PhilipTheBucket

@ PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat

Posts

127
Comments

432
Joined

2 yr. ago

Moderating

The Register rss.ponder.cat

Techdirt rss.ponder.cat

New York Times rss.ponder.cat

US News ponder.cat

BBC - US and Canada rss.ponder.cat

Globalnews.ca rss.ponder.cat

1y ago

Removed

Jordan Peterson says he’s left Canada and moved to the U.S. - National | Globalnews.ca
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PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat 1y ago
The applicable word is "pick-me".

1y ago

Whats your favorite "struggle meal"?

Graham crackers with whipped cream on top. This one was very much the bottom of the barrel. 🥲

Ghirardelli brownie mix from Costco, filled up to about 1/3 of a mug mixed with milk and microwaved for 45 seconds to make a little brownie. Serve with ice cream on top, or with a glass of milk. I actually still do this one, it is delicious and costs basically $0 per serving.

Rice + milk + sugar and then mixed up in a bowl into a kind of puree. This goes great as a dessert after rice + frozen vegetables sauteed up from those massive Costco bags lol. If you're feeling bougie you can shred some cheese on top.

1y ago

Trump Allies Sue John Roberts To Give White House Control Of Court System

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PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat 1y ago

the Great Depression + the Gilded Age + the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand + the Civil War + segregation + Asian-American internment camps, but instead of happening over the course of a hundred years, we’re packing it all in to Thursday.

You forgot that on top of all that, the people on top have in their possession an integrated surveillance state superweapon the likes of which has never really been seen before.

How effective they'll be able to make it, in service of destroying anyone who opposes them politically, remains to be seen, but people who've managed to build pale imitations of it have in the past been able to accomplish terrifying things, and they got this version all for free and all complete, someone else having built it for them.

I definitely wasn't saying it will be a straightforward struggle or a fun time.

1y ago

Trump Allies Sue John Roberts To Give White House Control Of Court System

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PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat 1y ago

People were getting born into slavery, live their whole lives working in the fields not knowing how to read, and there was a massive political and paramilitary fight over whether that was going to continue and how and where, which presaged the explicit military fight the whole country had about it.

Then we had the civil war.

Then we had the labor movement, people getting born basically into slavery again, and having paramilitary battles to fight for their right to simply live and exist and have some kind of voice in how their daily life was organized, and have some life outside of their slavery existence, instead of living on corporate fiefdoms obeying the owner of their company like a king.

Then we had segregation, poll taxes and voter literacy tests, police brutality, water cannons and tear gas and police dogs and lynching. When people talked about making lynching illegal it was a huge debate. Without lynching, what would we even do? To keep order?

Somehow, from that, we made it to today. People today can expect that they can vote, they can have newspapers or web sites that say whatever they want, they can be free of police public or private just coming around and fucking up their shit because they irritated someone powerful. (That last one is debatable in the modern day, but for 99.9% of people I would say that most of what I just said is still true.) But none of that happened because "constitution" or because "America."

It happened because people fought and died to make it happen. Maybe it's useful that there was a piece of paper somewhere that was giving them something to hope for when they wanted to give up, give an end goal in mind and remind them why it was important. They had something to talk about to other people about why they were doing it. But "the country" didn't do shit to help them in that fight. They just had to go and do it.

1y ago

Trump Allies Sue John Roberts To Give White House Control Of Court System

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PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat 1y ago

Fuck that, man. Stay and fight.

Have a passport (definitely apply for one today if you do not), have a plan, if shit really goes sideways then it's every person for themselves and their family. But as hard as it might seem if you've grown up in a time of stability, we've been through way worse than this bullshit in this country, and we've usually come out of it stronger and wiser.

“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.
"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

1y ago

Serious question for Americans: how was your history education re the 1930's in Germany

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PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat 1y ago

The level of public education in American schools, about anything that isn't a STEM precursor, is basically nonexistent. The STEM precursors are sometimes covered okay and sometimes covered poorly, depending on your school system, but outside of that it might as well be nothing.

I went to some good schools and I literally can't think of a single thing I learned about World War 2 from school, let alone about Germany before the war. It all comes either from family talking to me about it or from my own reading. I like to think of myself that at this point I have some fairly in-depth understanding but that's not because of school.

1y ago

Peter Navarro says shrinking US economy is good news

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PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat 1y ago

It is precisely like when Russia's currency tanked like a stricken submarine, which meant their PPP-adjusted GDP shot up the rankings and became one of the highest numbers in the world, which all the tankies promptly seized upon and used as an example of why the sanctions are actually helping Russia, by boosting its domestic economy, which is why everything is going great.

