ggtdbz

Not going to lie, as someone from a society where religious buildings are generally never reused into something else, I get mixed feelings seeing them being reused. Yes it’s good that they can still bring people together, it’s good not to knock decent walls down, but I don’t know. I’m not very religious but I often feel like in my community the church brings people together, even if the services don’t mean very much to me after two decades of Catholic school all but beat my faith out of me.

“Churches in the west being changed into parking garages/clubs/restaurants/forced toddler trans surgery centers/mosques” is kind of a meme among the older generation of Christians in Lebanon. And by meme I mean they believe that 110% of western churches have been destroyed and that it’s a sign of the end times.

I have mixed feelings on this topic usually. But boxing? Boxing in an old church sounds rad as hell.

I don’t know why but it feels like it works. Community space, an activity that requires mutual respect, something raw that people have done for thousands of years, there’s an undeniable cool factor.

I’ve done only a little bare metal work back when I was a student and I felt like a goddamn wizard.

Like… yes. Of course everything looks the same, just an ocean of ones and zeroes that is just coherent enough to make a processor do something, such as fetch the right ones and zeroes from somewhere else. Of course folders aren’t dedicated physical sectors of a storage device. Of course like half of anything we ask a computer to do is manipulating storage, and taking this storage and feeding it into the actual memory of whatever is going to process it.

When you zoom back out and realize that the majority of data processing happening right now is people streaming short form video on an unfathomably massive scale, that’s when it just falls apart for me and can’t exist outside the abstractions that make the concept digestible.

Like I can kind of understand Lemmy, as software. I can see where all this data sits and gets queried and how it works. I can vaguely conceive of a few possible federation protocols. That vast ocean of unindexed “content” over on Instagram or TikTok or YouTube? That the algorithms can serve you up no problem but that you can’t even always search for manually? That’s terrifying, on the scale of these platforms. It’s like a leviathan sci-fi body horror meat machine but of data. Yeah yeah I vaguely understand CDNs but I’m talking about the whole thing: the algorithms, the video files, streaming all this data, the impossibly complex social phenomena built around the data… the fact that this monumental achievement is only used to sell ads, landfill fodder, and to fuck with people’s brains and worldviews, it’s legitimately horrifying. I especially think about this when I’m in a public place surrounded by people watching videos on their phones and swiping through them at dizzying speed.

Is this how computer people end up chopping wood in the forest?

There's always some chud who stumbles in from the wrong instance to say "No You!" whenever Israel commits a new war crime. I'm looking forward to hearing how you're going to justify

I’ve learned to mentally prepare myself before reading comments and accept that some people will never fundamentally see me as a human being. And that’s fucked up but it’s something I need to understand to be able to explain the situation we’re in to those who are actually worth the time to convince.

Some people will look at photos of war destruction and maybe even feel sad about it. But it’ll never be their cities and communities, so they look at these photos and think it only happens to “those” countries. They’re countries “with war”, “probably because of terrorism”, essentially the “enlightened” understanding is that “these people are born to die from war”.

These people will never understand that the rubble they see on their screens was vibrant communities, places where people who watched the same TV shows and football matches as them lived. War victims aren’t a special type of human who exist only to suffer to make your news segments sad. I struggle to get across how normal these people are.

I think in part I used to be someone who thought this way. Lebanon isn’t Syria, Iraq, Palestine, it’s not an African country undergoing civil war, it’s not Serbia in the 90s and it’s not Haiti after a natural disaster. It hadn’t been any of these things since the early 90s. When I saw cities in Syria getting flattened on the TV it was sad but all those people were War People, not like us, couldn’t be us. (Situation is more complicated with Syria because at one point over a million Syrian people were displaced into Lebanon, a country with an official population of 4 million. I’m sure even the most accepting person of refugees could see how this is unsustainable)

The reason people cheer when Israel murders us is that they don’t think we’re people. It’s that simple. They think we’re destined for the slaughterhouse anyway and that we’re essentially terrorists for standing in the way instead of lying down to make the process easier on the Merkava’s suspension. Just look at that war footage! We are just blood for the blood god.

There’s nothing ironic about how every single person who has been murdered in this war who I personally know are people who hate the “terrorists” who they have been executed for “being a part of”. It’s how this works, it’s murder of normal people who are exactly like you and exactly like me. The cruelty has always been the point.

I saw a Phantom on the cover of PC Mag or MaximumPC in a shop in like 2011(?) and that was when I started thinking of computers as more than just machines for edutainment CDs. It was a eureka moment. Computers. Not just what’s happening inside but the outside as well. Cool computers.

(Don’t get me wrong, I think society would be in a better place right now if we were still making quality edutainment CDs. Those games were made with love and I want to give everyone who worked at DK Multimedia a hug.)

But yeah. It wasn’t just a box, it had this striking blue-on-white alien design and decorative LEDs. I’d lowkey love to find an original Phantom and restore it (and remove most of the non-structural metal and replace it with mesh). I remember cases becoming obsolete with old front panel IO but I think worrying about the front panel IO is obsolete in itself now. Unsurprisingly there are no classifieds for a Phantom or a PC inside a phantom in my country right now.

It was that specific case for me, from that specific company. Enshittification is even here for every memory of every magazine cover your remember.

Unlike these days when it looks like 3000$ will get you a GPU and a water block for that GPU, if you want to spread your budget as thick as possible.

Wasn’t the original Titan like 1000$ and considered a ludicrously expensive piece of luxury tech?

