Theistic Satanists

These would be the (mostly imaginary) ones that conservative Christians are fearmongering about. They’d believe the actual devil exists and that by serving him, they could gain something.

Atheistic Satanists

The kind that is pulling this stunt to fight for religious freedom. Specifically, The Satanic Temple. Their “commandments” are secular compassion, empathy and justice.

Amusingly, the biblical Satan seemed to value many of those things. Freedom (“non serviam” / “I will not serve”), Reason (apple from tree of knowledge in paradise), and perhaps Self Reliance and Equality (in some variants of the creation myth, Adam has a divorced first wive named Lilith who gave him the middle finger when he pulled that alpha male malarkey)

Do you know what we get to see of this “actual left” around here?

Not organizers trying to set up a demonstration in Washington. Not people linking to websites explaining how to mail your governor or the white house with suggested text passages. Not activists recruiting stunt performers to make some artistic display that will get reported in the press. Not people trying to aid the resistance within Israel itself.

All we see is people trying to dissuade the non-fascists from voting.

Fascist Russia’s genocidal war on Ukraine is completely masked out. In online spaces held by Marxist-Leninists, aka tankies, fascist Russia is even elevated to be the good guy, with mods deleting dissent. During China’s genocide of the Uyghurs, tankies posted Chinese propaganda memes trying to keep their communities supportive of China.

German anti-fascists had a name for such people. Collaborators.

These “don’t vote” posts always do the same shtick, too, attacking and blaming liberals (hint: Marx actually admired liberalism), while claiming some true, real, actual left is much better (how? are they all John Rambo? Do we have to wait until the shooting starts?). It just doesn’t look very organic, it looks like talking points constantly injected into tankie spaces by Russian propagandists.

I don’t know why that comment is collecting downvotes. They are referencing George Orwell’s “Animal Farm.”

Context: “Animal Farm” is a story about how communism can devolve into dictatorship. In the story, the animals on a farm drive out their tyrannical drunkard farmer. They write on the barn wall: “all animals are equal” and live in communist utopia. But some animals, too, hunger for power and status. Rather than overturn the system, they undermine it by adding “…but some animals are more equal than others” to the barn wall, legitimizing a ruling class (themselves) because they are “more equal.”

I think you’re mistaken there.

Wine is a vanilla Linux executable that runs as the user who launched it. The Windows program it runs thus also runs under that user. That’s possible because Wine doesn’t do anything system-wide (like intercepting calls or anything), it already gave the process its own version of i.e. LoadLibrary() (the Windows API function to load a DLL) and can happily remap any loaded DLL to Wine’s reimplementation of said DLL as needed.

Here are, for example, the processes created when I run Paint Shop Pro on my system (the leftmost column indicates the user each process is running as):

Also, some advice from WineHQ:

After reading, the gist of it seems to be:

• Vanilla far-right indoctrinated dumbo (his vision: “Reds” welcome, “Blues” not, “Anti-Blue Propaganda” on public view screens)
• Wants exploitative capitalism on steroids with companies controlling everyone’s lives completely
• Claims current capitalism is only bad because it’s “woke capitalism” which he claims the “ruling class” is pushing
• Wants tech bros to butter up police and give security staff jobs to their children as a favor, i.e. intentional social classism

.

In short, just another out of touch entrepreneur who sells snake oil cures to people suffering in the current system, so that they may invite in the boot that stomps them down for good.

I’m always hopeful, but at this point, I seriously doubt Russia’s sincerity. Past ceasefire agreements, for example, were broken by Russian attacks, usually within hours of the agreement taking effect.

I read his manifesto and substack. He had his own brand of crazy, mixing Russian misinformation and personal delusions half-and-half.

His gist is “climate change and resource scarcity will destroy society, the elites know it and created cryptocurrency to collapse global finance, which will fix things while making them untouchable rulers.”

Anyone remember the Foxconn building deal during the Trump presidency? It was supposed to prop Republicans up in the mid-terms of 2018.

The GOP offered a $2.85 billion subsidy so Foxconn would build an LCD panel manufacturing plant in Wisconsin. Apparently the subsidy was in the form of tax credits. Trump calls Foxconn “8th wonder of the world” despite its cost.

According to The Verge:

The renovations never arrived. Neither did the factory, the tech campus, nor the thousands of jobs. Interviews with 19 employees and dozens of others involved with the project, as well as thousands of pages of public documents, reveal a project that has defaulted on almost every promise. The building Foxconn calls an LCD factory — about 1/20th the size of the original plan — is little more than an empty shell. In September, Foxconn received a permit to change its intended use from manufacturing to storage.

As far as I can tell (from skimming over a few recent news articles), they ultimately employed about 1000 people (7%-10% of what was promised). When negative reporting on the project ramped up, Republicans claimed that incoming Democratic governor Tony Evers tried to renegotiate the deal and blamed him. When that turned out to be a lie, Republicans pivoted to the more nebulous claim that Foxconn bailed because Wisconsin was unfriendly to business under its fresh Democratic governor.

This could be a great side-by-side comparison on how Dems vs. Reps handle such a project, but I doubt the average person caught in the news cycle still remembers Foxconn after nearly 6 years). 😅

When you have a bunch of computers networked, each of them is assigned a unique number, so when other computers send data on the wire, they can say who it is meant for (imagine each blurb of data starting out like: “yo, I’m sending these next 500 bytes for computer 0A123FBC32, here they come”).

