fubo

@[email protected]

No relation to the sports channel.

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fubo,

If you’re already using OpenBSD, sure!

fubo,

“this mine is mine”
vs
“this mine is mined”

fubo,

Need an iron supplement, but the regular ones (iron sulfate) plug your bowels up? You want iron bisglycinate.

fubo,

The Empire Strikes Back, from the back seat of my parents’ car, at a drive-in.

Apparently I kept asking “who’s that? who’s that?” whenever anyone new came on screen. To be fair, though, ① I hadn’t seen Star Wars, and ② I was maybe three years old.

fubo,

Fan wikis for specific bands, like tmbw.net for They Might Be Giants.

fubo,

For people on Linux, enable the compose key in your keyboard settings and then type [Compose] [n] [~].

The compose-key method for entering accented letters is by far the easiest to use for any desktop OS … but it’s not enabled by default because you have to give up some modifier key to use it.

fubo,

This sounds like the same problem as English their/there/they’re.

fubo,

A state-licensed dispensary selling lab-tested products.

(But I buy my shrooms from a church.)

fubo, (edited )

Okay, so, let’s say it’s the descendants of the rats from Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH.

(Warning, this is probably fanfic. It is not intended as commentary on any particular human political situation, including colonialism, capitalism, communism, North Korea, Israel/Palestine, Native Americans, slavery, civil rights, libertarianism, or Trump. Really, I promise.)

They start out as parasites on our civilization; but they desire independence. Their philosophers believe (unbeknownst to us) that “to live without stealing” would be a desirable accomplishment for their people. They have ideas of both community and property; they have individuality and compassion. They argue with one another over their relationship to humans.

If we knew what was going on with them, we might have the chance to do something ethically competent towards them. But if a situation like this arises, we might not even notice it before exterminating it. Humanity has so much power over our world today that we might not even notice.

One initial problem is that we’ve been in the habit of fighting rats for millennia. They eat and shit in our food; they dig holes in our walls; we set cats and dogs and traps and poison on them. That’s how it’s been for a long time.

Another problem is that they know our language, but we don’t know theirs. Their ancestors were taught human language as a scientific experiment; after they escaped, they taught their children to read our language, so they could use our gadgets and protect themselves from our traps – and learn math and science and philosophy from our books.

But the human scientists never learned how to speak Rat. When the uplifted rats escaped, from the scientists’ point of view, the experiment was a serious failure – even contaminating wild rat populations with the modified and trained NIMH rats. The research team tried to contain the failure, then disbanded and went different ways; the idea “there are now rats in the wild capable of human-level civilization” didn’t even make the scientific journals, much less the media or policy circles.

In order to come up with an ethically competent response to this situation, we have to first recognize that it’s even happening. The rats dragging our electrical lights and books into their nest are doing so not just for nesting but because they want to read; the descendants of city rats are building complex colonies in our national parks because they want to become less dependent on humans.

But who notices new rat behavior first? People with rat-infested houses. Organic farmers who don’t use rat poison, whose cats are suddenly getting killed in farm equipment way more often than they used to. Exterminators. Health inspectors.

We’re more likely to notice the rats that don’t follow Nicodemus (who argued that rats must become independent of humans) than the ones who do. We’d first notice the clever and malicious ones; the ones who mutilate cats, evade traps, invade kitchens, and piss on our books and computers as if they were saying “we really fucking hate you.”

Or you’re a park ranger. The folks in town tell you the rats are being weird. Some wire and tools and books go missing … and months later some tripping campers come off the trail and tell you they saw a rat city in the deep woods.

After the fourth set of tripping campers talking about how the crazy city rats went and built their own city in the middle of a national park, you go up there to see it.

What do you think?

fubo, (edited )

Sometimes I pay for games. Sometimes I pirate games. Sometimes I buy actual freakin’ movie tickets and sit in a freakin’ comfy but chilly movie theater (wear a sweater!) and watch a goddamn mainstream Hollywood comic-book movie. Sometimes I download TV shows off BitTorrent.

I’m pissed at YouTube messing with my adblockers, because when I want to hear cheesy stereotypical pop-rock tunes from my youth, I go to YouTube first because YouTube had a mix of official music videos, remixes, unlicensed amateur covers, nerdy science fiik versions, and instrumental covers by twins playing harps. (And that male-feminist heavy-metal cover of “Surface Pressure” from Encanto.)

