I’ve only started working with bootcampers post 2021. I’ve seen trash code/design/architecture mainly from college educated SWE’s.

I have no problem with designers. They have a real job and the best of them make really great interfaces. It’s a really difficult skill. They are a parallel work capacity to me. Most of the time most software has really bad UI/UX because designers are treated even worse than us at companies that have been financialized to the hilt. I’ve been at several places that have fired designers only to have to rehire them again.

I know I make programmer interfaces. Designers help refine those to something simpler and more usable. I actually have had multiple talks to designers at multiple companies saying how we needed to push for a unified product style guide + component theme to standardize the visual language and design. This helps lighten everyone’s load because it makes time for building important shit on both sides. It’s so hard to explain to business how valuable it is to have a process for building a durable library off the shelf components.

Curious about this if you can expand upon it without doxxing yourself.

Often software success is measured by adoption. Let’s say tomorrow a turn key persona management system existed.

The most institutionalized levels of success possible is to be coopted by and contract out to an intelligence service (immediate pass, even the attention, immediate pass). However that means that such a system must unknowingly solve the problems of:

1. the features that are absolutely required for said service
2. the ease of migration of operations onto said service
3. be completely self evident to many at that service to be an answer for their problems
4. be a person that they could feel they could trust or manipulate into control

Very unlikely.

Another level of success is adoption in the general ecosystem. So now the DSA’s, PSL’s of the world can run persona management easily. Not really a big socialism success given you literally said it yourself it’s a tool that if proliferated creates a “broad distrust of social media”.

So who are gonna be the biggest users of such a tool? Open your phone and look at your texts. That’s right the people who are shaking down grandparents, the people who are pretending to be a rich celebrity that has taken an interest in a lonely isolated person living in a rural community, scammers, flim flam artists, NFT enthusiasts, crypto bros.

The problem is that there is already a “broad distrust of social media”, that doesn’t stop humanity from using the communication tool, and that doesn’t lower the total incidences of exploitation that happen.

If I had an implementation of “a turnkey internet nuke”, I’d be booking a flight to Beijing before releasing it on the open internet

Lol China would not have you. This is a movie plot. They don’t want guys who make “rocking the boat technology” at all. You think they’d want some OSS enthusiasts running experiments with apes commenting on the net in their green zone? They have their own versions. They have their own trusted operators. This is like adoption with any other intelligence service.

In general the problem with this technology is literally like nukes. It shouldn’t exist. It’s easier to make social systems without its existence. This tech doesn’t change anything, it makes a better integrated version of desperate components of an existing system.

If tomorrow at the same time everyone woke up with a turnkey nuclear bomb, Israel would pre-emptively nuke Gaza.

come around on social programs.

Wat.

Anarchists are the ones who are consistently making social programs from scratch. Direct action is and has always been about feeding people as well as sabotaging bulldozers.

https://foodnotbombs.net/new_site/

Strongly agree that something like this is needed. However, what enables the asymmetry here is a limitation on material resources and labor. No such limitation exists with digital systems that cannot be trivially copied and deployed by bourgeois interests.

Only idea I have for something like this is a system that requires user verification by existing members, possibly gatekept by irl meetings and capped at some rate per user. Few people use the fediverse because of tiny barriers to entry. No one would tolerate a system that imposes more burdens.

DDoS prevention solutions are probably capable of thwarting most technological solutions we can come up with to create our own asymmetries.

The root of your perception here is correct, the bourgeoisie will always have “promoted posts” for their personal interests, but that is no different than any censor or editor that exists today.

You are also correct in the economies of scale, my point is that we have always been playing catch up and these tools allow us to catch up significantly as well. These tools raise our capability floor to heights that were not possible before.

Do you have any specific knowledge on the characteristics, capabilities, or implementation of these? I would be very interested in learning more.

Pega and Capado are the advertising ones. Sock puppet is a commercial offering targetted at OSINT, “to protect researcher identities”.

The knowledge we have of the US government ones are from things like Operation Earnest Voice where they contracted out development to Ntrepid.

Most software out there isn’t a highly capable consistent package. I’m sure the CIA or Palantir has one developed, but a lot of places just run developer tooling like Playwright to control Chrome. Prior to LLM’s any procedural text generation was done via Markov Chains and sentiment analysis thru keyword analysis (e.g. regex).

