Charles U. Farley @freakazoid@retro.social
- Pronouns
- he/him or they/them
- Jewish by marriage
- https://babka.social/@freakazoid
Father of two elementary school age boys living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. Originally from Silicon Valley. Playing life on the easiest setting (white/cis/het). Atheist and anti-authoritarian. I make robot taxicabs.
Boosts = endorsement.
Joined May 2018
Pinned post
I'm not very strict about who I allow to follow me, but please have some posts and/or a reasonably detailed profile before requesting to follow.
Charles U. Farley
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Also, you can see Rackspace manipulating press in real time with this one - by wordsmithing they have “restored” systems (they haven’t) they are getting favourable coverage.
Reality: Hosted Exchange is still completely offline and they have no ETA. When they say restored, they mean they’ve helped some customers to migrate to M365, a competitor product.
Charles U. Farley
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US Politics (---) 🔥
The two purported most leftist US representatives, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) both voted to block the rail worker strike.
I mean sure, the fiction of corporations originates in the fiction of government. But if cyberpunk has taught us anything it's that that doesn't need to be the case.
I used to think that government power was somehow different from other forms of power, but I can't for the life of me remember why. I think it had something to do with the fictions that surround government. I was always really into "legitimacy", for example. But corporations benefit from the same kinds of fictions. Like that they're people. With rights.
Imagine being so unprincipled that you hold up the first and second amendments to the US Constitution as your battle cry while simultaneously following a man who says we should terminate the Constitution.
Don't want fentanyl in things? End prohibition. If you're not willing to do that, you are just using fentanyl as an excuse, you fucking Nazi.
If it's useful for an AI to write code for you, your programming language is bad.
John Robb vs anarchists vs fascists
I stopped being a patron of Robb's because of the fascism being expressed to little resistance in his Discord. I had talked to him about it, and he acknowledged it was a problem, but he didn't seem willing to do anything about it, so I just gave up. TBH I hadn't read more than about a third of the Global Guerrillas reports he'd published since I became a patron.
I do think his analysis is valuable; I'd just rather see it from an anarchist perspective. Unicorn Riot is much better.
John Robb vs anarchists vs fascists
John Robb: States are going to become weaker. This is bad. We have to build resilient communities.
Fascists: Yeah!
...
Anarchists: States are going to become weaker. This is good. We have to build resilient communities.
Fascists: Nooooo!
Zig (programming language)
I think Haskell's syntax is better than Lisp's and would be better suited to a Zig-like language. Something like monads could also overcome the problem of passing an allocator to an operator, like for NumPy-like operators or arbitrary precision integers allocated on the heap.
Zig (programming language)
My first impression is this: I would definitely use it over Golang, but the lack of operator overloading is a lethal design flaw. Their arguments against operator overloading are actually an argument against having operators at all, i.e. that it needs to have a Lisp-like syntax. Operators only make code more readable when you can actually use them to express what you want to express. If they can only be used for a subset of operations that happen to involve native types for which they are defined, they're really just dead weight and you're left with Algol-like function call syntax, which TBH is horrible.
Zig (programming language)
Trying to decide how I feel like Zig. I probably need to actually use it, or at least read a bunch more idiomatic code, before I can form an opinion. I can't say the fact that they consider its lack of expressiveness to be a feature gives me warm fuzzies, but at the same time the ability to call any function at compile time may make up for that. I guess I need to read some metaprogramming examples.
Charles U. Farley
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There's a lot of talk about Black folks coming to Mastodon and finding that mods on some of the big servers aren't always willing to step in and moderate, even if their rules say "No racism".
I want to be clear: Black people are WELCOME on retro.pizza and WILL be defended. And I will NEVER try to tell you what parts of your experience you can and cannot talk about out loud. #RPAdmin #BlackMastodon
Charles U. Farley
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@socialistdogmom has a solid thread going into recent background of far-right extremists targeting the power grid:
https://twitter.com/socialistdogmom/status/1599644977910337536?s=20&t=soILJH_Gu8faDpkjKS7YiA
When some reactionary, J6 insurrectionist, anti-LGBTQ bigot (Emily Rainey) insinuates this attack was to shut down a drag show, there's a reason we take it seriously. "God works in mysterious ways," she said. "The power is out in Moore County, and I know why". What a shock that people thought this ex-military christofascist could credibly be involved.
