palordrolap

Same reasons a bunch of Americans listen to the douchebag they elected President.

Farage is one of Putin’s useful idiots, if not also a puppet. He played a big part in Brexit and he’s vying to be the next PM. Populism is, unfortunately, a disturbingly easy route to do that.

Many of the rest of us wish that the helicopter crash he was in back in 2010 had made him give up politics one way or the other.

Will no one rid us of these turbulent shits?

Dukat would be proud that the humans in an alternate timeline, where he’s fictional, went and named something after him for all his great deeds.

And then he’d find out why we’re really naming it after him and he’d try every underhanded trick in the book and a handful of new ones in order to find a way into our universe to show us how great he really is.

Ratio’d

Just because these AIs are trustworthy doesn’t mean that the next ones will be. It’s always nice to be sure that what is being said is what is claimed to be being said.

A similar situation is when governments not on friendly terms, who each have a different language, each bring their own bilingual translator to the negotiating table, for each to be sure the other translator isn’t hiding something, or misunderstanding something.

It’s unlikely that a single translator would be underhanded (or misunderstood) like that, but everyone feels happier knowing that it’s even less likely with the extra safeguard.

So we’re led to believe.

It would nice to be sure though, wouldn’t it?

The Fediverse is also a sewer of both overt and covert Antisemitism

Is this a problem unique to the Fediverse, or is this a case that it’s more rampant here? Or does it only seem like it?

My feeds are fairly well curated, or perhaps you might say “blinkered”, so I don’t see a lot of it. Or maybe I don’t see what’s right in front of me, which is why I ask, since you definitely see it better than I can.

(This is not an attempt at a bad faith argument; I’m firmly anti-anti-Semitism, and I’m not saying it’s not there. Frankly, I’d be surprised if there wasn’t any. Anywhere there’s people, their prejudices generally follow.)

I figure that at some point you become so rich that you transcend nationality. That sounds complimentary, but I don’t mean it that way.

I mean it makes you an illegal alien wherever you might set foot. Pretoria, Ontario, Silicon Valley, Washington DC, Olympus Mons; GTFO. None of that belongs to you. Not any more. Persona non grata. You’ve taken so much that you owe literally everyone and should not be welcome anywhere.

I can see a lot of smaller companies (and maybe one or two reasonably big ones) opting for air-gapped networks of old operating systems and older versions of Office. A fool’s errand, sure, and for a number of reasons, but it’s cheap, and upper management likes cheap.

Just double-checked with the help manual of the one I use (PasswordSafe) and it looks like it can do it. Never actually tried it though, which is one of the reasons I didn’t mention it previously.

At the risk of sounding like an ad (I’m not affiliated, just a someone who found it in their Linux distro’s package manager), there are versions of it for pretty much any device. I definitely can’t vouch for the feature set(s) of the other versions, though.

You could probably convince a third-party password storage program to store and auto-type details like that. Preferably one that doesn’t need internet access to work.

There’s that bit in an episode of Red Dwarf, that may or may not have been a collective hallucinated memory of the crew, where they talk about a series of mechanoids (servant androids) that were “too human” looking and which unnerved customers.

The result of that was that they made their next series of mechanoids look like Kryten, with the low-poly heads on a similarly angular body.

Even if it was a false memory, the logic is absolutely sound. You want your 'bots to be at the other side of the uncanny valley, not at the bottom, creeping all horror-show-like up the side towards us.

Japan and Germany were strange bedfellows the last time this all happened, if you’ll recall.

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend” and all that.

Sometimes it takes years for this message to even to begin to sink in. Worse, one solitary success through blind luck can undo years of progress on that score.

Source: Uh. I don’t like looking in mirrors, but when I do…

Ah. I see. Being stupid on purpose, in parody or otherwise, sometimes doesn’t go over all that well either.

I have made that mistake before, and will probably make it again at some point.

Squid, you’re welcome here in the UK, but … er … don’t do that.

Flashbacks of the time I, a northerner, tried to do a “Landan” accent that time I visited London. In retrospect I’m lucky all I got was a “what are you doing?”

Well that has stumped me, I have to say. I thought the current US administration were all about cosying up to China on account of - how do I put this? - their governance model being an appealing template.

Here follows a link to a song about Afrikaners. It is from the 1980s and exceptionally politically incorrect, but it fits a certain subset of Afrikaners exceptionally well. Namely these people and a certain billionaire.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9dmoT9AfoI

You haven’t watched or read much dystopian fiction (or fact, as below), have you?

My mind always goes to that one scene in Roots where, below decks on the slaver ship, the captured slaves-to-be stage a revolt and resolve to swim to the bank of the river the ship is sailing on. They succeed in reaching the top deck, a masterpiece of planning, only to become dazed both by the daylight as well as the fact there was no riverbank in sight.

Those poor bastards were from inland, had probably never been more than a few miles from their villages. They literally couldn’t conceive of something as large as the Atlantic ocean.

Likewise you’re failing to conceive all the ways that your plans won’t work. You really think you’ll get to someone’s crotch or eyes? And if you do, that you’ll not be overcome and won’t get that opportunity next time?

The only hope is a whole heap of incompetence on behalf of the captor. And in that case you will still not win the fight. Run.

And hope there’s a riverbank nearby or else you’re cooked.

They put you somewhere that you have no communication with the outside world. Now what?