Interesting, thank you for the reply. I am not a hacker nor a gnostic but I have a slight fascination with the latter. But on hacking: while there’s merit to your position that hacker culture is reactionary I have to ask what do you think of hacker collectives like the one that leaked Project 2025 or other noble computer nerd activities? It seems to me like a hacker is exercizing another avenue of power over her world like jumping or singing. Thinking the online world is seperate and intangible from our non-online experience seems to be making the mistake of dualism in upholding one sphere of reality over the other/s.

hacker culture is intrinsically gnostic and reactionary

Do you nind elaborating a bit?

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You and what army?

If AI bros were serious about existential risk and problems of alignment instead of attempting to form a cult of technobabble to make themselves superior and scrounge for venture capital… They’d pull the plug.

Altman is selling what he alledges he dreads more than anything: AI that would lie to you without a second (or even first) literal thought.

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If you formed this chat clique you have to lead it and not be coy about it. If I were you I would talk privately with Ann and tell her not to spew the negativity. She could possibly have a blog type “quarantine room” for venting. But you should put your best foot forward and present a friendly space. Stick to your guns about that and people who don’t want that will self select out. When Ann is ranting you’ll look chill in comparison and maybe you can talk to her about who you both want to flirt with. You made a colleague chat, you have to, err, chat with your colleagues.

Hang on a second. Orson Scott Card is a homophobic motherfuck. What’d NS do that is so bad?

I would say Poe’s Law isn’t in effect here as the majority of 196 instance users (posters NOT lurkers) are anti-heirarchy as a soft prerequisite to jiving and understanding the humor.

I’ll say this, have we tried Yassifying the Kleptocracy? I mean have we run the numbers???

Well that certainly is some words you just said. Enjoy your naivete while you still can. I hope Sweden is always so wonderfully safe feeling. That must be nice.

The OP is merely a joke. Probably. 196 is an intensely left-leaning shitposting culture.

Here in Sweden you won’t get arrested for protesting peacefully.

If you want to stage a protest you need permission from the police, they are required to grant it to you unless it can’t be done safely, then they can suggest a different location for the protest.

Wow I hope Sweden never has any sort of rightward turn that would suddenly leave your “right to protest” (“peacefully”) (with mum’s permission) very much in the air. I hope you never have to fear they ID’d you at an event where the police kettled things from a protest into a survival riot. I hope you never have to decide whether to pop your phone in a faraday bag. Take the battery out. Never need to hide your face from a government fond of making lists. Never fear gait recognition following you home thru a hundred CCTV cameras. The raid that comes in the night when you realize your freedoms were quite illusory. I hope your protest movement isn’t demonized by the media or arbitrarily designated a terrorist organization.

Fuck your shaming. We don’t protest for glory and clout. We protest because we are human. And some of us land immediately in the crosshairs unless we try to protect ourselves. Am I being hyperbolic? Ask the environmental movement the UK branded as terroristic for highlighting how close to extinction we are. Ask Cop City protestors. Ask Palestinian supporters in Germany. Ask BLM protestors who did nothing illegal and ended up in black vans being intimidated.

Grow up. Freedom isn’t free.

Me when I’m Scorn Guy

Latin is a gay language for academics and naval gazers

• Borderline illiterate bigots

99% of democracies give up right before hitting it big and concentrating supreme power in the hands of a benevolent dictator.

Examine this change of logic. The democrats want a mandate from the people before they act antidemocratically? So that they can maintain the highground when they do an inherently lowdown thing? And they could do it now but they want a blue election first? Are you a snake eating its own tail?

But for Deus Ex, we’ve got… I don’t know, Cyberpunk 2077, maybe? But the whole open world thing doesn’t really fit in with the usual gameplay loop of Deus Ex. There are a fair amount of great cyberpunk games, but none seem to really scratch that immersive sim itch. I guess Prey is pretty close as well (in addition to its System Shock influences), if you consider some of the body/power upgrades, but it’s not all that similar thematically.

Check out Cruelty Squad by Ville Kallio on Steam. Aesthetically and spiritually it scrys into the future on the same level Deus Ex did and delivers an even more dire prophecy that feels as disturbingly prescient. It takes the open ended levels of DX and adds insane verticality and mind bending traversal. It plays more tactically than Deus Ex but the augment system is really rewarding and enables the player to munchkin their way to their target.

You may notice it looks artistically like a 13th century Christian piece with a Jackson Pollock splotch of New Years Eve stomach soup all over the canvas. I retort that so did DX1 most of the time. The CS playerbase refers to our ability to parse and navigate this style of level design and eclectic color composition as the ‘CEO mindset.’

But seriously I am a big Deus Ex enjoyer and other than Thief nothing has come as close to the full breadth of experience that world evokes in me. It is both terrible and beautiful to behold.

The left: Man… I’m never gonna fully get over having gone through puberty for the gender that I feel doesn’t represent me. I wanted to take my own life at times and I had no support. I see that people who started transitioning younger have better results passing and are generally safer for it. I wish we could talk about this openly.

The medical community: It should be alright to delay puberty for trans kids on the same ground we delay puberty for cis kids if there’s a developmental problem, I guess. I don’t think we’ll be providing any life altering surgeries until adulthood however except in maybe extreme circumstances. We’ll see if there’s a suicide risk maybe.

The right: THE LEFT R GONNA CHOP OFF MY SONS DICK AND MY DAUGHTERS TITS THE MOMENT NEXT PRIDE MONTH ROLLS AROUND, I HAVE SEEN IT WRIT IN THE SKY, I HAVE SEEN IT SPELT UPON THE WIND, THERE WILL BE HORMONE GAS ATTACKS, THERE WILL BE ROVING GENDER-SWAPPER MACHINES, MY LINE WILL END IN DEGENERACY

The leadership: This is factually correct. Let us begin the Great Work. Alexa play Yhorm the Giant Dark Souls III OST by Yuka Kitamura.

Centrists: I am just not sure where the line is, y’know?

By the same token gait recognition.

Counterpoint: My sibling had their goddamn desktop ransomewared by this thing when they dared to uninstall it. It isn’t privacy nerd sensabilities, Windows now behaves like malware under certain opaque conditions and at unpredictable intervals. This was four years ago on Win 10. How great do you think non savvy people are about clicking things they don’t understand anyway and essentially springing a trap?

Thank you! ERR UH Long days and pleasant nights, stranger!