Meanwhile Andy Ngo and other right-wing outrage profiteers are playing gotcha about lack of evidence and calling the people reporting about Rainey "militant trans extremists" (as if it was equally likely for a leftist to have taken out Moore County's power).
Know how many anarchists / antifascists / socialists I've heard discussing blowing up electrical substations to shut down power grids? Exactly 0
I think it's likely that feds will find this attacker and when they do, we'll learn all the fully unsurprising details about this Siege-reading motherfucker. Expect Andy to be very quiet about it and to move onto inciting harassment towards his next target.
As predictable as this cycle is, this is a huge escalation and we clearly need to be preparing for similar attacks. It's disturbing this hasn't been a more prominent story in national media outlets cause it's a very big fucking deal.
Charles U. Farley
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Really good thread from @leahmcelrath :
https://twitter.com/leahmcelrath/status/1599469081652232197?s=20&t=qQ7sxdLxuzHiUUXenKnLxw
This is one of the first clips I've seen like this. For as much discussion as there is about Kanye West's mental health, this is a good example of how he is putting on a calculated performance. He rails against pornography to appeal to the puritanical misogynists; he talks about jesus to speak to the evangelicals and christofascists; he blames jews for all his problems to channel white supremacy as the answer to people's grievances; he uses props and absurdist comedy to cater to the ultra-online, edgelord, far-right younger generations. He knows what he is doing and taken in context his unhinged interview appearances make a lot of sense.
In this clip he is cogent and deliberately planning some of his stunts and clearly recognizes their various roles. It's easy to want to dismiss this as uber fringe, but as is pointed out later in the thread (fuck Richard Spencer but he's spon on here), Trump (the champion of the entire ass party) has not and will not condemn this:
https://twitter.com/RightWingWatch/status/1599847977958354944?s=20&t=qQ7sxdLxuzHiUUXenKnLxw
This is the direction of the GOP. And Democrats aren't putting up any kind of fight. It is a demoralizing thought but the coming years will make the last 6 look tame. The thing that gives me hope is that there is a growing faction that is having none of this shit; we will militantly fight fascism on every front and fiercely support each other throughout.
Charles U. Farley
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There's this rhetorical strategy throughout these interviews to:
a) make ppl like Gavin McInnes & Alex Jones seem ideologically more reasonable by comparison
b) have the pretense of an adversarial interview where various points are "conceded" to launder antisemitic / far-right ideas.
They're all on the same fuckin page; this charade of McInnes trying to pull Kanye back from the brink is simply a backdrop; pure bullshit. Founder of the Proud Boys; full blown fascist; trying to paint himself the moderate cause Kanye's gettin noisy and saying the quiet part out loud. Fuck outta here
https://twitter.com/afainatl/status/1599951158738812928?s=20&t=qQ7sxdLxuzHiUUXenKnLxw
This is extremely calculated and the theatricality and taboo sensationalism is meant to draw in new audiences.
This should be dissected and analyzed carefully so we can tear this shit to pieces, because this vile propaganda is well-situated to further mainstream some straight-up genocidal ideology. As I type this McInnes is now asking leading questions along the lines of "well what then do we do about these jews Kanye?"
If you don't understand how influential someone like Nick Fuentes is in neo-nazi and fascist spaces, it would be easy to miss how dangerous this all shit is. I am watching this stream on a youtube channel that was previously devoted to some music and food shows. Kanye West is their perfect prop. A pretend foil to bring these dialogues into different spaces.
Fuck all these people. Get ready for the GOP in the coming years to look far more like Richard Spencer or Andrew Anglin than a Mitch McConnell or Marco Rubio.
OK muting all ChatGPT talk for a while.
Charles U. Farley
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Your car can be hacked (REMOTELY UNLOCKED AND STARTED) through... SiriusXM?!
https://thehackernews.com/2022/12/siriusxm-vulnerability-lets-hackers.html
Charles U. Farley
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Seasonal Reminder !
The #SalvationArmy is not a #charity. They are an evangelical protestant church that uses donations to oppose #LGBTQ rights.
Give them NOTHING.
Charles U. Farley
boosted
- Pronouns
- he/him or they/them
- Jewish by marriage
- https://babka.social/@freakazoid
Father of two elementary school age boys living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. Originally from Silicon Valley. Playing life on the easiest setting (white/cis/het). Atheist and anti-authoritarian. I make robot taxicabs.
Boosts = endorsement.
Joined May 2018
