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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • I didn’t say you should try or expect to convince them of anything. Just pointing out the error is enough to let anyone curious enough follow up for themselves. I say that about this post because the person seems to have a genuine intuition about the vague idea of collective ownership.

    You can’t expect to convince someone in a single argument.

    For myself, when I was still in a liberal mindset, I had someone on reddit say “down with democracy!”, and I called them a fascist, because that sounded pretty fashy to me and it was during trump term 1 when those guys were really stretching their assholes and letting the shit flow.

    They said actually no, they were a communist, so I just dropped it. I could tell they were being sincere but also I didn’t really want to take the time to unpack their point.

    It did flip a switch for me though, that someone was openly declaring to be a communist. It was definitely part of my walk away from vaguely status quo liberalism towards full anarcho communism.

    I still think the way they said “down with democracy!” was bad rhetoric, and I understand they probably meant “down with liberal democracy”, or maybe “down with representative democracy”, or maybe they were some sort of weird nazbol and they really did think democracy as a concept was bad. Doesn’t matter, it moved the needle for me.

    Anyway, point being a sincere answer whether it’s very well articulated or even correct, is usually better than making up some bullshit in some misguided machiavelian manipulation.


  • They let fascist propaganda trick them into believing that corporations are socialist because they flew the wrong flags. They would let those same fascists tell them the corporations are their friends now because they fly the right flags. That’s what they’re paying attention to.

    The correct response is, “You are describing worker ownership, which is socialist.” They have to learn they’re on the wrong side before they’ll stop listening to the fascists. They have to be educated, and agree to change the flag in their head, because the right is fundamentally domineering. They won’t accidentally make socialism happen, they’ll just smash our shit because they hate our flags.

    Sorry for the rant but I see this “joke” take people are making in this thread all the time and there’s a reason it’s a joke.





  • If all of the people who stayed home would have been kamala voters then it sounds like she failed to inspire them to vote. It sounds like she lost an election.

    Yes, if an unprecedented, impossible turnout occurred then dems might’ve won, but that’s not actually a strategy, that’s fantasy. Assuming there isn’t some level of divine intervention, then people are right that their vote doesn’t matter, because this is the real world where we already know a plurality of people don’t vote.

    It’s almost like voter disenfranchisement works.

    I don’t know why liberals can’t get this basic concept: if electoralism is meaningful at all, then the electorate cannot be wrong.

    If the electorate voted “wrong” then your democracy doesn’t do what it claims to, it does not represent the people. <- this is actually the correct answer btw

    Blaming the electorate achieves nothing.

    The electorate didn’t fail the dems, the dems failed the electorate.


  • It’s hard to blame the people who stayed home when disenfranchisement is an intended feature of your electoral system. The vast majority of people know for a fact that their vote mathematically does not matter and a huge number cannot get time off on the weekday it is scheduled for.

    If a full third of people stayed home, that’s a systemic problem, not an individual responsibility problem. Your electoral system is completely captured by capital and you are stuck blaming the electorate.

    Folks please: US corruption is not a cultural or personal issue, it is systemic. Power corrupts, not just people, but systems. The US has been at the head of the global hegemon for most of the last century, they have most of the billionaires, of course they are corrupt. That’s where capitalists focus their efforts to get the most returns. It’s not an accident that the guy doing DOGE just happened to be the richest man on the planet.

    Maybe focus your energy there instead of on the people who have literally no power.







  • Facebook has had a strategy for a long time of monopolising the internet of countries that previously had very little internet. They essentially subsidise internet infrastructure and make that subsidy dependent on facebook being a central part of the network.

    So I’m not surprised to hear this. They obviously have found ways to inveigle themselves into key infrastructure in lots of places, even if they couldn’t build it in from the ground up.


  • They are obviously not in a reasoning place. I wouldn’t try logic, but they are susceptible to emotional manipulation. That’s how they fell for fascist propaganda in the first place. I would go for emotional truth.

    You have to judge if you’re safe to do this, but the next time they’re screaming about their absurd conspiracies, I would get a really sad look on my face, make direct eye contact, shake my head and say, “You’re so full of hate, and it’s really sad.” Just go full sincerity and show them how you see them.

    You can even set them up for it. Next time you try telling them some fact that they’re going to have this hateful response to, you can have this in your back pocket. You start with a simple fact, they respond with hate, you reply by telling them they’re being hateful.

    This is a modification of this strategy: https://youtu.be/tZzwO2B9b64

    Basically, don’t waste time arguing with fascists, just point out that they’re being assholes.

    Now, I say you need to judge how safe you feel doing this, because you might be surprised how ballistic they go. People stuck in abusive behaviour patterns hate nothing more than having that behaviour simply described to them. But when they do lose their shit, you can just describe it again.

    Sometimes they will just short-circuit and try to ignore you, or chastise you for speaking out of turn. The authoritarian personality is deeply connected to authoritarian parenting attitudes. Just persist over time, and maybe they will notice that they can’t stop you from reflecting their ugly selves back at them.

    I don’t know how old you are, how physically big you are, how prone they are to serious outbursts, but again, pay attention to your body and how much you’re feeling your flight instinct. Only if you feel safe.

