Dessalines shouldn’t have stopped at Port Au Prince.

Bienvenidos!

We’re getting rid of the block feature.

To implement a rigorously enforced “disengage” policy, right?

To implement a “disengage” policy, right?

Flowers be like

Yes. This is how it works pretty much everywhere. Remote bans are essentially blocks which apply for all users on the instance. Only the home instance can completely disable an account.

A big fat bumblebee smothered in pollen landed on me today.

yes

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How’s your country doing today?

I fucking love when people who showed up a month ago say shit like “this is the Fediverse working as intended.”

This is dope as hell

A classic.

The Russian Federation, you don’t gotta hand it to them. But liquidating tens of thousands of conscripts in order to preserve the Ukranian state as currently constituted, while the state cracks down on Communists and Anarchists, dismantles unions, bans opposition media and political parties, and operates under martial law is nothing worth defending either. The people would genuinely be better off if the Ukrainian state conceded. If negotiations were carried through to completion over a year ago. Great power conflicts between rival capitalist nations are not an effective site of struggle for proletarian revolution, no matter how you slice them. It would be ideal if people stopped getting killed.

The status quo is gone. Changed irrevocably. The outset of the kinetic war, and the resulting economic war have imposed permanent changes in global geopolitics and the economic system. We are left only with the potential outcomes. The NATO victory, where the global imperial hegemon succeeds in making one of its key adversaries geopolitically irrelevant, or the NATO failure, where a different reactionary capitalist state prevails, but the concentration of power in the imperial core wanes. Ukraine is left a smoldering crater littered with landmines and unexploded ordinance which will take generations to recover - regardless of the outcome.

It is a truly fucked up situation, but the vast majority of the English-speaking Internet seems to be inundated with pro-Ukranian war propaganda, and at the very least we have been skeptical of the viability of this war effort from the outset. In a lot of places, simply commenting on the apparent state of affairs has been branded as defeatism and propaganda. I think in general, we aren’t excited about the prospect of the Russian Federation, as currently constituted, becoming more powerful - but embracing the United States and its allies to see it punished is not a viable path either.

None.

X-Plane comes close to FlightGear. It has far-superior visuals. fully functional glass cockpits like the Garmin G1000, and simulated ATC, but the vast array of community-made planes available in FlightGear still kinda seals it for me, despite the jank.

FreeCAD has its pain points. Software like Creo Parametric is much more robust in a lot of ways, but I literally cannot run it on Linux (no mouse-wheel zoom in WINE, slide show in QEMU). Fundamentally, they are similar enough, and my work primarily takes place on a component level so I can live without the streamlined assembly workflow. Also, FreeCAD doesn’t cost >$2000, and can still do FEM analysis and computational fluid dynamics. Maybe I could find a crack for SolidWorks and try that out, but it takes a long ass time to learn a CAD system proficiently.

Everyone who learned on Photoshop says the GIMP interface is weird, but I learned on GIMP and can say the same for Photoshop.

Games are the only exception, but games aren’t fungible. Minecraft is not a substitute for Dwarf Fortress. CS:GO is not a substitute for Unreal Tournament.

Shitposting is an anagram for “top insights.”

With this move, Putin has declared war on the gamers. He is finished.

I have had no luck.

If you want to take the issue of social media manipulation seriously, you need to take a moment to consider who is best positioned and best motivated to carry out these operations. The vast majority of the English-speaking social media platforms are headquartered in Silicon Valley, domiciled in the US. This includes TikTok. Despite all the hippie California Ideology bullshit, the Valley has been closely linked with the Pentagon since its inception (See Palo Alto by Malcom Harris, or Surveillance Valley by Yasha Levine as two examples of this history.) Today, these giant tech firms still live off the teat of military contracts. From Microsoft to Google to Amazon.

The social media platforms enjoy a regime of immense power and nil regulations. There are a lot of ways the state could cause these companies pain if it were interested, from rescinding contracts to imposing regulation, to engaging in some bona fide anti-trust litigation, but this doesn’t happen because they have an understanding. These companies collaborate with the state in surveillance, they install figures like Jessica Ashooh at Reddit - straight out of the Atlantic Council - to run moderation policy. They facilitate counterinsurgency by sweeping up disclosures like the Blue Leaks and shutting down dissident communities in the midst of large scale civil unrest. They flood these platforms with war propaganda when it is convenient, lay the seeds of doubt whenever US interests are challenged abroad. They allow floods of fake users to post positively about US-aligned coups like the one in Bolivia, or the SOSCuba nonsense. We literally have military formations who’s sole task is to manipulate opinion on social media.

These are the people manipulating public opinion on social media. They are the ones holding the keys to the platforms. The ones who DECIDE what the algorithm is going to show you day after day after day. The ones who let shitholes like r/The_Donald to run roughshod for years, then ban communities like r/ChapoTrapHouse in the middle of the biggest domestic protest movement in US history. The ones who remove moderators from places like r/PresidentialRaceMemes and replace them with ideologues from r/Neoliberal to ensure the website closes ranks against the most underwhelming candidate and political vision conceivable for the moment.

Seriously consider the power held by the people operating these platforms. What they believe. What their material interests are. Who they network with. Who they do business with. What constraints exist to severely punish them if they undermine the interests of state. Consider that, and balance that against the overblown panic about foreign influence bots. Which one do you think has a bigger impact?

States are massive, chaotic social systems. I’m not going to say that foreign influence ops don’t occur, because within each state there are competing factions with different interests. But consider China is much more concerned with domestic conditions within their country than they are about what a bunch of Redditors, who they have blocked, think about them anyway. Consider the same about Russia. Consider the disparity in power these countries have to manipulate infrastructure owned and operated in the United States compared to the people who actually own it, and the state agencies which have the jurisdiction to destroy these firms if they step out of line.