[-] it_wasnt_arson@awful.systems 1 points 2 hours ago

Vaporize? The land and equipment aren't going anywhere. Reorganize the parts of the parts of the business that are actually, physically real and let the workers decide how best to put them to use instead of an egomaniacal Twitter addict.

[-] it_wasnt_arson@awful.systems 3 points 5 days ago

I don't think the people who do things like that actually pay attention to what they're doing. It's like a subconscious reflex for small-time Christian singers, or something.

[-] it_wasnt_arson@awful.systems 11 points 5 days ago

iirc, they fell behind during COVID, the increased funding and facility expansions needed to actively push them back down into the chokepoint never got approved, and the trump administration would rather spend 10x more moving all the infrastructure up to the US-Mexico border than do anything that would help other countries "for free" (even though they already chip in).

[-] it_wasnt_arson@awful.systems 4 points 5 days ago

Maybe they listened to one of the covers that seemingly obliviously changes the line to "the shrine of your light"

[-] it_wasnt_arson@awful.systems 3 points 6 days ago

Chabad are mostly notable for being less insular than most Orthodox sects, doing a lot of outreach to secular/Reform/Conservative Jews, and thus ending up as one of the big names in overseas funding for Zionism in the modern day. They're really the mainstream face of Orthodox Judaism, and the fucked up abuse scandals in Israel have tended to come from fringe, Messianic sects that the state's Rabbinate and larger organizations like Chabad can at least pretend to distance themselves from.

As for the Talmud, it's weird how much it tends to get played up in antisemitic narratives, because in my (very limited) experience it is really, incredibly dry and mostly boring. It's like reading Reddit comments on every page of the scriptures, where 5 incredibly pedantic nerds are arguing over what exactly counts as a fork, or what a story about a wage dispute is supposed to say about contract law and social hierarchy. There's a predictably authoritarian "just listen to your boss and your rabbi" bent to the morals it extracts, but at the end of the day it's a couple thousand pages of mundane, day-to-day legal doctrine. Anyone can learn Talmud, it's just a lot of effort, and like a lot of difficult religious texts, it mostly ends up being a source local authority figures can pull out to settle arguments in their favor.

[-] it_wasnt_arson@awful.systems 9 points 6 days ago

Apparently the project got overwhelmed with LLM vulnerability reports, so the last person in the world who actually cared enough to keep maintaining it gave up and gave in to the spop himself.

[-] it_wasnt_arson@awful.systems 2 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

There's a lot of government and religious NGO money funneled around Israel for religious schools and student stipends, so any unscrupulous rabbis looking to start an abusive cult have plenty of opportunities handed to them. It's really not unlike the various Christian cults that sprouted up on compounds in the American West, taking advantage of cheap resources and isolation tactics to build organizations that beat the shit out of children or do whatever else they want.

Edit: I think the settlements in particular create a similar physical dynamic, where living on stolen land ringed with fences and security checkpoints allows leaders to create an insular community that keeps victims in and accountability out. Even twenty minutes' drive from Jerusalem, no one gets into a settlement without arranged permission, and a housewife with no car may as well be stranded out on the prairie.

[-] it_wasnt_arson@awful.systems 17 points 1 week ago

For years I lived right by the sea. I had plenty of alcohol and medications. the prevailing currents would've swept my body across the border into a hostile country, where no one who found it would've cared. I don't live to spare anyone else's feelings, not least those who would mourn me as dead for living the life I want to live. I live because I deserve it, I deserve my family's respect and care while we're both here, and I don't need anyone else's shame.

To live on solely for obligation and guilt isn't living at all, and anyone who wishes that on someone else just so they can remain a half-dead trophy they can congratulate themselves for "saving" can eat shit. If you're reading this and you need to hear something, keep going. Keep trying. We live in an insane world; sometimes you have to try the same thing over and over so you can get different results. Live another day and see what happens. Not for anyone else, but because it's a shame to miss out on this wild a ride.

This post honestly just pisses me off. Your life is worth living. Not your parents' child's life. Yours.

