@Michael Lucas Question: What's the stretch goal where you make an audiobook by watching the movie and trying to read your novel out loud at the same time?
Big brands are spending small sums on X to stay out of Musk’s crosshairs “It’s whatever amount is enough to stay off the naughty list,” says ad executive. arstechnica.com/tech-policy/20…
trust in me. I've tried it. It's not worth it. If you want anise in your coffee, grab some regular Pernot, not their absinthe, just plain Pernot. It's basically alcoholic anise and mixes fine with anything.
Trump and Vance are confused why everyone else isn't behaving like sycophants because they run the US.
Ok, let's sum this up. The thing that gets to me about the Signal chats is the Vice President of the US talking about bailing out Europe. There was a comment about how only the US could drone a building, which is wild, I feel like I could probably throw a bomb at a building using the contents of most kitchens. Sure - maybe the US's bombs and drones are fancier - but I think we need to zoom in on that.
The US administration thinks that it's getting value for its money on defense. There's a theory that the US military budget is being spent on getting stuff rather than mostly just a slush fund for defense contractors. But this leads them to believe that they're the most powerful people in the world and that they're as much stronger than any other country by the amount more they spend on weapons.
And because of that they think that Europe couldn't stop terrorists. There's a belief that people aren't shooting drones at civilians because they *can't*, and they're mad that people are relying on them to fire drones at civilians. They believe that everyone else is just ungrateful for their droning of civilians. They can't envision a world where blowing up innocents in an apartment building is considered a bad move.
Trump and Vance are confused why everyone else isn't behaving like sycophants because they run the US.
This is why he wanted Zelenskyy to say thank you! This is why the defense budget of NATO is so important! This is why they call him the Leader of the Free World! This Propaganda matters!
im glad you touched on spending as a poor metric of military strength/investment. Because I think about this a lot. I don't know if Europe is a good example, bc I feel (don't have actual data) that a lot of defense spending in the EU is contracts for private industry, as well. But China for example... China is definitely spending 0% on the profit margins of private industries. And that shit is going to hurt when our war-mongering leaders finally get the war they've been pushing for.
@silverwizard I didn't think it in so many words, but we got hung up on the same detail of this story. Not the poor OPSEC, not the unaccountability of Signal disappearing messages for public officials, not the vague disagreement between Vance and Trump, but the unwarranted jab at Europe.
@Hypolite Petovan To be fair, this is partly me thinking about your own thoughts (I read your post yesterday). But tthis line definitely was most formed with yelling at Zelenskyy for not saying thank you. But it's all fucked, but it's such background noise in all the warcrimes vomit.
I think the fact that they killed 50ish innocent people who no theory they were involved in anything is also wildly important to this stry!
My least favourite anti-pattern in everything is when someone gets the term Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY) stuck in their head. They then start building wrappers around an interface that has all the same inputs as their interface. So now you have 2-3 layers of abstraction on top of every interface, all of which add complexity. Because they are Not Repeating Themselves where things aren't the same. BAAAAAH
One of the worst parts of modern life is innovaton. One of the most annoying things that could happen in my economic life is if Kijiji Innovated. If Kijiji improved/changed it could only annoy me.
I see people being mad about "Dead Games", and I also see people mad about Live Service Games. My entire goal in gaming is for my games to never change. I don't want changes, I want to play, see the story, finish, or mess with systems.
I don't get the search for innovation in corporations, and I don't get why someone would want them to. I don't get why people get annoyed by a product not updating.
@silverwizard I keep circling back to the increase in bullshit jobs in product and marketing mainly. Without new stuff to constantly put forward, their entire job is at stake.
Although I believe this can also happen with engineering teams that were oversized at the start of a project to put out the MVP as early as possible, and then you have engineers twiddling their thumbs and scrambling to find reasons to stay employed, although it would more probably would take the form of refactoring and rewrites.
Nothing to do with customer desires, everybody is just trying to keep their job.
@Hypolite Petovan So I tend to work in companies with 10-100 people. I joke my career is turning companies from 10 person companies to 100 person companies and then moving on.
It often means my teams are unresourced - working with dev teams under 10 people. Often we'll have not enough bandwidth to do the things we need to do. But we primarily add to the things we have rather than improve the daily drive experience.
It's the same mindset as google only promoting for creating things and not maintaining things.
People's obsession with innovation is putting the cart before the horse. It's a (potential!) path towards an objective; treating innovation as an intrinsic objective itself is inane.
Sure, innovation may be required when established means can't achieve a goal.
Sure, when someone makes something we didn't know we wanted, their innovation can be retroactively impressive.
But just demanding innovation? "Why won't you change I dunno what to achieve I dunno what?!"
I really don't understand people's existential horror at Star Trek transporters.
