Man, don’t blame space on Elon Musk. Space is great, going to space is a good thing. Elon sucks because he’s too busy paying women to fuck him and firing engineers that disagree with him to actually get there, not because he wants to go to space and talks about it.

This is one of the genuinely alarming things I’ve seen out of the Trump administration.

The allegiance of the people with a monopoly on violence is one of the really important things in a fascist takeover. And, so far, Trump has been doing an absolutely great job at alienating both the police and the military, which I was super happy about.

If he’s about to get smart about getting the local cops on his side, that’s real real bad.

This is also relevant to any of you who might feel the need to walk up to cops who are interacting with a shoplifter or drunk driver and start bellowing “BLACK LIVES MATTER!” or otherwise making the knee-jerk assumption that all police are bad. They are not. Being pointlessly hostile to them in all respects is popular on the left I know, but it absolutely plays directly into Trump’s hands.

Sweet! I am eagerly awaiting the events of Act 2.

Well, it’s good that they don’t understand the Streisand effect I guess.

I can’t tell whether this is an interesting article revealing a new facet, however rhetorical, in the weird little stew that is American politics… or just some more bullshit from the Times. I’m a little bit leaning towards the latter.

“Immigrants”

In St. Clair’s case, Musk terminated his proposed $15 million payment and lowered her recurring payments to $40,000 a month

This is fucking hilarious and actually made me like Musk a little bit for an instant.

I know he’s only continuing the $40k per month to keep some leverage, but it’s easy to see it as “How dare you disobey me and take me to court you vicious harlot okay you can still have $40k a month I guess, I’m not a monster.”

Hm. I looked at it a little bit just now. I think putting content in the post body is the right thing to do. There are a couple different fields that can go there, and different feeds seem to sort of do various random things depending on how they feel like formatting their feeds, but it seems pretty common that description is duplicative with the description that Lemmy auto-fetches which looks a little weird.

I also think you’re right, the post volume now that the initial bump is over isn’t overly excessive. Let’s try it on rss.ponder.cat, since I do think the auto-posting community is probably something that’s sensible to separate in some way from the human-posted-on-Lemmy community. I might change my mind later but that’s my feeling right now.

Can you post something to !keyosc@rss.ponder.cat and then I can then make you a moderator and you can directly make the changes to the feeds via the bot?

That’s because there is an extensive blacklist which is filtering out the spam. They’re just trying to pay their bills by slipping advertisements into their story feed. I’m not mad about it but I don’t want to be posting them to Lemmy. It seems like with the blacklist in place, it’s more or less okay. I guess. No one set up any kind of bitter complaints on this post and usually people are pretty vocal about things that are a problem.

The one you linked to isn’t a real great article but it’s not just pure spam. There was one this morning (“Here’s what to shop for at the Sephora spring sale”) that slipped through the filters, I got a couple of reports and deleted it and updated the filters.

Hm. I set it up: !keyosc@rss.ponder.cat

However, I’m a little unsure about it from a spam perspective. It kind of looks like maybe we’ll be getting quite a lot of postings from this with all of these forums added. I’ve been trying to avoid having any of these “replicate a different non-Lemmy forum over in Lemmy instead” bots just because they tend to have a pretty low signal-to-noise ratio.

How do you feel about just interacting with the bot, and having it post direct to the !idm@lemm.ee community so you can keep this stuff curated to a useful set of feeds? I can probably make some reformatting edits if you want. I added the direct link to the RSS feed each one was pulled from which I think is a good addition.

I haven’t decided for sure, I wanted to see how it looks in practice, but I’m pretty concerned about the spam level just looking at it a little bit.

Since there is no due process, there is absolutely no protection for US citizens. Once you’re in their custody, how would you prove you’re a citizen without having due process?

They’re just starting with the easy targets to feel out how much resistance there’s going to be before they scale it up and move on to snatching up citizens who’ve displeased them.

Or, she’s working with the US government in some secret capacity and now thanks to Trump they know about it.

It could just be random. But either one is a strong possibility, and Putin’s involvement seems likely.

