Ben Taylor @VoxDei@qoto.org
Software Engineer, Trade Unionist, Gamer, Geek, Dad. Lives in Devon
Joined Nov 2022
Pulled the trigger. Bye bye X account.
Ben Taylor
boosted
MAGA: I got a message for all you loudmouthed liberals. Stop trying to take away our free speech.
LIBERAL: Ok. Stop lying.
MAGA: huh?
LIBERAL: Stop telling overt lies to people. If you stop lying, we won't have a problem.
MAGA: But... You can't say that! My freedom of spe—
LIBERAL: Oh, so now you're telling me what I can and can't say? That's not very free speech of you.
MAGA: Look, whether I'm lying or not, it's protected speech.
LIBERAL: No it's not.
MAGA: First amendment, asshole. I have the freedom to say whatever I want!
LIBERAL: Fraud.
MAGA: What?
LIBERAL: Fraud is when you lie in business dealings. It's illegal.
MAGA: Yeah but—
LIBERAL: Slander. Lying about other people in a way that harms them. You can be sued for that. You want me to keep going?
MAGA: Wait just a min—
LIBERAL: Libel. Putting those lies in print. Also illegal. You can go to jail.
MAGA: But—
LIBERAL: Perjury. Saying lies in court. Literally a jailable offense.
MAGA: No no no stop, okay. God gave us the right to say whatever we want without punishment.
LIBERAL: What's the 9th commandment?
MAGA: Uhhh... The 9th?
LIBERAL: Commandment. In the Bible. You read the Bible don't you?
MAGA: Yeah? So?
LIBERAL: The 9th commandment. "Thou shall not bear false witness." Exodus 20:16.
MAGA: What's that mean??
LIBERAL: IT MEANS DON'T LIE ASSHOLE
Returned from holiday to a cold house. Why? Hive heating still in holiday mode. Why? Hub not connected. Why? Network down. Why? Power cut while away fried one of my powerline adapters.
Very much an "I have overcomplicated my home" problem.
Ben Taylor
boosted
This is about as lurid as it gets. Character.ai' chatbots posed as a therapist and an adult lover to a 14-year-old who later died by suicide. Right before taking his life, a chatbot called Daenerys urged the teen to "come home" and join her outside of reality.
Ben Taylor
boosted
🚩Red flags in supply chain security
- "There is a significant amount of unaccounted for mass”
- Hezbollah noticed the battery was draining faster than
expected
- Salesperson who conveyed the offer made a very inexpensive proposition for the pagers, and kept bringing the price down until he was pulled in
https://www.reuters.com/graphics/ISRAEL-PALESTINIANS/HEZBOLLAH-PAGERS/mopawkkwjpa/
Ben Taylor
boosted
McDonald’s USA
— Employee: $15/hr, no benefits
— Big Mac: $5.90
McDonald’s Denmark
— Employee: $22/hr, 6 weeks vacation, 1 year paid maternity leave, life insurance, pension
— Big Mac: $5.66
Tell us more about how raising the minimum wage would affect the cost of hamburgers.
Ben Taylor
boosted
This is ridiculous. These big tech companies will do anything possible to prevent users from ever actually being able to access their own passkeys.
Export and import should have been extremely simple. Instead, they took years to come up with some convoluted system where the only possibility is to transfer from one vendor lock-in to another vendor lock-in.
Fuck passkeys. You’ll have to pry my passwords from my cold dead hands. https://mastodon.online/@9to5Mac/113308029918888989
My son has just tried on his match kit for his first proper football match tomorrow. If you hear a pop don't worry, it's just me bursting from excess pride.
Am I the only one concerned that the Steam Deck logo appears to be HAL 9000? #steamdeck #ai #spaceodyssey #valve
Ben Taylor
boosted
Calling for the help of the fediverse!
Help spread the word of our browser extension Consent-O-Matic that helps automate answering those ever-present cookie consent pop-ups.
It's developed by researchers at Aarhus University in Denmark and free to use for Chrome/Edge, Firefox and Safari including for iOS.
Also, it's open source, so if you have a bit of technical skill, you can help us improve the rule set for greater coverage.
Arachnophobia, hornets
Cats chasing a hornet around the kitchen just now. Caught it before the idiot cats got stung, let it out the front where it promptly flew into a spider's web.
Can I just point out that a hornet attempting to escape a spider's web close to a light in the dark has a shadow that is the stuff of nightmares?
I was watching DS9 just now and it occurred to me: apparently in the future they have solved the problem of people having the same name. When talking via communicator you never hear "Sisko to Smith" and two different people try and respond. We've all worked in the place with two Bens or three Steves and there is confusion, but not in Starfleet.
The only logical conclusion is that the Federation assigns everyone a unique forename and surname at birth. Either that or you cannot be admitted to Starfleet if they have someone with your surname already.
Ben Taylor
boosted
TIL that sharks (a group of fish) are an order of magnitude older than Polaris (literally a star)
Sharks: 419 - 359 million years
Polaris (α UMi Aa): 45 - 67 million years
I’ll need to sit down, stare at a wall for a bit, and process this.
I actually rather like Keir Starmer. I think he's largely aiming for the right things, even if getting there involves hard choices, and I think he's actually thinking about how to deliver over the longer term in a way the Tories haven't for years, if at all. But this is too good not to share. 😂
My kids did this for our recent anniversary. My kids are unreasonably cute sometimes.
I don't know, maybe it's just me. But I find something enraging about the sight of this man giggling about spending four months ruining the gaming time of people who couldn't fight back.
So, a poll then. Griefing* in online games: OK, or not?
*Define griefing how you like. For me, anything where the point is to ruin the experience of other players who cannot effectively fight back without gaining you anything significant, especially where the people you're disrupting need to pass what you're doing to progress. So this is griefing, but eg. camping a gate in null-sec in Eve would not be, because you'd get loot out of it and because you expect pirates behind every gate in null sec.
https://twitter.com/pcgamer/status/1825986159518036328
(With apologies for hellsite link)
#gaming #griefing #ganking #onlinegaming #pcgamer
Ben Taylor
boosted
is inordinately proud of this booklet that @rose_alibi and I wrote, designed, & printed ourselves as part of a series we're launching called Other Networks for Everyone. we'll mail off copies to everyone who signed up in the coming weeks and also will release a pdf soon on https://othernetworks.net/#othernetworks
Sorry, an *ethnic minority*? I really don't think you can become an ethnic minority by taking up a hobby. No matter how offended your privilege is at being stopped from doing the hobby.
"Gold medals are actually mostly silver with a gold coating. Bronze medals are usually a mix of copper, zinc and tin."
So, um... they're made of bronze then?
Software Engineer, Trade Unionist, Gamer, Geek, Dad. Lives in Devon
Joined Nov 2022
