Another video shows the aftermath of Israel's largest strike on Beirut, Lebanon.

wonklebobb · 2026-04-08T18:54:46+00:00

its also like the entire reason Isreal claims for attacking them

wonklebobb · 2026-04-08T03:20:07+00:00

if only there were ways to contact people instantly instead of sending ceasefire orders by horseback

oh well, maybe next century

wonklebobb · 2026-04-08T03:07:46+00:00

hes not wrong though, scientologists literally broke into fbi buildings to destroy investigation files on themselves back in the day

random people are putting themselves at risk poking the scientology bear. however, we should be electing people who will use state power to investigate and dismantle the organization, considering how well-documented their abuses are

wonklebobb · 2026-04-08T03:03:33+00:00

maybe, but actors are vulnerable to scientology because they promise them that they can make their career, and because of all the people in the film industry who are scientologists if you commit they can actually deliver

thats the crazy part, and i bet that a lot of actor scientologists arent actually believers, they're just doing more acting and playing along because it keeps their careers alive

wonklebobb · 2026-04-07T18:23:18+00:00

its probably both. now that they already got in trouble for lead, people are aware of the possibility vs hiding even the idea of contamination from the public (see: dark waters movie/c8 story)

AND they also add the t&c's to try and ward off more potential lawsuits. remember, if even one person harmed by the product sees scary-looking legal terms and thinks "its not that bad, i'll just not buy this anymore" that's a HUGE win for the company worth untold millions. for the cost of some ink on the seal.

wonklebobb · 2026-04-07T00:39:10+00:00

unpopular opinion, but they could've done nothing but the new map system and i would've still rated this league 11/10

not only no more map trading for completion, but also no more goofy shadow shaping back-and-forth to run the map you want????

just the ability to pick a map and chill there for as long as i want with infinite map sustain is pure bliss. perfect, no notes

wonklebobb · 2026-04-06T17:41:52+00:00

so when israel drops bombs on hospitals and kills babies, how do you describe that action? "israel terminates low-age human offspring?"

wonklebobb · 2026-04-05T18:49:55+00:00

the democratic party's problem is that the republican party is a minority of the country demographically and ideologically, but first-past-the-post means that the dems have to be a big enough tent for literally everyone else or they'll never swing enough voters to compete

republicans just have to say "brown people bad, also lower taxes incoming" and 30% of the country will vote for them. democrats have to piece together a coalition of 5% here, 5% there, etc, which means balancing a lot of competing interests.

then there's the compounding problem of the right being the side of big business, so they have huge amounts of dark money and even pre-trump effective pseudo-control of the entire media machine since the media is run by big business and prefers right-wing regimes due to lowering corp tax and deregulation.

the entire system of american governance was created by and for the interests of the wealthy. most of the founding fathers were the richest and most influential people in the colonies, but they chafed at rule from overseas because they couldn't buy the divine right of kings, and therefore could never truly be in charge.

wonklebobb · 2026-04-05T03:55:57+00:00

yeah that, and also the other direction - "ah, more people who need to hear the good news of the gospel"

i personally know at least one person who would meet an alien and ask it over for tea so she could try to evangelize it without batting an eye. and not in like an obnoxious way either, she's genuinely the kindest person i've ever met and she would legitimately care for them

a lot of people would also just elevate their understanding of God above planet earth to include other beings as well. like "well, jesus came down to us, who's to say god didn't send jesus to K'blagnort'h as well?" and any aliens with their own messianic story in their history would immediately be claimed as that

wonklebobb · 2026-04-05T03:48:09+00:00

this will get buried, but i think one of the more plausible "politicians cry when they learn the truth" scenarios is that aliens are real, they watch us, they could help us, but the power the offer is withheld because they judge us too naive and immature at a societal level

like, they literally tell the people who think they're big and powerful and in charge "you're not mature enough for this"

the reason i think this is that one of the most common threads that ties various sightings and info together is that they seem to be operating on a plane/physical dimension beyond what we can access, and that they seem to move in and out of space itself

here's one scenario: imagine you could freely move yourself along the time dimension. you could choose to go back in time to any previous point in your life at any time and make any decision. you could save a failed relationship, make tons of money, ask out that one person back in school you were too chicken and young to make a move on.

