jarfil

@jarfil@beehaw.org

Programmer and sysadmin (DevOps?), wannabe polymath in tech, science and the mind. Neurodivergent, disabled, burned out, and close to throwing in the towel, but still liking ponies 🦄 and sometimes willing to discuss stuff.

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China is perpetrating human rights abuses on a massive and intensive scale in the Uyghur Region, researcher says (globallabourcolumn.org)

Abuses include arbitrary mass detention of an estimated 1 million to 1.8 million people, and a program to ‘cleanse’ ethnic groups of their ‘extremist’ thoughts through re-education and forced labour. This involves multiple forms of involuntary labour at workplaces across the region and even in other parts of China,...

jarfil,

The Chinese wrote the book on that:

…m.wikipedia.org/…/Nine_familial_exterminations

jarfil,

That would be a great project indeed… just a heads up:

I was part of a group exploring to do something similar a couple decades ago. The main problem we found, was dealing with those first two points: by the time we figured out all the places a single “state” (this wasn’t in the US) stored all their legislation, they had already changed some of them. We realized that it would take either: collaboration from the government in terms of standardizing how they store things… or a constant game of chasing around the changes they made. At the time, we concluded it wasn’t practical to do it for free, and indeed some paid services have emerged offering something similar, but they’re not open.

My suggestion: if you managed to find a way for governments to make legislation accessible in a standardized way, that would be a HUGE success. Ideally, have it written into constitution, and/or use the constitution to beat government bodies into compliance.

Also a warning: the messy state of things, seems to be a sort of “job security” for some lawyer firms and companies offering the consolidation services, so taking that away may not be easy.

jarfil,

Actually… in its Declaration of Independence, Israel promised to uphold the UN resolution that would create two states… then merge them into one. They’re just skipping a step… 🙈

jarfil,

They’ve also had 75 years since, to approve a Constitution… yet to this day, can’t agree on one.

That makes the Declaration of Independence the ruling text for the existence of Israel, and it still says what it says.

jarfil,

I wouldn’t use disrespectful terms either, when you have a perfectly good neutral one right there: “leader”.

jarfil,

“Retired leader”. Yeah, the Times of Israel has always had an agenda, but they seemed to stick to an appearance of seriousness. It’s a bit disappointing to see them fall into silly name calling.

jarfil, (edited )

If you think you can compensate with the strength of your own inner contemplation, you are wrong

Is that a thing about neurotypicals, or just people without any selfcontrol?

I know I can compensate all the rhetorics, because I can spot most of the techniques by name, never get “pulled in” by the news, extract only the facts (if there are any), then contrast them with other sources, before “making my mind” about anything. I’m not afraid of saying “beats me, I don’t know enough”, until I do learn enough to build a consistent picture without holes or contradictions (doesn’t mean I’m always right, just coherent). Most times when I look at news, I end up taking away maybe a single sentence, which almost never is the one being highlighted.

There is also picking which news sources to care about. Right now I only know about two sources that are somewhat impartial: one of them is the weather channel, and the other a news meta-debate where they like inviting people with opposite points of view, without letting it turn into a cage match.

As for the rest of the article… it’s just describing the techniques used to produce what I like to call “news for toddlers”: fake human interest, full of rhetorical resources, cut down into tidbits easy to chew and swallow, aimed at eliciting an emotional response rather than a rational one (BTW, they’re the same techniques used by trolls).

You shouldn’t care about “that kind” of news. There are other kinds, like scientific breakthroughs, investigative reports, or news meta-analyses, that you might want to care about. Or whether to take an umbrella tomorrow.

jarfil, (edited )

The car and bridge one, is an example of “human interest” news, which some reporters, and news channels, try very hard to push for (“after seeing your son ripped to shreds and your husband fall into a volcano… tell us, how did that make you feel?”). Call me a monster, but I don’t care about that. Or rather, I already know that they’ll feel devastated, no need to rub it in.

Is there news out there that does not worry about the stability of bridges after such events?

Unfortunately, yes. There are whole news channels which, as soon as they get done with one emotional trigger news, they switch to the next one.