If you're a materialist - why do you care if your body is preserved alongside your mind. Why is it a problem that you get stored in a pattern buffer?
If you're not a materialist - why do you care about the body and not the soul? Why do you think your soul would become untethered because of changes in your body? I don't get it!
I once had a conversation in a philosophy of the mind class, where we were spitballing some things on a similar topic.
A lot of our everyday intuitions on our idea of a "self" involve that self having an unbroken continuity. (Whether one believes this is accurate or not.)
Most things that break that continuity give us the heebie-jeebies when put under a mental microscope.
@trashHeap That's valid. I mean - I am kinda a Lockean on this one - where conciousness is the thing and discontinuity happens (I've fainted before). Sure, I get why it feels weird. But... it's such a meme at this point - I don't... get it!
Maybe it shines too much of a spotlight onto the fact that a person is, much like a legal entity, a fiction; created by shared understanding, which is also a fiction.
You cant move files onto a USB stick - you can only copy them, then delete the first copy.
You can believe in materialism, and computer-files, while still feeling uncomfortable with the full implications.
@Malin Interesting - so you think that it's about the ability to copy. Thomas Riker is the real prior art here - but also kinda the counter example. Mirroring the pattern was supposed to be impossible - the idea of copying something with the transporter is impossible properly.
Maybe it's true - the idea of digital information is what's causing the issue - computers can only properly copy - but as envisioned in the 60s there's this idea that you can be transformed into a "matter stream" and stored in a buffer and it's fine. But now people don't materially engage with that...
Riker's twin makes a great example, along with that guy with the fear of transporters.
I think the fear comes from really thinking about what the real process is, but you're probably right that people understand it more now from working with files.
@Hypolite Petovan If your game has the coolest magic sword in the world, and the PC who swings a sword isn't getting it, it's a wasted detail. That sword should be in the hands of the villain or the hero, or else fuck it.
Maybe some games will have players who all hate swords and it doesn't come up, but the expectation is that the cool parts of the game are used in the game!
@Hypolite Petovan If I'm playing A Game Of Magic Swords my sword can be cool because it's on fire instead of +1, and if I'm playing Grim Gritty No Magic my sword can be cool because the hilt is obsidian or because it helped fight off the Huns.
But don't say "Grim Gritty No Magic has the sword called Magic Sword and it exists but the GM shouldn't let a player have it because it's rare!
A hacker is someone who studies and explores systems. Generally because they find it fun. Many posit this attitude is innate as opposed to learned. I think that that's complicated but I am willing to believe there are innate hackers.
My son is an innate hacker.
He has figured out that if I'm leaving for something, he can always get more time with me by asking for another hug. If he's had 3-5 hugs I'll eventually give up. Meaning he offers me a hug, which always works. If I'm in my office because I'm "at work" he can offer to make me a cup of coffee and then he gets to see me (even if briefly).
The problem is that cutting off these behaviours make him sad and I can't do that.
This means I have a hacker child figuring out how to exploit me. This is really fun but also really weird.
I bought a lineman's handset last weekend. I got a bix strip and a bix block to play with along side it. I am now asking friends "What's the difference between an ATA and a TRS cable punched to a bix block really?"
I think I found a bug in the AWS API. If you check an RDS cluster's endpoints from the CLI - those DNS records don't exist. You need to add -cluster to the domain. I am going mad.
One complicated thing about going to Parent Teacher meetings as a parent is that so many teachers seem to think you'll defer to them in how you treat your child. No teacher I've met is willing to admit wrongdoing or mistake, and it makes my fucking blood boil.
I think I'd put the pyramids and the phone system on par in terms of build complexity and knowledge needed that's mostly beyond my ken. but the phone system wins due to ongoing maintenance costs. Once a pyramid is built, you can mostly just walk away. The phone system, though, gotta keep those experts plentiful, happy, and intergenerational.
@sungo Exactly! The pyramids are wonderful beautiful things.
The phone system is the ultimate joy of humanity. It's communication, connection, and millions of people working together to make that happen. They're paid and unpaid. Phreak and cop. People who are talking, communicating, and agreeing. So I can put to wires into a line anywhere, and find connection to any other line in the world. As long as we all agree that communication matters.
@Lester Ward Oh sorry, I'm a step passed this, I've got markdown, and I want to put it in the description field of my RSS feed reader and make it look ok to any sensible reader
My wife walks into my office, and I excitedly tell her that I've found an old telephone service tech's Kijiji sale and we could start a phone company in the house with the kids, just for fun!
Friend: Apparently the LCBO in Ontario is one of the world's largest buyers of booze Me: 18-25 year olds head north to where there's shitty internet and no town and spend four months getting paid well and living in a camp. Of course it is.
The problem with parental controls, is that my kids are 3 and 5. I don't want them exposed to raw unfiltered internet. But I also know that they *will be*.