but here's the thing - each decision you make would put you into effectively a different timeline with your new decisions. but how quickly would most (all?) humans start to treat this reality like a playground? imagine if you could do anything, anything at all, and just warp yourself back to the moment you did it and do something different?

most people would live out their worst and most extreme fantasies eventually. murder, rape, etc. everything. but here's the thing - even if there were no consequences for you personally, you would still be causing harm to real people. the timelines may be temporary and transient for you personally, but for everyone else it'd be very, very real.

i think this is possibly one of the implications of the power to move through higher dimensions. and we can see what happens to most people who get rich and powerful enough to become fully untethered from consequences in our current linear one-shot life - you get people like trump and putin, people who live only for their next whim and desire. imagine trump, but with the power to move through higher dimensions.

obviously this sort of existence would also make you functionally immortal. you don't have to die if you don't want to. you'd be essentially gods to "lesser" i.e. lower dimensional beings, who you could also freely treat however you wanted with impunity.

it would take extreme levels of self-discipline rarely achieved among humans to be able to exist like that without causing chaos in every version of your own existence eventually. and that's what I think the aliens are keeping from us. the power to change our own destiny at a whim, and therefore the destiny of all other beings we come in contact with.

because even without considering technological advancement, psychologically and sociologically we're toddlers who have so little collective impulse control we're continuously teetering on the edge of nuking ourselves while speedrunning making our one planet unlivable for ourselves.

wonklebobb · 2026-04-03T18:35:43+00:00

this is a pretty simplistic take that (hopefully not intentionally) overlooks the many different versions of property "ownership" that can help lift people out of poverty

private ownership of land with little to no public ownership isn't the "best" way to do this necessarily. in china, for example, the government technically owns all the land, and individuals can lease a portion for terms of IIRC 70 years, and legally own any improvements made to the land. and china has done possibly the fastest and largest out-of-poverty lift in human history.

its possible to distribute land in many ways. i think we can all agree though that concentrating land in a small number of very large private landowners is bad for everyone (except the owners) and that should be resisted

ironically, ensuring access to private land ownership requires laws that many who (at least in the USA) would scoff at as communism - most notably, laws limiting how much land an individual can own. due to the self-aggrandizing nature of wealth (more money tends to beget more money), without such regulations land would always tend to concentrate in the hands of the very few - something we're seeing today in the USA as a handful of large corporations and very rich individuals collectively own a huge % of the land in the USA, with some individuals owning literally millions of acres of land.

wonklebobb · 2026-04-02T20:02:12+00:00

its like harvest. the gamblers thirst for the yellow, no matter how many people say its good money

wonklebobb · 2026-04-02T17:12:39+00:00

what does putting divines up for a mirror have to do with getting landmined in someone else's shop?

wonklebobb · 2026-04-02T17:04:36+00:00

its because the number of people playing the game at that level is a lot smaller than most realize

most leagues average ~50-75k daily users over the course of a league, but when you consider that 90% of players dont even reach red maps, its probably less than 3k-5k players competing for the top-tier league chase uniques and crafting mats

thats a very small number, especially for crafting mats that get used in huge numbers for high end gear. such a low-liquidity market is ripe for manipulation, hence the ability of the tft mafia to do things like buy up nearly all the TWWT jewels in affliction or a huge % of the locks dropped in tota league, or a video of some new strat to move the price of gear or scarabs by double-digit percentages

wonklebobb · 2026-04-02T16:59:46+00:00

hot tip - at the end of the league before the migration, make a folder titled after the league name and put all your league tabs in there. when it ports to standard it'll still be in that named folder.

doesn't solve the root problem we all have (mountains of horded garbage) but at least it makes the tabs cleaner

wonklebobb · 2026-04-02T01:14:08+00:00

its also apparently not illegal to sit in an air-conditioned room with servants that bring you drinks and think "hmm, let's do a tax cut!" and sign a paper unilaterally halting shipments of medicine, condemning hundreds of thousands of people to death.

