holy fuck, Yud criticizing Banks is fucking exhausting, and I keep getting angry seeing this barely readable shithead try to tear down the work of a sci-fi author he clearly doesn’t like because people keep bringing up the Culture novels as a counter to his horseshit, and because they’re more fun and fulfilling to read than Yud’s nonsense ever will be

so I tapped out early and quote mined the 400 years part:

They live, in perfect health, for generally around four hundred years before choosing to die (I don’t quite understand why they would, but this is low-grade transhumanism we’re talking about).

yud. buddy. that novel explains why they would in the same chapter that describes a Culture citizen going through with the voluntary decision to die. it’s boredom. the major motive force behind almost everything the Culture does is boredom, because its constituent beings want for nothing. the civilization as a whole knows that existence for human-like beings becomes intensely, painfully boring (just like reading yud’s output!) around the 400 year mark, and the Culture has both removed any stigma around voluntarily ending a painful existence and any reason to prolong it past your own comfort. after that, you can enjoy an afterlife of being acausally pampered by every networked Culture Mind.

there’s even a version of the voluntary death and afterlife process for entire galactic civilizations called Subliming, where every natural and artificial lifeform in your civilization becomes a singular being of pure energy and transitions into another dimension. just like with uploaded organic beings, Sublimed civilizations can still influence our dimension, but almost always don’t care to. the Culture is actually considered somewhat tacky by other galactic civilizations for being at a fairly late stage in its development without Subliming. they know how to do it, so chances are they just aren’t bored enough yet.

yud omits this (probably, I’m not gonna go back and check), but anyone who chooses an infinite existence at the cost of their own sanity is considered a fucking weirdo who should be sneered at. the Culture isn’t gonna end your existence (they don’t do murder, and there’s a possibly even bigger stigma against forcibly altering a sentient being’s mind) but they’re also not gonna actively enable you to self-harm.

welcome!

there’s something weirdly cozy about systems development, especially coming from modern web stack work. it might be that there’s no sandbox so you can do what you want, the toolchains are usually a lot lighter, and the APIs usually aren’t designed by the least honest people you know (my rant on the fuckery surrounding the Web Components spec is still incoming)

lately I’ve been working on the rewrite for our instance’s archives, and I’ve been getting very good results from a custom static templating engine and unpoly as a progressive enhancement library. after years of dealing with react’s bullshit, it’s surprising how much functionality you can get out of carefully structured markup and CSS, with a tiny amount of strictly optional JavaScript that mostly enables partial repaints (maybe the only good bit of SPAs? I still need to benchmark it to see if that’s even faster than native rendering) and a controlled, predictable amount of markup enhancement that seems to stay the fuck out of the browser’s way

so far it’s definitely a distinct improvement on what I’ve come to expect from SPAs, which is a world of loading spinners, crawling elements, and jank so severe and universal they’ve taken to naming all its varieties

presenting a DM from someone who absolutely doesn’t have internalized transphobia, never heard of it:

So I’m gonna reach out and say that you hastily misunderstood “and that shit about trans people”. I’m talking about the hate speech from the right wing. Keep me banned though that community is full of people who really have a low level reading ability.

when a libertarian-presenting shithead with not particularly deep political takes posts “it’s a distraction just like the bullshit about trans people” with no other qualifiers, it’s absolutely understood as a dogwhistle for “people need to shut up about trans issues”

and if I’m wrong about that? using trans folks to make your bullshit points is still fucking transphobia. don’t do this shit. it’s fucking concerning you can’t understand that.

e: also, and this is important: the republicans are planning a fucking genocide of trans folks and you’re calling it a distraction. what the fuck is wrong with you.

yeah don’t come back on an alt you fucking moron

I don’t give a shit about trans people

that much is clear, you use trans folks like a fucking cudgel to make a shitty point. but I also don’t believe this:

I was talking about the right wings nonsense.

given you seem to be a bitcoin right-libertarian at best. it’s time for you to fuck off, again

you might be amazed to find out they do this cryptobro shit a lot

holy shit we didn’t even have to dig to find out you’re garbage

thank you for making this the easiest ban ever

they named themselves Syrus hashtag Blog? like, on purpose?

