EnglishMobster

joined 2 years ago
[–] EnglishMobster@kbin.social 21 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Hey, how about reading the article before regurgitating your shit (wrong) opinions?

Here, I'll help.

At their second visit, about a week later, Regina tentatively asked Balthrop if there was any way to terminate Ashley’s pregnancy. Seven months earlier, Balthrop could have directed Ashley to abortion clinics in Memphis, 90 minutes north, or in Jackson, Miss., two and a half hours south. But today, Ashley lives in the heart of abortion-ban America. In 2018, Republican lawmakers in Mississippi enacted a ban on most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. The law was blocked by a federal judge, who ruled that it violated the abortion protections guaranteed by Roe v. Wade. The Supreme Court felt differently. In their June 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion that had existed for nearly half a century. Within weeks, Mississippi and every state that borders it banned abortion in almost all circumstances.

Balthrop told Regina that the closest abortion provider for Ashley would be in Chicago. At first, Regina thought she and Ashley could drive there. But it’s a nine-hour trip, and Regina would have to take off work. She’d have to pay for gas, food, and a place to stay for a couple of nights, not to mention the cost of the abortion itself. “I don’t have the funds for all this,” she says.

So Ashley did what girls with no other options do: she did nothing.

This is what the policies you support cause. I hope you'll do some research and reconsider.

[–] EnglishMobster@kbin.social 20 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)

There is a distinction between Communists and tankies.

Tankies are a subset of Communists. Specifically, tankies have rejected Marx in favor of authoritarianism, power for power's sake. "Everyone is equal, and some people are more equal than others" sort of thinking. They want to show anyone who doesn't agree with them the barrel of a gun.

The term came from when the Soviets invaded Hungary in order to prevent popular reforms. But I think a better example of what tankies are like (and how they differ from communists) is looking at Czechoslovakia.

Czechoslovakia was a communist country already, but they were doing reforms that would help the average worker and promote equality within the country. The plan was to transition away from a single-party state within Czechoslovakia and towards a form of democratic socialism, where the parties still held core communist ideas but no one figure could wield influence (in line with what Marx expected).

The Soviets saw this as a threat. Their model of a one-party authoritarian state where the secret police dominate everything and the proletariat have no rights is the one they wanted to push everywhere. So they invaded Czechoslovakia and sent tanks into the country.

Later, the Chinese Communist Party sent tanks in to crush peaceful protestors who were asking for human rights and democracy within the proletariat. The protesters were literally turned into jelly by the tanks and washed down into the gutters.

Tankies support these atrocities. They say that a one-party authoritarian state is the only way to do things. Don't let them trick you into thinking they're the only true Communists - tankies want an upper class and a lower class, just like capitalists do. The distinction is that to tankies, the upper class are the party elite, the ones who do and say what they're told. The lower class are the people they don't like, or those who are unlucky enough not to have friends in high places.

Tankies are absolute scum. Lemmy's founders are tankies, Lemmygrad and Lemmy.ml both push tankie politics (Lemmy.ml is more subtle about it, but does enforce it via their moderation policy), and now Hexbear is coming over to Lemmy in order to complete the tankie trifecta.

I hate that this place is infested with tankies. I don't mind communists - I'm pretty left-leaning myself - but tankies are not true communists, and they never can be unless they fundamentally rethink their views about equality and freedom.

[–] EnglishMobster@kbin.social 47 points 2 years ago (13 children)

With Lemmygrad hot on their heels!

[–] EnglishMobster@kbin.social 13 points 2 years ago

I use Flatpak all the time. It works a lot better than native apps very often.

Also it's a lot easier than fussing with PPAs or whatever. I'm on KDE Neon and wanted to run something through Wine. The Wine in the stock PPAs was an older version with a known bug that wouldn't let me install the .NET Framework 4.8. I tried fetching the Wine PPA directly, but then I was getting issues about system packages not being compatible with newer versions of Wine.

