He didn't steal 10 million dollars. They made that number up as a loss, they never fucking had it. Rockstar has spent more than a billion fucking dollars on GTA VI and will likely make billions more when it gets released.
Uber is a fucking shell game of a company designed to leech investor capital and output bootleg cabs.
Nvidia posted a profit in 2023 of $4.37 billion. This is like someone stealing less than a penny from me.
And they lock this kid in a prison hospital for LIFE?
What with GTA VI going up for pre-order i'd just like to remind everyone that rockstar conspired with the UK government to lock an 18-year-old away for life for hacking them.
Pleased to report that after a day of this i am not longer craving caper brine and my mouth is not dry as usual. There's some good suggestions in the notes too that I want to try.
-ancient roman posca: water, red or white wine vinegar, honey, salt, herbs (coriander, mint, thyme)
-switchel: water, ginger, vinegar, sweetener, lemon, salt
Zuckerberg’s increasingly bizarre war on whistleblowers
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
More than a decade ago, a group of young, internet-connected Belarusian dissidents launched a series of increasingly high-stakes, increasingly surreal confrontations with the corrupt, authoritarian government of Alexander Lukashenka, a man who is often called "the last Soviet dictator."
Lukashenka's secret police – still called the KGB – routinely terrorize and kidnap pro-democracy activists, and all forms of protest are banned. It was against the backdrop of this unrelenting oppression that the activists launched a series of whimsical "flash mobs" that challenged the Lukashenka regime's willingness to crack down on even the most innocuous behavior.
One of these flash mobs was an ice cream social: activists converged on a public square to eat ice cream cones. Lukashenka's thugs beat them and dragged them away:
The protestors thought that by daring Lukashenka to arrest people for eating ice cream, they could create a win-win situation: either Lukashenka would be revealed as the kind of asshole who thinks it should be illegal to eat ice cream, or he'd be revealed as the kind of weakling who couldn't keep a lid on dissent.
Lukashenka took the bait. And took it. And took it. In the years that followed, protesters would be arrested for smiling, clapping, and just standing silently:
The world learned that Lukashenka was a buffoon, and Belarusians affirmed their view that this buffoon would not hesitate to mete out the most vicious punishments for the most innocuous actions:
https://sci-hub.st/10.1080/25739638.2021.1928880
Speaking of thin-skinned, paranoid, wildly corrupt buffoons who will stop at nothing to silence their enemies, how about that Mark Zuckerberg, huh? Sure, all the headlines these days are about Zuck's intention to transform Facebook into a sports betting site:
But in the UK, Zuckerberg's war on whistleblowers keeps finding new, ice cream grade depths of absurdity to plumb. The whistleblower in question is, of course, Sarah Wynn-Williams, author of the internationally bestselling memoir Careless People, which details the criminality she witnesses during her years as the head of Facebook's international relations team:
Careless People is full of revelations about the gross institutional misconduct of Facebook, including its knowing encouragement of a genocide in Myanmar. But it's also full of stories about the severe personal failings of Facebook's executive team, especially Sheryl Sandberg, Joel Kaplan and Mark Zuckerberg.
These three come off as the most colossal of assholes, cruel, petty and predatory. Sandberg comes across as a sexual abuser who dreams of trafficking in poor people's organs. Kaplan is an oaf whose plan to provide paid internet access to refugee camps falls apart once he learns that refugees in camps don't have any money (he also takes points off of Wynn-Williams' workplace evaluation for being "unresponsive" over a period when she was in a near-death coma). Worst of all, though, is Zuckerberg, whose sins range from cheating at Settlers of Catan to endangering the Colombian peace process after a 50-year civil war because he refused to get out of bed before noon. Zuck is also revealed to have given the Chinese state access to all of Facebook and the power to censor content they disliked, as part of a failed bid to get permission to offer a Facebook service in China.
It's a terrible company, with awful products, run by the worst people. Wynn-Williams' conditions of employment required her to sign a contract that bound her to silence (nondisclosure), forbade her from speaking ill of the company (nondisparagement), and denied her access to the legal system in all her dealings with Meta (binding arbitration).
