alyaza [they/she]

internet gryphon. admin of Beehaw, mostly publicly interacting with people. nonbinary. they/she

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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: January 28th, 2022

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  • see also the coverage this has gotten in NPR:

    The campaign, “Resist and Unsubscribe,” was started by influential podcaster and business commentator Scott Galloway, who said he was increasingly frustrated by what he sees as the Trump administration’s indifference to protests and public outrage over immigration enforcement, especially in Minneapolis, where federal immigration officers shot and killed two U.S. citizens last month.

    In recent weeks, there have been renewed calls to boycott Target, demanding that the Minneapolis-based retail giant publicly show solidarity with immigrants and oppose ICE. Last month, hundreds of businesses in Minneapolis shuttered their doors for a day as a form of protest against ICE operations in the city.

    Galloway, who also teaches marketing at New York University, believes the president mainly changes course on policy when financial markets are under pressure, pointing to how Trump dropped his plan to impose tariffs on eight European nations after it rattled Wall Street. So, Galloway created a website listing over a dozen companies that have either worked directly with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement or play such an outsized role in the economy that a slowdown in their growth would send shockwaves to the markets.

    " I think this is a weapon that is hiding in plain sight," Galloway told NPR. “The most radical act you can perform in a capitalist society is non-participation.”




















  • the interview in question, which opens with the following exchange:

    Newton: You have joined us today to talk about this new age-gating policy that Roblox is rolling out to protect kids. And I think we should start by just talking about the scope of the problem here. What has led you to this point? And how do you think of the problem of predators on Roblox?

    Baszucki: We think of it not necessarily just as a problem, but an opportunity as well. (emphasis mine) How do we allow young people to build, communicate and hang out together? How do we build the future of communication at the same time? So we, you know, we’ve been, I think in a good way, working on this ever since we started. And when we were — this was almost 18 or 19 years ago — when we first launched the company and we had just four of us sitting in a room, we were literally the moderators, like we would rotate all the time. And so fast-forward to where we are today, it’s just like every week, what is the latest tech? At the scale we’re at, 150 million daily actives, 11 billion hours a month, like what is the best way to keep pushing this forward? And as you correctly note, we’ve just started adding that we’re going to be using facial age estimation with A.I. to complement that.


  • Children can still protest, fundraise, and engage in other forms of direct action. Children are not helpless or incapable.

    you are shadowboxing with things i didn’t say and are the only person inserting the terms “helpless” or “incapable” here, but also once again: this is a game marketed at literal children. i stopped playing Roblox at 14 and doing some research i’m led to believe that would be quite old for a Roblox player. probably half or more of the player-base is 13 or younger. do you honestly expect the average 13-year-old (or younger) to be capable of anything other than performative activism relating to the genocide in Palestine?


  • Holding a pro-Palestine candlelight vigil in Roblox, for example, whilst there are still Palestinian civilians being murdered is a woefully inadequate use of time and effort if you actually want to help.

    the people holding a vigil like this are probably literal children, because Roblox is a game for and overwhelmingly played by children, so i don’t understand the criticism here–it’s unlikely they can help in any material way you could as an adult, but they can be politicized into understanding who deserves their sympathy and who is perpetrating harm that must be ended, which such a rally helps affirm






  • there’s some real deadpan gold in this one, such as the immaculate:

    How do you feel about becoming a political lightning rod?

    People occasionally just flip [me] off or whatever, but nobody’s come up to me and tried to make a statement about anything. Personally, it’s kind of dumb. It’s just a vehicle. So it’s ironic that it would even become a political statement, but nonetheless it is. [Editor’s note: Taylor was arrested and pleaded guilty to conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding in the January 6 attack on the Capitol. He was later pardoned by President Trump.]



  • What about changing the parking requirements to be vehicle agnostic? Require construction projects to have parking for X people, rather than X cars, and consider the requirement met if it’s a mix of bicycle parking, cargo bicycle parking, and car parking.

    this is already how most parking mandates work (they’re not for X amount of cars, they’re obliged to have a set ratio of parking spaces to people), and changing it in this manner would almost certainly lead to no change because Los Angeles is extremely car-dependent and sprawling, and bicycling is only useful with actual pro-bike infrastructure which largely doesn’t exist.




  • for more on this, see the New York Times article on the observatory: How Astronomers Will Deal With 60 Million Billion Bytes of Imagery

    Each image taken by Rubin’s camera consists of 3.2 billion pixels that may contain previously undiscovered asteroids, dwarf planets, supernovas and galaxies. And each pixel records one of 65,536 shades of gray. That’s 6.4 billion bytes of information in just one picture. Ten of those images would contain roughly as much data as all of the words that The New York Times has published in print during its 173-year history. Rubin will capture about 1,000 images each night.

    As the data from each image is quickly shuffled to the observatory’s computer servers, the telescope will pivot to the next patch of sky, taking a picture every 40 seconds or so.

    It will do that over and over again almost nightly for a decade.

    The final tally will total about 60 million billion bytes of image data. That is a “6” followed by 16 zeros: 60,000,000,000,000,000.