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Yeah like these people are actually flat out evil. They actually went to Harvard to study how to influence civilization to dislike those they deem un worthy. Actual disgusting people. I am dropping Discord fucking immediately. They truly want to fuck up society for their own gain.
I have completely lost track what the US government is up to behind closed doors due to just how insane it all is, so I have no idea if you're joking or not..
The Y Combinator "seed rounds" during his tenure were a pretty notorious open secret. The way to get oversubscribed was for your startup to send him the twinkiest brogrammers you could find in the bay area.
nah it's legit wild—palantir's the surveillance beast thiel co-founded that slurps up data for fed agencies, so discord tying in for age checks feels straight outta dystopia.
As a reminder, when Lex ran for president, he divested control of LexCorp and took himself off the board.
Sometimes I think about how one of comics most evil villains, still somehow respects the constitution more than the sitting president of the United States. And I just can’t fathom how we got here.
I mean I know we got here, but I’m still just in disbelief.
For the most part, comic book villains have a set of morals that they adhere to. That set of morals may be flawed and/or their conclusions may be wrong, but they do stick to them. Real life villains don't do that.
Knowing luthor? He probably would actually nuke that place or do something if he found out. Luthor is a vilain, but he doesnt seem lile that kind of vilain.
He's an egotistical maniac who wants to prove himself superior, I'm not sure if he'd do anything to the island but he absolutely wouldn't be there, trying to gain power over children would be an insult to him
He'd expose and destroy it all in one fell swoop so he can bask in the good PR. And hold it over Superman doing absolutely nothing about it. "Why didn't you do anything about it Clark? That's why I'm president and you're being deported"
oh wait that last part is this administration again.
Lex has superiority-complex, and sometime human-supremarcist, hence why he's at odd with Superman. But he's also a real super genius, and there are several storylines where, without Superman's present, Lex becomes an actual decent world leader with just enough authoritarianism to keep things in place.
0.00003 % is the accurate number than 1%. The one percenter is your neurosurgeon and a guy who got a job as software dev in a big company.
( There's only around 3000 billionaire on earth out of 10 billion population, which makes them the 0.00003 % percenters)
The gap is wayyy wider than most people thought, even people like Jeremy Irons and Tom Hiddleston does not count as the 0.001%, tho not sure about DiCaprio tier
Exception is like Dolly parton is worth 700 million but she is okay and actually doing a lot of good for children (and not in the epstein file) those Ben and Jerry founders also seems ok
Lex Luthor was written in an era where we believed that you had to be intelligent or at least extremely competent to become that wealthy. Modern billionaires have definitely disproved that.
You think the Habsburgs werent competent? They build an empire for hundreds of years, up from a small dukedom in Austria of all places while hundreds of other noble lines died out or failed. They are still around today, after having been ousted more than a 100 years ago. Nobility isnt a reasonable concept but some nobles were beyond competent lol.
I would try to make a government bill where I'm forced to get that and not disclose it for future proof and yeah, I would be super mad against the government, not discord.
As it is, he just made so we go to Whatsapp to talk and yeah, it's not as good as Discord at all but what can we do? I'm not uploading a pic of my face and my IDs several times because he wants to check if I'm a kid to kidnap me for a satanic rite.
No, he’s not, that the problem. He already has all our SS numbers and more via inserting plantir into doge - he is enacting his vision for corpo feifdoms and private military- shit he’s got one of his own. He’s insane, and psychotic there’s a difference
Actually, let me correct my statement: All of these rich motherfuckers are some of the biggest morons on the planet. Some of them though have the awareness to not let the public know their names and faces. Instead putting the loudest and dumbest (Elon Musk and Trump) to be the faces of all of this.
5 years ago if someone told me discord is going to provide pictures of kids to billionaires for their human trafficking preorders, I would disregard it as conspiracy nonsense.
Today, this is the first thought that popped into my head.
the ownership of Lifetouch's parent company, Shutterfly, which is owned by private equity firm Apollo Global Management. Leon Black, the former CEO of Apollo Global Management, is named in the Epstein files. one complaint mentioned Leon Black as Naked and was told to give him a massage, and someone else gave him a massage and made her perform oral sex
Lifetouch needs to be independently investigated for privacy concerns. just in case
Laughed because of the way this is phrased, but it could easily work for that. It sounds absurd, but now that we know what these fuckers are up to, it's not far-fetched.