1y ago

Right-Wing Canadian Candidate Begs Trump to Stop Posting Weird Things

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PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat 1y ago

You picked which bus to ride on, you don't get to complain now that it's full of dingbats and losers and going somewhere you don't want to go. There are people who lost much more than their jobs, and you were happy as a clam with that and wanted to create more of them on your side of the border. And so, out you go.

1y ago

What is Docker?

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PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat 1y ago

Are you saying I was being silly?

You might be onto something

1y ago

What is Docker?

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PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat 1y ago

Okay, so way back when, Google needed a way to install and administer 500 new instances of whatever web service they had going on without it being a nightmare. So they made a little tool to make it easier to spin up random new stuff easily and scriptably.

So then the whole rest of the world said "Hey Google's doing that and they're super smart, we should do that too." So they did. They made Docker, and for some reason that involved Y Combinator giving someone millions of dollars for reasons I don't really understand.

So anyway, once Docker existed, nobody except Google and maybe like 50 other tech companies actually needed to do anything that it was useful for (and 48 out of those 50 are too addled by layoffs and nepotism to actually use Borg / K8s/ Docker (don't worry they're all the the same thing) for its intended purpose.) They just use it so their tech leads can have conversations at conferences and lunches where they make it out like anyone who's not using Docker must be an idiot, which is the primary purpose for technology as far as they're concerned.

But anyway in the meantime a bunch of FOSS software authors said "Hey this is pretty convenient, if I put a setup script inside a Dockerfile I can literally put whatever crazy bullshit I want into it, like 20 times more than even the most certifiably insane person would ever put up with in a list of setup instructions, and also I can pull in 50 gigs of dependencies if I want to of which 2,421 have critical security vulnerabilities and no one will see because they'll just hit the button and make it go."

And so now everyone uses Docker and it's a pain in the ass to make any edits to the configuration or setup and it's all in this weird virtualized box, and the "from scratch" instructions are usually out of date.

The end

1y ago

ICE promises bystanders who challenged Charlottesville raid will be prosecuted

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PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat 1y ago

As is often the case, the behavior they are telling you you MUST not do, and they will NOT stand for and you definitely will suffer for it, is what they're afraid of.

At some point the public opinion will hit critical mass at the street and individual level. Maybe (and maybe not). There is a reason they always want to get out of the area as soon as possible, and have stopped wearing identifiable uniforms.

I have no idea whether a group of ICE agents getting mobbed by an angry crowd that outnumbers them 20-to-1 will be a good thing or a bad thing, if things do reach a point where that happens. I legitimately don't know. It's definitely better than no one doing anything until they've escalated to filling up all these detention centers they've been building with people who mentioned "protest" on Facebook. Also, certainly, them threatening retaliation against people who are showing signs in that direction is a real and dangerous threat.

I'm just saying there is a reason they are calling out judges and bystanders as the threat that they MUST shut down. It's because it is by far the most easy and reliable undoing to their power. It means a lot more than the Supreme Court, honestly, at the end of the day.

1y ago

How do you promote communities on Lemmy?

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PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat 1y ago

I’m not sure this is actually necessary. I found that a single post of a moderately-interesting community to !newcommunities@lemmy.world wound up federating my stuff to all the main instances instantly.

I get the concept, and maybe depending on the details of the network it might be needed (it might be a good approach on Mastodon for example, which has a much harder chicken-and-egg problem in terms of getting your stuff federated). I’m not sure it’s doing any active harm or anything. But at the same time I do feel like importing this kind of “not enough people are seeing my stuff how can I make sure as many people as possible see my stuff” tools over from the SEO marketer’s toolkit might be a bad habit or pattern to get into.

1y ago

How do you promote communities on Lemmy?

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PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat 1y ago

Put up genuinely interesting stuff on the community, at least 1-2 times per day so it has a little flow of activity.
Once there are a screen's full of posts or so, post the new community on !newcommunities@lemmy.world and !communitypromo@lemmy.ca. People will see the thing and subscribe to it from everywhere (if they are interested) and it will get federated to most of the main servers.
As the activity continues, people may decide to post stuff of their own there, and other people will run across it either from the "local all" feed of your instance or from the "global all" feed somewhere else. They may subscribe to it, they may happen to see a cross-post from someplace they are subscribed to, but however it works out there will grow a steady flow of subscribers, if people are interested in it.

The sort of filtering aspect where not every new community will automatically get its posts thrown into every single person's feed every day, is a feature not a bug. The steps above are enough to get it popular if people are into it, but also limiting enough that it won't get publicized above its organic popularity level and start spamming everyone's feed.

