Starting mid June, SUPER stoked to finally have a job that does good work. Been over 18 months since i lost my last job in the tech field, so this feels SO fucking good!

I picked up a bike someone left out with a “Free” sign taped to it and put it online. Finally after a couple weeks someone bit on it. I’m picking it up from my storage unit and meeting the person tonight. I could make $100. Lowest I’ll take is probably like $75 unless there’s a good reason for a lower offer (like the brakes being fucked off or something).

I wish I could make selling stuff online into more of a hustle but idk. I suppose I could try doing what my father used to make me do with him: go to yard sales on weekends and buy things that can be upsold.

Yay.

I use YouTube without an account most of the time either through a browser (incognito) or NewPipe or PipePipe (Android), which means that the algorithm doesn't adapt to me.

So, every time I see a video, I know that the recommends are unadulterated algorithmic rage. I may be watching a gardening video, there will be some "Women are Evil" type of video, or "random guy talks about why [thing that women do] is wrong, bad and immoral." I am even seeing a comeback of those "sjw cringe compilation" videos - what's this, 2016???

There are also A LOT, and I mean, a fuckton lot, of trad Catholic content being pushed. Mind you, I even set my YouTube to different countries and languages, and it's being spilled that way too.

Fucking nightmare.

I don't want to end it in a low note, so I will also acknowledge that there's quite a bit of left, openly socialist, communist content, too. 10 years ago there was none of that, the right could roam free (I even identified as one, lmao). Contradictions of capitalism, I guess.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=_rjc0G1qWXA

Discuss.

First two paragraphs of 18th of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte is one of the most if not the most insightful works of sociology.

Hegel remarks somewhere[*] that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Caussidière for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848 to 1851[66] for the Montagne of 1793 to 1795, the nephew for the uncle. And the same caricature occurs in the circumstances of the second edition of the Eighteenth Brumaire.

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. Thus Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793-95. In like manner, the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue.

Here Karl Marx also humanistically describes the root problem of production of processes in general. The problem of the cumulative error. While Marx is describing the production of history that is a productive force, it is also in a class of meta-productive forces. These are productive forces that do not directly produce material goods but affect the productive forces that do create physical goods and services.

This is literally the same metaphor as tech-debt. Software has many parallels because the production of software is also a meta-productive force. It produces an immaterial good that is productive force in itself and produces other immaterial and material goods. Tech-debt is the effect of inefficient cycles, that weighs on future cycles.

This is similar to the educational concept of Wittigenstien's ladder or lying to children, because learning itself is a meta productive force. In essence as a productive force, learning is cyclical. In order to understand how atoms function, we teach children models that are technically incorrect such as the Bohr model so they can understand approximations closer and closer to the truth. These are all productive cycles that compound on each-other.

In all these cycles the most important thing is that each future cycle must trend more strongly in the positive direction (a better understanding, better materialist outcomes, software that is cheaper to build maintain and is more resilient), rather than accumulating errors, which will eventually self-reinforce to middling and negative results and eventually collapse.

These cycles represent real risk in the real world. For example one of the most difficult things about the way we develop technology is that its not deterministic. The classic black swan scenario of solar flares causing a strong EMP would result in chaos. This is not just because would have to rebuild everything. The simple reason fact is we cannot "rebuild" the world ex nihilio because we don't have clear knowledge of certain steps along the way. Sure we could figure it out, but that's a different process. That's the process of technological discovery, not the process of applying technology.

You can think of it as rebuilding a neighborhood being hit by a bomb. The neighborhood is gone and we don't have floor plans of some of the key buildings. But it's actually worse than that. We don't have plans to the buildings that lead to the creation of those buildings. We don't have a university, but to build a university we need a foundry, we need a printing press, we need a quarry, we need a brick yard, etc. We don't have some of those, or some of the inputs to some of those. It's actually more complex than that because each of these "functions" also scales and has dependencies at different levels of scale. So we might be able to build a brick yard, but that brick yard won't be able to produce bricks that meet modern specifications until we build a smaller university to research brick making.

I literally think about these daily during the course of my software job:

• the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce
• Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please
• The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

There was a period of time where I played nothing but Dark Souls 1 and 3 (same theme) and thought about these.

I'm moving out to a shelter because I lost my job.

i read these stories from this ig account and i think it is kind of interesting so i am reproducing them here and would like to see what kind of comments they create

the post is more orientated to arabs, but i figure there may be some similar sentiments expressed in the hexbear lot

The car has been repaired! And I've been able to start wearing shoes as my surgical wounds have healed. I'll still always have mobility problems because of my stroke but at least I am not completely trapped indoors any more.

I made the mistake of telling the billing department "i haven't had work in two years, sorry, I can't pay this 700 dollar bill." They cut me off, and now im switching to a sliding scale place. Feel hopeful about the new doc i booked with, but its still frustrating that I have to go through all the stuff that comes with that.

I can get my records transferred over, yeah, but still. Death to Amerikkka and death to Amerikkkan health care.

In another life I'd love to be a float plane delivery guy, dropping off toilet paper and beer to people living in bum fuck nowhere, and maybe doing some lite smuggling on the side. I'd have a handle like "Buck" or "Otter" and have a big beard.

I have had no energy today, I just want to use drugs and do nothing. I want to cook but I don't have the energy to, I just want to lay in bed. I tried forcing myself to do stuff with caffeine today but I just got overwhelmed by it and now I feel sick and want to lay in bed. Probably doesn't help that I got prescribed steroids today, and that's making me extra impulsive, but I really want to use today. Just hopped off a meeting and I feel better, but goddamn if the voice isn't loud today

So you know how in American English, the word vase is often pronounced /vɑz/ when describing an expensive or elegant item, and /vejs/ when talking about something more everyday and cheapo?

