kescusay

kescusay, 6 months ago

Damn, how did I miss this? I honestly had no idea he was even on trial. And I enjoy - or rather, enjoyed - his performances. Not anymore.

Well, fuck him if he’s actually a domestic abuser. Good on Marvel for giving him the boot.

kescusay, 6 months ago

Yeesh, what a creep. Those texts are not the kind of thing a stable and rational person would write.

kescusay, 6 months ago

Dude, figuring that out must have been tough. Good on you.

kescusay, 6 months ago

Getting myself some replacement earbuds (specifically, Pixel Buds Pro). Batteries are toast in my (very) old Sony ones, and I’ve got a ton of Google store credit, so they’re gonna cost me very little.

kescusay, 6 months ago

It’s hard to describe what it was like seeing Jurassic Park in the theater for the first time as a kid.

Picture this… You’re a teenager going to see that big blockbuster everyone’s been talking about, but it’s 1993. There is no YouTube. There’s basically no internet. No spoilers. You’ve seen the trailers, and they’re carefully done so as not to give away the big reveals. So you know this is some kind of dinosaur movie, but you don’t know much else.

And then the dinosaurs show up. And they look 100% fucking real.

Even today, that movie’s special effects hold up, and that’s for three reasons:

• They had CGI, but used it sparingly because it wasn’t ready to be all the effects in a movie yet. Where they could use practical effects, they did. And they did an astonishingly good job with them.
• The dinosaurs are shown sparingly until the audience is practically begging for the various “money” shots - which are then provided, with perfect timing. It’s like cinematographic edging.
• Spielberg was at the absolute top of his game. Scenes were thoughtfully executed and beautifully shot. The water in the glass scene? People in the audience were dead silent, holding their breath. Then the T-motherfucking-rex appears, and it’s glorious. Everyone screaming and shouting, half-thrilled and half-terrified.

It changed movies, permanently.

kescusay, 6 months ago

I mean, it looks okay and I’m glad to see competition, but yeah… Snoozer of an article with very little that makes me want to format and give it a go.

kescusay, 7 months ago

Many online bank sites have built-in budgeting tools these days. Have you checked if yours does?

kescusay, 7 months ago

I just threw up a little in my mouth.

kescusay, 7 months ago

No reason to resist. They’re nifty little things, and if you don’t have heavy computing needs for what you want to do with one, their performance is really good.

kescusay, 7 months ago

Yeah, I read that summary twice, and decided it was a lot of words to say, “We sell cloud services.”

kescusay, 7 months ago

Oh look, it’s Russia pretending anyone should give a shit what they say. Must be a day ending in “Y.”

kescusay, 8 months ago

Not terribly impressed. I gave it this prompt:

This is a surreal fantasy movie that involved some kind of magic paintbrush and someone putting peanut butter on his head.

That’s clearly a reference to The Peanut Butter Solution (a bizarre, 1985 Canadian film), but the site responded with this:

One movie that matches the description is “The Pagemaster” (1994). It is a live-action/animated fantasy film where a young boy named Richard Tyler gets transported into an animated world after taking shelter in a library during a storm. In this surreal adventure, Richard encounters various literary characters and embarks on a quest to find the exit. Along the way, he comes across a magical paintbrush that brings drawings to life and encounters bizarre situations, including a scene where he accidentally puts peanut butter on his head.

There is no scene in The Pagemaster involving peanut butter.

kescusay, 8 months ago

What it boils down to is that they’re not really AI. They’re large language models, and chatbots built around them are basically using predictive autofill on steroids.

kescusay, 8 months ago

Misread the headline and spent a very brief moment worrying about Billy Corgan’s well-being.

kescusay, 8 months ago

Thank goodness.

I’m reminded of a story I read a while back - not sure where - about how if you let a Nazi into your bar, you eventually end up running a Nazi bar. I think the same applies to online forums. You let Nazis overrun a forum, everyone else leaves, and eventually you might as well just be running Stormfront.

kescusay, 8 months ago

That’s the one! Thank you for finding it.

kescusay, 8 months ago

Yep. In welcoming back the Nazis, Elon made it clear he intended to make it a Nazi forum. Oh, he said a few things about “free speech zones” or something, but when you peel back the veneer of idealism, you just find a bunch of Nazis.

They love “free speech zones,” because no one wants to share a forum with Nazis and leave when the Nazis take over.

kescusay, 8 months ago

In my other (non-Lemmy) life, I’ve written extensively about the paradox of tolerance, and how recognizing it de-fangs the arguments of wanna-be totalitarians.

For people not in the know, Popper proposed that infinite, unrestricted “tolerance” is paradoxically self-destroying, because it necessarily means tolerating attempts to destroy tolerance.

The solution is simple and obvious in retrospect, but so many people have trouble finding it and worry about whether they’re hypocrites or not for refusing to tolerate Nazis and the like. The solution is this:

Recognize the fact that you never promised to tolerate Nazis.

No one ever promised to tolerate everything without caveats or restrictions. Instead, we promised to tolerate each other, to respect one another’s right to exist. In other words, tolerance is a peace treaty.

As soon as you realize that, it becomes obvious that you needn’t tolerate Nazis, because they have broken the treaty. You are not bound by it when it comes to them. In fact, given the nature of people like that, they were never really signatories to the treaty in the first place, because they start from a basis of intending to destroy it.

