Is saying someone doesn’t exist a criticism of them? It doesn’t sound very nice, but like, how can you criticise someone if you think they don’t exist?

Yeh it’s pretty clearly not sincere in voice. Seems like by saying ‘not satire’ they’re trying to avoid people thinking they mean the content of what the article describes isn’t sincerely true, but given how it’s written, it’s hard to conclude the author cheering on from the sidelines. Te nonchalance and unaffected language when discussing a travesty seems pretty clearly to be a device used for effect which frankly is pretty close to what gets called satire.

I ran a hackintosh for about 7 years and they didn’t care, I used an Apple account. Don’t think I had an iCloud though, maybe it makes a difference that I set up that account originally some years prior to building the hackintosh on a real mac.

I think with memes, there’s something of an implicit promise of at least some degree of comedy. I get the sentiment here about proprietary vs open source operating systems but there doesn’t really seem to be even an attempt at being funny besides maybe the way the characters are drawn which, given that as memes, they are recycled art used to establish the format, they don’t really elicit much of a laugh because there’s not even an expression of humour through the original artwork.

This isn’t really a commentary or a parallel or satire on that distinction between open source and proprietary OS installation, it’s more accurately describable as a complaint. Simply placing this complaint underneath the yes chad and crying wojak’s doesn’t really feel like a step up from a text post that says “I don’t like Windows or Mac OS because you have to pay for them and they make you sign up for and agree to things”. No one asked for my opinion I know, but I think this is a critique worth making: if you sum up your attempted meme in a bland, emotionally neutral sentence and then compare that bare sentence to its proposed meme counterpart and you can barely see the difference then maybe it’s not a meme that has to exist. The format is flexible, but you can still use traditional written words to express complex thoughts, not everything has to be meme-ified and if it’s not even funny when it is, why should it be?

It’s a tough job

I like to imagine your guest has a Lemmy account and was browsing while doing a fanless poop 💩

What would the phrase “infallibly flawed” mean? I can’t quite make those two words make sense together. Are they just using infallibly to mean something like “definitely” or “undeniably”?

It’s amazing how effectively just hearing this from someone who has firsthand insight can put it in perspective.

Further to that third point as well, there’s probably also a question simply of opportunity. You could take the Munich situation as evidence of capability, but it may also have been opportunity plus capability. Intelligence seems like it’s a pretty difficult game and perhaps the successes in operation bayonet had to do with fortunate and unlikely intelligence scoops that they have not luckedh upon this time around and can’t rely upon as a strategy. Also, while I don’t know much about the post-Munich assassinations, it sounds like they went on for over twenty years, didn’t really take out many of the actually important, directly involved individuals and a lot of the people they would have logically wanted to target successfully went in to hiding out of their reach so if the strategic goal is to behead the organisation that carried out attacks as a defensive strategy to weaken their capacity to do it again, 20 years just to take out relatively minor unimportant figures isn’t really going to work.

That said, it also looks, as many have stated, like “taking out Hamas” is more a convenient political smokescreen for a much more sinister goal so a very successful intelligence operation that rapidly took out all their leadership at once would actually run counter to their true objectives in this scenario.

Wow. That was fucked up.

I think he’s famously at least eaten a lot of McDonalds.

I can’t imagine getting worked up about it either, but then the whole mildly infuriating deliberate oxymoron turn of phrase is that it’s something that should only really be a little annoying but which nonetheless is really quite annoying. It’s a type of silent frustration where you feel it, but you don’t really express it or visibly react.

In terms of what should they have put on these screens? If they felt they absolutely had to do this or really thought it might help make people’s situations feel even a modicum of improvement, then the glib messages could maybe have focussed on something other than gratitude as their common theme. It hardly seems like the appropriate time to bring that up. By their nature, any cheesy and overly broad phrase is probably going to have a sadly ironic and patronising tone to it in the circumstances but maybe something like “hang in there” or just about anything except what they went with has got to better.

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To keep you busy so they can show up during the call and claim no one was there.

I pass butter.

Gee that Barbara sure does manage to be insightful on a lot of different topics. I try not be presumptuous but sometimes I really do feel surprised that she has so much more depth to her than her modelling career might make you think. Truly a polymath.

I don’t know how to program, but to a very limited extent can sorta kinda almost understand the logic of very short and simplistic code that’s been written for me by someone who can actually code. I tried to get to get chat GPT to write a shell script for me to work as part of an Apple shortcut. It has no idea. It was useless and ridiculously inconsistent and forgetful. It was the first and only time I used chat GPT. Not very impressed.

Given how it is smart enough to produce output that’s kind of in the area of correct, albeit still wrong and logically flawed, I would guess it could eventually be carefully prodded into making one small snippet of something someone might call “good” but at that point I feel like that’s much more an accident in the same way that someone who has memorised a lot of French vocabulary but never actually learned French might accidentally produce a coherent sentence once in a while by trying and failing 50 times before succeeding and then failing again immediately after without ever having even known.

I think you might be misunderstanding the whole advantage of the fediverse idea in the first place.

The thing is, in a scenario where it’s as big as Reddit in terms of users, most of the content on the fediverse then would be local to them so if they defederated everyone or everyone defederated them, who’d really be cut off from whom? They’d probably only be marginally less appealing to their user base who might not even know how the whole fediverse thing worked anyway.

Definitely. At least the damage could be largely limited to just that instance though. I can’t seriously imagine the people behind it letting their ideals trump profit for an extended period of time, especially with financial imperatives from the costs associated with the infrastructure required if that one instance alone had so much traffic.

Theoretically though, if it started going rancid it’d be much easier to jump ship without losing out on too much, that is unless they defederate with everyone or everyone defederates with them, either of which could be distinct possibilities. In that case, I guess you’d just have another Reddit.