Makes sense, it’s most likely an ongoing arms race - I’m probably coasting under the radar a bit from running an instance with effectively only 3 people to target at the moment.

Some admins have been developing and sharing solutions, from regex filters to going down into the databases itself.

For my small instance and personally, I haven’t seen any new messages in a while now, after adding this regex to the slur filter mechanism:

(.*(\n)*Hi.*[nN]icole.*[fF]ediverse [cC]hick(.|\n)*)

Sadly my brain is blanking which instance admins I should credit for that, but it was shared around somewhere.

(Also I’m still salty about Origin Systems in 1992!)

They are finally getting re-discovered by younger generations a bit more, but they are often missing from memes like this. Considering how groundbreaking their projects like Wing Commander and of course Ultima were, it is a true shame. They truly fell from the very top and slowly died thanks to EA. (And, admittedly, also in part mismanagement and not being able to overcome the prohibitive cost of physical media i.e. floppy disks and CDs properly)

Wow, you’re right of course. I completely forgot kwrite still existed, tbh.

I genuinely do a lot of coding in Kate, the standard KDE editor. It’s enough to do a lot of things, has highlighting, and is more than enough when you just need a quick fix.

I am also still using nano when editing stuff in the terminal. Please, don’t judge me.

I wouldn’t be surprised if that is true outside the US as well. People that actually (have to) work with the stuff usually quickly learn, that its only good at a few things, but if you just hear about it in the (pop-, non-techie-)media (including YT and such), you might be deceived into thinking Skynet is just a few years away.

My girlfriend and I can use our ‘interfaces’ to connect to a multitude of people, I call it the “Fedilationship”. 😏

Ah, important extra information: It’s on a dedicated server in Finland from Hetzner, so yes, no residential network. But I guess from that, I should look into setting up a proxy connection?

Plot twist: Nicole is a real person, building the biggest polycule to date!

That’s so funny, my new girlfriend is also called Nicole, and you won’t believe it, I met her right here on the Fediverse! 😍

Ha, I got interested in researching what exactly Mennonites are, and funnily, the German Wikipedia article has, in its very introduction, this disclaimer:

In den Medien gibt es immer wieder Berichte über Mennoniten in Nord- oder Südamerika, die einen sehr konservativen bis weltabgewandten Lebensstil pflegen und die in der Regel einen deutschen Hintergrund haben. Diese Gruppen stellen jedoch nur einen kleinen Ausschnitt aus dem mennonitischen Spektrum dar, in dem es auch viele modernere, angepasstere und liberalere Gemeinschaften sowie viele andere ethnische Zugehörigkeiten gibt.

Translation by me:

“In the media, there are regular reports about Mennonites in North- or South America, who have a very conservative or even withdrawn lifestyle, who usually have German ancestry. These groups are, however, only a small section of the whole Mennonite spectrum, in which there are also many more modern, more adjusted and more liberal communities, as well as many other ethnicities.”

Seems like your American Mennonite exiles are making the rest of the Mennonite world defensive.

Thank you for sparing us from the clickbait title

Hm, I get the sentiment, and while I think that can be a dynamic to consider, I know authoritarian systems often have this dynamic, where the upper class believes themselves to be worthy of “forbidden” knowledge. Take Kim Jong-un having been sent to school in Switzerland, the Nazi top brass collecting and enjoying otherwise censored/forbidden media, many early modern philosophers staying alive by tutoring the children of aristocrats and later industrialists, with knowledge that wouldn’t be allowed for the “common rabble”.

Now, they indeed are in the conflict of wanting their children to be obedient extensions of themselves and at the same time wanting them to be competent enough to carry on and be useful to their own legacy. That has been a pretty inherent conflict to patriarchical systems, including those in contemporary capitalism, basically ever since class society has been a thing. But overall, they do want at least the children they expect to take their place one day, to be competent enough to withstand the “dog-eat-dog”-world they favour, which often includes education on “alternative thinking”.

You are right, though, of course, that all those things will still be viewed through their ideological lens. Historical developments like class conflict has to be taught from their perspective, for example, and with the moral stance of the ruling class on it. Knowledge will often only be superficially understood, so they can feel superior in “knowing” it, without risking proper engagement. But those dynamics are also very old and widespread even today. I remain with my position of thinking, that they do want an “elite” education for themselves, including things otherwise deemed inappropriate or even forbidden. Hypocrisy is an integral part of authoritarian systems.

They want their own children to be educated in private schools and by tutors not available to common people, and everyone else just educated enough to do their jobs and work for them.

Maybe a few scholarships especially targeted at a few poor “gifted” children, that produce false hope and additional shame if you can’t be “good” enough for one of those scholarships.

I think there’s a missed chance to have mint and other “cooling” herbs on the outer rim

Genuinely, though, it is hard to gauge at times which actions are:

• Genuinely malicious plans to increase his and his cronies’ wealth
• Confused, because Elon or Trump were in a specific mood that particular day
• Some actor behind the scenes manipulating them by taking advantage of their impulsivity
• The genuine incompetence of the newly appointed loyalists (or the algorithms/AI they use) within the new deep state
• Genuinely ideologically motivated stupidity, from Libertarians that drank their own cool-aid within the administration.

It is genuine chaos. But overall, the effects are pretty disastrous, no matter what exactly causes which actions.

The Wing Commander series in general was such a great showcasing of combining cutting-edge tech with well-designed presentation. I remember watching my bigger brother playing the games and the impressions just burning themselves into my brain.

While this is very funny, and definitely representative of a sort of ignorance/arrogance commonly found in ideologues - I recently learned that most people talking about the effect have, in fact, been Dunning-Krugering themselves.

Insightful video on the topic.

What most people expect the effect to look like:

What the actual results were:

You put it better than I myself had formulated it in my head yet, why I am weary of those rumours. I find similar arguments here in Europe, where our fascist movements, which are without a doubt supported by Russia, are then sometimes reduced to being some sort of wholly foreign influence, instead of admitting that Russia is stoking flames in embers that had always been part of us and the problems we face.

You know, personally, I don’t think the rumours of Trump being an active foreign agent instead of “just” a narcissist grifter are useful, because they can be used to argue that things weren’t already pretty borked before in the status quo… (and I think they are wrong, personally)

But I do have to admit - if I was a foreign agent wanting to destroy the US and its influence in the world, I would basically do exactly what he is doing.