Oh I agree, I just cant help but to be stunned and bewildered.

Just to give everyone a reality confirming dose of … reality…

https://apnews.com/article/trump-russia-ukraine-war-un-election-a78ecb843af452b8dda1d52d137ca893

Yes, yep, he has been saying, quite specifically the phrase ‘on day one’ since at least July of 2024.

Brand New Apartment.

Good info, but dear god what is this fever dream nonsense clipart/facebook boomer graphic?

The very early biohacking scene did indeed have a lot of insanity.

A few people definitely learned the hard way that uh, oh, maybe I shouldn’t have made an incision right there, now I have permanent nerve damage.

As for your own at home setup… yeah, you are what I would consider ‘someone who actually knows something about cybersecurity’, as opposed to the vast majority of morons who just read a buzzword or some corpo nonsense marketing and then proudly proclaim its all fine and secure because big corporation that makes a baffling amount of money from dataharvesting would never lie to me!

Restricted Item. Please ask employee for assistance.

What is this goddamned clownworld timeline we live in where David fucking Brooks is calling for a mass revolt, a literal insurrection, against the pinnacle, ultimate form of what he and his ilk have advocated for and done their level best to make a reality for longer than I’ve been alive?

I mean… at this point, fuck it, this is good news, we are gonna need as many bodies in the streets and feet on the ground, from as many backgrounds and persuasions of all kinds to have any chance at all of stopping this madness…

But Jesus Christ if this isn’t the most ‘Dog finally catches car and is disappointed’ fucking thing.

Welcome to Lemmy, I love you!

… hey are the .world mods still banning people for celebrating the death of the United Healthcare CEO?

Last time I posted a picture of the Bear Jew (from Inglorious Basterds) and said a Louisville Slugger would make Marjorie Taylor Green finally see those Jewish Space Lasers in her eyes, along with a bunch of other people posting guillotine sharpening advice, that whole comment section got nuked… that was maybe a week or two ago.

Yes, you can invent an alternate reality where the largely corporate controlled and decorum and norms obsessed Democratic party actually prosecuted everyone up to and including Trump…

… and also pretend that entire process would not be capable of being derailed by a few very Trump friendly judges… and a heavily conservative Supreme Court… that did not (in your alternate timeline) invent an insane loophole interpretation of Presidential Immunity that effectively makes it legal for them to commit any crime while in office…

Or you could accept the reality that none of that worked, the MAGAs outplayed and thus subverted the entire legal system, is now openly defying the Supreme Court irt illegally renditioning legal immigrants to an overseas concentration/death camp, that ‘the law’ (as in armed agents of the state) are now totally lawless and not even trying to follow due process or habeas corpus…

… and that this new reality doesn’t play by the now broken rules that you seem to think will save us, and that … ironically, more traditional means of dealing with an oppressive violent fascist junta should… maybe at least be able to be discussed in an indirect, non specific manner.

I used to mildly follow the biohacking scene a bit over a decade ago.

Lots of stories of DIY implanting an RFID chip into your hand or finger … and mostly a whole bunch of stories about infections, a few about ‘wait the battery died now i have to dig it out’ … basically just learning the hard way all the lessons actual medical implant designers learned 30 or 40 yeats prior.

For now, our cyberpunk dystopia is gonna be mostly low tech, inexpensive jerry rigged solutions with as little high tech as necessary.

Why do you think anyone that actually knows anything about cybersecurity laughs at the idea of having a ‘smart home’ filled with easily hackable or just self-bricking bluetooth doodads?

I saw a post a few hours ago about Seattle officially turning on its AI camera system.

People saying ah yeah, tear em down Seattle!

… these would in all likelihood be the same people that would have their phones on them while they do this, with wifi and gps and bluetooth all actively pinging out their exact identity and location to every nearby wifi hotspot/router and cell tower… and cop cars with a stingray device that acts as a mobile spoofed wifi/4g/5g man in the middle attack that sniffs all your data as it passes it back and forth to a real data source…

…unaware that gait analysis (exactly how you carry yourself when you walk or run) is a far more reliable way of fingerprinting a person than facial analysis, in the context of a surveillance system…

The simplest solutions are often the best.

Leave your phone at home, and get some glasses frames with bright IR emmitters. Not guaranteed to work against higher end cameras, but against most surveillance cameras? Bright enough IR light will just make you a giant glowing white spot.

Harder to do gait analysis on an amorphous blob.

$9.99 on Amazon, probably can find similar prices for similar stuff at a hardware store or auto supply shop.

If you wanna conserve your night vision, just find one with a weaker lamp or variable strength dial… and then wrap some red plastic wrap over the lamp.

