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spamuel

182 karma · joined August 10, 2019

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spamuel··on Kodi 21.0 "Omega"
Kodi evolved from XBMC, which is the OG of this genre.
spamuel··on How The Pentagon learned to use targeted ads to find its targets
"track down and harm"? Just speak without weird political euphemisms please.
spamuel··on Yishan Wong: "Google's Gemini issue is not about woke/DEI"
This seems like a reaching explanation to try to wave away an ideological embarrassment as not being a consequence of the ideology.

"No one could have predicted the outcome of the instruction set we put in - which was followed precisely and in predictable fashion."

spamuel··on Yishan Wong: "Google's Gemini issue is not about woke/DEI"
It was very missable.
spamuel··on Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – early results aren’t encouraging
Minds have been changed on a lot of things that are pretty wild lately, in a short span of time. If this stuff continues, there might be further pretty wild changes of mind.
spamuel··on How Stuff Works replaced writers with GPT-generated content and laid off editors
I remember their podcast back about 15 years ago. It was just two dudes reading wikipedia articles aloud, with commentary.

This isn't an exaggeration.

spamuel··on Reddit Staffers Who Lost Jobs Livid at Being Painted as Low Performers
>But Reddit's messaging has angered some employees who were given high marks in evaluations and then let go.

Yeah, managers often damn with faint praise. If your evaluation is full of soft language about how great you are instead of specific metrics on what you've accomplished, you're not doing well.

A person I worked with was featured in an interview at one point about workplace discrimination. He showed the interviewer one of his old evals intended to evidence his value as an employee. It featured a lot of flowery language like "works well with others" and praising him for being on time.

Meanwhile the dude was a useless narcissist. If you looked closely at the eval sitting on the table in the interview, you could see that the "lacks competence" block was checked. There's no way the interviewer didn't notice it.

spamuel··on Reddit Staffers Who Lost Jobs Livid at Being Painted as Low Performers
Reddit really seems like a dead-man-walking company. There are too many problems with it - socially, organizationally, and culturally. In the company, but especially on the platform.

They're the most rabidly exclusive platform on the internet, and that seems to intensify year over year because the community is locked in a purity spiral of particular ideologies that don't seem to have a limit.

They're also extremely exposed to regulation right now. Moreso than any other platform (including TikTok) you can easily find content on Reddit encouraging children to engage in harmful behaviors and adopt extreme and bizarre ideas. And Reddit communities are more often than not led and controlled by people who are completely unknown, but somehow are able to spend career-level amounts of time maintaining their fiefdoms.

It's not great. Reddit was really good in the late 2000's when it was constrained to young nerds. Now it's something gross and weird.

spamuel··on Florida teachers could face felony for books in classroom not approved by state
Did you Google it yet? This isn't an obscure issue.
spamuel··on Florida teachers could face felony for books in classroom not approved by state
Why is it being placed in elementary schools?
spamuel··on Florida teachers could face felony for books in classroom not approved by state
I've read it.

If it's not for children, why is it in school libraries? The problem is not that it exists. The problem is that it is being put in school libraries. If you read it you will likely see why. It literally has graphical depictions of children engaging in what would be considered hardcore pornography in any other context.

I can self-describe liquor as a "natural sleep aid for young adults", that doesn't change the fact that it is liquor and has no place in a high school vending machine.

spamuel··on Florida teachers could face felony for books in classroom not approved by state
There's a difference between teaching about Jim Crow laws - which we absolutely should - and teaching ideological notions that cast white people as categorical racists and black people as categorical victims. Or teaching that white conquest of the North America is somehow an egregious reflection on white people, while omitting or downplaying Native Americans' tendencies for brutal tribalism amongst themselves. Human history is one of violence and conquest, between individuals, tribes, and nations.

That's the cutting line here - teaching historical narratives is what we should do. Teaching ideological narratives derived from CRT are not appropriate for K-12.

spamuel··on Florida teachers could face felony for books in classroom not approved by state
"This isn't happening."

"It's a good thing it's happening."

spamuel··on Florida teachers could face felony for books in classroom not approved by state
Do I?

I have no idea if criminal tendency is innate. And frankly I think such a discussion has no place in K-12 education, even if it were just a plain fact that black people were somehow inherently predisposed to criminality. They're Americans, they're part of our mix.

