Mantergeistmann
No bio...
User ID: 323
Mantergeistmann
14d ago
I mean, it's easy when people are throwing jars of blood on things.
Mantergeistmann
14d ago
it tickled my imagination as a city of insane-sounding joyless motherfuckers which I could scarcely believe had ever existed outside of a cartoon.
I think that's also how it's portrayed in Asterix The Gaul, and if there's one IP I trust to use stereotypes in a way that's 100% accurate to real life...
Mantergeistmann
15d ago
The biggest factor is the bubbles. In the old days, radicalism was harder to create and maintain because you had to essentially remove the person you wanted to radicalize from sanity checks that happen from non-radicalized people around the person. This is why old religious cults often encouraged members to cut off old relationships and only cult members remained for social connections. You also want to make the person’s thought process as much as possible about the thing you’re radicalizing the person on. So with a religious cult, you’d see this radicalized person seeing almost everything through the lens of the religion in question.
The problem we have at the moment is that the tools to do this are in everyone’s pocket and available all the time. A person who is in a liberal social media bubble often has very few people online that are not liberals (the same is likely true of hard right conservatives as well). They often block anyone who disagrees, stop listening to media that doesn’t support their biases, and spend hours watching videos about conservatives saying or doing something that looks evil to them.
I feel like there's a full-length article to be written on this, at some point...
Mantergeistmann
16d ago
Ha. One of these days, I might do a full-on effortpost ("Office Space: Confidential Edition! All the jokes you've heard about government contracting are at worst imprecise and at most significant understatements"), especially if I leave, but TL;DR: we're the only lab in the country that performs a high-priority task for the government (and, in some ways, has a deadman's switch: things will not be great if we vanish, although they'll be far less bad than your average MoP would assume). We're not federal employees, and so not subject to cuts there, but are a permanent fixture, and the only reason people get fired or let go are for violations of actual policy like "flushing a cell phone down the toilet instead of reporting it to security, and then lying about it when given a chance to come clean", or "falsifying time cards". As I said, we're a top priority, so even if the government cuts back everywhere else, we'll at worst be in a hiring/salary freeze. And its combination of "classified information systems", "work that if done wrong causes major disaster potential" and "deliberate tradition and founding of being more focused on details, safety, and human responsibility than NASA even before NASA existed" makes it impossible for us to be replaced with AI on any reasonable timeframe, based on what I've seen of internal rollouts and hinderances. I think last time a formal submission with any amount of GPT content went up the chain, the response from on-high was... rather scathing, even by their standards.
As for what I do, I'm a bog-standard technical project manager, but everyone there is about as immune to the future as I am.
Mantergeistmann
16d ago
What's the value of a sinecure?
I'm not entirely happy with my job (mostly the location, and there's no way it could ever go full remote rather than hybrid), so I've been pursuing leads elsewhere, but it's... safe. Doesn't pay as much as I'd like, but it's a solid salary, and it's safe. Even if every single prediction about AI takes off, even if the US government has a partial crashout, even if I become more of a drooling imbecile than I already am, even if there's a Great Depression style jobs crash... it's safe.
How much importance should I (primary breadwinner, no kids) be placing on that, and staying where I am, vs. finding something more lucrative/with remote potential?
Mantergeistmann
17d ago
which quotes him saying things he did not say. He says, this is the result of LLM usage by the Ars Technica journalists.
If true, this is the funniest news turnabout I've seen since a paper had to issue a correction in its hit of Gary Johnson asking about Aleppo.
Mantergeistmann
17d ago
Weren't a lot of the civil disobedience cases (or at least the high-profile ones) directly related to their goals, rather than interfering with federal officers? e.g. staging a sit-in at a restaurant counter, where they absolutely would (theoretically) purchase and eat a meal like anyone else should the proprietor serve them, rather than by (say) forming a cordon and blocking anyone from eating there.
Mantergeistmann
18d ago
Honeycrisp is overrated and overadvertised, but Pink Lady and Snapdragon are worth the hype.
Mantergeistmann
18d ago
Tacky, yes, but I'll not blame them for trying to be a bit trendy and get sales/numbers/interest up.
