fiasco @ fiasco @possumpat.io

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2 yr. ago

The funny thing about asking, who watches the watchers? is that people seem to take that as license to not watch anything. But I'll give you an answer that's less glib than the question.

Overwork is arguably the biggest cause of political disengagement. When you're working two jobs and barely scraping by, you don't have time or energy to understand what's really going on. If you read the entire essay, Russel also points out that overwork pushes people to passive forms of leisure—he was writing a hundred-odd years ago, so he talked about the cinema and the radio. But the passivity of engagement with the world is much broader than that; it also causes passive engagement with world affairs, i.e., news as entertainment.

It should be all of us watching the watchers, but we don't have time or energy.

As for your first two questions, you're effectively conceding that industrial work is slavery.

That makes at least a little bit more sense... Not to imply it makes sense, it just makes a little bit more sense.

I remembered after posting, the children of 4chan were implying the fake sinking thing was some sort of insurance fraud. But that only works if you also take the ship out of service, since otherwise the insurance company will be left wondering, well where did this other ship come from?

But this is one thing at the heart of conspiracy theories: they don't actually think about how the world works. It's like, one of the big conspiracies on 4chan at the moment is ESG—environment, social, and corporate governance scores in investing. They think that this is a social engineering effort, as though Blackrock cares about anything other than money.

If you're curious what ESG is really about, it's a con to make stock-buying more palatable for millennials. But since the children of 4chan don't know anything about anything, it's gotta be Jewish social engineering.

Do you know what the deal is with that? I couldn't figure it out, and one of the problems with /x/ is that they assume you already know what's going on with their conspiracies.

The best part about Bayeux Tapestry memes is, the Bayeux Tapestry itself came pre-memed. For example, this section has a naked guy in the margin for, I'm pretty sure, absolutely no reason at all.

What else are they gonna put in their tailpipes?

We routinely take photos in other frequency ranges. It's easy enough to find infrared photographs, made easier since not only is there film that exposes IR, but digital cameras are naturally sensitive to it so you just need to change out some filters. But you know, astrophotography often uses different frequency ranges, since a lot of stellar phenomena emit different kinds of radiation.

The bigger question is, would an alien without eyes at all be aware of electromagnetic radiation? And conversely, what phenomena are there that would be obvious to aliens but we just don't know about, because out sensory organs don't predispose us to being aware of them?

Yeah I couldn't help myself, once I remembered that the stucco dick was from this episode.

I browsed 4chan /x/ earlier today, so here's where they are...

The obvious one relates to the fact that founding members of the Federal Reserve were on the Titanic, and it was intentionally sunk to (something incoherent about economics). The submarine was sunk for similar reasons.

The Titanic didn't sink, but it was some other vessel, and They had to sink the submarine so the truth wouldn't get out.

There are deep ocean aliens, and the sub had to sink to conceal that fact.

Those are the ones I could remember. In any case, it's always the Jews and the CIA.

Okay, so I'm reasonably neurotypical I guess, but I'm browsing All. And a neurotypical perspective may help, or maybe it won't. And I'll warn you in advance, this may be a bit harsh.

The first basic fact is that the agenda is set by the people who actually do the work (and to a lesser extent, the people who fund the work). The quoted post says the poster is not a developer. So what we're talking about here is "backseat driving," someone wanting to impose direction without providing either work or money. I don't use the term "impose" lightly; the quoted post accuses everyone else of not being open to discussion, of being narcissistic.

The other basic fact is, unless you're in the thick of it, you don't know what's really going on. There are usually reasons things are the way they are. Sometimes those reasons are bad, sometimes they're good. But particularly when we're talking about complex engineered systems, and doubly so when we're talking about computer software, even modest changes usually ripple out and have systemic effects, or require systemic reengineering.

But this is why advice usually isn't welcome, because an advice giver doesn't know the details of what they're advising on. Unless they begin by learning the problem inside and out, obviously, but that takes a ton of time and effort.

Finally, speaking as someone who knows programming very well, the gulf between "why don't you just do X" and the actual work required to do X, if X is even feasible and possible, is enormous. Furthermore, everything comes with tradeoffs, and someone suggesting X is unlikely to understand the tradeoffs, or the tradeoffs that have already been made, and how X might affect those.

All this said, yes sometimes suggestions are ignored or rejected because of ego. This is doubly true when someone is part of an institution, government for example, and wants to defend their turf or they don't wanna spend "political capital" on something outside their personal agenda. This is also true of open source software; if you really wanna see some gnarly shit, try and figure out why LibAV split off from ffmpeg.

