mystraline

How to create an account on #WSocial in 13 easy steps:

1. choose a username

2. choose a password

3. choose your interests

4. download the #WIdentity app to your phone (two options: Apple AppStore or Google Play Store)

5. scan a QR code

6. create a PIN code

optional: enable biometrics; re-enter PIN

7. choose whether you simply want to verify that you're human or if you also want to verify your name

8. choose the verification method (automatic photo review, request a manual review or scan your passport chip)

9. scan your passport's picture page

10. scan your passport's chip

11. take a selfie

12. scan a QR code to link the W Identity to your W Social account

13. enter your PIN code

https://aseachange.com/@elena/statuses/01KVD55YBYVM3B46ACQTE...

Or.... How about not? Seriously, join Mastodon!

> We've all heard people say that local Qwen 27B or 35-A3B is "near-Opus level"

Uh, so, yeah. Im running local Qwen, but Qwen3.5-122B using Krasis https://github.com/brontoguana/krasis

Its by far better than Opus.

In fact with a phone migration, I was using an OLD android 2fa app "andOTP". Backup files it emitted were JSON but not any sort of standard.

I needed the standards version using otpauth:// to upload in my current 2fa. And gave it to my local qwen3.5-122b.

It responded with a scary "you uploaded credentials to a public instance LLM! And, it emitted standards compliant URLs. The new app "Tokn" ingested just fine. When side by side was tested, everything was 100% correct.

I coukd have did it myself, but it was a one-off. And asking local Qwen worked perfectly. Took like 6 minutes. Would have taken me 1h.

I also have at times ordered deliverables on Alibaba (not aliexpress). Being able to send funds in yuan over Ali network solves almost all problems with that.

PIA is my VPN vendor. They and Proton both support port forwarding. Port forwarding is a hard requirement of what I do.

And given Proton CEO's support of the US administration (specifically for Vance), I chose to cancel my subscription of 3 years with them.

Thats rough.

If anything, thats an indication to me to make a HA setup so you can power down 1 member.

Im not going to watch a video, honestly, but HA with a front-facing Zookeeper and sharded Postgres isnt super hard. Can be if you didnt initially plan for it.

Ideally, you need an odd amount of quorum machines to properly handle split brain decisions... But if its a money issue, you can technically get by with just 2, and accepting a possibility of split brain.

I can load US dollars I hand over to the CVS attendant and load it on my AliPay (Alibaba account).

I can then pay my Alibaba server bills with Alipay.

This person is correct.

I pay for 2 servers running in Asia under Alibaba, using my local CVS drugstore. Im in the Midwest USA. Not a single problem at all.

Hmm, my VPN provider explicitly has Chinese exit points. And whats funny is I can load AliPay from any CVS. (Like, seriously)

You can try to pry Qwen and Deepseek from my Graphene/Linux hands.

The app-devs were salivating on striking it rich on a garbage app.

The rest of us groan when we hear "DOWNLOAD OUR APP" or grocery stores that want you to install their spyware coupon app.

These days, nost apps are just data exflitrators, spyware portals, and surveillance pricing initiatives, wrapped up with a "FREE THINGY" wrapping.

> No teen is reading this far in and frankly probably wouldn't even pick up a MEMOIR called GENDER QUEER unless the story resonates with them already.

Exactly this. I remember how much hatred and strive was back in my high school days, with "fa@@ot" tossed around with anything not masculine. As a clarinet player, I got that a LOT. (Evidently the F word auto-kills a post. Hello, context matters.)

If a middle or high schooler is even so much as picking this book up, means theyre trying to cope with their own sexuality, that folks like NoMoreNicksLeft tremendously shames and demeans.

> This is besides the point, but did you read the surrounding pages?

We both know that answer. Of course they didnt. They gravitated to the single shocker image, and even ignored the shocker image of asexual feelings and how they're OK.

Ive been fighting against these types of christian nationalists for decades. I remember when Reagan called HIV a gay disease, cut funding, and said 'God would solve it'.

Killing us doesnt work, cause straights end up having children who are LGBTQ. And no amount of conversion therapy (sexual assault, seriously) or abstinence, or active denial of library materials will ever get rid of LGBTQ.

Hell, even Muslim nationalist nations can execute gay people, and there will still be gay people.

But this is the fight and the hatred we deal with on a weekly, and sometimes daily routine.

Title: Ad company makes a browser update to disable ad blocking

News at 11.