A laser would have to be pretty strong to illuminate much more than the exact point its aimed at… meaning you either wouldn’t really gain much illumination from the laser and wouldn’t be able to see the toilet… or the laser would be so strong you’d be able to see the beam itself, and that’d wreck your night vision.

Also, for it to actually be safe to uh… install in your unit, it’d have to be made of bioinert material, medical grade stainless steel or some such, otherwise it would get infected… and if you are more of a grower than a shower, doesn’t matter what its made if, its basically going to hurt and cause damage as your willy goes from nilly to silly.

Save your junk the trouble, choom.

Because it was generated by an LLM that assumes this one to ten iteration function is the entirety of all of what the code needs to do.

Japan, more specifically, the Harajuku district of Tokyo, has a number of … very aesthetically bold subcultures, which certain people take extremely seriously.

One of which is basically exagerated 1950s American Rockabilly.

https://www.messynessychic.com/2015/01/07/the-tokyo-subculture-of-1950s-rockabilly-gangs/

A good number of these guys are in actual Rockabilly bands.

I dunno if this guy’s PS1 blocky haircut really fits into an existing subculture, or if it is a joke off of this subculture… or if it is totally unrelated to all that…

But there actually are a good number of very dedicated aesthetic subcultures in the Harajuku district, Rockabilly is one… the ‘gothic lolita’ style almost certainly came out of Harajuku… there are many other niche identity/aesthetic/lifestyle cliques.

That is what I was referring to, not just… psycho/rockabilly generally around the world.

I can count to ten in English (native), Japanese (did Karate for about a decade) and Spanish (took classes in middle and high school).

I can … read and listen to Spanish and maybe understand at about a 2nd or 3rd grade level… very much out of practice.

I would not say I can speak Japanese or understand it … basically at all, unless the conversation entirely consists of either counting, or using nouns describing Karate forms, lol.

The first time I dated … a combination weeabo and owns her own horses, horse girl, who was actually taking Japanese in college to major in it…

She asked me a very grammatically basic question in Japanese, a yes no question…

And I responded ‘Osu!’… and then quickly learned that that is not a standard Japanese word for ‘yes’, that would be ‘Hai’, and that Osu … basically only contextually makes sense in the context of a dojo or some other sports/military type setting.

Apparently in proper/normal? Japanese it is a casual greeting amongst martial arts practitioners… but I was literally drilled to say it as an enthusiastic, affirmative response to any command.

EDIT: Also, this will sound insane, but I swear to god this actually happened: Many years after the aforementioned clarification from my at the time gf… I later encountered a man who told me he was … a yakuza, specifically a yakushi… we chatted for hours, he showed me how one of his fingers had been severely busted at the knuckle.

He explained to me that… there had been a fuckup on his part, but his… direct superior decided to basically accept some of the blame for the fuckup of this guy I met, and struck him with the blunt side of the blade instead of the sharp side… and then exiled him.

Which was why he was in America, and could no longer safely return to Japan.

Anyway, he explained to me that the reason why… most Japanese say ‘yon’ instead of ‘shi’ to mean ‘4’ … is because ‘shi’ is also the character/sound that… basically means ‘death’.

Which then circled around to why he referred to himself as a ‘yakushi’.

As he explained it to me, it meant that he had both dealt, and been sparred from death.

… I have no idea if what this guy was saying is actually true, if he actually was a yakuza… but he did tell me these things and seemed very serious about them.

It is astonishingly easy to get basically any LLM to output a simple iteration from one to ten function in all of those languages, and more.

Here’s Assembly:

    newline db 0xA  ; Newline character

section .bss
    number resb 1  ; Reserve a byte for the number

section .text
    global _start

_start:
    mov ecx, 1  ; Start with 1
    mov edx, 10 ; End with 10

loop_start:
    cmp ecx, edx  ; Compare ecx with edx
    jg loop_end   ; If ecx > edx, jump to loop_end

    ; Convert number to ASCII
    add ecx, '0'  ; Convert number to ASCII
    mov [number], ecx  ; Store the ASCII value in number

    ; Print the number
    mov eax, 4        ; sys_write system call
    mov ebx, 1        ; File descriptor 1 is stdout
    mov ecx, number   ; Pointer to the number
    mov edx, 1        ; Number of bytes to write
    int 0x80          ; Call kernel

    ; Print newline
    mov eax, 4        ; sys_write system call
    mov ebx, 1        ; File descriptor 1 is stdout
    mov ecx, newline  ; Pointer to the newline character
    mov edx, 1        ; Number of bytes to write
    int 0x80          ; Call kernel

    sub ecx, '0'  ; Convert ASCII back to number
    inc ecx        ; Increment the number
    jmp loop_start  ; Jump back to the start of the loop

loop_end:
    ; Exit the program
    mov eax, 1        ; sys_exit system call
    xor ebx, ebx      ; Exit code 0
    int 0x80          ; Call kernel

Here’s FORTRAN

program iterate_from_one_to_ten
    implicit none
    integer :: i

    ! Loop from 1 to 10
    do i = 1, 10
        print *, i
    end do
end program iterate_from_one_to_ten

Here’s COBOL

PROGRAM-ID. IterateFromOneToTen.

ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.

DATA DIVISION.
WORKING-STORAGE SECTION.
    01  WS-Counter PIC 9(2) VALUE 1.

PROCEDURE DIVISION.
    PERFORM VARYING WS-Counter FROM 1 BY 1 UNTIL WS-Counter > 10
        DISPLAY WS-Counter
    END-PERFORM.

    STOP RUN.

It … may have been upgraded to ‘death camp’ now.

Satellite images… seem to show a massive pile of human bodies and a giant pool of blood in a courtyard.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/el-salvador-cecot-satellite-images

(ironically this is actually the most comprehensive breakdown of these images and discussion around them I can find)

The courtyard does not always have … these visual features. You cannot directly pull it up via a search for CECOT in google Earth, but the exact coordinates will still get you there… and view sat images by a timeline… and this uh… what certainly looks like a massive pile of bodies and pool of blood… are not always there.

I will be shocked if the Dem establishment doesn’t run Newsom and do their damndest to ratfuck AOC like they did with Bernie.

Sure, there’s a lot of time between now and a theoretical 2028 presidential cycle…

But I have learned to set expectations pessimistically and be surprised in the optimism direction, not the other way around.

As someone with an actual Econ degree:

… Yeah, a whole lot of ‘technical signals’ aka, chart reading that a lot of ‘retail’ (ie, amateur) day traders use… is basically astrology.

Its not quite as absolutely nonsensical as astrology, which is just absolutely 100% bullshit… like, a 50 MA crossing a 200 MA downward… definitely does indicate that stock is not having a great time right now… but as far as the “power” of such a signal to reliably indicate future trends?

No, basically no. There are some technical indicators that have a slightly higher correlation coefficient of being a reliable leading indicator, but the correlations are not really that strong… there are just way too many other confounding variables.

…

Even the quants who work for hedge funds… who use some of the most advanced and complex mathematical models in the world to try to untangle all of those confounding effects…

…well, they are on average, over a decently long timescale, no better, or even slightly worse than random chance at picking stocks, bonds, a portfolio that will grow more than just the average.

Part of this is because… if a technical trading strategy that actually works to generate outsized gains… is actually figured out by one of the big boy quants… the other big boy quants will notice this and reverse engineer it from analyzing what their rival is doing.

Then, once all the big boys are using the same strategy… well now it doesn’t return outsized gains anymore.

… Which is why all your 401ks are basically index funds for their stock component, which is just a weighted average basket of whichever particular market, usually the DJIA or SP500 as the Nasdaq is historically a bit more volatile.

…

Now, all that being said… one arguably ‘technical indicator’ that always has been correct in the last 100 years… is when the bond yield curve inverts… the economy and stock market generally suffer a downturn roughly proportional to the time and magnitude of the bond yield curve inversion… soon after or right as the bond yield curve uninverts.

Except for right now, the last few years.

We have now, in the last 4 or 5 years, had 3 periods of yield curve inversion, 2 uninversions… and the broader economy has technically not yet entered into a recession, a period of negative GDP growth.

But it looks like we are heading now for basically something akin to the Great Depression, as the latest inversion is pretty widely being interpreted as ‘investors no longer see the US Bonds as the defacto save haven, the USD as the defacto world currency’… which means the dollar will devalue as demand for it goes down… which means even if the tariffs went away and never came back, all our imports would be more expensive… and our exports won’t be worth as much… and our external debt to other countries will become even more onerous…

And we are kind of massively reliant on importing material things and exporting services or non physical ‘products’.

(Great work Mr. Trump -.-)

So… yeah you can’t really make a day trading strategy out of that.

…

Beyond all that, its probably also worth mentioning that GDP per capita is not a reliable measure of actual wellbeing of the population of a country when it has enormous wealth disparity.

Ah, I was using the uh… food industry sense of the term (which is admittedly a fuzzy definition), not the chemistry definition.

Yay for domain dependent meanings!

A foot like this is a blend of decorative and functional, imo.

You end up with more surface area than if you had just gone with a straight column, and that helps with stability, slightly lessens the pressure.

Many modern tables or desks have… much less ornate footpad type structures, if the thing itself is quite heavy, or intended to hold a decent amount of weight.

Of course… I have no way of knowing if this old… desk? table? whatever it is, was intentionally designed with that in mind, but the function is still there, at least to some degree.