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.

The chilling effect this causes will make communities even more like echo-chambers, as dissent will be pre-emptively squashed.

If only there was a tool that allowed you to host an instance on a federated network that allowed you to make your own community and control how the rest of the network can interact with it. Why has nobody built this???

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.

CW: Ablism

Honestly, his post isn’t that far off from various Palestinians I’ve seen online. Their main thing is that anti-Zionist Jews can’t simultaneously complain about people conflating Judaism with Zionism while at the same time not taken up arms for the sake of saving Judaism from Zionism. If the IOF is Jewish ISIS, then where is Jewish Hezbollah or Jewish Ansarallah to send Jewish ISIS to hell and punish the Zionists for their shameless desecration of Judaism?

As a diasporist Jew, Palestinians have a moral standing to make that demand.

If a Palestinian says something questionable. I don't give a single fucking shit. The Zionist entity that is destroying their homes and their families is the source of their belief about Jews. The Zionist entity tells the world that its actions, it's interpretations of scripture and its decisions are representative of all Jews. The Zionist entity itself is a source of ethnonationalist supremacist garbage and I cannot fault the people it oppresses for believing what is written on the sides of its bombs. It's entirely correct that if we believe that it is a genocide, we should give them latitude in expressing their anger as it relates to their oppressors.

I am not going to give a Westoid the same latitude. You haven't earned it. Your cities aren't ash. You have never seen an Israeli bomb in your life unless you were signing it. You haven't known terror for your entire childhood, you haven't been deprived of education, health care, safety, food and family since birth. That is the reality for most Palestinians. So yeah, I'm not going to really take it too hard if they have some funny ideas about Jews. Westoids have no such excuse.

Likewise this doesn't explain the differences within Jewry. Beta Israel were oppressed by Israel itself. Not only did Israel originally refuse to allow them to make Aliyah, but after they did they were sterilized. We're not all just Ashkenazim (though I am).

A Westoid saying Jewish Supremacism after being accused of antisemitism is ZOG shit and I literally agree that Israel has created an extremely powerful outsized role for itself in the politics of many Western nations.

And I don’t agree with his assessment that Jewish people have been completely subsumed into whiteness. As a whole, Jewish people are white*. You have white people of Jewish ancestry who are otherwise completely indistinguishable from your average WASP at one end and you have Hasidic Jews at the other end.

This doesn't even encompass all European Jewry.

If capital cannot profit off of you, it will kill you. Autistic people tend to be bad at the wage work capital demands of us - hence why so many of us are chronically unemployed.

This is an important point. We should remember that this means that the most realistic worse-case model they have to cleanse us en masse is corporate private prison contracting where some Trump friendly dipshit gets $25k/per body a month from the Fed to warehouse us in a concrete tomb.

They cannot kill us cheaply and we aren't actually a balance sheet problem because there is realistically social spending for the majority of us. They'll starve all disabled and poor people before they single us out in any effective way. We might be a trial balloon, but it's extremely unlikely that we'll get it nearly as bad as migrants.

Autism is just a political talking point for their shit for brains NT base who doesn't want to be shown anything on the TV except their own shallow world view, and for the people who they talk about the TV with in public to never tell them the TV is wrong. We're just a means to an end, effectively to get society to agree to the fact that kids should die of measles.

America in 2025 is utterly incapable of mega-projects like Japanese internment, the government has been too hollowed out. They spent $1.1 billion in 2025 dollars in the 1940's just to build the camps alone using the US Army Corps of Engineers, the CCA and WRA. They were mostly public works. Doing something of this size is going to be a major in-fight between oligarchs on who gets this money, and it won't be $1.1 b done over a year, it will balloon to hundreds of billions and be stuck in development hell because of all the inefficiencies.

A single prison today typically costs $1b. For example Indiana is currently building a new prison for $1.2 that holds 4,200 people. They started in 2023, they're expected to finish in 2027.

Don't get me wrong people will be hurt, but we are so laughably incapable of 20th century style population transfers.

