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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • They’ve already bombed the vast majority of Gaza and resettled people, and the next step is almost certainly another expansion of the settler state of Israel.

    Most of the millions of people that live in Gaza have been resettled into a very small area. Whether Israel decides to nuke them or force them into neighboring countries as refugees is irrelevant to their end goal of settling the territory. The Palestinians are just “rats” that need to be removed.

    I’m sure they’d prefer to nuke them and just get rid of their problem once and for all; a final solution of sorts. However they do have limited political capital in this conflict, and nuking the remaining civilians does have the potential to negative impact U.S-Isrsel relations. So there’s a real chance they opt for just pushing the “human animals” out of the territories.



  • Yup this is the real world take IME. Code should be self documenting, really the only exception ever is “why” because code explains how, as you said.

    Now there are sometimes less-than-ideal environments. Like at my last job we were doing Scala development, and that language is expressive enough to allow you to truly have self-documenting code. Python cannot match this, and so you need comments at times (in earlier versions of Python type annotations were specially formatted literal comments, now they’re glorified comments because they look like real annotations but actually do nothing).


  • Not all gamers are triple A gamers. I’d call myself an avid gamer (I used to put in easily 80 hour weeks gaming, now it’s almost always lower, but I’ll still go on gaming binges during long vacations or holidays).

    The vast, vast majority of my time has been WoW and LoL. I have played other games throughout the years, but usually in the same genres (mmo/moba).

    A lot of these games have entry fees of below $70. Right now most of my gaming time is cata classic, and that requires $15 a month. Over time that will obviously add up, but everything adds up overtime, and $15 a month is not prohibitively expensive for most people. Also it’s really only $15 for the first month, just by leveling in cata classic to max you make enough to buy a wow token, and can easily pay $0 a month every month by just using in game currency.


  • 20 year olds are not generally getting night terrors from watching disturbing content on tiktok. They’re not losing sleep, or coming away with genuine psychological scarring. We don’t need government regulations to control media content for the sake of literal adults. And children in theory should already have their content moderated by the correct degree by parents, not the government.

    It’s just content I find dumb

    If you watch anything on YouTube that you don’t think is dumb, there is stuff on TikTok you also wouldn’t find dumb. I don’t use TikTok either, but I think you genuinely underestimate how much content there is, and overestimate how uniform that content is.

    Considering the country that runs it (…)

    ByteDance already stores U.S user data within the U.S, allows third party firms to scrutinize its data privacy policies far more than any other U.S media group, and has come back with a clean bill from groups like Citizen Lab (a Canadian research lab). No U.S userdata goes to the Chinese government.

    Government officials know this, they’re just putting on a show. Leaked phone calls have made this clear, the actual issue is the lack of policing around the kinds of content served. ByteDance is not aligned with U.S foreign policy interests like Meta/Google are. They are more than happy to showcase the horrors of the apartheid, genocidal state of Israel, and that’s having a real impact on the literal more than half of Americans that use TikTok.

    It’s clearly against the YouTube T.O.S

    Videos against YouTube’s T.O.S of the October 7th attacks have been on the platform since October of last year. They’re much more strict about removing videos showcasing the much larger-in-scale violent acts done by Israel than anything done by Hamas. TikTok isn’t. This isn’t a coincidence, and the U.S needs TikTok to fall in line here.

    If they don’t young people will continue to hold extreme views, like bombing tens of thousands of children in an open air prison that has been violating the GCIV since 2007 is somehow problematic. They need the American public to have the understanding that Palestinians are simply human animals; they’re savages that need to be put down. Not unlike native americans.

    Towards the end of the culling, when enough of the population has died to no longer pose a threat, they’ll give them small territories like the U.S did with native americans and feign sympathy. Imperialism hasn’t changed.


  • When we say younger, we might just be talking about different age groups. I imagine 16-30, and in that age range you’re not likely to come away with severe psychological scarring, but you will be deeply upset and that’s a good thing (we shouldn’t ignore genocide, we should be upset by it). Being upset leads to change.

