Sailor Sega Saturn @ sailor_sega_saturn @awful.systems

I am the journeyer from the valley of the dead Sega consoles. With the bles

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2 yr. ago

Relevant political cartoon (though I feel gross after looking at it)

Yeah, it's a lot easier to think of a potentially interesting premise than it is to sit down and actually write it out. Also if I'm gonna write something it'll be something I think is interesting rather than a prompt.

Writing Prompts:

• Pokemon and Digimon are both real and they are at war.
• Fractals are alive and they hate us
• A woman explores beyond the event horizon of a black hole and it's just very hot and cramped and boring and not at all pleasant
• A company starts a time mine where they mine causality but they didn't think about sustainability

OK OK you have a point, I hate all of these and I wrote them.

Yeah just saw that. It's messed up.

I told my job a couple weeks ago that I'm planning to move out of the US. They need me more than I need them so they might actually help with that; but even if a transfer works out I intend to get out this year one way or another, even if it means a study visa instead of a job.

Even if things magically turn around like some people think my mind is set. Irreversable damage has already been done in my mind. I said in another comment that I feel like a stranger in America now (this is, in a weird sense, kind of a freeing feeling).

Yeah I already have a lot of non-US stocks, and next week I'm going to rebalance to make them the majority.

I'm not a finance person. My uncle who's in the world of international corporate law thinks things will be fine so maybe I'm being a bit cautious but the way I see it there are a few big issues:

• The US government is trying it's best to implode itself.
• There is a brain-drain effect (or heck, a worker-drain effect in general), it will pick up as things get worse.
• The US government is becoming much more isolationist and detached from the global economy.
• There is a small but real chance that the US government will start one or more major wars over the next decade

All of this also increases the risk of "black swan" events like pandemics, hacks, the US "investing" all the "savings" they "found" into cryptocurrency schemes, large-scale unrest, or god knows what else.

A lot of the reporting is using kids gloves instead of calling out the thinly veiled threats (god our media sucks), but anyone who can connect dots and read the tariffs + greenland + canada 51st state + panama + gulf of mexico news should be able to see Trump's hawkish expansionist dreams pretty easily.

Is this a matter of not following the news, poor critical thinking, or just so much stuff hitting the fan that it's hard to keep up?

So about that...

It is quite the feeling seeing the federal government do their best to erase and discriminate against me and other trans people so openly and flagrantly and suddenly. Can't really put it into words easily. I now feel like a stranger in my own country.

r.e. incompetence look at #9 that I just added :D (I guess I should cut it off there and start collecting stuff for a new comment next week)

US government tech hellscape roundup part the third (ugh):

1. Elon Musk jokes(?) that the government doesn't use SQL ??? (source, note that his tweet has an ableist slur). I don't even know what to think about this. Is it supposed to be funny or something? Does he actually believe it?
2. Article: Elon Musk’s A.I.-Fuelled War on Human Agency -- People here probably already knew all this; but one of the ways the admin thinks they can fire everyone is by replacing people with AI / automating everything. Some of the social media responses from federal workers are pretty great:

   Really excited to see AI put on some waders and unclog a beaver dam from a water structure for me.

   If I've learned anything from all this it's about how unfathomably based cool a lot of federal workers are.
3. The less fascist / cowed parts of the infosec industry are currently raising the alarm about how insecure this all is. A representative social media post from Gossi The Dog

   I definitely recommend posting about what is happening in the US on LinkedIn as you will quickly learn many of the largest security vendors are staffed by people who have no interest in protecting people, while posting with their employers names.

4. Some federal workers have been fired via emails calling them [EmployeeFirstName].

Edit:

5. Elon Musk The US State Department plans to buy $400m worth of armored Cybertrucks from Elon Musk (nytimes) (Edit: may have been ordered under Biden's administration)
6. dogegov has been updated. Mostly just with more useless baby's first website materials; but they promise a "comprehensive, government-wide org chart" and are hiring "software engineers, InfoSec engineers, and other technology professionals". Aside: I already found two three minor website bugs despite not really looking for them and the website being tiny. But that can't be right... they're IT professionals while I'm DEI.
7. Find replace is so hard :( and that's why the government writes about "gay and rights" to avoid saying the... the... the forbidden t-word of which I dare not speak
8. So about how I said dogegov gives baby's first website vibes; it's database was left world writable lol
9. dogegov shares classified information
10. Classic Musk "humor": a "tech support" T-shirt to allude to all of this. The dude really likes custom T-shirts (which to be fair custom t-shirts can be awesome when they're less bad)

Holy smokes Jeeps will reportedly show ads while you are freaking driving:

Imagine pulling up to a red light, checking your GPS for directions, and suddenly, the entire screen is hijacked by an ad. That’s the reality for some Stellantis owners. Instead of seamless functionality, drivers are now forced to manually close out of ads just to access basic vehicle functions.