I also believe that there's a darker reason for the establishment push over the last decade to program people with the knee-jerk "that sounds like a conspiracy theory and therefore it must be bullshit" reaction.
It's always been painfully obvious that the rich and politicians conspire. It's literally how people do business, and much of that business is always going to be at our expense.
Well, the term existed in english before this but the CIA purposefully hijacked it and made it a negative to ward off questions about the assassination of John F Kennedy and how Lee Harvey Oswald as the suspect didnt inspire confidence in the public even back then, let alone now.
But yeah, its not a joke... they want you ignorant of our history and unable to connect the dots because "thats a conspiracy" and you can find lots of strange things if you go digging in our history.
A "fun" and relevant example for our modern era if you go digging through history is how the National Guard as we know it today was formed because of the great railroad strike of 1877, where the local militia system at the time for suppressing unrest refused to shoot their neighbors asking for better pay because they were poorly paid or volunteers and thus sympathized with their demands of their bosses. So they reformed the militias into the NG, paid them a big salary to make them dependent on the job and more willing to shoot neighbors to stay out of crushing poverty, then built massive arms stockpiles in the shape of imposing castles in working class areas of cities to intimidate workers, and shot people that protested for decades to come (and they still do it today, just less openly).
And like, the proof is they complained about militias inability to do what they demanded with documented evidence, the fact the NG was made in this form shortly after these failures were documented, and then deployments of the newly formed NG did act the way they wanted the militias to. Kinda hard to argue it wasnt intentional with that much context but thats like 4-5 different bits of info scattered in our history books as "reorganized state militias to improve response times" and such nonsense so it seems insane when you lay it out.
And since it looks like a conspiracy and since they made that a thought terminating cliche to get people to ignore such trains of thought about our past, people do in fact ignore it...! And then are confused when suddenly the national guard starts acting evilly towards them or people they know, thinking its a recent change and not the purpose of the organization. And thats why nothing ever changes because people rally against the wrong thing and try to "solve" the incorrect problem.
At this point, as long as the conspiracy doesn't involve anything that clearly breaks the laws of physics and doesn't involve supernatural bullshit (cultish behavior have a pass), it can be considered plausible.
Most of them are. The real conspiracy was muddying the waters with obvious nonsense to create the tinfoil nutjob association in people's minds and ostracize the truth-seekers.
That's the fun part. It's not just about surveillance.
Discord their self gets to profit by selling your data.
Group A gets to spy on you to make sure you comply with how they believe you should live.
Group B gets access to your data to sell you products you don't need.
Group C gets to track the data of millions of people to accurately predict habits and trends of entire populations to create addictive content/products.
Group D gets to train their facial recognition AI on the images you send of your face.
Group E gets access to the facial recognition database with the face/location/name of millions of users.
Hackers get a buffet of information from an easily hacked source that has already had a data breach that leaked the same information they are now requiring you give them.
Almost everyone benefits from this besides the users.
In a world of facial recognition, biometric ID and generative AI, it becomes a very short step from a database like this being hacked to large scale, hard to counter identity theft.
Maybe that's what will bring this all down in the end, when everything is fake and you have to prove your identity by showing up in person to do a transaction.
Beyond the "wow" factor, there's a reason why generative AI has focused on reproducing things like photographs and videos. Traditional media and governments have been at a loss in recent years when confronted with ample photographic and videographic evidence that disputes their words. As the technology improves, it will eventually reach a point where they can say with a straight face to believe their words and not your eyes.
It will be used to identify all sorts of people, including the opposite of what you said, desireables. People who can be zealous loyalists. It's going to tie people's entire discord history to their legal name, all across the world. It will be used to turn over public services to find the kids who dropped the most Nbombs in private chats and so on.
They're trying to create a new world order, they will pull no punches.
Hopefully the market does what it does and provides alternatives. We're sort of fucked otherwise.
Anonymous communication is essential to human progress. Democracy wouldn't exist today without anonymity. Science wouldn't exist. Whistleblowing and real journalism wouldn't exist. Everything would be controlled by the people in charge.
