Welcome to my take archive! I'm not one to feel the need to have a proper blog, but a more stable place for evergreen fedi takes of mine than pins on a specific account feels just right. These are in no particular order (though they may end up being grouped vaguely by topic at some point if the amount warrants it)
genpol, youth liberation
minors are a vulnerable minority, just like all of us queers, or people of color. we must do what we can protect the youth from being controlled, manipulated, locked up and abused by so-called authority figures.
report and block “mdni” on sight. arbitrary discrimination and isolation protects noone.
protest compulsory schooling. incarceration for the crime of being born is anything but just.
protest anyone who deems it a “right” or anyhow thinks it appropriate to treat minors as property and deny them privacy, autonomy and other basic rights.
protest any tooling designed to enable the aforementioned to control and cripple others’ lives.
you know how it goes: first they come for thise below their arbitrary years-old goalpost, then for the rest of us. accept neither.
the age verification frameworks and laws are being pushed all over have no purpose besides discrimination; the fascists see the youth as a convenient opening to push their control freakish totalitarian notions into the mainstream through. don’t let them. no violation of universal rights becomes acceptable if the victim is young.
please keep talking about this. don’t let the abuses grow unchecked.
elaboration on "tankies are fascists"
tankies are fascists with extra steps
an authoritarian ideology can’t not be fascist, that becomes extra clear if you try to trace the logic: a centralized government’s viewpoints can and will deviate substantially from those of the general public, or specific groups. authoritarianism implies a state is not at all receptive to the people’s needs and wants, and the only option it considers for dealing with any civil unrest is gaslighting and oppression. before long you get sciences dismantled, education further weaponized to play into an overarching machine of censorship and propaganda, borders locked down, violent thugs deployed in the streets to have dissidents rounded up and shoved into concentration camps, and would you look at that, you’ve got fascism that calls itself leftist for PR’s sake. that’s tankies in a nutshell. fascists with like, 1 extra step?
tankies do tend to know they’d readily abuse a position of power to commit atrocities. “put me in charge! i’ll murder those, nuke that, make this and that illegal under death penalty, and everything shall be great again”. dunno about y’all, but this is the kind of take i see some of them voice on occasion. and what’s that if not fascist?
tankies are also silly cuz they’ve made a whole thing of shielding from criticism with stacks of century-old books by marx and his friends. “if you’ve not read this or that book, you can’t be claiming authoritarianism is a bad idea!”
forcefem discourse
the forcefem joke/meme/cult is -phobic towards anyone who’s not transfem so can you like fuck off with it
ffs the way some people get super defensive when called out on perpetuating that harmful trend. all the men and enbies in the audience are super grateful im sure
the overarching ideology of forcefem is that all men and enbies who are perfectly satisfied with who they are are wrong for being themselves and must be fixed somehow. it may not feel like it at a glance but that’s the subtext those “jokes” carry, and it’s a very direct contribution to non-transfems being alienated from trans spaces. it’s basically christofascist transphobia but it’s fine apparently because its transfems doing it
“how about i Force you to be Feminine” thats called conversion therapy you fuck.
on "minors dni"ers
there are only so many blanket mdnier ageists one can encounter before crashing out and starting to report them again
i betcha y’all wouldn’t talk as casually to someone with “trans people dni” in their bio as to someone with “minors dni” despite it being the same damn thing - “oh i don’t like this oppressed minority, and i want it to be their problem”
the closest thing to an excuse those people tend to have is “it’s to protect them” but that’s the very same narrative used by abusive families and wannabe authoritarian politicians and it leads to under-18s being treated as subhuman all the same. this isn’t a valid opinion to have.
school system bad
“education” is mind rape.
it’s a cult of torture by forced purposeless labor, of authoritarian unquestioning obedience, that vies to control and consume every ounce of one’s life. it’s one of if not the largest gaslighting and propaganda operation constructed by the capitalist zeitgeist, tailored to render people numb to institutionalized abuse before they have the means to resist it, excused by an unfulfilled promise of useful knowledge.
