Isn’t that the red one? At least there’s no excuse for not being able to find it.

Yeah, that’s the sketch that always comes to my mind when it comes to people in positions of authority and computers.

“Computer says” is enough confirmation for most people.

Well, can’t have the sewage rats going all hyper or something.

According to the AI therapist both are “absolutelly right” even when contradicting each other.

I don’t think therapy can cure Stupid.

Here’s one which only works if you know BOTH Portuguese and English:

“In Portugal it’s very common for old ladies to go to a coffee place and ask for a big cock”

(Explanation: the Portuguese word for milk with coffee - “galão” - also means “big rooster”. Those are the only two meanings it has in that language. However when you translate it to English you can use a certain synonym for “rooster” which can be read as having another, very different, meaning)

Because that’s how it worked for pretty much everything back in the day when your chances of getting a loan from the bank depended on the impression of trustworthiness you projected on the bank manager when you asked for it, rather than some obscure algorithm running in the bank’s systems that didn’t take in account any feedback from an actual human.

Amongst large companies automation removed humans from the loop, at least at an early stage, so now your machine processable input and/or information about you extracted from some other sources about what you’ve done so far, matching whatever the algorithm is configured to favor is all that matters. Sure, beyond that you’ll almost certainly end up with a person making a final decision (for hiring, not for bank loans), but you first have to pass that big initial automated hurdle that’s supposed to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Amongst other things this has killed “being judged as having potential” as a way to get a foot on the door, unless you have a high score on a metric supposedly correlated to it such as good grades at a supposedly elite university, since unlike “impression” such metrics can be mathematically evaluated and compared by algorithms.

Mind you, when looking for work in smaller companies that haven’t outsourced their hiring, impressions still work since your first point of contact is going to be a person whose opinion counts rather than an algorithm or a person too low on the pecking scale for their judgement to be taken in account.

I used to think like that until on the e-mail address I had for my lemmy.world account (an account which I left following that) I started getting e-mails in my native language from an organisation based in Tel-Aviv inviting me to attent a “learn about Israel” online course.

This was when I was already very vocal about the actions of Israel in Gaza.

That e-mail wasn’t public and as far as I know only server Admins have access to that stuff.

When the largest Lemmy instance is infiltrated at the Admin level by state actors (and that’s also very clearly the case for Moderation in the main forums there, as reflected by their moderation actions with even one Moderator of the news forum being very openly Zionist in his posts elsewhere), the idea that there are bots and sockpuppets around in Lemmy trying to shift opinions for the benefit of nations and even large political forces, isn’t exactly outrageous.

I mean, if I remember it correctly the budget of Israel’s Hasbara ops is somewhere around $1 billion a year, so plenty of money to have a few people at least part time trying to influence a place with maybe a few hundred thousand people, like Lemmy.

Nowadays with mass media and the internet, we get aware of much more of the stupid shit happening all over than a common person would in the Western Roman Empire because stupid shit anywhere can be brought to people’s attention everywhere quickly, and since stupid stands out it does get brought to people’s attention.

Also real power is more centralized nowadays, also because of the speed with which information and people can travel enabling more centralised Command & Control systems.

So I would say that a fall due to internal social and political degenrence will happen faster and look a lot more stupid to bystanders, than back in Roman Empire days. Also the density of stupid timewise is probably higher now since everything is happening faster and in a lot more places at the same time.

That said, what’s happening in the US has been developing since at least Clinton’s time, maybe even Reagan’s, maybe longer than that - it’s just that the earlier stages which made the structural changes and created the conditions for what’s happening now, weren’t obvious to anybody but a handful of experts in some domains who of course weren’t given airtime on mass media or were deemed kooks by the rest of people when they did get airtime: any system’s eventual doom is guaranteed as soon as criticism of the structurs system itself is repressed or even de facto suppressed, though it generally takes time for it go through the stagnancy and then the internal-pillaging stages that lead to it cracking and collapsing from becoming unable to serve most people in it.

My gaming PC noticeably helps heat up one of the rooms in my place during Winter.

