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Stores like CVS are now making employees paid $7.25 an hour wear police body cams to stop someone from stealing a $2 tube of toothpaste.
  • I thought they don't want line employees to stop shoplifters because it costs them enormously in insurance and lawsuits if the employees get hurt? did the courts rule that it's all on the workers if they want the job now? not that they won't eventually, just asking if it already happened.

  • Note Taking: What's Your Strategy
  • I don't, it takes more mental energy than it's worth, personally. I need to focus on what I'm reading or hearing or I'll learn nothing and reading my notes won't help. it's an ADHD coping strategy though so I don't recommend it for anyone else. if you're in the group of people who need to ignore that advice, you already know that and don't need my permission.

  • Final boss of Quora
  • they're supposed to all be versions of that one, it's just not always very easy to see how - joke was mainly about that. category theory calls things compact if they're "small" in a very particular sense. algebraic compactness also has nothing to do with the topological notion, at least on the surface (abelian group that's a direct summand of every group containing it as a pure subgroup). basically, every area of math where the topological notion makes no sense will invariably call something compact eventually, because mathematicians can't resist.

    sometimes if you squint you can see how it relates back to the topological notion but frequently it's anything but obvious if you don't already understand the field - which means when you're trying to work things out for yourself, you just have to treat it like one more definition of the same word until you finally get it one day.

    I think it's easier if you have a prof who can just make the analogy clear from the start.

  • Final boss of Quora
  • it's worse than different languages. they use the same words to mean entirely different things. so you can say stuff from the same lexicon that means entirely different things to different mathematicians. there are supposed to be analogies that help you translate but jfc I swear to god if I hear one more definition of compactness I'm going to cry. no I'm not going to learn more category theory to understand how I can use a sheaf to translate the different notions because that also doesn't mean what I think it means. shut up shut up shut up words mean things. next you're going to tell me red is blue because color theory staaaahp

    self-teaching math is a pain in the ass

  • What's white's best move?
  • hmm I thought there was checkmate because the queen is all but trapped. h5 - king can either take or back up to h7, either way rg3 traps the king on the h file... and now I see the problem. if the king takes the pawn, it's not quite trapped because it can keep moving up and down the h file. ok, guess you do have to actually take the queen first.

  • We shouldn't have to work 40 hours a week to afford a basic life. We do because our currency is constantly losing value. This is by design.
  • yes, this is true. no, this isn't why wages haven't kept up with productivity growth or why you must work 40 hours to sustain yourself. you have to work because profit earned must increase and paying you even one iota more than you need to be able to show up to work again tomorrow is a loss of profit. if they could make you work 80 hours a week or 160, they would in heartbeat.

    thankfully, this is outlawed because labor movements of the past fought to enshrine in law a limit on how much you can be forced to work and set a minimum bar for how much they can pay you. these laws are under fire - I explore why in the rest of this reply - and will be repealed eventually if labor does not resist collectively.

    however, the rate of profit always decreases on a long enough timescale because of dead labor (technology, machines, etc), inter-capitalist competition - capitalists will steal profit from each other if there's more to be had - and because infinite growth is impossible so eventually externalities will always overcome the creation of new capital.

    consequently, capital accumulates in the hands of the capital-owning class - an ever-shrinking group of them, at that - and this continues until you, the worker, make so little that you cannot actually show up to work the next day - the loss of social reproduction. reproduction here doesn't only refer to progeny but also feeding, clothing, housing, etc. yourself and your family, the meeting of the basic necessities that allow you to continue working, including your health - physical and mental. capital eternally strives to reduce what it must subsidize on your behalf as ensuring you can take better care of yourself reduces profits. a capitalist that makes more profit outcompetes and drives out of business all others who choose to make less profit, eventually.

    this is also why capitalism has cyclical recessions, a fact predicted in the 1870s and termed crises of capitalism, when capital has accumulated in too few hands, profit can no longer be made, and workers struggle to feed themselves. you're just noticing Marx's second law - the law of capital accumulation.

