A Wild Mimic appears!

someone putting carpet in a kitchen must be either looking for a bad time or doesn’t give a fuck

yeah, there was quite a long time where useful software was bundled with toolbars or, the worse option, malware that hijacked your browser, which was a pain in the ass to remove. I was the techie in the family, and i got pretty good with tools like hijackthis and knowing by heart what services and background programs should start on a standard win98 or xp installation. (in this time i also was THE guy to ask at my job when issues with 56k modems came up, diagnosing a lot of issues by listening to the dial-up tones)

There was a time in the 90’s where ads were mostly banners, and that was fine; google’s text-only ads were completely acceptable.

But that didn’t last long - it went downhill with the proliferation of popups, especially the nefarious kind which created even more popups or tried to stop the user from closing them, and usage of dialog boxes.

And whoever was the first person to add sound to an ad, i wish you and your entire family tree that your genitalia translocate to your forehead.

it’s a bit like intrusive thoughts, a mental picture of violence. it’s a bit embarrassing to acknowledge to have such violent imagery, but i don’t act on it.

Intrusive thoughts is something many people have, and if you aren’t damaged as fuck, you won’t act on them. Something else to compare it with would be the call of the void - that feels similar.

Count me in on cute aggression - my 4 cats are regular victims of cuddle attacks, and one of them is so extra cute and loves me so much giving me soft love bites on my arm (maybe she has the same thing?) - when she does this i really get aggressive when petting her - and she loves it, giving me lots of kisses while i stroke her belly from top to bottom, if she doesnt zone out and start drooling

excuse me, i’ve got to grab my kittie now - aggressively lol

Yeah, there we get into the part where logistics for a lot of spare parts are simply more expensive than for a finished product. You need more storage space, you need more workers for that storage space, you need to keep track of a large amount of inventory, and you cant fully standardize packaging since different parts have different needs when shipped. If you want to make a buck out of that extra work too, we have the situation that the sum of the parts costs less than the parts themselves.

ok, so the system must be able to complete payment themselves using well-known “fancy” credit cards, which belong to a white guy working in Big Tech (or an equivalent business credit card, which would be easier) complete with linkedin profile.

sounds more complicated, but should still be doable. but it’s a mind experiment anyways (and probably already in use by secret services to keep a low profile on their agents).

Most is economics of scale and mass production; repair is device & damage specific, which does not scale at all. Add exploitation of workers, just in time deliveries eliminating storage costs, the fact that transporting parts for 100 devices takes much more transport volume than 100 devices themselves…

a standout product is the steam deck: every repair can be made by a layman with good documentation available, spare parts are quickly available and cheap. I don’t know how valve did it, but that should be the standard the industry should be aiming at.

I saw that yesterday specifically on Reddit posts in my search for a software issue, and not on sites like stackoverflow, so my money is on reddit

That’s a good argument, so probably the location should be in a pretty high COL suburb, maybe a gated community.

i know it’s not that easy, i’m quite paranoid about my trackability, but running that browser in a small VM would be an option.

I have an idea for a business: a browser with vpn. the catch is that the vpn connects to the poorest areas of the country you live in, and the browser reports your machine as the most crappy thing that can browse the web - which should result in low, low prices everywhere!

The RTO discussion the text is about, if you didn’t read the text.

What “moralizing corpo worship” do you see in my comment?

• this isn’t AI
• Even if AI, it would be better than posting the faces of unwilling participants
• and even more even if AI, i can generate images on my own graphics card, no need for corpos, TYVM, and even if i hadn’t a suitable card, there are things like AI Horde where normal people allow others to generate pictures, free of charge (yes, not even paid with any ads or tracking)

You have issues, mate, but i’m pretty sure i cannot help you, better talk to a therapist or smth idc

is that important to the discussion?

It’s even better than a real photo in this case, because you don’t have to worry that any depicted person is real and doesn’t want their face plastered over the internet.

I can’t wait until the novelty of GenAI wears off so we can resume concentrating on the message instead of the carrier medium. Either that, or until it becomes undetectable, which will probably be in 1-2 years at the current speed.

and don’t forget to tell the movers to keep it upright during transport to prevent damage lol

And that is exactly the situation in Russia: it’s an

• right-nationalist (“rescuing” suppressed people from the evil Ukraine - that one is super ironic because it’s exactly the same argumentation Germany used with the Sudetendeutsche)
• authoritarian (arrests for holding up empty pieces of paper, drafting for the war - but only in the poor areas far away from Moscow) regime
• centered on cultural identity (anti-gay laws, “restoring the CCCP”, persisting propaganda comparing the Ukraine war with WW2, "we have to defend ourselves from NATO)

It’s pretty late, so i don’t repeat the exercise for China or bring up more examples - i’m pretty sure that if you try to counter my points someone else will give you more examples.

You ignore 50% of the political compass here - authoritarianism sucks just as much as fascism or unbridled capitalism.

but the only way to break through this is to change the platform. Since both of them already keep their posts equal on both sites, it makes switching easier for everyone; removing their content from Xitter would be an incentive for others to switch.

The ideal way would be to try and band together a large amount of “regular posters” and completely switch on an agreed date together; that would have a pull effect for others to do the same.

It seems that multiple people don’t get what you are trying to say, and i would really like to know. if you have the time, could you elaborate?

and we are talking about reasons why people are still there - those two aren’t one, because you can read their posts somewhere else too. Except if you meant that people are still there because those two are still there.