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Trump campaign donation page crashes after guilty verdict
  • This is kind of blaming the victim: you think black or queer people did something other than existing to egg on hatred? True, some go out of their way to try to befriend KKK members and such, but that strategy has only makes a tiny dent on things. Once someone is pouring gasoline on your lawn in a cross, it's a bit too late to make friends.

  • Neuralink looks to the public to solve a seemingly impossible problem
  • There is a way they could make the majority of it noise - if they reduced their expectations to only picking up a single type of signal, like thinking of pressing a red button, and tossing anything that doesn't roughly match that signal. But then they wouldn't have their super fancy futuristic human-robot mind meld dream, or dream of introducing a dystopian nightmare where the government can read your thoughts...

  • Proposed Texas GOP platform calls for the Bible in schools, electoral changes that would lock Democrats out of statewide office
  • I remember when gay people couldn't get married. I remember when I never saw a fellow trans person on TV who wasn't a fictional depiction of a serial murderer played by a cis guy. I remember when we almost never had cops caught on camera so their brutality was an open secret.

    But 'steady' is a bit inaccurate.

    I've seen actual people with family from Gaza online say that they want Biden re-elected because he may suck balls, but Trump will outright throw protestors into concentration camps.

    Like... Trump outright said he's bringing the next Reich. And loves this murdering Palestine people business. So yeah, this is a trolley problem where on one track you run over some people, and on the next track you... run over those same people plus extra. So in this context, saying you're going to refuse to switch tracks to save anyone whatsoever is indeed kinda demanding perfection in a situation where the only options are horrifically flawed and no one really wants to do them, but if we had wanted to really do something about it, we all shoulda fucking voted in the primaries.
    That, and also maybe this whole thing could have been avoided if Sanders hadn't made some guffaws. I know he successfully pissed me off and all he needed to do was not go talk to a talk show host with known transphobia and that painful comment about Black southerners. Who knew it turned out that asking Sanders not to support transphobes was demanding perfection?111? /s

  • Half of Britons wouldn't take a trip to the the moon, even in guaranteed safety
  • It's amazing that if a post has two possible contexts, people always assume THEIR context is the clear one and anyone who doesn't assume it is an idiot (even if basic rules of implication in English would have the other context favored).

  • Elon Musk's xAI plans to build 'Gigafactory of Compute' by fall 2025 — using 100,000 Nvidia's H100 GPUs
  • I think maybe you meant to link to AI Winter (which that link has a link to down at the bottom) as that article doesn't really support your point (that people within AI acknowledge it has hype cycles) at all, there's nothing about AI directly in it, although it does serve a refutation that 'hype cycle' means it'll go away; if that's what you meant your sentence was a bit odd.

  • "Of course not - that might hurt my accelerationist dreams!"
  • PugJesus wasn't saying there would be no murders of minorities if Trump loses. They phrased things poorly, but what they meant was minorities are going to be thrown into concentration camps which is what the fascist nazis did.
    Sarcasm implies you mean the opposite of what you said, generally:
    'Fascism is when there are murders'
    Yes. That is not the sole thing about fascism, but murdering everyone not in your personal social group is kind of a big deal in fascism. You making this statement sarcastic does not reflect well on you or your ability to wield the English language. If you wanted it to come across the way you wanted it to come across, you should have said 'Fascism is about when there are murders and nothing else'.
    However, this would have revealed a deep misunderstanding of what your opponent was actually implying, and, ironically, strawmanning them.

  • Masahiro Sakurai refused to add Dolby Surround to a Kirby game because players had to sit through the logo
  • Dunno if you want a serious answer, but 'press start' titlescreens that start up an animation if you leave it unpressed too long are a throwback to when if a screen showed the same image for too long, it would fry the image on to the screen and leave a little ghost image, so screensavers were a screen saver. This allowed one to demo software and just leave it running without worrying about damaging the product hardware.
    These days however it is totally unnecessary.

  • New homeowner, just sorta winging it...
  • Make a small area, fence it off if you must, where you just let stuff grow wild and do zero maintenance (except maybe removing nasty invasives). The local wildlife will thank you even if it's just a couple feet. I did that and I get a ton of bees and butterflies.

