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17 days agodeleted by creator
HeyListenWatchOut
- 0 Posts
- 70 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: June 16th, 2023
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1·20 days agodeleted by creator
50·21 days agoWhen a company is using AI in place of a person, it’s not a sign of that they are “futuristic” or “forward-thinking…” It’s a sign they are cheap, chase fads, and make short-sighted decisions that are not designed to improve their relationship with their customer.
Anyone using some headless white-label monthly subscription version of ChatGPT in an attempt to save a nickel on their bottom line - even if it means making everything worse for the company, product, employees, and customers in every way possible - is probably someone you don’t want to do ANY kind of business with - whether you’re a contractor, customer, or client.
37·22 days agoThe democratization of technology is a double-edged sword.
For every improvement in UX and lowering of a once impassible barrier of entry, we seem to inevitably gain a massive number of “eXpErTs” who can suddenly stand upon the now much lower skill floor.
Shortly thereafter seems to be a destruction of the general reliability of whatever field these “eXpErTs” flood - usually a field which used to be inherently cryptic and had complex prerequisites just to begin operation within, let alone master.
Like… it makes me almost miss when “using a computer” meant you had to understand how to browse a directory in DOS…
Because at least then you literally couldn’t begin to operate in the field unless you could wrap your head around understanding the basics of syntax.
Now you can just have an entire legion of dullards misspell or misspeak 30% of a malformed question to some random free LLM that still has trouble telling you “how many Rs are in the word strawberry,” and have it confidently fart back out a wrong answer that they will then copy-paste into a paper or article which will then be added to the pile of growing misinformation currently stuffing a frighteningly expanding part of our collective knowledge base.
151·25 days agoExcept FOSS. Because if you can fork it, it cannot be enshittified… every time they attempt to, another fork can be made.
Favorite video about Pete is from Some More News back a few years ago just before Pete helped Biden consolidate all the fragmented neoliberal support he needed to suddenly turn the tide right before Super Tuesday that was otherwise resulting in Sanders gaining ground.
Pete is a weasel… a well-spoken one and perhaps once a decent dude… and even an ally in our country’s current dark moments… but Pete is NOT fit to lead when the left has a chance at any sort of power.
He will sell us all out for the rich donors who showed up for his wine cave campaign fundraiser. And trading Main Street voters for Wall Street voters is what REALLY has been what most helped Republicans win… at least since at least Reagan’s era.
14·28 days agoI don’t care what format someone uses as long as software I use supports it. I’d rather save as much bandwidth and support as many features as possible. Animated GIFs and JPEGs are literally ancient formats from the 90s at this point that are terribly optimized and so limited in their feature support. I want 120fps HDR animated images that can be bigger than 640x480 without playback being choppy and the file size being over 200MB.
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I’m afraid it’s worse than that.
Basically after FDR died, for as imperfect as he was… all the objective good he did was slowly whittled away by members of both parties - simply at differing rates.
With Truman put in as his VP after the DNC suggested replacing FDR’s first VP - Henry “I want to pass a civil rights bill in the 1940s” Wallace for their more “centrist” candidate, we dropped 2 atomic weapons on civilian cities.
Kennedy was the first real neoliberal in that he came from a dynastically wealthy family and successfully dropped the top marginal tax rate that FDR had helped set at 90% down to 60%… which helped create massive budget shortages about a decade later. LBJ got us into Vietnam. Carter was too nice to ever use the bully pulpit and also let his own personal Protestant work ethic dictate his own policy goals which he seemed to back with the idea that things like the oil crisis should be a burden that every day Americans shoulder rather than the massive giant multinational oil companies, and then after Reagan won 2x and Bush “my family worked with the Nazis” Sr. won a term afterward, Clinton pivoted the last remaining New Deal democrats to a 3rd way where they abandoned the working class for a more palatable version of Republicanism.
Bernie really could have been a turning point, but instead all that has happened is the accelerating worsening of all our lives alternating between the hands of the ultra rich who only do it slowly… and the hands of increasingly fascistic nakedly monstrous ultra rich ghouls and their goons.
I know this isn’t the point of your comment, but seeing “making sure your wife doesn’t get suspicious” reminded me that some people actually hide such things from their partner.
I find it a pity that some feel the need to hide their browsing habits from their S.O.
I feel lucky to have married a person who loves knowing all the depraved stuff I enjoy so they can incorporate it into what we enjoy together.
Honesty and communication are the bedrock of any relationship. I understand not sharing everything with every friend or family member… but if you can’t be honest regarding what you like with the person you literally decided to partner with for the rest of your life with whom to have sex… then who else in the world can you truly be honest with?
Gotta come clean - saw the header and the auto-TL;DR, and then commented based on the fact that the title and the bot only talked about the psychological aspects of Trump’s appeal as a candidate to shitheads.
Good to see the article covers the more tangible aspects of what brought about this new age of grifting wannabe despots, rather than just saying his supporters are all ghouls… which is probably also true to some degree… 😕
That’s exactly the type I want to see, too.
Just avoided their names specifically because there are a bunch of asshats on the fediverse who seem to take their mentions as a proverbial “bat signal” for spamming downvotes.
Demagogues like Trump are nothing new… and are only able to gain ground when a population is angered by the inaction of others in power to ease their real material suffering.
