Uriel238 [all pronouns]

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • algos / AI has already been used to justify racial discrimination in some counties who use predictive policing software to adjust the sentences of convicts (the software takes in a range of facts about the suspect and the incident and compares it to how prior incidents and suspects were similar features were adjudicated) and wouldn’t you know it, it simply highlighted and exaggerated the prejudices of police and the courts to absurdity, giving whites absurdly lighter sentences than nonwhites, for example.

    This is essentially mind control or coercion technology based on the KGB technology of компромат (Kompromat, or compromising information, or as CIA calls it biographical leverage, ) essentially, information about a person that can be used either to jeopardize their life, blackmail material or means to lure and bribe them. Take this from tradecraft and apply it to marketing or civil control, and you get things like the Social Credit System in China to keep people from misbehaving, engaging in discontent and coming out of the closet (LGBTQ+ but there are plenty of other applicable closets).

    From a futurist perspective, we homo-sapiens appear just incapable of noping out of a technology or process, no matter how morally black or heinous that technology is, we’ll use it, especially those with wealth and power to evade legal prosecution (or civil persecution). It breaks down into three categories:

    • Technologies we use anyway, and suffer, e.g. usury, bonded servitude, mass-media propaganda distribution
    • Technologies we collectively decide are just not worth the consequences, e.g. the hydrogen bomb, biochemical warfare
    • Technologies for which we create countermeasures, usually turning into a tech race between states or between the public and the state, e.g. secure communication, secure data encryption, forbidden data distribution / censorship

    We’re clearly on the cusp of mind control and weaponizing data harvesting into a coercion mechanism. Currently we’re already seeing it used to establish and defend specific power structures that are antithetical to the public good. It’s currently in the first category, and hopefully it’ll fall into the third, because we have to make a mess (e.g. Castle Bravo / Bikini Atol) and clean it up before deciding not to do that again.

    Also, with the rise of the internet, we’ve run out of myths that justify capitalism, which is bonded servitude with extra steps. So we may soon (within centuries) see that go into one of the latter two categories, since the US is currently experiencing the endgame consequences of forcing labor, and the rest of the industrialized world is having to bulwark from the blast.


  • Uriel238 [all pronouns]@lemmy.blahaj.zoneto196@lemmy.blahaj.zoneRule of Tarth
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    13 hours ago

    I’ve become bitter, but…

    … given our current examples of IRL men being masculine (Donald Trump, Matt Walsh, Ben Shapiro and Joe Rogan…

    …and, in SoIaF, masculinity as Joffrey Baratheon perceives masculinity, and Gregor Clegane is seen as a paragon of masculinity…

    Having human decency, or character integrity are feminine, or at least the opposite of masculine.

    There are plenty of guys that have these features (though considering the gender breakdown of the 2024 general election, many that do not), but I wouldn’t attribute them to what makes these guys men, rather what makes them mature or adults.

    Just as truth and facts are left-leaning, maturity and character are feminine-leaning. It is why I am no longer a man (though I don’t take offense at he, him pronouns).



  • There are literal eldritch horrors we do not comprehend. It is why the sun has all the material features of god, yet we see it as a (very large, implacable, thankfully consistent) object, and we don’t think about how we must refrain from looking at the sun directly, only that it burns our eyes.

    Bertrand Russell’s attempt at reducing all of mathematics to a perfect system of logic (until this was proven by Gödel to be impossible) broke him, much the way professors at Miskatonic would go mad trying to model the universe by pondering quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore.

    Myself, I was already pretty mad (diagnosed) when I saw lines being crossed in the US that pointed towards a fascist autocratic future and a purge campaign, and so I took to studying moral philosophy and the Holocaust, specifically the human mechanisms that justified the engagement of and participation in evil. Consequently, I broke my brain even further. Nature, human or otherwise, can be unflinching and ruthless in its efforts to exploit or consume us, which is why we need reciprocal ethics in the first place.

    I do not imagine the universe is incomprehensible, only that we are small and still pretty simple, imagining the moon closer and bigger since we see models drawn to disproportionate scale. And so the layperson doesn’t understand how difficult it is to launch a probe from one speck so that it drifts for months or years, to fall into an orbit around another speck. It’s difficult to imagibe that the stars in a single galaxy, each teeming with satellite objects, are uncountable like the grains of sand on a beach. We know it’s a number, but still have to estimate its value with a wide error margin.

    It’s not forbidden knowlege. The parabolic manifold in which the pillars of R’lyeh stand can be computed, but our hominid brains have to bend a lot, or chain together analogies and metaphors to understand them.

    It’s like a dog chasing a hyperball, possibly to its peril.




  • IMSI spoofing is a product of wireless telephony being an ancient (way-pre-internet) technology, and we’re long in an era where law enforcement (or in this case law-enforcement coded) investigators don’t have to obey laws, such as assuring due process, and unreasonable searches disqualifying evidence. Instead they’re hunting political enemies, and every prisoner of the United States is now a political prisoner.

    It also means we don’t have to obey the law, and can start using all-frequency jammers in and around protests and ICE actions to level the playing field. (It will also interfere with regular infrastructure, but it’s not like ICE or the current regime gives half a fuck about that.

    All-frequency jammers are older tech and easier to build than IMSI spoofers, and are highly illegal since so much of our commerce and communications depend on radio. But the current [FCC] has also been captured and is failing to do its job.

    Any Amateur Radio enthusiast will know how to make a jammer. And current battery technology would assure you could make a handful that are portable and powerful enough to shut down blocks and blocks of municipal communication. This is playing pretty hardball, but then ICE isn’t playing by the rules.






  • In psychology, it’s called attitude polarization, where we ignore data that conflicts with an ideology while accepting data that confirms it. It’s a known common human bias.

    Scientists train themselves to accept new data as challenging old presumptions (that maybe the old model is false, or simplistic and some unconsidered noise is affecting observed data)… at least when they’re doing real science. Failure to do so, and to cling to older models, is how old dudes get tagged as hidebound reactionaries. And even Einstein couldn’t square his feelings regarding Heisenberg probability models of quantum dynamics.






  • As we quickly learned during the George W Bush era, no news media agency can be trusted. To counter this, check reporting of the same incident from multiple news agencies and find the consistent facts. Everything else is suspect.

    In a hurry, see if Reuters or AP has covered it, but verify when you have the time.

    Done this way AJ is perfectly viable as a source for news, in that the bias can be filtered out.

    FOX and OANN are known to lie or misrepresent facts entirely, but that gets filtered through cross-checking.

    Trust, but verify.




  • My management tricks (which came from being managed) included calling for a 90 minute meeting if I needed 45 minutes, and bring snacks.

    Oh and when someone finishes an all day job in half a day, let them goof off for the rest of the day.

    But then I believed that whole happy workers are maximally productive workers thing that, well, every serious management study reports.