Together, these three clauses – routinely used by Meta to silence would-be whistleblowers – meant that after Wynn-Williams's book was published, Meta got its arbitrator – a lawyer who is paid by Meta to adjudicate contractual disputes instead of an actual judge – to order her to never promote or even speak about her book.
The arbitrator awarded Meta $50,000 for each criticism that Wynn-Williams levied, quickly coming to a total of over $11,000,000. This vastly exceeds the assets and lifetime earning potential of Wynn-Williams and her husband (a reporter with the Financial Times). If this bill ever truly comes due, they will be wiped out.
Which raises an interesting question: what else can they do to her? Once they've secured civil damages that exceeds her net worth several times over, why shouldn't she just flout her agreement? "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose," and all that.
Nevertheless, Wynn-Williams has scrupulously hewed to the arbitrator's rules, steadfastly remaining silent about her book, its contents, and her experiences at Facebook/Meta. When she and I appeared onstage together in London for the launch for my book Enshittification last year, she fell silent and assumed a blank expression any time the subject of Meta came up, and she didn't sign or sell books afterward:
When she won the British Book Award, she did not speak to accept it, and the cover of her book was blurred out on the overhead screen (she gave an acceptance speech on behalf of her co-winner, the late Virginia Giuffre, who was abused by Jeffrey Epstein and who accused Prince Andrew of sexual assault):
Nevertheless, when she was booked to speak – about a subject other than her book – at the Hay Festival on a stage with Tim Wu and Carole Cadwalladr, Meta sent a legal threat to the festival and Wynn-Williams, claiming that if by speaking about anything in public, she would violate the arbitrator's order. Accordingly, Wynn-Williams maintained total silence and a blank facial expression for an hour on stage, saying not one word, while Wu and Cadwalladr carried on a discussion. Careless People was withdrawn from the festival bookshop on the days she appeared there:
Nevertheless, Meta has informed Wynn-Williams that her silent, motionless appearance on a stage constitutes a further breach of her "agreement" and that they are going to seek even more damages from her. This act of anti-ice cream thuggery has pushed Wynn-Williams over the edge and now she's sued to invalidate her contract:
Her lawyers have posted their documents related to the suit, including a 285-page declaration by Wynn-Williams explaining the great lengths she's gone to in order to comply with Meta's demands, and the company's absolute intransigence and arbitrary menace:
Why would Meta be so intent on destroying this one high-profile whistleblower? Surely they've heard of the Streisand Effect. There is no better way to ensure that Wynn-Williams' book (already a NYT #1 bestseller) continues to attract readers than to continue to escalate these threats.
I think they're perfectly aware that they are convincing more people to read Careless People (you should read it, it's genuinely excellent):
But I think they've decided that this is a price worth paying, because:
a) They've done even worse things since Wynn-Williams parted ways with the company; and
b) They're laying off thousands of workers because their giant bet on AI has been a flop, leaving them with a massive cash crunch; and
c) By destroying Sarah Wynn-Williams, they can terrorize all those thousands of bitter ex-employees into silence about the even graver sins the company has committed.
Lukashenka knew that arresting children for eating ice cream would make him a laughingstock abroad. Zuckerberg knows that threatening Wynn-Williams for standing in wooden silence on a stage makes him look like history's most guillotineable billionaire. But both Lukashenka and Zuckerberg are willing to be thought a thin-skinned bully, so long as that means the people they oppress the most are too terrified to ever challenge their authority.
I've given myself heat exhaustion AGAIN (heck, I hope it's only heat exhaustion, rip) and I am not here for it ffs so to make sure y'all know about it, imma share the signs of heat exhaustion!
Heat exhaustion is quite literally your body getting too hot and Exhausting itself to cope. Heatstroke is your body Failing To Cope.
Heat Exhaustion signs include:
You get a headache that Will Not Go Away
You feel confused and dizzy (balance who? Idk her)
You don't feel hungry but you feel sick as well (this sucks and happens a lot in high heat so try and snack regularly)
Sweating and clammy skin like the kind that has people go "you're freezing!" because you've sweated so much you literally end up with a chill on your skin
Cramps. Feckin cramps. Arms. Legs. Stomach. They suck ass.