1y ago

Suggestions for people on Fosstodon considering moving

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PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat 1y ago

on the 50 communities here on lemmy he mods to silence discussion that doesn’t align with his views.

Who is he on Lemmy? I didn't know he was here too. Do you have some examples of silencing discussion that doesn't align with his views?

I'm aware of reports of him doing messed-up moderation on Reddit, which is sus. If it sounded like I was in his corner I am not. I'm just saying like you were that more clarity would be better.

Edit: There's also this and this

1y ago

Suggestions for people on Fosstodon considering moving

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PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat 1y ago

Yeah. The instant I read "racist, anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ+ views in a position of power" I strongly suspected that this is some bullshit.

IDK man. I've heard bad things about carrotcypher before, I have not looked into them one way or another. It's sort of dicey both ways: I'm paranoid enough to be wary of a moderator who seems right-wing or pro-corporate who seems to be abusing their position, and also paranoid enough to be wary of a sudden hue and cry that a particular moderator needs to be removed because they are "problematic" in poorly-specified ways.

Just taking a cursory look at it: Mike's defense of carrotcypher seems pretty credible. He looked at all carrotcypher's past moderation actions and decided that it all looked fine and explained why with details. The criticism seemed a little unhinged. The one link that I saw at a quick glance was a link to a single one-line reddit comment, saying that it called CNN propaganda when it didn't, and saying he favored deporting Mahmoud Khalil when he didn't.

Then there was a bunch of stuff like:

this is a wildly disgusting person that you welcome into your space. i know that as a trans woman i cannot trust any fosstodon user while knowing what kind of person you happily let on your staff, whether theyre acting on those beliefs or not. it's not safe for our mostly queer userbase to talk to your fascist-harboring userbase.

It would have been much easier to just link to some of the messed-up things, instead of asserting them and getting all upset and using the "I'm queer so don't you DARE argue with me or you will be a 'problematic' person too" card.

IDK, I'm not decided on carrotcypher specifically and he might be a big POS and I just haven't seen it yet. I have seen arguments that he removed particular reddit posts that there was no legitimate reason to remove. I just wish there was more light and less heat about why exactly he is a problem. Basing it on "this is stuff he removed that he shouldn't have, look, links" is way better, in my opinion, than just being loudly upset about it.

1y ago

What is fediverse basically ? How does it work ?

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PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat 1y ago

What? Why? That's exactly how it works.

1y ago

Why is it so hard for people to concede even small points when discussing charged topics?

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PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat 1y ago

One thing I would add to all the good answers here: It stems from a lack of contact with real-world, messy, difficult environments.

Usually people who come into contact with harsh reality a lot in their daily life are pretty humble. They don't get stuck on one way of looking at things, they don't refuse to admit obvious good sense arguments. Even if they get to the point that they're super-qualified, they just kind of have common sense and are approachable. Mostly, not always. I think this is why people kind of fall in love with certain types of environments with a lot of challenge or "win or lose" aspect to them: Business, sports, law, war, esports, mountain climbing, whatever. It's like you get to prove yourself and all your bullshit against the harsh light of day, and a lot of times what you learn is that some genius theory wasn't really all that solid once it got exposed to the real world.

But then, a whole lot of first-world modern life isn't like that. You can just go around your entire life talking about economics or politics and just be wrong as hell and you never get to find out. So it's easy to be super-confident, and it's obviously a lot more comfortable to be always right about everything than it is to admit when someone's maybe successfully poking a hole in your genius.

1y ago

Trump says Russia has shown willingness for peace by not taking over all of Ukraine, calls it 'pretty big concession'

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PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat 1y ago

What are you on about

1y ago

Trump says Russia has shown willingness for peace by not taking over all of Ukraine, calls it 'pretty big concession'

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PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat 1y ago

Multiple people told me I was being “antagonistic” when I spoke to the Hexbear people on the topic of Russia and Ukraine. I think I’m okay with that.

1y ago

Trump says Russia has shown willingness for peace by not taking over all of Ukraine, calls it 'pretty big concession'

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PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat 1y ago

As I understand it, his logic here is:

Iraq War: That’s their country that is wrong, go home
Israeli occupation: That’s their country that is wrong, go home
English oppression of Ireland: That’s their country that is wrong, go home
Ukraine war: Well you see it’s complicated, Ukraine is not innocent and anyway Russia was provoked

(Actually, if I’m being serious, I think the point was to tear down the very notion that matters of geopolitics can ever involve “right” or “wrong” and erode the reader’s sense of justice, depress them, make them disengage, and thus provide a narrative safe space for all the killing, torture, and destruction that Russia wants to do for as long as it wants to do it. But, if you take it at face value, that up there is what he’s saying.)