But sometimes I sing songs to myself, songs that maybe nobody else remembers – because the person who taught them to me is dead, and I never heard anyone else sing them, and I haven’t taught them to anyone yet.

(And the mixtape got stolen with my Walkman. Still pissed about that.)

fubo,

The one founded by the guy who got fired from Mozilla for supporting hate groups?

The one that integrates support for NFTs, the stupidest form of cryptocurrency scam?

That browser?

fubo,

Many of the services you’re thinking of don’t actually sell user data. They use user data to target ads.

Want to know who actually sells your personal information? You can start with the direct-mail companies that enable postal spam aka “junk mail”. They will happily sell you a list of the names and physical mailing addresses of people meeting whatever demographic criteria you choose to name.

If you ask Google or Facebook to disclose to you the locations of (say) African-American women of childbearing age in the Boston area, they will tell you 404 Not Found. But the direct-mail people will sell you a list of their mailing addresses.

Yes, this service has been used maliciously.

fubo,

Top. It may be relevant that used Macs for years, and never used Windows.

What are your experiences with polyamory, first or second hand?

I personally am in a phenomenally stable polyamorous relationship. I’ve been married to my wife for 12 years, and she has had the same boyfriend for about half of that time. It’s a really fulfilling arrangement for all of us in various ways. We’re all genuinely happy and satisfied. I’m kind of casually looking for a...

fubo, (edited )

My housemates are poly and pretty happy about it.

It’s a bit of a logic puzzle:

  • I live in a house with A, B, and C.
  • A and B are married.
  • B is also dating J, who lives in a big complicated house with lots of people, including their partner K.
  • Separately, C is dating X.
  • X is married to Y; X is also dating Z.
  • I don’t know Y or K well enough to know if they have other partners, but I suspect so.
  • No, I am not dating anyone on this list.

As far as I’m aware, there’s no current polycule link between AB and C; nor between any of them and me.

Everyone in this list is in their 30s or 40s, and almost all are some flavor of queer; at least two are also trans. There are no kids in the picture, although we know other poly people in the neighborhood who do have kids.

It’s all quite cheerful and civilized. Compersion is totally a thing. Also, fortunately people’s food preferences aren’t complicated when everyone’s over for dinner. If anybody starts dating someone who doesn’t like mushrooms, that’s gonna be a problem.

fubo,

I’m not at the moment, but if I were dating, it would be within a poly-friendly social context. I’m not in this space by accident; it’s actually what makes sense to me.

fubo,

Your grocery store should switch to a single queue dispatching to all registers, instead of one queue per register. Queueing theory and human psychology predict that this will reduce the likelihood of customers having heart attacks over another customer’s slowness.

fubo,

In the examples I’m thinking of – like the Trader Joe’s in my city, or the military commissaries I saw as a child – you don’t get assigned to a register until that register is free; so you’re never in a position to get upset over a specific other customer’s needs.

fubo,

Hmm. I can’t tell at a glance whether a person has bad arthritis, peripheral neuropathy, hand spasms, or some other reason not to do the things that I would do with my hands. Just because something would be easy for me doesn’t mean that I can safely assume it’s easy for that other person.

fubo,

Well that’s one way to say you’re into incest …

fubo,

I seem to recall he had a little trouble with some water at one point.

fubo,

A life with quite a lot of long & varied sex with his mom, his daughters (multiple; and both genetic and adopted), his sex-swapped clone, a couple of computers, …

fubo,

The Outside is a pretty cool game. There are indeed shops there.

fubo,

Recently most clerks are coded not to summon city guards, but random NPCs may start aggro depending on your race & class.

fubo,

U

fubo,

P

fubo,

F

fubo,

T

fubo,

As a reminder, Signal is still awesome, is run by cool people who have been doing good stuff for your privacy for many many years, runs on your phone and your laptop and your dad’s PC and your buddy’s phone of that other brand …

fubo,

I believe them when they say that one reason to drop SMS was that some vulnerable users were mistakenly sending SMS when they thought they were safe by using Signal. That’s a serious problem where a person having Signal on their phone could cause them to expose themselves to attacks. That person’s life is more important than my momentary inconvenience when my mom is using SMS and my friend is using Signal.