  • Ruffled gives his thoughts on hexbear
  • I'm afraid it's metastasized and already terminal: Hexbear Derangement Syndrome

  • Locked
    Bulletins and News Discussion from May 27th to June 2nd, 2024 - The Virgin France vs the Chad Sahel - COTW: Chad
  • I love days like today where my brain goes "we're having a good day, let's be high too", no drugs required. at least it waited until after work so I don't have to explain why I'm so giggly. like weed, I don't even notice until I stand up and go wheeee. wish it would ask permission first.

    but seriously, kinda tripping apropos of nothing. it's bizarre. at least it's a nice body high this time. stg my body/brain makes too many cannabinoids sometimes. it feels exactly like a low/mid dose delta-9 gummy. it's a little worrying cause THC/anything close enough is a seizure trigger for me. might be in for a rough night.

  • Major breakthrough
  • amusingly, I realized recently that I've utterly forgotten how to do long division and had to work it back out based on vague memories. now you have me wondering if I need to check addition and multiplication too... it's been... awhile... since I've had to do much beyond quick mental math in my head.

  • Major breakthrough
  • fwiw, commutativity didn't really get specifically called out by mathematicians until they adopted some kind of symbolic representation (which happened at vastly different times in different places). without algebra, there's not much reason to spell it out, even if you happen to notice the pattern, and it's even harder to prove it. (actually... it's absurdly hard to prove even with it - see the Principia Mathematica...)

    these algorithms are clearly not reasoning but this isn't an example. yes, it seems obvious and simple now but it short changes how huge of a shift the switch to symbolic reasoning is in the first place. and that's setting aside whether notions like "memory" and "attention" are things these algorithms can actually do (don't get me started on how obtuse the literature is on this point).

  • Red Scare Pod or something idk
  • setting aside the capitalist-laugh for a sec...

    hinduism doesn't have a religious objection to alcohol? it's a social objection - it makes you behave like an ass. there are some philosophical points like how it makes you less human and more animal because it clouds the mind and brings out your baser nature. there's no religious prohibition that I'm aware of. some sects of Brahmins might treat it as a religious prohibition but there's no shot this is any kind of blanket ban by the religion as a whole. it's not very prevalent because there was a religious prohibition by the Mogul empire for a very long time.

    people try to treat Hinduism like it's one religion with a completely unified and consistent belief system when it's more like christianity - there are quite literally countless different religious doctrines made at different times and that are accepted or rejected by various groups at various points of history. there isn't anything quite like a central church, at least since the collapse of the Indian empire, so it's more about which line of scholars and sages/saints you adhere to. hell, one of the major schools of Hinduism historically is literally atheist - following the Buddhist tradition, they deny the material world as real and seek truth in philosophy and spirituality. while this school isn't strictly alive today, it forms much of the backbone of Hindu philosophy in the present.

    even not eating meat isn't a universal. it's a relatively common prohibition but one mainly kept by particular social classes (Vaishnavite brahmins in particular, though many others as well). for example, a lot of Shaivite families do eat meat - especially fish. it's beef that's totally unacceptable in pretty much all contexts and that's because people drink cow's milk. milk comes from mothers so to eat a cow is like eating your own mother.

    it's very weird to me to consider any of these religious prohibitions, to be honest. the reasons are all framed philosophically and they're accepted or rejected by various scholars contemporaneously with each other. and it misses weirder stuff like certain religious groups prohibiting garlic and onion because they make you more physical and lead you away from a path towards yoga (union with the divine soul of all things). but again, this is only done by very particular groups and at very particular times. my grandparents adhered to this and the rest of my family did not.

    I think a lot of what gets confused here is that Hinduism incorporates so many different belief systems - I'm not sure I've ever seen any other religion that absorbed quite so many, not by treating other religions as heresy and wiping them out (though that obviously happened too) but more often just because some sage decided to study the other belief system and came back and said "I tried this and I was able to achieve union by following their path - their beliefs are Hindu".

    as a contemporary example, there are sects of Catholics in India that the Catholic church refuses to recognize because they're convertees who invented their own fusion of Catholicism and Hinduism that has Jesus as a previously unrecognized avatar of Vishnu, or names Krishna to be an avatar of Jesus, while adding a bunch of saints because, like Mormons, they believe Jesus came to live among them and converted some saints during his travels. this kind of local incorporation and reinvention is utterly commonplace.

