dreadgoat

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

I got this bug on desktop, running chrome, with no VPN.

This was, as most things like this are, just a pure dumb fuck-up by some guy putting things on prod without properly testing and staging. No need to put on any more tin foil hats than we already have, the incompetence is plenty reason enough to point and laugh.

The crux of this is whether Us vs Them is instinctual or learned. I don’t think we yet have a definitive answer, but certainly Us vs Them is so ingrained in our ways of life that removing it would be extraordinarily difficult.

Again, I may be excessively cynical, but my belief is that some people, maybe even most people, WILL take these mental pathways you describe no matter what, and the best we can do is provide distractions. Bread and circuses. At their best, these distractions channel our self-destructive tendencies into harmless oceans of impunity. At their worst, they are hijacked by ne’er-do-wells to transform the apathetic into frothing zealots of a cause they don’t even care to understand. It becomes the responsibility of those who are paying attention to design a system that is resistant to abuse.

Presuming I am wrong, that means that there is a path for society to eliminate competitiveness from its apparent nature. I agree that would lead us toward utopia, but I am very skeptical such a path exists, and that those who attempt to follow it will simply be eaten by the wolves they believe they can train.

I basically agree, but I think we should also think about this in a solution-oriented way at a large scale, beyond just personally opening one’s own eyes.

Tribalism is part of our nature. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, and it’s fun. It makes us feel good to belong. The sports analogy is frequently brought up and is the example of tribalism being leveraged for entertainment and social bonding. It’s a clever way to us to short-circuit our instinct for tribal warfare and use it for something constructive and fun instead of destructive and tragic.

Politicians and media outlets have started using this insidiously for their own powergames. Maybe this is too cynical, but it seems to me that the circus has been poisoned. You hear about all these people who “aren’t into politics” but will repeat their CNN and Fox soundbytes. There’s nothing terribly wrong with being personally apathetic about politics, in fact that’s the norm for those people currently benefitting the most from existing policy, but it’s terribly dishonest and destructive to lure such people into the political arena when they have no sincere interest in the impact of their political decisions, but a few powerful people benefit and countless powerless people suffer.

How do we reclaim our circus? Do we really just need more ESPN and less CNN? Can we punish politicians and news sources for the pervasion and perversion of information as infotainment? Can we educate people to source their identity from their family and culture instead of from their senator?

Then it should be obvious to you that inflaming those emotions isn’t a productive way to engage. What point are you making other than, “yeah, he’s a moron! fuck him!” Good for you?

I’ve just been on the internet a long time and pride myself on writing with precision. I am a rather bot-like writer, Narrrz.

Hijacking to point out to both the dumb lefty lemmies and the dumb righty lemmies that this is an amazing case study in the failure of people to separate their culture from their politics. I apologize for using you as a prop, vector_zero, but you signed up in this thread so I assume it’s all good?

Here we have a person who believes that are right wing, but lives in a decidedly left wing location. What examples do they provide to demonstrate their right-winged-ness? Gun culture, cooking, sewing, quilting, home projects. Note the absolute lack of policy. When pressed about actual politics further in the thread, we get things like “yeah we need to fix gun violence, healthcare, and the economy, but I don’t think any of the solutions I’ve heard will work.” Essentially we have here a person who is completely disengaged from the reality of politics, but places high value on their culture and identity, having confused one for the other in the process.

This is all reinforced by the fact that this person lived in left wing area and is active here on a left wing website, where their self-identification as “right wing” earns them demonization, along with some doomed attempts at political discourse. Since vector_zero only really cares about their identity and culture, the demonization is all they notice, internalize, and respond to. It provides a pressure that actually validates and encourages their perceived need to stand up for and defend their cultural values. The political discourse is entirely ignored because vector_zero does not actually care about or understand politics. Meanwhile, the attacking lefties are blind to this miscommunication, characterizing it as “convenient dismissal of the real issues.” No, it’s not convenient dismissal, it’s literally a disability: Our supposed “right wing” friend actually does not have the capacity to see beyond their shoelaces and understand how their emotional reaction to being personally attacked translates into large-scale impact for the rest of the world. So they go out and vote red (or not, since they are “powerless”) without any understanding of what the consequences may be.

Perhaps the lefties as well are so blind to the importance of identity and culture that they suffer from the same “convenient dismissal” of the content of the discussion that vector_zero values. That’s harder to say, but it’s an interesting supposition. If that is the case, then we’re doomed to go around in circles and continue beating each other until morale improves. But maybe not, maybe one or the other can recognize the tragedy for what it is and learn how to engage with it in a more constructive way.