I really wish that there were better options; some sort of incrementally-built web-of-trust like the old PGP model. But right now, Signal is still in a sweet spot for me: yes, it’s centralized, but it gets certain specific benefits of centralization while also credibly assuring that the server owners can’t do evil with it even if they want to … and they credibly don’t. I can get my family and my housemates to use it, instead of something from Zuckerberg.

fubo, (edited )

I think it’s a good idea from a security standpoint to have a UX space in which everyone can be confident that everyone’s stuff is encrypted; with a very distinct and (yes) inconvenient barrier — in this case, a different app — between encrypted and unencrypted spaces.

Everyone is using lots of different messaging systems: SMS/MMS; specific systems like Signal, Telegram, or WhatsApp; email; maybe Facebook Messenger; etc. It’s really important for some users’ actual lives that it be totally clear when you’re crossing from a secure space to an insecure space. Having the insecure space not be in the same app is one way to accomplish that.

When we need to move data between the secure space and the insecure space, we can do that through copy-and-paste, or even screenshots. It is inconvenient, but that’s because it’s explicit and intentional, which also means you can’t move data from one to the other by accident. That’s good.

As a privacy hobbyist, I want to notice what works for the people whose lives depend on privacy: the journalists, activists, sex workers, LSD dealers, etc. I don’t have their risks, but I want to contribute to a world where they can be safe.

However, there are definitely lots of different needs and comfort levels. What’s a sweet spot for me might be an uncanny valley for you.

fubo,

Yes, but my mom has an old phone and can’t install stuff.

FOSS alternative to... Sending Spotify links?

This is probably a dumb question but what is a better way to send a link to a song to friends without using Spotify? I don’t use Spotify anymore so I don’t like going back to that website just to copy a song link so people could hear it. I know I could send something like a YouTube link but I’m trying to degoogle so I...

fubo,

I know I’m middle aged but … MP3s? A few megabytes isn’t that much these days.

fubo,

Attention is a feature of minds, wherein a mind can have awareness of lots of inputs (senses, internal thoughts, emotions, etc.) but dedicate most of its “thinking power” to only one or a few things from its awareness at a time.

(“Attention” is narrow; “awareness” is broad. You can be aware of the color of the wall next to you, even if you are not attending to it.)

What does attention do? Attention selects; attention shifts. You can switch from focusing on this sentence, to your breathing, a sound in the distance, the taste of your coffee, your plans for the day, the texture of your socks.

Shifting is not a bug; it is what attention is for. That is why we have it.

There is a rhythm to attention shifts. They can happen quicker or slower; and more or less suddenly. This rhythm differs from person to person, activity to activity, and with emotional and hormonal changes.

Some people are more aware of their attention shifts than others. Some people feel more control over their attention shifts than others. Some people’s attention shifts are more or less in tune with classrooms or offices or other environments that expect certain sorts of tight control.

Meditation allows us to notice and gently alter the parameters of attention.

Spontaneous attention shifts are important! If a loud bang and the smell of sulfur happen from the closet next to you, your attention will probably no longer be on reading this message. If a loved one bursts into the room weeping in despair, your attention will no longer be on reading this message. If the smell of baking pies drifts into the room, your attention will no longer be on reading this message. (At least, if you’re like me. Mmm, pies.)

Focus is also important. When someone “gets in the zone” they may not notice many things that otherwise would grab their attention. They might even fail to attend to the smell of pies; and the weeping loved one would take a little longer to grab them than otherwise.

Attention works along with self-awareness. Attention does the shifting; self-awareness creates the sense of continuity: even though you are sometimes reading and sometimes thinking about pie, you still have the sense that you are the same person. Even though there is not really any such thing as “a self” (q.v. anatta), it is pretty useful to remember that “you” have a body and that it is pretty similar to the body “you” had yesterday.

fubo,

I can drive, listen to music, and have a conversation but it starts to overload my brain at that point, as most of my attention is focusing on driving.

