Yeah. There are a few useful websites I end up at that serve similar purposes.

My usual workflow is that I need to be able to work in an airgapped environment where it is a lot easier to get “my dotfiles” approved than to ask for utility packages like that. Especially since there will inevitably be some jackass who says “You don’t know how to work without google? What are we paying you for?” because they mostly do the same task every day of their life.

And I do find that writing the cheat sheet myself goes a long way towards me actually learning them so I don’t always need it. But I know that is very much how my brain works (I write probably hundreds of pages of notes a year… I look at maybe two pages a year).

One trick that one of my students taught me a decade or so ago is to actually make an alias to list the useful flags.

Yes, a lot of us think we are smart and set up aliases/functions and have a huge list of them that we never remember or, even worse, ONLY remember. What I noticed her doing was having something like goodman-rsync that would just echo out a list of the most useful flags and what they actually do.

So nine times out of 10 I just want rsync -azvh --progress ${SRC} ${DEST} but when I am doing something funky and am thinking “I vaguely recall how to do this”? dumbman rsync and I get a quick cheat sheet of what flags I have found REALLY useful in the past or even just explaining what azvh actually does without grepping past all the crap I don’t care about in the man page. And I just keep that in the repo of dotfiles I copy to machines I work on regularly.

I would generally argue that rsync is not a backup solution. But it is one of the best transfer/archiving solutions.

Yes, it is INCREDIBLY powerful and is often 90% of what people actually want/need. But to be an actual backup solution you still need infrastructure around that. Bare minimum is a crontab. But if you are actually backing something up (not just copying it to a local directory) then you need some logging/retry logic on top of that.

At which point you are building your own borg, as it were. Which, to be clear, is a great thing to do. But… backups are incredibly important and it is very much important to understand what a backup actually needs to be.

I WISH the Democrats were that cool

Yeah. It is a shockingly easy problem to solve. The point is more what the hardware is designed to listen for.

Drones? A quadrotor big enough to handle a… paint balloon is not that big. That is why so many dumbass russians don’t hear it until it is too late in Ukraine. So you need a fairly sensitive mic and the hardware to filter through all the background noise.

Gunshots? You COULD rig something up to do similar so you can hear a gunshot from a mile away but there really isn’t a point since that wouldn’t be actionable data for the real customers (cowardly cops who want to run the other way). And you want to sell a LOT of these because triangulation obviously means square mile because said customers don’t understand trigonometry. So you want to focus on loud noises and be able to distinguish a gunshot from a car backfiring from fireworks. So relatively low sensitivity mics and hardware more geared towards that.

Which, when you are re-purposing them for surveillance, are very different tools.

Allegedly, the physical construction of the gunshot mics don’t make them particularly suitable to listening to conversations on the street. Like a lot of flock marketing and products, it is over promising but it can still be useful for detecting “unrest”. So think less “it will hear you say 'fuck trump”" and more “it will hear a crowd of people in a starbucks realizing how fucked everything is” or “it will hear someone yell out a warning that ICE is in the area”.

What is inevitable and will actually cover the individual will be the drone detection mics. The actual act of hearing a Terrorist Drone is REALLY easy from a technical standpoint and is a very similar concept to the gun shot detectors but have MUCH more sensitive mics.

It is obviously based on an outdated concept of gender, but it actually is pretty useful to help match people to passports. If someone identifies as male but is dressed like a woman, it raises red flags. The answer to that might be as simple as “This is a 90s sitcom and I lost a transphobic bet” but it is there. Same with hair color.

Which, funny enough, is an argument for people to actually write down the gender they identify as. But it is also a lot like hair color or facial hair in that it is just too cost and time prohibitive to update a passport every time someone tries a new look. Because… genderfluid people exist.

Yes, violence works.

Go walk up to a cop and explain to them that if they don’t start serving the people then you and the people are armed and going to stand up. … I can’t think of a funny way to explain that you won’t have any teeth and won’t ever be able to come back to explain how poorly that went. But THAT is “violence” in action. They just have a lot more than you do.

As for your comment about how people should stand up: Sure, there are examples of that working. There are also plenty of examples of that being met with mass executions.