You have a heckin fast pulse or you're hyperventilating like you've just had a Scare
Your body temp is over 38°c (because you're literally boiling like a lobster in a pot)
You are Beyond Thirsty and no matter what you drink it Does Not Abate
If you end up experiencing any of these symptoms, or multiple, and you're in a hot/warm environment, then sit your ass down in the shade, get something to drink, and get a damp cloth on your head or a change of clothes that are cool.
Basically, stop what you're doing and give your body a chance to Not Keep Boiling
Heat exhaustion is NOT THE SAME as a heatstroke.
Heatstroke is So Much Worse™.
Heatstroke signs include:
Still feeling like utter shite 30 minutes after you sat your ass down, rested in a cool place, and rehydrated
Not actually sweating even though you really do feel like a lobster in a pot that has the heat up High
Your body temp is 40°c+ (which is bad btw, that's temp for causing your to pass out etc)
Hyperventilating/fast breathing or actual shortness of breath (I struggle with this because asthma so I'm always like "idk if I got this oops)
Feeling confused but in a like "I don't know what's going on, I can't think, I have no idea about anything, someone help me please I'm crossing into traffic and don't even realise" way
Having a fit/seizure because your body temp is so high your brain is Actually Getting Boiled In Your Skull 🙃 [upside down smiley emoji]
Passing out and not actually responding or waking up from a brief fainting spell (this is the Serious™ kind of passing out that has doctors going "oh shit, we need an IV STAT!" or whatever it is they say when Shit Is Going Down)
Heatstroke can be really dangerous if it isn't treated quickly so please don't ignore these signs. Right now, I'm in a cool environs, with hydration, and am avoiding moving and am gonna have a nap because I'm going very dizzy, can't focus properly, have a headache, and am only coherent here because I'm HyperFocusing on this post. I can't even understand words being said to me right now hence nap, hydration, and cool environs.
So please, y'all, take care of yourselves. Seriously.
If you have low blood sugar, but are having a hard time eating because you feel crappy from the heat, try sucking on some hard candy
If possible, after you get out of the sun/heat drink Gatorade or something similar to replenish what you've been loosing from sweating
When drinking water or Gatorade (no matter what you have it is important to stay hydrated!) it is important to drink slowly, even if you are very thirsty, because if you drink too fast the water might come back up
In hot weather, bandanas are very useful, even as a preventative measure, because you can pour some water from you bottle (or anything else) on them, and then put them on your head (as mentioned above) or neck. A few other areas help as well, like armpits, but I would personally recommend your neck.
It is not recommended to use a fan at or above 99°f or 35°c, because they can actually start to make the heat worse. (I know these are different temps, the recommendations come from different governments, 35°c is around 95°f, but this also depends on conditions like humidity, so just use your best judgement with this info)
Most importantly, if you think you are getting heat stroke call 911 or your equivalent, heat stroke kills several people each year, even in my area, where it normally only gets to 100°f for a few days each year
Well shit, I had most of those Sunday Morning, can heat exhaustion continue to hit even after you've moved into a cool environment, rehydrated, eaten, taken a long warmish-coolish shower and then slept for 7 hours?
Because those symptoms match the the symptoms I had last Sunday and made me feel like shit upon waking up.
They can yes @artisanscribbles because heat exhaustion takes time to go away. You may well feel a bit under the weather for a few days after experiencing it, and any sort of exposure to heat without proper precautions can make it flare up again and worsen into heatstroke.
It's why it's so important to rest and keep hydrated when it's warm. I hope you eventually felt better and maintained your hydration levels with water and other fluids.
I had three days of feeling the after effects of heat exhaustion myself and felt like I had a cold, a constant headache, and random chills all at the same time as having a dry throat, not sweating properly, dizziness, and even muscle cramps from the rapid dehydration I experienced.
In general, to anyone who sees or reblogs this:
It's really important to take care of yourself, both immediately after you recognise you've got heat exhaustion, and in the long term. It can affect you for days after.
June 12, 2016. Putting a date on this for when it gets reblogged months from now by people who think the post is about something from 30, 40 years ago.
I am a survivor of the Pulse nightclub shooting, having grown up in Orlando and just turned 20 a month prior. If you didn’t know, there were several families who refused to claim the bodies of their relatives due to their sexuality. One family even had their relative’s name removed from the memorial. Murdered by the same hate with which their families reject them in both life and death.