The article is oversensationalized, but it does hide a grain of truth: avoid that kind of sources, and you’ll be better off.

jarfil,

experts who talked about how likely nuclear annihilation was

If it helps, the actual likelihood is about 0%. There are not enough nukes to kill even 99% of the current world population, much less a 100%… they could be built, but it makes no sense, for now.

Unless you live in Russia. They’re all talk about nuclear strikes, but in reality Russia is the one who doesn’t seem to have effective anti-ICBM measures.

Why are redditors like this?

I made a post on r/civ (Civilization games subreddit) showing a really funky shaped randomly generated river I saw and most comments were fine but one guy was convinced that I went through the comparatively monumental effort of opening the map editor and changing the river for karma, as opposed to just starting the game and...

jarfil,

If I saw someone on a Beehaw community acting that way, I call it out.

That’s one of the reasons I support Beehaw potentially leaving Lemmy to do its own thing.

I’d rather Beehaw didn’t leave Lemmy, and instead “calling that kind of behavior out” got more popular on Lemmy instances… at least on the ones federated with Beehaw. But we’ll see.

jarfil,

I’ve posted some mean answers in the past, so I may share some insights:

  • Someone had a bad day. Maybe a client berated them, maybe they had a falling out with a family member, maybe they stepped into a dog poop on a rainy day and their umbrella got blown out before a passerby burned their hand with a lit cigarette (too specific? yeah, well…)
  • Someone decided to self-medicate (booze and weed seem to be popular choices)
  • Someone forgot to take their meds (high blood pressure can do it, the flu will do it, insomnia or psych meds will do it more)
  • Someone got a series of the aforementioned.

Generally: people post mean answers when their sense of empathy is either inexistent, or beaten into oblivion.

Once there are enough people in a place, the chance of encountering at least one person in one of those situations, quickly grows to 100%. If the place doesn’t actively discourage that kind of behavior because “engagement”… then you get the likes of Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, and similar.

How much does a creator's worldview influence whether you use their tech or consume their media?

Watching the drama around kagi unfold and it has me wondering how much you take into consideration a creator’s view on things like homophobia, sexism, racism, etc. when deciding to use a product. I think most of us have a bar somewhere (I would imagine very few on this website would ever consider registering on an altright...

jarfil, (edited )

How much does a creator’s worldview influence whether you use their tech or consume their media?

Depending on what we call “worldview”… either 0%, or 100%.

In this particular case:

SearXNG

SearXNG is a free internet metasearch engine which aggregates results from more than 70 search services. Users are neither tracked nor profiled.

  • OpenSource
  • Free
  • Self-hostable
  • User configurable

Kagi

Kagi Inc. is a company […]

  • Closed
  • For profit
  • Not verifiable, not controllable
  • You pay for the privilege

Google, Bing, etc.

  • Closed
  • For profit
  • Not verifiable, not controllable
  • You don’t pay, you’re the product

How much does their respective owner’s worldview matter to me?

  • Being open and verifiable: 100%
  • Giving full control to the user: 100%
  • Wanting to sell my tracking data: 0%
  • Misrepresenting their intentions: 100%
  • Having an unrelated opinion about politics, religion, human rights, or other: 0%

As for art, my opinion of the art doesn’t change whether I think the artist is a great or a horrible person; doing otherwise would be either dishonest… or imply the art can’t stand on by itself (I call that kind of art “trash”, no matter the author).

jarfil,

I’ve grown disillusioned with Greenpeace, they seem to have lost their north a long time ago, and only hop onto the bandwagon of what’s cool at any given moment. Like, “no fossil, no nuclear, no global warming” are all cool and all… but a contradiction. Or the silliness they’re doing right now in Spain, of combing whole beaches to remove a few pounds of plastic pellets from each… only for more to come the next day… while 30-odd years ago we already used to wonder what were all the multicolored “sand” grains, and some kids used to pick up chunks of tar to chew like gum.

jarfil,

I would suggest either Extinction Rebellion, which has an interesting open governance system with local chapters, and is “effective” in the sense of pissing people off enough to get itself on TV… or any local charity focused on a single achievable goal (sifting plastic pellets from a multi-ton dump at a rate of a few pounds per day, is a populist waste of resources; reforesting some area with native species, is direct and effective; and so on).

jarfil,

Everything points to humanity already having overcome the great filter, and for Elon’s family, bodyguards, and indentured serfs, to colonize Mars in the near future.

jarfil, (edited )

From the point of view of a peaceful outcome, Israel made a “strategic error” when they built a wall around Gaza, way before any of these children were born.

