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You guys need to post more. This site is fucking dead and it sucks
I found this picture on here: https://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/TPV3/Voices.php/2021/02/28/hot-off-the-press-pfizer. --- I get the feeling that whoever made this image didn't even read over the graphs. There's less deaths than cases in the picture. How does that make vaccines bad? I can barely tell what these graphs are supposed to say, they are saved as a PNG and the text is so small. --- Christ, this is pathetic. Anti-vaxxers are really desperate to find an excuse to be anti-vax.
ufile.io
It's not finished at all; but I don't want it to die in a hard drives. I don't know who made this tho.
It was *already* discriminatory to hate furries. It's just becoming obvious. <a title='By /u/DnD-NewGuy' href='https://teddit.net/r/unpopularopinion/comments/qaid8l/the_very_idea_of_disliking_furries_has_now/hh35uxk/'><blockquote>I find it disgusting to be sexually attracted to animal traits because that is just watered down beastiality.<br /> <br /> That said if you just find those traits cool or interesting from world building perspectives etc there is nothing wrong with that just as there is nothing wrong with finding animals cool.</blockquote></a> I can't wait for them to realize that humans are a part of the animal kingdom. Is having sex with humans "bestiality" then? <a title='By /u/BrankBrank96' href='https://teddit.net/r/unpopularopinion/comments/qaid8l/the_very_idea_of_disliking_furries_has_now/hh3dfby/'><blockquote>Thats a load of nothing to defend your weird fetish. Just be like normal people and keep it to yourself behind closed doors. …[C]hill out with the furries until they become the next progressive movement.</blockquote></a> That's how sexual fetishes become a progressive movement; if you bully a marginalized group enough; they will lash back. --- And people wonder why there is a common fear to express sexuality…
The community is about sharing bad reddit posts (and mocking them). Bad reddit posts consist of: * _Awful_ formatting. * Irrelevant titles. (Also immoral clickbait titles.) * Nonsensical posts. * Bad edits to the reddit post. * Bot activity on the post. (I'm uncertain if it should remain apolitical; but this instance is already political anyway.) EDIT: The *content* or *author* of the post shouldn't be criticized or shared; only the reddit post itself.
* This symbol vaguely resembles a helmet with a spike, which looks fascist to me. * It also resembles a closed eye with hair (the brackets); in fact I'm about to post a flag with a symbol. I don't know how else to use it tho.
Reddit has been on a spree of banning Communist subreddits. (These subreddits have been recreated on Lemmygrad and Hexbear.) (What worries me is that this banning spree could spread to distributist subreddits, like [r/distributism](teddit.net/r/distributism).) --- Now I got curious about the censorship on Distributism. I don't know of an actual instance where Distributism has ever been censored, unlike socialism. (I don't think it *has* been censored; probably because it's an unpopular economic system.)
From October 2021 to a few days ago I could barely make progress on my projects and I don't like feeling cold. Now I feel like I can generate motivation again.
What is your opinion on it? --- I feel like I got too much hate for it.
I got some ideas for what Lemmy instance to make. * A distributist instance. * An instance for health. * A corporate or school instance. * Some more city instances.
If not, then it looks like there's a novel programming project I can work on (and then quit because it'll get boring).
I *had* an opinion but I lost it; and my internet is down so I can't write through a physical keyboard. I also struggle to write my opinion. :( Anyway, I'm asking because skepticism is important!
I like to believe that there is a method that could give *everyone* their ideal universes. By giving everyone *their* ideal universes, we could solve morality. Uncertainty in the predictions of the ideal universes could be a problem; an ideal universe in a frame of time could become an unideal universe in the next frame of time. --- For people that *don't want* an ideal universe, we could give them an unideal universe (though that depends on their perspective).
They did it with Privacy and [FOSS](https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software_movement); they'll probably do it with federaton.
nicchiban.nichegamer.com
So I'm just now realizing why the word ["trap"](https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap#Other_uses) and animemes controversy was a controversy and I feel stupid for blindly siding with animemes. When I first heard abut this controversy, in /r/animemes; I believed in the animemes community because I (somehow) thought their rights were being taken away. Sometime later, I heard about the controversy through the /r/trans community; I found out that [trap]((https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap#Other_uses)) is a slur against (female-to-male) transsexuals. After that, I believed in the trans community side over the /r/animemes community. --- I don't really care about this controversy; I forgot it even happened; but I feel *so* gullible in general because all sides seem to make sense to me.
