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PhilipTheBucket

@ PhilipTheBucket @quokk.au

Posts
21
Comments
124
Joined
1 yr. ago

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  • seeing more nuance than "A16Z investment is a necessary, end of story! No discussion allowed!" does not make one a purity obsessed leftists

    Aw, jeez, you're right. I hate discussion and I hate nuance. You got me. That's exactly a really good summary of what I was saying.

    The piece about Substack making nazi blogs to stir up drama was not meant to be taken seriously

    Ah, yes, Schroedinger's leftist. "I was just joking! Unless...? Also, BTW, Substack's got a Nazi problem."

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  • I am not American

    Great, congratulations.

    it is reasonable to be sceptical of Substack's claims

    What "claims"?

    People in other countries get severally beaten up (or even killed) in an attempt to do real journalism

    IDK if you've been paying attention, but they've been putting journalists here in ICE detention for doing real journalism. IDK why you are trying to frame pro-journalism as a thing that is somehow unique to non-America, or in any way related to Substack. That framing just makes literally 0 sense.

    Journalists good. Beating up journalists bad. Hopefully we can agree on that.

    Also, hosting journalists good. Hopefully we can agree on that. No? Or does the first thing mean the second one is bad somehow? This is the type of weird circuitous framing I always see when people are bringing in some kind of bullshit narrative. "Substack hosts Nazis, I don't like that" makes perfect sense, I can dig it, we can talk about it. This is just some weird circuitous nonsense.

    Where did I make any claims about how the A16Z money was used?

    I mean, you sure brought it up as a bad thing. Which, yes, it's pretty suspect. I would actually describe the centralization of Substack (which means it's vulnerable to a single legal action or something torpedoing the whole thing or putting them in a position where they actually do have to skew their journalism in some sort of pro-fascist direction) as the biggest problem, but you didn't touch on that, because it can't be summed up in a bite-sized "What about the A16Z money!" nugget.

    Sure, it likely was used to fund journalists on the platform, including people who do good work. It is a good thing that they are getting paid.

    Great! Glad we finally agree on something. Yes, it is, and it's why the centralization and VC money was maybe a necessary evil to some extent where something like Ghost will have a harder time sending bunches of money to journalists, which is why all these good left-wing journalists are on Substack right now. Which is a good thing. I mean, at least we're getting somewhere on that part lol.

    I just don't buy the colourful story about "commitment to free speech"

    Honestly, why not? If a platform is 80% left wing voices and raised money specifically to give to those left wing voices, and then also hosts a tiny minority (much less than 20%, just kind of the ones who show up who don't cross certain objective lines, like being Nazis) of right-wing voices, why would "free speech" not be the most logical explanation for why they're doing that?

    I am aware that "free speech" is often used as a code-word to excuse Nazi platforms, but those ones are usually pretty easy to identify because they host majority Nazi voices, they kick the left-wing ones off instead of raising funding for them, and so on and so on. I get the instant suspicion of "free speech" at this point in the American media landscape, but I don't get why someone who took more than a cursory look at what Substack's doing would come to any other conclusion about why they're doing it.

    and the uncritical view of the A16Z investment.

    Sounds good! If I find anyone taking an uncritical view of the A16Z investment, I'll let you know, and you and they can hash it out.

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  • There's a good bit of fake voting on Lemmy, but after a quick glance at the votes I don't think this is that, I think it's just people legitimately believing the narrative that "Substack = Nazis" and upvoting it because they believe in it.

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  • (it would be funny if they created the Nazis blog themselves to stir things up).

    Jesus Christ, see this is what I was talking about. You're making up nonsense. What they actually did was invested a bunch of money in paying actual journalism people to do actual journalism things, and then create a new way of doing things that invited a ton of qualified mostly leftist journalists to do real journalism on a platform that's a little closer to how people actually consume media now, and get paid for it, and in a sustainable fashion now that all the previous media empires are either crashing down or getting replaced with explicit propaganda.

    That's where some of that A16Z money went: To journalists (some of it literally and directly, to get the ball rolling). That's why there are all these people like Robert Reich and Tim Snyder on Substack right now, doing journalism and getting paid for it. It's a good thing.

    Of course, it's super easy to pretend they created a bunch of Nazi blogs instead. They didn't do that, but "it would be funny" is easy to say. Man, get lost.