Many, many people celebrated Pulse. We were told we deserved it. That it was God’s punishment for our sin of loving the same sex. We are sent messages like these I received in 2018:
We in the community often call the victim count 49+ to include the survivors who couldn’t live with the pain.
The event was never officially declared a hate crime or targeted homophobic attack and is rarely listed as one in databases.
At our vigils for those slaughtered, Extremist Christian groups showed up to protest, holding signs like this:
ID: Me kissing a woman I was casually seeing in front of an angry looking man with a “Sodomy is Sin” sign.
Please understand how much more than just a mass shooting this was. We are still to this day harassed and told we deserved it by some.
This year was the sixth anniversary. The first couple years I received dozens of messages checking in on me on 6/12. Year 5 got enough news coverage for people to think to reach out to me. This year it was my therapist, the woman I kissed in that photo, and a couple of other gun violence survivor friends. People are forgetting already.
alright I've got to do some quick math to explain attitudes towards AI to my boss.
we're looking to create an AI policy, and when we were talking about this, my boss (older millennial) was genuinely shocked to hear that younger people do not (seem) to view AI positively (a la the recent commencement speakers being booed)
please rb for larger sample size!
Question 1/3
What is your age, and do you feel AI is a net positive or net negative in our lives today?
"From the Sun arise all beings. The Sun sustains them all. Into the Sun they all vanish. What the Sun is, that I am"
~ Surya Upanishad
Surya and his Golden Chariot
Talon Abraxas
The Golden Chariot and Seven Horses
Surya Dev’s journey across the sky is one of the most beautiful images in Hindu scriptures. He rides a magnificent golden chariot that sparkles like the sun itself. This chariot is pulled by seven divine horses, each representing a different aspect of life and light. The chariot and horses are not just a poetic idea but carry deep spiritual meaning.
The Markandeya Purana describes Surya’s chariot as a single-wheeled vehicle, symbolizing the eternal cycle of time. The seven horses are said to represent the seven colors of light, the seven days of the week, or the seven chakras (energy centers) in the human body. Each horse has a name, and together they pull Surya’s chariot with grace and power.
Surya rides a chariot with seven horses, shining for the whole world. Its single wheel glows brightly, revealing the cycle of time.
The seven horses are named Gayatri, Brihati, Ushnik, Jagati, Trishtubh, Anushtubh, and Pankti in some texts, linking them to the poetic meters of the Vedas. Spiritually, they show how Surya’s light touches every part of life—physical, mental, and spiritual. The single wheel of the chariot reminds us that time moves in one continuous flow, guided by Surya’s divine energy.
people want doing the right thing to be like pulling the correct lever at the correct time but actually usually doing the right thing is more like holding a moderate weight at arm's length continuously for seventeen years
every so often since like, March, this post will spike in popularity, and I'll just suddenly know that a few thousand people somewhere are Going Through it for reasons I cannot know in any detail, like I'm some small node in our collective lymbic system that doesn't actually know what to do with the signals it's given. it's interesting.
i don’t understand how neil gaiman intellectual properties still trend on here so regularly he literally trafficked women. like it’s not even a discourse thing or a “he’s problematic” thing he was “cancelled” for human trafficking. he repeatedly isolated women, usually his or his ex-wife’s fans, with no support system for the purpose of raping them while they were dependent on him for income and housing. that’s human trafficking
If we can stop reading Harry Potter because JK Rowling is transphobic, we can stop interacting with Neil Gaiman's media in any way because he's a rapist. It's not that hard actually. Fuck Neil Gaiman
I love you disabled girls. I love you scared girls. I love you dysfunctional girls. I love you sad girls. I love you hurt girls. I love you trans girls. I love you racialised girls. I love you lonely girls. I hope you find people who love you and care for you like you deserve. I hope you find people who will hold you and let you hold them. I love you.
Fuck ever news outlet for naming the murderer and blasting his face all over the internet, but the trans woman he murdered is never shown and only referred to as "transgender woman."
Her name was Juniper Blessing, and she was just doing her laundry.
