Father, Hacker (Information Security Professional), Open Source Software Developer, Inventor, and 3D printing enthusiast.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • The only time I’ve seen a super conservative person change their beliefs was when two of their fundamental beliefs came in conflict with each other and the conservative side became a problem: An empathy-free asshole I’m acquainted with had a grandchild that was immunocompromised (no idea if it was permanent or what caused it) when COVID hit.

    He wore masks everywhere except his house. He told me that that the people at his church “insulted him” and “practically kicked him out” for refusing to remove his mask. He basically made the decision at that point in his life that maybe these people weren’t the best people after all and he stopped going to church.


  • I’m going to take a guess here and say that the majority of evangelicals (which is the largest block of conservatives right now) do take issue with boob jobs. They also don’t like it when girls cut their hair short or wear non-feminine clothing, to give other related examples. At least, that’s the evangelicals here in Florida that I know.

    There’s varying degrees of just how much deviation from their cultural norms are allowed (I’d argue that’s what defines how “conservative” they are). This is why conservatives can get extremely upset when LGBTQ+ people are allowed to be themselves in public… Because it normalizes them.

    Conservatives know that if it becomes normal for their kids to see/meet gay dads/moms, trans people, or other non-binary people on a regular basis the very definition of what they believe to be “normal” will be swept right out from under them in the minds of their children. The very foundation of what they believe won’t be passed on to the next generation.

    That’s why conservatives are obsessed with children “being exposed” to LGBTQ+ topics/people in school. They know that if their kid grows up around completely harmless LGBTQ+ people that their kid will just naturally start to believe that these people are harmless (because they are), normal, and “no big deal”. That’s their worst nightmare!

    I’d go so far as to suggest that it is impossible (today) for someone to claim they’re a conservative while simultaneously claiming that LGBTQ+ people are born that way. There’s nothing conservative about that (it’s beyond cognitive dissonance). Furthermore, it goes completely against the Bible’s teachings that women are property! Property can’t just up and change itself into a man/actual thinking person!








  • Pro tip: If you’re just a regular office worker and your employer messages you or sends you an email after work hours just don’t respond to it until you’re back at work. If your boss gives you shit about it that’s the best-case scenario! Why? Because then you can demand that they document in writing that they expect you to work when you’re not at work and you can send that shit right to HR (who’s job is to protect the company from idiots like your boss). It could be a promotion opportunity to fill the void left by your fired boss 😁.

    Always demand everything in writing. An email or instant message is fine! Bosses know that making (young) people work after hours is sketchy AF and will suddenly decide that it’s way too risky to abuse you anymore. This isn’t the type of thing that’ll hurt your career! If it were that’s not the type of place you want to be working at anyway.

    Remember folks: The most sure-fire way to make more money and get a promotion is to go work somewhere else. “Rising up the ranks” just doesn’t happen anymore and raises will never be as much as you’d get going to work somewhere else.

    Big companies really don’t like managers pushing people around, making them do more work than they’re paid for. Not only is it a potential very expensive lawsuit (and really bad PR) it’s also an indicator that they’ve got an employee (your boss/manager) that likes to bend the rules and potentially do illegal shit. If they start digging around they often find the very same people who abuse their employees are the ones that embezzle money, make false expense claims, form secret partnerships with their friends outside of work (i.e. corrupt vendor selection), etc.

    Small companies are a different story and medium-sized companies often just haven’t learned such lessons yet or are just such terrible employers that they just expect extremely high turnover (and take advantage of it by abusing people for as long as they can).


  • In 2002 I was working for an Internet company (Genuity), had a cell phone in my pocket at all times (this one: https://mobile-review.com/phonemodels/sonyericsson/image/t68i-1.jpg), and had cable broadband (1.5MBs) at home. When I bought my first house (condo) at the time I specifically selected a location that had high speed Internet because being without it would be unbearable! I remember telling the real estate agent that I would only buy a house that had high speed Internet and she looked at me like I was crazy! I’m sure she was thinking, “Like that’s important. What a weirdo!”

    I guess what I’m saying here is that the people mentioned in the article were out-of-touch scrubs! It wasn’t as bad as they described. My friends and I would all chat with each other online to coordinate and we’d show up at various events/locations (people’s houses, concerts, theaters, etc) with tickets already paid for (usually over the phone though because not every venue had it but TicketMaster let you buy tickets over the phone since like the 1980s).

    It definitely did feel like a VIP experience a lot of the time showing up with your group of friends (all in our early 20s)–bypassing the often enormous ticket line–then proceeding to walk up to the bouncer/ticket people and just giving them our names which they would verify by checking a printed list that was attached to a clipboard with a white sheet of blank paper over it to hide the names (so people couldn’t just glance at it and say, “that’s me!”). A few years after 2002 such tickets finally started getting bar codes and it became a bit less, “VIP” hehe.

    What I’m saying was that all these things and more were available to the people in the article and they weren’t expensive “luxury” features that only the rich could afford. They were available and advertised extensively for everyone to use. It’s just that these folks in the article were just like soooooo many people at the time and just refused to explore or try things out on the Internet. They saw URLs (and AOL keywords, LOL) in ads and it probably didn’t even register in their brains. They were probably also afraid to buy things online (a very, very common attitude back then).

    These people were the early Gen Xers that would be dumbfounded when you’d ask them for their address to get to their party/event/whatever and you’d have to interrupt them when they’d start rambling off complicated landmark-based directions, “No… I just need the address.” (because you were going to just print out directions using MapQuest). Then you’d be the only person to show up to the party on time because you were the only one that didn’t have to navigate via landmarks (“Go three stoplights and make a right after the Sunoco station…”).








  • Can you do us all a favor and blog about your experience setting this up and running it somewhere? I’ll follow you 👍

    I was thinking about making my own Federated kbin-like server (writing the code from scratch) as an academic exercise. I’m a full stack developer and it’s the perfect thing to hone my non-embedded (full std) Rust skills and freshen my JavaScript skills.

    I have several side projects going on at the moment (that I’ve been working on constantly for almost three years straight) and I need a mental break from that. I’d love to learn what’s a pain in the ass VS what’s good from a semi-layman’s perspective so I can make something better.


  • I may be just a pie-in-the-sky optimist but I think the duplicate communities thing will die down eventually. Natural selection will do it’s thing and we’ll all eventually settle in specific communities on specific instances.

    Based on the nature of life itself all living things become specialized over time. This includes creatures, jobs, products, communities, etc. So what’s likely to happen is some communities will die out or be abandoned while others will thrive and yet others will simply become more specialized.

    Hypothetical example: /m/gifs on Kbin might become the place to find perfect loops and high quality/serious stuff while /m/gifs on some other instance might become the place for animated silliness.