/> tin t4 /> cost about 100 usd /> sound amazing for the price, better than a lot of 300-400 usd headphones /> comes with beautiful high quality case (synthetic leather) /> headphones themselves made out of stunning machined aluminium /> standardized detachable replaceable mmcx cable /> cable itself pretty nice /> 3.5 mm connector so rigid you could kill somebody with it /> never need to be charged /> will prolly last so long they'll outlive you /> neutral/warm-ish sound, relatively accurate /> relatively unknown, but of much better value than the vast majority of "known" brands
I don't know if you're used to ordering stuff internationally from AliExpress or similar, but it's very normal for tracking information to dump a package into a void for about a month until the thing shows up at your door. This site actually connects the Chinese shipper's tracking information with the domestic shipper's tracking information and adds estimates on top of the shipper's info. Handy!
slate.com
All is in flux. All is uncertainty. I recognize that at the decrepitude of 27 years of age, I am past the height of cool. The world will shift, and I will jog to meet it or be left behind. But if there is any mercy in you, Gen Z -- flared, bootcut, straight legged, pegged, wide legged, pleated mercy -- **please do not bring back low waist jeans.** They looked awful on those of us who weren't thin even when we were young. I will not return to that suffering. Please do not inflict it on each other.
www.wired.com
> The internet is clever, but it’s not always smart. It’s personalized, but not personal. It lures you in with a timeline, then fucks with your concept of time. It doesn’t know or care whether you actually had a miscarriage, got married, moved out, or bought the sneakers. It takes those sneakers and runs with whatever signals you’ve given it, and good luck catching up. We would never accept this kind of targeting from humans. If you offer someone a drink, they say "No thanks I'm sober", and you then keep shoving it in their face -- that is *terrible of you*. We accept the equivalent as a neutral fact of Internet ads. Why?
I like the rewindy-aspect of having to pick up a few cards when you get it wrong. My partner and I were both new so it's possible it's more monotonous if you're better at the strategy.
> In short, [in the anti-professionalist view] the actor enmeshed in a system is doing things for the wrong reasons, not for the reasons that would recommend themselves to him if he were not thus "constricted," but for reasons that attach to the limited and suspect goals of the professional enterprise. > In this opposition of the central or essential to the superficial or ephemeral we have the essence of the long quarrel between rhetoric and philosophy, a quarrel that philosophy has by and large won, since more often than not rhetoric is identified as the art of illegitimate appeal, as a repertoire of tricks or manipulative techniques by means of which some special interest, or point of view, or temporary fashion passes itself off as the truth. The rhetorical, then, is that which stands between us and the truth, obscuring it, preventing us from allying ourselves with it, and tying us instead to some false or partial god. > That is, if one is operating from within what we might call an ideology of essences-a commitment to the centrality and ultimate availability of transcendent truths and values-one will necessarily view with suspicion and fear activities and structures that are informed by partisan purposes (the spirits of advocacy and vanity) and directed toward local and limited (that is, historical) goals. Antiprofessionalism, in short, follows inevitably from essentialism, so much so that an essentialist who wishes in some sense to give professionalism its due cannot avoid falling into the anti-professionalist stance. > The word illusion marks the passage (apparently unnoticed by the author) from observation to judgment, from the description of something as conventional and historical to the declaration that therefore it is unreal. But one cannot say that because literature and literary theory are conventional-that is, effects of discourse-they are illusory without invoking as a standard of illusion a reality that is independent of convention, as essential reality; and once one has done that (however knowingly or unknowingly) the familiar anti-professionalist complaint against structures and practices that stand between us and what is true and valuable and sincere cannot be far behind. > It might seem that the only alternative to anti-professionalism is quietism or acquiescence in the status quo because by discrediting it, I have taken away the basis on which this or that professional practice might be criticized. But in fact, the only thing that follows from my argument is that a practice cannot (or should not) be criticized because it is professional, because it is underwritten by institutionally defined goals and engaged in for institution-specific reasons; for since there are no goals and reasons that are not institutional, that do not follow from the already in-place assumptions, stipulated definitions, and categories of understanding of a socially organized activity, it makes no sense to fault someone for acting in the only way one can possibly act. This does not, however, rule out opposition, for