Sparky @nicholask95 - Tumblr Blog

People still doing "do you think voting can fix this" memes when the answer to the question "when did voting last end an authoritarian regime" is "two days ago"

qqueenofhades

Reblogged this earlier, but doing so again to add:

Hey we all remember 2020, right? When we voted out Donald Trump the first time??? That was a thing that happened a mere six years ago, and yes, America subsequently massively fucked it up and voted him back in, but we did remove him by voting once before.

Anyone also remember 2024, when Jair Bolsonaro was removed by voting in Brazil? And when he tried a coup, Brazil actually fucking punished him, disqualified him from running, and sent him to jail, instead of letting him off scot-free to do it again?

Also a spate of worldwide post-Trump elections, where the far-right wasn't in power per se but was gunning to be, and voting ensured they stayed out (2025 Moldova, 2025 Romania where massive protests annulled Russian meddling and forced a re-run where the pro-EU candidate won, 2025 Canada where the Conservatives lost after previously being up 20 points, 2025 Australia where the far right was just fuckin wiped out, 2025 Netherlands where Geert Wilders lost, AND SO FORTH).

And of course, the result referenced in the original post, 2026 Hungary where Viktor Fucking Orbán was removed by voting? Despite the massive structural hurdles facing the Hungarian voting public, far more than is the case in America even now?

(Lololol the Kremlin and Trump have immediately pivoted to "Orbán who? Never heard of him. Never knew him. Shh.")

Anti-voting has always been a deeply stupid ideology by people who want miraculous revolution to be suddenly achieved with no downsides and no widespread catastrophe, by doing nothing more than posting violent rhetoric online. Because they have no interest in actually doing the kind of hands-on, slow, systematic work that leads to positive social change in real life, and because they have no understanding of how anything actually works.

Relentless, hypocritical, purity-test politics are literally the best friend of authoritarians everywhere, because they ensure that liberal/left coalitions will never get their fucking act together long enough to put their weight behind the non-authoritarian candidate.

We've all said this before, but sometimes it bears restating.

Nobody has ever suggested that social change can be achieved solely by voting in decent or lesser-evil candidates. Voting is one tiny part of that effort. "Oh so you just want us to vote and do nothing else??" No. No, nobody has ever said that. You can and you should do a lot more than that: protest, mutual aid, fundraising, organizing, pressure campaigns, community protection groups, literally whatever. You can and should continue to hound the politicians you voted for if they're not living up to their campaign promises, as long as you actually voted for them in the first place.

The end.

1947

kid had a great week

cultivating-wildflowers

happy 77 years to the best week of this kid's life

completed-nihilism-blog

labiodentist-deactivated2015021

what. why? someone pls explain to me pls i wasnt born yet in 1999 why turn computer off before midnight? what happen if u dont?

awhdjksadaluigsjkdfasdk-deactiv

y2k lol everyone was like “the supervirus is gonna take over the world and ruin everything and end the world!!!”

jibini

This is the oldest I’ve ever felt. Right now.

the-ilyasaurus-deactivated20160

WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU MEAN YOU WEREN’T BORN YET IN 1999.

faisdm

Ahh the Millenium bug.

It wasn’t a virus, it was an issue with how some old computers at the time were programmed to deal with dates. Basically some computers with older operating systems didn’t have anything in place to deal with the year reaching 99 and looping around to 00. It was believed that this inability to sync with the correct date would cause issues, and even crash entire systems the moment the date changed.

People flipped out about it, convinced that the date discrepancy between netwoked systems would bring down computers everywhere and shut down the internet and so all systems relying on computers, including plane navigation etc. would go down causing worldwide chaos. It was genuinely believed that people should all switch off computers to avoid this. One or two smart people spoke up and said “um hey, this actually will only effect a few very outdated computers and they’ll just display the wrong date, so it probably won’t be harmful” but were largely ignored because people selling books about the end of the world were talking louder.

In the end, absolutely nothing happened.

ralfmaximus

Oh gosh.

I’ve been a programmer working for various government agencies since the early 1990s and I can say with some confidence:

NOTHING HAPPENED BECAUSE WE WORKED VERY HARD FIXING SHIT THAT MOST DEFINITELY WOULD HAVE BROKEN ON 1-JAN-2000.

One example I personally worked on: vaccination databases.

My contract was with the CDC to coordinate immunization registries — you know, kids’ vaccine histories. What they got, when they got it, and (most importantly) which vaccines they were due to get next and when. These were state-wide registries, containing millions of records each.

Most of these systems were designed in the 1970s and 1980s, and stored the child’s DOB year as only two digits. This means that — had we not fixed it — just about every child in all the databases I worked on would have SUDDENLY AGED OUT OF THE PROGRAM 1-JAN-2000.

