Uriel-238 's BestNetTech Comments

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  • On the post: MAGA’s Big Miscalculation

    Uriel-238 ( profile ), 22 Sep, 2025 @ 03:49pm

    Every Republican Ever

    Seventy-seven million Americans, last November, voted for, as LP put it, Fire in the sunrise/ Ashes raining down. This raises the question of just how feasible it is to control the population that they vote stupidly. The project to get them to do just that has been going on since FDR's New Deal, and gained traction in 1980 when Reagan won by landslide. Mind control is here, and over a trillion is put into assuring right-wing propaganda hold record viewership rates. I know large chunks of the constituency voted against the black woman, or against the democrat, or against the communist, and others still voted for Trump based on vibes (though I can't imagine how Trump vibes could appeal to anyone -- but I'm an ASD lunatic, and have never before felt more divorced from the human species). But it's not like Trump effectively lied. He expressed what he was going to do in his rallies, time and time and time again. To paraphrase Professor Leah Litman, [they voted based on] conservative grievance, bad vibes and conspiracy theories the same thing that runs the majority bloc of SCOTUS. So shoot them? Not at all. Figure out why they have the civic self-control of a rabid dog, and treat it as a mental health problem? Absolutely. Otherwise, human society from here on out will just be Orwellian dystopias, until our betters find cause to not do them that way and treat others as human beings, and eventually as we run out of water for growing things and the global famine hits. Considering the old testament and Hammurabi's laws inform regarding treatment of the stranger, the fatherless, the impoverished, it suggests it has always been a problem of societies who are inclined to exclude the most deviant perverts, the most heinous violent wrongdoers, the most squalid transients, in all cases blaming it on the individuals who can't fit in. Creating a society that tolerates and manages absolutely everyone is going where no-one has gone before, so we've quite the challenge ahead of us.

  • On the post: MAGA’s Big Miscalculation

    Uriel-238 ( profile ), 22 Sep, 2025 @ 01:28pm

    Homophones...

    • quiet secession

  • On the post: MAGA’s Big Miscalculation

    Uriel-238 ( profile ), 22 Sep, 2025 @ 01:24pm

    Quiet violence.

    I've noticed a handful of content creators have suggested that the notion that political violence is unacceptable is only confined to those who have been privileged always to have alternative options available to them, and some demographics have not had this. Or as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said Riots are the language of the unheard. Right now, we're staring down the inevitable dissolution of US democracy at the hands of the Federalist Society faction of SCOTUS, and no legitimate power is going to stop them. But eventually, the public will cease to recognize the court system as an alternative to settling disputes and conflicts with violence. And we may stop from shooting at each other to gun down the judges who allowed the US legal system to be repurposed into a political weapon. We're in interesting times, and violence is back on the table, I suspect in the same forms as quiet quitting, quiet succession and quiet mutiny.

  • On the post: The World’s Most Popular Porn Site Is a Government Agent Now. Does It Matter?

    Uriel-238 ( profile ), 21 Sep, 2025 @ 01:00pm

    Non-Consensual Intimate Imagery

    TIL!

  • On the post: The World’s Most Popular Porn Site Is a Government Agent Now. Does It Matter?

    Uriel-238 ( profile ), 18 Sep, 2025 @ 12:54pm

    Then what about Twitter?

    TBF, Twitter is still popular, even as Bluesky provides a safer, more wholesome alternative, but I suspect if BS hasn't overtaken T already, it eventually will. That's a big assumption though. MAGA (specifically the white Christian nationalist Heritage Foundation / Seven Mountain Mandate / Project 2025 faction of MAGA) doesn't want the people to have access to porn, so either it'll stop providing it, or start snitching on its end-users, which will make for a mass exodus. I'd love to be proven wrong, if, say, MAGA falls, and the United States reasserts among its values a right to everyone to have access to porn, enforced by a state porn-access website. Probably not in my lifetime, though.

  • On the post: The World’s Most Popular Porn Site Is a Government Agent Now. Does It Matter?

    Uriel-238 ( profile ), 18 Sep, 2025 @ 12:50pm

    "The world's most popular porn site"

    Not for long.

  • On the post: Federal Judges Are Done Playing Nice: NBC Reports Full-Scale Revolt Against SCOTUS Shadow Docket Bullshit

    Uriel-238 ( profile ), 12 Sep, 2025 @ 11:41am

    The UK should have a cooler name for them

    In the UK, we don’t have the Old West, so we call that programme Family Fortunes. Yes, but your history features really rather long wars between families. I'd expect you'd have a term for when one house continues a vendetta against another house (and vice versa) across enough time that conduct of war and sabotage entirely changes from one age to the next. I mean other than history, of course.

