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WesternInfidels

@ WesternInfidels @feddit.online

Posts
1
Comments
350
Joined
7 mo. ago

  • Trump celebrates death of Robert Mueller, ex-FBI director who investigated Russian interference in 2016 election

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  • “Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people.”

    When we say every accusation is a confession, by golly, we mean every accusation.

  • Cyberattack on vehicle breathalyzer company leaves drivers stranded across the US

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  • This is a great story to illuminate the large number of problems that could be addressed by decent public transit, better options for walking and biking, etc.

  • Co-founder of tech company charged with diverting $2.5 billion in Nvidia AI chips to China in violation of export laws

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  • HP realizes that mandatory 15-minute support call wait times isn’t good support

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  • I spent a couple of years doing phone support (for a Windows program, in the internet-by-modem days), and we had a paper manual that we spent a lot of effort on. I'm not sure it helped too many people. We didn't have a way of measuring, though. We had no idea how many people were blundering through things on their own, how many people set things up on their own with the manual's help, or how many people were chucking the whole product in a closet and forgetting about it.

    Sure, some callers definitely felt it was a waste of time to learn how to work things; they just wanted their things to work. They wanted their things to serve them, instead of the other way around, and I can't even argue with that philosophy.

    But most callers just didn't have the technical experience to make sense of any documentation we could write. Some didn't know what the desktop computer they used every day even looked like, didn't know which of the metal-and-plastic boxes around their desk was "the computer." They didn't know the difference between a floppy drive and a hard drive, and they'd argue with us about it. "I don't have a floppy drive, my drive takes those hard disks." No manual or knowledge base article was going to help these folks, no matter how much effort we made.

  • MAGA has been swooning over an Army soldier and her pro-Trump message. She is AI

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  • I don't think it's strictly about "moral high ground." If you're willing to do anything to win, then if you do win, the winner will be a person who is willing to do anything.

  • MAGA has been swooning over an Army soldier and her pro-Trump message. She is AI

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  • "This technology" is, as used here, industrial scale lying which was made possible through industrial scale theft.

    We can re-phrase the question: "Why is the right jumping headlong into industrial scale lies and crime, while the left loses ground on this front?"

    An answer suggests itself to me.

  • suboptimal

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  • Q: So do you have any hobbies?

    A: Well lately I've really gotten interested in routing VGA through unusual items!

    Q: Ooooh, that's so hot right now

  • MAGA gov thrown out of restaurant after customers say she made them uncomfortable

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  • She went to the place she wanted to go, with her guests and her security detail, and she got the food she wanted to eat. She had the chance to eat it.

    Somehow even this write-up. which is not particularly sympathetic to her, is framing this as a kind of affront, a consequence, a humiliation. But she pretty much got what she came for, didn't she? She's facing no practical consequences at all. She lost a little face, maybe. This was a public declaration that people don't like her, don't like what priorities she's chosen to serve.

    Maybe we wouldn't be in this pickle we're in, if this kind of getting-through-to-the-isolated-elites happened more often. If we didn't have isolated elites in the first place.

  • Former Trump official admits that their goal is to impose their Christian values on other Americans - LGBTQ Nation

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  • If you don’t like it, I’m sorry

    ...as Jesus himself so famously said, of course.

  • FDA links raw cheese to outbreak; Makers "100% disagree," refuse recall

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  • Spotify playing ads for paid subscribers

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  • I participate in the techtakes community on awful.systems...

    Jesus, that sounds awful.

    Subscribed.

  • Spotify playing ads for paid subscribers

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  • Why Are We Still Doing This? - Ed Zitron

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  • I am constantly asked to explain my opinions ... I am constantly harangued for proof of what I believe, and every time I hand it over there’s some sort of ham-fisted response of “it’s getting better” and “it will get even more better from here!’

    For an industry so thoroughly steeped in cold, hard rationality , AI boosters are so quick to jump to flights of fancy — to speak of the mythical “AGI” and the supposed moment when everything gets cheaper and also powerful enough to be reliable or effective.

    I don't know what's going to happen with "AI," but I think this highlights an interesting pattern, one where the standards of evidence for critics and boosters are different. Certainly we've seen a similar phenomenon in cryptocurrencies and NFTs.

    Is it profound, is it one of those penetrating insights that you can't stop seeing once you've seen it? I'm not sure. Of course enthusiasts are biased, of course their arguments are emotional and unfair.

  • Commence psychological breakdown

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  • George would have some confusion about the "planet Vulcan" bit long before Star Wars, though.

  • Divide & Conquer

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  • You give somebody who’s used to living paycheck to paycheck a few million bucks and they will spend it.

    So they become job creators?

    Is the goal to become a rich asshole? Or is the goal for everyone to make $19/hr?

    Well I guess those are definitely the only possible outcomes, aren't they?

  • Microsoft wants devs to build Electron AI apps on Windows 11, says no need of native code, despite RAM concerns

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  • We could view this as "MS pushes for stupid direction that clued-in tech people are opposed to," or we could view this as "MS gives up on native apps because everyone else of consequence already has." I hate it but I have eyes.

    If AI enhanced coding is really so great, we might expect to see a Renaissance of small, efficient native apps, even on platforms like Android. I'm not holding my breath, though.

  • Iran war shows how AI speeds up military ‘kill chains’

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  • The term "kill chain" reduces the slaughter of human beings to an engineering problem. It tacitly admits that modern militaries are murder factories. If we had caught ISIS or a drug cartel speaking and thinking this way, that would be a Fox News headline for months. What a dispiriting bit of jargon. It tells so much more than it says.

  • The 49MB Web Page

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  • Removed Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

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  • I'm concerned in a general way that the federated design of Lemmy / Mastodon etc. is by its nature (arguably even by its intent) likely to lead users to construct isolated media bubbles. But I don't know how to improve it. I'm not going to subscribe to a (hypothetical as far as I know) fascist community just to "broaden my mind," that wouldn't work.

    It's hard to know how much of the division we see and feel is meatspace division facilitated by social media, and how much of it is social media reflecting divisions in meatspace. There's no reason to suppose the answer would be simple or easy.