So you're saying you want a federated wiki that uses a blockchain??? Genius.

Kidding aside, you're absolutely right. Wikipedia is one of the very few if not ONLY examples of centralized tech that ISN'T absolute toxic garbage. Is it perfect? No. From what I understand, humans are involved in it, so, no, it's not perfect.

If you want to federate some big ol toxic shit hole, Amazon, Netflix, any of Google's many spywares -- there's loads of way more shitty things we would benefit from ditching.

Edit: the "federated Netflix" -- I know it sounds weird, but I actually think it would be really cool. Think of it more like Nebula+YouTube: "anyone" (anyone federated with other instances) can "upload" videos, and subcription fees go mostly to the creator with a little going to The Federation. Idk the payment details, that would be hard, but no one said beating Netflix would be easy.

And federated Amazon -- that seems like fish in a barrel, or low hanging fruit, whichever you prefer. Complicated and probably a lot more overhead, but not conceptually challenging.

(transcribed from a series of tweets) - @iamragesparkle

I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you. So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, "no. get out."

And the dude next to me says, "hey i'm not doing anything, i'm a paying customer." and the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, "out. now." and the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, I noticed

Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, "you didn't see his vest but it was all nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them."

And i was like, ohok and he continues.

"you have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it's always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don't want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too.

And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it's too late because they're entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.

And i was like, 'oh damn.' and he said "yeah, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people."

And then he went back to ignoring me. But I haven't forgotten that at all.

Cylons being manipulated by other cylons doesn't absolve them of guilt.

BSG did have a few instances of the reverse of OP's question tho -- where the "good guys" turned out to be bad" -- trying to say this without spoilers; it's a 20 year old show but ffs of you haven't seen it, go see it now.

• the (temporary) new admiral
• several main characters during the part where they live on the dirty planet
• a very specific set of seven main characters (wink wink) ... .and more,..

And there's one specific example of the full 360 -- a character that starts good, turns bad, but turns out they were actually good all along. I won't give the name, but they were passing messages to the resistance.

That show was awesome.

One note tho, on the topic generally: flipping character alignments is a frequent pre-shark-jump thing, and is often bad writing. In BSG, tho, all of the "flips" are pre-planned, or at least 100% true to their character (eg the 360 example above).

I'm not sure it was ever accurate for people who weren't already conservative.

It makes a lot more sense that, as you get older, you stop growing and learning, so as society progresses, your formerly progressive views become commonplace and eventually anachronistic.

(That's 100% what happened to my mother, who was a hippie, literally flowers in her hair, and now "just doesn't really get the whole trans thing")

And, if a person was progressive, but had some secret conservative or regressive values, those values come into sharper relief when their other views become commonplace -- and, as you get older, you're less interested in hiding your flaws and/or shameful values, so they come out more.

(That's what happened with my dad, he was in folk music groups in the 70s and then became a doctor and didn't like the idea of poor people getting some of his money (even though it was those same programs that kept his mother afloat after his father didn't come back from Korea).)

Raping multiple children while supposedly being the spiritual leader of a community: sideways job transfer.

Counterpoint: losers of presidential elections have been president as often as not in the past 20 years

Counterpoint, the only way you'll be able to write efficient and clean code, that's both terse and readable, that earns the respect of influencers and CTOs alike, is with the Happy Hacking Keyboard, Type S. It's $300, but you're serious about coding, aren't you? And you'll need some after market keycaps; the stock ones are decent -- dye sub PBT -- but you'll look like a noob, you'll need to get a few sets of colorful blanks and create a pattern from them that defines your coding aesthetic. You have a color scheme that defines your coding aesthetic, right? If not, you need to take care of that, before you even write a single line of code.

I'm just kidding, literally anything. I don't even use one, I just use a mouse, since I'm just copying and pasting from chatGPT anyway -- or, I used to, back when I was a junior dev. Now I just use a magnetic needle and a steady hand

Look, if you didn't want to be price gouged, you shouldn't have paid those high prices! Vote with your wallet!

(For those who think I might be serious, I'm not. Voting with your wallet isn't democratic, it's literally plutocratic.)

Kidding aside, there's a clip of some grocery store chain CEO talking about how they will raise their prices as high as the market will bear - it's chilling, but, like, in the USA, it's the law - it would literally be illegal if they didn't.

"Kill your son."

"What...?"

"Do it, prove to me that you care more about doing what I say than you do about your own son."

"Are you serious? That's horrible."

"Fucking do it. You want to spend infinite lifetimes in permanent anguish? Kill him. Now. Cut him open on that big flat rock over there. Gut him with a big fuck off knife, like a sword or something. Slice him up."

"But he's my son, I live him."

"Sharpen the knife first then. Kill him, or I kill you, and him, and the rest of your family."

"Ok, but, ffs, this is insane..."

"Haha I was just foolin, you don't have to. I was just joshin. Just joshin with ya."

"Should I... Do you want me to kill my son or..."

"WTF no! I was just messing around. But seriously don't ever disobey me or you're fucking done."

The whole point of a lifetime appointment is that they can abandon all political concerns once they're in the SCOTUS - so they don't have to be political. And I've seen that happen - while they obviously stay conservative or progressive, they tend to drift away from an alignment with the parties - with exceptions, obviously.

But, as with all other branches of the US government, it's becoming clear that we've exited the era of being able to trust our leadership to support the Constitution and represent the people.

(For me, it wasn't even Trump that snapped me out of that mindset. It was when they were talking about outlawing congressional insider trading. One of the Republicans said, out loud and in public, that the notion of prohibiting congressional sick trading was off the table, because it was a core part of the job. He said something like, "half of us wouldn't be here" - as though that was a bad thing.)

It's like not knowing what Bob Vance does.

There's a gaping and dangerous misunderstanding in there. Having money or being successful under capitalism doesn't mean you don't see its flaws. The idea that rich people can't be communists is like saying that only gay people can support gay rights.

Believing that the world would be a better place if we pooled our resources has nothing to do with whether you created an operating system that all of global computing relies on.