It’s painfully obvious to me that everyone involved here actually wants the same things, and there’s a very clear education plan to get us all together on the same track. vector_zero simply needs to be made aware that left wing culture and identity is actually almost the same as right wing culture and identity. That absolutely nothing of themselves would be lost or reduced by voting for a democrat every once in a while. The difference is the policies, and since vector_zero doesn’t actually understand or care about those, there isn’t really any reason for them to hold up the label of “right wing.”

You can just be a guy who likes guns, simple living, enjoying the day-to-day with the wife, and wants to retire one day.

Signed: A guy who also likes guns, simple living, enjoying the day-to-day with the wife, and wants to retire one day, but also votes democrat every time because I don’t want anybody else to get hurt along the way.

You are underestimating the type of people this law is targeting. Nobody who is just stressed out is going to be forced into an institution (although I agree the law should be carefully written to guarantee that). This is meant to get people who are full-on batshit insane off the streets and in an environment where they at least have a CHANCE of getting sorted out.

For example, I have a friend who is psychotic. No, I’m not misusing the word or exaggerating, this is a person who is sincerely and obviously psychotic, diagnosed as such by a psychiatrist, sees and hears things that are not there, believes that the government is all rape-demons from hell that are out to harvest our sanity.
When unmedicated, that is.
Once medicated, she is like “holy shit clarity thank god, keep giving me the medicine.” But if there’s ever a lapse, we go right back to the rape-demons from hell trying to force pills down her throat and the only way to save her is to, essentially, violate her by being the rape-demon from hell that forces pills down her throat. Which is of course very illegal but people care enough about her to do it anyway.

It would be very nice for it to NOT be illegal to save people from the rape-demons from hell, to have a support system in place aside from what is basically a secret cabal of friends and family as a safety net should this person end up somewhere alone and unable to access their meds.

That’s the malicious banana. Everything happens for a reason, but that doesn’t mean it’s reasonable

I actually love this one, because it’s technically correct but not in the way people who use it mean, so you can turn it around easily.

Yes, you did get cancer for a reason. Because you insisted on maintaining your suntan every winter. Or perhaps merely because you pissed off the wrong banana.

Excuse me but you are interrupting my dopamine flow. Your response appears to be neither a meme, rage bait, justice boner, nor even a pun. I hope you learn from this experience and do better.

Disclaimer that I am completely talking out of my ass and speculating, but I have a personal theory.

COVID has been around long enough to have two interesting effects.

1. Almost everyone has gotten it by now. Some of us got it really bad, and/or acquired long-term secondary conditions. Some of this likely caused impaired cognitive function.
2. Kids had their school schedules totally fucked up for years, and those kids are now the young teens on the internet. Young teens on the internet are already by default a disruptive demographic, but now add the effect of years of desocialization and missed education.

One of my favorite Redditisms was picking out incredibly obvious sarcasm with massive downvotes. Bonus points if replied to with a huge angry essay.

And due to the voting patterns, I learned to be suspicious of my own comments that were highly upvoted. I started to see it as a bad smell. My best work was the controversial stuff.

Instead of removing two instances of S and replacing both with an X, you could simply remove the first S and replace it with a K. This would provide a functionally identical output with less code changes, and would preserve arity. Provide comments explaining the reason for the unintuitive implementation of the “fixes” interface so that future maintainers don’t mistakenly rewrite it. Pull request rejected.

I think this one is pretty confined to my region (southwestern USA) but we use Otto as the moniker of a generic stupid person too, but probably for a different reason: Otto is Oblivious to the Obvious

Gandalf isn’t a superhero because he’s more like an angel. He played a part in the creation of the world, and is entirely inhuman. He’s a primordial spirit masquerading in a corporeal form.

Luke Skywalker is much closer to a superhero because he’s a mortal man who was inadvertently blessed with incredibly rare powers and chooses to use them for good.

The Johnston & Murphy XC4 line has become my go-to. They are not cheap, and the selection is limited, but the construction and versatility can’t be beat.

I’ve had my oldest pair for over 4 years, with no functional degradation at all, and minimal signs of wear (minor creasing in the leather, hardly worth mentioning). They’re casual and comfortable enough for everyday wear, and stylish enough for business events. Easily the best value in a shoe I’ve ever gotten.