If you shave a yak, you get yak hair. And this material is like $35 a skein!

https://www.ulaandlia.com/collections/mongolian-baby-yak-woo...

Oh wait, you meant figuratively!

Your one page shocker doesnt address anything I said. It just shows how sexually backwards you want older children and young adults to be.

From Wikipedia the book is intended for 12-18, or a better description, someone who is going through or has gone through puberty. This is the same age where children start to learn themselves and others as a sexual beings we are. And in Judaism, a 12 year old IS an adult, religiously speaking. Bar|Bat mitzvah.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_Queer:_A_Memoir

And even in the US across most (all?) states, a 16 year old can legally have sex. Pictures however are "child porn" or csam, for fuck-if-i-know reason. But sex? 100% legal.

And again, *pretending* this doesnt exist, or hiding or destroying this knowledge is NEVER a good solution. Adolescents are going to get knowledge. Id rather them get the correct knowledge, rather than slop, misinformation, or worse. And its even harder for LGBTQ folks. So much hate (by people like you) have been aimed at us. We've got a tough path. We would rather accurate descriptions be shown, rather than shit like Chick Tracts.

But ive dealt with people like yourself who use shame and disgust when talking about sex. Ive also seen where that leads, and how utterly backwards and ignorant those adult children are. And that ignorance of sex is actually more dangerous than 'harming' their sensibilities.

Thats how you get rape and sexual assault, by not talking of consent. Thats how you get pregnancy, by not talking how sperm and eggs work. Thats how you get STDs, by not discussing sexual diseases and how to protect yourself from them.

At one job I worked at (food service), had a 19 year old woman think if she had sex standing up, the semen would run out of her vagina and she wouldnt get pregnant. 2 months later, she was pregnant.

Another job in food service I worked at hired a 18 year old lady who was heavily indoctrinated by extremist christian home schooling. She didnt even know the definition or how sex worked. Her parents kept it from her. She ended up asking her coworkers on breaks what it was about. We all recognized the severe harm done to her, and tried to help where we could. Questions she asked that we couldnt answer, we directed her to the public library. (These days, the cristian nationalist trash types dont even want that to be an avenue.)

The underlying theme with your comments and invoking shame points that you support the utterly failed approach of abstinence only education. Everywhere its tried is an abject failure. https://www.publichealth.columbia.edu/news/abstinence-only-e...

And Id say that you are harming your children more by arbitrary abstinence, than by actual education. Shocker image or no.

NoMoreNicksLeft conveniently left out the (singular!) banned book they were referring to. I believe that was by intent, to make the strawman unassailable.

And its easy to attack books in k-12 school libraries. The hard conservative christians attack DEI, sexuality, suicide, witchcraft, and other things regularly.

However, we are also seeing direct attacks on funding with public libraries.

https://michiganadvance.com/2025/06/23/local-michigan-librar...

They almost had their funding yanked to keep librarians from putting LGBTQ books on the shelves. These christian nationalists would rather destroy public libraries than allow (gasp!) books on subjects they dont like.

And as far as I can tell, the solution as of May 21 2026, was that the 4 republicans on the board voted to segregate all the aforementioned topics to the adult section. They also voted to remove the ALA's Library Bill of Rights. And who is this "They" who rewote it? "Alliance Defending Freedom", a christian nationalist group known for LGBTQ hatred.

https://thelivingstonpost.com/guest-column-cromaines-mass-re...

And all of this shit is in the name of children and "harmful to minors". (Geeee, where have we seen this using children for terrible shit before? Perhaps age verification?)

Im not always for democrats, as many of them are statist stooges as well. But book banning and threatening to shut down libraries is well within fascist and nazi regimes.

Nice strawman you constructed. However, it was burning the moment you put it together.

Its easy to say that pornography and smut are the only things banned in school and public libraries, as your claim. But thats easily demonstrably false.

One only need to look at the American Library Association's banned list

https://www.ala.org/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/top10

What do we see? Descriptions of sexual acts? Well, some. But we also see horrific accounts of sexual slavery, high schooler life troubles including suicide, a comic called 'Gender Queer', depictions of magic (read: non-abrahamic occult practices).

In general, anything that doesnt fit the puritanical hard right wing christian gets threatened with bans, with great scruitiny on LGBTQ, sexuality, mysticism, suicide, and real troubles of young adults in high school.