  • On the post: Federal Judges Are Done Playing Nice: NBC Reports Full-Scale Revolt Against SCOTUS Shadow Docket Bullshit

    Uriel-238 ( profile ), 11 Sep, 2025 @ 06:01pm

    Emotional support billionaires

    That's the term for them given by the hosts of the Strict Scrutiny podcast. I suspect they influence the ideology that drives the Federalist Society six. If Leonard Leo doesn't have them on short leash. SCOTUS is sooooo captured.

  • On the post: Federal Judges Are Done Playing Nice: NBC Reports Full-Scale Revolt Against SCOTUS Shadow Docket Bullshit

    Uriel-238 ( profile ), 11 Sep, 2025 @ 12:52pm

    Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories and Bad Vibes

    At the point a legal scholar writes a book about the failure of SCOTUS to actually do law, it's a problem. Frankly, we should have stopped trusting them after the internet social media screed that was the Dobbs opinion, but the signs were there long before then. The reason we have a gameshow called Family Feud is because the court system is an alternative to what we'll resort to the prior mechanism of justice: violence. And once it's common enough opinion that the court system cannot be impartial or fair, people who think they can't get a fair ruling in court will resort to old school frontier justice. Family feuds are what happens when the dispute is handed down generations, sometimes for centuries until the original matter is long lost.

  • On the post: Kristi Noem Lies, Says National Guard Deployments To ‘Blue’ Cities Aren’t Politically Motivated

    Uriel-238 ( profile ), 04 Sep, 2025 @ 05:12am

    Torture is necessary, and waterboarding isn't torture

    In blue zones, this isn't our first right-wing rhetoric rodeo, but now the troops are on US soil as it happens. I would have sworn after George W. Bush, we'd never see another Republican president again. Then we voted for Trump twice. I feel like Agent K, A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals, and you know it.

  • On the post: OK Anti-Woke Teachers Test From Prager U Is Impossible To Fail

    Uriel-238 ( profile ), 04 Sep, 2025 @ 05:06am

    This is a known gray zone

    Teachers often care about their students enough to pass the real info. A common(? rhetorical) matter is talking about consent in comprehensive sex ed that doesn't mandate it (or really anything beyond contraception and STDs). Then John Oliver's coverage of sex ed included a bit on a teacher doing an extra credit presentation about how to roll your sock onto the foot (leaving a bit of extra space for the toes). The metaphor was obvious. Woke information really explains itself. You can make a conservative talking point and then present the real data, and watch as the students [you can reach] see the conflict between what data indicates and what the PragerU talking points are. It's also funny, if you do it right. Do this enough, and your students will well wait a minute... their way into some critical thinking skills. It's teaching them the way that Monopoly (Parker Bros, Milton Bradley) teaches the outcomes of supply-side economics and late-stage capitalism: only one person has all the money and property in the end, and all players are pissed off at each other.

  • On the post: Politico Management Insists “AI” Shouldn’t Be Held To Any Sort Of Human Editorial Standards Because It’s Built By Coders, Not Journalists

    Uriel-238 ( profile ), 26 Aug, 2025 @ 03:14pm

    AI to replace work force

    This attitude belies what is going to be the cataclysmic crash of capitalism that is the secret ending of Atlas Shrugged (also the ill fate of the Golgafrinchans in THGTTG) in which the useless segment of the population (cleverly disposed of) turns out to have served necessary functions after all, and only too late do the elites realized they undermined their own citadel / hoisted themselves on their own petard, etc. We saw a smaller-scale version of this when John Deere laid off unskilled laborers to find that their upper management didn't have the skills needed to do the labor themselves, resulting in preventable accidents, and I assume a bunch of rehires. LLMs are not AGI. They can't follow the (oft poorly written or poorly illustrated) instructions of coffee machines and flat-packed furniture to make coffee / build furniture. Curiously, the Generative-AI porn and comics enthusiast communities share LORAs by the hundreds (Low-Rank Adaptations) in order to assure hands have five fingers (and twenty-seven joints): that vaginas have all their anatomically correct component parts in the right places, that faces don't get too deformed, that everyone in the picture are not wearing the same swimsuit at the beach and so on. We're discovering that a human artist makes a lot of presumptions based on established norms, based on what humans (or buildings, or actually-engineered mechas) can do, based on known preferences of the boss (looking at you, George Lucas) and based on their own preferences / creative impulses. And this reduces all the questions a generative AI needs to answer by an immense amount, so that the unskilled boss doesn't get overwhelmed with choices. Essentially, LLM has become its own programming language that requires the coder get very specific in describing what they want, and then curate from many attempts the handful of successes to present to the boss. As it is, it's a rather blunt tool, and bosses would find themselves vexed making too many decisions. I still think generative AI can be an immensely useful tool, but that it needs its own department and its own team, and currently its at the equivalent of AutoCAD during the command-line DOS era. And this rant doesn't even get into the problem that comes with commercial enterprises needing fewer workers, which means more people are unemployed and are getting that lean and hungry look. (And to finish that thought) sooner or later, we're going to have to have a civilization metamorphosis so that all this tech doesn't serve a few rich masters, but a large community. If we don't figure out how to provide a low-violence, low-risk-of-cataclysm means of making this transformation, the violent, disastrous process will be default.