This means that parental controls are a war I'm trying to figure out how to let my kids win in the most gentle way possible. I want them to win without feeling smarter and better than me, and like they're invincible. I want them to become aware of the fact that the internet is a complicated place, I don't want them to fear, but I also want them to respect. I dunno - parenting is hard.
When I was little I knew there were books in the library I was not supposed to read, and as I got older I could venture into those areas, but my mom still kept an eye on what I was reading and would talk to me about it, exploring how various groups were presented, etc.
Simpler days, eh? You can't know what all websites or whatever your kids lands on unless you've got a parental control in place, I would imagine.
yeah that's the tricky part, from what I understand! My mom always described it as working herself out of a job as our parent. 😉 I don't have kids myself but I can appreciate the challenges, a little bit. You'll do great! 👍
@Tek aEvl I don't do that because: 1) my kids will definitely win. That's a losing scenario 2) I'm not my kid's enemy - they need to know I support them
I need to teach them their own judgement. For now they're in their own sandbox - but I want them to learn how to grow.
when my son was younger (he is 12 now) we had regular conversations about why a movie or a network service will remain locked by the parental controls. With time, as he inevitable became exposed to more and more content above his age (some of that done by me, after assessing his emotional and mental capabilities) - games or movies most of the time - after another conversation I started lifting some aspects of controls above his age. And we continue the process. I think the point I am trying to convey is - be transparent about why some things are locked. Talk to your kids (when they're older) to know their experiences form elsewhere. Adjust settings. Support. I think I got it all quite well with my boy - not ideally but well. We still argue, he still tries to outsmart the system sometimes...
Ah, one thing: Android and Google Apps - do not enable any google apps for your children as embedded webview does NOT fall under any parental controls. Finding out Youtube playing through google maps was quite interesting. Android parental controls are not effective at all, chrome and otherwise. It a steaming pile of horse shite. Apple does a bit better but requires some fidgeting to be set up properly. But does work, most of the time. For anything else, other devices, I have a per device ACL list on the firewall...
@Artur Wawrowski Yeah! This is the important bit! Emphasizing my role as protector and that I am protecting. And that they will grow into things! "You need to learn more" is such an important idea that's really hard for a 5 year old to accept.
And generally - I think it's good for a kid to outsmart the system. Kids *need* to outsmart the system.
My kids are running custom android tablets with an in-house fdroid store replacing the play store. For now.
sooo been there myself! My kids are now 12/13. We started slow, with unconnected devices (old phones) and a few games, kinda like just a different toy. As they go through school we try to draw analogies with familiar things.. Internet is kinda like 'outdoors'. Some areas are safe for you, some are not. Running around when you should be in bed is also not good. Trying to present family controls as helping, not a war you will lose...
I'm wondering, with the US in the state it's in, and the potential death of some (all? any? no one knows) defense contractors. Combined with the current dramas around CVE/CVSS, is now the time to start replacing the CVE system with something else?
Our Shadowrun group just decided our TacNet (Military Tactical Network to link cyberpunk gear and soldiers) requires filing in Tactical Cards in order to meet our Mission Stories.
A couple years back I saw a travel projector for $99, and uh, holy crap. It's currently running all my sound, running the sbc for the media, and projecting, one block of resources to handle "watch a show". It's real nice.
Ah, my domain registrar enrolled me in WHOISGUARD, gave whois a bogus domain. And then required me to get an email to change the email I use on my domain, or change the DNS. They didn't grab the email from my account for this. Oh no! They grabbed the whoisguard bogus email!
How wonderful! I guess server migration isn't happening today >.<
I have two main laptops I use right now. Both of them display a corporate logo for an OS (Microsoft and Apple) when they boot and then do not boot that OS.
Every single time I look at them and think "Stop embarrassing me"
@sungo Yeah - so I've tried a few different options
So I'm kinda stuck in Armbian land because I'm doing this on a raspi knockoff (after they hired a cop I swore them off).
So I started trying with just putting things on fstab, and found a tool for autoplaying CDs - but it didn't really work. So I moved to a udev rule which works on and off - but wont kick off sound because it's not able to subscribe the audio daemon. I've started looking at stripping out pulse and replacing it with alsa directly. But now I'm just trying to find a tool that will play an m3u without a session (cvlc seems gone from packages).
There's more - but I've spent a few hours on this and I'm mostly just frazzled.
occurs to me for the playback side, you could run mpv as a daemon and then send it a command to play the new files via mpv's command fifo. I use that for an audio player of mine.
I'm a pretty religious dude, and I care deeply about my religion and my actually seeing religious people portrayed well, and stories about the ways our communities are preyed upon. It's really important.
Michael Lucas
in reply to silverwizard • • •