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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 22nd, 2023

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  • I was absolutely on a version of the alt-right pipeline a decade ago. I was raised by far-right, Mike Johnson-style “Christians,” so I was already pretty far down that path before I was drawn into any pipeline.

    Luckily, I ended up on a weird libertarian branch of the pipeline (LearnLiberty rather than Prager U), and somehow the YouTube algorithm steered me into Veritasium’s content on climate change, and clips from Adam Ruins Everything. It sounds a bit crazy, but those things started opening my eyes and expanding my worldview. Probably didn’t hurt that my favorite TV show at the time was Leverage, which had plenty of its own anti-corporate-grifting themes.

    Eventually, I realized that the Libertarian utopia doesn’t work because greed is an unlimited resource, and that makes regulation important.

    Of course, there were other things that helped me escape my upbringing and the alt-right pipeline during gamergate (I wasn’t into gaming at the time, so that probably helped), but looking back and seeing how easily I could have ended up being a January 6 insurrectionist. I’m so thankful for all the little things that nudged me out of that worldview, and helped me see reality.

    I wish there was an easy way to show young guys that the people they are listening to are liars and grifters who are manipulating young men into believing that their real pain is somehow the fault of women. But if I look at my own journey, it was a thousand little nudges. I didn’t change overnight, but there was a day during the 2016 election cycle that I remember realizing that even though I had spent almost 8 years despising Obama, that he had been an alright president - especially compared to the Republican nominee, Trump.


  • Yeah, check lists in Notes could really use some improvement for sure. Honestly, just now looking through the Github for the Android Nextcloud Notes app it looks like there’s a good deal of technical debt that has been stacking up over time from trying to bring more modern features to what started as a minimal text-only notes app.

    There is a way to enable “grid view” in the app settings for the more post-it view that shows the first part of the contents, but doesn’t seem to show on notes with markdown formatting, so anything with a list doesn’t show a preview.




  • I “broke” about 8pm ET to donate to Ukraine. I know we were boycotting Visa/Mastercard too, but after yesterday’s shitshow I felt like solidarity was worth more than my boycott.

    Otherwise, it was fine. I’ve already been heavily limiting my spending since the inauguration anyway, after admittedly overspending at the end of the Biden term to prep for impending tariffs.



  • Another thing it does is helps people realize what power they have, even if one day of boycotting has zero impact on the economy or businesses. It gets those people who are participating started taking action, and thinking about their actions in the context of politics.

    It’s a very easy first step, and if people find that they can do a day, maybe they’ll be okay with trying a week next time, or maybe showing up at a town hall seems easier. This is arguably more about getting people involved in the movement than actually sticking it to the corporations/oligarchy. That will come. But asking people who live paycheck to paycheck to boycott corporations for more than 2 weeks would be a huge ask without building up to it first.




  • While I personally agree with your sentiment, and much prefer arch to debian for my own systems, there is one way where debian can be more stable. When projects release software with bugs I usually have to deal with those on Arch, even if someone else has already submitted the bug reports upstream and they are already being worked on. There are often periods of a couple of weeks where something is broken - usually nothing big enough to be more than a minor annoyance that I can work around. Admittedly, I could just stop doing updates when everything seems to be working, to stay in a more stable state, but debian is a bit more broadly and thoroughly tested. Although the downside is that when upstream bugs do slip through into debian, they tend to stay there longer than they do on arch. That said, most of those bugs wouldn’t get fixed as fast upstream if not for rolling distro users testing things and finding bugs before buggy releases get to non-rolling “stable” distros.


  • Absolutely agree. I’m only talking about the fleeing the country part. Those of us who can stay are going to have to put in a lot of work, speaking out against fascism, protecting those who cannot flee, and being generally rebellious against tyranny.

    If anything those of us who happen to not be directly in their crosshairs have a greater responsibility to speak out for the groups that are going to be targeted, because it could quickly get to a point where it’s dangerous for those marginalized people to be as vocal. We cannot leave the most vulnerable to fight alone for their right to exist.


  • Technically it’s not a full 55% of my countrymen, just 55% of the ones who bothered to vote. I’ll admit that’s not really a meaningful distinction though. Unfortunately, there’s also more of us who want to leave than the rest of the world can reasonably handle. I hope as many marginalized people can get out, because it’s going to be bad, especially for them. But those, like me, who are unlikely to be directly targeted due simply to being lucky enough to be born straight, white, men should probably leave those limited seats for those who truly need to leave.



  • While I’m not the person you replied to and don’t know what their argument would be, I’ll take a shot at giving my own answer. In many cases when people post examples of AI giving unhelpful or bad information, there’s often someone who runs off to their favorite LLM to see if it gives a better result, and it usually does, so it gets treated like user error for using the wrong LLM or not wording the prompt properly. When in other examples that person’s favorite LLM which gave the correct answer this time, is the bad example hallucinating or mixing unrelated concepts, and other people are in the comments promoting other LLMs that gave them a good reply this time. None of the LLMs are actually trustworthy consistently enough to be trusted alone, and you won’t really know what answer is trustworthy unless you ask several LLMs and then go research the topic on your own anyway to figure out which answer is the most correct. It’s a valid point that ChatGPT got the answer more right than Gemini this time, but it’s somewhat useless to know that because other times ChatGPT is the one hallucinating wildly, and Gemini has the right answer, but since they’ve all been wrong before who do you trust.

    LLMs are like asking an arrogant person who thinks they know everything, who rather than admitting what they don’t know, will pull an answer out of their butt, and while it might be a logical answer, it isn’t based in reality, and may still be wildly wrong. If you already mostly know the answer, maybe asking the arrogant person works, because you already know enough to know if they are speaking from their actual knowledge or making up an answer, but if you don’t already have knowledge on a topic, you won’t know whether the arrogant person is giving useful information or not.