Disagreeing with the orthodoxy is a good way to draw a lot of attention to yourself, which has benefits both social and financial. And, if you exist in a fact-free culture like the US has, there’s no immediate harm to yourself even if your counter-orthodoxy is both wrong and dangerous. I don’t think it is much more complicated than that.

Don’t forget the huge transfer of assets that currently belong to the US treasury into the hands of like 20 crypto bros. That’s another key goal.

Disrespectful?

Troublesome?

1968 would like a word. 💔

There are so many ways to engineer something into the system that will go sideways in some nightmarish way if you are not there to prevent it.

I get that not every person has write privileges on every piece of software that is important anywhere in the company, let alone a steady enough rate of commits to sneak something into production. But that’s where you gotta get creative. Or, if you’re just going to write an explicit bomb that is hooked up to a isDLEnabledInAD() function, you gotta just not be in the country anymore when it goes off or something.

Yeah. Honestly, I want to fault Zelensky a little bit in a theoretical sense for not being more “diplomatic,” but:

(a) The fact that he has some integrity, for example not just sitting silently by while Trump shittily claims that the EU has given less than the US, is why Ukraine is still alive.

(b) There is no winning the game of trying to make Trump happy. Whatever level of shit you want to throw at Zelensky for doing 10% of instigating the shouting match while Trump and Vance happily did the other 90%, it hardly matters. Trump was always going to do Trump stuff. Focusing on the reliable partners, and shooting straight with them and expecting straight answers, fair treatment, and respect from them in turn, is 1,000% better of a game to play.

"I’ll tune in the Raspberry Pi to the airplane’s network … and then I’ll have a little five-dollar Raspberry Pi Zero, I’ll have it put on a second Wi-Fi of its own and name the network ‘spanky’ with no password. Everyone on the plane can log in… eleven people connected. So I started using it as a honeypot.

This is vastly underselling Woz’s pranks. He made up a fake ID for himself from the “Department of Defiance,” and he would get himself on airplanes with it. He said in his mind it wasn’t fake, because it wasn’t an ID for anything in particular, just kind of an official-looking thing he would show to people. He said that whenever he would use it, people would get really deferential to him and wave him right on through. He used to print out perforated sheets of 2-dollar bills, like a huge post-it note, and try to pay for stuff with them, because it was perfect legal tender but as far, as he could figure out a way to get, away from something that looked real. A lot of times people wouldn’t take them.

He loved phone pranks. As far as I know, to this day if you dial 888-888-8888 you’ll get Woz, or at least an answering machine controlled by him. He snatched it up the instant they made the 888 toll free area code available, because before that all he could get was 800-888-8888 and that wasn’t really satisfying.

It’s kind of hard to explain. Maybe all of this just sounds jumbled and odd.

None of any of what he did was malicious in any way. I can guarantee he didn’t try to steal any private information from anyone who used his fake airport hotspot. He might have run a little squid proxy that did a MITM attack to turn 1% of their images upside-down, something like that.

When Steve Jobs cheated a bunch of employees out of some money he’d said they would get, Woz found out about it and gave them all the money they were supposed to get, out of his personal money. He didn’t have a shortage, at that point, but still, he didn’t have to do it, and such a thing is basically un heard of in silicon valley.

He’s a pretty unique person, but also, there are others like him. People just found out about him and he got famous (Not really. Steve Jobs is famous, and gets the credit for Apple, because he fits what TV likes people to be, i.e. awful.) But there used to be thousands of these guys running around, behind the scenes. They all operate in a certain way. They made the microcomputer revolution happen, and the video game industry, and the web. A generation before that, they had a lot to do with winning World War 2.

I don’t know what they are doing now. The ecosystem is very hostile to them, now, both in and out of the computer.

Peretti complains about something he calls SNARF, an acronym for “stakes, novelty, anger, retention, fear,”

To build a new social media platform called BF Island

Peretti claims BF Island will be “built specifically to spread joy and enable playful creative expression.”

I guarantee you he used AI to come up with some of his concept. No human being comes up with shit like this.

I am not joking. Ask a million bajillion people what they want their new social media concept to be called, and I can guarantee you that not a single one will say “BF Island.”