  • Who will be the villains in future Hollywood movies?

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  • I suspect that, just like Columbia University and CBS, some Hollywood movie studio is going to decide to try to make Trump happy by feeding him the kind of self-congratulatory bullcrap he loves to hear, and they're going to make a full-on big ticket studio movie about some kind of barely-veiled (if that) MAGA hero busting heads to fuck up the evil Democrats. Basically along the lines of "My Home Village," absolutely equally shameless.

    It sounds nuts from today's POV, but I think it's better than 50% that at least one is going to get made before all of this is over.

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  • !fediverse@lemmy.world hasn't yet succumbed to the international shittymod conspiracy. Give it time, I'm sure once they secure their hold over dbzer0, they'll get to work on some of the medium-sized LW communities, and start booting out defenses of Substack because of "trolling" or something.

    (I am joking. I think. Maybe not.)

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  • This is of a piece with "Mamdani isn't left wing enough for me" / "AOC supports genocide" / "Bernie is a Zionist" kind of glib one-liner reasons why left-wing people need to stop supporting left-wing things, because they're not really virtuous enough, and so we need to abandon them in pursuit of some kind of imaginary virtue solution instead of just having unity.

    TL;DR: They took some funding from Marc Andreessen long ago, they were willing to give blogs to everyone including Nazis (bc free speech) and the whole internet yelled at them, so they caved and removed the Nazis. IDK how this particular push notification happened, but I would bet that the blog will be removed. They are not wholly ideologically pure, I think Richard Spenser is the worst person they willingly host and he's pretty bad, but they don't allow Nazis anymore specifically because of the hue and cry it raised up the first time.

    More conversation about it here, I don't have the patience right now to write up a full explanation. TL;DR someone who's panicked at you about the Substack Nazi problem is listening to something that's mostly designed to hurt a mostly left-wing platform.

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    What are some natural hot springs/spas in video games?

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  • Oh, also: Deep cut

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    What are some natural hot springs/spas in video games?

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  • Chillin' with Quirrel in the hot springs

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  • Hollow Knight

    Running into people in the hot springs randomly is dope, the lore is strong

  • As governments around the world are set to make the Internet more restrictive and privacy-invading, we need a solution

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  • Well, but we're talking about how to prepare for the future where it does need to be fed proof. At some point, I think pretty soon from now in some places, it's going to become necessary to either break the rules of the internet in ways that can actually get you in trouble, or accept that you have to do things like upload your ID to all these places, agree not to access certain types of content the government doesn't want you looking at, not say certain political things on social media or else you're going on a list, things like that.

    I think option A is probably better and it probably makes sense to start to think about, how are we going to do that and not have the expanded-and-mission-creeped version of ICE showing up at your door for it to give you a citation or worse, a year from now.

    Right now, yes, a VPN is fine. But that's only true for as long as the government doesn't strongly dislike anything that you are doing.

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    Uptick in inflammatory posts

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  • Or do we just have some bad actors trying to stir the pot?

    Yes.

    People are hostile idiots sometimes, also, so that doesn't help. But yes, people are definitely trying to stir up deliberate ballache for whatever weird reasons of their own.

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    Can i simply bake frozen chicken or does it actually need to thaw over several hours or immersed in cold water or something?

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  • Maybe like 20 minutes at 325F?

    This 1,000% will not work (assuming it's a cutlet / thighs or something). This is not enough for even a defrosted chicken breast.

    There are ways you can do it, other people have commented some approaches (basically, cut it up, if you want it to work). But (a) it's unsafe without a meat thermometer (b) it will probably be a failure unless you're pretty skilled. Definitely don't just throw it in at 325, the most likely outcome is that you'll have to leave it way longer than 20 minutes, and then give up once it's getting dried and awful around the outside, and have to take it out anyway and slice it up and fry it or something, because the inside is still raw.

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    Can i simply bake frozen chicken or does it actually need to thaw over several hours or immersed in cold water or something?

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  • 😬

    If it was me, I would just throw it in the fridge and find something else, and eat it tomorrow. If you have a meat thermometer you can try to make it work with low heat, or there are other ways to cook it that work fine (maybe thaw in cold water and then cut it to strips and sort of stir-fry it for example), but I think the 1-2 times I tried something like this I was not happy with the result.

