I think this is a pretty good analysis, but I want to add onto it a little.

From where I'm standing, it seems like the reason they care so much about riling up their base is because their actual policies and interests hurt the working class rust belt people that are their main constituency. So they have to come up with some huge overriding cultural battle for their base to get really invested in fighting, to make them feel like they have to vote Republican and oppose the Democrats no matter what, and to distract them from the underlying social and economic issues that are the source of their undirected frustration in the first place, and deflect their anger onto a scapegoat that they can blame for all society's ills without actually changing the system.

Because if they didn't, their base would continue going down their populist route. They might start actually realizing how bad capitalism is for them and fighting against it in their own weird way. Some might see the benefit of Medicaid and Medicare and food stamps to working class people, or taxing rich more and the middle class less, and go over to the Democrats. And that could actually be pretty unprofitable for the elites and their donors and lobbyists.

Not to say that this would be exactly a good option either, though, because I think there is still a ton of genuine nationalism, traditionalism, anti-intellectualism, conservatism, and so on among today's right wing, it isn't all trumped up by their leaders, and that's going to tinge their social and economic understandings, so even if they went down this latter route, it would still end up being a conspirational populism that looks disturbingly like fascism.

It connects to my android extremely reliably using Gadgetbridge

I don't think so, no, it's pretty sparse on the health tracking side of things.

[-] edgerunneralexis@dataterm.digital 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I haven't read it yet, but from what I've just read on the Wikipedia page — and other things I've heard about it previously — I'm very interested in reading it! As a cyberpunk, a queer, a trans woman, and a feminist, with an interest in poststructuralism, I think there'd be a lot of interesting things I can glean from it.

(I've always felt that challenging essentialized notions of gender, and engaging in radical body-modification and self-expression, is a pretty cyberpunk, and feminist, thing to do)

In theory, I wouldn't hesitate one second to replace a substantial amount of my body with chrome — legs, arms, internal organs, eyes, etc — but I think actually going through with removing a healthy bodypart that I didn't hate and has served me well enough would be difficult. Nevertheless I don't think I'd really regret having gotten it done, so it'd just be like any other big scary surgery.

I don't think I'd want to do whole-body biotech upgrades like increasing muscle density or nervous system efficiency or whatever, because that effects a lot of things, so it's both more invasive and could have a lot more accidental unintended consequences. I'd probably start with replacing my left arm with a cybernetic one, since that's my off hand so I won't miss it as much if something goes wrong. Then use that as a platform to tinker and experiment and decide if I want to go further.

As for what kind of chrome I'd want to chip — I want the simplest, sturdiest, most robust thing that can possibly work, something I can understand as completely as possible, something that I can at least somewhat repair and upgrade myself, something that's well-known for reliability. Nothing super flashy with a lot of moving parts so its flimsy and unreliable, I want the PineTime or ThinkPad T420 of cyberware. And of course I'd flash it with open source firmware and remove all the corpo software and tracking I could!

I'd be a lot more careful about modifying my brain, for two reasons.

First of all, my theory of personal identity / consciousness is that the sense of coherent, singular identity doesn't come from a single, constant set of essential characteristics — whether physical or psychological — but from there being a sufficient resemblance between yourself prior to any given change and yourself after any given change, and a coherent self-narrative pathway from one to the other so that you can reconcile the two. Yourself at 20 and yourself at 35 can have completely different interests, beliefs, neural pathways, memories (our memories falsify over time, after all), and whatever else, but it's still you — how? Because you got there by a step by step process where you remained you between each change, and so by the transitive property, you're still you at the end, even if you're completely different now. If A ≈ B, and B ≈ C, and C ≈ D, then A ≈ D, even if A and D are completely different, because they've got this web of other things connecting them. Thus, if I'm going to maintain my sense of being myself, instead of accidentally killing myself off, I'm going to have to do any modifications of my brain slowly, step by step, and adjust to each one before getting the next one.

Which works out, because of my second point: if an implant in your brain goes wrong, its WAY, WAY, WAAAAAY worse than if something goes wrong with your body. Like, brain damage is no joke kids, I'm dealing with the fallout of it right now and it is not fun. And of course, as we all know, tech fails. A lot. It's buggy as shit. It's often pushed out the door before it's ready. It has vulnerabilities. So I'd want to keep the brain mods minimal if I did any at all — tried and true, tested, resiliant, as simple as possible, and not connected to the 'net.

By far the most punk (cyber and otherwise) thing I have done in my life is become a public school teacher working in a low-income urban school district.

🤘

[-] edgerunneralexis@dataterm.digital 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I'm really excited for the possible addition of something like cyberpsychosis, or at least cyberware limits with the in-world excuse for those limits being cyberpsychosis. It has the potential to make the player feel less like some kind of truly special "chosen one" who's exempt from the rules everyone else has to follow and wins because of it, and more like just another punk on the street, who makes it — or doesn't — in spite of that. It would also add a real sense of fear and worry and downsides to balance out all the chrome you can get, which might balance the game (and the power fantasy aspect) a bit more.