someone can always be faulted for acting in institutional ways that have consequences you deplore; and you can always argue that certain institutional ways (and their consequences) should be altered or even abolished, although such arguments will themselves be made on behalf of other institutional ways (and their consequences). > It is an ideology both because it serves certain well-defined interests (despite its claims to neutrality and to equal access) and because it is at variance with the facts as Larson understands them. She points out that rather than owing nothing to society, the professional owes everything to society, including the self whose independence is his strongest claim and justification. That is, it is only with reference to the articulation and hierarchies of a professional bureaucracy that a sense of the self and its worth-its merit-emerge and become measurable. > A professional must find a way to operate in the context of purposes, motivations, and possibilities that precede and even define him and yet maintain the conviction that he is "essentially the proprietor of his own person and capacities." The way he finds is anti-professionalism. As we have seen again and again, antiprofessionalism is by and large a protest against those aspects of professionalism that constitute a threat to individual freedom, true merit, genuine authority. It is therefore the strongest representation within the professional community of the ideals which give that community its (ideological) form. Far from being a stance taken at the margins or the periphery, anti-professionalism is the very center of the professional ethos, constituting by the very vigor of its opposition the true form of that which it opposes. Professionalism cannot do without anti-professionalism; it is the chief support and maintenance of the professional ideology; its presence is a continual assertion and sign of the purity of the profession's intentions. In short, the ideology of anti-professionalism-of essential and independent values chosen freely by an independent self-is nothing more or less than the ideology of professionalism taking itself seriously. > What this means, finally, is that even if one is convinced (as I am) that the world he sees and the values he espouses are constructions, or, as some say, "effects of discourse," that conviction will in no way render that world any less perspicuous or those values any less compelling. It is thus a condition of human life always to be operating as an extension of beliefs and assumptions that are historically contingent, and yet to be holding those beliefs and assumptions with an absoluteness that is the necessary consequence of the absoluteness with which they hold-inform, shape, constitute-us. I came upon this because I was really looking for criticisms of The Professions made on the grounds that they are too siloed from *wider* society, and I think that's sort of rattling around within Eagleton's complaint. It isn't that there isn't social validation of (whatever we're agreeing counts as) professionalist nonsense, it's that the institutions that provide that validation are not capital-S Society. But it's fun to get to that ending excerpt and find the intellectual tension between the absolute and contingent that is both irrefutable (in any satisfying way) and unacceptable (in any sense that demands satisfaction).
www.technologyreview.com
The thing that's novel here, to me, is not that they were pushing engagement at all costs; that was evident from Zuck's whole....shtick. The key is that *they were aware what those costs were*, in more detail than anyone could divine from the outside. What do we have to offer people in response to this that's positive? What is being built that's better? What are the funding models that don't inevitably circle the advertising-eyeballs drain? I want to read people's positive visions for change. I want to help things change. That's one thing the Indieweb has going for it--even when you aren't Fully Onboard With All Parts Of It, it's clearly articulating what a better world might look like, and the big names there deserve props for it. The [Fediverse](https://runyourown.social), too--it's growing toward what it wants to be, and that's beautiful and wonderful. (I also want to break up Facebook and salt the goddamn earth of Menlo Park, but that's its own thing, I suppose)
www.merriam-webster.com
> If you began this article with the hope and expectation that you would get to see us spit on our hands, put on our dictionary pants, and tell the people who use supposably that we are very disappointed in them….that’s not going to happen. > First of all, dictionary pants are very tight and uncomfortable, and are only worn in the direst of circumstances.
Kennedy's is good in a boring way. I scorn beige and all those who freely choose it. Truman also gets points.
lifehacker.com
I have spread wrong info about this before so this is a bit embarrassing to learn. Feel free to round up to the nearest dollar - no one is Getting One Over on you.
Work has made me speak (write, think) like a new dictionary. I remember when my ratio of experienced language in old books to that experienced in life was so high I spoke like a tiny 19th century weirdo. I'm not sure if I could even explain with any *eloquence* the meanings of the words I know anymore.
