BeautifulMind ♾️

While on the one hand I can agree there’s a place and time to be present and participate appropriately, on the other hand it’s so goddamned tiring to see politics that in situations of nuance zoom in on ‘control them’ as a thing everyone can rally to as if the solution of phone control was really going to be simple and accomplish its objectives.

I mean, criminalizing drugs seemed on its face to be a simple-enough thing to do, and a good idea- who could object to that, right? Who favors addiction, right? What could go wrong? Fundamentally, the ask for enough power to ban anything isn’t a trivial ask, and it shouldn’t be undertaken lightly.

It’s not so bad once you’ve got your teeth into the problem

assuming you can code, that is

This is where windfall taxes come back into basic utility. Also it becomes the basis for antitrust action on price collusion if all the sellers coordinate

Welp. It’s time for Tesla workers to unionize, and hard

I’d take it today. I’m in my 50s, I’m an endurance athlete (I race bikes) and the calculus looks like: if I wait 20 years I get to experience body-age 50-70 twice, but if I take it now I experience 30-50 twice. Living my prime twice is better than enduring my decline twice, thanks

"We’re tracking you for your privacy 🙄

One interesting corollary to the bicameral mind theory is that our brains have multiple sentient centers to them- that in turn might explain that feeling of struggling with a decision and being able to see the same thing from more than one point of view. It also explains why different parts of the brain light up in different situations

Reagan, like Trump and Bush43, was the face guy connecting to people while behind the scenes the wrecking crew drafted their EOs and delivered on their patronage’s shadow agenda.

A lot of what Reagan’s admin did was foundational- as head of the executive (which includes regulatory agencies) he had the power to quietly dismantle regulatory agencies, and in so doing hamstring America’s capacity to regulate its own affairs at the request of lobbyists that didn’t want their industries regulated. His legislative affairs team gutted budgets and raided social security while he charmed audiences and the media.

I got tired of seeing my teflon-coated pans wear out like that or lose their non-stickiness, it bothered me to realize that the ‘premium cookware’ I was buying was temporary trash I’d need to replace every couple of years.

I retired my teflon cookware and now have just steel and cast iron (and ceramic-coated cast iron) and I don’t miss teflon-coated cookware at all.

Sure, sometimes I end up with stuff stuck to my pans, but realistically that was true with my ‘non-stick’ pans as well. The nice thing about cast iron and steel is that with use, they seem to get better, whereas the teflon pans start out nice but deteriorate in the way they work. When I do end up with stuff stuck to the pan, I can scrub that clean in a few seconds with a steel scrubber or scraper, whereas stuck-on stuff with teflon (the stuff the dishwasher didn’t get, anyhow), seemed to demand the extra-soft scrubber (and lots of time, because the soft scrubber doesn’t work as well).

It’s my bike, I ride my bike.

Indoors, I’ve got Zwift, which looks a bit like a game.

Outdoors the resolution is better, but the NPCs can be belligerent.

Isn’t that in the Torah?

Exodus. Exodus is part of the Old Testament, along with Leviticus.

Leviticus (11:9-12) is where shellfish are banned, mixed seed or fabrics (19:19) It is where modern Christians cherry-pick their justifications on being anti-LGBTQ. (Lev. 18:22, 20:13)

Point is, they cherry-pick from the Old Testament when it suits them, and if you look at the rest of the rules in the books they reference that they ignore (e.g. tattoos, touching pig skin, eating pork, shellfish, etc. etc. ) it’s totally fair game to point out the rules they ignore in the same books as the ones they cite.

Y’know, if I could use gmail and pay a few bucks to do it (and not be tracked everywhere without a way to opt out) I would do it. Likewise for any social media that makes its money by trading my privacy for it, I would pay them for the service of being a conduit by which I can keep track of friends and family if it meant I wouldn’t be followed everywhere by ads. As for how ad revenue funds so much of the useful content online, it’s depressing as hell to see that political propaganda is free while informative media is sequestered behind paywalls. I’m old enough to remember when the news was a prestige business and didn’t have to turn a profit

The fact that platforms like Meta give advertisers (or propagandists) the ability to target their messaging to people that fit a detailed profile, tho, ensures that our politics can now be cheaply and profitably flooded with shit, and that in real ways is a threat to democracy, I think.

Yes! your fedi client will spit out a text file (.csv format I think) of accounts you follow, or of accounts following you and I forget how many other kinds of information (like block or mute lists, etc). You can share that with others, or if you decide to migrate to a different instance, you can use that in your new account to automate following of everyone you followed in your old account.

how people find accounts they like to follow.