From the point of view of genocide… no they didn’t; now they can clearly point to how “radicalized” are people in Gaza as a excuse.

jarfil,

Translated: “We want money. Germany bad, so we want them to pay. If they don’t, then we’ll use this as a bargaining chip to get money some other way”

jarfil, (edited )

Pimps are just entrepreneurs offering management and protection services, for a sometimes slightly exorbitant price. OF is great when it stays online, but the moment a worker decides to diversify into IRL, they will need a pimp/boyfriend to kneecap the abusers… right?

PS: I knew an IRL sex worker once, she would only do dom work with sub clients, and still keep her “boyfriend” at the door just in case.

jarfil, (edited )

Right, and just to make sure, where do I apply to get on the chopping block with the golden parachute? I want to be chopped parachuted so hard, I’ll cheat and swindle all you want (wait… hope that saying this publicly didn’t disqualify me?).

jarfil, (edited )

@Hirom @Overzeetop

The plane was still climbing, this happened at an altitude of 16000ft when the cruise altitude for that flight is 30000ft:

This flight: www.flightaware.com/live/flight/…/tracklog

https://beehaw.org/pictrs/image/f44a1cd6-9c13-4ec0-9c8d-ba61c2432eee.webp

Previous flight: www.flightaware.com/live/flight/…/tracklog

https://beehaw.org/pictrs/image/740a71f1-4455-49a1-97ac-77bff87b33b3.webp

They usually keep the “seat belts” light on during ascent and descent because it’s when air pressures are changing (or you might run into a tree, or another airplane), while once at cruise altitude it is reasonably safe to take the seat belt off.

jarfil,

“Sir, they’re asking for an excuse, are we still doing those?”

“Tell them they were terrorists”

“It says here the car was full of journalists”

“Journalists, terrorists… whatever. Tell them that”

[…probably]

jarfil, (edited )

I don’t get the claim about it being “impossible” to shoot it down while hypersonic, either.

So maybe it’s high enough that you don’t have any interceptor missile capable of reaching that altitude… but if you had one, that hypersonic ball of plasma is not “hyperluminic”, all that radio noise is going to light up on any radar like a beacon. Sounds like it should be easy to predict its trajectory, particularly knowing that it can’t maneuver much at hypersonic speeds, so it should be even easier to plot an intercept course.

It may by impossible to shoot it down from behind, or from a plane right underneath that doesn’t have hypersonic interceptor missiles, but from any position in front of the enemy missile… you could float a balloon onto its path, and hit it.

Also, there is lasers. They may not be great as an offensive weapon, or too easy to mount onto a plane, and need several seconds to burn an incoming missile to a crisp… but they do work at the speed of light, can’t beat that.

jarfil, (edited )

Peas with pasta and mustard… sound bad. But I’ve done worse, so not going to judge.

jarfil,

X/X11 is a client-server protocol from the age of 10Mbps networks, intended for a bunch of “dumb terminals” connected to a mainframe that runs the apps, with several “optimizations” that over time have become useless cruft.

Wayland is a local machine display system, intended for computers capable of running apps on the same machine as the display (aka: about everything for the past 30 years).

Nowadays, it makes more sense to have a Wayland system (with some RDP app if needed), than an X11 system with a bunch of hacks and cruft that only makes everything slower and harder to maintain. An X11 server app acting as a “dumb terminal”, can still be run on a Wayland system to display X11 client apps if needed.

jarfil,

Is it wrong if I read that with an Oxford comma?..

“I am currently munching on a foot, long sub, and beginning the latest Native map update”

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