The more I dug, the more issues popped up (typical Linux). So I gave up and decided to install Lutris and try it through there, since Lutris has a workaround for those Wine issues. The Lutris in the stock PPAs also was an old version with a known bug where it just... wouldn't work. You'd click a button and nothing would happen because of an HTTP bug. Rather than fuss around with that, I gave up and installed the Lutris Flatpak.

30 seconds later, my program was installed and running. No nonsense in the command line, no fussing around with packages. Just open and go.

A majority of the programs I have are Flatpak now. I have Flatpak for Zoom to let me take work meetings from my Linux partition; I have Flatpak for Parsec to let me remote in to my work desktop from my Linux partition. Blender, Calibre, Chrome, Discord, Thunderbird, PrusaSlicer, Slack, Rider, VS Code... all Flatpak.

They all work great. I get prompt updates to stay on the bleeding edge. No more dependency hell. I now actively search for Flatpaks before I fall back to apt.

[–] EnglishMobster@kbin.social 3 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Agreed. Fuck tankies.

[–] EnglishMobster@kbin.social 6 points 2 years ago

I'm also in Vulkan on Linux with an AMD card. I don't get those black boxes.

The main menu has terrible framerate, but everywhere else is acceptable through Proton (45-50). DX11 has great framerate on the main menu, but like 8-10 FPS ingame (my Windows partition can hold a steady 60).

[–] EnglishMobster@kbin.social 25 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

The idea is that it would be similar to hardware attestation in Android. In fact, that's where Google got the idea from.

Basically, this is the way it works:

  • You download a web browser or another program (possibly even one baked into the OS, e.g. working alongside/relying on the TPM stuff from the BIOS). This is the "attester". Attesters have a private key that they sign things with. This private key is baked into the binary of the attester (so you can't patch the binary).

  • A web page sends some data to the attester. Every request the web page sends will vary slightly, so an attestation can only be used for one request - you cannot intercept a "good" attestation and reuse it elsewhere. The ways attesters can respond may vary so you can't just extract the encryption key and sign your own stuff - it wouldn't work when you get a different request.

  • The attester takes that data and verifies that the device is running stuff that corresponds to the specs published by the attester - "this browser, this OS, not a VM, not Wine, is not running this program, no ad blocker, subject to these rate limits," etc.

  • If it meets the requirements, the attester uses their private key to sign. (Remember that you can't patch out the requirements check without changing the private key and thus invalidating everything.)

  • The signed data is sent back to the web page, alongside as much information as the attester wants to provide. This information will match the signature, and can be verified using a public key.

  • The web page looks at the data and decides whether to trust the verdict or not. If something looks sketchy, the web page has the right to refuse to send any further data.

They also say they want to err towards having fewer checks, rather than many ("low entropy"). There are concerns about this being used for fingerprinting/tracking, and high entropy would allow for that. (Note that this does explicitly contradict the point the authors made earlier, that "Including more information in the verdict will cover a wider range of use cases without locking out older devices.")

That said - we all know where this will go. If Edge is made an attester, it will not be low entropy. Low entropy makes it harder to track, which benefits Google as they have their own ways of tracking users due to a near-monopoly over the web. Google doesn't want to give rivals a good way to compete with user tracking, which is why they're pushing "low-entropy" under the guise of privacy. Microsoft is incentivized to go high-entropy as it gives a better fingerprint. If the attestation server is built into Windows, we have the same thing.

[–] EnglishMobster@kbin.social 28 points 2 years ago

People don't want to sell their personal data for currency.

People need currency. There is only a finite amount of currency in the world. Power structures are formed because some people have currency and other people need currency.

People are forced to do things like sell their bodies, sell their organs, and - yes - sell their biometric data. Because they need currency to survive. You don't see billionaires lining up for this.

It's exploitation of those who are most desperate. You can argue that there's the systemic problem - that there shouldn't be billionaires alongside people who are starving and need to sell their bodies - but that isn't being solved anytime soon.

But exploiting this systemic problem, using it as leverage to convince millions of poor folks to sell their biometric data... that's immoral. It's immoral to take advantage of desperation just to line your own pockets.

Why do you think you're hearing about this from some of the poorest countries in the world?

