark theme.
It's like the man himself says
The acid test for any two competing socioeconomic systems is which side needs to build a wall to keep people from escaping? That’s the bad one!
I've seen this "gotcha, you're a hypocrite!" tweet linked every single time someone has brought up this new policy in a discussion space I'm in, and at no point has the argument (implied or otherwise) gotten any better. Social media platforms are not socioeconomic systems and this is not a "wall" that Elon "built" to "keep people from escaping". At any time people are free to choose to leave Twitter without much consequence, which is not remotely the case if you're, say, looking to move to the US from Mexico, or if it's the 1960s and you're living in the USSR. Yes, yes, you can gripe that you'll lose all your followers or tweets or what have you, but that is not remotely the same as needing to uproot your entire life to move across national borders or needing to go through the US's complicated immigration system, nevermind the risk of death if you tried to do the same in the USSR, and to pretend that they are the same is... to put it politely, a category error.
This sort of hyperbole seems to be the norm around anything Elon Musk does. If Elon bans a bunch of journalists (nevermind all the journalists that were banned before he took over which didn't receive this sort of outcry), it's suddenly a "Thursday Night Massacre" and deserving of its own article on Wikipedia, alongside other actual massacres that took place on Thursday such as:
Bloody Thursday, Thursday Massacre or Thursday Night Massacre may refer to:
- "Bloody Thursday", on March 28, 1918, during the Battle of Tampere
- "Bloody Thursday" on July 5, 1934, during the 1934 West Coast waterfront strike in the United States
- The Chiquola Mill Massacre, on September 6, 1934, during the 1934 textile workers' strike in the eastern United States
- The Kossuth Tér Massacre, on October 25, 1956, during the Hungarian Revolution
- "Bloody Thursday", on May 15, 1969, during protests at People's Park in Berkeley, California
- "Bloody Thursday", on February 17, 2011, during the fourth day of the Bahraini uprising
And just to be sure, let's look at the Chiquola Hill Massacre:
Violence broke out when Dan Beacham, the mayor and magistrate in Honea Path as well as the superintendent of the mill, ordered an armed posse of strikebreakers to fire into the crowd. As the crowd fled, six strikers were shot in the back and killed, one mortally wounded, and thirty others suffered less than mortal wounds.
Beacham obstructed court proceedings against himself and the other strikebreakers, and ordered some of the strikers arrested. Dozens of unionized workers were fired or evicted from their company homes, and after the defeat of the larger strike on September 23, the unionization effort in Honea Path largely came to an end. Until the 1994 publication of "The Uprising of '34" and the subsequent journalistic work of Dan Beacham's grandson, Frank Beacham, the events of the massacre were largely undiscussed in Honea Path. Today, the event is memorialized by a stone marker in nearby Dogwood Park.
Yeah, that's right. People literally getting shot and murdered and evicted from their homes is placed on the same level of importance and described in the same way as some people being unable to use their accounts on a certain social media app. Nevermind the fact that they still have a huge massive platform to publish their views because, you know, they're journalists and they work at giant media companies, so really this didn't do anything, and to compound the amount of nothing this did, Elon ended up unsuspending them anyway.
I would say something to the effect of "touch grass", but I know everyone's already been told that and clearly it's not working. So instead I will just reiterate that the internet is not real life and Twitter is a platform barely used by less than 5% of the population. It's really not important. Whatever stupid shit Elon Musk does is not going to be the end of the world, and not even the end of Twitter for that matter. If Twitter ever does get run into the ground, life will go on and things will continue as normal.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
Very much agreed. To me, the fundamental problem with any sort of critique of any wide, global-scale distributed system (such as capitalism, but also others) is that it's very easy to diagnose problems but very hard to come up with solutions. You can criticize and criticize all you want, I'm not listening unless you have something better to replace it. And most of the time, they don't.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
While the page you linked doesn't seem to be glaringly, egregiously wrong, the fact that the author expressly believes the moon landing was faked is... uh. Well, that's the sort of crackpottery that's undeniably wrong and not even slightly right, and honestly it just makes me go "please promote anything else than this ancient debate which has been debated to death". I do have to admit, this gives me pause to link to this site in the future, or believe anything this person says.
