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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Thank you. I stole that from Philip (I think) in Off To Be the Wizard by Scott Meyer. He was describing that book’s antagonist but I’ve taken it to describe people who casually break rules to get ahead.

    And I think that’s kind of what they’re doing, flooding social media with stories of how they broke rules in ways that make me go “foul! That’s a foul! Why is the ref doing nothing? This breaks my brain and I have no idea how to respond to this!”


  • mspencer712@programming.devtoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    4 days ago

    No I know you’re being genuine.

    So this is going to sound really weird, because I think you’re talking about the experience of debating troll farm accounts - understandably really frustrating - but I’m talking about the people, the voters, the weird family members you can’t talk about politics with any longer. (I have some of those - they’re in rural Illinois while I’m in blue-dot Omaha, I love them very much, and I absolutely hate that we can’t talk politics any more.)

    But I think you need to give them more sympathy. (The IRL humans, not the online trolls.) The worst of them grew up in a system where they only see minorities as risks, because (a) brains look for patterns, for free, factory firmware, and (b) they don’t realize evil people set things up long ago so that minorities had things on Hard Mode. And maybe © fighting against your factory defaults takes work and practice.

    Like, because TLOU is back on TV I’ll share something uncomfortable. S01E03 was really uncomfortable for me to watch. I was a nerdy kid, teased for being gay in high school when I was not and am not gay. So I have some homophobia I haven’t gotten rid of yet. I’m trying. But I still look away whenever men kiss. My wife doesn’t love that part about me, but she still loves me.

    Do you give up on me because my journey isn’t complete there? Am I to be hated because I look away, lumped in with the people who vote against gay rights? Clearly not. Mostly because I’m clearly making an effort.

    Some people who voted for Trump don’t wear red hats. They were on the fence and they went one way and not the other. And I promise they’re not the people you’re tired of debating. They deserve your positive thoughts. Don’t let the troll farms steal those thoughts. Please.



  • mspencer712@programming.devtoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    4 days ago

    (Apologies to parent, this is something I’ve been itching to say, but the parent isn’t the problem I’m discussing.)

    They will clap because it makes them feel good. It makes them feel good because they think we don’t respect them, that we celebrate their losses (in the Laslow’s Hierarchy sense, not the political sense) and that we don’t want to lift them up with us.

    So yeah, we have differences. (Stay with me for a bit.) They think a foul in basketball is something you’re allowed to do a certain number of times and then you have to stop. We think a foul in basketball is something you Should Not Do.

    Is the solution more hate for the people who got duped by Trump’s team? Yeah they got played. Yeah they have cognitive dissonance. Yeah they’re on Facebook too much, fed poison by an algorithm that optimizes for engagement (you know, happy, horny, angry, anything except writing letters or volunteering or registering to vote). That’s no reason to hate them.

    Help them. Love them. Even if there’s no internet points in it for you. (Certainly none for me because I’m usually a crappy communicator.)





  • I think you’re right about style. As a software developer myself, I keep thinking back to early commercial / business software terms that listed all of the exhaustive ways you could not add their work to any “information retrieval system.” And I think, ultimately, computers cannot process style. They can process something, and style feels like the closest thing our brains can come up with.

    This feels trite at first, but computers process data. They don’t have a sense of style. They don’t have independent thought, even if you call it a “<think> tag”. Any work product created by a computer from copyrighted information is a derivative work, in the same way a machine-translated version of a popular fiction book is.

    This act of mass corporate disobedience, putting distillate made from our collective human works behind a paywall needs to be punished.

    . . .

    But it won’t be. That bugs me to no end.

    (I feel like my tone became a bit odd, so if it felt like the I was yelling at the poster I replied to, I apologize. The topic bugs me, but what you said is true and you’re also correct.)









  • I, too, think humans become incapable of learning from their mistakes when they become wealthy. That’s what keeps them wealthy of course.

    More seriously, it makes sense that this could become a good thing. If it’s true that Kevin failed the first time by lacking the confidence to stand up for his ideals, why are we judging what we haven’t seen yet? Give him a chance.

    (Is that true? I’m open to being wrong.)

    If they ran ads asking Reddit moderators to catalogue their frustrations, it feels reasonable that he could be bankrolling solutions to address those weaknesses and problems.

    I’m excited to see what amazing new Fediverse features will be inspired by what he pays his teams to build for Digg.

    (I need some hope for the future, damnit. Do NOT take this away from me.)



  • mspencer712@programming.devtoScience Memes@mander.xyzwe are stardust
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    2 months ago

    In the US? You have to pay taxes. Don’t need to file. See Substitute For Return (SFR). I’ve done this ever since the Bush administration.

    Intuit are quick to point out the massive deductions you’re missing out on. Until you pay for their services, and those theoretical deductions evaporate.