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evocatus

328 karma · joined May 24, 2017

Neo-Inquisitor. Psychological and ethical pentester. Humanoid adversarial generative network. All comments are a work of fiction. Good karma must be released back into the universe. Opinions are those of your employer.

Reject the simulacrum.

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evocatus··on Ask HN: Are there any good poverty simulator games?
Whichever one you choose, be sure to select the one that gives you the experience of waiting on tables packed with rich, white, fat blobs of flesh and decadence opining on what it may be like to be the server, an ethnic minority, sixty years of age and five years away from retirement, still hauling sacks of ice out back to raise enough cash to make sure they can fill their rice cooker with enough food to make dinner for three tonight.

This will ensure the most authentic experience, as opposed to some cheap simulation whites use to amuse themselves and vicariously live the life of a human who's actually had to fight for their lot.

Oh, right, this is Hacker News. None of you actually give a father flying fuck. It's more important to leave a digital paper trail merely suggesting that you do.

evocatus··on Feeling uncomfortable when leaving phone at home shouldn't be normal
Would you make the same argument for amphetamines? Wonder what Erdős would have to say about this.

As far as communication goes, frankly, I regard large swaths of the internet as hostile and cognitohazardous. I'd rather be cut off. Though, fortunately the choice has already been made for me - there is no escaping assimilation.

The psychological dependence is already taking root; the societal dependence is next to come. Cash is dirty. There are no taxis to hail on the road. You require a COVID app to gain entry to this venue.

evocatus··on Netflix’s big power clash and rivalries behind the crash
The irony is that my karma has actually increased since I began.
evocatus··on PayPal Has Begun Quietly Shuttering Left-Wing Media Accounts
dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31269176
evocatus··on Netflix’s big power clash and rivalries behind the crash
I identify as white and demand the accompanying privileges.
evocatus··on Netflix’s big power clash and rivalries behind the crash
Why are you focusing on LGBTQ+ which, as some other posters have noted, appear over-represented in media (relative to their occurrence in the population), and not transracial people who receive effectively zero representation in media? Do you think it's acceptable to punch down like this?
evocatus··on Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf]
Nothing to do with being misinformed, everything to do with starting life on easy mode as a privileged white free from socioeconomic pressures and - yes, what a foreign concept - a life of prolonged existential, primal fear around gaining and maintaining shelter and sustenance.
evocatus··on At the boundaries, applications aren't functional
Correct. In more mainstream language, quoth Gary Bernhardt, "functional core, imperative shell."

Functional programming is a convenient fantasy, a highly restrictive and controlled environment that allows us to make large assertions about bodies of code - "no network IO can take place here"; "your inputs will most assuredly be numbers that can be added together."

It's the equivalent of assuming the cow is a sphere [0]. A useful mental model, that ultimately breaks down upon contact with the "real world."

Hence the imperative glue code / monadic actions wiring all of the pretty, perfect abstractions together.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_cow

evocatus··on Making friends on the internet
> it starts with twitter

No thanks. If this is the state of socialization in an era where online discourse is controlled by private interests with "agile" ethics, and people are too afraid to socialize in real life for a growing number of reasons, I'll deepen my mastery of hermitage.

evocatus··on Where are the low level system engineers?
> a crisis in terms of the few people holding up the world not being paid properly.

Who? The farmers and sweatshop workers in frontier or emerging economies?

evocatus··on Where are the low level system engineers?
Bootcamps and anti-intellectual sentiment spreading through the software development community have convinced newer developers that web APIs and other high-level frameworks/languages are actually the bedrock of abstraction, and that nothing important lies beneath (if they even recognize there IS something beneath). Nothing ever breaks down there, anyway. And if something does, it's not my problem to fix.

16 weeks at a bootcamp is enough to get you up to speed with the important parts of a rigorous 4 year education into the foundations of computing. No one needs to know CS or computer engineering anyway. It's just like math - useless.

I'm a software developer. How does software work, you ask? Uh...

evocatus··on Ask HN: What software/program annoys you?
Slack. We've gone from terminal IRC clients running on practically no memory, to shipping entire Chrome/Electron installations that allow you to conveniently log in with a button that opens your real Chrome browser, so that you can go back to Electron and accomplish the exact same things IRC did, except with slower load times, frequent service outages, eternally shifting UIs and redesigns, memory footprints that stretch even a 16GB system, and creative reinterpretations of the input field widget.

Oh. And emoji.

Too bad systems for globally coordinating the development of software never existed in the past. I wonder where we would be without Slack.

evocatus··on The 37-Year-Olds Are Afraid of the 23-Year-Olds Who Work for Them
It's the New York Times, an esteemed institution in the advertising industry. I'm sure they have done their journalistic due diligence in accurately representing the myriad of individual opinions and zeitgeist of these broad demographic groups.

