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Cake day: July 28th, 2023

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  • Are the Israelis murdering Jewish people on mass?

    I mean, sort of by proxy they might be inspiring a bunch of hate crimes, and I wouldn’t be surprised if their actions on sort of a broader geopolitical scale are inspiring a kind of antisemitic cycle of violence, but I dunno if I’d say that makes them more specifically “nazis”, in like, the 20th century hitler ideology sense.

    In any case, don’t be a linguistic prescriptivist, it’s cringe.


  • I’m guessing we agree on #1 and disagree on the premise of #2. I see #2 as a systemic pattern that really launched after the 2008 primaries when Obama disrupted the plan to place Hillary in the White House. It came to a head in 2016 and has been rippling ever since.

    THANK YOU. It’s fucking insane seeing people claim “well uhhh nobody ever complained about this before! maybe you should’ve complained about this before, maybe then things would’ve changed!” just because republicans decided to adopt it as a talking point since they’re scrambling to come up with a new strategy and their plans have gone to shit. It’s partisan brainworms of the highest order. I guess it’s not surprising that they haven’t heard these complaints or noticed these trends when they all only become fixated on keeping the pendulum republican candidate out for 6 months out of every four years at most and then completely go back to sleep for the rest of the time.







  • Still not the point of a live-chat application. The use case is not the same as a forum. You want an archive where everything is well-organized and most questions have already been answered. Discord and other live chat services are more like live tech support, to fill the gap between the raw technical documentation found in GitHub, and the just getting started guide or FAQ, which are usually lightweight enough that they could be posted anywhere. Discord doesn’t exist to be an archive that holds all the knowledge, discord exists so that when you open an app, you can go in, ask a couple questions, and hopefully someone will get to you in a couple minutes, at most, rather than in a couple days.


  • I was going to maybe correct and add a little bit to this recollection by linking a comment I’d made a while back on the subject, but since lemmy can’t seem to dig up the post, I guess I’ll just kinda summarize.

    Sometime a while back, after moot sold off the site, and it got bought out by the japanese dude that runs 2chan (apparently it’s also funded by toy company “good smile”), the administrative staff kind of got slowly replaced by a bunch of white supremacists who will selective moderate to kind of create their idealized “free speech” shrouded platform. Mod logs from them got leaked some time ago as evidence of this. I think it’s probable that some of those guys are funded by political activist groups in order to do it full time, after 4chan kind of showed it’s hand earlier on with the level of efficacy they could achieve with internet hacktivism, but that might be reading too much into things.

    I mean, obviously 4chan also needs a large level of moderation, contrary to what people might think. It’s historically had some problems keeping up servers, because there would sometimes be CP floating around on the platform at any given time, and whatever company you’re renting your servers from, probably doesn’t want that shit on their servers. You also need a good filter against extremely large amounts of botposts, or large amounts of corporate spam, as well, which is really the case with any internet community. You can’t really survive without some form of content moderation.

    It was always kind of less about the new users, then, who can pretty easily be distinguished and mocked/ignored/moderated away (the latter approach is always better), and it’s always been more about astroturfing, and who controls the switchboard, who’s in the positions of power. “Eternal Summer” is only really a problem when that kind of outstrips the moderation of their ability to properly sift through posts and moderate, at which point, you kind of have some other problems that are more practical, related to scaling up your operation.

    User based gatekeeping need not apply, because there’s not really much the users can actually do to stem the tide, despite how much users like to squabble over the correct usages and origins of slang terms, surface level distinguishing characteristics, and in-group purity tests. How much people like to bitch about “board culture” and shit like that.

    Internet communities are a collage, or a kind of, bacterial culture, that ends up reflecting their moderator’s lowest possible standards and sensibilities, I think.

    Edit: oh, I should’ve also mentioned, that in many cases, there’s a financial incentive to let new users flood in almost completely unmoderated, because, even if it lowers content quality, it would be better to have lower content quality, but a larger userbase, than do anything that might possibly upset the userbase and drive them away. Oftentimes I think also that high quality content is a demarcation of a userbase that is not easily monetized, compared to low quality content, but that obviously reaches a kind of critical tipping point when the content quality gets so shit that corporate power brokers start to take notice and demand more control.


  • I don’t think the relative amount of people that would do that would be high enough to really end up mattering, and it’s not like, in that circumstance, advertisers can tell whether or not people are actually watching their ads anyways, which has always been the most dubious part of ads. And, is the biggest advantage of the internet and youtube, is that you can tell, you’re allowed access to those metrics. I don’t see a reality where youtube just goes to basically like, shittier cable advertising, forcing everyone to watch all the ads all the time, and that becomes somehow attractive to advertisers. I think, if that were the case, advertisers would probably pull out just on that basis and go where they know exactly what content they’re putting their ads in front of, which has always been the disadvantage of youtube.