But its completely disingenuous to says 'oh its just smut'. No. Its censorship for people who cant vote, and have no power. And the censorship is done by adults who want to pretend that not having a LGBTQ book will make young adults 'not gay' or some bullshit.

> What I've come to realize as I've gotten older, is that some people think they have a right to show smut to my young children behind my back and want to call me a Nazi if I object.

'Young children' are like 5 or 6. And no, its not a "right to show smut". Its having these books on the shelf in a age-appropriate way. These christian nationalist types are targeting anything related to anti-christian sentiments, DEI, LGBTQ themes of any sort, and whatever else falls in the sights of these worse-than-nazi folks.

Even a picture book that says a friend has 2 dads (and elementary way to relate) is banned. And those are real situations children will deal with, book or no. Im not saying to an 8 year old to read "The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty", either. But if they look up basic LGBTQ books cause they feel different, yeah, they should be able to.

Also, I think it would behoove you to learn your history, especially with the original nazies. One of the first libraries they dismantled and burnt was the https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institut_f%C3%BCr_Sexualwissen... or a university for sex medical studies. Some of the first trans research was done there. And anyone who wants to destroy knowledge is an enemy of me.

In the USA, the books that are banned are for public schools. They talk about topics like (gasp) LGBTQ and sex things!

Now where the USA censors routinely is financial censorship. If you can afford the thing thats fincially banned, the sure, its not banned. But if you cant afford it, youre screwed.

And, if you work for a company, they can fire you for any/no reason, INCLUDING your speech off work.

In the USA, its "freedom of speech" if youre independently wealthy. If not, hope you dont offend power.

You didnt write it. You slop machined it.

I quit after this: "I asked ChatGPT this:"

Even I had enough respect to respond with my words and my intellect. Even if my thoughts are in possible error. You didnt have enough respect for even that.

I know youre trying be inflammatory, but also accurate.

US culture has always had an out-group that could be sacrificed to the capitalist machine. And even Northern rhetoric woukd have people believe that slavery didnt exist there. Ive been in Boston at the slave docks. Banned in 1830's btw there. And slavery also benefitted the North even if banned.

And after the Civil war, black folks were still 3rd class. Took another 100 years to get the same legal rights. And even now, blacks are underpaid compared to the same jobs by whites.

Most of wealth extraction to black communities is mostly complete. Musk runs datacenters using methane generators in black communities, horrifically polluting them. And the republicans who run the cities/states dont care.

But the USA has effectively run out of people to sacrifice. Now, theyre coming for the middle-income whites. Thats the squeeze we're seeing. And thats not going to end well. Likely will be horrifically violent.

> Finance, Law, VC guys were good too in the beginning but when the value/status change happens it attracts certain kind of guys who are average in talent but excel in demonstrating value and social management of the value/status.

Those career paths were always crooked. We see that going back to my great grandparents time with Black friday of 1929. They fucked around with unrestricted capitalism, and found out. Quite a few killed themselves by throwing themselves off of buildings.

It was only when FDR took office and worked with Congress to make tons of rules keeping the money hoarders from destroying the economy yet again. And it bloody worked. For those of you who say FDR was a communist, absolutely not. He was fighting against a large contingent of the population who were socialists and communists. He did appease some of their demands, bit not many.

FDR led us into our most glorious 20 years, the 1950's to 1960's. Cheap education, cheap homes, plentiful well paying jobs, only needed 1 worker per house. Thats what the boomers remember and want.

And it was systematically dismantled piece by piece.

'VC guys were good too'?!?! I take it you do t remember the 1980's Mergers and Acquisitions crisis? Thats when enough data was available for a company, that mergers, acquisitions, and liquidations coukd make a handful of people scads of money, and destroy the economy to boot.

And i also scarce remember a time when 'Finance' was good. Their slur was beancounters. Something costs $20 but saves $1000? Nope, its -20$. The loss is never analyzed. Every job Ive woeked in has had this perverse logic.

And especially with money, Goodharts Law comes to mind. "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".

"Men living in democratic ages have many passions but most of their passions either end in the love of riches or proceed from it." Alexis de Toqueville

Well, for starters, Elon Musk actively adheres to the Labor Theory of Value. He named it differently, with the "Idiot Index". Except, its an inverse LTV.

Both theories use the SAME formula.

Final Price = Raw Materials + Labor + Overhead + Profit

The difference is that Marx pushed that labor is what makes a thing have value. Wheres Musk pushes that humans have 0 value, and should be removed whereever possible.

