The object of a system of authority is order, not justice. Justice matters only after injustice sufficiently compromises order.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 8th, 2023

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  • You can blame Reagan for a lot of things but not this and frankly even if it somehow was all his fault the Clinton Administration could have undone it.

    The economy was already in trouble by the end of Lyndon Johnson’s final term in 1969. The Nixon Administration implemented some large changes trying to fix it but was unsuccessful. The Carter Administration also tried with very limited success. It wasn’t until the 1st Rise of Tech in the 80s during the Reagan Administration that things managed to get moving again. The Clinton Administration caught a lucky break with the 2nd Rise of Tech in the 90s so the streak got extended to right about 2001.

    The amusing part is that Johnson, Nixon, and Carter bear no blame for the economic woes while Reagan and Clinton deserve no credit for the economic successes. They just happened to be the guy in the Oval when things happened.

    Its a good chunk of the reason that everyone from Wall Street to the US Federal Government is trying so damn hard to make AI happen. They want a 3rd Rise of Tech, or something like it, in order to re-float the economy.


  • For example, I’ve noticed that some websites start throwing captchas at me or even just straight-up refuse to load with 403: unauthorized errors because I have my router set up to load-balance across two Internet connections. (At least, that’s my guess as to why it’s happening.)

    I maintain several multi-wan commercial setups and they don’t have this problem. I obviously don’t know what your setup is but I’d guess something is wrong with how its handling flows / connections. Once a connection is established between your edge and an internet resource that flow should remain “stuck” to whatever wan port it started with and it sounds like that isn’t happening.


  • As an American I fully agree. I’ve completely had it with our politics infesting everything, everywhere, all the time. For everyone’s sanity it needs to stop. More communities need to have and enforce a “No US Politics” rule. No Trump, no Elon, no AOC, no Bernie, no State Senator from bumblefuck Alabama or Los Angeles, California. None of it. Just.Fucking.Stop.Already.







  • There is no comparison between a top of the line SGI workstation from 1993-1995 and a gaming rig built in 2025. The 2025 Gaming Rig is literal orders of magnitude more powerful.

    In 1993 the very best that SGI could sell you was an Onyx RealityEngine2 that cost an eye-watering $250,000 in 1993 money ($553,000 today).

    A full spec breakdown would be boring and difficult but the best you could do in a “deskside” configuration is 4 x single core MIPS processors, either R4400 at 295Mhz or R10000 at 195Mhz with something like 2GB of memory. The RE2 system could maybe pull 500 Megaflops.

    A 2025 Gaming Rig can have a 12 core (or more) processor clocked at 5Ghz and 64GB of RAM. An Nvidia 4060 is rated for 230 Gigaflops.

    A modern Gaming Rig absolutely, completely, and totally curb stomps anything SGI could build in the early-mid 90s. The performance delta is so wide it’s difficult to adequately express it. The way that Pixar got it done was by having a whole bunch of SGI systems working together but 30 years of advancements in hardware, software, and math have nearly, if not completely, erased even that advantage.

    If a single modern gaming rig can’t replace all of the Pixar SGI stations combined it’s got to be very close.




  • We are, but at the same time having parallel communities helps with that

    Does it though? Seems to me that we just end up with two echo chamber communities where there’s no cross pollination of ideas and no challenges to our viewpoints. It’s good that people still have a place to interact but self segregation along ideological lines isn’t healthy for anyone over the long term.

    As an example it’s why I’m still subscribed to communities over on .ml. They challenge my base reality and expose me to viewpoints that I wouldn’t consider on my own.





  • To use an extreme example, if I saw someone just spamming the hard-R I would want their comment immediately removed.

    In the forum days those users would get attacked and / or blocked by other users. If they caused enough havoc for long enough then the mods / admins would step in. The expectation NOW is that the mods / admins will actively monitor every post and comment in order to remove disagreeable content before it can be seen. That’s quite the change over the last 20 years!

    The funniest part is that this mirrors real life. If someone did that IRL, I would just leave.

    “Mirror” is probably more apt than you realize. IRL you would leave but on the internet you want them to leave. I’m not blaming you or saying that you’re wrong, I’m just pointing out the difference.

    I agree that all forums require some level of moderation in order to keep from turning into total troll-fests however there’s a wide chasm between moderating someone because they won’t stop posting racial slurs and moderating someone because they’re going against the grain / hivemind.


  • Being designed around persistent topics rather than the ephemeral post model

    Hmmm, you’re probably on to something there. I think Lemmy could do that but no one cares to set it up.

    and more visible user customisation (more prominent avatars, signatures, that sort of thing).

    I’m honestly not sure this is a bad thing. Dear God, remember how threads would get blown out by hyper-configurations? Sig blocks that were 20,000 pixels long and endless GIF spam? Not sure I’m in a hurry to get back to that!

    One of my favorite forums has been around since 1999 and is currently running on XenoForo which is very phpBB-esque. Anytime I get a nostalgia hankering I drop in for a few minutes. It’s not always as good as you may remember. :)