  • Name a Superhero you just can't stand
  • I love the version of Superman where he growing up and is friends with Luthor and he's like 'I cannot tell him my secret because my dad would disapprove' and it's got accidental closeted queer vibes.
    And there's this comic book (not in the same continuity) where Luthor is this mad genius who escapes from prison easily and Clark interviews him and he's like "I like you Clark, you're so humble and down to Earth, but I hate Superman who is the opposite of that."
    and then Lois likes Superman more than Clark, at least to start with, in some versions I think.
    And then with Brainiac there's the possible storyline of 'this computer has a lot of information stored on my lost culture but he is also an existential risk to all sapients everywhere in the galaxy ahhhhggg'.
    And how will Clark deal with an environment where everyone is hostile to immigrants when he is one himself and also dedicated to upholding the law?
    And the first comic where he interacts with Batman is actually fairly good: Batman threatens to bomb people if Superman unmasks him and Superman is like 'oh shit, he is not lying, I can hear his heartbeat', but Batman was actually threatening to explode himself. And the cartoon where Batman is fighting Brainiac and his costume gets ripped to reveal he was Superman all along was hilarious: "I did not predict this possibility." The Justice League series in general (part of the same continuity) was pretty good actually.

    I like the potential stories there. There's so many emotional possibilities. Stories where he just punches stuff are indeed boring. He is, frankly, under-utilized as a character imo because many writers don't understand that, or think the solution is to make a version of him that is evil which still involves him punching stuff, or because they're scared to actually touch on political issues like immigration or queerness. (can you imagine how many people would explode if Luthor was an ex-boyfriend for both him and Lois and they bonded over how shitty Luthor was as a date lol.)

  • Name a Superhero you just can't stand
  • The thing about his movie is that he was like, almost okay. Iron Man I was about him learning that selling weapons = bad. He could have continued his moral development.
    Instead, we got him fighting Captain America over a very stupid implementation of 'oversight' (coming from the guy who refuses to let gov. oversee his iron man development), being creepy to some random boy he just met (actually twice - first Peter and then some kid I don't remember; in a better set of movies I don't think Peter would be very thrilled to realize Iron Man was advocating for Peter to get outed in a national registry), and having a snit fit about how he doesn't want to help Unsnap people who died because he personally is OK with his future with his daughter who may or may not be a robot he built to mime having humanity.

    What makes him really insufferable for me is his fans who think Captain America is EVIL for daring to snub poor Tony, and that Tony should go date Loki (no I'm not kidding; while I am happy with Loki being queer, I really can't see the Marvel Universe Tony being a good date for, well, anyone ever, nor Loki being a good date until he works out his genocidal tendency issues at which point he threatens to become alas a much less interesting character).

  • Name a Superhero you just can't stand
  • While arguably Batman could use his wealth better (especially in versions where he's richer than Luthor, because you don't get to be richest guy without being a major asshole who does things like force workers to pee in bottles), the other guy/gal also has a point. The comic book universe isn't our universe, it has aliens invading and Spwecial People who have to be fought by other special people. Batman is basically super-powered the way he can run a marathon, run a chemical analysis and synthesize a new cure for something overnight, and jump 10 feet, they just pretend otherwise.

    You might enjoy Harley Quinn where Batman gets arrested for tax fraud.

  • I'm trying to understand how the rules work - is the mod overreacting or misunderstanding?
  • As someone who has actually tried to get government assistance, I suspect it was removed for being misleading, not because they actually believe there is 'no healthcare in the US'. Don't strawman people.
    Poor people often cannot get healthcare, such as via lack of documentation, lack of means to actually get to the places they need to go, etc. In my case, the government invented a completely fictional job for me that I did not have and declared it meant I was not eligible, and gave me a time limit to respond that expired before I had the actual chance to respond. The window for applications is a very short time period and I live with people who frequently do not give me my mail before winging it some place random, so it can take me a week to find my own mail.
    Someone living without a mailbox would have had zero opportunity: in that regard, I was 'lucky'.

  • Medellín, Colombia, bans sex work in two areas after U.S. tourist found with minors
  • Because most sex workers are grown ass adults and should have the right to do what they want with their own bodies without getting arrested for it? Not everywhere is as backwards as the USA.

    What they should really do is permanently ban US tourists from it. /s

  • A.I. George Carlin Creators Agree to Banish It Forever to Settle Lawsuit With Comedian's Estate
  • Dead people may not have rights, but their very living family definitely does. When my dog died, I got upset when my mom kept trying to shove reminders in my face when all I wanted to do was forget for awhile - I can't imagine how I'd feel about an actual human being.

    How would you like it if you were grieving and someone posted some tasteless shit about your loved one? (assuming you aren't a sociopath, of course, which may be a bit much considering this is the internet)

  • A plan of action that isn't just protesting: Cut the pigs off directly

    The Problem

    The biggest problem with the 'trying to do reform online' is that people are physically separated from each other, and most traditional protest is physical.

