unwarlikeExtortion, unwarlikeextortion@lemmy.ml

tl;dr rust yt-dlp frontend in a flatpak for some reason

This is why we can’t have nice things.

The community Vocal members thereof, instead of seeing genuine effort as something praiseworthy always find the worst stupid angle to belittle well-meaning people from.

Britain is clearly speedrunning becoming Airstrip one

Depends on who your they actually is.

Because it isn’t the current US citizens’ constitution - it’s the US founding fathers’ constitution.

And now it’s Trump’s to wipe his ass with, together with his cronies.

It will become the current US citizens’ once again once it starts being upheld.

But for now, in some a lot of places, it’s Trump’s little 250 year-old dusty rag.

Honestly, this idea has me pretty mortified as well. Just seeing ”rm -rf /” as part of a string sends chills down my spine.

Granted, any reasons or explanations to cause a string being cut short to this godforsaken form and accidentally run is extremely unlikely, but a valid theoretical possibility: I can easily imagine someone mistyping the first letter after root and, wishing to delete it, pressing Backspace while simultaneously accidentally grazing the Enter key.

Sure, the chances of it happening are about the same as a gun user accidentally dropping their gun, clumsily catching it in the air and accidentally shooting someone right in between the eyes as a result.

The licence over 100 pages long, with deliberately convoluted language no one ever expects you to read. Some services even block you from accepting if you haven’t scrolled to the end, but then most give a “Skip to bottom” button!

And since most EULAs are not grounded in reality and as such unworkable, they’re pretty much just a scare tactic.

I have to say, I have my doubts about that.

This is the way. Take their words at face value - but just the ones that you like. Repeat them like a parrot. Embellish them. Make up stories.

Facts truly don’t care about felings. But a lie repeated oft enough effectively acts like the truth.

Use their weapon against them.

To convince idiots, sometimes you have to play by idiotic rules.

And for the bootlickers out there: No, I’m not saying OC is lying or an idiot by any means. I feel like I have to spell this out precisely because of the unreasonableness of the times we live in. Some bootlicking facehugger is bound to come and take the most unreasonable interpretation of my words and sink thei facehugging claws into my mouth. Maybe not right here or right now, but inevitably time and time again.

It’s easier to screw over consumers than businesses.

Busunesses like to complain. They have long-term contracts. They have a lot of purchase power. They’re more likely tp swotch to a competitor. When they threaten, they’re more likely to go through with the threats since they have both money to burn and employees to blackmail with pay cuts.

Among other things.

There’s a lot of consumers, so those that do jump ship usually don’t cause a big dent in profits when they do. Consumers are also less likely to jump ship in the furst place since they have only their extended family and their family lawyer to look out for them (if). They usually have “bigger” problems than the electricity bill: car payments, mortgages, school bills, you name it.

Again, among other things.

It’s probably due to legal requirements. It’d be unisex if it could, but if not, pick a random gender for the bathroom to identify as. Pretty ironic.

Bee if you want to get stung, bird if you want to get shat on.

Either way, you’re fucked.

Obligatory “If they choose the ’Netflix Quick Picks’ route, at least they should recommend ‘The Terminal’ starring Tom Hanks!”

And here I thought it was almost at boiling point!

Ironically:

Internet of Thing = secure
Internet of Things = insecure.

Therefore, the ‘s’ in IoT stands for insecurity.

Look What You Made Me Do!

Honestly, advertising is very dystopian. Online tracking being the obvious first example.

But that’s not all. How should I block physical ads in the city? Not only does it ruin the view, but roadside billboards surely caused at least one death by distracting a driver, and ads can get quite distasteful.

Also, it’s not just roadside - they’re plastered everywhere! Buildings, bus stops, right in the middle of the sidewalk. Some are classic paper, some are of the TV screen type. Some are quite small and inconspicuous, but a lot are huge enough to be seen from at least half a mile away.

Physical ads don’t finance anything. They’re just obnoxious. I don’t know how succeptible to ads other people are, but for me it takes an actually good offer to entice me - and usually that’s heard on radio or seen on TV (as far as ads go).

Some economist please corrcxt me if I’m wrong, but: Trickle down may not work. However, trickle up should.

If you do say, UBI, people will spend the stuff. And the money will go to the big players. They’ll buy their food at Walmart. Or meds at Target Pharmacy. Or get a loan at JP Morgan.

Unlike, say Walmart, who won’t buy their huge private jet collection from the swathes of less-than-well-off people across all of America.

So even if UBI made people lazy, even if it made people less productive, the money will still disproportionately end up in the hands of the rich.

Well, anarchism in general isn’t a “Get rid of state” nuclear button type of thing just as all communism isn’t a magic “skip the socialism part” ideology. (I’m skipping this part a bit, but if you need/want this explained, feel free to ask!)