It says a lot that nobody could be quite sure if the “we aren’t going to prosecute rape anymore” rally was actually going to be another 1979 Ba’ath Party Purge where all the people who had previously stood up to saddam (or might have done so in the future) were literally rounded up to be executed.

Again, resistance and violence are tools. People need to understand the consequences of that and the odds of it ending in anything other than mass executions.

And that is the Call of Duty mindset at play!

You are morally righteous and the protagonist of your own life. Of course you just need to grab a gun and all problems will solve themselves in a slow mo shootout! And then everything will be better and you’ll get to bang your hot scientist love interest.

Which ignores the reality of how much violence is pointed at all of us. Some Very Smart People were insisting that the military are actually great because when the BLM protests were going on they just stood by with guns and didn’t shoot anyone. Which fully ignores what would happen if those protesters “went too far” and there wasn’t a fat white kid nearby to put them down. Those “kind and heroic and nice” military folk would have shouldered their rifles, chambered a round, and mowed down the protesters.

I realize it somewhat undermines the point of “stop basing your life on tv” but… go watch Andor. Specifically “Who Are You?”.

Resistance is complicated. I strongly encourage anyone who is interested to go to those protests and talk to those organizers. There is going to be a feeling out for obvious reasons, but understand that people are thinking this through and it goes WAY beyond “go buy some tacticool pants”.

A comedian I like who used to write for a TV show talked about wanting to do something similar to the Its Always Sunny “What are the rules” where the protagonist woke up and, instead of being black, was a woman. And the “joke” would be that he tries to live his life, brags about how he is getting so much more attention and free drinks, and then gets roofied and violently raped. And when he goes to the cops they call him a slut and want to “give him a ride home”. Needless to say the network vetoed the ever living hell out of it and said comedian later deleted the posts after realizing it was more depressing than funny to even talk about (and may have impacted future jobs).

But it really sticks with me when thinking of just how much privilege people have and how so many, generally white males, don’t understand what it means to have a system that is actively against them.

A couple years back a friend and I realized that far too many modern day adults think life is a nickelodean kid sitcom.

We caught the bad guys by tricking them into saying that they did something bad. The cops are going to arrest them and the video game club is saved! Oh, wait. They don’t give a shit and are just gonna keep doing bad stuff…

Its similar logic to how “both sides” villify intellectuals. Someone tried to explain a complicated topic you don’t want to hear but they said one sentence that you can take out of context and nitpick. You are the smart one and they are stupid and the cops are gonna arrest them and video game club is saved!

And we continue to see “They aren’t allowed to do that. It is against the rules!” as though it matters in the slightest.

I am looking at it froma purely financial standpoint.

Then let’s do that.

Reddit has three official and one implied revenue streams.

Of the official, we have:

Ad sales. This is where most “user data” actually comes into play and is the idea of building a profile of each user that can be used to put them into categories for targeted ads. That might be a simple as “likes video games, hates women, curious about learning to pee while sitting down”. Or it might be “doesn’t realize that guy at the bar took off the condom and is now pregnant”. This is demonstrably profitable and doesn’t seem to be effected.

The next is people buying reddit premium because they are idiots.

The last official oneis the actual topic of this thread. Reddit sells API access to, among others, companies training LLMs. ChatGPT has, allegedly, stopped using them. Thus, one of their major sources of revenue dried up and their stock dropped as a result.

As for the rest:

Otherwise reddit stock is just a volatile place to park your cash in the hope that you can sell it for more later.

Ah, so you DO know what the definition of a stock is. You just refuse to accept it because the word “reddit” is involved.

The vast majority of stocks are horrible to even consider purchasing as an individual. A general rule of thumb is the only ones you should even consider buying are those with dividends where you just buy a few shares and every couple years check your investment account and transfer the excess to your savings.

The rest you rely entirely on mutual funds (and similar). Where the idea is that an investment group has a large pool of money and they try to stay ahead of minor fluctuations and often outright bet against themselves. So you might have some funds earmarked at assuming reddit will go up and other funds that take the Oracle announcement as a hint that OpenAI spending on Reddit might decrease and sell the stocks ahead of time to buy shares in coca cola instead or whatever.

But the thing to understand is that that is happening to basically every single stock. Because the fundamental idea of the stock market is about leaving others holding the bag.