  • On the post: Politico Management Insists “AI” Shouldn’t Be Held To Any Sort Of Human Editorial Standards Because It’s Built By Coders, Not Journalists

    Uriel-238 ( profile ), 26 Aug, 2025 @ 11:45am

    Funny you should say that

    Behind the Bastards did a two-parter last year How Liberal Media Helped Fascism Win noting that Jewish owned newspapers in the disintegrating Wiemar Republic sided with NSDAP rather than their Jewish bretheren in the work force and trade unions downplaying the actual pogroms going on. It turns out that rich Jews may sometimes identify more closely with other rich people than with poor Jews. (So it is with any other group we might assume are monolithic and aligned with each other). Even when those other rich people eventually will go full antisemitic and seize their newspapers out from under them before packing them into the cattle trains. As non-far-right media agencies in the 2020s are rapidly learning, appeasement and capitulation to autocratic movements doesn't work: They keep asking for more tribute until the media company is broke, at which point it's cannibalized for parts. Curiously, now that talking about Nazis and Jews in historic context still triggers moderation software, I can't report this on many forums on the presumption that it's hate speech. (Though I'm hating on wealthy interests who do seem to be willing to betray human beings to preserve or increase their personal power.) No war but class war.

  • On the post: Politico Management Insists “AI” Shouldn’t Be Held To Any Sort Of Human Editorial Standards Because It’s Built By Coders, Not Journalists

    Uriel-238 ( profile ), 26 Aug, 2025 @ 10:17am

    This is something I never understood about privatization either

    < rant > As Belle of the Ranch notes, there are a lot of Chesterton's fences in our regulations. And so it's weird that we might decide privatized offerings (say, of prisons) don't have to adhere to the standards that are mandated for state-held prisons, leading to further abuses and worse environments for inmates. Like WTF? It might just be that once we did insist private offerings had to adhere to the same standards they might not be profitable enough, or cost more per inmate than the state version, but then, that's a reason not to privatize. (The whole Enron affair, which really made private PG&E look bad compared to SCE and SMUD illustrates this example, especially since PG&E continues to be problematic with smart days and oops, we started a wildfire by failing to maintain our junctions) The only reason PG&E is still tolerated is because it's a big lobbyist front toward both parties at near-gubernatorial strata of offices. PG&E pays handsome bribes. So why are rules relaxed for AI? They should be tightened because automation should be able to perform to a standard that meets or exceeds the human equivalent. Otherwise, it's just slop that still needs human curators and editors (which cost as much, if not more, as journalists and copy-writers) Also Politico might want to make sure their content is of a minimum quality before slapping the brand on it and releasing it to the public... unless they cease caring about brand reputation, say if they're going the Private Equity route. We've seen how presumption of regularity has been decimated in courts thanks to DoJ and White House roughhousing in federal courts. The court of public opinion is even less kind regarding enshittification. < /rant >

  • On the post: OK Superintendent Plans To Give Transplant Teachers From NY, CA Woke Tests Developed By Prager U

    Uriel-238 ( profile ), 23 Aug, 2025 @ 11:31am

    But then, I am not a credentialed teacher.