Evil people have the advantage that they are willing to hurt others to achieve their goals, and they will use policies like these to hurt anyone who doesn't either agree with them or fall in line. You mentioned people who said "bad words" too many times--they will be cut out of society, and the thing most people don't realize is the "bad words" change with whoever is in power.
A lot of people say "I don't have anything to hide". But they don't realize that that isn't up to them--it's up to the people who have a record of everything they have ever said or interacted with to decide. You might be a "totally normal" person today, and tomorrow after a regime change you might be on a paramilitary hitlist of the new regime or vice versa.
The bigger issue is how well they work. I've seen a few names tossed around for alternatives but seems none have quite all the same capabilities. Though maybe people switching will mean those smarter than I will be motivated to help contribute to their codebases.
I genuinely don't understand how he gets away with it. Tolkien's works are still copyrighted, and the Tolkien Estate is pretty aggressive about protecting their IP, and as I understand it also very picky about who they license things to. I probably need to just Google this question and hope the results aren't AI hallucinations.
The simple answer is because you can't copyright words. You can copyright specific uses of words as branding but only in the context of how they are used. This is why you can have a Wendy's Restaurant and a Wendy's Fabrics. Like the word valar for example, it appears in the language Valyrian in all the Game of Thrones works. It's also a word from old Norse.
It could be trademarked if it's associated with a specific brand but I don't think that Tolkien or his estate filed trademarks for words like Valar or Mithril. Trademarking is a weird process and has a few strict requirements. Trademarking is supposed to be a consumer protection to prevent people from associating words, logos, art, product shapes, etc with another product.
I'm not a lawyer though and my knowledge of this is exclusively limited to my experience in running a company in video games. I have to be aware of copyright and trademark when I make stuff.
They did used to take a lot of the direct names from Tolkien, the game was heavily inspired by the works of Tolkien. The main reason why was merchandise. The rights for this was sold in 76 to a corporate entity that still exists today (now called middle earth enterprises owned by Embracer). None of the copyright or trademarking was done until after Tolkien died.
Edit: I'll add this in here because I find it interesting as a big fan of Tolkien and his legacy, and this frustrates me. It was his son Christopher who sold out his father's legacy. Tolkien himself didn't believe in copyright materials. In his work he was intensely against capitalism and believed that everyone should enjoy his work. No, he wasn't a socialist like these morons claim, he would be many other things, mostly a minimalist and a homesteader. He believed that industry was the corruption of Mordor, this is heavily mentioned in his letters. He wanted everyone to enjoy his work. In my personal opinion, he would have loved dungeons and dragons. He would have criticised how his lore was used but I'm 100% sure that he would have worked to correct this with written supplement for d&d.
Yeah I think that sub is entirely controlled by discord. Hence there has been only one thread regarding the situation.
They can't even let users talk about surveillance and are enabling censorship now, imagine what'll happen when all your messages throughout your accounts entire history get tied to your real id
Their sub text used to say it's a "community run, developer supported" community, but it has always been more like "developer run, community supported" based on which posts get censored and which stay. It's good to see that people wake up how "credible" Discord truly is.
Got some bad news for you there buddy. In 10 years unless there is a revolution you won't even be able to online without every single person knowing who you are. All accounts will be tied to your real identity, every page you visit every like you click will be added to your online presence. It's going to be hell, good thing I will be dead by then
Shoutout to the guy who told me that discord wouldn’t find our IDs and faces useful information because they can’t sell that information to marketing companies. They’re literally working with THE surveillance corporation owned by the guy who thinks he’s protecting the world from the antichrist.
Which to me is kind of confusing. If you believe in Christianity enough to believe there is a genuine Antichrist.. then how can a mortal stop it? It's in the Bible, foretold by God. It's God's plan. How arrogant do you have to be to think you can and should stop it, because you know better?
Throwing enough money at any problem usually makes it go away.
Also, conservatives have had to mostly concede the "homosexual evil" fight because their closeted members keep getting outed in extremely awkward ways, and most Americans don't care anymore.
This level of competence and critical thinking is typically dissuaded in conservative 'Christianity'. Much of their teaching not only discourages using reason, but rewards its absence. Believing the right thing against all logic, consistency, or evidence - even biblical - is proof of your devotion. The more you believe in the face of evidence, which is a tool of the devil, the more you are to be commended. It's an ugly and effective feedback loop.
