FaceDeer

Yeah. It’s disheartening when obvious jokes like that are missed by so many.

Think of all the astronomers he put out of work. :(

It is possible to dislike something without believing it should be erased from existence. This is really extreme black-and-white thinking that isn’t remotely realistic.

Same here. There have been tons of technologies coming out recently where my main reaction is “awesome, I can’t wait to use the heck out of that.” If anything my biggest sigh comes from “but I bet the comment threads are going to be littered with tedious doomers moaning about how it’s going to enable the awful stuff they’re imagining instead.”

The issue I’m taking is with:

Louis doesn’t want to improve the show, they want something else entirely.

I don’t think he’s trying to “improve the show.” He’s saying the same thing you are, that he just doesn’t think Black Mirror is a good show.

Saying “those are just mercenaries, we didn’t send them” would have also been a perfectly fine response by China. But then I suppose that would be admitting that there are Chinese people that the CCP can’t control.

There’s been plenty of negative portrayals of new technology throughout the history of sci-fi. Heck, the very first one is usually considered to be “Frankenstein”, and it’s all about how new technology can backfire spectacularly.

I think the problem is not the existence of negative portrayals, but the absence of positive ones. There aren’t a lot of shows for folks who want to see a positive view of the future, where technology solves problems rather than always being the source of them. That used to be the domain of things like Star Trek but modern Star Trek is a pale shadow that no longer paints a particularly rosy view of humanity’s future. The Orville took up that mantle, I suppose, but it’s stretched pretty thin.

It doesn’t “show the future”, though. This is exactly what frustrates me so much about online discourse and shows like Black Mirror, some new technology comes along and people go “that’s a terrible idea, haven’t you seen Black Mirror?” As if Black Mirror was some kind of rigorous scientific study that shows the One True Way that the future will unfold.

It’s an entertainment show. Its purpose is to draw in viewers and keep them watching. You don’t do that with episodes that show a new technology coming out and everything turning out fine, you do it by presenting a scary, compelling narrative.

We don’t get freaked out in real life by summer camps and restrict the availability of machetes and other bladed instruments near them because of what happened in that documentary series “Friday the 13th.” It’s fiction. Plot trumps realism.

I don’t think he’s proposing changing Black Mirror itself, he’s saying the same thing you’re saying - that it’s just not a good show.

Like, if I was writing an article criticizing the prevalence of torture porn in modern entertainment, I wouldn’t say “they should release a Saw movie where Jigsaw forces his victims to undergo nonviolent counselling.” That wouldn’t be a Saw movie, it’d be a weird parody of one. I’d just say “Saw is an example of the sort of thing I’m complaining about.”

Ah yes, since the one thing that markets truly love is stability, and moving production from one country to another requires long-term planning, this will surely help with that.

And any qualified workers you do have could randomly disappear to El Salvador at any moment.

It’s afraid.

But didn’t Trump tell them not to retaliate? I’m pretty sure Trump told them not to retaliate. I don’t understand.

I don’t consider it something to be “fixed.” I like that the Fediverse is fully decentralized, with no authority over who gets “in” and who doesn’t. Once you’ve got some kind of authority that can decide who’s allowed on which instances, with some kind of global registry of individual users that can exclude you if the wrong people don’t like you, we’re basically back to being Reddit with some fancy extra steps.

Sure, it risks allowing assholes to continue getting new accounts. But we already have a Reddit, I’d rather try something new even if that comes with downsides.

The problem is that Trump doesn’t understand what “tariffs” are, and thinks that a trade imbalance is somehow a tariff. Trying to comply would be like Mattingly trying to trim his sideburns.

Reddit is able to do global IP bans. The Fediverse is not able to do that because there’s no “global”.

“Asshole” is a broad term. It includes racists, abrasive personalities, anger-management problems, and so forth. Ie, people who have a tendency to get banned from other places. It’s not just trolls.

Being banned from Reddit is a unitary action. They can’t get back into Reddit, they’re just gone. Whereas in the Fediverse you can just go to a different instance and sign up afresh each time you get banned. This is part of the Fediverse’s design. And so I am concerned that the Fediverse will accumulate the worst users.

One thing that has been concerning me lately is that the Fediverse is being treated as a refuge for people who get banned on Reddit or other social media. Sure, sometimes those bans are based on arbitrary power tripping nonsense. But people actually do get banned for being assholes, and so I’ve got some worry that this is distilling the population of the Fediverse in an unfortunate direction.

At the root of this comment chain is a proposal to have laws passed about this.

People can set up their web servers however they like. It’s on them to do that, it’s their web servers. I don’t think there should be legislation about whether you’re allowed to issue perfectly ordinary HTTP requests to a public server, let the server decide how to respond to them.

Pedro Duque wrote a diary entry in orbit in a Soyuz capsule using an ordinary ballpoint pen specifically to disprove this. Don’t know what went wrong with your pen, cheap ballpoint pens fail sometimes regardless of what orientation they’re in.