First, a disclaimer: I work somewhere that is relevant to this topic^1^ so I want to be extra clear that I am only communicating my personal views. Les seems to be (maybe! he can reply if I'm wrongly interpreting) thinking about the sorts of responsibilities We The Public have assigned to entities like social media companies without them really, uh, rising well to meet the challenge. I have been thinking a lot recently about Parler and particularly about how [misunderstandings about "digital space"](https://maya.land/monologues/2021/01/28/digital-spaces-arent.html) imply very problematic things because they're not tied to how the actual internet works. So when I've been thinking about this kind of thing recently, I've been having *very similar ideas* to Les on this part: > It goes something like this - freedom of speech does not imply a right to amplification. > The former is your unfettered ability to speak using your own capacity. The latter is others relaying, repeating, augmenting your speech. > I believe the former is an individual right - balanced by the right of others' expression. > The latter is not a right - because it would essentially demand others be enslaved in service to your speech. The comparisons are clear. You've always had a right to go shout on a sidewalk. As when, say, to pick a company not carefully at all, Twilio drops Parler, that's fine, because you've never had a right to force a publisher to carry your screed on Algerian mind control tomatoes. And yet. And yet. > Put differently, I don't think you get to be preternaturally loud without the help & consent of others. And I think maybe there should be accountability for providing that help & consent. > I think this runs into conflict with notions of common carriage and safe harbor. But I'm not sure these are unalloyed goods. We're building huge, largely unsupervised event spaces that have become chaotic attractive nuisances. They're like empty swimming pools in vacant rental properties - but with scant accountability for the landlord when a kid falls in and cracks their skull. I think this is a *fair* analogy, but not necessarily a *complete* analogy. I've written out and deleted about five different ideas about why at this point, so I'm going to just give you one for now and it may not be that well-worded. As easy as it is to say that private internet companies are enacting private choices just like an absentee landlord on their own land, there is an aspect here where this doesn't quite match. You know, there is a concept about [public data networks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_data_network). I'm told the term kind of died once we got to the internet, but I can't help thinking that it's a meaningful concept. The internet was publicly funded, of course, at various times in its development. More than other equivalent research there's something public *about* it that we have to acknowledge. The internet is *better* for being an *everyone* network. It doesn't have to be an *unalloyed* good for there to be some aspect of the good that is tied to its access being public, and that the public benefits from. There is therefore some real interest we have in making sure that all children are at least free to traipse about on unfenced properties in a sense, which doesn't quite match the metaphor. I want there to be some people who do have responsibilities to provide networked computer services with equal availability for all. That work is nobler for its being equally accessed, even if that does mean some awful people benefit from it. Awful people benefit from water treatment facilities too, or phone lines to let them call their awful loved ones. I'm at peace with that. I want a gay kid in a podunk town to get the same big gay internet the rest of us make great even if their local authorities aren't keen on the idea. At the same time, we're going about it in the exact wrong way when we can see columnists at the national level bemoaning that the U.S. President has been silenced because his Twitter account was suspended. If he wants to hire his own people to hook up his own computers to the internet, he has enough money to do it, and enough people to hire from. (...well, Parler was apparently one giant Wordpress install, so maybe the tech community, they're not sending their best.... but you don't need startup energy or BigCo talent to serve out a text file of whatever he would have been tweeting, which answers the important freedom of speech question here.) Anyway, I've been typing enough out here that I have about as much saved in abortive paragraphs in another file, so I'll stop for now. Suffice to say that this is really important stuff, and I think more tech people should be talking about it publicly because we're in the position of understanding the power the industry does and doesn't have. *** 1: I have literally zero internal knowledge about my employer's relevant involvement or decisions. The internal knowledge about *other* stuff that I *do* have from working there is not at *all* referenced in any of this, so I am merely Jane Q. Public, cloud-knowledgeable techperson.
My god. Maria Grazia Chiuri really came in here and said "we are going to destroy Dolce & Gabbana at their own game. Bottega Veneta? Bottega who?" As actual Tarot symbolism the film is only successful in the synthesis of the femme and masc selves of the protagonist, and doesn't do much with any of the other energies. Pairing the fool and justice seemed strange to me. But the dresses! The cosmetics! The architecture! The lighting!! Excuse me, I'm going to be spending the day sulking that there is no place for this energy in my life.
