Mitch Effendi (ميتش أفندي)

I like coffee, Philly, Pittsburgh, Arabic language, anything on two wheels, music, linux, theology, cats, computers, pacifism, art, unity, equity, etymology, the power of words, and getting high off airplane glue. Will use Adobe Illustrator for food.

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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: July 30th, 2025

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  • Frankly I don’t understand why they didn’t expect anything less by creating random traffic choke points. Mark my words, attitudes on ICE are going to start shifting radically once they start causing more and more collateral damage in pursuit of these capricious arrests.

    It’s gonna be something big, like, an ICE agent smearing one of Jeff Bezos’ kids with an SUV while they’re chasing a 75 year old abuelita through a palisade in downtown San Francisco. It’s gonna be random, and whichever unlucky ICE agent ends up doing it is going to get crucified — literally. This kind of high recklessness isn’t even seen in states with sophisticated surveillance or fascism. We are absolutely on some Great Leap Forward bullshit right now.











  • If I can ask, have you spent any time in the Rust Belt? Because I grew up there, and I can tell you that Americans don’t actually want plastics manufacturing in their backyard, nor will they appreciate the lung cancer and COPD rates skyrocketing because some dipshit has misplaced nostalgia for a time you most likely didn’t even live through.

    For a time, I was quite close to manufacturing workforce development in the US. The dirty little secret that nobody who kvetches about American manufacturing will ever acknowledge out loud is that we have plenty of manufacturing in the US, but manufacturers have the plants in places where people cannot affordably travel, nor do natural American workers seem to want to actually do factory work.

    They all say they do, by I can tell you from looking at actual jobs data that only 1/10 American workers who start at a factory job actually remain there longer than a month. To fix any of this, we all need to first acknowledge that maybe manufacturing doesn’t exist as much because it’s a shitty job with low pay, low security, and carries a high risk of on-the-job injury. None of y’all are gonna be lining up to be the guy who agitates the molten steel while it’s being transported from the forge to the smelter. Do you know how many people were just encased in molten steel? Do you know how often we just sorta moved on without even compensating the family? Enough so that the American labor union practically began in Pittsburgh.





  • a lot of people aren’t old enough to remember that when the digg exodus happened, reddit didn’t even have subreddits yet. it was just links on one page, and we built our little subculture in the comments of each thread. that’s why there is such a culture of commenting before reading the article (if at all) — it used to be a big, disorganized blob of chatty nonsense, much like Fark or MetaFilter were at the time too.

    reddit is a lovely example of how tech companies from 1995 to 2020 fell into success and figured out what their product does later down the line. to quote homer simpson when asked what his tech company does, “we’re a website that sells computers… or… a computer that sells websites, I haven’t decided yet.”


  • i actually knew one of these powerusers in the early 2010s. he had leukemia, and i signed up to be a match to donate spinal marrow for him. i visited him in the hospital a bunch. he hasn’t acknowledged me since. that was a real bummer, but, i tend to see friends where they don’t exist so that might be on me.

    i am a little bummed that i got permabanned just because i was so close to all of the reddit founders and early employees. i personally prevented alexis from getting arrested for trying to openly smoke weed on the street in pittsburgh when it was still the kind of thing that got you put in prison for a few years if your skin is darker than popcorn.

    steve huffman in particular is a shitter and always has been. think of that kid you knew growing up who would make up that his dad worked at SEGA and that Goku was going to be in the next Sonic game — that’s spez, still, to this day. he is “mr. namedropper.” steve, genuinely, i do not care that you saw Beyoncé at the airport.

    ETA: since people are being weird about phrasing, i signed up to be a match. his alias back then was Dacvac. i literally sat in bars and watched him mod /r/pics on an iPad. believe me or don’t, i’m just some schmoe online after all.