interolivary

interolivary, 7 months ago

What’s “yikes” about that?

interolivary, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

How on earth does paying for a service mean someone’s “being taken advantage of”? You do realize that Google, Bing et al aren’t actually free? The whole problem with eg. Google is the fact that they’re an ad company with a search engine and not the other way around, which creates perverse incentives to show you bullshit results as long as it means more ad views for them (and they control both the supply and demand side of that ad network, which makes it even worse). That’s literally the reason why Google’s results have gotten so bad.

While I’d love to live in an economic system where people could just build good web search engines for free and on a volunteer basis, unfortunately we don’t find ourselves in such a system at this time. I’d rather pay for a search service than use one that’s incentivized to not show me what I’m searching for, and I’d also rather pay for developer time than assume that they’ll work on services for free during their time off (which is the reality with eg. Lemmy admins)

interolivary, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

I’ve been using Kagi for about half a year now, and I’ve definitely been very happy with it. As you pointed out, the fact that you pay for it with actual money and not with your attention (ie. ad views) means that they actually have an incentive to show you good results instead of endless walls of spammy links that lead to pages using their ad network.

People don’t seem to realize that Google’s not a search engine company with an ad network, but an ad network company with a search engine: the ads pay for all of Google’s services, so they’re incentivized to fill your search results with bullshit that you have to dig through, but that uses their ad network – every useless spam link you have visit when looking for the thing you actually searched for means more 💰 for Google.

The fact that so many big online services are ad-funded has led to the situation where people seem to believe that we’re entitled to have everything for free online. While open source projects run by volunteers are definitely a thing (as is obvious considering where we are), I don’t think it’s reasonable to assume that every online service should have rely on voluntary donations and volunteer work, and that developers should work on your free pet service during their time off from their actual work

interolivary, 7 months ago

That’s one thing that really bugs me about Javascript (weirdly enough I’m okay with eg prototypal inheritance and how this works, or at least worked before the bolted on classes that were added because apparently I’m like one of the dozen or so people who had no problems with those concepts). The fact that all numbers are floats can lead to a lot of fun and exciting bugs that people might not even realize are there until they suddenly get a weird decimal where they expected an integer

interolivary, 7 months ago

potato products that aren’t made of pressed potato eyebuds and anuses

I’m not sure what you’ve been eating exactly, but I think most the Pringles I’ve eaten have been anus-free.

Not that I’d buy them myself, anus-free or not.

interolivary, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

Regulations be damned.

I guess when it comes to plutonium the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission doesn’t want to take any chances – it’s still frickin’ plutonium after all. But yeah, having a pacemaker that’ll essentially work the rest of the patient’s life sounds pretty damn impressive, although I really don’t know what the state of the art is.

But if we do want to sew radionuclides into people (because why not), maybe the same could be done with one that’s a bit less spicy? I’d imagine that with modern technology you could get away with using something that wouldn’t give you the same amount of power, but that also wouldn’t be… well, plutonium.

interolivary, 7 months ago

Yeah that makes sense, and I guess it figures that they didn’t originally pick plutonium just for shits and giggles

interolivary, 7 months ago

Would have made for a pretty crazy story though 😅

I got to wondering what happened to David Hahn, and it turns out he died of an OD in 2016. He was apparently doing a lot of coke and was ‘paranoid about people who he claimed “had the ability to ‘shock’ his genitals with their minds”’, and around 2007 he decided it’d be a great idea to steal a bunch of smoke detectors for, well, something.

So his real story didn’t end nearly as happily as I’d hoped

interolivary, 7 months ago

I’m not sure Hahn would have cared about that, considering he was paranoid about people being able to shock his dick with their minds, and he stole a bunch of smoke detectors to get at the americium because reasons 😅

interolivary, 7 months ago

Huh, that’s interesting. I found a wiki article that describes a diamond battery that generates current from beta particles emitted by carbon-14, but that one’s only good for microwatts. I also found some pages that referred to diamond batteries that use nuclear waste, like this one, which might be what you were thinking of? No idea what the wattage of those would be, but I’d guess more than ^14^C

interolivary, 7 months ago

A-ha, fellow interrobang enjoyer!