In other words: these kids would suddenly be “too old” to receive critical vaccines.

Okay, so that’s not a nuke plant exploding or airplanes dropping from the sky. In fact, nothing obvious would have occurred come Jan 1st.

BUT

Without the software advising doctors when to give vaccinations, an entire generation’s immunity to things like measles, mumps, smallpox (etc) would have been compromised. And nobody would even know there was a problem for months — possibly years — after.

You think the fun & games caused by a few anti-vaxers is bad?

Imagine whole populations going unvaccinated by accident… one case of measles and the death toll might be measured in millions.

This is one example I KNOW to be true, because I was there.

I also know that in the years leading up to 2000 there were ad-hoc discussion groups (particularly alt.risk) of amazed programmers and project managers that uncovered year-2000 traps… and fixed them.

Quietly, without fanfare.

In many cases because admitting there was a problem would have resulted in a lawsuit by angry customers. But mostly because it was our job to fix those design flaws before anyone was inconvenienced or hurt.

So, yeah… all that Y2K hysteria was for nothing, because programmers worked their asses off to make sure it was for nothing.

spytap

Bolding mine.

jaybushman

Absolutely true. My Mom worked like crazy all throughout 1998 and 1999 on dozens of systems to avoid Y2K crashes. Nothing major happened because people worked to made sure it didn’t.

Now if we could just harness that concept for some of the other major issues facing us today.

shananaomi

this meme came so far since i saw it this morning. god i love tumblr teaching tumblr about history.

forloveofreason

As a young Sys Admin during Y2K, I can confirm that it was SRS BZNS. I worked for a major pharmaceutical company at the time. They spent millions of dollars on consultant and programmer hours, not to mention their own employees’ time, to fix all their in-house software as well as replace it with new systems. Sys Admins like myself were continually deploying patches, updating firmware, and deploying new systems in the months leading up to Y2K. Once that was done, though, the programmers went home and cashed their checks.

When the FATEFUL HOUR came along, it wasn’t just one hour. For a global company with offices in dozens of countries, it was 24 hours of being alert and on-call. I imagine that other large organizations had similar setups with entire IT departments working in shifts to monitor everything. Everyone was on a hair trigger, too, so the slightest problem caused ALL HANDS ON DECK pages to go out.

Yes, we had pagers.

For hard numbers IDC’s 2006 calculation put the total US cost of remediation, before and after, at $147 billion - that’s in 1999 dollars. That paid for an army of programmers, including calling up retired grandparents from the senior center because COBOL and FORTRAN apps from the ‘60s needed fixing.

Also note that there were some problems, including $13 billion in remediation included in the figure above. Some of these involved nuclear power plants, medical equipment, and “a customer at a New York State video rental store had a bill for $91,250, the cost of renting the movie ‘The General’s Daughter’ for 100 years.”

Y2K was anything but nothing.

all-things-olicity

@figure-forever

cumaeansibyl

tfw you do your job so fucking well that everyone thinks you weren’t necessary in the first place :(

salute our COBOL cowpokes and other Y2K wranglers, they saved all our asses

another important lesson we learned: a shitload of stuff in the ‘90s was still running programs from the ‘60s and ‘70s. it’s hard to justify the expense and trouble of a massive upgrade when things are working “fine” – easier to say “well, I suppose we’ll need to change at some point, but not now”

and if things really are working “fine” you can let them go on for a while but every so often you run into something like Y2K where the software simply wasn’t designed to handle certain eventualities. can’t really blame the programmers, either. if you were writing shit in the ‘60s, would you expect people to still be using it in the science-fiction year of 2000? that’s not a real year! you might be dead by then!

so, y’know, you don’t always need the latest and greatest for everything you’re doing – how much power do you really need for an inventory system? – but regular upgrades are a Good Idea

musicalluna

nerds quietly saving the world. this is superhero nonsense i love it

emeraldmercury

Holy shit so THIS was why my older cousins were saying all the computers were going to die and four year old me was like “what.”

silks-stuff

Within a certain FTSE 100 retailer, I worked on the millennium bug project for over 8 months to make sure that none of our 2,400 mainframe programs would crash. Out of those, over 900 needed changing and testing.

On New Year even while others were out drinking and being merry, my colleague and I sat in a dark room together until 5am keeping one eye on our computer screens, and the other on a large TV I’d brought in for movies.

Rest of the world: Nothing went wrong! hahah

Me: You’re welcome.

kou32-deactivated20190911

Thank you for your service

dollsahoy

Add my voice to the “nothing happened because people made sure it wouldn’t” brigade.