The low-hanging fruit is sometimes checking out posters that show up in your feed because someone you do follow boosted their post. This sort of amounts to having the people you follow nominate people for you to also follow.

(fwiw, boosting a post just shares it to your followers, liking it just notifies the poster that you liked it)

FWIW you can follow hashtags in mastadon If you know where to look you can see trending hashtags In other fedi clients (particularly firefish) you can configure antennae and channels to give you the ability to have pre-set feed filters and focuses (e.g. search by hashtag, keyword/subject, etc) You can also curate lists (can include people you don’t follow if you don’t want) in case you want to look at what the law or history or cycling people on fedi are talking about just now. Often when I want to change subject I’ll check to see what #lawFedi or #histodon or #biketooter have to offer today

If that sounds a bit like rolling your own algorithms, that’s probably because it sort of is

LOL if the algorithm can’t tell republicans from nazis and they back down when republicans complain… the result is that it caters to nazis hiding among republicans because the goddamned GOP shelters its nazis

I don’t know about anyone else’s experience, but I’ve noticed that any time I click into a post view and then back out, I’m taken to the first page of posts, no matter if I was 2 or 3 pages on. If the redirect respected where it came from instead of going to home, that could reduce the impact of post-order sorting. Also if the list pager had more options than ‘prev’ and ‘next’ (maybe a few numbered pages between or beyond) I could get beyond that 3rd page without getting there feeling like an illustration of the schlemiel the painter’s problem

AI needs data to train up on. It can’t create art without first consuming existing art and spitting out parts of the originals. There’s a reasonable claim to be made that AI synthesis of prior art is itself original enough to count as having intrinsic worth, but if the only way to get it is stealing other people’s work to train up your model, the whole value proposition of AI art is probably net negative, entirely at the expense of artists whose work was used to feed the model.

Yes, there’s the argument that automation of new things is inevitable, but we do have choices about whether the automated violation of copyright to feed the model is tolerable or not. Sure, it’s a cool sexy technology and who doesn’t love getting on the bandwagon of the future and all, but the ethics of modern AI development are trash and despite promises that automated AI labor will save the owner class money by doing for free what the plebes demand to be paid for, it’s really as much a ponzi scheme as all those crypto currencies that don’t have intrinsic value unless enough suckers can be convinced to feed the scheme.

And yet, it’s a powerful technology that has potential to be a legitimate boon to humanity. I’d like to see it used to do things (like picking crops that are hard to automate with dumb machines, or cleaning trash off of beaches or out of the ocean, or refactoring boilerplate code to not use deprecated packages or to review boilerplate contract text for errors) that aren’t just ways for owners to cut labor out of the economy and pocket the differences.

Perhaps, if we are going to allow AI to be a great big machine that steals inputs (like art, or writing, or code) from others and uses them to do for-profit work for their owners, the proceeds attributable to AI ought to be taxed at a 90%+ rate and used to fund a Universal Basic Income as payment for the original work that went into the AI model.

Maybe you don’t think you have anything to hide today, but what about the future? Millions of women gave their period-tracking apps that kind of personal/private data when Roe was in effect because at the time, states couldn’t use it to prosecute women who miscarry or get abortions. Now that Roe is gone, that data is out there and can’t be recalled.

By the same token, everyone who went out and got a 23-and-me genetic test gave their genomes to private companies who can legally sell that information to insurance companies that can use that information to hike their premiums or terminate their policies if they think your genes predispose you to some expensive-to-treat condition. Also those family trees don’t lie about whose kids are the product of adultery, hahahahaha

You do have things to hide in the sense that they’re nobody else’s business.

Also, some countries have established digital privacy as a right (in particular, EU countries) and that’s not just about protecting your dirty stinky secrets, it’s also about preventing social media being weaponized as political or information warfare vectors based on private information obtained without your consent. (the same profiling used to target relevant commercial ads to you is also usable to target information warfare and propaganda to your susceptible relatives, and they vote in addition to giving racist rants at holiday dinner)

In other words, your privacy is intrinsically valuable- if it wasn’t, exploiting your private information wouldn’t be a multi-billion-dollar industry

That’s interesting to hear; somehow my algebra 2 skipped sum notation (and it wasn’t remedially covered in subsequent math classes) but I’ve been writing code for decades now and seeing it in code totally explains the sum notation for me