In March, Google said it was altering its algorithms to tackle spammy AI content after 404 Media reported that Google News was still boosting spam sites. Just removing the spam sites from Google News is too much work or something.

now now David, having a small team maintain a blocklist wouldn’t be very Google scale. instead they have to deploy a myopic fucking algorithm designed by the same software powerhouse that decided we don’t want to see an article if the author’s name looks too foreign

god, that orange site thread immediately crawls up its own ass pretending that anti-spam LLMs will fix this and it’ll somehow be a better world (and absolutely not, you know, boiling) and also fucking e-commerce is better than the moon landing and the “collective FAANG” could go to mars tomorrow if only they applied themselves

seriously, if you want to know what a concussion feels like, read the first couple screenfuls of that thread

I don’t think any of the reply guys I’m talking about work for the government, but I am pretty fucking angry that a lack of regulation and government oversight allows the companies I mentioned to flood the market with worthless, polluting grifttech they say needs dedicated power plants to scale to meet a fictional level of demand

it’d be nice if anyone was seriously considering regulation that’d stop these companies from doing stupid harmful shit. unfortunately they’re not (and the ability of the US government to effectively regulate any industry at all has just been effectively ended), so I don’t really have anything to write about in that area.

holy fuck shut up, nobody fucking asked

see occasionally you meet a UFO person and they’re normal and you only find out about their interest in UFOs because it’s the reason they want to get into radio or whatever and they want to see if you can recommend them a setup to communicate with satellites and other stuff in orbit. in effect, their UFO hobby is essentially a modified radio/birdwatching hobby that’s hopefully driving them to learn more about the world around them

but much more often you meet a UFO person and hear the absolute worst thing you’ve heard all month while looking for an escape route, without making it too obvious because you’re fairly certain they’re armed. they will later go on the internet and call you an NPC who refuses to wake up because you wouldn’t discuss lizard people with them.

having unfortunately known several David Icke fans: it’s always veiled antisemitism, and the veil gradually disappears the more you let them talk

e: yes, the area I live in is teeming with various flavors of conspiracy nut, why do you ask

it’s so common that I wish there was a specific name to put to that and every other type of reply guy that cryptocurrencies, chan culture, and meme stocks “gifted” us. it feels like the bullshit tactics cropped up faster than anyone really was able to catalog them, though a lot of them are really recognizable when you’ve seen them a few times.

so I think I must just have one of those faces cause it’s been something that multiple former friends have revealed to me, and it’s usually a weird show of trust? and it’s always something like “you know, I just think fairies must be real, like they’ve got to be out there? you know?”

and in all cases I’ve gone “…oh that’s cool” and mentally earmarked that person as “do not trust with heavy machinery”

hahahaha happy garbage day everybody

The logs also show Ms Power claiming that “the social disapproval for ‘racism’ is a psyop to stop people realising that there are alien and fairy races”, and that “black and white were alien races and very different”.

wait, is believing in fairies as an adult a weird racist thing? fuck, it’d kind of make sense if the people I’ve known who just causally slipped “by the way fairies are real” into casual conversation were doing a dogwhistle I didn’t pick up on

vibes enhancing substances

fuck yes

the part of me that sometimes spends an hour just choosing the right words for the couple of paragraphs I’m writing is fucking screaming

…

there is a screaming noise that comes from me while I write

thanks magibook!

Another example which doesn’t make a good viral news story is my not being able to put my Vietnamese name in the title of my blog and have my blog indexed by Google outside of Vietnamese-language Google — I tried that when I started my blog and it caused my blog to immediately stop showing up in Google searches unless you were in Vietnam. It’s just assumed that the default is that people want English language search results and, presumably, someone created a heuristic that would trigger if you have two characters with Vietnamese diacritics on a page that would effectively mark the page as too Asian and therefore not of interest to anyone in the world except in one country.

the entire post is very good, but my brain zeroed in on this as both a perfect example of why search was absolutely fucked even before LLMs (who in fuck deploys a language heuristic that doesn’t take the content of the page into account? who asked for this?) and of the engineering attitudes that feed into LLMs and generative AI having unevaluated biases and defenders that insist those biases can’t be real

“it’s just lemmy, my reddit shit will work fine there” says meme stock marketer who’s never been subjected to any kind of scrutiny

no, we don’t need marketing copy or suggestions for chatbot services here