I love that opening this I can immediately tell that it’s not AI generated, and not just because everyone’s got reasonable proportions and numbers of parts, and the face can handle being split by that line while still retaining its structure.

It’s obvious because there’s composition, negative space that’s not crammed with prompt-maximising guff. There’s a focus, deliberate lines of action implying tension and intention. It’s five heroes with the eye at the centre of their motion, with a godlike being looming ominously over them. The eye is red which is reflected in the looming figure’s eyes, implying a connection between them.

I have no idea about the story here, I’ve never seen it before, but I can glean that much just from the design. This is what art is, it tells a story or expresses something. This is why it matters that someone made it on purpose.

I remember reading about digital warfare and how the character of different weaponry can be stabilising or destabilising.

So the example given was nuclear weapons. The consequences of using them are so disastrous that there is no good use case, and so they tend to be stabilising. They discourage use.

Digital warfare is destabilising, because it’s very easy to do and very hard to catch, so you’re better off using it, even without any declared war.

Information warfare is probably very similar, it encourages use, but that’s because it’s very low-stakes. It wouldn’t be very exciting. I imagine it’d make a better comedy than a drama.

Kind of a weird semiotics misunderstanding. There was this trashy tabloid news program that did sensationalised nonsense most of the time, and they advertised the show with these teasers that were like, “tune in for the shocking conclusion OMG SO DRAMATIC”, it was ridiculous.

One time they were talking about a security guard who was killed, and the ad had some footage of the incident - or a reenactment -shown in slow motion with a red filter. The implication was you were seeing real footage of a lethal encounter, and OMG SO DRAMATIC.

Then later that week they were doing a piece on school bullying, and they had what was probably actors where two kids walk past each other in the halls and bump shoulders, you know, like you’d do in a TV show as shorthand for bullying. They put the same slo-mo red filter over it, and the same ominous DUN DUN soundtrack OMG SO DRAMATIC.

I thought that red slo-mo filter meant death, so I thought I was watching security camera footage of the lead up to an incident where one kid literally killed another kid. It was pretty traumatic.

I’m glad I didn’t grow up on a diet of that, I just saw the ads and didn’t like it. This is how people grow up to be afraid of everything they’re told to be afraid of.

Anarchism isn’t non-violent. To assume anti-oppression and pacifism are one and the same is to make the same mistake Engels makes in On Authority.

Authority is violent, but violence is not authority.

Edit: on this topic I’d recommend Anark’s video on Power, where he explains that anarchism seeks to create a horizontal power structure. It is not the absence of power structures, it displaces oppressive power structures with egalitarian ones.

Sure, and I’d say that’s piracy too. I wouldn’t mind if it wasn’t also being siloed into private hands to enrich the wealthy and screw the rest of us.

I’d say if the copyright holder says you’re not allowed to then you’re not. It’s piracy.

People will tell you that you’ve already downloaded the data so saving it is fundamentally, technically no different, but that doesn’t matter to the law, it’s still piracy.

Like yeah, it’s absurd and pointless and anti-consumer and anti-knowledge and unenforceable and unsustainable, but that’s copyright. It’s always been that way.

Copyright destroys culture and piracy is our ethical duty in the face of that. The only reason to care about it is so you don’t get caught.

Right click -> inspect element (Q) works.

You can also press F12.

And if right click is blocked, on Firefox holding SHIFT will unblock right click. There is also a plugin that does this for you.

Often websites will put an invisible element in front of the content to intercept this trick, but you can navigate through the elements to find the one they were trying to obfuscate.

Glad to hear it!

Oh but I bet that other person is 14 then. That’s obviously the substance of my critique, you win.

Translation: “I have no way of arguing with this obvious and simply stated fact, so I’ll pretend they’re 14 and think it’s deep and then attack them for that. I’m 28 and this is a worthwhile use of my time.”

Genuine answer is that you need to get a feel for when the clutch begins to bite. The rest of it - when to use the brake, handbrake etc, is going to depend on what you’re doing. Learning to feel the clutch is the critical skill.

The way to learn how to use the clutch is to start on a flat piece of ground with no traffic around, like an empty car park. With the engine running and the brakes off, press the clutch pedal and put the car into 1st gear. Then, slowly release the clutch pedal without using the throttle. Practice this until you can get the car moving without stalling the engine, and you’ll have a feel for it.