alongside all other mechanisms of systematic oppression, i wish schools a very explode
school system bad (continued)
the school system is, quite plainly, a torture cult. its purpose is to normalize institutionalized abuse. its lessons are that you should always place the needs of an oppressive system before your own, that conformity at all costs is the way forward in life, and those who question authority are inferior. those lessons are taught via emotional manipulation and straight up psychological torture, which is framed as normal. it serves to violently beat the fight out of and/or traumatize for life anyone who’s not a model obedient neurotypical.
it is not an overstatement to say compulsory schooling, especially as it stands, is a crime against humanity.
the only reason it’s allowed to exist is the core belief of ageism that anyone below a certain age is a slave, or pet, or object to be freely tossed around and abused, and its “owners” are always right. to hell with that
re: last paragraph: “MDNI”ERS ARE DISGRACEFUL PIECES OF SHIT. if you knowingly exclude people from communities or company based purely on the number of their age, FUCK YOU. you’re why we can’t have nice things. you’re part of why so many people enter adulthood traumatized, this fucked up attitude that anyone below 18 years of age is lesser and thus can’t be allowed to just live. “MDNI”ERS CAN GO FUCK THEMSELVES.
I hereby invite all of you to report “minors dni bc i feel like it” accounts on sight; that’s the right thing to do, and pretty much the least you should do.
making ethical choices matters
as capitalism is plucking itself apart in a fit of increasingly evil insanity and the govts backing it follow, we must hold on to our spines at all costs
ethics have always and will always matter, and your personal choices factor into where society goes next, so let those be good choices or so help me.
let yourself take this away for a start: being on fascist platforms is a fascist thing to do
the platforms and services and software you use are strengthened by your reliance on them. using one is an indirect way of backing whomstsoever runs it. do not back fash
i’ve said this years ago and i’ll say this again, i absolutely find it appropriate to judge people on the internet for their choices of software and the likes, and if you use and talk about using fashware, i’ll judge harshly because it absolutely does reflect poorly on a person to be word-of-mouthing fash and expanding the influence and platform thereof
selling digital data makes no sense
it’s directly against the spirit of free software to paywall any part of your project including the latest binaries
if you’re gonna exclude The Poors from engaging with/using your project i don’t care if it’s technically open-source or not, please fuck off!!
having the means and resources to do capitalism must not be a prerequisite to engaging with infinitely replicable data on a computer (be it software or media) in any way
there’s no scarcity on the internet but manufactured scarcity pushed by overprivileged corpoheads. the reality is, copying comes at no cost; copying cannot be theft.
geniunely if you paywall copying of data what the fuck are you doing
bluesky sucks ass
let me reiterate and be extra dextra clear: ATProto is a half-built sinking ship
bluesky is very rapidly becoming is now a network effect fuelled platform ran by fascists, just like X. there’s very little to nothing to the protocol outside bluesky. when bluesky finally becomes too openly fascist not to defederate, or collapses in on itself, [insert independent infrastructure provider] is going to be left in the dust with literally Zero appeal as compared to any fediverse instance.
we do not need another social web protocol. there’s no reason for ATProto to exist beyond a corpo wanting a gimmick they can use to divide and conquer those working in good faith. no, there’s no cooperation or cross-pollination or however you might want to call it if you can’t settle on one protocol, which should be ActivityPub
AP has a functional truly decentralized network built on it by good entities - right now, not in an imagined future - and any technical disadvantage it may have over AT is temporary, so once again, there’s literally no point in developing for ATProto especially when that’s basically you doing BS’s bidding, helping the authoritarian-supporting nazi-platforming corporation gain more footing
No they are not going to encourage anyone to switch away from their infrastructure, what reason do they have to do so? what could possibly motivate the evil ass shitcorpo to give up its control over its users? what? do you for some reason believe in the “public benefit” nonsense? well don’t. if anything, expect them to start trying to obscure and obstruct the way to move away
bluesky sucks ass (continued)
bluesky is:
- undecentralized, and impossible to decentralize anywhere near as comprehensively as Fedi from what i’ve been hearing
- powered by false advertising of decentralization that’s not there, faking it with no plans of making it
- commited to platforming fascists, the vilest of the bunch in fact as proven by the recent checkmarking of the fucking ICE acct
- equally as commited to deplatforming people who say mean things about fascists, and obeying the whines of authoritarian regimes
- in obvious function, a way of sewing division amongst those interested in decentralized social networking, and scamming those who are none the wiser into amplifying the strength of yet another cartoonishly evil centralized corporate site
- generally not a place to be unless you’re a fashbro
Hopefully this is comprehensive :3
Time to start calling it FashSky and taking note of who gets mad or once again starts shouting “misinformation!!!”