But yeah, how frickin’ cool would it be to have an implant powered by an RTG‽ Honestly the most cyberpunk thing I’ve heard in a while

interolivary, 7 months ago

Ha yeah I’ve read about the stray Soviet RTGs. Great power source for some godsforsaken lighthouse etc. in Siberia, but much to the surprise of exactly nobody, of course they just left them lying around when the Union collapsed. I have a vague memory of there having been some, err… incidents related to those, something along the lines of some poor Siberian schmuck finding one and going “ahh, this metallic doodad is nice and warm, I think I’ll camp next to it”

interolivary, 7 months ago

Ha, I never actually paid attention to that. I think the fact that I’m not a native English speaker could be why “dampener” never sounded weird to me.

Although looks like the Oxford English Dictionary says both have the meaning “thing or person that has a restraining or subduing effect”, so I guess they’d both be correct in that sense?

interolivary, 7 months ago

Heh, unfortunately there’s no fighting linguistic evolution. I’m a descriptivist so I can happily skip those battles – ie. I think a language is defined by a description of how it’s used, compared to prescriptivists who think that eg. grammars and vocabularies prescribe how a language should be used.

interolivary, 7 months ago

Humans, Vulcans, Klingons and Romulans are descended from Jeffrey Combs

interolivary, 7 months ago

I, uh… what?

interolivary, 7 months ago

lol and here I was thinking I had a gap in my Trek trek meme knowledge.

Also, don’t be too hard on yourself: considering the frankly ridiculous amount of information that we modern humans cram into our craniums, tripping up on an actor’s name is prettty minor 😀

interolivary, 7 months ago

Yeah, if there’s one thing Risa’s known for, it’s “coloring inside the lines” 😄

interolivary, 7 months ago

It’s funny how at one time he was the sane alternative to Putin. I wonder what happened

interolivary, 7 months ago

He wasn’t nearly as insane when he was president for that short while

interolivary, 7 months ago

That’s not a bad hypothesis at all. He really does seem to be much more unhinged than he was during his stint as president when he was pretty milquetoast in comparison, so I can’t help but wonder wtf’s going on

interolivary, 7 months ago

Sure, he’s still a Russian politician so some level of “evil” is to be expected, but would you seriously claim he was exactly as unhinged when he was president? Because if you would, either you weren’t paying attention then or you’re not paying attention now – something’s definitely changed, and it’s not like I’m the only person who’s noticed.

The Guardian brought it up a year ago, and eg. the Harvard Kennedy School’s Russia Matters project even has a list outlining how cramatically his views have changed

interolivary, 7 months ago

Ha, I didn’t know there’s a name for that, but it’s definitely what I assume they’re going to do. My initial reaction was to wonder what they’ll now present as the “reasonable” option to WEI.

Considering they’re rolling it out in Android, maybe they’ll just wait a moment and then integrate it into desktop Chrome as well, just without any of the fanfare?

interolivary, 7 months ago

Because everybody has to know that they’re mommy’s special little munchkin who doesn’t use Gnome

interolivary, 7 months ago

Why is there more matter than antimatter?

interolivary, 7 months ago

Heh, I think you have much more faith in people than I do

interolivary, 7 months ago

And don’t forget Miles O’Brien, union man. Or Quark’s employees forming a union for that matter

interolivary, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

Well, it’s not like Apple doesn’t also collect pretty hair-raising information on you. Go digging through some of the sqlite databases on your machine and you’ll find eg. a social graph that even supports labels for things like political affiliations (I think this db was the one used by their ominously named “intelligence platform” service). Another db (which I think was for the knowledged daemon) has an incredibly detailed log of everything you do on your computer and phone, including eg. web URLs and millisecond granularity events on when you interact with your devices. Whether that social graph or all that other stuff ever leaves your devices is unknown (although eg. the knowledged stuff definitely does since I can see events for my phone on my laptop), but I wouldn’t count on it not being sent to Apple – regardless of what they claim.

And yeah, sure, this is all to make “customer experience” better, but do you seriously believe that’s all they will be used for?

Edit: and just as a side note, I’m not basing these claims on stuff I read online, but on actually having looked at the contents of those databases myself

interolivary, 7 months ago

Sure! ~/Library/IntelligencePlatform (associated with intelligenceplatformd) has a bunch with graph.db being the social graph, but with others like behaviors.db and eventLog.db also likely being relevant, and I think ontology.db was the one where they kept more information on the tags available for the social graph. ~/Library/Application Support/Knowledge/knowledgeC.db (associated with Spotlight’s knowledgeconstructiond, which I think used to be called knowledged in earlier versions) has the other stuff I mentioned.