So my beta reader for the Big Fics is an astrophysicist, right. Who is currently also writing a hard sci-fi novel about the exploration of Phobos (more power to them, I cannot with the physics required for that, best I can do is soft sci-fi/fantasy and that reminds me I should finish that story).
Anyway I was bitching about how hard it is to come up with feasible planets in Star Wars because sometimes you need a new planet from scratch and sometimes you need to know more about a planet than the 'has jungles, is probably a moon technically' than Wookieepedia will give you, and they're like 'oh yeah I can do something about that'.
So they've written (in Matlab but they swear it will run as a .exe as well and I may be conscripted to embed it as a web tool at some point) a star system generator.
You input what you know about the planet (ecosystem, population, sun colour, does it have liquid water, does it have a moon or moons, is it a moon or moons, temperature averages, atmosphere, you get me) and it will give you the... everything else about the star system, in obedience to real-universe physics. And if you input nothing you get a randomly generated star system.
And I’m like oh I know people who will be into this with a vengeance, and they're not on Tumblr, so this is me seeing who exactly would be keen on, and I cannot stress this enough, a real-physics comprehensive star system generator.
It's still in the debugging phase (last error fixed: every planet wants to have a population of exactly 5000 regardless of other factors, turned out to be a missing equals sign somewhere), but I'm psyched for this and trying to gauge interest for how high a priority 'make this an accessible web tool' needs to be.
Y'all if you're American please email your politicians and senators against the parents decide act. I'm fucking begging because we're reaching a tipping point.
Quick and easy link to both find your congressmen/women and giving you a quick and easy way to copy / paste the message into it. You want to oppose. It's an act that will demand that all major OS makers integrate a direct forced age verification control into all OS.
I received a comment on this that I figured would be very helpful- it's a template for communicating with your representatives. Be sure to use it for reference
Dear Representative [Name],
I am writing to express my strong opposition to H.R. 8250 (The "Parents Decide Act"). As your constituent and a concerned citizen, I believe this bill introduces unprecedented risks to digital privacy and security.
Specifically, I am alarmed by:
SEC. 2(a)(1)(B): Requiring age verification to even use an operating system creates a mandatory "hardware lockout" that ends anonymous computing and forces users to hand over sensitive identification data to major corporations just to power on their devices.
SEC. 2(a)(3): Mandating that OS providers create a system for all app developers to access verification data is a massive security vulnerability. This effectively creates a centralized API of user identities accessible to thousands of third-party developers, many of whom may lack adequate data protection.
This bill does not protect children; it creates a centralized surveillance infrastructure at the OS level. I urge you to protect the privacy of your constituents and vote NO on H.R. 8250.
This is a hell that us down under in Australia are already living in, and it’s not even effective at what it claims to do in protecting children.
Given that, in the wake of this mandatory identification policy, my country seems to be moving to hand over its citizens biometric data, like fingerprints, Face ID files, and identification documents, over to the USA and to ICE to maintain the visa free travel (ESTA) we have, I strongly urge any US resident to send these emails, or make calls.
But if you can’t do that, the most powerful thing you can do is spread the word. Tell your friends, family, coworkers, anyone who can help.
My reach will likely be small, and so I don’t know if this will mean very much in the grand scheme of things, but I cannot stand to see this tracking happen to another population as it did to mine.
And if you think it won’t affect you, it will. All anonymity goes out the window when your accounts can be linked via your personal ID
I wish you all luck in preventing this act from going through.
This is all one take?? And they have MULTIPLE people as Robin Hood so that they can "cut" between them by spinning the camera??? Wow. That's so complicated but super clever
OK, so, what's happening here isn't actually a single take. But that's OK, because faking a good one oner is often just as hard as doing one for real.
There's definitely only one Robin. Sorry, but even with identical twins, those guys are flat out identical, down to the chest hair.
So how are they doing this?
It's called a whip cut. Every time the camera swings, the view smears for a moment. By carefully blending the start of one smear with the end of another they can stitch together two shots in a way that appears completely contiguous.
I want to be 100% clear; this is not easy. It takes care and knowledge of your tools to make the cuts this smooth, and your original footage can't have any noticeable differences in stuff like lighting. This took work, all for a bit. I'm actually more impressed at how they faked this being in one take than I would have been if I thought it was real.