There are some OSS tools out there in various states of quality like:

• https://github.com/dimensi0n/persona
• https://github.com/malwaredojo/loki

I did a whole bunch of research on this as I thought it would be a fun challenge to build one, I wanted to make it OSS, but I decided against it after I generally thought about what “success” would look like, I was basically thinking of building a turnkey internet nuke.

Typically your keywords are “persona management”, “sock puppet tools” etc.

Posting internet comments is the one form of media that proletarians can easily participate in to reach the masses without outright gatekeeping by an editor

Be for real lol. You’re posting on one of the only places on the internet that isn’t completely owned by the bourgeoisie. Your reach is already limited by segregating yourself on this site. Pretending that posting on “the internet” (e.g. the biggest sites) which is mostly controlled by gigantic bourgeoisie interests and petite bourgeoisie interests is a purely proletarian act is silly. In practice “freedom to post” is ancillary to feeding you advertising. You are playing in their sandbox and have always been. The enshittification of the 2010’s blurred the lines between content and advertising intentionally because the smallest advertisers who refused to pay for ads already started doing that in the late 2000’s.

This creates an asymmetrical playing field where corporations and NED orgs can spend lots of money on GPU farms to push their messages, but prole groups cannot nearly as easily.

You’re just competing over different resources. Prior to the mechanization of this through any software you were competing for bodies doing the posting (whether the medium was internet, newspapers, leaflets, pamphlets, word of mouth etc doesn’t matter). With augmented mechanization prior to AI you were competing for bodies and compute. Now you can argue you mainly compete over compute. However because of the fun logic of capitalism, in the current state of capitalist organization proletarians can afford compute more than they can afford to feed other proletarians amortized over time. So this really only boils down to “humans are becoming obsolete in the posting wars”, which was already true.

The inherent contradictions in capitalism make it effectively impossible for this technology to be really gate kept from proles over time without a literal crackdown on ownership or development. The cat is so out of the bag there’d be a civil war if the bourgeoisie started drawing lines on who can own what things for the “greater good”. The US could not even keep a lid on encryption software over time, despite export controls for encryption still being a thing.

So even if we built ourselves a life raft with the fediverse / Lemmy, we are still trivially subject to large scale influence operations, even if less valuable as a target. It seems like big tech is aware of efforts to avoid corporate control over public opinion

This was already true before 2020. The type of software that major botnets/intelligence services/ad companies specializing in guerilla advertising is called a Persona Management System. These systems mechanized the dissemination of posting and conversation shaping across the internet. It has only really been in the last 8 years that Persona Management has been a thing that exists outside of intelligence adjacent circles.

What AI does is it makes running / developing Persona Management Systems easier. You no longer have to make a cohesive overarching strategy to make things feel organic for humans, you can simply be “good enough” with AI and that’s always what these systems campaigns aim for.

Don’t get me wrong this is an acceleration, but it’s not an acceleration that brings us to a “brave new world”. Yes the owners have new toys, but they haven’t been able to prevent us from using them. Likewise if this was a real “information war”, this becomes a war of logistics like every other war. It becomes necessary for proles to find a tactic that allows them to make the equivalent of a Hamas piss rocket or a Quds drone, something that is incredibly cheap but because of the capitalist state of the world requires a wasteful amount money to defend against. For every dollar in prole spend we make them spend $1,000 against it.

Smaller sites are already protecting themselves using proof of work systems like anubis to prevent AI crawling. Anubis is a great example of making them pay more. If Hexbear/Lemmy implemented anubis, it would be a slight annoyance for us an extra 1-2s browsing. However for an AI crawler running at scale to “take over the community” it would create a significant financial disadvantage because at scale the costs for running a hashcash for every interaction would balloon.

This isn’t even new for reddit. They seeded the original site back during the 2005-2007 years by paying people to run sockpuppets to simulate the network effect. They’d post about tech before, the subject matter they’re posting now is a level of degeneracy that only comes with an IPO.

I don’t think Trump is capable of the Medvedev switch tbh.

Thanks! I’ll message them!