There’s also some system-level things in eg. /var/db/knowledgegraphd/ but I haven’t bothered looking into those yet because it’d require disabling SIP.

interolivary, 7 months ago

Catiplatslim

interolivary, 7 months ago

Shit, the EU’s really on a roll with these draconian laws. There’s also the “chat control” bullshit that’ll wreck end-to-end encryption (see eg mullvad.net/en/chatcontrol for a list of sources)

interolivary, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

Hundreds if not thousands of Finnish cops got caught belonging to a chat group where they were sharing pretty explicitly neo-Nazi material. A few cops even got caught planning to murder leftist politicians and making it clear that they’d already used police systems to dig up information on leftists and given it to extremist groups.

Nothing ever came of either of those. The prosecutors sided with the cops in the latter case, saying something like “it’s not criminal to have bad thoughts.”

Saying that the majority of our cops and prosecutors are literal fascists probably wouldn’t be far off the mark, much to the surprise of exactly nobody.

interolivary, 7 months ago

Since intelligence – and I don’t mean IQ but intelligence as a trait just like height or even your reaction speed or whatever – is more than likely normally distributed just like the vast majority of other traits, the average is the median.

interolivary, 7 months ago

Stupid sexy emergency medical hologram

interolivary, 7 months ago

No no, just repeat after me: “I can say I tOlD YoU So!” You don’t want to be caught using anything resembling logic when it comes to pharmaceutical companies.

interolivary, 7 months ago

Well, deep pockets or a lot of “adherents.” I think many people underestimate how fucking horrible the “average person” can be

interolivary, 7 months ago

As a programmer and Linux user, I have some ideas as to what an extra virgin is

interolivary, 7 months ago

It’s a flork

interolivary, 7 months ago

Ah, I see you’re extra virgin as well

interolivary, 7 months ago

For all their talk about how they’re the freest country in the world etc, the US is honestly weirdly rule-oriented and there’s a lot of surprising restrictions in different aspects of life – at least from this particular Finn’s perspective.

High school is an interesting example. I did an exchange year in South Carolina, and I was really struck by how strictly regulated school was. So things like needing a pass to go to the bathroom during class, or needing yet another pass that you have to get from an office if you’re even a minute late from class, not being allowed to be in the hallways between classes, not being allowed to leave school grounds, and so on. And don’t get me started on the whole pledge of allegiance thing.

Work seems to also be more regulated, with some companies having stricter controls on how employees spend their time, and for example policies on appearance (and I don’t mean just the service sector) and apparently some even have “fraternization policies” that forbid romantic or sexual relationships between coworkers.

Then there’s the Homeowners’ Associations – HOAs – which seem to have surprising amounts of power to regulate things about eg. the appearance of houses, or what you can and can’t have in your yard.

Varying levels of censorship in movies and TV has also been common through the years, some of it official and some just “this is how we do things”. Censorship of cursing and nudity is somehow especially odd since often violence is totally OK in the same contexts, but somehow showing a nipple or saying “fuck” will lead to the degradation of the moral fiber of everyone who’s exposed to that smut. I still remember the moral panic caused by a few hundred milliseconds of Janet Jackson’s nipple during some Superb Owl (🦉) thing or another.

And just as some background, on top of that exchange year I’ve spent probably a half a year if not more in the US, from vacations to eg. a zillion work trips I had to do at least once a month when I worked for a company headquartered in SF. Haven’t been to all that many states though, but more than just one anyhow; off the top of my head I’d say New York, Michigan, California, Florida, South & North Carolina, and Georgia.

interolivary, 7 months ago

You don’t say?

interolivary, 7 months ago

I mean, reich-wingers think that even telling kids about the existence of gay, trans etc. people will turn them into huge flaming queers, soooo…

Funny how seeing representations of cis-het people & relationships as a kid didn’t turn me cis or hetero.

interolivary, 7 months ago

Ah, that does sound irritating. I wonder if my adblocker keeps those at bay since I’m not sure I’ve seen any

interolivary, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

And, frankly, without conservatives in general. They’re an existential threat, starting from the fact that they’re opposed to doing anything about climate change (well anything that doesn’t make it worse, anyhow), not to mention that a nontrivial percentage of them would love to see me and others like me murdered because of our gender identity