Holy shit I hate STEMlords sometimes

"just use AI to supervise the AI"

"why don't they just let it get stuck or crash like in murica?"

Been hearing this a lot and honestly only haven't posted it here because I was assuming it already had been posted a bunch when it first came out.

from the artist, in the comments:

Gaza is Calling is about my first experience with heartbreak in friendship. I was 11 when I met this boy from Gaza. We were inseparable. With him I shared one of the deepest loves I’ve ever known, he grew up alongside me in a housing project in Toronto. And not even this love was a match for the violence we were up against; the one in our new home, the one that followed him from Gaza like a cold wind. In the end it was all the bloodshed between us that didn’t allow us to see each other without tears appearing, and one of the last notes he sent to me was about how we would continue on in another life.

The string sample is the Arabian nostalgia that we share, the autotuned Arabic I sing is the balance we tried to reach being boys of cultural empires in a small hood, and the Oud is the instrument of our homelands, Sudan and Palestine.

These fucking dipshits lol, its winter, so the trees are missing leaves and there's coal smog on everything, which was in wide use in the west just as it was in the east because it was cheap and domestically abundant. The reason it held on longer in the east after reunification is because the east was economically hollowed out and coal continued to be cheap compared to retrofitting in modern heating.

Here's a picture from the late 60s(?) that's not in winter (though it unfortunately frames out the large trees that are visible in the foreground of the reddit OP):

One near me is having an issue with rats. I think really they just need better trash pickup mainly, and better shelters in general, but they've specifically asked for help getting rat poison. Would bait boxes with poison even make a dent in an outdoor environment like that? I can't singlehandedly improve the cleanliness of the camp or get everyone rat-proof shelter obviously, but I feel like just going straight for the poison could have adverse consequences and not be effective, potentially.

Please don't be a dick, I'm genuinely feeling pretty down.

For context, I'm a massive nerd about like electronics and technology, and some other things (less enthusiastic than I used to be because of burnout and capitalism and surveillance and such, but still), and I'm reasonably well off, as long as I can hold onto this job anyhow, but not 6 figures or anything (USD).

So I see videos like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J38kDEsVZ3A

and I just am so sad. It is so up my alley, it looks so fun, but I just don't feel like I can justify devoting that much of my life to hobbies and events like that just to make me happy (and showing up empty handed and burned out to events like that with no projects to show off or even talk about isn't that fun either). I'm probably too busy with work, and even if I wasn't, how can I justify it when my comrades are starving, freezing, homeless, etc. and fascism is looming, I need to be organizing and learning and preparing, not making fun toy projects and getting drunk in the woods with a bunch of cool, queer, but ultimately pretty white upper class leaning people....

I know communism isn't when No Fun, but I just don't feel like I can square the circle of living life to the fullest, doing the things I know I must, politically and morally, and working for capitalists to survive. Instead I sorta half ass all three and am happy with none. Sometimes I feel like I'm just treading water and getting more and more cynical...

Somewhat reddit-brained lib friend of mine sent this article which triggered a whole discussion of geopolitics: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/tsmcs-euv-machines-are-equipped-with-a-remote-self-destruct-in-case-of-an-invasion

He said that would reduce the chance of an invasion and I was like (paraphrasing): "really? does it? the generations-long and unfinished business of the chinese civil war and all the history there is outweighed by the thought of losing one chip fab that they've already proven they don't really need after all the sanctions? They aren't going to invade unless their hand is forced, there's literally already US troops on taiwan-held islands, if they were on the brink of invading they would have done it already, but they aren't."

He basically argued that the majority of people there wanted to be independent therefore its simple self determination and the US should help them, etc.

I said the no capitalist state gives a flying fuck about self determination and asked if texas has the right to secede, or perhaps more relevantly, if texas settlers had the right to secede from mexico and join the US in the first place? because its not like the nationalists that took over the island were its native inhabitants, who are now mostly dead, flooding a low-population place with "settlers" doesn't mean you own it...

we went back and forth a bunch and he stopped arguing when I pointed out the inconsistency of supporting palestine but also taiwan, when they (while not the same, taiwan wasn't settler colonialism) have kind of a similar arc, what with israel's "majority", both having invaded and largely displacing the prior inhabitants.

I don't feel I had all the best arguments at my disposal, though overall I feel good about my responses.