Wasn’t “woke” originally a good term until right wing screechers took it over at an insult? They do that a lot, every time some positive phrase or idea starts to gain traction. Seems intentional.

Oh. Makes sense. To be honest, I really didn’t care enough to bother checking their profile or any other comments. Just saw the response today and wanted to try and offer some sort of olive branch or something. idk

So, let me unpack what happened, from my point of view. I’m not complaining or anything, just pointing out how it seemed from my end.

I made a comment that I personally didn’t like the show because of how many times people around kept saying I was like the main character.

You replied directly to me implying that nerds should like the show because it normalizes dating them. (Which I agree is a good thing.)

I replied to say that doesn’t apply to me, and I’m not sure why it was relevant to my comment.

Finally, you left a comment to call me names.

Do you see how that entire interaction makes no sense from my side of things? I said that I didn’t like a show, and you inserted yourself into the conversation to complain that hot women should want to date me because of the show. Then, when I said that had nothing to do with what I was saying, you insulted me.

So, like, why?

…I don’t want to date women, so I know know how that’s relevant.

“It’s so funny! Sheldon reminds me of you!”

Yeah, never watched it, but heard this enough to hate the show with a passion.

Sitcom of chimps in the big city running a shady laundromat.

For those who don’t know, In the US, the two political parties basically switched sides at one point. I only skimmed, but here’s an article about it:

https://www.livescience.com/34241-democratic-republican-parties-switch-platforms.html

But I’d rather look at what modern people are doing and saying, than muse about what older generations would have wanted or done.

Huh. I hadn’t thought about that. That’s not a bad point either.

Why would Reddit ban it? It’s an easy way for them to collect users’ IP addresses for their corporate overlords.

¯\_ (ツ)_/¯

I haven’t used “lol” in a long time, but started to do this earlier today and had to stop myself.

I feel seen.

I haven’t bought a printer in years, but had to service a crappy one for work. I’m very interested in this ink bottle refill type of printer. That honestly sounds perfect. Didn’t know it was a thing. Thank you.

I’m sorry, I was going to reply, but my printer had a forced update and then detected an unauthorized cyan cartridge from a third party, shut down, and called the police to arrest me for violating HP’s terms of servitude, er “service”.

Problem is that one day, it will. I’m old enough to be able to see the difference in how much freedom has been lost online.

It’s not impossible. North Korea exists. There’s nothing stopping the rest of the world from adopting the same authoritarian regulations and technology bans.

That’s why people need to be involved in their governments; elections, local regulations, and what have you. It’s easy to complain that things aren’t perfect, or that you don’t like any of the options; but being part of the process, long term, is the only real way to fix that. The more people that give up and say they don’t care, the faster corruption infects everything and ruins what good is there. And trying to be clever and say that “one side is just as bad as the other” is not only a selfish lie people tell themselves to feel better about not doing anything, but it actively helps the authoritarians claim power.

The only thing that staves off corruption and authoritarianism is when the people being governed get involved and stay vigilant. Even small things like school board elections matter down the road.

You want to have a free internet? Then vote in school board elections. Seriously.

It already is. For example, it’s basically impossible to run your own email server these days, because most big email providers just block residential IPs to reduce spam.

Lots of ISPs block or heavily filter things like torrents.

Your ISP might decide you having a personal server at home is against their terms and force you to make a business account. They don’t want people uploading, only downloading.

Some countries are trying to weaken or ban encryption across the board.

And this is only slightly related, but things like websites that let you watch movies or shows are dying. They either all share the same server for video, or they just copy the files from each other. If you find one and watch a video with a little glitch, you’re likely to find that same glitch in all the other websites too. Think things like TV logos, audio suddenly changing language for a few seconds, scan lines on old VHS or TV recordings, etc… There used to be a lot, but now all the small players are being sued or shut down, and only the largest ones are still alive. The noose is tightening.

Don’t forget Nintendo.

Step 1 - Push people to piracy.

Step 2 - Complain to lawmakers about rampant piracy.

Step 3 - Get governments to outlaw and shut down piracy sources, compatible technologies, and generally force more authoritarian standards and laws.

Step 4 - P2P starts to die. Piracy starts to condense around large hubs.

Step 5 - Make money suing the only large hubs of piracy that still exist, and shut them down.

Step 6 - Profit from lack of competition and ability to force DRM into everything.

“The viewers are mad because of something you did or said, so we’re cancelling your show on our network.”

vs

“Hey everyone on this forum, let’s all dox this person and send anonymous hate mail to their actual home.”

I wonder if newer AI models are going to have to learn what “AI Generated” is supposed to look like, and how ironic it would be it they had to output worse quality in order for people to accept it was AI generated. Maybe “Gen[1/2/3/4]_AI” would be better, like how we have console generations and stuff.

…squeeze your meat?

I guess that does make me happy.