I was married to someone in a bank’s IT department back then, and I remember helping him run updates on individual computers (stick in a floppy, run a .exe, repeat for the next computer…and the next…and the next…) several times near the end of 1999, and then he was at work all night on New Year’s, and I ran into someone I kinda knew at the store the next morning and she said her husband had spent the previous night babysitting computers, too.

But.

People–the kind of people who would eventually go on to fall for the most outrageous, unbelievable, sensationalist stories on FB–didn’t understand what the problem actually was. They thought that every electronic thing with a clock would become useless at midnight. Microwaves. Alarm clocks. Coffee makers. And the fact that those things kept working–those things that never had a chance of not working to begin with–probably has as much as anything to do with convincing them that Y2k was a false alarm.

vashtijoy

I was not actually in the industry in 1999, but I was adjacent, and the amount of “they think we did nothing wtf” had to be seen to be believed.

I did have a tshirt that read 19100. Because that was what Perl did, as a fair number of websites found out.

kaitrizzo

“all that Y2K hysteria was for nothing, because programmers worked their asses off to make sure it was for nothing.”

The difference between “experts were saying something was gonna happen, but it didn’t, so experts don’t know shit” and “experts said this thing was gonna happen, but it didn’t because EXPERTS FIXED THAT SHIT THEREFORE LISTEN TO THE FUCKING EXPERTS”

loki-zen

you know what it’s probably going to be harder and harder to refute this myth, because people won’t remember that alarm clocks and coffee makers used to not have computers in them.

kitstacean

yknow what’s the Really fun part?

WE’RE GONNA HAVE TO DO THIS AGAIN, YEEHAW!

Ok to be fair to the software industry, this was recognised way earlier (you may have noticed many programs releasing 64 bit versions and slowly trying to encourage people to stop using the 32bit versions. This is probably one of the reasons why)

Imagine you're so small and cold and scared but there's smaller ones that are smaller and colder and more scared. I'm going to cry

mpregeminem

the thing is i love living under a rock #myrock. people will ask you howwww can you not know about this?? it's because of my rock next question

drunp-archive-deactivated201711

this is peak Craigslist

impuretale

I want to know if they got answers.

finninsanelycoolish-deactivated

I really wanna know how this turned out.

chemmonkey-deactivated20230109

Just so you guys know.

hydok

cracking open 500 cold ones with the dads

out-there-on-the-maroon

“over 100 hopeful dads applied for the position” omg this is so lovely.

I love that the internet enables things like this.

toomanyvocals

VINCE GILLIGAN: I hate AI. (Variety; Deadline)

skribblegurl

some people think writers are so eloquent and good with words, but the reality is that we can sit there with our fingers on the keyboard going, “what’s the word for non-sunlight lighting? Like, fake lighting?” and for ten minutes, all our brain will supply is “unofficial”, and we know that’s not the right word, but it’s the only word we can come up with…until finally it’s like our face got smashed into a brick wall and we remember the word we want is “artificial”.

heywriters

I couldn't remember the word "doorknob" ten minutes ago.

bumblewyn

ok but the onelook thesaurus will save your life, i literally could not live without this website

breelandwalker

REBLOG TO SAVE A WRITER'S LIFE

myfairkatiecat

LIFE SAVED

REBLOGGING TO SAVE ANOTHER WRITERS LIFE

sirowsky

I use this every time I sit down to write. It's the best tool in the world and I would be lost without it!

goawfma

i feel like we don’t talk about things like this enough

blatterpussbunnyfromhell

Moroccan architecture (specifically, amazigh from Chefchaouen)

Post-colonial Algerian architecture (Algiers and Constantine):

Mozabite architecture (from Ghardaia, Algeria):

theprofessional-amateur

Well played Merriam-Webster.

“There is artificial intelligence, and there is actual intelligence” 🎤🫳

theprofessional-amateur

tedcruzisthezodiackiller

all-hail-the-antler-king

Like to charge reblog to cast

bundibird

So from what I read, theyre asking a judge to throw out the case on the grounds that: "if everyone we stole from chooses to join the class action against us, it would financially ruin our company and would also be a precedent for people to sue the OTHER ai companies too, and it would financially ruin THEM as well.

Their argument isn't "we didnt steal," or "we broke no laws by using their stuff without permission" ---- their argument is "but if you hold us legally liable for stealing their stuff, itll be super expensive for us :( "

Needless to say, i hope that the class action goes ahead, and i hope it finds the company legally and financially liable for a fucktonne of money, and I hope that every other AI company also gets sued and has to pay damages into bankruptcy.