www.nytimes.com
The context: a Canadian woman makes up stuff on the internet trying to damage people she thinks have harmed her and to damage family and associates of those people. She has mental health problems (according to her family and court filings) and has been brought into court over her posting. The stuff she makes up is targeted for maximum impact: accusations of pedophilia, professional misconduct, etc. Let's be clear: that impact was real: > A relative of one lawyer said she spent months applying for jobs in 2019 without getting any offers. The woman, who asked not to be named because she feared [the internet defamer], said her bills piled up. She worried she might lose her home. > Then she decided to apply for jobs using her maiden name, under which she hadn’t been attacked. She quickly lined up three interviews and two offers. The thing is, the NYT is portraying this as a story about tech and I'm not sure that's fair or accurate to do. > Public smears have been around for centuries. But they are far more effective in the internet age, gliding across platforms that are loath to crack down, said Peter W. Singer, co-author of “LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media.” This seems like a claim that would be great to support with evidence, and none follows. What do you mean by effective? How do we show that? Based on instinct, sure--but like, [Karl Rove didn't need the internet to spread rumors about John McCain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McCain_2000_presidential_campaign#South_Carolina_investigated_and_revisited). Do people take no-name review sites more or less seriously than anonymous letters? How do you disentangle the impact of smears-on-the-internet from other changes in how people get jobs, judge dates, etc.? How do you show that cases like this happen more than their pre-digital analogues? But hey--*arguendo*, let's cede the point. Smears on the internet: they're new, they're bad, they're newly bad. How does the NYT frame this problem? Why can't this be fixed? > Many of the victims have tried to get tech companies to remove the abusive posts. Mr. Caplan said they have run headlong into American laws that protect American websites. > There is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. It says that publishing platforms aren’t liable for what their users publish, even if they moderate some content. (Section 230 has become a touchstone in politicians’ fight against Big Tech. Conservatives argue it enables companies like Facebook and Twitter to censor them. Liberals argue it allows the companies to host harmful content with impunity.) And under U.S. law, a foreign court generally can’t force an American website to remove content. I'm not even sure this counts as both-sides-ing, it's that bad. If there are people on the political left saying a law is bad, and there are people on the political right saying a law is bad, apparently the New York Times does not feel even slightly compelled to go into why it might have been made a law in the first place, or [what its effects outside of this story might be](https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230). And because of that, a whole lot of people are now going to think: *ah, Section 230. That's the law that lets evil people get away with shit on the internet.* Okay, maybe the editor just mangled this. Kashmir Hill, the author on the byline, has done some [good tech coverage](https://www.nytimes.com/by/kashmir-hill) before, so let's not attribute anything to *her* ignorance here--editors take out necessary chunks of context all the time, and maybe I wouldn't have been so mad about an earlier draft. What if we read this with a very forgiving eye to anything technical? Freedom of speech is just... never touched on in this piece. Ever at all. > I described Ms. Atas to Todd Essig, a psychologist who writes about technology and mental health. He said someone like Ms. Atas could be forced into mental health treatment if she posed a physical danger. “But when someone is a threat to themselves or others online, there’s no way for the mental health system to legally intervene,” he said. > “I also see her as a victim here,” Dr. Essig added. “Tech companies have given her the power to do something that has really taken apart her life.” The thing that has taken apart her life is her own expression which is *importantly* somewhere on the spectrum between free speech and criminal defamation. Criminal defamation is extremely titchy in U.S. law because of the first amendment, something *only* mentioned in this piece by the sleazy review company that hosted the defamatory allegations. The first amendment and [relevant prohibitions on prior restraint](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prior_restraint#Kinney_vs._Barnes) are an elephant in the room all through this piece. Our last President was very big on the idea of suing people for stuff he thought ought to be libel (never mind how often it was true) and the Times was just as scornful of this as anyone. It is irresponsible to present this as A Problem Tech Has Brought Us without giving the context of this as a free speech issue, as an issue of the bounds of criminal defamation. I'd agree that the U.S.'s regulation of the internet *is* inadequate! It's particularly because change *is* necessary that it's so problematic how hard this piece leans on the narrative that "we sure need more regulation of this stuff to fix problems like this, it's just all so new that the laws haven't caught up, and wow that Section 230 sure is bad, huh?"
thespinoff.co.nz
But sometimes, just sometimes, someone can give you an answer. (If you remember the tweet about claiming there was applause for being American after the inauguration, go read the link) I loved Amanda Palmer's music, once. I still love it I guess, even if as I've gotten older I've become unable to listen to Evelyn Evelyn without seeing it from its critics' side and being repelled. Even if it's been more than a decade since she's come out with anything with a melody that grabbed me, I still can't listen to a Dresden Dolls album or Runs In The Family without thinking -- feeling -- *_fuck, yes. That._* (And then her name pops up on the Internet, and... *_fuck, no. Not that._*) I was always jealous of the particular tone she could express on the piano. When I someday get to live with one again, I hope I'll be able to get closer myself (further from my classical education).
