1. Neighbor + Yagi + xfinitywifi

Surely you know someone’s Xfinity password, or you can make a little grouping and split it

My ISP got all excited about the WWW and was incessantly emailing us encouraging this pretty arcane process that you would have to do in order to get Winsock on your computer and install Mosaic and all. When I looked into what it actually was, I was just confused and put off by it. I have usenet and ftp. What the fuck are you trying to sell me on? Fonts and graphics? On the internet? This looks stupid, I don’t want it.

I eventually had a job where there was a computer in my office that could do WWW. Literally all I can remember about it was the Rome lab snowball cam where you could look at a real-time image of their office and try to hit people with solid white circles (“snowballs”) that would get dynamically added to the image. I still was not impressed. In hindsight, I think I was onto something.

This was exactly what I watched that educated me about it, it is fascinating. The whole documentary is a masterclass in telling the story by just laying out what happened, not really editorializing but just letting the bad guys hang themselves by explaining their take on it and then juxtaposed against some other events and information.

Update: I guess the master advertising hoover-machine that listens to your cell phone all the time to see if you’re talking about cat food has reached Lemmy. In reference to the whole Lindybeige conversation, this was literally in my YouTube recommendations today:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9KD3Xv7D1c&t=1349s

TL;DW Lindybeige is fine, maybe a little racist, he’s entertaining but also just literally makes shit up instead of reading about it first

Yeah. I just removed him from !nerd_streams@ibbit.at. If you’re going to be a nerd, you need to know what you’re talking about.

I wrote up a whole little historical essay about how in Woodstock '99, when some assholes decided to run a music festival that was an exploitative cash-grab that ultimately was sloppily put together, disappointing, and endangered the safety of the participants, all the kids recognized what the game was, and tore the venue apart with their bare hands and burned it all to the ground. They threw batteries at the MTV "VJ"s, they smashed up the cash machines and vendor tents and took back their money, and then they lit a match.

So yeah it was a different time. Right around that time was the end of the vigor generation and their replacement by the tech job generation (which then birthed the Doordasher no health insurance generation because they weren’t vigorous or well-organized enough to fight back real effectively.)

It’s a little bit of a nitpick, but “Mozilla” didn’t exactly rise from the ashes of Netscape. They tried to open source Netscape, but among other issues the code was horrible, and when they started discussing getting serious about open sourcing it, someone had some kind of bright idea of making this all-encompassing UI framework based on XML, and piping every app through this horrible omni-UI layer because it was going to be the future, with a perfect utopian web browser called Mozilla as the central crown in the kingdom’s highest tower, and it was always a janky and glacially slow pile of ass that, year after year, continued just barely working but not really. Linux users of the day generally had some experiences with it and then switched to one of the even-less-complete options available like Galeon or Konqueror, which brought their own maturity issues to the table, but at least they weren’t Mozilla.

Eventually, after investing years of effort and millions of dollars into this pile, the Mozilla foundation eventually decided with great fanfare to invent the idea of just making a web browser. They called it Phoenix Firebird Firefox (Iceweasel), and it used normal UI technologies and came alongside some other separated normal-UI apps like Thunderbird. And if you ask them about Mozilla itself, they react like Germans when you ask them where their granddad was during the war years.

Yeah. The biggest empire of the ancient world was built on basically a 100% horse archer military and they didn’t seem to have too much of a problem.

I feel like it would be different if he was citing some kind of history “look at the composition of all these armies, cavalry’s actually a really small part, look at these big battles where the horses were a liability and then they moved away from them after.” That’s history, whether or not it’s right or wrong, it’s based in fact. This whole thing sounds like “I ride horses and it’s a mess, cavalry doesn’t work, the end.”

Yeah… I think this is just wrong. It think you’re right that he is just making a big authoritative sounding thing based on his personal experience on horses and guessing and extrapolation and some light confirmation-bias research.

IDK, I thought this guy was legit, but maybe not.

They chose to reject all of that along with the social contract we all have as a society.

This is the key part I want to disagree with. There’s this impression among the sensible-thinking people in the US that the 1/3rd of the country that supports Trump is actually aware of what’s going on, and supports it. They are not. Their news is full of incredible degrees of deliberate lying, such that anyone who comes up and tries to even tell them the reality of what’s happening, they think is just lying maliciously on purpose.

They don’t know about CECOT. They don’t know about the corruption. They don’t know about innocent people getting snatched up. They think Biden fucked up the economy, and Trump is going to fix it, and Democrats are whining and making up all these crimes that Trump allegedly committed that he really didn’t do. It’s really, really difficult to grasp how distorted their view of reality is.

This is why part of the occupation in Germany after the war was setting up movie theaters and rotating people through, showing them films of literally what had been happening. They didn’t know (you could say they should have known something was wrong, and they kind of did on some level, but they legit didn’t know the full extent). Some of them were crying in the theaters. It wasn’t that they all thought “yay concentration camps, let’s kill all the Jews.” They didn’t know.