The usual computer analogy is multitasking, in which the kernel rapidly switches from one process to another. A single CPU core may switch between running code for my browser, my chat program, the temperature monitoring process, and the wifi driver; this happens so quickly that it appears to me that all of them are running “at the same time”.

Attention also shifts quickly. When you are doing two things “at the same time”, attention is switching back and forth between them! You’re not really constantly attending to the music and the road; ideally you switch back to the road often enough that if something surprising happens there, you can respond to it in time.

We know from experiment that when people have more distractions going on while driving, they actually do respond slower to surprises on the road. Eating a bagel with the radio on and your kids in the back seat is actually hard, and really does slow down noticing the dog that just ran out into the road.

fubo,

Going much more speculative here:

Some of the parameters for attention seem to include:

  • Speed and rhythm of attention shifts. Am I focusing solidly on one thing? Or am I switching back and forth between several things, like a student driver who must keep track of their feet and their hands and other cars and pedestrians and signals? When I am distracted, how reliably do I return to an intended object of attention? (I say “rhythm”, but “melody, meter, and rhyme” might be a better analogy.)
  • The ratios between attention on different sorts of targets: external (senses, objects in the world, people saying words at me), bodily (stuff my body is doing: motions, itches, weird inner ear noises, gait, hunger), and reflective (stuff my mind is doing: inner voice, memory recall, making plans, worrying about that weird inner ear noise).
  • The strength of episodic memory formation; and the subjective passage of time. Short-term memory is how we perceive time passing; people who are not forming short-term memories (e.g. alcoholic blackout, senile dementia, high psychedelic doses) don’t notice time passing, experience frequent deja vu, repeat the same “discovery” over and over, etc.; they may have extended attentional focus on a single object because they’re just having the same thought repeatedly without forming memories.
fubo,

Is it weird that I find kookery to be sad? After reading this, I went and looked at the Wikipedia edit history for “Satya Nadella” to see if there were a bunch of reverted edits.

fubo,

No.

fubo,

You don’t need a license to kill tomatoes. nom

fubo,

Eh, the relationship isn’t quite the same as that one.

It’s more like the relationship between a video game framework and a video game. Pygame, Unity, or Godot are not games you can play; they’re tools for programmers to build games with.

Similarly, blockchain is a technology for implementing scams; NFTs are one specific scam.

fubo,

Good Omens.

fubo,

It was pretty popular in my house, but we’re all frightfully silly here.

fubo,

That was years ago :)

fubo,

No, that’s hummus. Hamas are a domesticated South American camelid.

fubo,

No, that’s de Armas. Hamas is the rear end of a pig.

fubo,

As a reminder, Hamas has plenty of food. Is it unreasonable to ask them to release that food to the people of Gaza?

fubo,

The question should be pretty simple:

Does the AI product output copyrighted material?

If I ask it for the text of Harry Potter, will it give it to me? If I ask it for a copy of a Keith Haring painting, will it give me one? If I ask it to perform Williams’s Jurassic Park theme, will it do so?

If it does, it’s infringing copyright.

If it does not, it is not.

If it just reads the web and learns from copyrighted material, but carefully refuses to republish or perform that material, it should not be considered to infringe, for the same reasons a human student is not. Artistic styles and literary skills are not copyrightable.

e e cummings doesn’t get to forbid everyone else from writing in lowercase.

(Some generations of ChatGPT won’t even recite Shakespeare, due to overzealous copyright filters that fail to correctly count it as public domain. The AI folks are trying!)

fubo,

Sure, then whoever uses it to extract that text is infringing. If I memorize a copyrighted text, my brain is not an infringement; but if I publicly perform a recitation of that text, that act is infringing.

Really the precedent of search engines (and card catalogs and concordances before them) should yield the same result. Building an index of information about copyrighted works is librarianship; running off new copies of those works is infringement.

On the other hand, AI transparency is also an interesting problem. It may be that one day we can look at a set of neural network weights – or a human brain! – and say “these patterns here are where this system memorized Ginsberg’s ‘Kaddish’.” I hope we will not conclude that brains must be lobotomized to remove copyrighted memorized texts.

fubo, (edited )

Perhaps every federal judge should receive a copy of Spider Robinson’s “Melancholy Elephants”. (It’s under a Creative Commons license.)

www.spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants.html

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