  • I think replacing songs in the dub can go pretty hard, like, that’s how we got most of the iconic 90’s american anime theme songs. pokemon, digimon, yugioh, etc. I do like a lot of the naruto OPs too, for the record, and soul eater, and fullmetal alchemist, but it’s really hard to beat how iconic the opening to pokemon is, and how that’s laser engraved to like a fifth of all millennial’s brains.

    Actually, I wanna hijack this top post a little bit. Other people have brought up japanese name pronunciation, and replacing the names with more western stuff, and I would like to bring up the decision specifically in yugioh to make joey have a boston accent to mimic the accentedness of the japanese he would otherwise speak with. I dunno, there’s something to the 4kids dubs that has a little bit more texture than your normal modern anime dubs. I like the lack of censorship more, the VAs tend to be better, there’s not like, big confusing rewrites or repacings of certain sections, all that is good, about your more modern stuff. At the same time, I feel like a lot of the sub vs dub argument is gonna come about more when people don’t let the dub be it’s own thing. You already have to translate turns of phrase, culturally dependent expressions, yadda yadda, at what point do you really decide to stop? Maybe a bad example, because it doesn’t really conform to the spirit of the original at all, but people still occasionally talk about the ghost stories dub. I dunno. I guess it doesn’t need to be official, there’s always abridged series to fill the void in my heart when it comes to anime that’s written for a western audience more, but I do kinda wish that more dubs were just like. Willing to take risks. That more dubs were very obviously stand out.


  • I think it’s a pretty good example of something that totally lost all meaning and got beat into the ground, rather than getting worked into some individual lexicon or accent, and having a specific kind of role.

    Totally passing observation on top of that, but I think, it’s probably much easier for that to happen to specific references, than for that to happen to actual novel uses of language.


  • It’s sort of really dependent on what people want out of you, which has to be taken on a case-by-case basis. Sometimes people just want someone to vent at, or, they want someone to kind of be like “hey that sucks sorry about that”, and actually care about them and their hardships (these are usually the situations in which people are facing some sort of inevitable problem that they have the solution for, but the only solution sucks), what they need is emotional support, and probably a boost to their ego. And then sometimes people have been like, facing what’s an unsolvable problem, and they just need kind of a new, fresh pair of eyes on it. The latter is the circumstance in which people will be more open to obvious solutions, because sometimes people just won’t think of them for whatever reason, could even be as simple as just forgetting that something existed. I think, in either case, it’s usually a decent idea to ask obvious questions, and if you end up stepping on a bombshell (“well I ALREADY THOUGHT of THAT!”), that’s usually more of a like, that’s indicative of something that you both have to defuse in the moment, but that’s also something that you can sort of question why that was placed there, and what the foundation of it was. Usually, though, that’s something you reserve for later.


  • I don’t think asking questions can ever be a bad thing, really, especially if you’re not cutting anyone off. That’s not in counter to the post, or anything, I just think it’s generally a very good idea. You can honestly listen to someone with questions, and it shows that you’re thinking about their problems in a way that’s more real than just like, making eye contact, saying garbage platitudes, and then kind of being like the human equivalent of a teddy bear or some sort of comfort object for someone. A well directed question can often get more to the root of the problem more than anything else, I think. You can also direct people around with questions, but that’s maybe best left for your good faith actual listeners, rather than people who just want to abuse their question-asking so they can direct someone towards what they think the solution is.

    I dunno. people are just like. Not good listeners, at all. I’m not, most of the time, I like to think that I’m decent at it when there’s something that matters, but then I also have a pretty big brainfog whenever this shit happens, and I forget to ask questions sometimes, which really, really, impairs your ability to comprehend the whole situation. The biggest thing is just trying to piece everything together, right, that’s a good use of your conscious thought. A bad use of your conscious thought is thinking about what you’re gonna say next, or remembering whatever like. scripted response you’ve come up with for this scenario, slotting this scenario into a specific “problem” set that you’re gonna pretend that you’ve already solved.

    On the flip-side, I do find it kind of annoying when you ask someone some question like “well have you tried talking to them?”, and they interpret that as “what do you think I’m STUPID do you think I haven’t TRIED THAT!”, when usually the purpose of a question like that is more like “what was the result when you talked to them?”. It’s to spurn on more context, it’s a platform to vent more, basically. The language of the question could be more precise, yes, but oftentimes people are so used to not being talked to and engaged with as human beings, that they kind of default to taking every question as a bad faith attack on their intelligence as a sort of defense mechanism, or something. It’s kind of annoying, and when that happens you have to deliberately be more precise and be more careful to get across explicitly that you’re invested in their life, but it’s just like. It’s just a thing I’ve noticed that people do sometimes, I guess, what I’m saying is, be on the lookout for that more. Don’t get mad when/if that happens, just be like, oh, my bad, sorry, that’s not really what I meant to say, I meant to say (insert more precise and carefully worded question here).

