NaibofTabr

Perhaps it was easier to push the right in that direction, to get them started, but nothing will disable the left quite like elitism. Nothing makes the people on the left special, or somehow immune.

If we recognize that this kind of manipulation is happening to others, we should be examining our own behaviors, motivations, and intentions for similar effects.

I have no interest in being manipulated into contributing to the chaos and destruction to serve someone else’s political goals. And if we believe that the path the right has taken is lined with mistakes and cruelty, why would we then follow them down the same path?

Our path should look like this:

You’re right, but this is also going on:

Russia should “introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social, and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics

The right wasn’t radicalized by accident, and it would be naive to think the same manipulation isn’t being done to the left - say by advocating for violent resistance.

Yeah, I don’t take criticism from armchair warriors.

This is expected, planned for, anticipated and even desired by the people pulling the strings. Violent resistance will be used to justify mass murder in response.

I want to do something broadly effective, not make a useless gesture of violence in response to violence. If you feel like you need to take direct action against the oppressors, for whatever reason you might have in mind, you are being reactionary - which is how we got to this place of divisive extremist politics in the first place.

And yes, I understand that we’re past mere political disagreements at this point, and people are dying. It doesn’t matter, because any action taken without planning and coordination will be performative and nothing else.

You might want to consider a different brand:

“So violated”: Wyze cameras leak footage to strangers for 2nd time in 5 months

As Sahib explained in replies on Reddit and X, Hytale is serving as the host for the crossplay session, and while block placements are translated to equivalent blocks on the Minecraft side, it seems like only the prototype’s Hytale player is capable of placing new blocks. Considering he’s handbuilding a bridge between two different games with their own systems and mechanics, it’s not surprising that Sahib says “currently many things are Broken.”

Based on this, it sounds like the Hytale server is providing map data to the Minecraft session, which is why the block placement works on the Hytale side but not the Minecraft side. He must have created some kind of translation table for block types between the engines.

AI coding tools can do common, simple functions reasonably well, because there are lots of examples of those to steal from real programmers on the Internet. There is a large corpus of data to train with.

AI coding tools can’t do sophisticated, specific-case solutions very well, because there aren’t many examples of those for any given use case to steal from real programmers on the Internet. There is a small corpus of data to train with.

AI coding tools can’t solve new problems at all, because there are no examples of those to steal from real programmers on the Internet. There is no corpus of data to train with.

AI coding tools have already ingested all of the code available on the Internet to train with. There is no more new data to feed in. AI coding tools will not get substantially better than they are now. All of the theft that could be committed has been committed, which is why the AI development companies are attempting to feed generated training material into their models. Every review of this shows that it makes the output from generative models worse rather than better.

Programming is not about writing code. That is what a manager thinks.
Programming is about solving problems. Generative AI doesn’t think, so it cannot solve problems. All it can do is regurgitate material that it has previously ingested which is hopefully close-ish to the problem you’re trying to solve at the moment - material which was written by a real thinking human that solved that problem (or a similar one) at some point in the past.

If you patronize a generative AI system like Claude Code, you are paying into, participating in, and complicit in, the largest example of labor theft in history.

This is a good suggestion because even if you’re unable to dissuade the interest in guns, you might at least make the kid think twice about safety before they eventually handle one and thus prevent a tragedy.

This may not be the approach you have in mind, and it kind of depends on the kid’s personality, but one of the ways to de-glorify and de-romanticize something is to de-mistify it, to take it out of fantasy and make it real (to the point of being mundane).

To that end, consider Forgotten Weapons on YouTube. Ian will discuss a single gun, its design history, manufacturing, intended use, disassembly and cleaning, along with regular reminders about gun safety. Ian will even talk about the political and financing decisions that led to a particular gun being made (accounting is of course the height of glory).

If the kid finds the history, engineering and basic maintenance discussion to be boring, they might lose interest in the topic altogether. Alternatively, if they find it interesting, you might steer an unhealthy interest in violence toward something productive (history and/or mechanical engineering).

Keep in mind that forbidding access to something just adds to the mystery and romance around it and can have the effect of increasing the desire for it.

Everything old is new again.

Empire of the Sun is a film about civilians caught in a war zone.

The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien, is a collection of short stories about the Vietnam War. It shows the exhilaration, the terror, the cruelty and hardship of living through a war. It definitely doesn’t glorify conflict.

My War Gone By, I Miss It So, by Anthony Loyd, is a firsthand account of the Bosnian conflict of the 90s. It is ugly and brutal, and the author tries to give an honest presentation of his own state of mind at the time.

Black Hawk Down (the book, not the movie), by Mark Bowden, is a fairly thorough account of the incident in Mogadishu in 1993. Bowden did a lot of research and describes the political background that led to the UN and US presence in Somalia, and all of the mistakes that led up to the helicopter being shot down and what happened after. He interviewed many of the military personnel who were actually involved and recounts the events from several different perspectives. And as the Wikipedia article says:

Bowden simultaneously manages to capture the siege mentality felt by both civilians and the US soldiers, as well as the broad sentiment among many residents that the Rangers were to blame for the majority of the battle casualties.

This is a very realistic presentation of what combat is like, framed inside the perspective of the overall military operation. Bowden doesn’t shy away from describing the mistakes in decision-making, but also does a fair job of describing how lack of information or bad information leads to bad decisions in the moment which result in people dying for no good reason. He definitely doesn’t glorify the conflict. My overall impression after reading it was “I hope I never have to be involved in anything like that”.

And finally, Alice’s Restaurant, by Arlo Guthrie, is a song about the draft.

Tongo

Tongo: What and How? by Certifiably Ingame on YouTube

Tongo Rules

birds of a feather

plug for somafm

Or pipe GUI output into another GUI function.

Or >> log.txt

Er, wouldn’t that also set the value of human life to $0?

I’m convinced that many of the people calling for violence from the left in response to the administration’s behavior are the same ones that pushed the right into extremism over the past 30 years.

Division and chaos are the intent and they’re playing both sides to achieve their goals. The last thing they want is for people to sit down and talk to each other.

The technology enables the surveillance state. Therefore the technology is not amoral.

Enabling a surveillance state is not amoral.