One Jeep 4xe owner recently shared their frustration on an online forum, detailing how these pop-ups disrupt the driving experience. Stellantis, responding through their “JeepCares” representative, confirmed that these ads are part of the contractual agreement with SiriusXM and suggested that users simply tap the “X” to dismiss them.

"Listen guys, if you don't want me stabbing you you simply have to ask nicely every time, and also I'm trying real hard to reduce the rate of stabbing incidents so in a way I'm the victim here."

Reading around it sounds like modern cars can be user-hostile in general, and this might not be new; so I'm sure glad I have one from the ancient times of 2012. It has a tiny unobtrusive screen which does nothing but show my music, the odometer, the backup camera, any warnings, and the Hatsune Miku wallpaper I loaded into it.

go to linkedin and post the first thing you see (that provokes a reaction).

Why would you do this to me?

Well as they promised Google Maps has finally fallen. It now shows "Gulf of America" and nothing else to US users. I suspect someone outside the US will be shown both the real name and Gulf of America. Denali is still labeled as Denali... for now.

Disorganize the world's information and make it universally inaccessible and stupid.

One more year of controversial Gemini sports ads and it will officially be a tradition!

Reading books in US high school was an exercise in frustration. There weren't many books assigned, and not a lot of them vibed with me. Most of my classmates did the minimum reading they could get away with (and this was before cellphones were everywhere).

Also I once read through the entirety of the Lord of the Flies before the first quiz on it and so got a quiz answer wrong because I got mixed up due to remembering stuff that happened later in the book which I'm still bitter about.

Fixed the graphic for them:

Also Google is no longer woke, so not too much equality: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-scraps-diversity-hiring-goals-002553150.html

Mission accomplished or whatever I guess.

Somewhat related I was thinking about how different this blog post from a DOGE "employee" reads during Elon Musks coup attempt: https://vinay.sh/i-am-rich-and-have-no-idea-what-to-do-with-my-life/ -- it was discussed here but no one really knew what was coming at the time.

There's also a youtube video which has been popping off on social media over the last week and is a gentle introduction to techno-fascists for the general public.

(After sleeping on it it's possible the book I was thinking of was written in the earliest 21st century).

There was an announcement on their mailing list here: https://lists.pglaf.org/archives/list/gmonthly@lists.pglaf.org/thread/MTHHI3TD7YXD3EHLKVBBA57KRBBWRI72/

We then worked with the same programmers [as AI generated categories] to provide automated summaries of nearly every book in the collection. You can find those summaries on book landing pages. These summaries are intended to be helpful for people trying to decide what book to read, or to get an idea of what a book is about.

For example, here is the automated summary from book #1, the US Declaration of Independence (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1): [...]

If you spot errors in summaries, let us know. Summaries of most books are based only on the first 12,000 characters, because the costs would have been too high for if we included all of every book.

We have also been corresponding with another programmer seeking to instruct AI technologies to "read" books from Project Gutenberg, summarize them, and answer questions about them. We hope this might be described further in a future newsletter.

Based off Wayback Machine poking around it looks like they were added sometime between September 20th to October 1st.

The file metadata of the oldest copy on the gutenberg webserver says 2003 -- and the document itself says Gutenberg created it in 2003 and published it in 2005 (whatever that means, maybe they were delaying ebook releases to ensure a steady stream)

Anyway this 2003 copy had their public domain boilerplate; it was described as a book in the public domain.

There are indeed a lot of websites about this, but none with any more information that Project Gutenberg so I'm guessing they all trace back to the Gutenberg release. Probably you'd have to find some physical information about it in an actual library to trace it further.

But I'm not like a professional book researcher or anything, that's just my opinion!