Looking at each piece in isolation it’s hard to see the real world value. You have to put it all together. Let’s do the airline ticket example.

Real world today, the information involved in purchasing a ticket is controlled by three parties: The customer, the airline, and the financial institute (assuming you didn’t walk up and pay cash). Anybody involved here screw up or be malicious. You lost your ticket. The airline had a database malfunction. The bank/creditor improperly recorded the transaction. All parties are aware of these potential failures, so there are contingencies in place in case of a missing ticket, a ticket that can’t be found the system, a bad or missing financial transaction. But these backup plans also open the door to fraud, so there need to be even more plans on top of the backups: How to verify the integrity of a seemingly real ticket, protocol for re-verifying a financial event, etc.

It’s simple because it’s familiar, but it’s really ridiculously complicated and error prone.

Let’s introduce NFTs and blockchain.
You buy the airline ticket and the following things happen:
The bank performs the transaction and records it to the blockchain, which is decentralized and owned by no one, so it is verified by all parties before anything else happens. Bank errors are now impossible.
You and the airline perform a mutual authentication, which generates an NFT proving existence of the ticket and attaches it to your identity. From your perspective, this would be unlocking your phone and clicking “approve.”

Now you approach the airport kiosk and there’s a problem.
Airline has no record of purchase - well, the blockchain does, so it’s their fuck up and they have no reasonable argument. You win.
Airline can’t match your ticket to their database - You show them your NFTicket, which their system verifies is a valid, unspoofable, immutable ticket for what you say it is. Again, it’s their fuck up and they have no reasonable argument. You win.
Conversely, you say you have a ticket for today, they say it’s for tomorrow. You inspect the ticket, it is in fact for tomorrow. You fucked up, no further argument.

The only way any of this goes wrong is one of the following:
Multiple forms of your identification are stolen - phone, password, biometrics. Obviously a lot harder than nabbing a CC number.
Multiple parties lose their records at the same time. Possible but unlikely.
State-level villains sabotage the entire system. Possible, sure, but this is an apocalypse-level event and probably an act of war.

It’s effectively impossible for someone to steal or fake a ticket or transaction in this system, and because of that, anybody who has receipts is automatically proven right and you don’t need to jump through any more hoops or threaten to sue anybody. It’s complex behind the scenes but it makes life for businesses and consumers braindead simple. There are so many layers of trust in action that no individual party can reasonably claim something did or did not happen just because THEY messed up.

It’s not the cryptocurrency itself that prevents fraud, it’s the surrounding technologies such as blockchains and NFTs.

Using NFT to own the address to a PNG is hilariously stupid and worthless, but what it’s actually great for is receipts. If I buy a donut and get an NFT proving that I now own the donut (along with metadata about where and when I purchased the donut) and months later I am on trial for murder, I can prove to the court with absolute mathematical certainty that I couldn’t have killed anyone at that time because I was eating a donut halfway across town.

Using blockchain similarly is great for proving your transaction history. Maybe I somehow faked that NFT about the donut? Well, I couldn’t have, because it was months ago and blockchain history is cryptographically impossible to spoof.

These are obviously contrived examples, but when applied at scale it becomes an extremely powerful way to verify truth. Yes, I did in fact buy those tickets, here’s my NFT, now let me on the plane. No, I did not spend $3000 on knock-off accessories, here is my blockchain. The odds of someone being able to fake these is extremely low.

But, again, this will never come into practice, at least not in the near future. As @beefcat pointed out, implementing these systems would be expensive for the established financial institutions, and would present new challenges for them to create new processes for handling. An awful lot of work to create something that is stronger and safer when there is little motivation for them to do so.

Technology rarely advances for reasons that benefit the majority. It advances to make a few people rich, kill people very efficiently, or to increase profit margins on porn sales (see item 1, I guess).

If you think about the really good applications of things like crypto, NFTs, blockchain, etc., you quickly realize that they are things that aren’t marketable or profitable for the entities that would need to implement them. If all the banks and credit companies bought into blockchain, transaction fraud and identity theft would disappear overnight… but what would THEY get out of it? The only way it’s ever going to happen is with coordinated government mandates, and nobody running for office has the faintest idea of what crypto tech is other than “dumb way for the nouveau riche to waste their money”

It comes down to whether the owners have a spine.

4chan runs ads. Pornhub runs ads. They have most certainly said goodbye to a large number of advertisers who were uncomfortable with the content they host.