If you want the real answer to the question, it is possible to be in charge. The danger with being in charge is that you become accountable for the things you've overlooked. You have to be able to survive your mistakes, then figure out how to avoid them in the future. Being in charge is incredibly taxing, but this is a choice we're all condemned to make: accept things more or less as they are, or put yourself on the line.

I have a bit more of a radical view of this...

Copyright has become a tool to enforce privatization of culture, which is a pretty modern take—and, obviously, it's just another example of the ongoing attempts to squeeze every last possible dollar out of everything and everyone. Culture is supposed to belong to us, it's supposed to be our culture.

Another way of looking at this is that absurd choice of word, "canon." This is a religious term, for what a particular religious establishment accepts as the Truth, from among all the spiritual and theological writings a particular religious tradition has produced. But why does the Pope have the right to choose which stories are True? And why does Disney have the right to choose which stories are True?

This is one of the subtler reasons that Star Trek is so much better: while there is still a Star Trek Canon, that canon was massively diversified by their spec script policy (back in the days that Star Trek was still worth watching).

Anyway, this is also why fanfiction is such a big thing.

Ah yeah, I know the type. In CS those tend to be a more malicious version of the pokémon trainer sorts. Their main goal is career advancement, and they figure that parasitizing grad students (and postdocs) is how they can get there.

It's like I said originally, academia has gone corporate, including the abusive middle managers.

Of course, they'd charge you $300 for having to make the effort.

It's been a while since I messed with it, but I'll try and give you my recollections that might be outdated.

First, GoG version, at the time at least, did not ship with the creation kit. So that sucks.

The big problem I think was the address library. Major version changes change the layout of the game's memory, which means something that directly addresses game data has to update constantly. When I was playing it about a year ago, that mod had not been updated. A bunch of more sophisticated stuff depends on that library, so it breaks a lot of dependencies.

SKSE itself works, and more basic SKSE mods like SkyUI work fine.

So I mean, the GoG version is playable. Personally I despise how much Steam has normalized intrusive DRM and basically refuse to use it. If you don't care, then you will probably have a better time with the Steam version.

They should just start posting rules. You know, screenshots of laws, photos of stop signs, warning labels...

Even apart from that, it implies that a sixth grader is not only a gay furry, but he has no problem letting his teacher know he's a gay furry.

I think not caring about being cool only amplifies preexisting coolness. An entitled boomer isn't gonna become cool just because they're even less self-conscious about their obnoxious opinions.

So also, not surprisingly, the Prophets/wormhole aliens are by far the weakest part of Deep Space Nine. Especially when it comes to shit like "Sacrifice of Angels" (DS9 6x06). Deus ex machina like the thasians showing up at the end of "Charlie X" is just two wrongs making a right, and it's one of two obvious endings for the misfit god story (the other one being "Devil's Due," TNG 4x13).

Taking the wormhole aliens seriously was just such a shame.

Sorry to hear that. What are they like?

Well let me tell you about the biggest disservice academia does to PhD students. Or at least some of them. But it's worth mentioning, my PhD is in computer science, so your mileage may vary.

So first, in my experience, there are two kinds of advisors. There are some who give their students a ton of latitude, and are genuinely interested in what they get up to. Then there are those who see grad students as pokémon, and the reason to catch 'em all is that it helps with grant funding. These professors set the agenda, and their offices have all the whips and yokes you could need for slave-driving.

The latter professors prepare grad students for the realities of academia. The former group mean well, but I can't help but feel they're trying to live vicariously through their students. Because they long for the freedom they once enjoyed.

Actual academia is an unending series of songs and dances for funding, interspersed with teaching undergrads who don't give a fuck. This is also why you almost certainly see a huge difference in professors' attitudes toward undergrads versus grads: they have hope for grad students.

As others have noted, I don't think you can bait any relevant information from them. And this works both ways: some people are okay with homosexuality (or whatever) in the abstract but "don't think it could happen to them," if you catch my meaning; other people, love for their relatives overcomes homophobia.

Incidentally, this was part of why Pride became what it is: since it's easier to hate Someone Else than your own family, coming out en masse forces people to confront homosexuality as a tangible rather than abstract thing, in the context of people they love.

I don't have any particular advice for you. I can only say that I don't regret having come out.