    (this is actually one of the more infuriating parts of the religious strife between Hindus and Muslims - Islam was decreed Hindu during the Mogul empire, just as Christianity was during the British empire. the British stoked the flames of religious war to serve their own ends - but the whole reason there are so many Muslim Indians is because the Hindu institutions welcomed conversions as entirely consistent with a path towards divine union.)

  • NSFW
    (cw racism) Reddit is mad again about advocating to kill slave owners
  • his mother said as much on stream. they left because they lost their family plantation.

  • Off the top of your head your most hated vidja game boss.
  • god he took me so many tries that watching someone attempt the fight made me realize I wore an extremely deep groove into my brain. my shoulder twitches every time you have to dodge two fucking years later.

    does he actually input read, though? I remember baiting him with spacing to consistently get free hits and then dying because I got greedy and went in for just one more with a large club that locks you into a swing for an eternity. if you run to the far side of the arena from him, he does the slow, heavily telegraphed flying attack eventually so you dodge under him, let him do a combo in the wrong direction with just enough space that he can't do the reverse claw/tail swipe thing, watch for his shoulders to relax, immediately jump attack and dodge again as soon as you connect, and break for the opposite side of the arena to rinse and repeat. he always looks like he's open to one more swing and he will get you if you fall for it.

    so I think what he does is entirely in relation to where you are relative to him? dunno though, I wouldn't put it past them to cheat the difficulty. I'm really bad at reading tells and reacting fast enough so I had to come up with safe strats like that for every fight and just gave up on the game because fuck doing that much work to play a game.

  • NSFW
    (cw racism) Reddit is mad again about advocating to kill slave owners
  • library is a fan channel, not his. ironically, he wishes it were his because his actual channel attracts all the gamer-gulag types.

  • NSFW
    (cw racism) Reddit is mad again about advocating to kill slave owners
  • he's a lib but he has a way with words and he stays in his lane: dad.

    evergreen example

  • This is just sad
  • I kind of hate this term. it originates from the US/UK withdrawal from Polynesian islands after the local economies had been warped to depend on food shipments via plane. when people started starving, they tried to replicate what they observed as rituals associated with the arrival of planes - bright yellow vests, reflective rods to signal where planes should land, etc.. desperate people did something desperate and I hate that we denigrate them for it.

    the military bases on relatively small islands decimated the local flora and fauna. we commandeered their boats during the war and deforested the islands so they couldn't build more boats to go fish. calling it a cult of any kind is utterly bizarre and it shifts blame for the tragedy onto the victims and allows the west to mock them for it. we inflicted famines because we didn't view them as fully human. we didn't even do it intentionally - we gave literally no thought to them or their continued existence. and we memorialize those dead as "cargo cultists" - because it's their "barbarism" to be blamed and not the withdrawal of an empire.

  • [Not the Onion] Customers are asking for H5N1 milk.
  • reinventing vaccination but shittier

  • Am I wrong though?
  • I don't know what you mean, I have more tabs than that open and they unload if I haven't opened them in awhile. memory usage doesn't scale with number of tabs. I think your extensions are bugged.

  • god damn there's nothing more satisfying than listening to D*stiny get dunked on by Norm Finkelstein for 5 hours

    jesus christ the arrogance of this man. what the fuck possessed him to get on this stage with people who wrote the books that his Wikipedia research is summarizing. this man couldn't find israel on a map until a couple of days ago and thought Erdogan is the president of israel. and Norm just calls him on it over and over while continuously mispronouncing his name.

    my favorite quote: "if Israel nuked Gaza and killed all 2 million people living there, I'm not sure it would count as genocide."

    bonus: Hasan's coverage was so brutal that he rage quit his own stream 2 days in a row. he knows he got owned.

    46
    PSA: ExpressVPN, PIA, and Cyberghost are all run by Israeli intelligence

    they were all owned by the same company and sold to Kape, which has ties to the Israeli intelligence service, a few years back.