But 12 year olds do not have the reasoning capacity to handle that issue. It's not "age-appropriate" for 12 year olds to be introduced to such topics in elementary school. Just like gender theory.

spamuel··on Florida teachers could face felony for books in classroom not approved by state
The vast, vast majority of people agree with this. Academic elites, and the kind of people who can spend vast amounts of time online overrepresenting themselves in discourse, do not.
spamuel··on Florida teachers could face felony for books in classroom not approved by state
You're casting the desire for public schools to not make available a book with illustrations of two children engaged in anal sex with a dildo as "Republicans playing the victim".
spamuel··on Florida teachers could face felony for books in classroom not approved by state
Showing pornography to children? Presumably all states.

Oh, you meant on sexual dimorphism and crime statistics? None. It's not even clear that Florida now criminalizes those discussions. But you would certainly be fired in California if you dared to biologically define human beings, or discuss incarceration rates as a product of criminal tendency.

spamuel··on Florida teachers could face felony for books in classroom not approved by state
The rule says books that are pornographic. This became an issue because teachers began putting books like "Genderqueer" in school libraries and classrooms, featuring explicit illustrations of apparently children engaging in things like fellatio on a dildo, anal sex with a strap-on, etc.

This isn't about Romeo and Juliet. Do you have a better way to describe those kinds of books? Or do you support having "Genderqueer" in elementary school libraries?

spamuel··on Florida teachers could face felony for books in classroom not approved by state
Gonna be a lot of books about sexual dimorphism and crime statistics in there.
spamuel··on Meta Ending Suspension of Trump’s Accounts
What racist statements? Please say "rapists and murderers".

James Comey said a true thing - Hillary Clinton was under investigation for using a personally owned and possessed BES for official state department communications, which she destroyed when the FBI wanted to review its contents because what she was doing was illegal and a huge security problem. She was never charged.

And then the FBI went on to pretend well after they knew otherwise that the Clinton-fabricated Steele dossier might be legitimate.

spamuel··on Meta Ending Suspension of Trump’s Accounts
What happened between 2016 and 2020 in the name of making sure people understood that supporting Trump would not be tolerated truly boggles the mind.

For three years they used the FBI to threaten his family and jail his friends under an investigation into what we now know was a political campaign weapon falsified by the Clinton campaign. And the FBI knew that immediately as well. With Adam Schiff out there every day swearing that behind closed doors with the intelligence community he knew of big things that were going to come to light any day now.

But it worked. The political weapon did exactly what it was supposed to do.

Moreso than the right, it broke the left into the hyper-defensive ideological mess that it is right now. Fully embracing things that were mere crackpot ideas of their most wild-eyed constituents in the Obama years.

spamuel··on Twitter 2.0: Our continued commitment to the public conversation
Other people seeing and understanding what is going on does not require your participation.
spamuel··on Twitter 2.0: Our continued commitment to the public conversation
You need to be more specific - he wasn't banning George Takei or Occupy Democrats. He banned ANTIFA accounts that were being used to plan "direct action", ie: riots. Something that was previously against Twitter's TOS, but it wasn't being enforced specifically against ANTIFA accounts because Twitter employees were sympathetic to the cause.
spamuel··on Twitter 2.0: Our continued commitment to the public conversation
Elon specifically mentioned that his polls were actually a great way to obviate bots, as reflected by the bot activity seen on them. He was going to reinstate the accounts anyway.
spamuel··on Microsoft is turning Windows 11's Start Menu into an ad delivery system
Why not neither? Why not just keep appropriate ideas in appropriate contexts instead of feeling the need to colonize and proselytize, only to be shocked at the backlash?
spamuel··on Microsoft is turning Windows 11's Start Menu into an ad delivery system
Yes you do. It's in the form of "nudges" toward more Apple products - mostly iCloud ecosystem products.
spamuel··on The Babylon Bee's Twitter account is no longer suspended
DARVOism, illustrated.
spamuel··on CIA doctor hit by Havana syndrome
I don't think an individual working for the CIA inherits anything from the CIA training militias in South America any more than I think the guy who refills the coke machine at my job inherits national socialist sympathies.
spamuel··on CIA doctor hit by Havana syndrome
lol, someone gets it.
spamuel··on CIA doctor hit by Havana syndrome
You find it maximally disgusting that someone would acknowledge that there are a lot of people lying about being hurt, so they can steal money. Got it. I acknowledge that you feel this way.
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