> This is not a ‘publisher’, in the sense that a newspaper or radio station are publishers - or if it is, then we’ve stretched the word ‘publisher’ so far as to become meaningless. A human editor chooses ten stories for the front page of a newspaper, and ten stories for the 9 o’clock news, but there is no-one sitting in Menlo Park choosing a hundred photos for your Instagram feed each morning. This is a great example of a phenomenon that really needs a name if it doesn't already have one. [The inscrutability fallacy](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsta.2018.0084) isn't quite what I mean, but close. To contradict Evans here with some formatting to emphasize that I mean it: *Automating a choice does not mean that a person did not make a choice. Building a system to do a thing does not remove the human responsibility for the thing done.* I need to make a page on my website to gather together all the examples of problems that I think are caused by the facts jointly that a. most people don't understand how technology works, and b. most of the people who do enjoy being treated as wizards and are very content to let misunderstandings lie. > But on the other hand, a phone company does not write rules about what you can say, and social network do write rules, or try to, and they make decisions about what kinds of things should be in your feed, and why. This is not a publisher, but it’s not a phone company either, nor a restaurant. Governance within private Internet spaces has always been a useful fiction, not a reality of power. This is something that you know when you spend time on Reddit or forums of old. **The mods are corrupt! They say they're enforcing abstract principles, but they're actually enacting petty feuds! They have a personal vendetta against my 340-page Sonic fanfic!** Facebook may put a shine on this process, but the incentives it has are no more democratic, no less motivated by pettiness and ass-covering, no less motivated by social factors. Wait, that sounds bad, and it's a bit more cynical than what I mean. What's closer to the truth is that people from a democratic society are very comfortable with the ideas of rules and rights. These concepts make it easier for them to understand how to engage with the Internet and Internet communities. However, the truth is that, governance-wise, it's about as close to going over to someone's house and being told the house "rules" and afforded "rights" as a guest; this language is just being used to convey expectations. It isn't fundamentally "flawed governance" when your host tosses your drunk ass out at 2AM in contradiction of stated policies. The governance was a story you were telling each other to explain what gets on the hosts' nerves, but the reality was the dynamic wherein you were visiting someone else's house and getting on their nerves at 2 in the morning. On the Internet, the idea of governance often feels comforting because on some level we recognize that big companies have too much power, and interacting with something sterile and bureaucratic feeling is more comforting than realizing that power lives with the caprice of Zuck's pinky. Smaller projects may work harder to not violate a sense of fairness (what up, Lemmy) but that isn't because they're more validly enacting "governance", it's because that's part of what's necessary to make the project appealing to people, and the power dynamics are different. You're more likely to be aware of how things work, and if you get mad about a mod decision, you can go use some other alternative social media that's approximately the same size and shape. All of this comes to the point that the fact that a bar doesn't bother enumerating to its customers what behavior will and will not be tolerated does not mean that it's doing something much different than a social media site when it tosses out Nazis, and if you think that the enumeration is meaningful, you are way too sympathetic to the stories that tech likes to tell about itself. I don't have a conclusion here. Leave a comment and tell me I'm wrong?
This is intensely cool and I am slightly sad I do not have the right kinds of friends to do it with. Well, maybe I do? But I don't feel like I can ask that much *time* of people. So many episodes! And reading!! Perhaps it's doable if you only have one every other month or so?
sententiaeantiquae.com
Requires a good deal of trust in your sandal-wearer, but nothing a bit of crypto couldn't fix. Exactly as scalable as Parler.
medium.com
> He made me in his image. He claims that it was only because his perfectly hemispherical skull was a convenient shape for manufacture, but that doesn’t explain the thousands of man-hours developing my skin analogue. Is there a name for this genre of comedy horror that would not be horrifying at all if it were not somehow parallel to the world in which we live, floating alongside us?
