“Baskets” is an excellent documentary series about becoming a clown (jk)

Sure, but that’s not really the point. And I do think it’s an important point to understand how trumpism and neofascism works.

Basically when I look for new hardware, I always look at specs. And it’s so easy to get sucked in by “oh this is a little bit more expensive but has 20% more performance!”.

Well I do think he is “casually” racist but not serious. Like it’s not a guiding ideology. If it’s between making a scene or shaking the hand of a colored person’s hand he has no problem with that. He doesn’t really give a shit. He’s a malignant narcissist, which means he is driven by the psychological need to be “the best and most amazing person”. Justifying that just because of his whiteness would probably almost be an insult to his unique greatness.

I also think his mind is in a kind of fugue state where he’s not fully conscious, like sleepwalking. He’s more like an LLM that is constantly throwing things out “to win” and his mind is optimized to do that very well. If you’d institutionalize him, put him on medication to calm him down and then slowly and calmly begin talk therapy you’d probably find he’s just a standard narcissist without any special ideology. Possibly Hitler was similarily “out there” in that regard, but they actually and truly believed in their ideology. They also believed in their nation and making it great, which Trump doesn’t give a shit about either.

You can define fascism (including racism or sexism) as a “sincere belief in inequality based on identity”. He certainly believes in that, just only for himself. In comparison, neoliberals also have a sincere belief in inequality, just based on class / wealth.

Interesting debate, and certainly has some truth to it. Because individuals seek personal gain, they fulfill someone else’s ideology they don’t really care about but it helps them to get promoted or get rich. But Hitler definitely planned the holocaust as a “final solution to the Jewish question” in Mein Kampf.

In that sense Trump is very different from Hitler - he doesn’t really believe in anything but being the strong man. He has no ideology. He’s not really a racist. But he adopts ideology that enchants and beguile the masses, so it works similar to the functionalist view.

I believe that MAGA functionaries actually look for things that would shock and pain liberals, and then make that real, simply because it would be “fun” for the MAGA crowd and enrage the libs, and keep them constantly in a confused and shocked state. Just to keep it all going.

I can’t stand the look of Windirstat lol.

I use explorer++ now because it can show subdir sizes. Unfortunately performance suffers quite a bit because of no caching and unsmart file system lol. Maybe linux has this basic and essential feature in it’s file explorer.

+1 for using space sniffer. It’s the best of such apps I’ve found. Unfortunately doesn’t seem to get updated any more.

Sounds like it would make a good wedge issue for the next election.

PS: And yeah I get it, it’s weird that you KNOW someone breathed that out lol. I’d even support it if it was based on annoying someone with vaping at a buss stop or in a park. Like it’s a misdemeanor if someone complains, and only then. That should be enough so people police themselves to be more courteous.

Ahh, now I’ve instructed my bot army to downvote you :D But seriously, I’ve read proper research papers about electronic cigarettes. Not the fake ones put out by big tobacco or the puritans where they deliberately measure dry hits, which are sill orders of magnitude better than cigarettes. Ultimately it’s just vegetable glycerin, polypropylen glycol and nicotine, with optional flavor. It’s not like you’d get addicted just by smelling a vape in a park. There is also no gateway to go from vaping to smoking.

There is simply no valid legal argument you could give why it should be banned. Well, unless it’s massively annoying to a majority of people. But then they should really go after those kids with ghetto blasters and skateboards first.

“Vaguely annoy”? :D I mean vaping isn’t really harmful, so what would be the legal basis to ban something like this?

Ban everything that mildly annoys us!

I was thinking of the Gemini (protocol) - Wikipedia but a bit more elaborate, and yeah I’m not sure how far text compression can be pushed. But I think LLMs could be useful and help reach a critical mass of being able to download and store tons of articles.

Torrent V2 and other official extensions Updating Torrents Via DHT Mutable Items allow some ways to do this. Like hosting a youtube channel and updating it with new videos, without any new network protocol. Well theoretically since this isn’t yet supported well in torrent clients or lib.

I’ve been thinking how this would work for a while but it’s kind of frying my brain haha. Like a “P2P version control database” that is truly open source. For articles and blog posts, but also for metadata for manhwa, movies, tv, anime, books etc. Like anybody can download and use it and share, edit, fork it without needing to set up some complex server. Something that can’t be taken down, sold or if abandoned someone else can just pick it up and you can merge different curated versions and additions easily.

You’d basically want a “most popular items of the past X time” that almost everybody downloads, and then the whole database split into more and more exotic or obscure items. So everybody has the popular stuff but also has to host some exotic items so they don’t get lost. And it has to be easy to use and install.

But the whole database has to be small and compact and compressed enough that you can still easily host it on a normal HDD. It the current times with economic and political dangers lurking this would be a crucial bit of IT infrastructure.

I believe everyone can, it just takes practice and is only relevant for 120hz games. Or VR.

That is just stupid. How about a slighly more complex markdown.

What I really want is a P2P archive of all the relevant news articles of the last decades in markdown like in firefox “reader view”. And some super advanced LLM powered text compression so you can easily store a copy of 20% of them on your PC to share P2P.

Much of the information on the internet could vanish within months if we face some global economic crisis.

I bought an oled phone for 200€ a few years back. What I’d really want is that every smartphone sold in the EU is open, with open drivers and OS with root access if you want to. And some investments by the EU to support open smartphone OS.

What a shithole civilization.

Fundamentally, web-archive or just signed hashes of existing documents to verify they haven’t been changed. Like this which the NED deleted. That also does require an institution dedicated to journalism or truthfulness or education.

The main problem is the immense power imbalance. The rich get richer has this inevitable outcome. We need a purge and restore a democratic government. It’s more a physics problem than an ideological one, a question of quantity of energy and forces. They have corrupted a large part of the population in one way or another, but they haven’t convinced the majority that truth is bad.

Any fake picture could be traced to the individual camera and it’s registered owner, and the certificate revoked. It would be cumbersome and not foolproof, but it would reduce fake pictures and make it possible to verify photo and video evidence. A browser could then tag or even block any image in an article that hasn’t been signed.

My point is that it’s theoretically possible to avoid a “post-truth world”, although it is practically impossible to get done currently.

You could build cameras that crypto-graphically sign photos individually. And that capture a lightfield at least partially (maybe possible with autofocus pixels already), then you know someone isn’t just capturing a monitor. This could be implemented into reputable smartphones too. If someone cracks (physically) the camera sensor/chip assembly, the certificate can be revoked after it’s been found out.

Then you could design an image format where any editing step (like cropping, color mapping) is reversible and signed too.

Most of this is because we don’t have a free press anymore. There are only 3 international newspapers and they have all been infiltrated or captured.

I couldn’t remember it either. I described it to deepseek in order to find it. Ironically it mistakenly thought

the short story you’re thinking of is almost certainly “Nanny” by Cory Doctorow. It’s part of his collection Radicalized (published in 2019)".

If you find it, let me know. I think I might have been conned by deepseek.

This FUCK is unbelievable. He wants a cookie for withdrawing a nomination which should never have been made in the first place? Should we applaud?

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/the-shadow-of-1930s-appeasement-hangs-over-us-led-peace-talks/

Read this garbage, talking about appeasement. This Merezhko a fascist himself, and every accusation is a confession. What about the literal far right extremists and nazi sympathizers in Ukraine who are responsible for the maidan massacre and helped grab power and start and escalate the civil war? What a fucking farce.

It needs to become clear to everyone that you can’t just demonize Putin and deify tools like Trump or also Obama. They all play geopolitics. They all only care about gaining and maintaining power. The world has gone fucking insane believing this shit.