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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 22nd, 2023

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  • It is no surprise at all to me, that the folkloric heroes who take from the rich and give to the poor, a merry band of men of the people for 1000 or more years, perhaps as mythically relevant as King Arthur as a fundamental statement on the morality of rich people and their scumbag cop soldiers,

    no surprise at all, that Hollywood, which cannot stop itself from telling stores of Rich People Who Are Actually Just Like You And Me, they spend millions (billions?) a year on pushing this “rich people are not evil” narrative,

    it is no surprise that the ultimate enemy of the rich is being recast as a psychopathic villain in this ahistorical culture. The fucking poster straight up says “He was no hero,” as though a movie poster is capable of rewriting centuries of folklore.

    Nobody gives a shit, for damn sure, and everyone involved should have “useful idiot” tattooed on their foreheads.


  • This whole internet could run on a tiny fraction of what it current consumes, with no drop in service levels… if the extraction of profit from every single interaction was not prioritized.

    That being said, I was addressing someone who refused to believe that local inference was even possible on CPU; this tells me that the efforts to present the current grift as the only and inevitable AI outcome is working, on minds that do not fundamentally grasp what the technology is, nor what it’s doing. I think the tech is great, and highly useful - the way they are implementing has perverse incentives and existential outcomes, and it does not have to be that way, but it is, because capitalism.




  • Listen, everything that they are doing by scorching the planet and turning the tap water brown, could be achieved on CPU or much smaller GPUs on local machines - it’s a question of focused, tight training. What they’re doing instead is literally attempting to build gigantic models that take in absolutely everything (burning real books in the process because fuck history we got money to make) and attempting to sell the idea that this brute force, one-thing-does-it-all approach, which requires us to give up everything else that is good in the world, is the only way forward, and yes, we must build the roko basilisk now.

    It’s a big, big grift.


  • JTode@lemmy.worldtoFediverse@lemmy.worldReturning to the fediverse is hard.
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    1 month ago

    I have always felt surrounded by right wing bullshit, on previous socials and in life.

    This is the only place where I look around, and believe that it is people further to the left of me that are maybe taking things a bit far. I do NOT, for the record, agree with the apologists who want us to let more fash in, I like being in a place where I am, for once, the moderate.





  • Sometime in the last two years, the number of people consider themselves to be programmers has at least doubled. We have a giant contingent of people who have never gone through the hell of actually developing a skill but are now “developers” in much the same way that typing “make me a song like ______” now makes you a musician. No theory, no chords, no building of callouses, just load up our AutoPlagio and dance the night away!

    And these sudden Developers and such are all very upset at having their legitimacy questioned by a bunch of… of… NERDS.



  • The second feature for RotNerds, if you’re making an evening of regrettable comedies, would absolutely have to be Hot Dog: The Movie.

    Features David Naughton, the American Werewolf In London, the I’m A Pepper guy, the Makin’ It guy, a true icon of the early 1980s.

    Also features the line, “Now that’s a girl I can take advantage of!” in reference to a girl who has just been handed and drank a large enough sum of mixed liquor to pass out on the floor.




  • I did, loved it mostly, but… they literally erased a brother. There was another one, and he was even more tragic than the one they kept - he was small, and had extremely brittle bones, and the only thing he wanted was to wrestle, of course… and they let him, and he got put out by injury very quickly, and then followed his dead brothers.

    I think they cut him out because first off, it would probably have come off to audiences as “overdone” or something because it is difficult to countenance that much tragedy on one family. But also, the ones who were alive to allow that last one to happen bear some culpability in his death. He should’ve been sent to distant relatives and kept completely away from the family wrestling cult.


  • If you liked The Wrestler and have not seen Beyond The Mat (1998), do that. Randy “The Ram”'s entire story is basically a straight copypasta of the section on Jake “The Snake” Roberts, one of the best wrestlers of his era. “Best” is used here in a very loosely-defined way, because well, we’re talking about Pro Wrestling.

    But I was like 12-15 during the high years of the WWF, I was watching some of the most legendary names, and Jake was my absolute… ok well it’s a tossup between Jake and George “The Animal” Steele, who was older, looked like my grandpa a little bit, managed by Captain Lou Albano (both vintage heels turned face) from the Cyndi Lauper videos and had an excellent “crazy ape man” kinda schtick. He also would destroy a turnbuckle every match and I loved the vandalism.

    For a kid of the right age, mid-80s WWF was the best entertainment going, in a time when you had 13 channels if you were lucky. VCRs weren’t even completely ubiquitous yet. What else going on? Family Ties, Growing Pains, Lawrence Welk…

    But Jake was an absolute dark horse with incredible intensity, and totally unique - most were using steroids then, he had a very basic physique and didn’t give a shit. Most wrestlers would be high fiving and gesticulating and getting the crowd whipped up as they walked out. Jake would just walk out staring at the ring or his opponent, neither hurrying nor dallying, just a purposeful walk, with his grey sack containing a python slung over his shoulder. Great finishing move, great schtick, one of the absolute legends.

    Finding out over a decade later that his life was this Shakespearean (think Titus, not Romeo) tragedy the whole time was just wild, but also not at all surprising, because anyone who watched his matches could see that this was a different type of dude from your typical wrestler.

    Don’t sleep on Beyond The Mat. It’s also got some amazing stuff with Mick Foley and Terry Funk, two dudes who have done more damage to each other than the Romans did to Jesus, and who love each other intensely for it. Lots “holy shit what the fuck did he just do” clips.


  • It would be accurate to say that the Internet reached a critical mass of user in 1995. I was here in 1992, and 95 is when media started talking about the internet as a necessary thing for businesses etc to get onboard with, and by extension, when loads on servers started to get wild. A communal pool of servers for the web community to lean on during times of extreme demand is still an excellent idea that can solve a lot of problems, but not if we let capitalists run it for profit. Never work.