If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.

This quote from LBJ centres me. Its been the conservative tactic for literally decades, from African Americans, to lgbtq+, to immigrants; it’s always been the same grift:

• Choose your marginalised group-du-jour.
• Convince a whole lot of stupid people that that group is the cause of all their problems.
• Profit.

Its honestly astonishing how blatant it really is.

Science is never “sure”. And I’m not a quantum physicist. But that’s the gist of it, yes. I’m not smart enough to know all the details though.

Basically it’s related to the uncertainty principle; the cat is both alive and dead until you look inside the box.

Let’s say i’m about to roll a dice. The result of that dice throw is in a state of superposition until it’s thrown. Meaning that until it is thrown, all results exist. And it’s only when the dice is thrown and the result is observed that the wave function collapses to a number from 1 thru 6.

From there, there are two camps of scientists:

One camp believes that all other superpositions dissipate once the roll is made. So if you roll a one, then the universes in which you rolled a 2 thru 6 just kind of evaporate, for example.

The Second camp that believes that all superpositions exist, and branch off into 6 different universes (one where each number was rolled) and they all continue unaware of the other universes existence (Multiverse theory)

This was honestly my biggest fear for a lot of FOSS applications.

Not necessarily in a malicious way (although there’s certainly that happening as well). I think there’s a lot of users who want to contribute, but don’t know how to code, and suddenly think…hey…this is great! I can help out now!

Well meaning slop is still slop.

My theory is there are 100s of timelines where humanity nuked itself. 100s of timelines where I was never born, or got kidnapped during that “running away” incident, or got murdered by my brother during a fight, or died of suicide.

From a quantum theory, wave function collapse perspective, that’s as good a theory as any, and it’s also one that that personally subscribe to.

What pissed me off the most about Lost is that, very early on, I pegged onto the fact that they were naming a lot of characters after prominent social philosophers; all of whom wrote about things like inequality, the social contract, human nature, etc…

• John Locke (John Locke, Liberty and the social contract)
• Desmond Hume (David Hume, treatise of human nature)
• Danielle Rousseau (Jean-Jacque Rousseau, discourse on inequality and the social contract)
• Boone Carlyle (Thomas Carlyle, the importance of belief)
• Juliette Burke (Edmund Burke, Philosophy of Conservatism)
• Mikhail Bakunin (Mikhail Bakunin, Russian Anarchist)

And a few others. As they introduce these characters, they set them up in opposition to each other and I’m thinking "okay…this means something. They’re trying to say something about society in a Lord of the Flies type of way.

I remember myself and a friend of mine discussing the show endlessly after each episode wondering what it all meant in that context. And then…nope…they were all just dead all this time. It meant…precisely…jack…shit.

And it couldn’t have been an accident that they so many promininent social philosophers showed up. They CHOSE to name those characters that…for no other reason than a fuck-you-red-herring.

I can’t even begin to describe how much that angered me. I’ve despised JJ Abrams ever since.

I feel embarassed to say this as someone who is fairly techy, but I’m a little confused by the whole brouhaha.

Is Google making changes to Android, or to AOSP?

If Google is making changes to the Android fork they put on their own phones, then fuck 'em. Use Graphene. Use e/OS/, use Lineage…use something that forks their own branch of AOSP and Google can pound sand because those forks are in no way obligated to make the same changes as Google. AOSP is open source for that very reason.

If Google is making those changes to AOSP itself, which means that anyone who uses AOSP as a base have those changes by default, then isn’t Google obligated to keep those changes as Open Source, in which case anyone else who uses AOSP can just remove them from their own fork?

Someone explain like I’m a particularly dim five-year-old, please.