genai has no applications
even sans the enviromental and wide social aspects, LLMs are largely useless. machine learning is useful. LLMs/chatbots in particular are slop generators with no reasonable applications however, they suck the soul out of art and make software developers less productive while eroding real skills and destroying maintainability
there’s no good usecase for slop generators; all “good use cases for AI” are either
1. not good or
2. good but fulfilled much better by dedicated tools or
3. actually applications of machine learning in general
"claude mythos"
adapting my statements from a thread that begun as followers only:
i have much trouble believing the slop machines are getting nearly as good at finding bugs and vulnerabilities in code as the bubble-blowers would like everyone to believe
you’re telling me the same company responsible for that source code everyone and their mom was laughing their asses off at just the other week is now revolutionizing cybersecurity with some exclusive special sauce variety of slop? x doubt to that one
where are those claims of unprescedented amounts of geniune vulnerabilities being found coming from? another llm that’s been told to review the work of the first one and pretty please not hallucinate? the CEO’s mouth? neither is a reputable source im afraid
you have to remember ai bros lie shamelessly and pathologically. you cannot take them at their “trust me bro”
in the specific case of that “claude mythos” thing, “trust me bro” is explicitly the only thing backing it. noone outside of anthropic & friends is allowed to touch it, so there’s no verifying their claims from a sane point of view. thus the most realistic scenario is that if those vulnerabilities are real at all, they’re being found by Actually Indians or the like behind the scenes
we’ll have to wait and see whether the Special Slop makes a broad positive impact on the quality and stability and security of software as it’s used in the wild. not holding my breath for such a miracle; so far only the opposite of that seems to be happening, but who am i to judge, only a mere fool left behind
techno-ageism
even a simple age field in your software serves only to erode privacy and enable fascist discrimination. no, im not overreacting, im reacting to what lies further down this slippery slope. the sensible thing to do is to refuse to start rolling down it.
at systemd and shit me not with “well we have to comply with this new legislation”, you were not being held at gunpoint by those states. it was your choice to comply, noone was forcing you to do so in the moment. obeying so well in advance is worse than complicity, it’s straight up collaboration
enshittification of systemd
for the longest time we as a community have been largely turning a blind eye to the icky bits of systemd; the centralized interdependent kitchen sink design that makes it a convenient yet very hard to drop dependency, the way developers have been telling each other to “just use systemd” instead of establishing implementation-agnostic standards for wanted features, etc
now that theyve come out as fashware, by embracing slop generators and voluntarily laying the groundwork for age verification (while ignoring all objections to it as “spam”, lol) i think it is a good time to stop overlooking those things; in retrospect, its design does feel like an intentionally engineered way for fashbros to have a chokehold on the ecosystem (being a microslop backdoor into it, as someone put it earlier)
there are now all the reasons for “fuck systemd” to be promoted to being the reasonable mainstream position
so by all means boycott slopstemd if youre able to. it is a shitstain on the linux desktop
basically we let systemd become another gatekeeper even though it really had no business being one and look where that gets us
depending on specific implementations of features instead of standards is a grave mistake. you could apply similar critique to stuff like glibc, and notably the linux kernel itself. you have a situation where if one project goes rogue or rots over time everyone is forced to keep going along with it because there are almost no alternatives nor space for alternatives
systemd for one is such a vile violation of the unix philosophy, and the cause of such a massive collective “just use systemd” brainfart, that if you dont want to depend on it yet rely on other software that fell for that brainfart, you have to find several alternatives that not only do their job well but manage to be compatible with the way systemd does things without systemd making it easy for them. and that does sound rather evil on their part if you put it that way, hence, fuck systemd
signal bad
Just to be clear, when a foreign state introduces fascist legislation that makes it illegal for your online service to ethically operate within it, you don’t exit that country (or place geo-restrictions on specific content or features), you ignore their bullshit and keep providing your service as is. Anything else is compliance & complicity.