    This would rule me out, though perhaps because I am neurospicy. Through grade school and into college, I'd read T/F questions and multiple-choice questions and know the answer the teacher wanted me to select, but be troubled by the wording which made that answer logically incorrect. As a kid this cost me a lot of grade scores. In college, when I cared, I'd challenge questions and sometimes have (non-sarcastically) delightful conversations with my professors, and / or wonder at the end of the year how I got a high grade when my work and test scores were consistently low. (Note, when the teacher was a jerk, I just stopped caring, so this is biased anecdote.) Anyway, woke teachers in Oklahoma desperate to get jobs should be able to intuit the proper PragerU answers to such tests and pass them with accolades. But then wouldn't sleep for a few nights after the fact. Wokeness remains awareness of systemic biases against marginalized peoples, and English colonials were victims of such biases, and revolted and formed a new nation (with some launch failures, and some undue influence by the plantation powers) specifically to counter anti-wokeness. It's been an uphill battle ever since and continues to be, despite fantasies of a communist revolution < Bolshevik chorus swells in the background. >

  • On the post: Federal Judge Rips ICE For Turning The Legal Migration Process Into ‘Detention Roulette’

    Uriel-238 ( profile ), 19 Aug, 2025 @ 06:11pm

    Return to Nuremberg

    Since the US has already shown it can no longer lead the industrialized world, it's a small step to decide it can no longer be trusted to govern itself, at which point everyone in DHS will have to face tribunal for participation in international crimes against humanity. After uncorking this bottle of mayhem in November, the whole of the United States deserves no less. It'll be funny if foreign garrisons end up patrolling DC because we can't trust the government here not to abuse their power and send troops in for disinformation purposes.

  • On the post: Train Maker Sues Hackers For Exposing Dodgy Efforts To Make Train Repairs More Difficult

    Uriel-238 ( profile ), 19 Aug, 2025 @ 06:03pm

    R2R in EU?

    This looks particularly shady for NEWAG. It'd be keen if the EU implements right-to-repair regulations in response to someone trying to DRM train engines.

  • On the post: Trump Pretends Crime Rates Are Up To Justify Sending Troops To DC Streets. Too Many Americans Believe Him.

    Uriel-238 ( profile ), 14 Aug, 2025 @ 01:54pm

    Rules of engagement

    Every national guardsman is advised on the rules of war, what they are allowed to do, and so those willing to fire on US civilians get used as examples to the Army and USMC of what not to do (See Kent State, Ohio. See also the CS&N folk song Ohio about Kent) There are extremely narrow limits what a national guardsman is allowed to do, and when a governor or the President gives them an illegal order, they suffer the consequences for obeying it. At the same time the rank and file of every US armed service are advised off the record how jolly sorry they'll be should they refuse to obey an illegal order, in what has been a drift towards coerced obedience since the end of the cold war, conspicuously when the enemy shifted from proxy soldiers and Eastern bloc to NGO terrorists. The end result has not been units totally loyal to the administration, but fragile units with cohesion that shatters whenever they have to process an illegal order. The post-George-W-Bush training has tried to undo the damage, but between health problems and counter-recruitment based on Iraq-war era stories, recruitment efforts have been failing to meet quotas. Trump inherited a mess within the ranks, and he and his autocratic regime are only going to make it worse, and may put the loyalty of units into play should civil war ever go hot.

  • On the post: Trump Pretends Crime Rates Are Up To Justify Sending Troops To DC Streets. Too Many Americans Believe Him.

    Uriel-238 ( profile ), 12 Aug, 2025 @ 12:56pm

    Why Trump won

    There are two big factors that seem to indicate how Trump got the thin leads in the battleground states. The first is the trillion dollar propaganda machine that still holds most of the viewership (which is in turn helped by algos directing people towards right-wing content). Looking at people I know for whom FOX News is their regular diet, and my own dad regurgitating FOX talking points that he once disagreed with, it's a mind-control machine for which we don't yet have a countermeasure. The other is a factor affecting most nations that pit a neoliberal party versus a far right party, and that is neoliberalism is leaving a lot of folks in precarity. There was a general global shift to the right around November 2024, which halted when the world watched what Trump was doing in / to the US (which has informed election results since). When frogs are dying under King Log, there's a temptation to vote King Heron for any change, hoping Heron will eat the other frogs first. This is why I think the DNC in 2019 should have gone progressive, and when that failed Biden needed to go more progressive than he did (even though he was more progressive than his own historical average), and then Harris needed to go even more progressive than that, instead of palling around with Cheney. On 60 Minutes, Harris assured the US she was still a capitalist and a staunch neoliberal, and all the frogs running out of options were going to continue running out of options, so they didn't come to the polls. There's also the conspicuous numbers of top-only votes for Trump (save for a vote for trump, the ballots were empty -- US general elections have a conspicuous lot of those). The MAGA zombies heeded Trump's eldritch call in vast numbers.

  • On the post: Trump Pretends Crime Rates Are Up To Justify Sending Troops To DC Streets. Too Many Americans Believe Him.

    Uriel-238 ( profile ), 12 Aug, 2025 @ 12:39pm

    CECOT, the Everglades encampment, etc.

    We've seen the places to stay Trump offers his victims.

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