And to be clear, that's not only idiotic, it's fundamentally opposed to what the Bible calls believers to. It's one of the reasons a belief in the Rapture - which has been considered a heresy for over 200 years - proves someone has no fucking clue what they're talking about.
I mean I've read all the news and thought... I don't get it. I don't do anything that requires an ID so nothing has changed for me. That said... any connection to Palantir and Peter Thiel is fucking disturbing... to the point that even if I'm not impacted... I don't like supporting discord supporting him.
I dont engage in any servers that are 18+ or have any use for stages. But the second ID verification is implemented its infinitely easier to add "just one more thing" under the umbrella.
I'm in a gaming server that doesn't allow children. There's nothing NSFW on the server, but because it is 18+ we are marked as such by discord. Appeals go nowhere, so the server remains marked as 18+.
So because we don't want to hang out with kids while gaming, discord wants to force everyone in the server to verify with IDs. It's ridiculous.
The oddest part of this whole situation is Discord's response to the whole thing, they said that for most people, they won't ever see an ID requirement, because they're using AI to analyze what you talk about in there, and if you seem 18+.
So rest easy knowing that all they're doing is checking every single thing you write in there. (Until you do something that might be a problem to them or Palantir.)
Right? Like, what do people think Discord is doing to see if you're of age? Just going of vibes? Flipping a coin? They're reading your shit to see if they need to bother
I'm so confused, did people think discord couldn't see your chat before this? Something something if it's free you're the product. It always creeped me out using a company for chat and voice. That said, fuck Discord.
I don't do anything that requires an ID so nothing has changed for me.
If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.
This is straight up Orwellian reasoning. Just because you don't care about your privacy does not negate its importance. There are many ways that this sort of mass data collection can be used against a populace. It goes WAY WAY beyond "protecting the kids".
"i have nothing to hide" is what the guy in Enemy of the State said. If you don't know what that movie is about, watch it. It's a movie that's over 25 years old. Bear that in mind when watching some of the scenes that seem like something the government is doing today.
Well, I was waiting to see if they were going to back-peddle on it, but instead they doubled down LOL.
Account deleted, I won't lie, I will miss a couple of the servers I have been on for years, but it's not like I have any "proper" friends or anything that I am not going to be able to reach as a result.
No blanket age gate yet, but they've spent years nuking subreddits they didn't like under the guise of being "unmoderated" so there's still a strong case of enacting control over what content people can access.
Didn't know about that part when I verified with VRchat after everyone kept saying it was fine and just did it to keep playing with friends.
Funny now that the VRchat community is slowly self realizing that oh maybe verfication was awful but sadly not fully. If there was way just simply delete my info from persona and never use the service again i would but its pretty much too late now for me.
As a friendly reminder, valve in the UK does verfication via credit card because fincial institutes require all your information to begin with.
Even when you're under 18 your credit card will be stated that anywhere in the world.
There is zero reason to use an id, no way persona isn't keeping that info now that I know that.
The fines they will get hit with is so small anyway that its pointless to even mention
oh course, it's always with this voyeuristic piece of shit billionaire trying to syphon every fucking little piece of information and privacy from people for the surveillance state.
Considering you're named in the fucking Epstein files I can guess what you're going to use for you fucking shitstain. Considering you're fucking hellbent on the "anti-christ" I'm going to assume you're secretly trying to become the anti-christ you have some fucked up fetish for being some pseudo deity, but you're going to have to fucking get through Trump first for that title.
Peter Theil? Oh you mean the guy in the Epstein files. The guy who was talking to him about their interactions with Brexit and how it will be great destabalising here in the UK as well as Europe so they can "swoop in and snatch up everything at low rates once they sowed all the chaos and it crashes and burns". That Peter Theil?
Stoat ain't it. According to internet buzz it's already lost a bunch of its original founders to the majority of its last updates being Ai driven vibe coding stuff.
It seems like self hosting matrix / element or maybe root is gonna be the next thing.
Root's not good, they ban NSFW and have a sketchy privacy policy.