Oh I disagree with this one anyone who says “I’m a progressive” means “I’m a good person”. That one has been dispossessed of its original meaning and re-imbued with a very clear new one.

It’s epithet context used by conservatives means “we don’t think you’re fascist enough”.

maybe someone is going to come problematize those philosophical arguments in 4 hours

Wdym? In the history of the internet nobody has ever had posting wars about fuzzy concepts. Nobody has ever had posting wars about the concept of fuzzy concepts.

I was not trying to denigrate feminism. The West’s mainstream feminism is extremely syncretic now that it’s not even liberal / bourgeoisie feminism anymore. There’s no real word for it. Naomi Wolf is a perfect example. In ideology the Naomi Wolf who wrote The Beauty Myth is not the Naomi Wolf who polices women’s vocal fry. Both Naomi Wolfs are synthesized within the Western mainstream feminism in 2025. It’s only practical effect on the world is reflected in things like Space Katy Perry, which are re-emergent forms of mid-century advertisement patriarchy.

We have gone from Mad Men controlling economic machinery to convince women they need to buy things to enforce a fake beauty standard. To the 90’s and 2000’s where women took on the roles of men in that system. To a systemic patriarchy (e.g. a social structure where patriarchy can exist without patriarchal attitudes) that sells things to women in a Schrodinger’s feminism. Every idea is held in a superposition until society observes it, and society does not categorize it in a logical or consistent way. Society simply collapse the wave function and whether the idea ends up as “pro-women” or “anti-woman” is not deterministic based on the ideas of any specific strain of feminism or even the basic idea of equality between genders.

To explain it in complicated philosophy instead of complicated physics, mainstream feminism is a signifier without the signified or as Lacan put it a pure signifier. I hesitate to say this, but in layman’s terms a pure signifier is “a label that doesn’t mean anything”. I hesitate to use that phrase because it is used in causal conversation that is meant to be simplistic and dismissive. Mainstream feminism isn’t inherently meaningless, it’s part of a dialectical process that has hollowed it of meaning. It’s real meaning should be the history of how it became meaningless. Mainstream feminism is great example of the real social processes that govern how our world works.

To offer an analogy, the last name Carpenter has the same problem as mainstream feminism. Last names were given to people based on certain social meanings. There would be various systems like a literal lineage name like Johnson e.g. Son of John. Occupational names are also a thing like Smith, Miller, Carpenter would literally denote the person’s trade. John Smith would be the guy in your town that makes nails, Tim Miller would be the guy in your town that makes flour, etc. You wouldn’t even think to ask Sabrina Carpenter to make you kitchen cabinets because Carpenter has through dialectic social processes become just a label. So in effect “Sabrina Carpenter” sings, “John Carpenter” makes horror movies, and “mainstream feminism” sells things – all of these labels have been imbued and dispossessed of significance from the same dialectic process of meaning making.

It’s this.

The most hollowed out form of liberal feminism. Not even corpo feminism. Not even white corpo feminism. A feminism that is itself as a vehicle for marketing and driving consumption.

This is a losing game because like “freedom” in the West for normal people “feminism” is in practice a treat-based ideology. Now you can heap Islamophobia on top of that.

Hezbollah is the best out of all these groups to women. They allow women to participate in all parts of society. They have women-led politcal steering committees setting political positions based on Islamic feminism. Hezbollah has a unique risk because their primary benefactor Iran has a much more conservative political position on the issue.

However Islamic feminism is a tenuous balancing act. Like any other religion it Islam is not coherent or consistent in its texts and oral traditions. Coherence and consistency is made based on social views on choosing what passages to elevate and what passages to deprecate. As such Islamic feminism often has very rough edges and looks different based on different political contexts.

Hamas is lower than Hezbollah here but still not comparable to the Taliban or ISIS. The status of women in Hamas and by its governing principles are not equivalent to Hezbollah or the PLO. Hamas has been changing slowly by allowing more women into leadership and changing some of its views since 2021.