Here's an example. This is from the "How capitalism destroys everything" article which, besides pushing the fake moon landing crackpottery, is a modestly-above-average article detailing flaws with capitalism (the thesis in the title that those things are being "destroyed" by capitalism does not follow, however):
I don't get how can people be excited about this system, and mock the "leftists" who want something better. A system where the most evil person has it the best (NASA has spent $116.5 billion dollars (archive) on the fake moon landing; and since it was fake, most of this was pocketed), while the most moral person (the one who e.g gives stuff away for free, or fixes computers for free) - the worst. I think those people who love this situation have been brainwashed into associating the lack of money with laziness or stupidity, and the opposite with effort or smarts. But this is so easy to disprove; maybe the idea that their rich heroes are not really heroes - and that this world rewards evil - is just too hard for those people to take in. Assuming an average American worked 40 years, his earnings would be 67521 (archive) * 40 (presumed years of working) = 2700840 US dollars in a life. This is 43135 times less than what has been spent on the fake moon landing. The fake moon landing could have paid for 43135 people to never work. So the world has valued the fake moon landing at 43135 American lives, and that is supposed to be something to praise?
This point could've been made without claiming the moon landing is fake. It's still not a particularly good point (the assumption that the money could've simply been shifted elsewhere without causing any problems or second-order effects is... well that's simply not how any of this works) but it would've been better.
Here's another example. This is from the article (rightfully) shitting on Wikipedia (but perhaps for the wrong reasons), where they go even further and claim that "the moon landing is so easy to disprove" and "the chance that the moon landing was real is zero":
The United States' Apollo 11 was the first crewed mission to land on the Moon, on 20 July 1969.[4] There were six crewed U.S. landings between 1969 and 1972, and numerous uncrewed landings, with no soft landings happening between 22 August 1976 and 14 December 2013.
Same old, same old. Opinions as facts, no criticism, dismissal of alternatives with the "conspiracy theory" label. The thing that makes this one unique is that the moon landing is so easy to disprove. Like, a single Bart Sibrel video - for example this one (CF) or this one can do it in less than an hour. And then nothing remains of all the fluff they've included in this Ministry propaganda piece. Look, people - the chance that the moon landing was real is zero. Absolute zero. And there is no way the Wiki editors don't know they're bullshitting you, proving Wiki is evil to the core.
I'm the last one to defend the accuracy or reliability of Wikipedia, but they really should've picked a better example than the Apollo moon landings. To its credit the rest of the page makes the point that sentences are often unsourced, and when they are sourced it's from sources that are less than great. It's just that... the examples given are parapsychology, plasma cosmology, alternative medicine, and even the September 11 attacks (yes, it seems like this person is a 9/11 truther too) among others. There's very few examples on the page that are passable (I'm not qualified to evaluate the claims about COVID-19 vaccines and I don't know anything about coconut oil or the Hunza people; I think the white genocide point is confused because the fundamental mistake is using the word "genocide" to refer to something that sounds like the Holocaust but isn't and is only-sort-of the Holocaust in the most superficial way, but sure, I'm willing to give them that) and they could've picked so much better examples to point out the errors in Wikipedia (like the articles on cryonics or Kiwi Farms).
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
- In theory, you can talk with the FAA and join the Privacy ICAO Address program, which gives out a unique non-N-number ID you can use once a month. In practice, the program doesn't work: it requires physical modifications that are a pain, adds a lot of hassle with ATC at irregular intervals, complicates international flight (since it's a US-only program), and doesn't actually obscure the aircraft identifier if it's anything more unusual than a Cessna 152 (since it's not that hard to look for the closest aircraft model of the same type at a given airport).
This is exactly what Elon Musk did, however Jack Sweeney explicitly worked around it.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
Does Chipotle have real, legitimate reason to enforce 2FA on its customers? And is it at all possible there is non-security motivation behind its phone requirement?
No and no. Or rather, there is a vanishingly small chance they have a good reason for any of this.
Given the fact that the majority of purchases will be through the mobile app (i.e. most likely the same device receiving the 2FA code as the one signing in and ordering), it's quite useless, actually. This is on top of the fact that SIM-based 2FA is horrendous for being extremely susceptible to social engineering, i.e., a random person calling up your phone company pretending to be you and have "lost" your SIM card, then obtaining access to it. (In contrast, TOTP 2FA does not have this vulnerability, but there's still not much to gain from using it here unless you have two phones).
Googling Chipotle and 2FA, there are a couple of Reddit threads that claim their accounts were hacked, and somehow a hacker ordered $60 or $120 worth of food through their app. I have no idea if these examples of being "hacked" is truly a matter of Chipotle's back end being compromised, or just someone whose credentials were phished, a reused password sold on the dark web, or a lost or stolen phone being used. My prior is it's overwhelmingly the latter and not the former.
If the backend is compromised, everyone's credentials are compromised, 2FA or not. Without knowing more details I can't say for sure, but it is likely their phones were simply stolen and the 2FA was useless because it went to the same device as the one signing in. Or it could be that people were phished to hand over not only their password but also the 2FA code for authentication (social engineering is surprisingly powerful and 99% of the time humans are the weak link in the system).