Well when I was a child I did the same thing with sew, using the spelling pronunciation /su/ — which I perceived as fancier or more old-fashioned — when talking about expensive or elegant needlework or whatever, and the conventional pronunciation /sow/, which I frequently spelled sow, when talking about more everyday needlework. So I might've said a hand-{sewn|/sun/} dress for the fairy tale princess but a {sown|/sown/}-on button on my second-hand jeans — though keep in mind that these weren't necessarily strict and absolute distinctions, just overall tendencies.

My running theory for how I ended up inventing this distinction "out of thin air" is that I had conflated the words to sew and to sow: a seed drill and sewing machine after all both move over a flat surface to make holes in it at regular intervals, into which they quickly insert something, so people kinda do sow fields with seed in the same way as they sow shirts with thread. And then because I already believed these to be the same word, then seeing the same word with both a spelling that makes sense and a spelling that doesn't, caused me to rationalize the irregular spelling as representing some sort of archaic variant pronunciation — which I could then use when I wanted to sound fancy.

And yeah, once you make that sort of rationalization, then confirmation bias can take you a long way. But with time I did end up getting corrected and eventually I just stopped making the distinction.

Which is maybe a bit of a shame, because it would've been pretty cool to make that kind of distinction.

Growing up in the 2000s fucked my brain hard. The sexism, homophobia and racism coupled with the free-range parenting that was simultaneously neglectful while gaslighting everyone into thinking that it was too coddling, and an internet that simply did not give a fuck who it traumatized. All topped off with a resurgence of Western jingoism from the "war in terror".

The only good thing about that period was some of the videogames were okay I guess but only if you avoid ANYTHING remotely military flavoured. A lot of shit outside of Nintendo was afraid of colour and everything was that washed out brown. Just a miserable time. Everyone was so uncreative and the world had some fucked up Southpark brainworms.

Like seriously, who uses it?

In terms of capability, I don't think I've ever seen Grok ranking high on any leader board for any kinds of task. Normal people would use ChatGPT. Open weight enjoyer would use DeekSeek/QwQ/Mistral/Whatever(haven't kept up with the developments). Programmers probably use Copilot or some dedicated coding model.

In terms of image generation, Stable Diffusion is free and easy to setup. Image generating sites are a dime a dozen. Midjourney used to be massive. Most chatbot services like Bing or ChatGPT also offers it for free. And Grok's quality, from what I've seen, is pretty sub-par.

In terms of accessibility, almost all of them are accessible on a webpage or have dedicated apps. The only advantage Grok has is you can tag it on twitter. But 1, you need a twitter account. And 2, it's response will be public for everyone to see.

So why is there a significant user base for it? I know they exist, because I kept running into guys that posts some long text/image and then says "I asked Grok and got this", "Grok generated this, lol". And it's not like they use a lot of different services because they would consistently mention it's from Grok on multiple occasions instead of just saying it's AI generated or mention some other name.

Who are these people? Why? Is "Grok" just a dogwhistle to let others know you are rightwing? Am I schizoposting?

Dude owns a Tesla (yes I know, but he's chill I promise, just a bit of a tech bro, surprisingly good politics despite it), and apparently they're offering free Cyber Truck rentals to all Tesla owners to entice them to buy one.

He decided to do it as a bit despite thinking they're dumb as hell. What should we do with it?

Won't be able to get my dose until tomorrow at 11-12 pm. FUCK.

I've had it for about a week now, I've kept the outbreak from getting too bad but it still itches so bad, and I have it EVERYWHERE. On my face and lips, I have a patch in my ear, on my dick, all over my hands and arms, everything is suffering. I already washed myself with dish soap so it's not spreading anymore but goddamn if this isn't hell

I'm tired of having an argument with a "leftist", they throw every bad faith liberal putdown at me, yet somehow they've gone to all the best schools and have traveled to 6 continents for fun in their life.

Are you a member of the bourgeoisie!?!?

One guy I know from uni is the largest shitlib in the world. Absolutely "if a guy won't vote for Hillary, he's sexist" kinda dude. Only I know that he's from one of the largest landlord families of his country.

Incredible things are happening on Instagram!

also seaweed with it

Are they gonna write an article in 2025 about the sharp hike in the cost of food staples in America with phrases like "deadly crackdown" or "panicked shoppers raided stores" or any of the other blatant dogwhistles used in this article, like talk about the glaring (yet mysteriously accepted) threat posed by America's nuclear weapons, just as they bring up Iran's nuclear deal?

May be sent to a women's prison

"Oh dear, don't tell me this is some TERF screed... Well, it could also be the opposite, right? But I'm smelling a dead dove here..."

The perpetrators were three men, two of them transgender

"Either this is a very progressive way to cover two trans men, or a very regressive way to cover two trans women."

Identifying as women

"Yahari."

[interview with some TERF calling the Norwegian state's respect for the women's gender a "parody of political correctness", accusing trans women of being men trying to sneak into women's spaces, repeatedly emphasizing how the SA was penetrative using their "male organs"

"Eugh......."

[doesn't even interview anyone who isn't a TERF, leaving that person's stances completely unchallenged]

"Yup, it's manufacturing consent time!"

This wasn't some obscure publication, either, this was Nettavisen — Norway's first online-only news publication, founded in 1996, owned by the conglomerate Amedia, with a revenue of some 171.3 mln NOK (2021), so it's in fact one of the most popular news publications in the country.

News in this country has been increasingly embracing TERFism and other transphobia. I'm getting a bit worried about it.