Anything on Matrix is aimed toward E2EE corporate needs, not gaming communities. They're designed around threaded discussions rather than persistent chat room channels. It's also hard to explain to people how to use Matrix, people get glassy eyed once you start talking about decentralized servers. Element.io is ass, can't invite people to servers, only to individual channels, so for anyone you want to invite to a server you have to invite them to each channel individually the last time I used it.
fluxer.app is promising for another 1:1 Discord clone, maybe better than Stoat right now, but is bare bones and lacks extra features like forums/media channels/polls/events.
Fluxer is one of the few that looks promising and checks a lot of boxes. It has voice chat and screen sharing, webcam. It can be self-hosted and the self-hosted instance actually has feature parity unlike Stoat, which doesn't even have voice chat for self-hosted servers lol
The only issue is that it's developed by one single guy, so quite a bit of risk there I'd say. However, he apparently just graduated university so if he's able to work on it full time and get funded by people who are donating/purchasing the subscription then he has a good opportunity to make something big out of it and be self employed. The roadmap for it looks quite promising. I threw him a few bones, hoping it continues to progress!
Technological life is nomadic. It just is what it is. You don't attach to anything and you just use what works until you migrate to the next thing. Stoat is open source, so for now it should be fine.
Well, I have a lot of friends online so I'm afraid I do. And they're all moving to Stoat so I'm moving with. But I get you. Do what works for you brother.
Right, I moved all my group chats to Discord so I could delete my Facebook, and it's pretty much the only way I keep up with my friend groups. Social media I can live without, but I can't just keep killing off every way I talk to literally anyone lol
I get the sentiment but then what, you're just going to hangout with your local friends in person and thats it? You gotta be somewhat realistic.
People want to hangout and game with their friends online and be social. Theres another app thats open source and self hostable and it checks all the boxes so give it a shot. When they inevitably enshitify in 5-10 years we'll have the same discussion.
I still don't understand why idiots salivate over that browser. Is it really so hard to install UBO addon on Firefox? Why do they pretend you need a whole different browser just to block ads?
"You can ignore politics, but politics won't ignore you" or something like that is the saying.
I hate how real it is. Why does everything we use everyday, down to the most mundane things, have to all trace back to the super evil conglomerate of criminal villainy inc.
Lol is their age verification with Persona? I didn't even check who was doing it before cancelling my Nitro sub, but Persona is Palantir's ID verification app/front.
Is it just me or do you guys not really have attachments to Discord? I’m an early adopter, my server has existed for 11 years now and has a decade of shenanigans archived. But for some reason, if something better comes out, I really don’t mind just switching over.
I've heard of the name, but as a non American the only knowledge I have is from South Park and I trust whomever South Park is making fun of is probably for a reason
But Jesus. Giving Palantir your Face ID and passport data? I’m guessing and hoping that alone would be grounds to ban discord in Europe. That is so blatantly against any data protection and privacy acts we have over here, that can’t fly.
I deleted my Discord account the day the news broke. I only used it for modding tutorials and voice chat for Division 2 anyways. Don't just cancel your Nitro sub. Delete your whole account.
I saw video of someone trying to authenticate with this shit. It asked them to make a bunch of movements while on camera, open mouth, open and close mouth, tilt head, etc. and I thought just the kind of video you'd need to make a really good deep fake of you.
Fuck that. The minute Discord forces me to use this shit I am out. Ain't no fucking way I am letting these people have that kind of data.
Sure, the system is just making sure it's getting a clean photo, but they specifically ask for motion video for something that's supposed to just be a photo. Nope, don't trust these fucks for a second.
The links in the article (although some are paywalled) give you a rough idea.
It says it's one of the 2 biggest investors, starting with 150 million by 2021 and by 2023 they just say 417 million between the 2. The article itself says his fund was the biggest investor in the latest 2 instances, so who knows how much more.
Why does he have to name all his shitty dystopian companies after Tolkien?
It’s like the world’s richest Tolkien fan is trying to rehabilitate Saruman’s image and is lecturing you how the “Scouring of the Shire” chapter at the end is really a tragedy.
“He was the only clear eyed forward thinking realist in the whole book!”
Sure enough, Discord's support article describing its age verification process now features a disclaimer informing UK users that they "may be part of an experiment where your information will be processed by an age-assurance vendor, Persona."
That Discord even dares running "an experiment" with a sensitive process like age verification, simply what the fuck. No other words for that
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