You are absolutely wrong about Ansar’Allah. Ansar’Allah is not as organized as the Taliban but ultimately has the similar views and worse practices. Ansar’Allah does gendered child soldiers. Boys as young as 7 become soldiers. Girls as young as 13 become liaisons in the gendered traditional militaristic sense they do “women’s work”. They do intelligence, logistics, support, and involuntary sex work. Like female military liaisons in other traditionalist armies including in the West they are extremely vulnerable to abuse and are effectively prizes and play things for the officer class. Ansar’Allah has some women’s units but there is actually disagreement about militarization of women both official (as soldiers) and unofficial (as liaisons) within Ansar’Allah on “social cohesion” grounds. The Zainabiyyat batallion (women’s battalion) also sources the must vulnerable women in Yemeni society so the poor or groups like the Muhamasheen. The Zainabiyyat batallion’s general is a man and it’s not really a fighting force, it’s a policing / occupation / intelligence force. Zainabinyyat has been accused of being given the duty to create the intelligence networks as a compromise and preventative measure but I haven’t seen strong confirmation of that, nor have I seen any strong evidence that if it’s happening that outcomes are changing for women and girls forced into these networks.

The US might miraculously find deposits of rare earth metals and then the war could get very long and very bloody.

If there was a realistic enormous certified deposit of every single rare earth mineral in the most Goldilocks location and the deck was stacked for this deus ex machina miracle, it wouldn’t matter.

In mining a deposit of minerals is a concentration of minerals. Think Minecraft, in a 9x9x9 cube the vein takes up an 8x8x9 space and runs into the next 9x9x9 cube. That’s what mining companies look for.

Rare earths are called rare earths not because there are few deposits, it’s because they’re more uniformly distributed in low quantities in mineral deposits. Again think Minecraft, but for every 9x9x9 cube there is a single block of antimony.

Rare earths cannot create mining economies of scale. The reason China has the most rare earth production is because they “use every part of the Buffallo” more than other country’s mining companies do. Rare earths are usually not refined from minerals that contain them in America because the labor to do so is too expensive. America’s access to rare earths has always been an economic question of cheap labor, not a question of locating the resources.

Biden was part of this. Trump’s plan is a rootless generalization of what Biden had tried. But instead of “high tech manufacturing”, “national security”, and “sanctions”, Trump’s trade war is based in “manufacturing”, “making America great”, and “tariffs”. This is just CHIPS without the subsidies and a more unrealistic plan that isn’t backed by NatSec blob. CHIPS has been an absolute failure too. It’s simply mystified by the technocratic ghouls of the DNC where if you question them you’re “too stupid to get it”.

Biden literally put all his chips in the Intel basket. Intel the company who had been riding on financialization and market dominance for so long its bean counters forced it to sleep walk into a complete production failure – then it was revealed that the same bean counters had painted it into a corner by cutting R&D. They have no answers to the architectural problems in their chipsets.

TBH any time you see a “gun guy” video and the main character is a femme woman it’s 9 times out of 10 going to be a dangerous setup and misogynistic.

The classic “we’re gonna let the hot girl shoot the Desert Eagle as her first gun so she breaks her nose” comes to mind.

This is in Brazil. This shooting range is essentially a private club which is very much a tacticool/MMA/No Touch TKO/Warrior style place. https://www.instagram.com/gunfightoficial/

The primary red flag in these kinds of things is always what caliber gun they’ll hand someone who’s never shot before. If it’s anything other than a 22LR it’s often a bad sign. The Glock she’s holding is at least a 9mm and she’s clearly scared of it.

I’m not certified or anything but every time I’ve taught someone to shoot I’ve started them on a 22LR rifle. The first 40 minutes is literally going over how to use it multiple times. The last 20 is pumping out a couple of mags. If they like it then you move up to higher calibers. Often the worst is when you’re teaching someone new/skittish in an indoor and someone’s playing around with their “9mm doesn’t have stopping power” compensator in the next stall.

Basic safety courses (the kind that states mandate as a bottom of the barrel minimum e.g. NRA basic) are taught on 22LR because it’s a safer way to learn.

Also Weaver foot stance + Isosceles grip + open toe platform shoes + trigger squeeze is why she’s swaying from recoil. Her center of gravity is fucked is so fucked. Looking through their insta they teach some incredibly bad shooting posture consistently. Very “we trained them wrong as a joke” vibes. This place blows so much.

This is what they use in their intro course. Fucking lol

Who/where?