This dug out some memories of impossible spaces from dreams I’ve had when I was a small child. This was done out of a harsh necessity, but we take for granted that everything in a house has to be rectangular.

Anyway the demon thing snapped me out of remembering the two distinct places my brain soup conjured up decades ago. Rip

I’ve been to both touristy and more “normal” parts of Turkey, and I was pretty shocked how few people understood English (or French, since you mention it). I actually mostly got by with a broken mix of English and Arabic loanwords I know they have in Turkey (or Turkish loanwords we have in Lebanese Arabic).

Drive down any road in Lebanon and you’ll see most signs, especially newer signs, are in English. When I was a kid it was mostly French and Arabic, now it’s mostly English and Arabic with some French sprinkled in. I’ve also been seeing a lot of municipal road and highway signs use “Beirut” instead of “Beyrouth”.

I think we still lean more heavily on French loanwords in our day to day Arabic, at least when not discussing something tech-related.

Also cinemas have consistently used the original English audio now, while we had a good 20% of these movies dubbed in French when I was a kid. A lot of companies’ business operations now are almost exclusively done in English (I’m talking about the documents - the conversations are naturally in Arabic).

I guess none of this is strictly true, there are areas and sectors (especially law) where French is still much more dominant. But people who are French-educated all eventually learn some English, the reverse (the category I’m in) is very rare. I still understand French, even rapid-fire French French, but speaking it or writing it has become so rare for me that it’s really atrophied over the past few years. My English is fine, because I’ve actually had to use it daily.

This is all just additional info, my point is just that Lebanon should probably be higher than Turkey on the list. Turkey has a massive domestic media machine, business is done in Turkish there, I’m pretty sure their schools teach everything in Turkish instead of having some subjects only done in foreign languages like we do. So just based on what I know in these two countries, the placements seem off, and it makes me question what else is going on with the data.

I wonder what the methodology is. There’s no way Turkey is higher than Lebanon unless the metric is something specific that we have terrible data coverage for (which is very likely)

I haven’t really seen anything since the exodus but I think he’s just not the kind of guy who cares too much about niche decentralized internet communities.

He’s very much in the Applesphere of polished premium apps that do specific things. Which is fine. He’s frankly the only dev I knew of who did that without being a total ghoul and even then I was seeing a lot of complaints about people being begged for subscriptions, which I never found excessive (he claimed those people were experiencing a bug).

I don’t really know what to make of his opinion, I don’t know if he saw the UI as a threat or a liability to him or anything like that.

I would love Voyager (mine is still called Wefwef) as a native iOS app because I run into some quirks of the web app backend (especially when editing text), but what we have now is excellent and has made the transition much more bearable. I do still feel like something is missing and I miss how much more connected with the world I felt as a longtime Reddit user, but it’s okay, people’s primary platforms used to change all the time (and as yet another wave of Twitter users are finding out, it can be a hard first few months).

All of our trains in Lebanon have been ripped out in the 60s and 70s so we can siphon our money more efficiently to the patron class by buying cars and gas through their companies. Granted cars make sense for the topography but trains should have stayed in operation, especially for freight.

Not sure how recent some of these data points are, unless it just describes the law for some of these if less data is available

That was precisely the turning point honestly. It’s been a bit hit or miss on Palestine (like most English-language anything online), but I remember commenters defending that attack as “pinpoint precision” or whatever they’ve convinced themselves.

Doctors have had to pull damaged eyes out of children. People with compromised devices were out on the roads, a few blew up in public buses. Imagine driving down the road and driver in the car in front of you loses half his skull and smashes into a shop. Not so cute huh

Still what happened that day, terrorizing as it was, was easier to live with than what’s happening now.

The human shield narrative is a whole other level of mental gymnastics for me. Is there something in the water preventing people from understanding militants are people and people live in houses and houses are typically built next to other houses?

Just to be clear, these groups are (politically) in the way of a lot of internal progress. I’ve been personally threatened and intimidated by them for some political stuff I’ve done in the past. And even I feel compelled to explain how the situation is more complicated than it looks. Fighting for the right thing often involves putting aside differences, even major differences, for the greater good, so that we may live to fight another day. Yes their internal, extremely regressive politics are very dangerous. The diplomatic quagmire they worsen is also a massive problem. But these conversations are complicated and they require a lot of preamble, and they’re for us to have.

I kept an eye on it because it’s cool to know what the buzz is with the more mainstream memes about wars and whatever. Weapons systems I haven’t heard of, military secrets being leaked on gaming forums, I wouldn’t post or comment there but monitoring it isn’t stupid if I’m browsing All. A little crass about people dying but I thought it’s all an in-joke.

When things started escalating here in Lebanon I was absolutely baffled how the average poster there had zero nuance or interest in questioning whatever they considered to be the status quo. I saw people arguing and getting banned in the comments over “supporting terrorism” while I was out dealing with the very civilian damage we are experiencing. You can check my post history for more on that, my comments detailing the situation feel like screams into the void and I’m less and less motivated to write about my experience.

I never posted or commented anything in NCD because how could I possibly say “Whether you consider this person a terrorist leader or not, their tactics were more pragmatic than potential successors and this will likely lead to prolonged conflict” on a page like that. A message that ostensibly should be very clear on a conflict discussion board.

I think it’s mostly Europeans and Americans fetishizing their fancy weapons, never having been on the receiving end of them. But I have, and therefore my opinion doesn’t matter, because I must be a terrorist.