    I do this with my parents sometimes. Like if my mum is fussing over my kids in some way that I think is invasive, - this was a sore point in my upbringing, she has no filter and no boundaries - I don’t engage on the facts of what she’s saying. I don’t tell her, “That tiny red spot you’ve noticed isn’t a big problem,” because that’s also being invasive and speaking on their behalf. I say “People don’t like to be scrutinised like that. If that’s a real problem they can tell us.”

    It’s honestly astonishing how fast this resolves some situations. That might have been a perennial argument about some fussy detail of my child’s appearance, all the time adding to the boundary-crossing scrutiny they experience, but shutting it down by pointing out her behaviour really makes her stop, and it communicates to my kids that they don’t have to put up with it. It teaches them that they have autonomy.

    It’s taken many years of demonstrating to her that I won’t be pushed around or intimidated for me to get to this point though. It’s not an easy road, and often the way to know the tactic is working is by watching how unpleasant someone gets when you do it, at least at first.

    Again: only if you feel safe.


  • This is an online forum. It’s words. Your idea that the people you’re talking to are all talk is unfalsifiable. If anyone did post on here about pulling a trigger you could attack them for being all talk for exactly that same reason.

    On this forum, you are also all talk. There is literally nothing else you can do on here.

    But go off, everybody around you is all talk, all the time. That certainly isn’t a feature of the place you chose to express your vapid rants.

    People who are organising on the ground are under no obligation to keep you in the loop by posting about it publicly, especially given you clearly aren’t interested in helping anyway.

    My guess is your accusations are all a projection of your own feelings of powerlessness. I mean there’s not going to be another election for about 4 more years, and your only method of change is useless until then.

    Gee, I wonder if that’s by design?


  • I agree broadly with the idea that the state’s legitimacy relies on the appearance that they wield their violence justly, but I think you’re giving the state too much credit when you frame it as a fair and considered exchange of power.

    The state has had all of us under its purview since birth, it has pumped us full of pro-hierarchy, anti-autonomy, anti-social propaganda and it wields its violence more to prevent insurgency than it does to protect us.

    There is no “social contract”, nothing that I ever signed anyway, and even if there were, contract law invalidates any contract signed under duress. The concept of the social contract is just yet more hierarchical propaganda. It’s a vague, handwavey vibe to obscure the fact that we really aren’t given a meaningful option to leave.

    The state relies on not just the appearance of legitimacy, but the appearance of absolute power. Both are illusions, and can be opposed by organised people directly building mutual aid on the ground. The more we meet one another’s needs for security the less we need the state and the more people can see it for the charade that it is.



  • Okay, that’s all very interesting and I love the idea about dynamic music, I’ve had similar thoughts myself but wouldn’t have thought to go this far to make it happen. I’d love to see what you come up with!

    My only real thoughts are about the transpiling, so the editor uses relative time codes but the format itself uses absolute, if I understand you, and you’re converting between the two?

    That to me hints of code smell, because I wonder why that’s necessary. For example, could you program the editor to display and work in absolute time codes, or is there something stopping that from happening?

    Alternatively you could simply make the format capable of natively understanding both relative and absolute commands, so whichever is more appropriate to the context is what gets used.

    Keeping them different seems like it will require you to program two formats, make them compatible with one another and deal with bugs in both of them. Essentially you’ve not only doubled the number of places where bugs can arise within the formats, you’ve added the extra step of transpiling which also doubles the number of interactions between the formats, adding even more complexity, even more places where inconsistencies can show up, even more code to sift through to find the problem.

    It’s the sort of thing that shows up in legacy systems where the programmers don’t have the freedom to simply ditch one of the parts.

    Personally if I had the freedom of programming the system from scratch I would rather commit completely to a single format and make it work across the entire stack, so then I only have one interpreter/encoder to consider. That one parser would then be the single point of reference for every interaction with the format. Any code that wants to get or place a note for any reason - for playing, editing, recording, whatever - would use the same set of functions, and then you automatically get consistency across all of it.

    Edit: another thought about this: if you need some notes to be absolute and others to be relative, it might be worth having an absolute anchor command that other commands can be relative to, and have it indexed, so commands are relative to anchor 1, 2, etc. Maybe anchor 0 is just the start of the song. Also maybe you could set any command as an anchor by referring to its index. That way you can still move around those commands in a relative way while still having the overall format reducible to absolute times during playback. Also a note “duration” could just be an off command set relative to its corresponding on command.

    I say that because as another principle I like to make sure that I “name things what they are”. If the user is programming things in the editor that are relative, but under the hood they’re translated into absolute terms, that will probably lead to unexpected behaviour.



  • Honestly a lot of this post is very inside-baseball with a lot of lingo, and the last paragraph is very dense, so it’s hard to know what you mean, especially by the term “transpiler”. What is it transpiling to & from, and where does this happen in the overall process of implementing the editor?

    I’m sorry I don’t have a lot of insight other than: it sounds like you know better than anyone here, so just try it and see what works. Sometimes rewriting a system is unavoidable as you figure out the logic of it.

    Also as someone with some interest in programming my own physical MIDI instruments, I’d be interested to hear what limitations of MIDI you’re talking about and what your system does differently. It sounds like you’ve got a pretty advanced use-case if MIDI isn’t up to the task.