136
Physics lecturule (awful.systems)
submitted 2 weeks ago by it_wasnt_arson@awful.systems to c/196
13

A couple months old by now, but I still find this a fascinating case study. A good old-fashioned NFT grift, unmoored from time and washed ashore as a sad, solitary UZDoom pull request in the year of the Common Era two thousand twenty six. The honorable representative of "Next Gen Software UK" seems to have taken the rejection in stride and without comment, seemingly only attempting to upstream the NFT features to promote their own fork, ODOOM.

What's the "O" stand for? Open Advanced Secure Interoperable Scalable-System obviously. That's right, they're not just making a Metaverse like in Snow Crash, they're making the OASIS like in Ready Player One, by putting a shitty social overlay into some FOSS game engines. I'm too tired to come up with a clever torment nexus joke to put here. Anyway, web3 is passé now. Their interoperability layer is web4. Their social layer is web5. Loading a WAD presumably makes it web6, and from there we'll be on pace to hit the web* singularity by 2027. That's right, AI is here too!

Now, as someone astutely pointed out, you might think that tying the ability to mint NFTs to killing enemies in a notoriously moddable game would be bad for the whole artificial scarcity thing, but our friends at Next Gen have a solution: enterprise blockchain holonic braid AI! From what I can tell, this is a delicate prompt caressing technique to write out a bunch of GOFAI symbolic logic in markdown and then get an LLM to pretty please evaluate the fuzzy logic. That's right, the cyberdemons are going to prompt so hard they'll beat you at deathmatch. In a game famous for being played at the pace of an LLM API endpoint. Blockchain-based anticheat is left as an exercise for the reader.

Obviously, this is all bullshit. One look at their generically titled landing page makes the unimaginative grift clear. You buy a token to play, the tier of token you buy determines how many loot and "quest" reward NFTs you can mint in a week so you can corner the hypothetical market by preordering, and not only are they promising a roadmap, they're so gracious that if you pay for the top tier, they'll let you write the roadmap for them! Only 20 slots left! Buy now!

I know the standard NFT project like this is supposed to prey on people who want to join a fun discord server and/or know they're looking for the next bag holder to cash out, but it still surprises me that these devs think they can get something out of it this late to the party. Did their AI blockchain compliance automation thing fall through in the wake of the Delve scandal? Did they really spend a decade in the mines preparing their get-rich-quick scheme for launch and miss the boat? …Come to think of it, "10+ years" ago is around when the Ready Player One movie was announced. Are they just really, really genuine fans of Ernest Cline's Torment Nexus?

I don't know why I felt the need to write all this, but the economic, social, epistemological, and game design failures of this horseshit, and the amount of work people are willing to put into a Potemkin software project like this never fail to astound me. Twenty-twenty-six, everyone. The best part is, for anyone actually interested in alternating back and forth between playing Doom, Quake, and a bunch of other games connected by a social layer to complete shared tasks, Archipelago already exists and doesn't want you to buy their AI-extruded membership cards. Peace on Earth, gamers.

[-] it_wasnt_arson@awful.systems 14 points 1 month ago

9 months is a typical direct transfer, using a traditional rocket engine whose thrust is so high you can basically treat it as infinite: accelerate up to your transfer speed in a few minutes and coast until you need to slow down in a similarly negligible amount of time. You need to set a lot of gas on fire in those few minutes, though. Electric propulsion is so low thrust that it can't put you on that kind of direct trajectory in one go, so the trip is more of a slow spiral around the sun with continuous thrust the whole way. The tradeoff for everything taking forever is unbelievable fuel savings, which is a surprisingly common occurrence in space travel.

[-] it_wasnt_arson@awful.systems 14 points 2 months ago

I'm struck by how much contrast gets blasted into the shadows of every scene, reminiscent of the average RTX "remaster." Lighting is treated not as a tool for composing scenes and guiding attention, but as a dial to be turned toward "more gooder" wherever possible. Just make everything look like everything else; that's how you know the technology is getting Better.

146
Deltarule (awful.systems)
[-] it_wasnt_arson@awful.systems 14 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I love how this is so close to a cogent critique of people literally just repeating racist jokes but using a word swap to make them acceptable, and then the "(whatever that means)" hits and it all falls into place.

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it_wasnt_arson

joined 11 months ago