Yeah bo

I know my share of history
How hard it is to be free
From wearing masks that turn to skin
Hiding what you could have been

Man… it’s so weird.

They want to have Friday beers in the office. They want to go to the game together. They want to organize little events after work that I’m semi-obligated to go to. I went to one, reluctantly, and one of the executives more or less made it clear to me that he had been against hiring me in the first place (for understandable reasons).

No I don’t like you people, you’re pod people, why the fuck do you do this with your lives

Edit: It wasn’t just me, either. They all would get excited for sandwiches from this one place, and I went with them one time and they all clearly thought it was a treat, and the sandwich was foul. Just a big stinky wad of toppings and condiments. I never went again, and every so often with some fanfare they would go there again. I literally don’t know what’s wrong with them.

Next you’ll be telling this mod isn’t actually an unhinged alcoholic foot fetishist loser or whatever else they accused her of…

(I feel like asking for ideological consistency of the trolls is asking way too much, they’re just not operating on that level even)

Yeah. It doesn’t come across as malicious to me FWIW. I feel like people are just tribal, and there’s this incredibly strong impulse to stand up for “your tribe” be it the anarchists, or the trans people, or whatever, whenever you perceive that they’re being attacked or mistreated. Maybe that’s it, maybe it’s just that it’s such a minor issue that the admins don’t feel like getting involved, who knows.

I feel like just like separation of church and state, there should be separation of instance and tribal grouping. Like no making an instance that’s only for anarchists, only for the Marxists, officially anti-AI or pro-AI, or what have you. It seems like in practice it has been a tailor-made formula for producing drama with other instances. In general you notice the regional instances, they don’t have stuff like this come up, it’s just “hey we’re the Canadian people come join us.”

*Sweet Home

It’s incredibly easy to do, too. All you have to do is cast across the length and breadth of every single thing any particular leftist person has ever done, pick the one that can be interpreted the worst, and spin it up into the entirety of their being.

Putin killed a million Russian soldiers and God knows how many Ukrainians, bombed a bunch of cities on purpose, and all the rest of it? Well… it’s complicated. Let’s make sure we look at the whole picture. Here, I’ve got a pamphlet.

AOC voted against one doomed amendment from Marjorie Taylor Greene which was (to all appearances) actually accidentally a good idea because it was defunding Israel, and then had a pretty unconvincing explanation as to why? Literal genocider. Fuck her forever, she’s the enemy now and nothing else matters.

I looked it up, and the recommended cable size for carrying that voltage and amperage is practically the size of the adapter part lol

Yeah. It is hard to tell the difference between people just being dysfunctional in a way that will cause pointless strife because they are dysfunctional, and people being dysfunctional in a way that will cause pointless strife because they are planning out how to cause pointless strife. I do agree with you that my guess is that at least some of it is that second thing.

It’s sort of mind-boggling to me that no one involved in this “in authority” on the dbzer0 side seems responsive to the idea that this is a bad idea, will make their instance look bad, and also won’t do anything to solve the harassment of the mod (will in fact make it worse).

But whatever ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯

I sort of suspect that they’re lying. I feel like that cable would just melt if you put 12V/125A through it.

Yes. The top rated comment is one of them, as is MigratingApe as I mentioned.

My ISP got all excited about the WWW and was incessantly emailing us encouraging this pretty arcane process that you would have to do in order to get Winsock on your computer and install Mosaic and all. When I looked into what it actually was, I was just confused and put off by it. I have usenet and ftp. What the fuck are you trying to sell me on? Fonts and graphics? On the internet? This looks stupid, I don’t want it.

I eventually had a job where there was a computer in my office that could do WWW. Literally all I can remember about it was the Rome lab snowball cam where you could look at a real-time image of their office and try to hit people with solid white circles (“snowballs”) that would get dynamically added to the image. I still was not impressed. In hindsight, I think I was onto something.