[-] edgerunneralexis@dataterm.digital 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

My bad, it wasn't deleted, it was hidden from me because if you set Lemmy to hide posts you've already read, it immediately hides all your own posts as well. I guess yeah, technically I have read my own posts! Anyways, sorry for being a gonk.

We need to crowd source a common list of instances to block from users and mods across the network for instances to use, like people on Mastodon started doing. It was really effective. Defederation is really the only way to deal with / only check on users that sign up on instances that don't moderate them at all in order to harass others with impunity, since moderators can't effect users on s different instance and so it basically gives such users free reign. That's why IMHO defederation is a REALLY crucial tool to make this place livable, otherwise it'd be filled with trolls doing their thing with absolute impunity and there would be nothing mods, who are supposed to be the first line of defense for that kind of thing, could do,

[-] edgerunneralexis@dataterm.digital 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I just want the freedom of choice for everyone. I'm tired of living in a world where there are people who think they know whats best for everyone else.

I hear you <3 I think we share the same goals, and might even agree on our ideal world (the best solution IMO would be to let users individually defederate from instances as a first line of defense and then have instances defederate from each other after the community approves of it only as a last line of defense). But I think practically speaking, there are places I disagree with you.

(Also, I apologize for the length of this comment, but I think we are in the early days of something extremely important with these federated and decentralized networks, and hashing out the culture and pros and cons and technical features of these things is really important to do carefully and intentionally to lay the groundwork.)

I think being able to defederate from hate groups and rogue instances is a very important feature of the network, because it allows communities to avoid other hostile communities instead of being forced into one giant, common, one-size-fits-all compromise social sphere where they are forced to coexist with communities who hate them or even want them dead.

A lack of this ability was one half of the problem with corporate social media, the other being that to solve this they had to use centralized moderation that, when banning a user, utterly banished them, instead if just separating two groups but allowing them to remain in a common network and have indirect connections, as in Lemmy.

Mods on one instance aren't able to moderate the comments and posts of people on other instances, so the only way for them to properly deal with users and communities that consistently refuse to moderate their own members is to defederate. If there's no way to defederate, there's no way for communities to essentially moderate their interactions with other communities, so if a group wants to do a mass harassment campaign against e.g. trans people or black people, all they need to do is start an instance where they'll never actually be banned or muted or have their comments removed, and they can then harass people on other instances with complete impunity, consequence-free, with the harassed people having no recourse but to individually choose to block the harassing instance.

Preventing that sort of mess where everyone has to fend for themselves with personal blocklists is the whole reason mods were invented in the first place, to be a first line of defense for everyone else, so we don't have to deal with hate and nonsense constantly. They're essentially a community defense organization. It would make lemmy basically unusable for marginalized people who face a ton of hate and harassment and this information and concerning directed at them to be left completely to their own devices on this front. Yes, they may be a somewhat centralized locus of power, but would you object to moderators doing their other functions such as banning or muting users, removing comments, etc too? Because this is very much in line with those things.

Anyway, independent of what the mechanisms are for deciding when to defederate, I think you have to look at the cost/benefit analysis, instead of just declaring it bad, and I have personally experienced the benefits. Many Mastodon instances regularly defederate from many other Mastodon instances, and yet that network has not turned into anything like what you fear, and I've directly felt the benefits of such defederation as certain never ending sources of problems and hate are effectively quarantined from the people that don't want to deal with them.

Moreover your assumption that allowing defederation will cause a degenerate network condition is verging on a slippery slope argument. Defederation will never be widespread enough to turn the Fediverse into just an array of mostly centralized hubs like corpo social media because it's a very extreme move you only do to cesspools of hate and fascism, so the network will just be a decentralized mesh network that isn't completely directly connected, which might be a small sacrifice in some abstract metric, but has direct benefits in making communities more liveable for people that aren't okay with being on something like 4chan.

Now to answer your main point. The decision to defederate one instance from another is the decision of the instance's owner(s), and so may be unilateral in that sense, yes, but thanks to the overall interconnectedness of the network, unless your current instance literally defederates from ALL other instances, if the mods on an instance do something you don't like, you'll always be able to find or make a new instance that is connected to all the people on the old instance and all the instances you disagreed about the blocking of. That's the most crucial aspect of the federated network — freedom of association and freedom from network effects. That freedom of association means there's competition between instances (and little barrier to entry for making new ones or switching), which will incentivize mods to implement collective decision-making such as polls. Additionally, most instances have a mission statement or description of the attitudes and goals of the instance and so it can be assumed that if people join that instance then they agree for the most part with that ethos and so as long as the mods act in line with that then it's fine.

Would it be possible to make the bot post the content of the Reddit posts, instead of links to Reddit, via web scraping? That way we could avoid giving traffic and engagement to reddit.

[-] edgerunneralexis@dataterm.digital 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

bootloader can be... re-locked

Yes, but iirc they configured their verified boot setup incorrectly (using the keys Google provides publicly for debug/testing purposes instead of their own secret ones) so someone can easily bypass verified boot and install whatever OS or root kit or whatever they want on your phone if they get physical access to it without the phone detecting that and erasing your personal info. That's why GraphineOS doesn't support the fairphone IIRC.

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