Mantergeistmann
19d ago
What was happening to gaming and online nerd spaces (like Reddit itself) was essentially a form of gentrification. You had a "marginalized" community (nerds) that had made something interesting in their ghettoized spaces (videogaming, online forums like Reddit, open source software, tabletop games). The mainstream that had previously stigmatized them decided they wanted to move in, force out the original communities and sanitize them for mainstream consumption. The same process that happened to Reddit is what leftists complain about when it happens to some neighborhood in Queens.
Status 451's Social Gentrification post is an absolute must-read, if you haven't already.
Mantergeistmann
23d ago
I've made my peace, and I'm going to do what I can to escape the (potential) permanent underclass.
Presumably via investments?
Mantergeistmann
23d ago
There's an episode of Lark Rise to Candleford where an elderly lady's bobbin lace is no longer needed by the local dressmakers, due to the new machine lace. Also a bit of other industrial commentary in other episodes, but that one always hits me the hardest.
Mantergeistmann
23d ago
I don't know how my coworkers are using it, but I've been having great results with replacing "google an excel function and hope somebody else had the same problem and got it solved".
Mantergeistmann
25d ago
Furthermore, I acknowledge and condemn the abuse of on-duty ICE agents. Are you suggesting those incidents justify the fear of harassment, stalking, doxxing, and violence against off-duty officers?
How many shootings have there been at ICE facilities? More or less than at drug enforcement agency facilities, who often wear masks (and not just in the US either, there's plenty of drug bust photo ops with masked agents in Europe, too)? Enough that it seems reasonable there might be shootings of off-duty agents were their identities more common knowledge?
Also, we do know that people were willing to harass an off-duty ICE officer when they learned what church he preached at. Hell, they didn't even make sure he was actually there before harassing everyone else in the building just for being associated with him.
Mantergeistmann
25d ago
I am once again asking for them to have unique hats.
Mantergeistmann
27d ago
I'm not sure it's more sophisticated than Carl Barks's Donald Duck from the same period
Yes, well, we can't all have a concept album created by a symphonic metal composer, now can we?
Mantergeistmann
27d ago
Picard and Dathon at El-Adrel.
Mantergeistmann
27d ago
20 years ago? I wouldn't be too surprised to see a Gen-X engineer with long hair in 2006.
Mantergeistmann
28d ago
The other day I was at a zoning meeting, the engineer came in to present and he was a youngish white kid with a man-bun. There was a time, and not all that long ago, when at a formal meeting no one would take a guy with a bun seriously. You just wouldn't. Everyone would comment on the guy's fuckin' hair.
Maybe we have different definitions of "manbun", but IMO it's one of the more professional hairdos for guys with long hair, especially if it isn't straight. Or am I thinking of a topknot type of thing, and a manbun is different?
Mantergeistmann
28d ago
medical insurance for a family is 2000+ dollars a month
I'm pretty sure the engineer in your example isn’t paying nearly that much.
Mantergeistmann
28d ago
Generally, though, houses last longer than cars, and the land they're on is worth a bundle as well (and that lasts forever).
Mantergeistmann
1mo ago
I think that there is an extremely high level of agreement on the left that Kirk's death was both bad in its impact on the world and unjustified based on Kirk's actions.
Maybe amongs the higher ups and the normies. There was a hell of a lot of celebration (and "not celebrating, just selectively re-quoting the man in a way that makes him look maximally negative to my in-group") on social media. Certainly gives the impression that whatever may be said by others, there's a large and vocal contingent out there.
Of course, those people would say the exact same about the other side, and have plenty of nutpicking of their own to support their stance of "the other side wants us dead".
Mantergeistmann
1mo ago
And if they had just beaten him a bit too heartilly with their truncheons (yes, I know, no longer a thing due to bad optics), or shot him before he was disarmed and being restrained, I'd agree!
Mantergeistmann
1mo ago
He went to a protest while armed, which is apparently illegal in Minnesota
First time I'm hearing that this is illegal in MN.
Two minutes isn't even enough time to figure out why one of my production chains is borked in Anno 1800.
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