Medical debt, unaffordable housing, price-gouging, a lack of upward mobility or the ability to afford retirement or having children… all these things make it easy for demagogues to offer scapegoats.
Really - to beat Trump, we just need a firebrand populist who will try to pass legislation that helps the average American and - when unable to pass specific such legislation that would alleviate real tangible problems faced by the overwhelming majority of Americans - would use the bully pulpit to loudly push for the change they support are unable to enact - letting their voters know where to direct their anger and power.
Only genuine populism can soundly beat fake blustering demagoguing populism, because fake populism is designed to only emulate real genuine populism rather than offer up actual solutions to problems faced.
People want universal healthcare, they don’t want wars, they want to be able to take care of themselves and their family, they want the corrupt punished and justice for the citizen harmed by the giant multinational corporation’s greed driven pollution, waste, or lack of safety.
Fake populists only offer fake scapegoats and vague gestures. A real populist loudly and accurately points to the root of these issues.
You want to beat Trump? Then we need Biden to have been this his whole time in office… and to be this now.
The fact that the White House is focusing now more on pushing for anti-deepfake porn measures - only because billionaire Taylor Swift has been wronged by it - rather than making it so Americans can avoid losing their homes, jobs, or medical coverage - is ammo for lying demagogues to then disingenuously blame such problems on trans-kids and illegal immigrant workers.
There are multiple reasons idiots will vote for Trump, but I really get upset at the number of disconnected types who believe that the only reason people are not necessarily voting for Trump… but instead just not showing up to vote (when they ostensibly would for Biden were they to vote), is “because they are idiots.”
Instead what should be happening is introspection by the party of “not-fascists” trying to understand what they could do to galvanize their own voter base into volunteering and showing up and voting in record numbers.
They’re not going to convince any Trump voters to vote for Biden, but they really fucking need people who mistakenly think - as a result of lacking party action - that “their vote doesn’t matter” or that there’s not much really that they stand to tangibly gain by waiting in an 8 hour line in an otherwise deeply blue district where Republicans got rid of all the other polling locations.
Hell, I think at this point even just a few firebrand speeches from party leaders instead playing on loop the “gee shucks not all Republicans are bad” line would help… but really…
…If the “not-fascist” party’s only answer is, “I don’t know… umm… we reduced overdraft fees, stopped prices from getting even worse, and I think we can make it so you can still maybe get an abortion in blue states as long as you aren’t traveling through a route where you pass through a psycho-run red state?”
…then we are probably in a concerning position… because normal working people don’t leave their shitty job on a bus to then show up and stand all day in line for polls when they don’t feel there is much of a measurable and direct benefit to their lives.
I mean… do you see how many tech companies have laid off TENS OF THOUSANDS of employees in just the past couple of months?
How many of those people who were fired are disconnected generally from politics are going to just associate that “when Biden was president” was when they lost their job and will vote just based off that?!
I can assure you I have… and the real root of the problem is not the AMOUNT charged by fees… it’s the fact that there is ANY sort of fee that the bank is allowed to charge you on top of the fact that people don’t have enough money to keep an account solvent.
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Feels like I’m probably gonna get dogged on for this as some will just call it self-promotion, but I’ve been making “content” for a long long long time - I think my oldest personal completely original YouTube video is like 14 yrs old… and I used to just make it for the fun of it.
The problem came when my own stuff started getting bogus takedowns and copyright claims and other people sticking ads into my work or claiming that because 2 seconds of my 20-minute long video essay has a clip from a popular movie, I should get no revenue for the other 19 minutes and 58 seconds of detailed analysis… or that - because I chose to use the cartoon theme music from the 1980s animated show for the background music for a 2+ week project on a highly detailed transforming 3D model animation, I should get zero credit or possible revenue from it…
My choice was either to delete my shit to spite them and move it somewhere else or just give up…
Sometimes I said fuck them and deleted it. Other times I moved it somewhere else. Other times I shifted what I spent time on.
Now though, I honestly try to put stuff up not ONLY for the fun of it, but to try and make some sort of tiny bit of money.
My job contract with a company I had been with for 10+ years ended at the end of last year… and I got a new 6-month contract position at a different company… but it pays way less.
Being able to make content “just for the fun of it” is nice and easier when you’re young and still on your parents’ dime, but that’s kind of a luxury to some of us older folks who are now just also looking to secure some sort of income in an increasingly shitty world where there are no safety nets, and no job seems safe from elimination.
The worst part is that - over the years as Google and other companies have increased the requirements for being able to have any sort of monetization whatsoever, I went from making a couple hundred bucks a year to not even qualifying anymore to be a YouTube partner.
Now with 1,100+ subscribers and over 1.1 million views on all the stuff on my channel (some of which is honestly garbage or just the best versions of otherwise maybe lost media I do NOT own and so am NOT complaining about a lack of making revenue on), I still have yet to make enough from any of the stuff that IS my original work over that 14+ years to even have it be significant to show up as required on my taxes.
The insulin thing is big in itself, but it doesn’t still address the main issue. Shouldn’t your mom‘s cancer treatment be free? Shouldn’t your sister’s heart surgery not put her out of her home?
Weird how we can only make small changes and tiny little slivers of improvement to the overall problem - of a non-universal privatized healthcare system… instead of just fighting to get universal healthcare and yelling about it loudly from the bully pulpit in the same way that someone like Bernie Sanders did.
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