Same thing, different conclusion.

And know what happens when we get "perfect idiot index" of 1.0? There are no workers, no money, and wealth is accmulated purely in the hands of the elite. Hell, even Ford saw this in tge early 1900's - who'd buy cars if nobody can afford them?

Wait a sec.

You want me to *trust* the output of a hypercapitalistic slop machine whose owner bulk pirated most of the western knowlege for money. And he wants to scan the eyeballs of everyone for his shitcoin (and kicked out of multiple countries for abuses).

And, you expect me to read that slop drivel? Fuck, no.

I had the decency to use my own words. You can too. And, "Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans." I do not care about your propaganda clanker.

Why is it a "dumb zone"?

What in the models causes this 'dumbing down'?

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it"

- Upton Sinclair

And, well, you are right that there are 'debunkments' of Labor Theory of Value. Of course, they are put out by hard right-wing laissez faire capitalist enclaves, like Mises. I would never expect them to take a dispassionate view of capitalism, given their extremist position.

https://mises.org/mises-wire/three-arguments-debunking-marxs...

You do not EARN 1B$.

You mass exploit labor at scale to exfiltrate 1B$.

You commit wage theft to obtain 1B$ (the largest theft category).

You union bust and fire workers who try to fight for better working conditions and wages.

You engage in monopoly practices to obtain 1B$.

You engage in corruption via 'campaign donations' to lay down laws that benefit you and harm others.

Doctors earn. Engineers earn. Scientists earn. LABOR EARNS.

But billionaires never *earn* 1B$. They exfiltrate, steal, and corrupt.

Soooo, you paid $2300 for 80 slop game-lets?

You know I can download the following

All NES games: https://archive.org/details/NESMegaPack201808

All SNES games: https://archive.org/details/snes-usa-romset-complete-collect...

All Genesis games: https://archive.org/download/sega-genesis-romset-ultra-usa

All Playstation games: https://archive.org/download/psx-roms-archive

All Gameboy Advance Games: https://archive.org/download/GameboyAdvanceRomCollectionByGh...

And those cost..... 0 tokens.

Add this to a mSD card and a Mayoo Mini+, and you have games for years. Years.

I look at at reverse centaurs as a spectrum of autonomy at work.

We can now observe a complete reverse centaur. But those of us who go ticket after ticket, metrics of tickets, response times, and all of those management metrics also go directly to reverse centaurs as well.

Now, its not Marshall Brain's "Story of Manna" level each listed action at a time... But it was definitely getting to that point.

Call centers were already absolutely at that point, with completely scripted communications, that that attendant could not deviate from or be fired.

> Presumably at the other end of the ticketing system is other people.

Sometimes. As a systems engineer, tickets can also be generated by other systems as an "immune response" to detected but unfixable errors.

As a systems engineer, ive been a reverse centaur more often than not.

I have a Jira queue. It drives what work I do. I may have some leeway in how I do the work, and what tickets I pull, but Im absolutely at the behest of the ticketing behemoth.

Tickets have been my life since I started helpdesk. And future roles will also be ticketed. And they almost all are customer-facing or system-breakage (which impacts lots of customers).

Im not sure what IT roles im capable of doing wouldnt have tickets. So, yeah. Reverse centaur.. But not an AI driven reverse centaur, yet.

"Email us" versus a public Ask HN does not exude confidence in stopping a HN-backed scammer.

Thankfully, theres enough sites and accounts that scrape HN, that all new posts are immediately posted via @hackersnews@mastodon.cesium.pw

So damage control (ala deletion/hiding) can be found.

Now, YC should consider cleaning their ranks from companies that use their name for legitimacy in running scam operations.

"Yet you participate in society. Curious!

I am very intelligent! "

https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

Ive directly complained against the latte liberals screaming DEI.

Ive had them demand my pronouns. I really dont care, but saying that is absolutely not acceptable. Ill use your pronouns. I really do not care.

Ive been in meetings with 'land acknowledgements' with whatever former indians/native americans who were there. Its not like we're giving them the land back.

DEI and what it turned into was a big for-public-show that you knew the buzzwords and the antiwords. And if you didnt, or woukdnt play along, theyd ruin you.

The current MAGA MAHA meritocracy crap is also just the opposite, but the same games as DEI folks. They have their buzzwords and antiwords. Although, theyre a whole lot stupider and easier to manipulate and deal with.