Nah, you’re good. I’m glad we still have people speaking up for what is actually right, and not just that which has become necessary because everything else built on fairness has collapsed. And you’re right, unfortunately: every rule broken now will probably be broken for all, and for the worst of reasons.

If these are your first comments then I look forward to more. You sure did get a warm welcome to Lemmy, lol.

I see your point and have been upvoting you because it is absolutely true that once a standard is disposed with in service of a just cause, it tends to be disposed with for pretty much any cause thereafter, no matter how unjust. It IS a loss when just practices and standards are overturned, especially when it’s because there’s nothing else left to do.

The problem is that we are in a state of extreme social and political dysfunction where normal routes of dealing with corruption and bad actors have themselves been hijacked. This, getting rid of a fair standard in order to accomplish a desired goal that should have gotten taken care of far earlier and by other fair rules – what you are protesting – is all that’s left.

As I said in another comment, in a functioning society we would not now be having this conversation. The usual practices would be taking care of most of this, with time and resources available to deal with outliers. But here we are. I appreciate your stand, I just wonder if there will be anything left to defend when the dust settles.

deleted by creator

I have used both tankie and vatnik (ватник?) directly and unironically, both face-to-face and online.

Holy shit, yeah, you’re right. He’s Cuban-(Canadian-)American too. Forgot about him entirely, which is always a happy moment.

You know, I realized after I wrote all that about Rubio that, under the new policies, Desi Arnaz would have been in line for deportation. No lie. Desi Arnaz (of I Love Lucy fame) was a Cuban-American who came from wealth, emigrated to the US with nothing, then made it big.

I don’t know if he ever got citizenship but he was uber-patriotic about his adopted home, and worked throughout WWII and a while afterward for the USO entertaining troops and getting starlets to visit wounded GIs in the hospital.

Unfortunately, later he was also arrested a couple of times for drunk and disorderly back in the 60s, at the height of his fame.

Desi fucking Arnaz. Everyone my age (I’m old) and plenty of others remember when he was literally iconic. There was never a bigger flag waver, never a better illustration of the now-long-gone “American Dream,” and he’d be the first to preach it.

But now they’d just deport him, without even letting him grab his ID to prove his legal status. Blows my goddamn mind.

There is a quote by Arthur Ashe that I refer to often because in the face of overwhelming personal adversity it keeps my head on the right track, and I think it may help you as well:

“Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.”

I don’t reply to your content often, but every time I see your handle pop up I wish you well, just because I am unfortunately so personally familiar with the trauma-creating circumstances you’re dealing with. I wish you could see you as I see you: someone with something so completely different from their banal, cruel family of origin that they have no knowledge of what a truly gifted person they are just to be able to survive and even see past that shit. Good luck to you, and I mean that.

Just a reminder that the orange shitstain’s Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, is Cuban American.

I’ll save you a click, but when it comes to pulling up the ladder behind himself, there may be none finer than Rubio:

Marco Antonio Rubio was born in 1971 in Miami, Florida. … His parents were Cubans who immigrated to the United States in 1956 during the regime of Fulgencio Batista, two and a half years before Fidel Castro ascended to power after the Cuban Revolution. … Rubio’s parents were not U.S. citizens at the time of Rubio’s birth. They were naturalized in 1975. Some relatives of Rubio’s were admitted to the U.S. as refugees.

Rubio’s maternal grandfather, Pedro Victor Garcia, immigrated to the U.S. legally in 1956, but returned to Cuba to find work in 1959. When in 1962 he fled communist Cuba and returned to the U.S. without a visa, he was detained as an undocumented immigrant and an immigration judge ordered him to be deported. But immigration officials reversed their decision later that day, and the deportation order was not enforced. Instead, Garcia was reclassified to the legal status of “parolee” that allowed him to stay in the U.S. He reapplied for permanent resident status in 1966 after the Cuban Adjustment Act passed, and his residency was approved.

Maybe, but speaking for myself, my revulsion to the way they are currently trying to use AI is nothing short of visceral. No headline has a chance. It is such an intrusion to personal privacy, and toward incredibly bad ends all around, that I don’t give a shit what they say at all.

To get past that, they’d have to stop trying to data farm everything that crosses someone’s monitor, stop using AI to support and further large-scale national operations like genocide, and not use every word that anyone’s ever written that they can get their hands on to train their LLMs. Oh, and something more than a “You’re overreacting!” when it is pointed out that AI output is not at all neutral, but shaped to deliver their own chosen narratives, which its devotees tend to accept without question. They could even – and I know this is a novel concept – pay authors and artists for all the work they used without consent and without compensation.

It’ll never happen. And I will never not hate AI, for all of these reasons and more (like how they took my fucking em-dash and made it unnatural, so now I’m taking it back).

TL;DR: I hate AI so much and so deeply it’s automatic, there’s literally nothing they can say I would care about, and the more they try the more repulsed I am. Fuck 'em all.

No, you’re right. It’s a problem. Someone in another thread said, “Hey, I’m considering moving to Linux from Windows, what do you think of these distros?” and got downvoted to hell just for asking, because apparently one of the distros they mentioned is disliked by others.

It’s a problem, generated by some of the exact same people who loudly wonder why more people aren’t on Linux without ever considering how having their own noob question thrown back in their own face by someone who has made their OS their identity would turn them wayyyyy the fuck off Linux as well.

For myself I will always be grateful for the many others who have generously and graciously answered my stupid Linux noob questions.

No, you’re right. Thank you for the reminder.

South Carolina has entered the chat

You can use the yt-dlp executable in the Youtube-DLG GUI interface. The interface is fine, the only thing wrong with it was that the executable behind it couldn’t keep up with YT fuckery. They may have fixed it since then, but once I started manually updating it with yt-dlp I never stopped, so I don’t even know anymore. And I’m sure there are better alternatives, I just got used to using this one.

So if you want the GUI front end, it’s profoundly easy. Download Youtube-DLG, rename yt-dlp.exe to youtube-dl.exe, and then put it into the appropriate folder (%appdata%/youtube-dl/ on Windows). Overwrite or just delete the existing youtube-dl.exe because it doesn’t work anyway.

If you are installing Youtube-DLG for the first time you may have to manually install ffmpeg as well, if memory serves.

The sole drawback is that, for obvious reasons, updates are now manual. Every so often YT breaks it again and I just go download yt-dlp again, rename it, and put the new one in the Youtube-DLG folder. Job done.

This isn’t great, but it has more information than the above, with links to other sources:
https://old.reddit.com/r/cybersecurity/comments/1pwvji3/did_wired_have_a_breach_on_122325/

Alternate link:
https://redlib.catsarch.com/r/cybersecurity/comments/1pwvji3/did_wired_have_a_breach_on_122325/

Fucknugget

That’s more of a technical label, no? Like this is what their list looked like:

Spawn
ProcessedBabyBatter
RipenedOvum
FailedCondom
Sprog
Fucknugget

“Oh, I like that one! Let’s go with that!”

I remember a rich kid named Choate (like the school) and laughing every time I saw it because that shit’s just way too close to chode.

Short for Thaddeus, but you’re right, the “Tad” spelling is apparently for the over-forty crowd. I don’t personally remember seeing “Thad” before the 90s, and then it left me wondering how to pronounce it when I did.

🤣

Where’d she get her medical degree, Temu?