In the Summer, however, that’s a downside rather than an upside.

What Israel is doing nowadays IS different from what the NAZIs did: the Zionists aren’t yet attacking the “superior” races.

The Humanitarianism in Western “Democracies” was always performative, the least democratic the nation the more performative it was, which I why generally you see the most support for Israel in the countries with the least democratic voting systems like the US and the UK (though present day Germany is a bit of an exception to this since they have a mixed voting system with a Proportional Vote component).

Way back in the beginning of NAZIsm the European and American elites loved the NAZIs and their ideas (for example, there is a picture of young British Princess Elizabeth, later Queen Elizabeth, being taught how to do a NAZI salute by her uncle, the then King) and it was only when the NAZIs attacked other Europeans that they turned against the NAZIs. This actually makes lots of sense as the NAZI ideas of the inherent superiority of some over others, especially along ethnic lines, were normalized in early XXth Century American and European society and very popular amongst the old-wealth elites (which naturally saw themselves as inherently superior to the rest, as that explained their higher status and priviledges in their societies - they deserved to be born into wealth because they were superior people)

We’re looking back at the NAZIs from the end of a long track that included a period of propaganda heavilly against them which was necessary to inspire the population to support the war effort against them - in the period betwen then and now all the shit they did came out and none of it was reframed to seem justifiable (as is being done right now for the Zionist Genocide by many politicians and news media), quite the contrary: through some of the most powerful means to do so - dramatic films - we were made to experience and empathize with some of the pain of the victims of the Holocaust, mainly the Jewish (curiously, that of the Roma and Sindi was pretty much ignored) as well as repeatedly made to feel pride in the actions of the men and women that fought against the NAZIs in WWII and in the Resistance movements in places like France (just compare the portrayal of the Resistance Française to how Hamas is being portrayed)

I have little doubt that had the NAZIs just sticked to exterminating “lesser races” (like in the eyes of just about every Racist out there the Zionists are doing), the “pragmatism” (read, treating Principles as secondary to the Economic interests of the elites and themselves) of those in “Democratic” governments would have a lot of them justifying, reframing, denying and excusing the murderous actions of the NAZIs and claiming they didn’t really do a Genocide, same as they do now for the murderous actions of the Zionists.

By the way, this also explains the massive difference in the reaction to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the reaction to the Israeli Genocide in Gaza, even though the latter is thousands of times more murderous for civilians.

A perfect match for the character of the man whose face would be on the coin!

Surely a 30 cent (or maybe 70 cent or some other not really believable and pretty much useless) coin value would better represent Trump.

Surely toilet paper would be a more appropriate medium to carry his semblance.

Well, there core of every Tech-related mania since at least the Net boom in the late 90s has been people invested into the mania passing themselves as just people giving friendly advice online to try and convince others to jump into the bandwagon in order for their own stakes to go up in value.

This kind of shit has been more than normalized for decades.

The only unusual thing thing here is that they’re open about having an investment in TSLA.

Deterring them from the Fediverse (as in not letting the use the protocol) is a near zero impact for them outcome, possibly technically impossible (it’s an open protocol and the software is open source) and possibly with a lot of negative impact for everybody else (it risks undermining the main point of the Fediverse - Freedom).

Much more important is deterring them from spreading their hate to other people (in general) and as it so happens, when it comes to the people in the Fediverse, them segregating themselves in their own server actually helps with that: other servers can simple defederate, taking away their audience, hence they’re not actually spreading their hate to others in the Fediverse.

With them not being self-segregated it’s a lot harder because it they’ll do what they are doing right now: join servers all over the place, post comments all over the place, so in response they get banned if they go too far (and then just open a new account) and others tend to try and nullify their poison by downvoting them or pointing out the with logic the stupidity and/or inconsistence of their position, all of which is a lot more fallible than just defederating the NAZI instance.

More generally, there is no perfect way to “deter them from the fediverse” (just try to actually analyse the problem space and you will soon find that there’s no foolproof method), and hence the discussion has to be about how far should we go and what the delivers the best results, which brings us around to the point I was making: having the NAZIs in their own instance does more to stop them spreading their poison the Fediverse audience than somehow blocking that and keeping on trying to stamp them down individually when they’re mixed with the general fediverse population.

