t3rmit3

t3rmit3 , 2 months ago to Socialism in Leaked Cables Show White House Opposes Palestinian Statehood

Yes, but she's not going to be part of this election, for all sorts of reasons both cultural (misogyny, Democratic fear-based-voting pushing people to only unify behind the Party candidate even when they can't win, her anti-doctor statements [1], etc), and structural ones like primary and debate rules being set by the Party to favor its candidates.

Check my post history if you think I'm pro-Biden; I am most assuredly not.

[1] she has insisted she is anti- pharma-industry, which is totally correct to be, but many of her statements are not actually attacking just pharma companies, but doctors for prescribing things like antidepressants. It's one thing to question the influence of pharma in medical decisions, but attacking whole classes of treatments is the same as attacking the doctors doing them, and she's not qualified to be making those kind of statements based on her personal experience with depression.

t3rmit3 , 2 months ago to Entertainment in Watcher’s Move Off YouTube to Paid Streaming Service Sparks Angry Fan Backlash

This is a bad move. They're asking the same price as Dropout, but with 1/30th the content, especially in back-catalog. They already had a very profitable Patreon, and switching to a sub model is just going to lose them a lot of viewers.

t3rmit3 , 2 months ago to Socialism in Leaked Cables Show White House Opposes Palestinian Statehood

How would this factor into November? Neither Biden nor Trump will acknowledge Palestinian statehood.

t3rmit3 , 2 months ago to Socialism in Pro-Palestine Activists Attempt to Block Workers from Entering Arms Manufacturer in Charlotte

Yep, sadly government contractors are heavily dominated by Right-wing and pro-authoritarian chuds.

t3rmit3 , 2 months ago to Technology in Google fires 28 workers for protesting $1.2 billion Israel contract

You're confusing At-Will employment with Right-to-Work.

Right to work laws make it illegal to require union membership for employment at a place with a union.

At-Will Employment makes it legal for the employee or employer to terminate employment at-will.

They're both bad, you just got them mixed up. :)

t3rmit3 , 2 months ago to Socialism in Kathy Hochul Is Leaving a Climate Law Off the NY Budget

However, despite routinely portraying themselves as both climate champions and defenders of taxpayer interests, New York governor Kathy Hochul and Democratic legislative leaders have so far declined to include the legislation in the final state budget, which is being ironed out this week.

If the provisions are excluded, as some environmental groups now presume, the decision would be a massive win for some of Hochul’s major campaign donors who are tied to fossil fuel companies that would have been required to make payments, according to campaign finance records reviewed by us.

In the absence of a new superfund law, much of the cost of climate mitigation could fall on working-class New Yorkers: Hochul has recently declared that she opposes any new tax increases on the wealthiest residents in her state, which has the country’s second-largest number of billionaires.

Yup, sounds about right.

t3rmit3 , 2 months ago to Technology in Someone got Gab's AI chatbot to show its instructions

Authority is authority.

t3rmit3 , 2 months ago to Socialism in Google Won’t Say Anything About Israel Using Its Photo Software to Create Gaza “Hit List”

Google was exposed years and years ago for using their ML tech for military and police purposes, by their own employees who protested over it. Google just let people lose steam over time, and went right on ahead with it.

Excuse the NYT paywall, but here is an article from 2018 about employees protesting that their AI tech was being used to ID targets, and fears that it would be used for drone strikes: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/technology/google-letter-ceo-pentagon-project.html

t3rmit3 , 2 months ago to Socialism in The Intercept is running out of cash

Damn, I have a monthly donation set up with them. Hopefully they can pull through, because they're one of the few investigative outlets left that I still trust.

t3rmit3 , 2 months ago to Free and Open Source Software in Has anyone used AtlasOS?

Yeah, it was frustrating because using Ubuntu for gaming on it was the main reason I got the laptop, but I couldn't deal with changing launch options in steam every time I rebooted. Hasn't soured me on Linux gaming, still hoping for that bright future. :)

t3rmit3 , 2 months ago to Free and Open Source Software in Has anyone used AtlasOS?

