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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • I’m not surprised. I know people who don’t even know what an ethernet cable is. I’ve worked enough IT to realize that a tangled mess of 6 cables can be as horrifying as a Predator to people. It doesn’t help that everything is slowly going to POE, POE+ and even ++ now so it’s doubling as power as well. In analog video days I could look at the back of a random device and instantly figure out it’s purpose. That’s rapidly becoming a rarity. For a worrisome section of the population, plugging in an ethernet cable is the equivalent of building a table or performing a back flip.

    And when it comes to hacking, good god nobody knows anything. I remember we had a dozen students in high school (around 2000ish?) get suspended for “hacking” and really it was just that a section of the student body found a network storage location without any password protection and were using it as a flash drive on school grounds. Literally they just suspended anybody who signed their name on the homework assignments stored there.

    The real crime was that drive had lunch pins for all the accounts in plain text to run their system, without a password!




  • Well the entity system adds an entirely new branch of research, that works separately from workbenches. To make fast progress in the darker research you need mutliple sources of dark research in the form of trapped entities. A LOT can go into the containment of some of these entities, basically making sure you have a room that can actually hold some of this stuff. So from there I actually prefer the research loop to the main method. Not only that it doesn’t take AN ENTIRE PAWN’S DAY to actually perform. I haven’t caught anything SUPER nasty yet, but I see the pieces that will require a supermax of entity containment. I kinda feel like I could forgo research and move direct into the darker research. Make an army of ghouls.

    Honestly I feel like it’s definitely bigger than the royalty DLC, and I’m only about five hours in.


  • No, I think the comic is making you think about the system at large. It’s not the anchors that are the problem. Anybody in any position can be where she is.

    You could be getting tons of money… not to produce anything or to improve the world, but to maintain power for an upper echelon. It could be a lawyer, it could be an influencer, it could be a pundit, a politician, a programmer, a security guard, a military contractor. There’s this idea that a large paycheck is because you deserve it, because you are providing what’s needed. In reality a high paycheck can be given to you because you’re part of a problem that someone wants you to maintain.


  • I sincerely doubt they give a shit about it.

    I mean, they definitely won’t give a shit if you don’t vote. If anything it simplifies their math. If you don’t show up if you’re mad or sad you sure as hell won’t show up if you’re glad. So you can be safely ignored.

    Biden already gives a shit about ~20% uncommitted in Minnesota, ~10% uncommitted in Michigan in the last primaries. nope, uncommitted didn’t win but they’re freaking out high ranking Democrats. There are more uncommitted than the percentage he won by in some of these states. They didn’t win but now a LOT more politicians are struggling to dismiss Palestine. Hell Pelosi was out and out accusing protestors of being shills for China and Russia last week.

    Democrats are currently avoiding college campuses for appearances because they realize how unpopular this war in Gaza is.

    showing that there is a voting population that is unhappy carries weight, and it sticks around for years to come. It’s a record just like the census.


  • I respect that, but you can still make that known at the polls with write-in, with third party, or just scrawling “fuck all y’all” over the ballot.

    Even if it doesn’t lead to someone winning, every one of the above does get recorded. Every year mickey mouse gets a fraction of the vote, and lets be real, if Mickey ever got 5% of the vote, every candidate would be announcing their runs at Disney World with the hope they could attract just half that group.

    If you do nothing at the polls, everyone will assume you don’t care and don’t care back.

    If you do something at the polls, that doesn’t help either party, then the two other parties might actually be incentivized to get your vote doing things you DO care about. You at least show up, so you are someone they should care about.

    If for no other reason, it’s a record of someone flipping the bird to everyone in power, a small act of defiance that can’t make it back to you because voting is anonymous. If you’re really that powerless the process should only take 5 minutes because the lines to the polls will be short.

    vote vote vote. even if it’s “none of the above”


  • Perhaps the main use for technology is increasing the amount of inequality society can tolerate without collapse. I can’t fix inequality – that just seems to be what the humans want.

    However by investing in surveillance technology, computer vision, and AI I could perhaps help our society to bear unbounded amounts of inequality indefinitely, without collapse. Social collapse is a less-than-zero-sum game, whereas an unequal society is still generally more-than-zero-sum. So I posit that the latter is objectively better.

    … Are you suggesting that we increase inequality to make the world better? Like we need an overlord, be it robot or human, and the rest of the population needs to be placated, worked to the bone, and easily replaced?

    I gotta assume I am just vastly misunderstanding something in this argument, but I cannot for the life of me figure out what it is. Is it just sarcastic?


  • I mean, the sad part is that there’s really no other place guys and gals mix besides work or school. Once you graduate it’s just work that remains. I don’t even mean romantically either. I think it’s hand in hand with the loneliness epidemic everyone keeps talking about. Where do you meet new people? Women can be so rare in some men’s lives that to just say “ask if they like you” almost implies that they should ask every woman which both sides know is not what should be happening.

    Ideally you would be mixing with strangers at a pub or something where if you put your foot in your mouth and somebody says no to friendship/partnership you both go your separate ways and no harm no foul, you probably won’t even run into each other for days/weeks, but now everything is just shitty.

    • Clubs are too loud to talk at, so while you might be adjacent to a bunch of new people you won’t be with any new people.

    • Bars work somewhat decent, people are friendly, the counter is where strangers mix. It does require you to imbibe a steady stream of booze though. You’ll also have to jump around until you find one that you like. Same thing with smoking areas, smokers are crazy friendly, asking for a light is a great ice breaker. I actually used to carry a lighter just for this reason, and I never even smoked. Still a terrible habit to adopt to get friends though.