Yeah he has. I am 50:50 on if he actually believes that or it's shoe horning stuff into Trump's policy agenda. I think he literally believes that we cannot work so how would labor camps even work? His whole "wellness farms" stuff was funny because bringing back RFK Jr. designed sanitoriums during a fascist austerity government after Regan happened is a nonstarter. I do not believe that RFK is going to be able to put together a network of camps and the mechanisms to round people up into them. ICE under Trump is less effective than under Biden/Obama but is more brazen. There's like several steps that here that aren't going to be easy, and it's a game of numbers not just if you'll get got by the RFK HHS but also if the RFK HHS will be able to get you at all.

I think RFK's average case success scenario for this is having some high profile arrests and claiming mission accomplished.

Remember that these systems were actually made effective or outright built by competent technocratic ghouls during the Democrat run government years. Bush's war in the middle east was a failure, Obama mechanized it and turned it into a success (politically speaking because he removed American troops from the political equation). Biden adopted Trump's border policy and made it work effectively and proved it out in the stats and Democrats were complaining that the evil fascists of the GOP weren't giving them credit for being good effective fascists.

Yeah I'd almost never disclose ND status regardless of what it is and to what bureaucracy, it's almost always bad, and it's almost always on me to fight for any kind remedy regardless of disclosure. The liberal rules around disclosure esp. in the work place are effectively meant to make ND people more vulnerable. The standards protect only those with visible physical disabilities to a extremely minimal degree.

The only things protecting us have been HIPAA. That's actually the worst part about RFK's database, given that the government just leaked Abrego Garcia's wife's address to their stochastic psycho contingent.

In fact, it would not surprise me if suddenly they start picking up random US citizens and just declare them autistic.

I have my doubts about this because they are already doing this through ICE and they have said they are going to do it for people who disagree with the President regardless of their citizenship status.

RFK's HHS is not going to out-compete ICE to create a general gestapo model, it already exists, has for a long time, in multiple different modes. It's just that it was much more polite before.

I'm much more scared about keeping my passport up to date, and being denaturalized than I am about RFK's goofy autism caregiver based genocidal ideas.

The old approach has a lot of downsides esp. for our more visible comrades who need support.

I'm fine with "autist" tbh and describe myself as such. I've gone so far as to call some of my behavior when I know I should mask and don't for tactical reasons "weaponized autism". Honestly one thing that a lot of NTs don't understand is that some of us like that our neural patterns are autistic. I don't want to be NT, I like myself, I like how I think. Is it annoying that I get sensory issues? Sure, but I don't want to trade for the "benefits" of being an NT.

I'm also a Jew. People have used "Jew" as a slur before as well. Did getting hung up on saying "Jewish" or "person of Judaism" ever help prevent the Holocaust ? Did it help Jews get into a college other than Tulane before 1964? Whether someone respects you as a person isn't going to be changed through their language. They're just lying.

You can hate me, I can't change that. But make it easy on me and don't lie about it, I have a hard time with social cues. I prefer self describing as "autist" and it being a "bad word" for NTs. It makes it very clear not only who is autistic but how an NT feels about you as an autistic person. For others I typically use autistic because I know some autistic people don't like autist and it helps create that signal that's gonna make it easier for me to tell who to stay away from.

RFK's bullshit is very closely tied to the ideology of orgs that pretend to be focused on the needs of autistic people but actually and actively cater to caregivers of autistic people and their inherent ideology of "I have been saddled with this annoying child and someone needs to fix it." These orgs such as Autism (Caregivers) Speak are already genocidal in their talking points about autism, RFK is mainly catering to these people who believe we're broken and taking their ideas to their logical conclusions that we should not exist in our current mental states.

I had looked into autism diagnosis as an adult and there are basically no upsides. It's expensive and you'll have to fight doctors for it, and you'll be given a piece of paper that doesn't mean anything to anyone. There are no real resources (the ones gated by neoliberal austerity that require the paper) for autistic adults in the US from what I've seen. For adults it seems to be "just be thankful your support level is low".

Nobody is going to check your papers and kick you out of a support group or meeting for not having them.

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.