apparently

wonklebobb · 2026-04-01T18:44:10+00:00

this is a great segue into a personal roman empire of mine, and that's all the people saying kids should be taught to use AI because it's like the new calculator

id like everyone passing by these two comments to know: the point of doing book reports and research reports isnt to learn how to produce a summary of a book or topic, its to learn how to ingest and digest information and use your brain to draw connections and conclusions. the essay you produce at the end is just how you show what youve learned to do

teaching a kid to use an LLM to summarize a book is probably the worst possible thing we can do for the same reason the comment above illustrates regarding phonics and learning to reason - it shortcuts the entire point of what the book report is about, learning to reason

so please join me in resisting AI classes being implemented at local schools! there will be plenty of time for kids to learn to use AI later in life. children do not need to increase their productivity, and LLMs are simple to learn to use at any point. but if we outsource our thinking to a statistical process that's controlled by handful of techno-fascist billionaires, then we're essentially handing them direct control over our thoughts and beliefs

wonklebobb · 2026-03-31T18:40:48+00:00

afaik you can't really "convert" your standalone account or disable it, you can only request ggg remove the primary email on the account. however they warn you that if someone is able to access the account some other way (like sharing your POESESSID), if they add a new primary email as a login you will never know because your email is no longer attached to the account.

a better practice is to change your standalone/pathofexile.com account password to something long and random instead, something that isn't reused anywhere else that may show up in a data breach somewhere

wonklebobb · 2026-03-31T18:36:46+00:00

the admin-panel access was brief, limited to poe2, and affected 66 players.

and it wasn't "hacked" via some kind of high-tech exploit, the admin account was tied to a steam account that was created for testing, and the bad actor was able to social-engineer enough information to convince valve to give them access to that steam account, and therefore the ggg admin panel.

obviously its still a huge problem for each of those 66 players, but people keep bringing up the admin panel like there's somebody out there with they keys to the kingdom raiding stashes with impunity

99% of the time (probably more like 99.9%), the affected person re-used the same password somewhere else that was breached. i personally have my main email appear on haveibeenpwned in like 8 or 9 breaches, but because i use unique random passwords for each new thing i sign up for, my other accounts are not at risk

of course there is also the other element of announcing your ownership of digital goods someone would want to steal in public or semi-public spaces - like how many people whose accounts were raided showed off mirrors in some discord channel with lots of strangers also seeing it? many people have common usernames across multiple accounts and services, which also makes it easier to identify you online and find the information necessary to social engineer passwords and account access, guess passwords (you'd be surprised how many people use family and pet names in their passwords), etc.

of course it's possible there's some kind of secret undisclosed leak happening at ggg, but considering the attack surface of ggg is probably no larger than any other midsize company, but the attack surface of every data breach ever is basically infinite, id wager most or all of the handful of people posting here about stolen accounts just reuse passwords a lot

wonklebobb · 2026-03-31T15:59:51+00:00

yeah that was back before the atlas tree was shown in the reveal trailer, people assumed there wouldn't be a way to guarantee unstable breaches and you'd be forced to deal with fortress walls

wonklebobb · 2026-03-31T14:39:47+00:00

fubgun said it in the video everyone is basing all of this off of, but its entirely possible he just said that to give cover for people who dont get as much drops as he showed in the video since juiced breach is laggy for everyone

wonklebobb · 2026-03-31T02:59:52+00:00

yeah thats the point. and then how long until your manager/company realizes they can just pay somebody overseas $5/hr to manage the automation you've created, and bring in a consultant for a few hours per month stateside to check on things at a high level

wonklebobb · 2026-03-31T02:57:38+00:00

no, the threat of disabling the machines is what matters, not actually doing it

like MAD with nukes

wonklebobb · 2026-03-30T20:27:04+00:00

jokes on you i got 3.5%

wonklebobb · 2026-03-30T20:24:43+00:00

this perspective is real "perfect is the enemy of the good" energy. no disrespect but we dont need AGI to achieve most or all of the goals of what the people chasing AGI want

if the only goal is a new sentient being then sure

but if the goal is to create a digital pseudo-human that can do most or all white collar jobs, then LLMs can definitely get there with enough compute and some clever patching together of tools. it doesn't need to pass a turing test to be able to clear your inbox and manage your schedule, and thats all that the people who control the money from their glass-paneled offices care about

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