    > The issue is who he sold it to -- the notorious creator of some pernicious data-huffing ad-ware, Crossrider. The UK-based company was cofounded by an ex-Israeli surveillance agent and a billionaire previously convicted of insider trading who was later named in the Panama Papers. It produced software which previously allowed third-party developers to hijack users' browsers via malware injection, redirect traffic to advertisers and slurp up private data.

    I personally use perfect-privacy, which didn't turn up any red flags when I did research a few years ago. it's a little lacking in features but openvpn isn't that hard to set up on linux & android. no clue how well their desktop app works.

    62
    "standard time" is revisionist bullshit

    EST should be -4 not -5. this is fucking reactionary and you can't expect me to remember this shit. fuck congress for ruining this possibility after passing it.

    8
    A real history of video games | Pay to Win

    cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/1384395

    > an interesting look at the connection between video games and gambling - a lot of classic games companies started out building slot machines.

    1
    Help - I have to interview someone from Palantir next week

    I won't be the only one on the call so I can't just give him an impossible interview. we're planning the interview together today. how do I make sure we can't hire him?

    luckily his background doesn't line up with what our team does, at least from his resume -- god it's the worst to read from the formatting alone. so maybe I can just lean into that? my team is part of a software infrastructure group and we're tasked with making the rest of the org stop sucking ass at software development -- secrets don't go in git repos type of stuff. so people skills and writing little bits of code that ensure the culture changes over time. his background is in operations and maybe a little software dev.

    I need suggestions for questions that will make him a no go. I can't take someone who worked for Palantir, for nearly a decade no less, seriously.

    0
    when wikipedia is too accurate for you

    I love the slider that asks how well you know the topic so it can assess how much technobabble it needs to feed you to satisfy your credulity.

    https://mycyclopedia.co/

    edit: wonder what the slur any% run for this one looks like

    57
    every time

    in which some nerd tries to call in a 4chan harassment raid

    28
    feedback @hexbear.net silent_water [she/her] @hexbear.net
    I sometimes appear to be logged into some other user's account

    it happens when reloading a page or navigating back. it shows me a different user's account in the top bar -- worried that if someone hits stop during page load, they'd actually be able to impersonate another user's account. this appears to be random and I've seen several different accounts over the course of the day.

    sorry if this is an already known bug or if it's just a cosmetic issue that doesn't actually give anyone perms.

    0
    feedback @hexbear.net silent_water [she/her] @hexbear.net
    I think this user is expressing a sincere gender identity

    these comments were removed for transphobia because they're kind of close to attack helicopter ahit but I don't think this is a tranaphobe making a joke, it's just a enby with an unconventional gender identity. it's not up to us to decide thir identity isn't valid. I'm open to having my mind changed - if it's invalidating others' identities somewhere - but absent that I don't think this is transphobia.

    0
    PSA: nazis trying to poison trans women

    !this product sold by EstroLabs, a company started by nazis for the express purpose of selling fake HRT to desperate trans women, taken at the recommended dosage on the packaging is potentially fatal and will definitely make you sick. DO NOT BUY THIS.

    0
    to no one's surprise, LTT is a garbage fire

    it calls into question LMG's ethics and business practices. what they did to the waterblock company of two people is obscene. they reviewed the only viable prototype the company had on incompatible hardware, trashed the product in the review, then sold the product act auction to a potential competitor. they effectively destroyed the company and in the WAN show said that they couldn't retest the product properly because it would have cost $500 - not of Linus's time, but of his employees. it's such a callous way to behave that I literally cannot fathom it.

    the sheer scope of the data errors from rushed video production are the icing on the cake.

    also anyone else remember the company paying out settlements to former female employees for what was suspected to be sexual harassment, forcing them to sign NDAs?

    capitalist enshittification continues on and on.

    2
    Cracker News

    it's indistinguishable from the original. I for one welcome our javascript-speaking, dolphin overlords.

    0
    silent_water silent_water [she/her] @hexbear.net
    Posts 16
    Comments 1.4K
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