• 6 Posts
  • 190 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: April 1st, 2022

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  • for a service/site/mom-and-pop shop to be sustainable without unending growth.

    I’ve been on somewhat niche sites which have lasted decades, with waves of people coming in whenever related sites screw up and trickles of people leaving when an alternative community becomes more popular. It’s a comfy, slow existence, which works for some communities, but not for ones like this which thrive on diversity and chattiness, rather than really well thought-out replies days apart from each other. On reddit-like sites, time penalizes how high a post goes (unlike a forum where years-long threads are very normal to see on a front page) so there is an inherent benefit in having consistent activity. That doesn’t imply boundless growth, but at least sustaining a decent level of activity. We’re not chasing ad revenue, growth for growth’s sake is not what we want or need.

    But with that said, a community with no new visitors can only lose them. That can be a slow process, but it’s inevitable. Been there, done that. Again, doesn’t imply that pointless growth is a good thing.




  • It is always morally acceptable?

    Morality is, literally, subjective. There is no universal answer to that question.

    I personally consider anything being sold by a distributor to be fair game, no questions asked. If I pay for mainstream music, films or games, most of the time, zero of that money goes to the workers who created those artworks. It just makes rich owners richer, because they legally own rights. I would go as far as to say it’s morally wrong to pay for those things, it’s not neutral, it’s supporting a cycle of abuse at your own expense. So that’s my perspective on your ‘giant corporations’ question.

    Digital copying isn’t stealing, unfortunately, because those giant companies deserve to have their hoard of capital expropriated.

    Two screenshots. The first is a headline: "The world's richest countries came up with just $22 million to fight the Amazon fires.", the second lists the budget for The Emoji Movie: $50 million.[src]







  • comfy@lemmy.mltoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.worldWhat is hexbear?
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    4 days ago

    And if you’re a dictator, at that point you dont care for any left or right leaning values…

    But this just evidently isn’t true. Take the fascist dictators like ᴉuᴉlossnW and Hitler, who clearly believed in their ultranationalism, irredentism, anti-communism, anti-liberalism, militarism, etc. etc. until the days they died (ᴉuᴉlossnW even created a last testament while captured shortly before death re-iterating all their beliefs despite their lost of dictatorship). Then take socialist-party dictators like Castro, Stalin and Mao, who, despite any and all critiques and shortcomings and hypocrisies and failures, intentionally took actions with measurable results to improve living conditions, health and literacy for the worker class as a whole, while limiting and even oppressing the owner class (bourgeoisie). If you already checked out that video in my last reply then we’d know ‘left leaning values’ can mean a heap of different things in different contexts, but I believe that these progressive and anti-capitalist efforts are solid examples to prove the point.

    Also those that think they’re marxists or whatever, you’re even bigger idiot, enjoying your materialistic ps5 and 4090 dreaming of a communism… oh the irony

    I don’t have either of those, but I can’t understand why there would be any irony or contradiction there, at all. Marxism isn’t an anti-technology or anti-fun lifestyle or some religious glorification of poverty. At its core, it’s an analysis of society which (long-story-short) concludes capitalism is an exploitative system and socialism is an alternative economic system where the worker class, as opposed to an owner class, control the tools and resources of production. There’s far more depth than that, but how much time or money someone has doesn’t (directly!) come into that analysis. The famous rallying cry in the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) is “Workers of the World, Unite!”, and those workers rich enough to afford luxuries are still workers with shared class interest with other workers. You don’t need to be committing crimes against labor to reach that level, they’re not buying factories, commissioning mega-yachts and flying to space.

    And about anarchists, some people just want to see world burn… or profit in a lawless society

    I’m talking about the political philosophy and movement, anarchism. Most of them want to abolish the concept of profit whatsoever, and they make up a major part of the environmental and social justice movements. There’s plenty of critiques of their movement, but they really only want to burn down the state which exploits us.



  • North Korea is a particularly tough topic to have objectivity on. On one hand, their isolation in itself means they’re not a typical country by any interpretation, and not gonna lie I’d be surprised if even their supporters claimed it was perfectly normal. On the other hand, its portrayal in the media is highly propagandized, to the point where some defectors (e.g. Yeonmi Park) have made ridiculous claims like that citizens sometimes push a passenger train to work in power outages, and reputable news outlets simultaneously report that everyone must have the same haircut as Kimmy and that having that haircut is also illegal, or claiming multiple officials have been executed with an anti-aircraft gun but it turns out they’re alive. It’s hard to have a meaningful discussion when this is the information we’re given to work with! While NK is often open for work and tourism (albeit stricter tourism than in most countries) and those tourists often enough share videos or write articles, they’re enough to get a peak inside and learn that ok, it’s not a literal cartoon place, they have a water park and rail with a nicer metro than my city and people’s lives are much closer to normal than what we often hear, but there’s only so much we can really learn from these foreigners’ experiences.