    • Any speed-friending or dating events/sites are just crawling with cringey people (I once went to one and had someone try to sell me a timeshare)

    • Everything has gone up in price, which sucks because now you go to an event and have a pressure to make it worth the money which just adds to the shittiness of the night.

    • The most reliable place people hang with strangers is the internet, but even then it’s not a conversation. It’s letters and pen pals.

    Way too many people just have work left to meet people and that’s not exactly a great place to pursue a relationship because careers cause way to many tripwires. A foot in the mouth brings in HR. Someone gets promoted and now there’s a power dynamic. Yes it’s inherently riskier to pursue people there. I think guys complain about it more just because they’re more isolated and deal with it more.

    I spent a lot of time when I graduated trying to find somewhere where I could find people and I finally landed on the convention scene and even met my wife there, but it took almost 5 years of leaving my house, trial and error, lots of events, and some truly boring expensive nights.



  • Oh it’s easy, they just googled “Roland voice lines” and he sounds like a perfect role for Kevin heart.

    Could he pull off the borderlands 2 Roland intro? I don’t think so, but I’ve been surprised before.

    What really has me saddened is the whole pisswater gully bit. Tiny Tina is a native of pandora, Roland and Lilith are not (to my knowledge). So if anything, the roles should have been entirely reversed because:

    1. It makes more sense.

    2. It’s way funnier.

    Which means they’re messing with backstory of the characters to match… nothing. Because it doesn’t seem to make the writing better, and it differs from the original. It would also match Tiny Tina’s character so much better and mitigate the annoying whiny child part of the character that is just SHINING through this trailer.


  • point #1

    No, it wasn’t. We didn’t keep the secret. USSR successfully stole secrets. They also knew we were up to an atomic bomb. I don’t know why you think they didn’t.

    Point #2

    Imagine if someone told you that Europeans never went back to the New World after Columbus.

    That would be ridiculous because there was good free unclaimed land. While it’s never explicitly said, free unclaimed land requires oxygen, food, and water. Otherwise it’s not land you can live on, it’s land you can work on while someone keeps you alive.

    We should have the Moon setup like it was in the Sam Rockwell movie: Moon by now.

    Why? In the arctic we can measure the weather of the poles, study long term isolation of humans. We don’t need to provide water or air, transportation is cheap compared to the moon. The marianas trench allows us to study formation of the earth, genetics of crazy offshoots of earth biology. Evacuation procedure is UP, taking hours. Moon trip is 6 days round trip, can’t be cancelled or evacuated. Both are drops in the bucket in price vs the moon.

    With the moon you can… well what? A telescope could be awesome but if you’re going that far you could also just drop one off at a Lagrange point of the earth. Mining sounds great until you realize that bringing the resources home require either an entire manufacturing hub on the moon to launch resources at earth. You won’t see returns for decades, any fuck up could ruin it all. Telescopes are unmanned, so drop it somewhere and it lasts as long as it lasts.

    I believe the moon landing was faked.

    • The USSR acknowledged that we made it, there’s no reason for them to lie.

    • We plopped retroreflectors on the moon, so you can shoot lasers at them and bounce them back.

    • multiple groups were able to track the missions via radio transmissions, which isn’t someone saying “oh look they said they’re in space so they must be” It’s mutiple locations saying. “I’m recieving this signal from this direction at this time. Judging from all this data, they’re halfway to the moon.”

    • Why would we lie about it? If it’s about stealing the money that went into it we already have 60% of the pentagon budget unaccounted for. If it’s about deceiving the soviets how could we possibly trick them? If it’s about raising nationalism why not pull an FDR and minimize poverty?

    just… no. If you want to push this then you need some hard evidence. You’re the one making the extraordinary claim.

    As an aside, do you also think the James Webb telescope fake? That is as nuts as the moon landing, and is still friggin THERE.







  • It’s because a person can crank out a deep fake in 3 hours, and a crappy one in one. It never cropped up because… well lets be real it was a couple of weirdos that were doing it, unless it bubbles up from the dark corners of the internet you risk the Streisand effect by bringing attention to it.

    AI can crank out 40 in a minute. 7200 in three hours. That’s an entirely different beast. The sheer mass and volume ramps up the odds of any image bubbling up from the dark corners of the web falling into the limelight and now this problem that wasn’t big enough to merit thought is rearing up it’s ugly head right in front of us.

    You can generate unique pictures of Taylor Swift faster than even Taylor swift can generate pictures of Taylor Swift. Within one hour of Taylor swift being seen with a man (and you have enough images of the man) you can create a dozen images of her on a date with that man and attempt to sell them to paparazzi.

    The problem is volume. Just like how email made everyone connected and allowed the Nigerian Prince scandal to occur.


  • Yeah, there is a large fixation on whether he did or did not pull the trigger and I genuinely feel like that’s not the straw that breaks the camel’s back, because ultimately he was told it was a clear gun.

    What matters is:

    • Did he know that there were serious concerns about gun safety on set?

    • Did he use his star power/producer role to silence those concerns?

    • Did he retaliate against people who raised those concerns?

    If he did any of those three things, then you have a rapidly strengthening case that he knowingly endangered the crew, and he should have known NOT to have aimed that gun at anybody. You made that gun unsafe and then the gun went off in your hands because you reaped what you sowed.