Homie? I assume you are just looking to hear “reddit bad” and… it is.

But if you are actually attempting to discuss things in good faith? You are just describing stocks and you should REALLY educate yourself on the subject if you ever intend to invest beyond retirement and mutual funds… which most people shouldn’t in the first place but that is an even bigger tangent.

see any return in their investment short of managing to sell the stock for more than they bought it

So… it is a stock that doesn’t pay dividends? Like… that is what stocks are.

Companies pay for API access so profits go up and stock value go up.

I assume the reddit stock doesn’t pay dividends based on profits. But if you bought for 10 dollars and now it is 500 dollars? You can sell some of that stuck to people hoping it will go up to 1000 dollars for a solid profit. And so forth.

And if it DOES pay dividends (some kinds of stocks do) then a percentage of those profits are directly sent to the share holders based on how many shares they have.

Which is also generally very detectable (if you actually care) and is generally used to push (monetized) social media and not the answer to “what is the difference between normal and merino wool?” and so forth.

The vast majority of the “user” interaction and memes is not the product (at play. it IS useful for societal manipulation but there are better platforms for that). It is all those useful questions and answers that people get pissy about folk deleting the answers to.

Because people, generally, weren’t searching for team edward or jacob reddit but instead the fuck is a renesme reddit or LED versus fluourescent bulbs reddit and so forth. And the community labeling of the latter is generally REALLY good.

Things DO get messy when the question becomes best synthetic boxer briefs reddit but… it is incredibly rare for an astro turfing campaign to be strong enough to get a genuinely bad product “on top”. You tend to just get an overly expensive branded white label in the top slot which may actually be identical to the “real” best one anyway. But considering you are relying on human opinion regardless, that isn’t far off of what you were gonna get without said astroturfing.

No. I am not saying “anyone can run and win in local elections”… barring the really fucked scenarios where there is literally a single person running.

But if you coordinate with one of the local parties? You would be shocked how easy it is to get those signatures. Because, for even a medium sized city, it actually doesn’t take THAT much money to run a campaign. And many local orgs will have their own team of volunteer phone bankers and people willing to go door to door. Or… there aren’t even that many candidates and they spend more time convincing someone to run for comptroller than actually convincing people to vote for said comptroller.

The key is that you have to actually get involved. You can’t just show up on election day and say “Fuck you, vote for me because I am against dark money”. You show up for meetings. You get on the zoom calls that actually discuss policy and strategy (and realize how wild it is to literally be asking a future POTUS questions and grilling them on things behind doors that don’t come up on CNN) and so forth. And no, you don’t need to become a massive big wig for that. Calls to the regional offices are actually pretty common because… those regional offices are what put us in a position where a congress person or POTUS can even do anything in the first place.

If all you want is accelerationism because call of duty taught you that you’ll end up on top? We… might already be there. But don’t get pissy if other people are actually trying to do what the republicans literally fucking did to take over this country and put us in this mess in the first place.

And that’s great.

But you’ll understand if stuff like what you said makes people assume you are a lazy doomer who doesn’t understand how the government works rather than someone actively discouraging others from even trying.

Ah, apologies. I did not realize you were part of secret seal team seven.

But… honestly? Try harder. It fucking sucks and it is massively demoralizing. But if there is any hope in the system then it involves fixing things locally and propagating that upwards. It is literally what republicans did and we can see the counter efforts bearing fruit around the country.

And if there is no longer any way to run counter efforts (increasingly likely come 2028…) then we are in a very different stage of things and probably shouldn’t be discussing that on public facing forums.

New York fielded AOC and now Mamdani. Georgia flipped blue back in 2020.

Local elections matter. Arguably moreso than federal (barring deranged fascist dictators taking over…). That is how republicans gain the power to destroy school boards and take over states so that they can gerrymander it and make it much harder to ever be voted out.

So… maybe you should think harder before choosing to do nothing?

I would add on: How many people just know rfk as “that health guru my favorite celebrity talked about”.

Never forget that there was a fairly large trend on google of “Did Biden drop out” last year on fucking election day.

People are deeply ignorant. Intentionally so. Just think about all the times over the years you have seen “I am going to stop watching the news for my mental health” and all that.