Gentle nerd freak of the pacific northwest. All nation states are vermin.

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  • 17 Comments
Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: June 26th, 2024

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  • TBH, I just don’t think something better is possible - I suspect that there are no valid shortcuts to trust.

    Unless something is just obviously bullshit, it will always take some time to develop a sense of how the different sources are treating a new story. Even a trusted source can prove unreliable on a particular topic.

    It’s uncomfortable living with that uncertainty until you’ve seen a story from enough angles that you can judge for yourself. But either the story is important enough to me to spend that time, or I just accept that I can’t really know.



  • I downvoted then blocked it because:

    • I don’t trust its specific analysis of sites. Others detail some examples.

    • I don’t think whole-site analysis is very useful in combatting misinformation. The reliability and fullness of facts presented by any single site varies a lot depending on the topic or type of story.

    • Other than identifying blatant disinformation sites I don’t see what useful information it provides. But even that’s rare here and rarely needs a bot to spot.

    • Why is an open-source, de-centralized platform giving free space to a private company?

    • Giving permission for a private trust-assesing company to be operating in an open public forum makes it look as if these assessments reflect a neutral reality that most or all readers would agree on or want to be aware of. It’s a service that people can seek out of they decide they trust it.

    Presenting this company’s assessment on each or most articles gives them undue authority that is especially inappropriate on the fediverse.



  • This is a story of one bootlicking employee who was in desperate need of fucking off and minding his own business:

    However, just as the movie started, an employee told them to put their snack bags away, the report said. They agreed but the employee apparently insisted on sitting next to them to monitor the snack situation.

    A few minutes later, one of the children popped a Skittle he was already holding into his mouth, and quite frankly, all hell broke loose, the women said. The employee started shouting at them, and said that the police would be called unless they left. This is when the children started crying.

    “My niece asked nicely: ‘If you’re calling the police, are they going to kill my mum?’” one of the women told the newspaper. “And he laughed at that stage. He looks directly in her face and he said: ‘Yeah, maybe we’ll find out.’


  • Belief in the divine likely comes from our brains’ hyperactive agency detection system: our brains err on the side of seeing agency where there is none in order to keep us alive.

    If a branch snaps behind you and you react as if someone did it but it was really nothing, you’re fine. But if it was a human or other animal and you react as if it was nothing, you might be food.

    Property crime is largely a factor of poverty, but also social inequality. If you lack a need you will try to fulfill that need. If you feel like you’re unfairly “less-than”, you’re much more likely to engage in prohibited behavior to correct that. But also if you have power or wealth, your brain becomes less capable of empathy making it much easier for you to criminally hurt others - the rich do most crimes.

    Religion is just using this evolutionarily beneficial flaw in our brains to justify the unjust social hierarchies which drive crime. So in a roundabout way, religion puts upward pressure on crime.




  • At my previous job their was a role where you just called insurance companies and asked them incredibly basic questions about what they planned to do for a patient with diagnosis X and plan Y. This information should be searchable in a document with a single correct answer, but insurance companies are too scummy for that to be reliable.

    In 2021 we started using a robot that sounded like a human to call instead. It could handle the ~80%+ of calls that don’t use any critical thinking. At a guess, that’s maybe 5-10% of our division’s workforce that wasn’t needed anymore.

    With the amount of jobs like this that are 100% bullshit, I’m sure there are plenty of other cases where businesses can save money by buying an automated bullshit generator, instead of hiring a breathing bullshit generator.



  • This is objectively within the bounds of “normal” human experience. It’s seen in primates and other mammals too.

    Sleeping in the same bed as your family was the norm for a long while, across many cultures. It was also perfectly normal for say a noble to sleep in the same bed as some of their staff, or for merchants or other traveller to share a bed while on the road.

    Most people in many western cultures would probably find it weird, but they’re the weird ones for needlessly sexualizing the act of sleeping.



  • Free will.

    It’s hard to accept, but free will is just not compatible with reality. It’s like geocentrism. It seems obvious on its face because of our limited perspective, but nothing else in the universe makes sense if it’s true. We live in a mechanistic universe and cause and effect doesn’t suddenly stop when the atoms are part of a human.

    I freaked out for about a week once I came to realize how much of our society is based on a scientific impossibility. Redesigning justice, ethics, healthcare, the very concept of blame, etc. to account for this is a daunting fucking prospect.