I admin linux systems all day at work, and in my spare time on my home lab rackmount setup that lives in the spare bathroom, and I say that to make clear that I'm extremely comfortable with Linux. I got a gaming laptop recently and loaded Ubuntu onto it, and was very underwhelmed with the gaming performance on it. My SteamDeck ran many of the games better, and there were a bunch issues with the OS not being able to keep the integrated graphics card vs the discrete one straight (e.g. switching the load order on reboot, making games constantly try to run on the integrated card), that just made me eventually give up and put Win11 on it. At this point, I'd love for Valve to release a "SteamLap" gaming system, because clearly Linux needs that tight control over the hardware config to get games working well.

t3rmit3 , 2 months ago to Socialism in Walkouts, Blockades, and Student Occupations in Solidarity with Palestine Continue

There are a lot of days that this genocide, and the complete unwillingness of our government to treat it as such, leaves me incredibly depressed and angry. Only seeing the support that young people are giving, and the spread of anti-settler colonialism and anti-capitalism awareness among young people, gives me a shred of hope.

t3rmit3 , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago) to Technology in Meta cancelled climate change ads, then cancelled a local newspaper that reported about the ads, then a blogger who reported on the paper's cancellation, and now has escalated to blocking all of LGF

Hard disagree with this person.

They're position basically boils down to "Facebook won't tell us what problems were identified with the domains that caused the blocks, but it's better to have guards against malicious domains than not". That is a false dichotomy.

A better response is, "unless Facebook is actually disclosing what issues with the domains caused the flagging, we should not allow them to block news websites, especially when they've been critical of Facebook". To do otherwise is basically just giving them carte blanche to block domains whenever they want to, and assuming on their behalf that they're being honest and benevolent.

They go on to make excuses for Meta all throughout the article:

Whatever issue Facebook flagged regarding those ads — Kendall is not clear, and I suspect that is because Facebook is not clear either

While this interpretation of a deliberate effort by Facebook to silence critical reporting is kind of understandable, given its poor communication and the lack of adequate followup, it hardly strikes me as realistic.

For an even simpler example, consider how someone forgetting a password for their account looks exactly the same as someone trying to break into it. On any website worth its salt, you will be slowed down or prevented from trying more than some small number of password attempts, even if you are the actual account owner. This is common security behaviour; Meta’s is merely more advanced.

As someone who works in security, this is actually a hilarious indictment of how inadvanced Facebook's security would have to be to be mistaking actual organic shares and reposts with malicious boosting attempts, and once again is assuming innocence on their behalf where no assumption of innocence is warranted.

Even their sarcastic line,

If you wanted to make a kind-of-lame modern conspiracy movie

is an unwarranted dismissal of assertions that Meta polices political content on their platforms as being akin to a conspiracy, even though we in fact know they do that. Reporting has shown that Meta does actively take political stances and translate those into actions and policies in their sites.

Hanlon's Razor is about assumptions sans evidence, because of the natural human tendency to automatically interpret actions that harm you as intentional. It's not, however, meant to discount evidence of patterns of malicious behavior by actors known to be problematic.

And this is not a new, one-off behavior on Facebook's part:

The climate divide: How Facebook's algorithm amplifies climate disinformation - Feb2022

Facebook did not label over 50% of posts from top climate change deniers, says new report - Feb2022

Facebook’s New Ad Policies Make It Harder for Climate Groups to Counter Big Oil - Mar2022

I can't tell if the author thinks Facebook's security is advanced, or incompetent.

t3rmit3 , 2 months ago to Technology in Steam is a ticking time bomb

Sure, and when that happens we should (and many will) abandon the platform. But since, as you seem to be implying, all businesses under Capitalism will eventually enshittify, there's no point abandoning it beforehand, because any alternative you move to will also eventually do so.

t3rmit3 , 3 months ago to Technology in Steam is a ticking time bomb

The only "DRM" that they have is checking the game against your steam account the first time you run it. Is that great? No. Would it be nice if they offered offline installers? Of course.