I’m not making excuses for them. I’m saying you have to understand the problem to solve it.

GOP are not literal Nazis, although they are fascists and fulfill the Nazi part of basically any analogy to what’s currently going on with 1930s Germany. I was talking about literal Nazis. There’s a small overlap between literal swastika Nazis and MAGA Republicans but they’re not the same thing.

The supporters definitely aren’t literal Nazis. They’re victims of propaganda. They might be dangerous, we might even have a war, but assigning all the blame to them instead of recognizing the real source of the infection in their brains, I strongly disagree with. Maybe like 10% of them are genuinely just bad people who are glad of an opportunity to fuck up the immigrants or whatever, but most are just confused by the news they consume until they literally can’t tell up from down and think they’re doing the right thing.

they hold the most power and have the highest rated programs. I see no reason whatsoever to further allow their psychotic agenda to be promoted.

This part, I agree with. That was why I was saying it needs to go by a case by case basis. Providing a signal repeater (of sorts) for MAGA propaganda is very bad. One of the really notable features is that most of the MAGA propaganda isn’t really “speech,” in that it doesn’t really allow any kind of disagreement and is deliberately crafted to disable mechanisms that might let people disagree with it or talk sensibly about the issues. So yeah, I’m very much against posting or allowing pro-Trump news outlets, for example, even though that might look like “free speech” and in a technical sense I guess it would fall under that heading.

When did MigratingApe do any anti-AI trolling?

I have no idea, nor do I care to investigate how a mod handles things on a small community.

I feel like this isn’t the post / the community for you then. In my opinion it is relevant whether or not someone who’s being banned actually objectively did anything, and I feel like I’m not alone in that. But if you are convinced that it’s totally irrelevant (and at the same time that what some other people did is super relevant), then I feel like we can agree to disagree on it and conclude our conversation at this point.

comes across as dismissing the idea that they exist

If anyone is getting that impression, then hopefully me and others talking extensively about them and their real existence, in the post text and in the comments, will dissuade them from it.

The mod in question studiously avoided getting involved in the thread where people who hadn’t done anything were complaining about their bans, but then did decide to jump into one of the threads where one of the trolls who was giving cartoonishly horrible abuse to them was complaining about their ban.

If you do get a response from the mod, let me know, I’m definitely curious about what they have to say about.

Just saw your edit. When did MigratingApe do any anti-AI trolling? The whole point here is that random people are getting caught up in this who are objectively not doing anything remotely related to anti-AI trolling, hence the quotes.

A couple of people who were banned asked about that, and there wasn’t really an answer. IDK if this post is the right place for it, it sort of seems like it’s walking up to that line of breaking the community rules by being the drama instead of posting about the drama, but yes it seems like a reasonable question to ask to me.

Oh. IDK why I didn’t see that coming.

Anyway, the post before it was deleted was more or less a carbon copy of this post, except that it was made by one of the trolls, who actually do deserve to be banned. And so, all of lemmy.world took a look at that and said, “Yeah that’s messed up they shouldn’t ban you for no reason,” and all of dbzer0 took a look at that and said “But you’re clearly a twat so of course they banned you, YDI”. I don’t know if the two camps had a chance to have each notice the other and start fighting, but people are already talking in these comments about a reason to block all of dbzer0 as a result, which I think was exactly the kind of intended response for this to generate.

I just blocked their whole instance the other day.

Yeah, see, this is what I was talking about with this whole thing being to gin up pointless drama.

db0 is clearly fine. Being overtly “pro AI” makes them a little anomalous on Lemmy, but it’s whatever, they have sensible reasons for it and it is fine. This kind of slap fight developing can lead to this balkanization where now one person is the “enemy” but no actually it’s this other person that’s the “enemy” for some stupid kind of reason, and now no one is getting along because they’re all in little tribes that mutually hate one another.

Centralized control of media is a huge problem, and yes gradually deregulating it and getting rid of the guard rails had a lot to do with that. Capitalism is just dangerous in general, you need to have strong safeguards for it once it gets too big. I’m not really in agreement that that has anything to do with censoring Nazis in leftist spaces though.

For one thing, the actual literal Nazis are generally so unpopular that they get booted regardless of any kind of philosophy conversation. A lot of the time it seems like those “deplatforming” efforts seem like they’re targeted at someone who’s not really a Nazi, but just someone who is trying to publish some leftist thing on Substack (which is Officially Problematic ™ because Richard Spenser is there), or said something which a very cursory reading could consider as transphobic, or something like that.

Not really. Crushing the Nazis’ free speech doesn’t do any harm at all to their ability to talk with one another, but it does insulate them from the wider community that might otherwise be able to talk sense into them. Also, it provides an environment where it’s a lot harder to recover free speech for the leftists once things recover to a more stable civil society.

Every case is different of course, sometimes it is okay to censor for particular reasons, but in general my opinion is that reducing insulation between communities is better.