Now the right computer will listen, but it doesn’t know what program the data is for - is it a chunk of a file your browser is downloading? Or the email your email app wants to display? Or perhaps a join request from your buddy’s computer for the Minecraft game you’re hosting?

So in addition to the unique number of the target computer, the data also specifies a “port number”, which tells the computer which of its running programs the data is meant for (programs ask the computer’s operating system: “if any network data arrives on port XY, give it to me”). Some ports have become standards - for example, a program that serves web pages to other computers would typically ask the operating system that any data arriving on the computer that indicates port numbers 80 and 443 should be given to it, and when a web browser wants to fetch a web page, it will send a request to the computer serving the page, defaulting to port 80 o 443.

If you dig deeper, you’ll find that there are even more unique numbers involved and routers/firewalls let data through not only by port number but also by distinguishing between data that is the initial request to another computer’s port number and data that is an answer to an earlier seen request – and more.

That’s how the Earth got destroyed in “The Forge of God.” :)

I love that example. Microsoft’s Copilot (based on GTP-4) immediately doesn’t disappoint:

It’s annoying that for many things, like basic programming tasks, it manages to generate reasonable output that is good enough to goat people into trusting it, yet hallucinates very obviously wrong stuff or follows completely insane approaches on anything off the beaten path. Every other day, I have to spend an hour to justify to a coworker why I wrote code this way when the AI has given him another “great” suggestion, like opening a hidden window with an UI control to query a database instead of going through our ORM.

I assume that Twitter still has tons of managers and team leads that allowed this and have their own part of the responsibility. However, Musk is known to be a choleric with a mercurial temper, someone who makes grand public announcements and then pushes his companies to release stuff that isn’t nearly ready for production. Often it’s “do or get fired”.

So… an unshackled AI generating official posts, no human hired to curate the front page, headlines controlled through up-voting by trolls and foreign influence campaigns, all running unchecked in the name of “free speech” – that’s very much on brand for a Musk-run business, I’d say.

Vox is a reputable and very thorough news source, though, usually worth the read.

This two-pager, for example, highlights false Twitter journalists popping in Baltimore to politically spin the recent bridge collapse.

This is the first time I wish I could donate against something. Like, pay them $100 so they subtract $50 from the collected donations :)

Considering the teams tasked with containing political opinion manipulation campaigns were the first to go, I think that is exactly what the acquisition boils down to. A license to manipulate and meddle in public discussion for anyone rich or powerful enough (and of a political disposition agreeable to Musk’s increasingly GOP/Russia-indoctrinated mind).

It’s a “public town square” where the major approvingly smiles as groups of paid shills and remote-controlled opinion pushers insert themselves into discussions and roughen up people they notice going against the opinions they push.

Regarding the “novelty wears off” thing, another side: I’ve been running for two decades, starting from a sedentary lifestyle, but it only became fun later on. I started running shortly after a friend, probably out of some youthful ambition or inferiority complex, so I ran alone and picked routes where as few people as possible would see me struggle. I don’t know why I didn’t drop it like so many other things, but I learned to yearn for it and it’s part of my identity now.

Yes, in various ways.

One part is immediate. When I’m nervous or keep worrying about something, going for a run almost certainly resets my flow of thoughts. It also burns off most of the tension, at least I have a much easier time relaxing after a workout.

The other part is more long-term. Despite many, many years of running, it merely helped keep my weight in check rather than give me a dream body, but it seems to have changed my thinking a bit – not like some motivation guru’s story where someone forces themselves through hardship to develop a warrior mentality stuff, though. It’s more like becoming aware, long after the change happened, that, woah, I may have skills now.

As in, there is no mental talk-back or willpower needed for me to run up a steep mountain trail in my area, the gist is more: no question that I can do it, it will be cool to experience it again. For a long time, I wasn’t even aware that it’s not always been that way. It also doesn’t seem to rub off on other areas of life like one would hope, but just having proof in myself that I may have built up to something is a small confidence booster.

Maybe at some point, his best buddy will decide that he’s more useful as a Martyr, rather than having him slowly drag down his base as he falls. I can imagine some good headlines already “Orange guy murdered by secret cabal assassins. have Antifa Super-Soldiers returned?” 🙃

I had a gig as a software developer at a company that tried to organize its software development with… the most horrid call center ticketing system I’ve ever seen.

The software was named “TANSS” (an acronym for “transaction action notification solution system” which… says a lot… in a certain way). It couldn’t handle UTF-8 and the company had Asian customers, it placed the signature of a different company under each message sent to a customer and project management might as well have been non-existent (supposedly the crapper of a ticketing system had “projects” but it was just a super naive lining up of tasks without buffer times, burndown/velocity chart or anything).

The expensive p.o.s. was strong-armed into the company, probably because one of the company owners had a background in tech support crap where you’re generally chasing billable minutes.

I don’t know if it was unprofessional by me, but I quickly refused to interact with the whole thing and handed in my notice (and I had actually liked the company and my tasks up until that point). Even Jira, which many consider a highly unpleasant system to work with, felt lean, responsive and fun after that experience.

It’s been over 6 years, but I can state with certainty, if I see that system in use anywhere, my respect is gone and whether customer or employer, they’ll be a hot potato in my hands form that moment on :)

Yes, I do that on all my VMs about every 3-5 weeks when it turns itself on again.