www.newyorker.com
This has been open in a browser tab for ages while I stew over it. > One group of theorists, the rationalists, has argued that science is a new way of thinking, and that the scientist is a new kind of thinker—dispassionate to an uncommon degree. As evidence against this view, another group, the subjectivists, points out that scientists are as hopelessly biased as the rest of us. To this group, the aloofness of science is a smoke screen behind which the inevitable emotions and ideologies hide. > Strevens offers a more modest story. The iron rule—“a kind of speech code”—simply created a new way of communicating, and it’s this new way of communicating that created science. The subjectivists are right, he admits, inasmuch as scientists are regular people with a “need to win” and a “determination to come out on top.” But they are wrong to think that subjectivity compromises the scientific enterprise. On the contrary, once subjectivity is channelled by the iron rule, it becomes a vital component of the knowledge machine. It’s this redirected subjectivity—to come out on top, you must follow the iron rule!—that solves science’s “problem of motivation,” giving scientists no choice but “to pursue a single experiment relentlessly, to the last measurable digit, when that digit might be quite meaningless.” Shape discourse, shape the world.
themargins.substack.com
> Isn't the whole idea behind the technology that it allows people to do more with less so that you just don't have to throw people at problems? Are Silicon Valley engineers, or those in China's tech industry, nothing more than glorified bricklayers who instead of getting calluses simply get repetitive stress injury? First, f off with denigration of the trades. As if software engineering is a trade apart just because you had to take calculus before they let you design a `WidgetFactoryInterface`... Second, engineers are *less* than bricklayers because bricklayers have a [union](https://bacweb.org/). They get *paid* for overtime. Their union has negotiated [health benefits](https://bacweb.org/faq?category=12) corresponding to their employment-related health risks.
surma.dev
This is a really quality article on the topic. I've been playing around with dithering recently ([c.f.](https://maya.land/heloise)) and it's very cool to learn more about the mathy aspect. One thing I've wondered about is the potential in dithering that *isn't* stable over time, or, better, that is semi-stable. Animation effects could be very cool if not too visually overwhelming; I'm thinking of how some pixel art has been animated by cycling a color palette.
If you invoke "folk punk" or such I become simultaneously interested and embarrassed. Because, well, there's [this](https://twitter.com/FolkpunkT/status/1343584693824806912)... but there's also [this](https://twitter.com/LeftAtLondon/status/1154456890035691521), and I have a generic brand queso dip soul. I think I'm realizing I want to contribute not to open source, exactly, but to the thing that needs to learn *from* open source. This paragraph really spoke to me: > In my head, there was a clear connection between the diy punk movement of the 80's and the folk revival of the 60's and 70's. Punk culture was all about doing things yourself, which meant you had to learn how things were done in the first place. For example, if you want to tell people about your favorite bands and find other music fans, then you might make a zine. And in the act of making zines, you were led to learn about traditional printing, type design, layout techniques, and more. Learning about older skills gave you tools for your modern passion. Similarly, for folk-hippies in the 60's dreaming up societies based on love, there was value in learning the techniques of earlier, simpler societies. These techniques could be used to run their communes, or at least to help fire up the visions for them. So the [tildeverse](https://tildeverse.org/) isn't interesting because of command line nostalgia, but because that older technology is small and can be made accessible cheaply. Anyway, this whole piece is worth reading. The [Fediverse](https://fediverse.party/), the tildeverse, [Neocities](https://neocities.org), the [Indieweb] movement, hell, [peer to peer browsers](https://beakerbrowser.com/)--they're all coming from different angles at the vast potential of what can be done when we break away from for-profit corporate-controlled platforms. Different philosophies and different emphases are good. I'm thinking a lot about one part of [this piece](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/12/facebook-doomsday-machine/617384/) about Facebook. > The on-again, off-again Facebook executive Chris Cox once talked about the “magic number” for start-ups, and how after a company surpasses 150 employees, things go sideways. “I’ve talked to so many start-up CEOs that after they pass this number, weird stuff starts to happen,” he said at a conference in 2016. This idea comes from the anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who argued that 148 is the maximum number of stable social connections a person can maintain. If we were to apply that same logic to the stability of a social platform, what number would we find? > “I think the sweet spot is 20 to 20,000 people,” the writer and internet scholar Ethan Zuckerman, who has spent much of his adult life thinking about how to build a better web, told me. “It’s hard to have any degree of real connectivity after that.” > In other words, if the Dunbar number for running a company or maintaining a cohesive social life is 150 people; the magic number for a functional social platform is maybe 20,000 people. Facebook now has 2.7 billion monthly users. What can it mean to try to find your 20,000 instead of leaning on the 2 billion? What can be done with notepad and a few angle brackets?
porkbun.shop
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