Signal for one is fully intent on being complicit in the enforcement of the EU’s fascist chat control legislation should it pass.
signal bad (continued)
signal is garbage fight me
how does one stoop so low as to advocate for a lame whatsapp ripoff that’s outwardly hostile to third-party apps and hostile to decentralization AND hostile to anyone with a desire for anonymity AND hostile towards desktop use as The Only Correct Messaging App
https://delta.chat/ all the way, if you need to recommend a whatsapp clone at least bring up one that’s embracing the values of openness and decentralization and people’s agency over their identities and not fighting them
signal bad (further continued)
it [signal] may be secure at the moment but it absolutely is sus and there’s no reason to have any preconceptions that the Signal service is developed and ran in any good faith or will remain that way in the coming months/years
consider:
- it is based in magastan, and relies on magastanian fashcloud providers (which they lie about being impossible to avoid)
- it’s woefully corporate in its presentation
- the explicitly privacy-hostile phone number requirement (which they make up bullshit excuses for)
- the explicitly hostile stance towards decentralization (which, again, they lie a lot to justify)
- dark patterns like the aforementioned
signal carries plenty of red flags, it might as well only be a matter of time before it blows up in its users’ faces
on UBI
UBI would put capitalism on death bed
If we just do away with the silly idea that everyone must have to “earn a living”, and instead establish that being able to live is a person’s unconditional right, the billionaires get the floor yoinked from underneath them
If everyone can live without serving a capitalist, noone will care for jobs that are arbitrarily abusive towards them, with long hours of pointless busywork and/or hostile bosses, and those companies will have to change for the better or die.
all people will be able to dedicate their lives to fulfilling things, and making a positive difference via what they truly enjoy doing
uncompromising UBI+UBS should be the primary goal of workers’ rights movements, as the first and foundational step towards a better world
centrofascists invoking "cultural differences"
People who try to use “culture” or “tradition” as an excuse to do shitty things are morons
“why do we need an orphan crushing machine??? thats so fucked up!!”
“Welll in MY culture crushing orphans is a traditional morning ritual!! you’ve gotta respect my culture!!! how can you be so intolerant of people with different cultural backgrounds!?!!!” and so on
i’ve observed my fair share of such conversations on the internet, and I’d like to bring up that:
- traditions maintained for the sake of tradition are not immune to critique, they can and do cause harm and should NOT be respected without a second thought.
- generally, if any bigoted prejudice is part of your culture that culture can fuck right off. come back with your culture when it doesn’t actively promote harm.
(this very much applies to relgiion too)
neither is the gotcha those people think it is.
I figure at the root of such arguments is that obnoxious “tolerant enlightened centrist” worldview that the fash are valid and worth platforming and protecting just as much as good people, and like, to hell with that.
"creating jobs"
can we as a society stop obsessing over “creating jobs” and start obsessing over creating a surplus of resources and distributing that to the 99% so a job isn’t nessesary to live
think about it. people don’t eat or breathe jobs. irregardless of what the employers may want, people don’t live at jobs. people eat food and live in homes. treating jobs as some sort of resource people inherently require is yet another bizzare dystopian capitalist delusion.
any requirement to have a job to survive is completely manufactured.
resisting irrational self-hate
the #1 rule of leading a happy existence is to never blame oneself for society’s faults
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