They are after all a left-leaning publication, and thus are woke to the dangers of making overly broad generalizations.

evocatus··on The 37-Year-Olds Are Afraid of the 23-Year-Olds Who Work for Them
Correct. The mechanics of the advertising industry and the incentives it imposes on other industries are some of the greatest evils our society has created in recent memory.
evocatus··on The 37-Year-Olds Are Afraid of the 23-Year-Olds Who Work for Them
> Regardless of age / generation, you can't simply speak successs. By definition, that's not how it works. It is a result. A result of decisions and actions. It's not an oversimplify social media post.

After we started to mistake the Internet for reality, this became entirely possible.

evocatus··on Every Bay Area House Party
> “No, you don’t understand. This is just the first step. Once we make it super-big, we’ll introduce other things into the algorithm. Charities. Political causes. We’ll have millions of people competing to praise UNICEF in order to get that next million-dollar ViraCoin drop. If you think about it, all problems are caused by lack of awareness. We’re an at-scale solution to awareness. Solve that, and you solve poverty, inequality, racism…”

Poetry.

evocatus··on Tell HN: We'd better step up to protect privacy
As a minority, it's impossible to be racist to whites [0]. Perhaps you should become educated.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prejudice_plus_power

evocatus··on Why video calls are bad for brainstorming
You must be white.
evocatus··on On Form versus Meaning
See also: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/
evocatus··on Why video calls are bad for brainstorming
Global collaboration on software has existed for years before videoconferencing.

All video calls are good for is exposing latent unconscious biases in your colleagues.

evocatus··on Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery
Exactly. The guilt never ends, and there is always something you can be persecuted for.

The solution is not to demand that "the institutions" do something to atone for their blasphemous behavior; rather for individuals to introspect on their own behavior and the innumerable ways in which they, too, are guilty, before pointing the finger at others.

I find it immensely aggravating when those who call for large scale social action seem incapable of observing the very same tenets they espouse during small scale, every day encounters.

evocatus··on Google’s AI-powered ‘inclusive warnings’ feature is very broken
Correct. There is a time and a place for a little cognitive shock and awe to shake loose the cobwebs of stagnant thought.
evocatus··on Google’s AI-powered ‘inclusive warnings’ feature is very broken
Hear hear. Latinx, Filipinx - how dare the whites invent terminology to refer to disadvantaged minorities, using incorrect grammatical constructions or letters not even in the language of the people you refer to.

This is white cultural imperialism, full stop. Right or left, I don't care where it comes from - I know it when I smell it.

evocatus··on ANSi Web Browser concept (2012)
Sounds like something a white supremacist would say. I suppose you also believe that people who find the "master" branch on GitHub objectionable are also "purely projecting."
evocatus··on Facebook internal memo on Jan 6, with comments from employees
Are you assuming that just because they're blue?
evocatus··on Facebook internal memo on Jan 6, with comments from employees

    the opinion which it is attempted to suppress by authority
    may possibly be true. Those who desire to suppress it, of course deny its
    truth; but they are not infallible. They have no authority to decide the
    question for all mankind, and exclude every other person from the means
    of judging. To refuse a hearing to an opinion, because they are sure that
    it is false, is to assume that their certainty is the same thing as absolute
    certainty. All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.

    - John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859)
Good thing we have the world's greatest minds working on the problem of modern online discourse.

> Again, not sure I know the exact right set of answers but we have been changing and adapting every day

Oh. Agile ethics.

evocatus··on The 'Batman Effect': How having an alter ego empowers you (2020)
This is the ego death. You could fill libraries with what has been written on this phenomenon, though under many different names.
evocatus··on The 'Batman Effect': How having an alter ego empowers you (2020)
What happens when you assume the alter ego in perpetuity? Where does the "original ego" go?
evocatus··on SF's government is uniquely broken
What are your thoughts on Sam Harris, and in particular his positions on Islam [1]? Are you aligning with alt-right ideology?

How is Christianity, or any religion for that matter, germane to the linked discussion?

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/28/alt-ri...

    But it may be said that very little proof is required in a charge of this nature, since it takes very little argument to expose a person's guilt; for it is said in the Canon de Haereticis, lib. II, that a man makes himself a heretic if in the least of his opinions he wanders from the teaching [...]

    - Malleus Maleficarum
evocatus··on SF's government is uniquely broken

    Noun

    bigot (plural bigots)

        One who is narrow-mindedly devoted to their own ideas and groups, and intolerant of (people of) differing ideas, races, genders, _religions_, politics, etc. [1]
Set the pyre ablaze; you shall burn for your hypocrisy and self-righteous heresy [2].

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bigot#English

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30634872#30636389

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