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
How does it even happen that people post in the main thread instead of replying to the comment that they want to reply to? Wouldn't you first have to scroll all the way up to the comment box at the top, forget about clicking "Reply" on the comment you want, and then begin typing your comment?
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
I think there's a general trend that people don't actually know how their professed enemies behave, despite the fact that they think they know, and they don't want to actually find out. Pedophiles have this problem the worst because anyone who wants to investigate pedos with even the tiniest air of neutrality and doesn't already assume they should be condemned with no exceptions are instantly speculated to be pedophiles themselves.
InfoTeddy
2yr ago
Why is SBF still free or at least not in trouble?
He's probably in a lot of trouble and will probably eventually not be free, or at least on the run from U.S. authorities. But as for why he's still free at this moment, it's because FTX isn't a bank and was crypto-based, plus he's in the Bahamas at the moment.
InfoTeddy
2yr ago
Aren't there only like a couple of "newswire" sources (e.g. AP) from which all journalists get their first facts from?
InfoTeddy
2yr ago
Reminds me of /r/fuckcars. God, that sub is a shitshow.
InfoTeddy
2yr ago
Mastodon isn't really a company. It's more like one instance inside a federated network of tweets (the "Fediverse"), similar to how you can start your own email server with your own domain but anyone can send and receive emails from you.
For all the posturing from everyone about how they're fleeing to the Fediverse because of big bad Elon firing the mods and Twitter will soon stop working, the reality is that Mastodon is basically worse in every other way. Almost by definition, Mastodon is comprised of people who are so outcast they either don't like Twitter, or were banned from Twitter (many here recognize this as the "seven zillion witches and approximately three principled civil libertarians" problem). So already you have selection effects for a population of users that are worse than Twitter users.
Then there's the fact that moderation is harder, because while you can ban someone from your own instance, you cannot ban someone from another instance. However what you can do is defederate the instance - in effect, banning the entire instance because it's full of witches or whatever. But even this isn't a panacea, because spinning up an instance is so easy (after all, that's the point of the Fediverse) that people can just evade the defed anyway. Most people will just want a Twitter, a centralized platform that can simply ban the offending persons and be done with it. They don't want moderation taken into their own hands, they want someone else to do it.
Lastly there's also the simple fact that Mastodon and the Fediverse were simply never built to accommodate the huge influx of users from the Twitter exodus. For all the doomerism that Musk firing half the employees will result in the site simply failing to stay up, along with claims that this will happen during the World Cup (no similar claims have been made about Meta who did a huge round of layoffs shortly after Elon did), Mastodon keeps dying under user loads that are a fraction of the users Twitter has. Even other exodus destinations like Cohost haven't stayed up as well. Meanwhile I've never seen Twitter go down at any point. Sure there were sometimes a couple glitches here and there but nothing major.
InfoTeddy
2yr ago
He keeps starting drama with people and saying dumb shit about mass shootings on Twitter. He has a KF thread, that says it all.
InfoTeddy
2yr ago
Okay, being cancelled from 77 newspapers at the same time is kinda suspicious, not gonna lie. But it's otherwise hard to tell the reason (though I grant that we would expect there to be no reason given to maintain plausible deniability).
InfoTeddy
2yr ago
Apparently it was pulled but probably not for his politics.
InfoTeddy
2yr ago
The Wikipedia page doesn't even have to be doctored. Wikipedia's standards on truth and facts are so horrible that they openly admit that they don't publish truth, they publish consensus. Basically you should never trust Wikipedia on anything and you should always double-check an article against actually reliable sources.
InfoTeddy
2yr ago
Scott Adams has done enough lolcow-ish things throughout his life that I am not willing to believe he's an intelligent person "just duping everyone". Sure, you can easily "dupe" people and intentionally get them to engage with you by saying stupid shit on Twitter. That's not particularly intelligent or insightful. Ditto for Trump.
Even more: Krugman unknowingly raised awareness about the very fine people hoax by spreading Adams’ own Trump disavowment hoax. He did Adams’ bidding without realizing it.
Nothing in Krugman's tweets indicate this. He doesn't seem to have talked about the "very fine people" quote at all. Besides, the basic problem with Trump is that he says enough stupid shit to the point where anyone who dislikes him can always find something to get pissed over. It's not worth arguing with them even if they concede that he never called neo-Nazis fine people.
I wanted to like this piece because of the segment on Elon Musk and the Ligma Johnson hoax but the rest of it was pretty meh.
InfoTeddy
2yr ago
Are these people believing that pro-choice is good because it means more black babies are murdered/unborn or do they literally also believe that black people are subhuman too?