Oh, how they hate it when people realize this and refuse to put up with Nazi bullshit or apologize for that refusal. Well, sorry, Nazi turd burglars, we never promised to put up with your shit in the first place, so y’all can fuck right off.

kescusay, 8 months ago

They’re not really communists. Hint: Russian trolls are getting paid.

kescusay, 8 months ago

Chinese ones, too.

kescusay, 8 months ago

Uhh, dude? Hamas is just a terrorist organization. They murdered a bunch of babies by cutting off their heads. You can support Palestine and oppose Israel’s settlements without carrying water for a group that does shit like that.

kescusay, 8 months ago

No, it’s since been confirmed by numerous news organizations from all over. It happened. Hamas did that.

kescusay, 8 months ago (edited 8 months ago)

You’re kidding, right? So IDF soldiers who were interviewed as they were moving bodies out of the kibbutz were just lying?

Don’t do this. Don’t carry water for barbaric, inhuman acts like this. You can support Palestine’s freedom without condoning the beheading of children or trying to convince yourself it didn’t happen. Too many independent reports have corroborated it now. The BBC interviewed individual soldiers who had to deal with the insanity afterwards, and they’ll be scarred for the rest of their lives by what they’ve seen. Don’t belittle it.

And don’t belittle the Palestinian quest for freedom by defending monstrosity done in their name. Hamas isn’t Palestine.

kescusay, 8 months ago

Lemmy automatically marks comments from mods as mod comments. This isn’t Reddit. I’m not talking as a mod, I’m just talking as me.

But it’s not IDF propaganda. It’s been confirmed by dozens of news outlets now. It happened. Stop carrying water for people who would do that. Hamas isn’t Palestine.

kescusay, 8 months ago

Yeah, although the real trigger for this was the Uttar Pradesh posts. They had zero Onion-y content.

kescusay, 8 months ago

Obviously.

kescusay, 8 months ago

Great! Now all you gotta do is get speaker groups to consistently work!

kescusay, 8 months ago

You really, really don’t need an AI assistant for regular computer usage. It’s a solution in search of a problem.

There are genuinely good reasons to use GitHub Copilot if you’re a developer, but otherwise, I think they’re way more trouble than they’re worth.

kescusay, 8 months ago

Jesus… As a dad myself, this is my recurring nightmare. May I ask what was wrong?

kescusay, 8 months ago

Yeah, that’d do it.

kescusay, 8 months ago

Hence the need for this community!

kescusay, 8 months ago

It’s just a somewhat poorly-written headline. It’s about a guy - not Trump - who was supposedly victimized by the Me Too movement. And all-too-predictably, it turns out the guy - not Trump - is probably a psychotic murderer. Because that’s the sort of guy Trump likes.

kescusay, 8 months ago

Yeah, those are the worst. I’m like, “Look, I’m a news-interested person, and I want to know about this guy. Just give me a headline that interests me without it seeming like you’re trying to trick me.”

kescusay, 8 months ago

Jesus Tapdancing Christ, that’s horrifying. If Disney’s at fault, she deserves all the money for that.

kescusay, 8 months ago

Get fucked, Donny. Watch your criminal empire crumble to dust.

kescusay, 8 months ago

Okay, that looks legitimately fun.

kescusay, 8 months ago

Tragic, I know.

kescusay, 8 months ago

100% agreement. Fuck that guy.

kescusay, 8 months ago

Is that really what you want? A world where being an asshole is a death sentence? No opportunities to turn yourself around?

I don’t want to live in a world like that, even if I find this guy an absolute tool.

kescusay, 8 months ago

Agreed, it sucks all around.

kescusay, 8 months ago

Okay, let me be more blunt: Since I don’t want this community, which I mod, to be endangered by becoming a cesspool of support for violence, I will wield the ban-hammer for the very first time to prevent that from happening if I have to.

I don’t want to, and so far, I don’t think I need to, because just reminding people about Lemmy.world’s rules seems like enough. I intend to mod very lightly, and limit myself to stepping in with reminders and warnings (like this one) as much as possible. This is a fun, light-hearted community, and I want to keep it that way.

But it’s not the sidebar saying this now, it’s me, the guy who volunteered to mod here and wants this community to thrive: Please don’t push on this. Keep it fun.

kescusay, 8 months ago

Okay-dokay. That’s fine. Fuck mods and all that. But you are on world, when you’re using this community. Which is hosted on world.

You’ve said your piece, I’ve said mine. No reason we can’t part as friends here, as long as you’re not espousing violence.

kescusay, 8 months ago

So? Just because no one you know is talking about it doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. I’d bet if you called the local hospital and them if there’s been an uptick in COVID-19 cases, they’d wonder what rock you’ve been living under.

For the record, the strain with the largest circulation right now is EG.5, which is a descendant of Omicron (which should give you an idea of how infectious it is).

kescusay, 8 months ago

Woah, that’s weird! Like, even if it’s been months since the last shot, you can’t get your blood pressure read from it because it hurts too much?

kescusay, 8 months ago

I’m sorry that happened, but you must know reactions like that are extraordinarily rare, and COVID-19 itself frequently causes much more severe heart injury.

I hope you’re doing better now.

kescusay, 8 months ago

Weird. I wonder if one of the vaccinations nicked a major nerve.

kescusay, 8 months ago

Yep, definitely. Despite Moderna kicking my butt for a day or two, I’m very glad I got it. Much rather not be part of the problem.