    Short list of traditional stuff we can still do: Voting Informing of protests organized by others Sending letters Sending money

    Less Traditional Solutions

    Getting to the same location: At a bare minimum, some kind of code to find out if there are other people in your area. That there is some population clustering strikes me as quite likely actually, even under random chance you get clusters.

    Mutual aid at a distance: People could try mailing goods to each other, or figuring out who is on the edge of the range they are willing to drive to once a year and occasionally meeting up to exchange gifts like canned goods. I've been thinking the usual method of trying to rely on local groups just isn't very effective - what if your local group doesn't exist or isn't accepting people? That actually happened in my case when I went to look at a local mutual aid group.

    The oncoming climate disaster: I do not have a green thumb, but I would love a project to green things. I suspect a lot of people wouldn't mind having their walls turned into mini-gardens but don't have the skills (or resources) to really maintain it or start it. Efficient use of space could mitigate the fact land is expensive. If global warming really starts baking plant life too, it may also be a good idea to start practicing in-door basement gardening (perhaps try to make much deeper basements for natural cooling?) sooner en-mass rather than later (which could lead to mass starvation if put off).

    Pure Online Actions: There are some forms of work that lend themselves really well to being online. Coding, writing, news, encouraging people to vote, sending money to workers on strike.

    and finally...

    Cutting the pigs off directly: I firmly believe the most effective way to combat unethical companies is simply to start and support worker owned companies where every employee gets a vote on their wages, and 'starve' the big companies. I found myself looking at the massive amounts of money raised and wasted in political campaigns by small donations and found myself thinking - damn, with a million dollars, you could start a really small company with that. The second most effective way is probably striking, which, yes, you need people on the ground for that.

    We could use an ethical version of Amazon, with a collective of shops that people can visit (the offline side of warehousing is a whole other bundle of issues), and an ethical Paypal. I know that credit unions exist, but I don't know of any credit union that has a Paypal-like API and easy convenience of simply clicking to pay for things. Uber and other apps. There is a huge amount of labor that we could 'take back' simply by providing another venue for people to practice it. Unfortunately, I don't think the fediverse way of doing things is quite appropriate when it comes to systems dealing with money. It's one thing to duplicate posts or ads for content for sale, but you don't want to duplicate credit card information. Open source it maybe and use 'semi centralization'; the Paypal-esque site can handle logins and money, and the Amazon-esque sites can perhaps do some form of federation and handle actual showing of items.

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    What's your favorite microbe?

    Not really a question for just biologists but I can't imagine too many nonbiologists knowing enough microbes to answer it haha.

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    Useful resources [licenses variable]

    One useful resource is the website opengameart. You can also do a search on duckduckgo for images and there will be an option to look for just public domain works / creative commons, although note this doesn't work properly 100% of the time. Clipart sites are often a good place to find creative commons art.

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    [parody] The scariest thing ever

    No matter what, Gary couldn't sleep. This wasn't because it was far, far too bright outside, and baking hot under the glare of the desert sun. Oh no. It was because they had been invaded... By children's television characters. He peered out the window cautiously. The coast seemed clear. Maybe he could wiggle out and do a quick run to the gas station. Just then, a thump from the front hall caught his attention. He moved to check the door, nervously clutching a baseball bat as he inched forward, but a jiggle of the knob confirmed it was still locked. Thank God. "I LOVE YOU." Gary whirled as something fuzzy and cute launched itself at its back and screamed as it hugged him. "LEAVE ME ALONE!" He managed to wrestle it off and throw it to the ground. A puppet. He hated puppets. Actually, Gary hated most things. His one joy in life was causing misery and pain to others. This invasion? Had ruined all of that. "Die, damn you, die!" he howled as he whacked it with a bat, but it just squeaked and giggled. Suddenly, nothing in the world would die any more. There was no, ahem, bedroom fun time results either. It was exactly as if some creator on high had decided to put on some PG filter setting, perhaps because the creator's grandma was visiting and didn't like gore. Or fun. "Become one of us!" it squeaked. "Yes, one of us!" Another skittled out from the darkness. "We're all friends here." "one of us, one of us," chanted more and more fuzzballs and cartoons, emerging from the darkness to swarm the grumpy misanthrope and drag him kicking into the sunshine. They dunked him into a rainbow pool, and he weakly crawled out and vomited. "How do you feel now?" They said. "Friends?" "I feel... great! Friends!" His eyes dilated wide and he began to grow fuzz across his entire body. "Yay! One of us, one of us! Friends foreeeever!" they all shouted. Sleep? Gary no longer needed sleep. Gary only needed... friends!

    Any similarity to real life is coincidence. If we are ever invaded by cartoon characters, please do not blame the author.

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    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)ST
    Stardust @kbin.social
    Posts 4
    Comments 31