When starting normally you’ll gently press the throttle as you do this. Cars usually idle around 1K RPM, use the throttle to maintain about 2K RPM for a normal take-off.

Then all the other skills will fall into place. The key objective is that you should have the brake engaged until the moment the clutch engages and is ready to take control, then the brakes should be smoothly & quickly released.

You can do this with either the handbrake or the foot brake, but if you’re using the foot brake you need to be manipulating the clutch, brake and throttle at the same time.

That requires pressing both throttle and brake with the right foot, which is a more advanced technique, but very useful for smooth driving in a lot of situations. It’s often called “heel-toe”, but that’s misleading. You don’t use heel & toe, you use the two sides of your foot.

It is entertaining.

Holy shit, what an opener, and then the second paragraph is the perfect punchline. I think the wiki editors knew exactly what they were doing.

You know, I like to think of participating in the fediverse as being part of the construction of what internet culture will become.

It’s literally a chance to be on the ground floor of the next iteration of the internet. Maybe you’ll make something that lasts.

Yes, you don’t get to sit back and passively consume vast swathes of content, but maybe that’s good for your creative process.

I have noticed that a lot of the most irritating and vocal reactionaries come from those two instances, and it’s not improving much. It makes sense - this is an alternative to reddit and the people most likely to leave reddit will include a large number of people who get banned a lot.

If they’re reactionaries, they’re not going to have many instances that are for them specifically - because those instances get defedded - so they will tend to go for the open instances. So those instances get a lot of the worst people.

And if their goal is growth at the expense of quality, then they won’t fix it. They’ll just get worse. The reasons beehaw defederated haven’t changed.

Yes, do both platforms, and also we’ve already figured out that the patron model works. If enough people like something, some will pay to support the creator.

That fact doesn’t grow peertube right now, but I think it means we don’t actually need to monetise peertube directly.

Personally I have a very small yt channel that I haven’t uploaded to for months. I’m making stuff again, and my plan is to start uploading things to peertube early and then to yt, and I will tell people in my videos that they can find my videos early there.

I doubt I’ll make a huge difference from me personally, but I’m sure if more creators did this it would start to. There needs to be a bridge between the platforms.

The thing is, they’d have to do it for the sake of creating an alternative space, and not for like patreon benefits or something. I guess the peertube videos could be unlisted and there be links from patreon, and then they go public after the yt one does? I don’t even know if peertube has this functionality.

But again, this would have to be done because the creator believes in federation as a long term solution. It certainly would benefit creators personally to have a backup they’re more in charge of. The difficulty is they don’t seem to know it’s a viable option.

I don’t know that much about the process of selecting the court or corrupting it, but in Australia in the last little while we’ve had three whistleblowers tried in our supreme court.

One was exposing the government illegally spying on East Timorese diplomats to gain bargaining power. The trial was held in secret because of “national security concerns”. The accused was only known as Witness K, and he managed to avoid jail time.

Richard Boyle exposed abusive practices by our welfare and tax offices to illegally share information in a “robodebt” scheme that fraudulently sent poor people crushing amounts of debt. A lot of people committed suicide as a result. He may go to prison for a long time. (Edit: he’s facing up to 46 years, and it seems the robodebt scandal was separate, but the ATO was part of that as well EDIT 2: It was in fact about robodebt and the predatory culture in the ATO that spurred it)

David McBride exposed war crimes by Australian special forces in Afghanistan and was given six years jail time. His identity was exposed when our previous right wing government raided our national journalists’ offices and stole documents regarding their investigation into the war crimes.

Our current nominally-leftist government could have stopped the last two of these prosecutions at any time and they just let them continue.

Oh and of the three incidents, only the whistleblowers were prosecuted. None of the people doing the crimes have been charged with anything.

Our government and its courts have made their priorities extremely clear: snitches get stitches.

Boil some chicken bones and tie them together with hair and hand it to them next time they come over.

Completely harmless, but deeply disturbing for anyone who thinks witchcraft is real.

The key is implicit permission. They believe that objects imbued with demonic power grant permission for the demon to enter your life if you accept the object.

Whether this will work depends on how intensely they’re into “spiritual warfare”, so maybe actually don’t do this.

They said it was far away so it may have gone subsonic on the way. Especially small common bullets like .22 will lose speed relatively quickly as they fly.