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Cake day: March 31st, 2025

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  • “I Transformed Into An Invisible Tiger And Began Killing Billionaires” - A cat-and-mouse Death Note style detective anime about a college freshman communist tech nerd who miraculously gains the ability to transform into an invisible tiger and uses his leet Linux hacking skills to track down billionaire targets. At first the supernatural crimes are easy to carry out, then billionaires start to develop bunkers and defense systems against the mysterious threat. But when the killer discovers that a prodigy medical genius has acquired the same power, and intends to unveil their research on it to earn a Nobel Prize - that’s when things really start to get complicated.

    DM me for my Venmo info for any royalties thank you


  • mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.detoScience Memes@mander.xyzGoals.
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    2 days ago

    This is a great example in support of something I often think about. We see our consciousness as “me” and as “the thing in charge” of the body, but really it’s more of an ancillary subprocess that the body runs for its own benefit. It’s just a special subprocess that does its job best when it mistakenly thinks of itself as being the boss of the body.



  • I see what you’re saying. You’re not talking about “making sense” in an ethical or social well-being sense, you mean it’s literally confusing why the technology wouldn’t be used for all kinds of crimes, given that it already exists - irrespective of whether the technology should be used. Is that right? I think you’re getting downvoted because it kinda sounds like you’re saying this is all a good idea when you say it “makes sense”. Unfortunate English ambiguities. But you’re saying, like, sure it’s dystopian and creepy and wrong, but why wouldn’t the creepy dystopia use the tech for all cases then rather than just some? That’s a good question. I think because there is legitimately some understanding of the dangers of using these powerful tools willy-nilly. While people aren’t perfect angels, they also aren’t perfect devils either. Another factor is that there is some pressure to appear not to be overly heavy-handed with these tools - as we see in those chats, they knew it made them look bad for this to get out.

    And the final most pessimistic factor is that this Flock company almost certainly charges per seat, so giving direct usernames and logins to every officer or even every department is probably absurdly expensive. Companies (in this case the police) will often try to limit their license seats to as few people as possible and then just funnel as much different people’s work through that one person’s license as they can.


  • It does make sense. Police are not perfect saint-like beings, and the government is not composed of perfect beings either. I’m not sure what kind of person you are, but I’m sure there are some things you enjoy and partake in which some other social group really despises. If you’re religious, it may be militant atheists who despise you going to church. If you’re not religious, it may be militant theists who despise you not going to church. The point is, there’s probably some social cultures out there that hate you for the things that you love. Those people may not be in charge right now, but they might be one day. Those people can end up in police departments, as developers for these camera companies, as administrators for the database that collects information on where you drive and when. Those people, being imperfect as they are, may not always resist the temptation to use this system in a way to track down and identify people like you for doing whatever it is that you love and they hate. Now you end up on a list for that.

    There’s no denying that sophisticated surveillance technology does make it easier to catch criminals and does legitimately protect from the threats those criminals pose. But surveillance technology, by it’s very nature, cannot surveil only the criminals - it has to surveil everyone to find the criminals. And the notion of what is criminal may change. If your favorite hobby becomes criminalized, or if the government criminalizes your identity itself, these beautifully effective tools are suddenly turned against you.

    There is a happy medium to be found between giving your society tools to enforce the will of constituents, vs. giving your society tools that be too easily abused. Given that this tool is already being abused, it probably isn’t worth the benefits.







  • I don’t know if I like assuming that obedience is a genetically heritable trait. I’ve heard racists use this assumption to argue that racially Chinese people are more likely to be sneaky servile backstabbers because that’s what their genetics are selected for due to their political past.

    Controversial statement incoming: I also don’t want to preemptively rule out the possibility of obedience, or anything else, being genetically heritable - even if it could lead to these uncomfortable conclusions. I think scientific studies should be done about such things to answer the questions of whether these personality traits are heritable, come what may of that knowledge. But to my relief, from the studies I’ve seen, personality traits heritability is on very shaky ground in most cases.








  • As others have pointed out, I don’t think you have solid evidence to suspect that this is a neurotypical vs ADHD thing.

    Personally I think it’s just a matter of poor taste. The sad truth is most people cannot appreciate good art, and the only reason why most works of art are as high quality as they are is because artists make them, and artists do appreciate good art and have high standards. From the artists point of view, their piece needs to meet criteria X, Y, Z, etc. to be a good satisfying piece. But from the point of view of the tasteless plebian masses, it probably only needs to meet criteria X. I first noticed this when I saw that almost every highly upvoted artwork on Reddit years ago was a really hyper realistic pencil drawing, usually of a pretty girl. Most people don’t appreciate form, composition, subtle meanings, abstraction, etc. Those things require more thinking and are therefore too difficult for many people to engage with. Instead, “how hard does this seem to make” and “how much do I like this at first glance” become the proxy standards used by tasteless lazy people to judge art, and hence the “best” art by those standards is a super realistic pencil drawing of a pretty woman became “zomg I thought this was a photo!!!” and “I couldn’t do this in a million years!!! So impressive!!!” As if the point of art is just to flex on people?

    But it gets worse, because even when people decide to half-ass their ingestion of art by flattening it down to a single dimension of “how realistic is it”, again, because people aren’t artists and have never even tried to engage in art (and this I actually don’t hold against them, unlike their prior laziness), they don’t have a trained eye. So sometimes you’ll see just a mediocre pencil drawing of a pretty girl, and people with less art skills will be like “wow 10/10 it’s perfect!!!”, but people with art skills will be able to notice things like “well if the shadow on the neck is like that the shadow on the nose should be going the other way, you mixed up your light sources”, or “the perspective is off on the angle of the eyes here”. Sometimes these improvements would be subconsciously picked up by the masses, but many times not. Often the subtleties that make an artwork go from mediocre to amazing are lost on the masses. As a result, the masses are equally satisfied with poor quality AI-generated images as they are with high quality human-generated images.

    TLDR; The lack of media literacy among many people strikes again