    If you’re talking about like 10 year olds watching it, sure I can agree. They can’t really do anything about it. They can’t go out and protest, or advocate for change, or vote, etc. Plus they’re much more likely to have genuine scarring. Issues sleeping, night terrors, trouble concentrating, etc.

    As for “that content is dumb”, I assume you’re talking about tiktok in general. And again, for some people it’s definitely not dumb. People get served different things. Tiktok isn’t a platform trying to do good in the world, like any other social media platform it’s trying to drive engagement. However, it’s one of the few social media platforms outside of the U.S media interest groups, and that’s why the U.S is either banning them or forcing them to sell.

    The end goal is to censor all of that raw footage of genocide, because it changes views. When you can hide behind rhetoric and not show how horrific the mass bombings are, you get a lot more leeway. That’s good for Israel, and why AIPAC and other Israel lobbies are the main forces behind this push in the U.S. In the end, the ban is bad for humanity (will allow the genocide to escalate without public backlash), but will be good for Israel and U.S elites.




  • I don’t use tiktok, but some people have unusually based tiktok feeds. They can get direct footage from the genocide happening in Gaza, for example. I never get that recommended on YouTube, despite my very obvious socialist leanings, watching pro-Palestine content, etc.

    This is the actual reason tiktok is being banned (if they don’t sell) after the election. One of the largest lobbying groups in America, AIPAC, in probably the most well-funded policy categories (pro-Israel policies) backs most of Congress. They’ve determined tiktok has far too much influence on American youth, and has made the Israel/Palestine divide a young/old divide more-so than a left/right divide.

    There’s already a strong correlation between political leaning and age, which is problematic for the future of the fascist movement in America, but this issue falls outside the norm. You’ll find a lot of young conservatives calling for an end to the needless killing of civilians. They won’t call it a genocide because admitting Israel is a genocidal apartheid state is too far for them, but they can at least admit killing tens of thousands of children is not the right path here.

    That kind of extremism (e.g not greenlighting any amount of culling of “human animals” Israel feels it needs to do) is unacceptable to the pro-Israel lobby, and they’re not used to getting this kind of pushback from the American public.



  • Glad someone said this, it bothers me even with human ages. Like there’s this perception that as you get older you simply gain knowledge, wisdom, world experience, etc. Not a lot of people account for biological limits for knowledge/memory, nor degradation from aging.

    If some young intern decided to try to have sex with Biden, I think there’s genuinely a conversation to be had about if that’s statutory rape. I think you’d need a healthcare professional to rule on if Biden has the mental capacity to fully consent. Similar to a drunk person. They’re still obviously a person able to think/engage with the world, but they’re heavily impaired and unable to fully consent as a result. Age impairs cognition too.


  • I like your comment, but there’s an important note that needs to be made, I’m not the one who invented the conflation of organizational and electoral politics. Putting all that under the sphere of “politics; not to be discussed at work” was a convenient tactic by capitalists to delegitimize important political discussions under the guise of the important considerations you bring up.

    Conflation is a powerful rhetorical strategy. Capitalists do it with other things too (legitimizing private property by putting personal property under that umbrella, somehow making you owning your own home the same “kind” of ownership as Elon Musk/Tesla owning a factory on the other side of the planet that he’s never stepped foot into).

    The dual to conflation here is intersectionalism, which is important to consider too. It’s not always relevant (e.g foreign trade policy often won’t intersect with organizational politics), but it sometimes is. “right to work” ideals in electoral politics directly impacts organizational politics, so if we legitimize and normalize the latter, it’d be hard to unilaterally ban the former as well. The line gets muddy, and it’s better to stray too far on the side of allowing too much discussion so organizing can actually take place, than too much restriction.


  • I get some people have immense faith in capitalist rule, that you genuinely believe that the reason it’s normalized to not discuss salaries or politics is for your own good. Some people don’t believe in class antagonisms. This used to be a purely fascist position, but liberals adopted it in the mid 20th century because of how effective it is at driving complacency.

    Politics used to be common in the workplace. Not necessarily electoral politics, but organizational politics, which is far more important and impactful, and also much more regulated by capitalists and the petite bourgeoise. I’ve talked to my boss about electoral politics before, and it didn’t cause issues. If I brought up unions with him I’d be fired within a month (based on how other union organizers were let go).



