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this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2025
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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I screenshot this the other day and forgot to post it. Well, enjoy.]
i wonder which endocrine systems are disrupted by not having your head sufficiently stuffed into a toilet before being old enough to type words into nazitter dot com
In the process of looking for ways to link up with homeschool parents that aren't doing it for culty reasons, I accidentally discovered the existence of a small but active subreddit for "progressive monarchists". It's titled r/progressivemonarchists, because their imagination in naming conventions only slightly outatrips their imagination for forms of government. Given how our usual sneer fodder overlaps with nrx I figured there are others here who I can inflict this headache on.
Quality shitpost, I could imagine some thirteen year old actually believing this.
Yea, no fascism whatsoever took place in the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, or Belgium during WW2, in which they were all very successfully avoiding being occupied by fascists.
Extra points to Spain who already avoided succumbing to their own homegrown brand of fascism before the Nazi German invasion of Poland, and where they avoided having fascists in power all the way until the 1970s. There's a book I quite like about the war where that happened called Homage to Catalonia. I wonder if Orwell ever read it.
Missing from the list is Italy, which is no longer a constitutional monarchy, but used to be until 1946, which is why they were so good at avoiding fascism they even named it.
This might take the cake for the dumbest take I've seen from George Orwell and not for a lack of competition.
Oh yeah Britain didn't become fascist, they just imposed brutal imperialist exploitation on colonies in Asia and Africa lol. It's not fascism if you export it!
Fascism really is "we have imperialism at home"
i would love to read someone more familiar with historical fascism and imperialism who is able to articulate the link between the two. like, an analysis of imperialism as the construction and maintenance of borders across which exploitation is enforced and economic value is extracted -- paired with the observation of fascism as the attempts to construct borders "across peoples" from within the imperial core
let's also not forget these very liberal and not at all nazi-collaborating kingdoms of Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Thailand and Japan. honorable mentions to Cambodia that very successfully avoided Pol Pot and Iran that very successfully avoided islamic revolution
is it a real quote from Orwell or just something someone made up?
seems to be a real quote https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monarchism#Liberty
Yeah then it is a shitty take.
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Spent the last week playing with some security shit (thinking about a career change, since it looks like I will be mastering out of my PhD program) and fuck me everything about hardening your personal devices is exhausting. We are nowhere close to accessible privacy and security in our computers. The best solution right now may be "buy a Macbook and learn MacOS", which is so depressing.
Still deciding on a web browser. Used to be I could recommend Firefox because Righteous-Opposition-to-Google, but that doesn't really track anymore with Mozilla's behavior. Now I guess I would recommend Chrome, but it feels so gross (and I am unsure about things like Ungoogled-Chromium, for security reasons).
the basic laptop hardening
- Install Fedora Silverblue
- Be sure to set a good LUKS password
- Set a BIOS password and disable USB booting
- Rebase to secureblue
- Follow the Post Install Readme
- I personally couldn't figure out how to set the GRUB password. I will probably get around to it eventually.
As far as passwords, the only password I have to memorize is the one to my Bitwarden vault. Everything else is stored in Bitwarden. The passwords (except for my phone PIN) are 16 characters if I ever need to type them in manually (e.g. LUKS password), whereas passwords that will always be copy-pasted are 128 characters. I am looking into integrating a yubikey, but am leaning towards "fuck that shit, why would anyone actually want to use this?" If anyone here has comments on this (am I missing an obvious pitfall? do yubikeys suck as much as it looks like they suck?) I would be happy to hear them.
- I personally couldn't figure out how to set the GRUB password. I will probably get around to it eventually.
Anyway tl;dr is I spent the last week hardening all my devices and it sucks. In some cases it was a complete waste of time (my Steam Deck does not appear to have a way to set a password in the BIOS). In other cases (e.g. my Framework), it was probably worth it but a deeply terrible experience.
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Today on highlighting random rat posts from ACX:
(Current first post on today's SSC open thread)
On slightly more relevant news the main post is scoot asking if anyone can put him in contact with someone from a major news publication so he can pitch an op-ed by a notable ex-OpenAI researcher that will be ghost-written by him (meaning siskind) on the subject of how they (the ex researcher) opened a forecast market that predicts ASI by the end of Trump's term, so be on the lookout for that when it materializes I guess.
scoot asking if anyone can put him in contact with someone from a major news publication
how about the New York Times
NYT and WaPo are his specific examples. He also wants a connection to "a policy/defense/intelligence/foreign affairs journal/magazine" if possible.
well I guess the NYT is auditioning the Völkisher Beobachter rôle so that tracks
Does scoot actually know how computers work? Asking for a friend.
(Reposting from the last thread)
Days since last open source issue tracker pollution by annoying nerds: zero
My investigation tracked to you [Outlier.ai] as the source of problems - where your instructional videos are tricking people into creating those issues to - apparently train your AI.
I couldn’t locate these particular instructional videos, but from what I can gather outlier.ai farms out various “tasks” to internet gig workers as part of some sort of AI training scheme.
Bonus terribleness: one of the tasks a few months back was apparently to wear a head mounted camera “device” to record ones every waking moment
P.S. sorry for the linkedin link behind the mastodon link, but shared suffering and all that. I had to read "Uber for AI code data" so now you do too.
I had to read “Uber for AI code data” so now you do too.
Wow, what a fractal of cursed meaning. I don't even understand what it really means, but it feels like understanding it any further would cause considerable psychic damage.
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