I understand the feeling.

I also look at it Logically and that yields a more subtle take.

My point is that thinking that ANYTHING is acceptable to contain the NAZIs (even when it hurts the rest) is forgetting that the whole point of stopping the NAZIs is to protected everybody else and their freedoms.

I’ll give you a parallel example: start by “Everybody should be thrown in Jail to make sure all criminals are in Jail”. Whilst it would work, this is obviously senseless. Once that’s accepted the discussion becomes “how far should we go to make sure criminals go to Jail” and onwards to “how many innocents wrongly in Jail is acceptable” and “how many criminals who evade Jail is acceptable”.

All that is what lead to things like a Justice System with Presumption of Innocence, different sentences for different Crimes and an Appeals System.

When it comes to stopping NAZIs the same reasoning applies - “ANYTHING is acceptable” is obviously senseless (killing all human beings would certainly stop the NAZIs, but I expect we both agree that it’s a bit too much) so the discussion is then moved to “how far are we willing to sacrifice the rest in order to stop the NAZIs”, which is the area of thinking anchoring my original point - if the NAZIs are contained (by their own choice, even), then maybe it’s not worth it to sacrifice the freedom of the rest by mangling the Fediverse if all that would deliver as a result is the near-zero impact outcome of barring the NAZIs from their own separate space in the Fediverse whilst they can still gather elsewhere.

In my view by wanting that you asked originally, a far greater number of people than the number of NAZIs would sacrifice a lot for something that will make the NAZIs lose very little - or in other words your idea amounts to “throwing the baby out with the bathwater”.

I don’t think that “lets’ fuck up what’s important for almost everybody in order to barelly inconvenience the NAZIs” is a wise position, even if I understand the impulse to “just fuck those sons of a bitch no matter what”.

They would have one either way - I mean, just look at Twitter, Reddit, FOX News. Even when there weren’t such NAZI spaces bought and paid for by billionaires, NAZIs had their own websites, mailing lists and whatever.

Weakenning the freedom inherent to the Fediverse’s implementation just because the NAZIs might use it to create their own space is just indirectly constraining yourself because of the NAZIs, which IMHO is the opposite of what we should be doing.

Would you defend changing HTTP(S) and HTML to somehow stop NAZIs using it because as they are now they can be used by NAZIs to spread their message? How about e-mail? How about pen and paper?

You can’t just throw the baby with the bathwater “because NAZIs”.

If you really want to stop NAZI messaging altogether you can’t do it by Technical means, you have to do it by Social and Political means - Laws Censoring NAZI messaging - and even there, look at Germany that does it and all they seem to have achieved is that the NAZI symbology is hidden whilst a large part of the NAZI way of things is widespread in society (hence the AfD success) and some elements of it are even shared by the majority (hence Germany’s very overtly race-justified unconditional support of a nation commiting a Genocide). De facto Germany’s banning of NAZIsm hasn’t stopped the kind of Fascism like in the US right now or the AfD there, were they use the NAZI propaganda techniques and share many ideological elements with the NAZIs but just don’t use NAZI symbols.

Them making their own space actually lets us much more easily reduce our exposure to them - without their space we get them everywhere and each of us have to ban such users individuals to avoid their poison, whilst if they’re congregated in a server we can just ban that server and/or its forums.

In terms of the NAZI bar metaphor, this is more like the NAZIS setting up their own bar and congregating there rather than trying to take over other bars - everybody else can very easilly avoid even looking at the NAZI bar, much less going there and listening to them spreading their ideology - yeah, by default the sound of their activities does leak to the street, but in Lemmy we’re the ones who can chose to close the door, not them.

Compare that with, for example, how the Zionists captured [email protected] and even up to a level the server itself, by seeking moderation and admin positions there: subverting an existing large traffic forum and the biggest Lemmy instance is way much more pernicious than what the other kind of NAZI are doing by setting up their own - easily avoided - corner.