  • Agreed on everything, like I said in my first comment. I was fairly confident we were on the same page on everything, less cars is good, less human drivers is good, etc. I hate Musk, you hate Musk, etc.

    Also I appreciate the humility, it’s something very few people have, and what you’ve done here is what I hope I’m also able to do when needed.

    I’m fully in favor of the USSR/European/Chinese/Japanese/etc. model for public transit (prefer public transportation over cars as much as possible). It vastly outperforms the U.S in every important metric (safety, reliability, cost, etc.)

    Also agree that self-driving is a small piece of the overall picture. It’s just I think that’s the only piece Tesla really has a part in playing, most of the improvements need to happen on the government’s end.


  • you don’t want human drivers, I don’t want cars

    I’m the one misinterpreting you, yet when I explicitly advocate for public infrastructure to lessen the amount of cars, I’m somehow in favor of cars? You’re definitely projecting.

    not sure how you would have thought I was advocating for privatized public transit

    Go back and read your comment. You never said the word public, I did. We were in a conversation about Tesla and its failings, and you randomly brought up “transit”. So either you were making a completely off-topic point about something the government should do, or you were making an on-topic point about something Tesla should do. I read it as an on-topic comment.

    the proverbial carrot of “fewer road accidents” is likely to prevent regulators from taking effective steps

    Actually stop for a moment, take off your argument hat, and think about what you’re advocating for. The government has had 100 years of non-self driving cars to implement the changes you’ve wanted. They’ve failed, miserably. They’ve actually taken a ton of steps to do exactly the opposite, and have built the largest car-centric society the world has ever seen.

    Now that we have something that is statistically reducing the number of accidents on the road (autonomous vehicles, which will only get better, but already statistically outperform humans), you want private companies to revert these safety features in the hopes that the uptick in human deaths will lead to regulation that the U.S hasn’t implemented in the 100 years of sole human driving?

    Please tell me you’re just miscommunicating your position again, and that you’re actually not against the development of safety features to reduce human deaths in cars just to encourage the government to do something it hasn’t done in the past 100 years.


  • You want Tesla to create transit infrastructure? I hard disagree, that should be something the government does, not a private company. Tesla should stay in the business of making cars, and the government should move to make that obsolete in cities with good public infrastructure.

    Self-driving has pushed probably 0 people in the world from using public infrastructure to using cars. I’ve never met anyone that has said “yeah, I was using trains daily, but I decided to buy a $50,000 car with a $12,000 software upgrade to have it autonomously drive me”. You honestly think there’s a person that exists that has done this?

    Leads to unsafe situations

    Absolutely, it’s just human drivers lead to unsafe situations more often. I understand it might not feel that way, but it’s the actual truth, we have massive amounts of data on this, and your feelings don’t outweigh that.


  • Agreed on everything, just want to make sure it’s clear he’s endangering people’s lives by artificially restricting access to FSD. Supervised automated driving (that is, the car drives often drives itself point to point with no interventions) is statistically safer than the national average.

    The fact that access to this is behind a $12,000 paywall (outside of the currently running free trial) is limiting access to a software safety feature. This should be illegal.



  • The goal of semantics, and words in general, are to convey ideas. It was true in the past that socialism was a very concrete, straightforward thing. If you believed in worker control of the means of production, you were a socialist. Now there are people who say they’re socialist, and they advocate for private tyrannies for the foreseeable future (decades or sometimes even a century+). They want entire generations of humans to be wage slaves, serve the interests of capital, pay their reduced wages to land leeches and banks, and then die without having ever seen a better system.

    Those systems, systems by which entire generations of people are subjugated to the interests of capital under authoritarian rule, are now called socialist or sometimes communist. And I no longer have the word to describe a system where wage slavery is immediately abolished (much like chattel slavery was), and workers take immediate control over the means of production.

    Those societies/institutions were often overthrown and overrun by either conservative Marxists (e.g Lenin) or fascists (e.g Catalonia).