cld8483

> there is a kind of... meanspiritedness to them. It's hard to describe but almost like, spiritual viciousness or a deep nasty pessimism about people.

Yes, I felt this way about his books when I was a kid. I did like the books despite it, but there was always an element of grotesque cruelty to his books that I didn't particularly care for.

Still, removing that from the books is wrong. Read different books, or write your own books. Editing his books to remove the author's distinctive style is just plain wrong. What's the objective, to trick kids into thinking Roald Dahl was a different sort of man? To what end? Whatever the problem, deception is not the answer.

Or why they tried to erase Joseph Conrad, despite Conrad being famous for his opposition to colonialism.

(Probably because they judge Joseph Conrad by the outdated language he used, rather than by the ideas and values he presented. Because they are shallow fools.)

The device is the hard part. AR hardware that occludes the real word is a difficult challenge.

I predict that creative innuendo will always stay one step ahead of the AI censors, which will always be playing catch-up. It's just another form of euphemism treadmill.

When I was in public school, the adults got sick of kids using the word "retarded" as an insult so they renamed the class for people with actual disabilities to "special education". So kids started calling each other "special" as an insult synonymous with "retarded". Euphemism treadmills always lag, they're reactive and can't keep up with the rate at which people can invent new insults.

I haven't heard of this trend before, what you say seems very strange to me since I've always found first-person novels to be more than a bit odd and uncanny.

> Kind of a tangent, but is it fair to define ppl up in arms about this as “anti-woke”? Im basing this on the fact that anti-woke usually is considered right-wing/libertarian etc

You're right that one of these is unfair, but it is the latter not the former. "Woke" is the progressive fringe, not the mainstream. Opposition to woke is a set that includes both the moderate mainstream and the right fringe. Liberal enlightenment values, which represent the moderate majority today, are distinctly "anti-woke".

Debian Sid makes a pretty good "rolling release" distro for home/hobby use at least, although I prefer OpenSUSE Tumbleweed for this.

> Said no one relevant

[Retort insult.]

AppImage is great, definitely the best of the bunch.

Ubuntu is an African word which means "Afraid of Debian"

Seriously though, just install Debian. It's not hard, the netinstaller may be text-mode but it walks you through the simple steps one by one just like Ubuntu's GUI installer. Anybody who's comfortable using Ubuntu in the first place should be able to get through the Debian installer just fine.

That's fine if you have no other option, but it is inferior to uBlock Origin since it can't do any cosmetic filtering. Better to use pi-hole on your network for clients that have no other choice, but to then also use uBlock Origin on any client you can.

Not permitting the accused to know what they are being accused of is always done in bad faith.

If the accused were guilty, then they'd already know who the victim is and already know who the accuser is, so hiding the accuser does nothing. Hiding the accuser is only ""useful"" when the accused is actually innocent. The entire point of hiding the accuser is to deny the wrongfully accused of the opportunity to defend themselves. Such systems are weapons created by and for bureaucrats to cement their power.

Whenever an institution makes the decision to start taking anonymous accusations seriously, you can bet the bureaucracy of that institution has already been captured by precisely the sort of people who are eager to abuse such a system. To anybody else without such a malicious intent, the hazards of anonymous accusations should be obvious.

Be very careful when seeking to reform such a system, because those you are trying to disarm will use those very same bureaucratic weapons to stop you.

The rattlers around here could fuck you up, particularly if you can't get medical attention within a few hours because you're disabled on the ground alone at night. But fortunately, rattlers rattle (usually) so the snakes actually help people avoid this sort of accident.

Unfortunately, may people kill rattlesnakes when they become aware of them, which is usually after the snake started rattling. So there is now a selective pressure on rattlesnakes to stop rattling. Very misguided.

The only "good" ads are those you have to specifically go out of your way to view because you want to view them; such as product catalogues.

All other ads are physiological assault and should be made illegal. Particularly those ads which exist "IRL" and can't otherwise be blocked, such as billboards.

Weather permitting too, but yes. Moonlight is quite bright once your eyes have adjusted to it.

