Bloodshot [he/him,any]

  • 32 Posts
  • 369 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
Cake day: July 29th, 2020
  • Bloodshot [he/him,any]tothe_dunk_tank•r/antiwork poster joins South African subreddit to defend "white flight". Yea...
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    3 years ago

    Regular poster? The account has commented four times over its lifetime of six months, two being cheap quips and the other two being conservative sentiments that weren't well received, and has not made a submission. Almost all the activity is a mix of /r/daytrading, /r/forex, and /r/southafrica, which allows you to pinpoint exactly what kind of guy this is.

    This isn't someone who's misguided and thinks work sucks but doesn't know any theory so makes incoherent statements, it's a right-wing white Afrikaner who's on reddit to make money on stocks

  • Bloodshot [he/him,any]tochapotraphouse•The Unofficial Hexbear Experience Survey
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    3 years ago
    spoiler
    1. Yes (in spirit; I didn't subscribe but browsed daily)
    2. Week one
    3. I did not
    4. I believe I made a comment in the first day or so
    5. About ten times
    6. I mostly comment, I am not a poster
    7. I am interested in this being a continuation of whatever community existed on the old subreddit

    Create an online space which would preserve as much social momentum from r/ChapoTrapHouse as possible following the ban of the subreddit

    1.5. This website has very little of that momentum and ineffable "spark". There's probably a case-study to be done about this; I think one of the failures was trying to be a replacement for reddit.com rather than being a replacement for the subreddit. It's a complex thing.

    Ensure the space was welcoming to marginalized voices and identities

    I can't really speak to this, but my impression is that it's a much more positively curated space than every other general social media, link aggregation, forum, etc. site.

    Provide resources which aid in organization efforts

    1. /c/tactics hasn't had a post for months. There's no organisational body here, no skeleton upon which to build these tactics. And what are isolated tactics without a strategy? But of course you can't have a strategy because you're not a political body. You can't execute on any of it by posting.

    This was true of the subreddit, of course, but you didn't get a constant sense of anxiety about it. The subreddit was impactful discursively

    Foster a culture which allowed for leftist education and discussion

    2. There is discussion and elucidation to a degree, but mostly falls foul of the same things I've listed above.

    Allow users to use the site as a positive outlet for their mental health

    I'm not sure how to rate this, but it's my observation that having a site that is a lot more personal means that stuff that, on other sites, would be "online bullshit" now causes people a lot of stress. Having that level of investment but without the ability to form meaningful interpersonal connections with individuals, or to have any kind of material support, can be very deleterious.

    Contribute to the open source community generally and to the fediverse specifically

    I don't interact with the "fediverse". I'd say 4. for making efforts to work in the open and (I believe) upstream some changes.

    Encourage privacy of our users by default and create a culture which values basic opsec

    One of the things that irks me about the culture here is the instance on so-called "opsec" but without a clearly defined threat model, without a clearly defined "operation". Encouraging privacy hygiene is good, but it's done in a way that doesn't really help you understand why you might make a decision, one way or the other, about what information to share.

    Experiment with what modern social media could look like outside of corporate control

    3. It looks mostly like reddit. With a different admin structure.

    Minimize sectarianism and make a robust case for left unity

    3. I think "left unity" or "anti-sectarianism" is a false goal. While there aren't a lot of bitter personal back and forths that I see on this site day-to-day, it doesn't compare to what really was a kind of melting pot on /r/chapotraphouse. There's a very clearly delineated "line" here on, for example, China. Emphasising the dialectic, as it were, of the discussion itself is more valuable than emphasising the unity of everyone.

    Make sure the space is a fun and less habit-forming experience than corporate social media

    2. I don't have a social media habit. I visit this site a lot less than the old subreddit. There are fewer posts, of lower quality. So I browse reddit instead.

    1. This might appear that I'm very negative about the project, and indeed I've seen more internecine bullshit here than anywhere else, but I'd like not to be. I don't think this site or the project is worthless or "bad", but I think there's a big misalignment of goals. There's a sort of idealistic misapprehension of what a link aggregation website can and should be.
  • Bloodshot [he/him,any]tomemes•Gun robot dog
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    3 years ago

    The intent is for there to be homelessness. It's a coercive measure that lowers the floor of how bad things can get for you if you don't participate.

  • Bloodshot [he/him,any]totechnology•*Permanently Deleted*
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    3 years ago

    I expected this to be an eye-rolling article, and it was at first, but it correctly identified the cause and implications, I think. It's not that a directory structure is intuitive or naturally, but simply that it was the interface that was taught by the tools used at the time, and isn't by mobile devices.

    What makes directory structures interesting is that they are essentially recursive (a directory is a collection of files and other directories), and to understand them is to understand a recursive structure (a linked list being another such example) — I would guess this is where the barrier is.

    This is a noteworthy phenomenon, though I wouldn't worry too much. It's just that a formerly grade-school level skill is now a college level skill. If you're in STEM, you're probably also going through the arduous task of learning LaTeX at the same time. If eight year olds typeset their book reports, you could imagine an professor equally incredulous that their students didn't know it.

    One interesting takeaway comes from the invocation of search. There are filesystems (none in production use that I know of) that identify files as an unordered collection of (searchable) tags rather than a path: https://stackoverflow.com/a/3263550. There are a lot of interesting implications that come from this, such as tag-based ACLs, or transparent version control, but it's pretty underesearched.

  • Bloodshot [he/him,any]tothe_dunk_tank•An Afghanistan take hotter than the surface of the Sun.
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    3 years ago

    From a good article in the New Yorker, The Other Afghan Women:

    I met Wakil, a bespectacled Taliban commander. Like many fighters I’d encountered, he came from a line of farmers, had studied a few years in seminary, and had lost dozens of relatives to Amir Dado, the Ninety-third Division, and the Americans. He discussed the calamities visited on his family without rancor, as if the American War were the natural order of things. Thirty years old, he’d attained his rank after an older brother, a Taliban commander, died in battle. He’d hardly ever left Helmand, and his face lit up with wonder at the thought of capturing Gereshk, a town that he’d lived within miles of, but had not been able to visit for twenty years. “Forget your writing,” he laughed as I scribbled notes. “Come watch me take the city!” Tracking a helicopter gliding across the horizon, I declined. He raced off. An hour later, an image popped up on my phone of Wakil pulling down a poster of a government figure linked to the Ninety-third Division. Gereshk had fallen.

    Wow if only the coalition had good SIGINT they would have been able to hold