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    Can i simply bake frozen chicken or does it actually need to thaw over several hours or immersed in cold water or something?

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  • Absolutely don't bake frozen chicken

    You can defrost it in the microwave, they usually have a "defrost" setting with some different options which may take 5-10 minutes. It's a little less optimal than waiting, but it's fine. Definitely don't bake it frozen.

  • As governments around the world are set to make the Internet more restrictive and privacy-invading, we need a solution

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  • I've literally never in my life heard of "this person was doing (whatever), but they were behind a VPN, so we had to do (whatever elaborate sting operation) instead of compromising the VPN." I've heard that many times about Tor.

    It's possible that no one's ever done something significant enough to make the feds interested from behind a VPN, just always used Tor, but I feel like it is unlikely. I feel like it's more likely that they either have the ability to force the VPN companies to comply with some legal structures that give them the info they need, or else just wiretap the pipes going in and out of the VPN servers and can sort things out pretty straightforwardly if they really start to care about it.

    VPNs are certainly useful; they make it a lot more difficult for non-law-enforcement people to know what you're up to, which is a significant gain, and they are faster and generally more convenient than using Tor. But if you're actually concerned about the government, I would use Tor 100% of the time over a VPN.

  • As governments around the world are set to make the Internet more restrictive and privacy-invading, we need a solution

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  • Yeah. As far as I know, there are some theoretical state-actor attacks, but nothing that anyone's ever been able to make work in practice. Compromising something else is just always easier.

    It was literally designed by professional spies to be resistant against state intelligence agencies. It was originally made by US intelligence for secret communication with their assets, and only released to the public when they realized they needed a bunch of additional traffic on the network that the US intelligence traffic can blend in with. At least as of the Snowden leaks (which showed NSA compromise of huge amounts of the internet including most HTTPS traffic), they hadn't figured out a way to undo it for their own spying purposes, either.

  • As governments around the world are set to make the Internet more restrictive and privacy-invading, we need a solution

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  • Seriously. The reason CSAM merchants and drug dealers use Tor is because it actually protects their privacy successfully. Whereas, if you're using a VPN or whatever cobbled-together solution, the feds just have a hearty laugh about it, send a subpoena by email or use some automated system that's even more streamlined, and then come and find you.

    Tor is not bulletproof; they regularly run operations where they take down some big illegal thing on the dark web. But they have to do an operation for it, and if there were any solution that was any better, that thing would be even more infested with illegal material than "the dark web" is. That's just how it works. And listening to the newspapers when they tell you that it's a sign you need to stay away from those actually-effective solutions because "terrorism!" or whatever is a pretty foolish idea.

  • As governments around the world are set to make the Internet more restrictive and privacy-invading, we need a solution

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  • Tor is slow and has a reputation of being used by pedophiles and drug traffickers. I2P is scattered in implementation and cannot handle high load.

    Physical bluetooth mesh networks or other technology is an example. Maybe even a new version of dial-up.

    These are incompatible statements lol

    Tor is fine, I'm looking at this on Tor Browser right now. I would say the jank level is about 20%. Quokk.au, actually, for some weird reason has significant problems with it (significant slowness and sometimes refuses to load a page). I actually have no idea what's going on with that, but it and I think one other site are the only Fedi sites that have any kind of problem at all. The majority (but not all) news sites and things work fine. Some things do not and I have to bounce over to some normal browser. The jank level is definitely not 0, but it's bearable.

    I actually do agree about needing to set up a better architecture overall. Tor is an extremely special-purpose architecture for one thing only (near-bulletproof privacy and firewall traversal even against extremely aggressive government attempts to defeat both), which is honestly a pretty fantastic start, but there's a lot more that goes into "the internet" than just slapping a slightly janky but super-safe VPN over the front of it.

    The main point is: Hey! Don't badmouth Tor, it's good (and the jank level of starting from scratch instead will be super high for any forseeable future.)

  • Oh My God, TAKE IT DOWN Kills Parody

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  • I have a feeling they're going to be fine moneywise whatever happens. Their personal safety is probably fine. Maybe not, but probably they don't have to worry too much.

    It's still courage that they're doing it.