    Some of the big points that often get overlooked are:

    • Their mindset, especially the skepticism and national security extremism didn’t come from nowhere. A major cause of their lack of development are that the UN Command bombing ‘destroyed nearly all of the country’s cities and towns, including an estimated 85% of its buildings.’ [wiki] and the US and later UN sanctioned them [wiki].
    • The pervasive propaganda is VERY blunt by our standards. That said, their nationalism and idolization of political leaders is certainly not unique, even if the pictures and statues of their ‘glorious leaders’ everywhere are freakin’ weird. For a comparison to a more familiar country: the US pledge of allegiance, idolization of the Founding Fathers and pervasive flag display are also unusual manifestations of ingrained nationalism, even if to a lesser degree than NKs patriotism.
    • South Korea is also pretty far from normal. Their First Republic stage included their leader getting exempted from 8-year term limits and executing the opposition leader while arresting other members, and has repeatedly become a dictatorship up to the present Sixth Republic, where the current president just got impeached for establishing a dictatorship, making them the third SK president to be impeached so far (the second-previous president was being directed by a cult leader’s daughter along with the ‘Eight Goddesses’ group of billionaires who were basically writing legislation themselves.)

    But, at the end of the day, with all that context, I would never call North Korea normal or typical, just nowhere near as bizarre as the mass media portrayal from even reputable outlets. And I suppose that’s why some (imo silly) people will overcompensate and try to say that they’re just the same as other countries.


  • comfy@lemmy.mltoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.worldWhat is hexbear?
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    5 days ago

    I can’t help but wonder if tankies are the political equivalent of flat-earthers.

    One way forward is to ask them for evidence for their viewpoints and investigate their sources for errors. The problem of the flat-earther is that there is objective evidence of a 3D rounded Earth that they can’t adequately counter with objective evidence.





  • While I doubt the concept is unique, the script is: a keyboard shortcut will check the clipboard for a YouTube link and then show launcher options for mpv or yt-dlp, including launch arguments for lower quality format and audio only. It launches that in a terminal for easier handling when yt-dlp doesn’t work properly (much more common if using proxies, but also if a video is age-restricted or deleted).

    So when I see a yt link here, I can just copy it, keyboard shortcut and then it’s playing in my local video player.

    edit: here’s the script. It assumes xsel (clipboard access), rofi (menu creator), gnome-terminal (terminal) and notify-send (system notification on failure) are installed and working, you’ll need to replace any which don’t match your system. My DE just runs it in bash when the shortcut is entered.

    Code (click to expand)
    #!/bin/bash
    
    ARR=()
    ARR+=("mpv full")
    ARR+=("mpv medium")
    ARR+=("yt-dlp")
    
    NORMAL_URL=`xsel -ob | sed -r "s/.*(v=|\/)([a-zA-Z0-9_-]{11}).*/https:\/\/youtube.com\/watch?v=\2/"`
    
    CHOICE=$(printf '%s\n' "${ARR[@]}" | rofi -dmenu -p "mpv + yt-dlp from clipboard")
    DOWNLOAD="false"
    MPV="false"
    OPTIONS=""
    
    if [ "$CHOICE" = "mpv full" ]; then
    	MPV="true"
    fi
    
    if [ "$CHOICE" = "mpv medium" ]; then
    	MPV="true"
    	OPTIONS+="'--ytdl-format=bv*[height<721]+ba' "
    fi
    
    if [ "$CHOICE" = "yt-dlp" ]; then
    	DOWNLOAD="true"
    fi
    
    if [ $MPV == "true" ]; then
    	COMMAND="mpv $OPTIONS $NORMAL_URL"
    	gnome-terminal --title "$NORMAL_URL" -- bash -c "echo $COMMAND;$COMMAND;if [ \$? -ne 0 ]; then notify-send 'yt-dlp failed' $NORMAL_URL; bash; fi;"
    elif [ $DOWNLOAD == "true" ]; then
    	COMMAND="yt-dlp $OPTIONS $NORMAL_URL"
            gnome-terminal --title "$NORMAL_URL" -- bash -c "echo $COMMAND;$COMMAND;if [ \$? -ne 0 ]; then notify-send 'yt-dlp failed' $NORMAL_URL; bash; fi;"
    fi