    That’s it, that’s all I got.

    edit: Actually it wasn’t. Most of the time, the solutions you’re proposing are garbage, and your partner (usually, unfortunately, could be whoever you’re talking to) is elevating the conversation to a more top down view of why all your solutions suck. The reason it’s important to ask questions is because the problems everyone is having are usually more complex than the solution you can come up with in five seconds. People aren’t like, “how do I fix my toilet”, and then you just tell them to turn off the water. The problems people have are way more complicated than that. At least give it five minutes of listening, you will be impressed by the results.



  • I dunno if that’s really a possible thing to teach. I think most fake news takes advantage of distrust in institutions and primary sources, I dunno if you’re ever going to really be able to fix that. Short of seeing something yourself, which is pretty hard to come by, and also not a solution because evidence may not be immediately obvious, and is subject to the same sorts of post-hoc rationalizations as reading the news. You could try to teach logical and argumentative fallacies, and that might help, but I think you’d probably get a good proportion of students which would totally misunderstand what you’re saying and just apply it to everything they don’t like, and then you’d just get a bunch of annoying kids succumbing to the fallacy fallacy, and treating comment sections and conversations with other people like debate pervert encounters, where the only formal win they can get is the one they give themselves when they get an epic own.

    It’s also not like real news is much better, as you can tell from almost any war reporting, a subject where evidence is thin and technical phrasing and abstraction tends to be high. Deaths are referred to as casualties, people are referred to as potential threat vectors, any violence done against us is terrorism and any violence we do to anyone else is self-defense, pre-emptive or otherwise. A bullet leaves a gun and happens to strike an unarmed black man, in liberal media, and in conservative media, who cares, actually, because we’re gonna dig up all of the previous run-ins this guy had with the police and do some character assassination so we can help justify a narrative of contextually blind self-defense. It’s more complicated than “fake news”, it’s more nuanced than that, sometimes the evidence is real, but is just getting twisted to fit a narrative.

    Ultimately I think misinformation is subject to inhabiting an alternative information landscape, false, twisted, or just alternative in vocabulary, and then, subject to death by a thousand fallacies. You make the decision to discount this piece of evidence here, this news story there, and pretty soon you’ve built yourself an entire alternative information landscape where maybe a couple times a week you’re faced with some alternative piece of evidence, in a vacuum, and you are faced with the choice of, do I abandon literally everything I’ve ever known and believed, and scrap most of it, and instead believe in this random factoid, or do I just easily handwave the factoid and maybe get a little bit frustrated and that’s about it? I think lots of high-schoolers are probably already in those boats, because of everything else about their environment.

    It’s a much better position to be in, to where you can try to find a way to absorb every piece of information and rationally put it into it’s own self-contained perspective, and construct your own perspective from the many internally consistent ones that exist, but I think that’s asking a lot of empathy and thought out of most people, who are already totally overburdened with things like schoolwork, work, and poverty. I think the approach, constantly, that education is the way out, education is the way forward, the way of the future, if only we educate the next generation enough, somehow, they’ll save us, they’ll save themselves, that’s bullshit, at face. You can only put through so many students to college before someone else falls victim to the zero-sum game, you can only get so many students good, well-paying jobs, some of them have to remain unemployed and homeless and poor for the system to work. Someone has to be a fry cook. I think that’s part of why teacher turnover is so high, and wages are proportionally so low to the psychic damage you take, cause the system as a whole is kind of irreconcilable, and you know that a certain percentage of the kids in your class are gonna get shot, die in some horrible way, go to prison, get cancer and not be able to pay the bills, despite whatever you might try to do to improve their chances, and it’s hard to dehumanize these kids as not trying hard enough when you know that their parents aren’t in a great place and you have to see those kids every day.


  • Yeah. I think the only way someone would sway my mind one way or the other would be on the basis of serious historical evidence, which is somewhat unlikely to come up, since you can sort of speculate any direction as being the correct one. I think it’s also kind of stupid how people like, use this sort of historical anecdote as evidence for structuring society in one way or another, which is kind of some 1800’s style bullshit. We’d be much better off just using modern medicine to make the distinctions, if that was the case, but the vote’s still pretty split as far as that goes and it’s pretty hard to structure those studies in a way where they actually prove anything comprehensively, so I think it’s probably just in the best interest to occupy whichever position is the least dickish.



  • I would like to believe in calendar reform as a goal. At the same time, I think calendars are one of the only pretty decent somewhat universal standards we have going for us, and if we changed it at all, you KNOW we would just be using two competing standards, not everyone would want to switch because people are stupid, so unless you forced it from the top down through technology, like a really advanced, shitty version of y2k, which would make people super pissed, I dunno if any of it would work.