InfoTeddy
2yr ago
Imagine an alternate world where any time a kid expressed suicidal ideation, government employees would firmly nudge them towards euthanasia, and would jail you as a parent for protesting.
Just to note, this isn't really a hypothetical anymore. Canadians are nudged towards euthanasia after being told how much they cost the healthcare system and a survivor of the Belgium airport ISIS attacks in 2016 was euthanized this year after expressing suicidal ideation. The only difference is that this is not happening to kids and people protesting it are not jailed by governments. Not yet, at least.
InfoTeddy
2yr ago
Not to defend the mod decisions too much, but I'd imagine that they would've banned the replier for a longer length if the replier had more of a history of antagonizing people in this way than the original poster. Though, I'm not a mod and don't have access to the notes they have on each user, so I can't say for sure that's why they banned Westerly for longer than MeinNameistBerd.
InfoTeddy
2yr ago
From my experience, I would estimate people who do forks for woke reasons run out of steam very quickly, because maintaining a fork of any project that does something substantial is a lot of boring and thankless work, and "to spite somebody" is usually not a good source of motivation for that. I've seen several such occurrences and it never survived long.
I'd be inclined to agree, but in this case it seems that all the maintainers Lenny ousted are now working on Prism. Only time will tell but I'd wager a guess that they are simply going back to business as usual, only without Lenny (or any other people they deem a "right-wing bigot").
InfoTeddy
2yr ago
It's especially bizarre to me, given the origins of the open source software community lie in techno-libertarians and vague communo-anarchists who eat shit off their feet.
You link to a video of Richard Stallman here, which is fitting since a couple years ago he was more-or-less cancelled for having made comments about one of his former coworkers in a private email chain that fell short of condemning and demonizing him. I think at this point the open-source community more-or-less fell into some form of gentrification where now any difference is no longer seen as worthy or at least tolerable for the bigger goal of giving every user freedom over their own devices (which, sadly, has only gotten worse in recent years), but now a liability that "discredits the movement" and is just plain unpleasant, no matter how valuable they may be to the movement (I mean, he's literally Richard Stallman for god's sake).
InfoTeddy
2yr ago
Now, of course, the fork is embattled by another "opinionated lead developer" -- who I understand was relatively inactive for a long period of time -- who has seized control of the project and removed the CoC.
My understanding is that Lenny owned the PolyMC organization on GitHub and was thus able to oust all other maintainers that way. And he owned it because he started the fork. People have been passing around the commit graph chart on the PolyMC "Insights" page and saying "look, he didn't even do jack shit for the project!" but that's misleading because (a) every contributor's graph will look like that because PolyMC only forked from MultiMC in December of last year, and (b) GitHub is weird about crediting people on the graph if a commit was authored by person A but committed by person B, plus there are several merge commits that were made by multiple people who may or may not get credit for it on the graph, etc.
I originally learned of the change due to an update message when I recently upgraded the flatpaks on my personal system:
This package is currently read-only until situation around OVE-20221017-0001 clarifies.
So for those not in the know, this "OVE" is basically trying to mimic what is called a CVE report, and fake it enough such that maintainers get scared and take action to deplatform the package, despite it not even being a real CVE report. I'd go as far to say that calling it merely a "fake CVE" is being too charitable. That's how much this abuses a process that is (nominally) politically neutral and objective.
The package managers aren't the only thing PolyMC has been kicked out of. The user agent string it uses to fetch mod updates is now banned by CurseForge, so users have to change the string around. The API key they use so people can sign in to their Minecraft accounts has been mysteriously and silently deleted (allegedly, because a previous ousted maintainer owned it). Every single Minecraft-related Discord server has sent announcements fearmongering about the project, as well as respected figures in the community like KingBDogz, a Mojang developer, repeating the message that people should stop using it immediately "because he is promoting bigotry". Basically, everyone has done everything they can to screw over the project, all over allegations that it was "hijacked" by a "right-winger" for "malicious purposes". I get the sinking feeling that if the situation was reversed and it was instead a left-winger taking over to own all those Nazi chuds, people would instead be cheering them on (and any objections that the takeover now means they could install malicious files onto people's computers would just be dismissed as right-wing talking points). Just goes to show you who's truly in power.
InfoTeddy
2yr ago
It's literal brain cell death which is why so much of the medical emphasis is on identifying a stroke happening and quickly responding to reduce how many brain cells die from lack of blood flow.
That is... quite horrifying and it sounds like he shouldn't be even running for election and should instead be trying to recover as much as possible before trying to handle the stresses of political decision-making.
I don't disagree that there's a lot of porn on Twitter, but most of the porn is located on the site, not offsite. So while some might leave I can't think of a reason why all of them would leave as long as the porn they came to the site for is still there.
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