alyaza [they/she]
internet gryphon. admin of Beehaw, mostly publicly interacting with people. nonbinary. they/she
- 361 Posts
- 208 Comments
20·24 days agosomeone on Bluesky analogized what is happening to how QAnon transpired for most people, which is that the crazification it was causing simmered under the surface until January 6, when it all publicly exploded and the influence it had over a non-trivial block of the population became undeniable. hard to disagree with that!
1·1 month agodeleted by creator
just a nightmarish headline. get these two the fuck out of here
Art rock legend Brian Eno has called on Microsoft to sever its ties with the government of Israel, saying the company’s provision of cloud and AI services to Israel’s Ministry of Defense “support a regime that is engaged in actions described by leading legal scholars and human rights organizations, the United Nations experts, and increasing numbers of governments from around the world, as genocidal.”
Eno’s connection with Microsoft goes back 30 years—he composed the famous boot-up jingle for Windows 95 that was recently inducted into the National Recording Registry at the US Library of Congress.
“I gladly took on the project as a creative challenge and enjoyed the interaction with my contacts at the company,” Eno wrote in an open letter posted to Instagram (via Stereogum). “I never would have believed that the same company could one day be implicated in the machinery of oppression and war.”
Regardless, Eno clearly isn’t interested in Microsoft’s protestations of innocence: “Selling and facilitating advanced AI and cloud services to a government engaged in systematic ethnic cleansing is not ‘business as usual’. It is complicity. If you knowingly build systems that can enable war crimes, you inevitably become complicit in those crimes.”
and the press release from Fandom, which previously owned them for some reason:
San Francisco, CA - May 10, 2025 - Fandom, the world’s largest fan platform, is selling Giant Bomb to long-time Giant Bomb staff and gaming content creators Jeff Bakalar and Jeff Grubb. Financials of the deal were not disclosed. Giant Bomb’s programming, which was paused in order to work out the terms of this deal, will resume as quickly as possible. More details will be communicated soon by Giant Bomb’s new owners.
Statement from Fandom
“Fandom has made the strategic decision to transition Giant Bomb back to its independent roots and the brand has been acquired by longtime staff and content creators, Jeff Bakalar and Jeff Grubb, who will now own and operate the site independently. Fans are at the core of everything we do at Fandom and we’re committed to not only serving them but also supporting the creators they love, and the sale of Giant Bomb represents a natural extension of that mission. We’re confident Giant Bomb is in good hands and its legacy will live on with Jeff and Jeff.”
Joint Statement from Jeff Bakalar and Jeff Grubb
“Giant Bomb is now owned by the people who make Giant Bomb, and it would not have been possible without the speedy efforts of Fandom and our mutual agreement on what’s best for fans and creators. The future of Giant Bomb is now in the hands of our supporting community, who have always had our backs no matter what. We’ll have a lot more to say about what this looks like soon, but for now, everyone can trust that all the support we receive goes directly to this team.”
You can post articles critical of the US, EU, Australian or any other government, but if you post a China-critical text you are whatabouted to death.
this will be a blunt comment. people would have no problem if you were doing this, but just in a quick scan, something like 10 of your last 15 submissions on our instance (Beehaw) are you obsessively posting about China–often from sources that are straight up fearmongering and/or guilty of doing literally the same thing they’re complaining China is doing. one of the most egregious submissions you’ve made in this vein is quite literally from the House Select Committee on China, as if the American government’s committee on “competition with the United States” doesn’t obviously have a vested interest in portraying things China does in the most uncharitable light possible (much as China would for America).
separately, and in a Beehaw context: at least from our userbase, you will largely not find disagreement that China is bad–nobody here really needs to be proselytized to the fact that China is an authoritarian capitalist country guilty of acts of imperialism against their neighbors, and probably of ethnic cleansing and genocide in Xinjiang. in fact, partially because of our political disagreements in that space, we do not federate with many of the Lemmy instances you might characterize as “pro-China.” this fact makes it incredibly conspicuous when someone like yourself obsessively posts every neurosis a Western country has about China on our instance. we’ve had a pattern of several users doing this in the past year or so–and at this point it’s blatantly propagandistic and Sinophobic bullshit we’re just not interested in letting people use our instance for.
even if you aren’t doing this for propagandistic reasons, though, and just think you need to push back against pro-China campists on Lemmy or whatever: this is also not your personal anti-China dumping ground, nor is it a place for you to shadowbox with campists who think China is cool. if you are genuinely posting in good faith: diversify your submissions and, if you don’t, at least drop the persecution complex when people push back on your voluminous China posting; if this is just using us as some middle-man in a bigger thing: going forward we’re going to aggressively prune these types of post.
the website for it is pretty comprehensive as far as i can tell
this strikes me as a fascinating idea–with a couple of eyebrow-raising backers–that is probably going to flop spectacularly because it’s too minimalistic to the point of just being cheapskate
FYI: we’ve banned this user because after communicating our disinterest in being used as an anti-China dumping ground to shadowbox with people who can’t even see our instance, the user responded with a bunch of hostility about people pushing back on them.
it’s been very strange to watch this game i grew up on–pretty innocuously, i should note–gradually morph into one of the most exploitative, undignifying, generally dangerous spaces for children online. the worst stuff i got into on Roblox in 2010 was online dating and learning about 4chan. now the company seems to openly revel in exploiting the labor of children and ripping them off
Except it’s likely on purpose so they won’t have enough people to look into this and other large cases against corporations that might impact the people buying out the government.
this is exactly what has happened; previously, the FTC was aggressively pursuing anti-trust against Amazon, Google, etc.
Isnt nigeria basically the only african country right now that isnt a shithole right now?
Nigeria probably has the most theoretical wealth available to it of any African country because it’s super rich in oil, but there are definitely other countries that have it better than Nigeria (South Africa, Cape Verde, maybe Namibia or Kenya if you want some deeper cuts). Nigeria also has a metric fuck ton of problems (religious tension and sectarianism, terrorism, an openly corrupt political system which likely stole the last presidential election, and constant economic turmoil) that severely rob its capability to exploit its riches. and yes colonialism is a big part of that, it has fairly bad deals with major corporations to exploit that oil
you’re being very weird in this specific chain of comments, and it’s unpleasant to read and dragging down otherwise pretty decent conversation. dial it back, or you’ll catch a temporary ban.
hardly surprising. we talk about enshittification today but Skype was one of the most egregious offenders before the term was even coined, in late-stage Skype (circa 2016-2017) i couldn’t even run the fucking thing without lag because of in-line ads. the user experience was frankly awful, and once you’ve used something like Discord or Zoom there’s just never any reason to go back.
come on, this is not productive discussion
the going theory is that this is effectively the western division of NetEase getting axed because they’re not important enough and “cost too much” to keep around
resetERA is an unusual source for this, but the OP is just direct screencaps off of LinkedIn of people saying they were laid off, and it’s hard to get more definitive than that in terms of sourcing
it’s very funny because at the absolute most this maybe saves like, what, two steps in the best case? AI is so bad at this stuff that you have to human-edit it into something that looks good most of the time anyways
the study: Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task