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Joined 29 days ago
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Cake day: October 13th, 2025

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  • I don’t actually think many people are open to changing anything, even with information that may indicate good reasons to. Even with good reasons proving they should.

    This entire argument could be had over every divisive societal split.

    At first they seem rational.

    “Letting common people learn how to read books is a bad idea.”

    “Listening to the radio is the down fall of this world.”

    “TV is a really bad idea.”

    “I don’t make friends with Nazis.”


    Then they run the gamut of becoming they sound ever so slightly smarter.

    “I don’t make friends with conservatives.”

    “I don’t make friends with Republicans.”


    Skipping ahead:

    “I don’t hangout with people who spend all their time watching (insert streaming service here)”

    “I don’t like people who don’t hate AI.”

    “I don’t date people who use AI.”

    “AI use will prevent me from being friends with someone.”

    This is just a smattering of divides, there are plenty in between all these if I had to make a spectrum of them, but you get the point.

    Anyway, somewhere on this spectrum you find your spot, and everything previous to that spot seems absolutely obvious, your exact spot seems reasonable, and everything beyond you seems utter lunacy.

    Currently I’m pretty strong in the “all AI is bad AI” end of it. I think translating can be useful, but still isn’t great, but I can easily see how a perfectly-preserved translation can be useful. But I don’t see much actual use or value beyond that. And given it’s enormous power and water drain just to support something that might be valuable later, this approach is ass-backwards.

    Previous world shaking technologies were easy to find value in pretty quick. Language, printing press, radio, TV… So could be used for brain rot, but information sharing is generally good (if it’s honest).

    But AI doesn’t really have a killer application (yet, anyway) and devoting this much to it before we figure out any potential way to use it that makes it worth what we’re giving up to use it is absolutely bonkers.

    I don’t personally currently know of anything that’s even possible that it can be used for, but I’m willing to hear use cases.

    Meanwhile we’ve got lazy thinkers that have less than zero reason to believe in God that still do. So just having evidence isn’t all there is to it. You have to be open enough to acknowledge and change with that evidence.




  • I mean I have a few. But I’m not interested in more. I have one little (well smallish) hanging shelves thing that I put them on, and it’s full. But I’m not making it my place’s identity.

    One of my former housemates went crazy with em. Not quite hoarder level, since he kept them in his room and not throughout the house (just like I do mine). But he bought enough that he was on a rotating basis of selling them at garage sales while buying different ones. I don’t think he was trying to profit, as he sold most at $5-10 I believe, but he has a phase. I think I’ve got like 10 with 10 amiibo on that shelf, and yeah it’s kinda cringe, but I’ve made my peace with it.


  • I can believe going through the account deletion is inconvenient.

    But you cannot make me believe that just deleting the app is. Takes less than 5 seconds unless your shortcut is millions of homescreens deep.

    I mean I got everything I use often on one screen, and everything I use occasionally is like 4 extra icons on the second. You cannot convince me that is inconvenient.

    And even if you could, just ignoring it is even less inconvenient.

    Then you have to decide how much effort it is to prevent their emails showing up. Either following them or going back and deleting the account are your choices. One is less convenient and more thorough. Decide between those.

    I did it around the time he bought the place. I didn’t even know anything about his politics at the time, but I barely used it and that picture of him with the funk with that shit eating grin and the general sentiment of everybody’s else’s feelings on it just pissed me off. Once the election started I was happy to be far away.


  • It gets fuzzy because show means different things when you’re mixing pay and present speeds, as it’s a relative term. Everything was slow back them by today’s standards When I first started torrents I was on a 1.5Mb connection, which felt screaming fast at the time, but now it feels crippling because everything has board to take advantage of the extra speed for more ads and tracking data. Plus now videos mostly default to 1080p now, but back then 4:3 was the typical ratio on most computer monitors, and HD wasn’t even born yet. Widescreen was still a baby.

    I had visited some of the video sites back then, but I was more preoccupied with school and online gaming to give it a whole lot of thought for what was mostly people tripping on stuff and machinima type stuff.



  • One of the few reasons I encourage suicide.

    Sure, watching them get mowed down is more satisfying, but I will take every IDF, Nazi, and fascist death literally no matter what the circumstance is, except deaths that involve actual decent people going down with them. With the exception to the exception of good people sacrificing themselves specifically in order to take out the maximum number they can with them.

    o7

    But all you IDF morons should feel bad, and you should definitely teamkill as many as possible before killing yourselves. Bonus points off you get good footage. Extra bonus for backflip.

    Some day the best outcome is 0% of evil remaining, but I prefer 100% evil mortality rate. Don’t leave room to presume rehabilitation is possible. That effort isn’t worth it.



  • I remember the buttons existing for it, but maybe it was just super and acceptable seeds.

    Most stuff has so few seeds that I got anyway I was lucky to get the whole file anyway. Plus I was trying to get a collection of movies to keep, not just watch on demand.

    So maybe I want the target audience for the feature. Plus if it had a lot of secrets it just made me more paranoid that there were undercover ones looking at it.

    Which isn’t really bring the pale, especially since back then I didn’t even hardly know what encryption was, much less anything like Tor or VPNs.

    I actually got a letter from the ISP one time, and it wasn’t even for a good movie.





  • Video content creation wasn’t a thing that far back.

    YouTube was (in my experience) the first site at all where you could click a video and not wait 3 years for it to load, plus having a UI around it.

    Most people’s Internet speeds weren’t even close to being fast enough to consistently load them fast enough to want to watch more than a few in a session. Decent waits and buffers throughout still made it painful. Just less painful than it was before.

    Most other videos back then were scattered around on separate sites, and related to the content on the site, and they usually had to download completely before even starting to play. (Kinda like pirating a movie these days)

    So given that most people couldn’t use other sites and tolerate it for long, YouTube created a market that didn’t exist before, and there wasn’t a content creation machine in place ready to go.

    That kinda took off as more and more people got broadband connections and started being able to watch almost as soon as they clicked a link.

    I don’t have hard dates for this, just an impression from memory of the era.

    So the “creators” were just random people filming slightly less random things. There weren’t well known channels, or filters for different genes or topics. You could choose from “dude filming an animal do something funny” or “something unlikely to be caught on camera being caught on camera”.

    And most of it was shot on terrible cameras (since digital cameras were still going from “looks like objects filmed through 4 layers of plastic” to “really tiny footage of decent quality”, there wasn’t much that existed to draw a lot of people other than a feeling of hoping to stumble on the newest really cool clip.

    But, since capitalism exists to make everything worse, the market got its act together shortly after. But not immediately. It took a whole new kind of infrastructure to get it moving.

    People needed better digital cameras (unless you thought transferring from analog tapes was a fun weekend), better Internet, and the site itself has to start figuring out how to run things to make a better experience.

    Google buying it was both a great infusion of capital to help it as well as being a cancer injection that would poison it.

    I like the concept of peertube, but it’s not gonna take off in its current state. I don’t think anything takes off without capitalism happening to it these days. If something takes off, it’s probably fruit of a poisonous tree. Can’t have any good new popular technology without it being tampered with by billionaires