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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • Kamala lost because it was obvious from the beginning that she was a bad candidate whose only hope of becoming President was to be parachuted into the role via the 25th Amendment once Biden’s mental state truly deteriorated. Unfortunately for her and the DNC, Biden’s condition declined right as a key presidential debate rolled around, and his declining cognitive health became so utterly apparent that not even Reddit’s tyrannical cabal of power mods could cover it up anymore.

    Before that debate, even merely suggesting that Biden was senile would have gotten you labelled a Nazi and banned from at least a dozen subreddits.

    THAT is why she lost to a convicted felon.



  • Kids back in the eighties were coding in BASIC, running command line prompts and using home computers like the ZX Spectrum, Atari ST, Amstrad CPC 464 and Commodore 64. The most I did in terms of coursework for my IT classes during my secondary school days was make a personal webpage about my hobbies & interests using Microsoft Frontpage. Sixth form (where I did A Level Computing, basically 11th & 12th Grade equivalents) was even worse, It was 2010 and they were still fucking teaching us Visual Basic 6 and the Waterfall Model of system development!

    Something like an introduction to unix and programming should be mandatory. They seem to think that kids need to “learn to use a computer and the internet.” It’s a fucking point-and-click interface. What is there to learn? The software industry is very skilled at making it all so easy that a chimpanzee can use it.

    This may be infuriating or sad for you to read, but very young kids who have been brought up on smartphones, TikTok and YouTube Kids these days can’t even do basic shit like this. Like, I’ve genuinely heard about kids starting kindergarten and reception who cannot even turn pages on a book and try to swipe left/right on them like they’re a touchscreen. Some even struggle to work with a physical keyboard or a gamepad that actually has tactile inputs.

    The only other group where I’ve personally seen such ineptitude with technology is in old people. I used to work in customer support for a major right-wing British newspaper, and it was mainly things like website account access issues, basic tablet/smartphone tech support, and promotion enquiries I dealt with. I genuinely hated that job for a lot of reasons, but a big part of it is that trying to guide a senile 75+ year old pensioner through a basic password reset or explain how to redeem an e-voucher.

    My dad is 80 years old and as the younger autistic one in the family who got economically screwed and is still living with my parents, I’m left with having to continually explain how to do basic email or phone tasks to him.



  • This may be the millennial in me talking but I’ve generally found schools to be fucking dire when it comes to implementing technology in the classroom.

    During Year 10 (equivalent to 9th Grade for any Yanks here), our school enrolled in a government programme to start using PDAs in the classroom. So they offered every kid in our year a Pocket LOOX 720 at a heavily subsidized price.

    They were never used in lessons.

    Pupils instead used them as music/video playback devices and to play games, since it was 2007, smartphones weren’t yet a thing and YouTube was just in its infancy.

    Maybe things have improved since I left secondary school.


  • The Machiavellian part of me thinks Ring screwed up by not raising the stakes. Search Party and the way they advertised it makes you go "awww’ when you see the golden retriever and then “wait, WHAT?” when they show all their Ring doorbells going full surveillance mode in locating the missing dog.

    A lengthier ad showing a pedophile being tracked down and arrested by law enforcement mid-abduction, their victim rescued, then the nonce being served justice may have had a more positive response.

    I mean, “think of the children” has been the perfect strawman argument to justify mass surveillance, after all…