Just as some young men ride motorcycles at 200mph or free climb cliffs, others travel around the world to join wars that have nothing to do with their family or community. I would be very cautious about ascribing noble motives to reckless death-seaking behavior like this.

Butlerian Jihad gives me a spark of hope. ;) A global taboo against thinking machines is probably our best bet for freedom.

I distinctly remember trick-or-treating in suburbia with a flashlight. A flashlight at night is not so odd, that's pretty much what they're for.

(And yes, there were sidewalks...)

I take the view of humans being very innovative cockroaches (in the most endearing sense possible) with a strong will to survive. There are surely global catastrophes in store for us in the near future, climate change particularly, but I don't expect these to exterminate humanity or even do enough damage to seriously set back technological development for long. I expect mass migrations and major wars, but humanity has a track record of surviving these sort of things. We'd need something more in the magnitude of a comet strike to really unwind the technological-industrial revolution.

Yes.

I think he does a good job of explaining that technology necessitates the loss of freedom, and that conservative politicans who oppose regulation are taking people for suckers to promote big business. Footnote 13:

> [13] Conservatives’ efforts to decrease the amount of government regulation are of little benefit to the average man. For one thing, only a fraction of the regulations can be eliminated because most regulations are necessary. For another thing, most of the deregulation affects business rather than the average individual, so that its main effect is to take power from the government and give it to private corporations. What this means for the average man is that government interference in his life is replaced by interference from big corporations, which may be permitted, for example, to dump more chemicals that get into his water supply and give him cancer. The conservatives are just taking the average man for a sucker, exploiting his resentment of Big Government to promote the power of Big Business.

> Do people walking on foot carry torches?

At night, if there is insufficient moonlight? Yes of course. Street lights only exist in urban areas, if you're walking anywhere else in the world at night, a flashlight seems like a logical choice.

What a truly unfortunate coincidence.

That really is a perfect analogy.

> a breaking point

Of our sanity maybe, or a breaking point of traditional liberal enlightenment values, but short of a global catastrophe I don't see anything halting the inexorable march of technological development and the social chaos that inevitably causes. Any attempt to stop this through political means would require Pol Pot tactics applied globally; aegrescit medendo.

With LLMs and voice generators particularly, I think the general public has been given access to military-grade information weapons. The chaos this causes will be used to justify crackdowns and regulation on the flow of information, to curb the automation of weaponized misinformation. New technology always spurns new regulations, so new information technology will beget new information regulations. The inexorable march of technology cannot be stopped, and so our freedoms will inevitably be curtailed until there is nothing left.

Or as another man put it:

> 114. As explained in paragraphs 65–67, 70–73, modern man is strapped down by a network of rules and regulations, and his fate depends on the actions of persons remote from him whose decisions he cannot influence. This is not accidental or a result of the arbitrariness of arrogant bureaucrats. It is necessary and inevitable in any technologically advanced society. The system HAS TO regulate human behavior closely in order to function. At work, people have to do what they are told to do, when they are told to do it and in the way they are told to do it, otherwise production would be thrown into chaos. Bureaucracies HAVE TO be run according to rigid rules. To allow any substantial personal discretion to lower-level bureaucrats would disrupt the system and lead to charges of unfairness due to differences in the way individual bureaucrats exercised their discretion. It is true that some restrictions on our freedom could be eliminated. but GENERALLY SPEAKING the regulation of our lives by large organizations is necessary for the functioning of industrial-technological society.

Even if that worked, it would still only get her something like a 6-12 month reprieve. She's been convicted of murder, none of these ploys will get her out of going to prison eventually.

Both these abortion-related takes are incredibly cynical. I know lawyers aren't people but even they might earnestly care about a pregnant woman and her fetus/child...

> I think it's more of a sovereign citizen "hail Mary" type move to get her out of jail.

It would only delay the inevitable by a few months at most, right? Trials regularly get delayed for years anyway, so they may as well delay her sentence for a few months.

That's very unfortunate for the individual victims, but it cannot explain the under-performance of the targeted movies.

Try FDroid instead of Play Store. FDroid has a clean version of 2048. And Shattered Pixel is pretty good too; a well polished touch-based graphical roguelike, free on FDroid without any ads or IAPs.