If those Internet duds that get mad about black people in video games spent like half that energy being mad about, like, wage theft, we’d be so much better off.

No. Your reading of it is unusual, in most contexts. It almost always means “agreement, and I have nothing of substance to add”.

It can be rude if the thing you’ve said should warrant a substantial response. Like if you wrote “my brother just died in a car wreck”, a thumbs up (or probably any emoji) would be an inappropriate response. Heavier stuff warrants whole words.

But if it’s like “Can you get cat food at the store? The kind we always get” then a thumbs up is an acceptable shorthand for "yes, I understand and commit to this request "

I had a thought earlier in the bathroom about AI. It’s like building a fancy indoor toilet when you don’t have plumbing.

If people’s basic needs were met, housing food health care all that, then it wouldn’t really matter as much if people want to fuck around with AI. People who do things for passion could still do so.

But we live in a capitalist hell, this AI stuff will primarily benefit the ownership class while everyone else suffers.

I don’t need a fancy toilet. I need clean running water.

Is the backend Python and the frontend JavaScript? Because then that would happen and just be normal, because Boolean true is True in python.

I thought mercurial was older than git, but apparently it’s 12 days younger.

moving mouse targets. Like let’s say you have two pinned items on the start menu, Firefox and steam. You click Firefox and it starts to open. You go to click steam, but Firefox finishes opening and the icon gets bigger. Steam’s icon then moves to the right, so you click where it was but instead just hit Firefox again. It’s stupid.

Note how Firefox has solved this with tabs. Open a bunch of browser tabs. Enough so they shrink a little. Then rapidly close some, starting from the left. Notice how they don’t change size until you’re done closing tabs.

Mouse tunnels. Like you click the “File” menu, and then mouse over “New” and a long sub menu opens. Longer than the original File menu. If you mouse directly from the top of File to the bottom of New, your cursor will briefly be outside either menu. This often will cause the entire menu to close. Mouse tunnel. Have to keep the cursor in the tunnel. Annoying.

Had an old job that insisted this was fine and refused to let me or anyone change the interface to fix it (on a website)

Focus stealing. Like you’re typing, and some other application pops up and takes focus. The absolute worst is when it pops up and puts focus on a dialogue box, and you just happened to hit “enter”. Instead of adding a new line to your document, you just accepted something. Awful.

We should get rid of the Republicans. Traitors and fools, all of them.

I find it kind of funny how games are becoming more mainstream, but every once in a while I still meet people that are like “games are a waste of time”. But then again I guess people said that about movies and tv and still do sometimes.

Also I’ve been playing guild wars 2 again. Base game is like 10 years old but it’s still fun

It’s a relevant question to ask if we want to continue with the system of paying for higher education. Which maybe we don’t. You don’t pay for high school.

I get that by calling attention to it, Trump increases the odds of an attack though.

Yeah that’s really the whole of it. They’re not trying to get smart professional people to shoot their enemies. They want to get impulsive people. That person isn’t likely to go look up these things but if they get the idea put in front of them they might act

Maybe, maybe. But the way stochastic terrorism works is you just roll the dice against long odds over and over and eventually someone does what you’re suggesting.

Posting about it on social media seems to be thinly veiled stochastic terrorism

I feel like social media has definitely made things worse. Stupid people can find each other and make each other more stupid. Start whole “flat earth” or “anti-vaxx” groups and conventions. Before social media, you might have a couple idiots in your office or village, but they’d typically be surrounded by more average people who could level them out.

I think the right wing has also been trying to defund education, which isn’t helping. ( For example, https://www.propublica.org/article/idaho-deteriorating-schools-repair-bonds )

There was also a disaster in how reading was taught in the US for the past 20 years, so a lot of kids didn’t really get taught to read well. ( https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/ , if you’re interested )

is the joke there’s no diagram, or did the image just not load for me (firefox browser)

I was going to say the same. But I think there’s a big difference between a band (art) and like the startup tshirts I’ve accumulated as “free swag” over the years (not art).

A band is cool and human expression. Some website that sells ads in emails is capitalist nonsense.

He is such a teenager. It’s embarrassing.

Getting organized is good.

Individuals just yolo shooting Nazis and CEOs is kind of heart warming, but real power I think comes from organizing.

I would be absolutely shocked if we had anything approaching justice for what this administration is doing.

We barely got anything for that whole ass insurrection attempt.

I’ve been told violence isn’t the answer and we shouldn’t just shoot nazis and nazi enablers dead.

The way most people change their mind isn’t based on facts or figures, but emotions. Specifically, in-group belonging. For most people, and this certainly includes me and you some of the time, what our in-group believes is more compelling than an out-groups supposed facts.

They see that guy as someone in their group so they believe him. They see you as a bad outside bad bad bad liar, so nothing you say is likely to get through. (This comic is worth reading on this topic: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe )

If you want to change someone’s mind, they have to see you as in-group. Not necessarily the same group as what you’re arguing with. We all belong to many groups. American, new yorker, white guy, middle aged, yankees fan, etc etc there are many such slices. Like how you can’t get a republican to recycle by appealing to environmental concerns (because environmentalists are out-group, so fuck them), but you might be able to get them to recycle via something like “only american ingenuity can turn trash into bridges and tanks!”

This takes a lot of time and effort, and if you don’t get them to stop hanging out with the other group, you won’t make any lasting changes.

So I think you’d need a multi prong approach:

• Get them off bad media. Facebook, fox news, etc. This is reinforcing their bad beliefs. Because they see this stuff as trustworthy in-group, it goes right into the worldview.
• Get them to stop hanging out with their shitty maga-hat friends. This is the social in-group that’s reinforcing bad beliefs.
• Get them to trust you.
• Gently introduce the idea that maybe the extreme right doesn’t have their interests at heart, etc

All of which takes a lot of time and effort, and your opposite number is basically trying to do the same thing. Except they have fox news, trump, and such in their corner.

And, again, I’m told we definitely shouldn’t just shoot extreme right wingers and other nazi sympathizers dead. Nor should we burn their houses down. If we’re an emergency responder, we definitely shouldn’t let them die while thinking to ourselves “they would let so many die. without a thought, their passing deserves no mourning” or similar.

You should definitely nullify if you’re on a jury and someone allegedly did violence to a shitty ceo or red-hat, though, bu that’s getting off topic.

Most people don’t care about things. This is kind of a recurring problem. Imagine if people just cared a little bit more. All sorts of problems, like littering, would just go away.

But people are lazy and don’t care. They don’t care that their behavior today will be a problem for them tomorrow.

The big sites are where the content is, and that’s what they want. Suffering a little bit of hardship (fewer memes) in order to bolster a stronger future? Ridiculous.