[–] EnglishMobster@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago

You're not incorrect, and even "he was a product of his time" isn't an excuse: when he was alive, even other racists thought that Lovecraft was a bit too racist.

However, at the same time - you have to look at what impact reading his work has.

He's dead. He doesn't get money from it. The works are public domain. His estate doesn't get money from it. Further, the language used is striking, influencing a century of other work.

Does that language come from a place of racism? Yes. But it the work itself isn't overly racist - or at least, it doesn't make it more racist than Sherlock Holmes. Conan Doyle's The Sign of the Four is used in college classes today to teach Orientalism, yet largely people accept such a thing as okay because it doesn't radicalize new people into the subject.

If you reject every artistic work because the creators had questionable views, then you begin forcing yourself into strange choices. If the artist doesn't gain benefit from you reading it - then logically, it doesn't matter if you read something they made or not (contrast this to Harry Potter, where consuming said media gives money to a TERF). When the artist is out of the picture, the only thing that matters is what the work means to you.

You have the right to say "the work is abhorrent because of XYZ", but said things should be things you can point to within the work itself. If the artist isn't gaining benefit and their views aren't the focus of the work - why does it matter?

[–] EnglishMobster@kbin.social 8 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

There's a great video about this sort of thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agzNANfNlTs

Essentially, it looks at why conservatives vs. liberals approach the world differently. Democracy vs. capitalism is inherently a logical contradiction; in a true democracy, everyone is treated equally and all voices have equal weights. In capitalism, some people are more equal than others - it's a pyramid. Fascism is when these "some people are better" is because of something like genetics, or culture. (The video doesn't touch on this, but modern Communism falls into the same trap as well, where "some people are better" because they know the party leaders or they're technocrats. It's a mindset that humans have and not something exclusive to capitalism.)

Where you wind up on the American political spectrum is based on where you fall when the ideals of equality vs. hierarchy clash. There is no middle ground because the two are fundamentally incompatible - if everyone was truly treated equally, you couldn't have people with more power/status than others. If you accept that not everyone should wield power and that at the end of the day there must be some rich and some poor - some that have power and others that do not - then you are therefore arguing that people shouldn't be treated equally. From there, the pyramid structure is the natural order of things ("always a bigger fish").

Because the structure is fundamentally at odds with itself you can't have both at once. You have to compromise on one side more than the other. Hence there is no such thing as "apolitical", even with technology - it will hold a bias one way or the other.

 

I logged into Kbin today to see 18 notifications where the same guy banned me from all of their magazines for downvoting them.

I was only subscribed to 1 of those magazines, but it's still annoying to wake up to 18 ban messages from someone who got easily angered from a downvote.

(Side note: IMO, this is why being able to see downvotes is bad. Even if anyone could see them by spinning up their own instance, that's a lot of work compared to pressing 2 buttons.)

I've blocked the guy, but is there anything that can be done to stop this from proliferating across the site?

 

Pardon me if this should go into @artemisquiver, but it'd be lovely if I could toggle a switch and make any posts I've voted on go away.

 

Citing "lack of transparency from Fandom [...] loss of features [...] and toxic company culture."

 

A while ago, I made https://kbin.social/m/EnglishMobster to test out how magazines work. You'll notice it's the same as my username... this was back on my first day of Kbin where I thought I needed to make my own magazine to get what I wanted in my feed.

I've been content with just letting it sit and trying to forget it exists. The issue is that there's now some ambiguity about what @EnglishMobster means, since it is both my username and this accidental magazine I made. Mastodon seems to redirect to my user profile (yay!), but Calckey redirects to the magazine (not yay!).

Is there anything I can do on my end to delete the magazine, other than bugging poor @Ernest? I'm not sure if we have any other admins with the power yet...

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rule (media.kbin.social)
 
 

Those two are my favorite authors, but sadly I've read all their work and neither are making any more.

I absolutely love that style of writing and I'd love to know if there's more like them!

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rule (media.kbin.social)
 
 
 
 

"We got down from the car and went inside."

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o7 (media.kbin.social)
 
 
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