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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: March 4th, 2024

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  • But it would have been great for a Shakespearian minor joke character bit.

    GUARD: “See, milord, how in this year’s almanack the booba hath been veil’d, compared to last year’s edition.”

    KING: “Greatly?”

    GUARD: “Yes, greatly indeed! Two inches of cloth more!”

    KING: “Thou art a nutter and I ought to throw thee in the madhouse.”

    GUARD: “But you wouldn’t dare, sire? Tales of your treachery and oppression already circle widely.”

    KING: “Thou shouldst consider thee lucky that we have to get the Hell onward with our plot.”


  • Yep, as I tried to hint in the last paragraph. 😆

    Digg’s biggest sin was that the votes were all that mattered, and the admins just leaned into that by coddling the power users. That’s why Digg got so toxic to random people who just wanted to share something cool they found. The last redesign just made it official that there are those whose votes matter and the unwashed plebs. Everyone already knew people were fucking with the votes, and the admins just said “go right ahead”.

    So what Reddit offered was at least some assurance that the algorithm would combat blatant vote manipulation by power blocs and that people could share cool stuff fairly. Digg users promptly voted with their feet.

    Now, to Reddit’s credit, the system worked for years. Admins absolutely condemned vote manipulation and actively fought it. People were actively against all sorts of vote brigading, and the admins listened.

    Problem is, it all changed. Corporate media influencing came in, under radar. Political memefluencers came in, under radar. It’s all allowed unless it’s blatantly against policy and everyone pretends it’s just organic random users.

    Now, you don’t see the Reddit admins talking about what made the site work so well back in the day. I’m not sure they’re interested in maintaining the anti-brigading and anti-manipulation algorithms. They’re this close to saying “fuck it, it’s a free-for-all” and going full Digg publicly.


  • Hey, remember what happened to Digg? Why a bunch of people moved over to Reddit in the first place?

    I guess not a lot of people remember, so let me tell you.

    Bunch of dipshits ran upvote brigades. Stories they didn’t like got buried really fast.

    Now, Digg was a hive mind site to begin with - good luck posting anything the hive mind didn’t care about. But add blatant political machinations on top of that, and the site got unusable real fast.

    Take a few guesses which political views those groups were trying to futilely promote while quashing opponents. Go on. (I’ll give a hint, some of them retreated to Conservapedia)

    So that’s what killed Digg. …that, and the Digg admins were being dicks and the site redesign sucked ass. (…insert comparison to modern Reddit here)











  • Hillary was hardly alone in that. Can’t find the exact video, but the point of the video that Jimmy Kimmel platformed Trump, with the guise that the show was “apoliticial”. The video argued that that was not the case. The broader argument: “If you’re atheistic, you denounce the existence of gods. If you’re polytheistic, you acknowledge the existence of multiple gods. Now, if you acknowledge the views of all political candidates going your way, you are not apolitical. You’re polypolitical.”


  • The whole “The_Donald was a FBI honeypot” is a pretty strongly persistent urban legend. And obviously false. Surprises me how many people thought that was legitimate.

    Ask yourself: Shouldn’t there have been results sooner? Would FBI (or whoever) have left an obviously dangerous forum open for honeypot purposes for years and years? If this really was a honeypot operation, wouldn’t they have made arrests as soon as they could? And if this really was the case, shouldn’t we have the details by now (FOIA requests or whatever)?

    Of course not. US law enforcement would have immediately involved themselves if there were any credible threats posted there. But they don’t really do much about festering pits of far-right radicalisation. It was left open with the full approval of Reddit admins. Can’t really claim ignorance on their part either.



  • I’d argue that Audacity (audio recording/editing/processing suite) is a little different niche than Reaper (full-fledged DAW). If your use case is “I’m doing a podcast and I need to do an audio recording from multiple mics and mix them down”, Audacity is good enough that there’s no point in paying extra for a DAW. If you’re a musician and you need to mess nondestructively with recordings and MIDI and filters, then you know you need to go bigger.


  • A somber thing about nitrogen gas executions:

    People generally agree that nitrogen (or any inert) gas asphyxiation is a relatively painless and peaceful way to go. People have been using it for (animal and human) euthanasia for years without incident. Seems appropriate, right?

    So how did it work in capital punishment scenario the first time around? The guards slapped the face mask on the condemned. Then they asked them for their last statement. Quote: “Mffmfmf, Mffafam fmfmfm mfffmfmf mf mfmf f mfmf mfffmfmmf. Mfffm mfm mfm mfmfffmfmf mf. Mfff mff mf mff.” (Transcribed as: “Tonight, Alabama causes humanity to take a step backwards. Thank you for supporting me. Love all of you.”) Then they opened the gas valves. It took too long. …OK, it’s time to pause now, let’s see how many problems you can spot with this procedure.

    Problem: They’re continuing to use “medical” and “painless” and whatnot procedures, administered by unqualified staff, on unwilling participants. Look, I’m not an advocate of death penalty at all and I think it should be abolished everywhere, but even I know that the guillotine designers were up to something. You need to minimise the amount of fuck-ups at all levels.




  • NOP is $EA, of course, and… um…

    …sorry, I’m just a Commodore 64 scrub, I don’t know nothing about this high and mighty Intel 8086 nonsense.

    [looking up]

    …it’s 0x90 on IA-32? WHAT? Someone told me every processor used 0xEA because that was commonly agreed and readily apparent. …guess I was wrong


  • I was like, ooh, I didn’t know there were newer Nikon tilt-shift lenses (Nikkor PC-E) for the F mount that are still available for purchase new… …and the bloody things cost like 1900€. Even the older PC-Nikkor lenses cost a pretty penny in second hand market.

    These lenses are firmly in “would be extremely neat to have, but are both on the very expensive side and also I don’t know how much use I’d get from them in practice” category of photography gear. …which doesn’t narrow much down if we’re talking photography gear, but hey.