There are more and less “extreme” versions of both. And the core idea is to abolish state authority, although the way they go around it is very different, but I feel the percieved reasons (by anarchists in particular) as to why it should be done are the most misunderstood thing about anarchism in general.

One of the core tenants of anarchism is its definition of a state: A monopoly on violence, full stop. And I have to add, this definition is academically accepted, as in, all academic definitions of a state agree on the “monopoly of violence” part, but also add other things into the focus of what “a state” embodies, while anarchists don’t.

The reason for this is that a state inherently takes away power away from the people, no matter how “good” the state itself is. If anything, the bureacuratic process oftentimes harms its citizens and makes misinformed decisions based on procedure rather than the facts and merits of each case (which is a general fact of life anarchism isn’t immune to, but it hopes to avoid).

Another reason is that to save costs, decisions aren’t made by all people in referendums on a local or national scale, but by nationwide election to decide “representatives” who wote in the general electorate’s stead. Or because it concentrates power and money in the hands of the few. But it probably goes both ways.

Anarchism doesn’t believe in “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” as much as it believes people should make all the important decisions. It is also aware of the fact that some compromises have to be made in reality.

This is why a bunch of streams in anarchism aren’t so focused on achieving direct democracy (a general referendum for every little thing imaginable), but rather want to upend the direction of power: all power must be bottom-up, as opposed to top-down: people join into neighborhood councils, which join into larger units of various sizes and names. Self-sufficiency is valued and respected, but isn’t a requisite. People aren’t islands, but being less dependant on others is seen as a good idea.

And it’s not just limited to democracy. People are expected to be members of multiple “home units”, for example a geographic one, a work-related one and one for a social issues they have strong feelings about. In other words, “Anarchism applied” translates strongly into workplace syndicalism and membership in charitous organizactions, i.e. looking out for your own interests as well as helping other members of the community.

These smaller units make smaller decisions. As they form larger ones, they jointly decide their leadership, but the focus is always on the top being more dependant on the bottom than vice versa, all the way up to the national assembly (or even beyond).

The most important idea here is the “social contract”. Individuals “sign off” a part of their “rights” (i.e. give decisionmaking power) to the larger units, in hopes of achieving a stronger, more general impact.

This is the core idea about globak decisionmaking. With power comes responsiblity. The more units join in on this issue, the more accoubtability the newly-formed body has. These are kind of like government-run agencies and departments work today, but are formed by groups “joining in”, as opposed to an assembly “going down” and saying “This town needs a hospital, thus one doesn’t”. Or “The maximum number of hotels in a city is one every 15 blocks” (What is a block? What is a hotel? Why everywhere, etc?).

It’s not quite different from how contemporary democracy works in theory. Merely the accountability in practice is flipped right around. The rest can stay mostly the same.

In contemporary democtacy, there are only a few elections for a few rigid bodies. In anarchism there’d be more bodies which would make up those bodies. Those bodies would retain some of their power*, but the lesser bodies could (and would) exercise some of that power as well.

Decisionmaking bodies are still made up of experts, but not spawned from above, but rather synthesized from bellow.

Power corrupts, so all power must be spread as democratically as possible. Holders of concentrared power must be personally and fully accountable to those under them whom they represent (and not, say, view those underneath them as pawns on their personal chess-board).

Well, that sounds very undue-processy of them. Obviously what a same, civilized society would allow.

I know I write essays which is a weak point of mine. One I should address, but I see the gist of my message didn’t get to you.

For one I use (and like) Inkscape and have strong negative feelings towards Adobe (and run Linux). Just like most of the folks here. That, however, should be pretty clear-cut from my original message.

They have a point.

I’m kind of the other way around:

I’m used to Inkscape since forever. I’m no graphics design expert, but do know my way around Inkscape for simple SVG editing, mostly stuff shamelessly taken off Wikimedia.

Way back in college, I enrolled in an elective “graphic design” course. Of course, being a course, they used Illustrator.

That thing works nothing like Inkscape. It was a long time ago, but I remember being baffled by it, to the point of being unable of doing basic stuff.

To be fair, I had no need for learning Illustrator and no wish to do it either, so I quit the course while I still could and exchanged it. I just felt like i’d be losing my nerves on switching, when I had better stuff to do than becoming dependant on Adobe and losing my minf in the process.

Both programs may indeed sport menus in the same spots, but the menus aren’t the same. They may look like the same thing, but they’re really not.

It’s kind of like a bus and a train. Illustrator (the bus) sports all the nice stuff (i assume) from other Adobe stuff. Just like a bus uses the same road like cars do, with the same signalization.

Inkscape is more like the train. It does things differently from say Krita or Gimp, but it also does other stuff than either Krita or Gimp. Which (dare I say) makes it more effective at what it’s meant to do.