This was exactly what I watched that educated me about it, it is fascinating. The whole documentary is a masterclass in telling the story by just laying out what happened, not really editorializing but just letting the bad guys hang themselves by explaining their take on it and then juxtaposed against some other events and information.

I wrote up a whole little historical essay about how in Woodstock '99, when some assholes decided to run a music festival that was an exploitative cash-grab that ultimately was sloppily put together, disappointing, and endangered the safety of the participants, all the kids recognized what the game was, and tore the venue apart with their bare hands and burned it all to the ground. They threw batteries at the MTV "VJ"s, they smashed up the cash machines and vendor tents and took back their money, and then they lit a match.

So yeah it was a different time. Right around that time was the end of the vigor generation and their replacement by the tech job generation (which then birthed the Doordasher no health insurance generation because they weren’t vigorous or well-organized enough to fight back real effectively.)

It’s a little bit of a nitpick, but “Mozilla” didn’t exactly rise from the ashes of Netscape. They tried to open source Netscape, but among other issues the code was horrible, and when they started discussing getting serious about open sourcing it, someone had some kind of bright idea of making this all-encompassing UI framework based on XML, and piping every app through this horrible omni-UI layer because it was going to be the future, with a perfect utopian web browser called Mozilla as the central crown in the kingdom’s highest tower, and it was always a janky and glacially slow pile of ass that, year after year, continued just barely working but not really. Linux users of the day generally had some experiences with it and then switched to one of the even-less-complete options available like Galeon or Konqueror, which brought their own maturity issues to the table, but at least they weren’t Mozilla.

Eventually, after investing years of effort and millions of dollars into this pile, the Mozilla foundation eventually decided with great fanfare to invent the idea of just making a web browser. They called it Phoenix Firebird Firefox (Iceweasel), and it used normal UI technologies and came alongside some other separated normal-UI apps like Thunderbird. And if you ask them about Mozilla itself, they react like Germans when you ask them where their granddad was during the war years.

When did MigratingApe do any anti-AI trolling?

I have no idea, nor do I care to investigate how a mod handles things on a small community.

I feel like this isn’t the post / the community for you then. In my opinion it is relevant whether or not someone who’s being banned actually objectively did anything, and I feel like I’m not alone in that. But if you are convinced that it’s totally irrelevant (and at the same time that what some other people did is super relevant), then I feel like we can agree to disagree on it and conclude our conversation at this point.

comes across as dismissing the idea that they exist

If anyone is getting that impression, then hopefully me and others talking extensively about them and their real existence, in the post text and in the comments, will dissuade them from it.

The mod in question studiously avoided getting involved in the thread where people who hadn’t done anything were complaining about their bans, but then did decide to jump into one of the threads where one of the trolls who was giving cartoonishly horrible abuse to them was complaining about their ban.

If you do get a response from the mod, let me know, I’m definitely curious about what they have to say about.

Just saw your edit. When did MigratingApe do any anti-AI trolling? The whole point here is that random people are getting caught up in this who are objectively not doing anything remotely related to anti-AI trolling, hence the quotes.

A couple of people who were banned asked about that, and there wasn’t really an answer. IDK if this post is the right place for it, it sort of seems like it’s walking up to that line of breaking the community rules by being the drama instead of posting about the drama, but yes it seems like a reasonable question to ask to me.

Oh. IDK why I didn’t see that coming.

Anyway, the post before it was deleted was more or less a carbon copy of this post, except that it was made by one of the trolls, who actually do deserve to be banned. And so, all of lemmy.world took a look at that and said, “Yeah that’s messed up they shouldn’t ban you for no reason,” and all of dbzer0 took a look at that and said “But you’re clearly a twat so of course they banned you, YDI”. I don’t know if the two camps had a chance to have each notice the other and start fighting, but people are already talking in these comments about a reason to block all of dbzer0 as a result, which I think was exactly the kind of intended response for this to generate.