voluble

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voluble,

Maybe it’s my lack of imagination, but I can’t imagine a dispute between those two nations that would be justified in any way at this time. Likewise, I can’t see how the relationship could degrade to point where war was the only feasible option.

World being configured as it is today, I don’t see a reason to point a gun at anybody, for any reason.

While we enjoy that luxury, it’s the perfect time to: talk with someone who you disagree with on a fundamental level. Get to know them as a fellow human being. Listen to their life experiences, & share your life experiences with them. Discuss deep questions openly and honestly. Don’t be afraid. Be honest, be sincere.

voluble,

I think this type of anthropocentrism extends to chess too actually. I’m not an expert on the subject, but I’ve heard that chess AIs are finding success doing unintuitive things like pushing a and h file pawns in openings. If, 10 years ago, some chess grandmaster was doing the same thing and finding success, I imagine they would have been seen as creative, maybe even groundbreaking.

I think the average person under-rates the sophistication of AI. Maybe as a response to the AI hype. Maybe it’s because we’re scared of AI, and it’s comforting to believe that it’s operations are trivial. I see irrationality and anger cropping up in discussions of AI that I think stem from a fundamental fear of its transformative power.

voluble,

I agree - if there is a big-picture target for growth, it’s so important that there are strong lines of communication and collaboration between citizens, cities, provinces, and the federal government if it’s going to work.

To the poster above you - Trickle-down is a thoroughly shitty “¯_(ツ)_/¯”-style policy. But so is any decree from above that lacks clear objectives, regularly measured outcomes, and checkpoints with the citizens. Our system is struggling right now when we reach checkpoint moments. Discussions get railroaded into these ‘oh that’s racist’ or ‘oh we should have 0 immigration’ polarities. Discussing these things is worthwhile & good.

voluble,

I feel like as a country, we should be pragmatic more broadly. Not just about tobacco, but about anything a person could enjoy, extending to the black market. Determine the things that people will consume no matter what the taxation, social, or regulatory structures are. Quantify the costs of the consumption of those things openly and honestly, and create systems to build those costs into the price of the thing consumed.

I think we’re running aground on that right now, because federal & provincial tax on enjoyable things is set at a rate that isn’t indexed to the costs incurred by the enjoyment of those things.

Personally I enjoy Nicotine, and I would like to know that the price I pay for it is fair to the base of taxpayers who fund our healthcare system. It doesn’t stop at Nicotine though, of course.

voluble,

Interesting.

I’m not an expert on the matter, but to my eyes, taxes on alcohol and tobacco are set arbitrarily. It would be nice to see those funds enveloped for specific programs & a layer of transparency on how the numbers are determined. Canada taxes spirits at ~$13/ litre of absolute alcohol. We ought to wonder - why exactly that number? Is that too much, or not enough, from a healthcare outcome standpoint?

voluble,

Just to provide a counterpoint here.

I’m left leaning on most issues, and I don’t think the current parliamentary composition is a good thing at all. The Liberals have a comfortable minority, and have an explicit agreement with the NDP that props them up. This means the Liberals simply do what they were going to do anyway, and the NDP rattles their sabres about cost of living and pharmacare and dental care, to no real effect. Liberals are not effectively kept in check, and real progressive policy issues that could materially benefit Canadians aren’t being put forward.

I don’t like it, and I don’t think it serves the plurality of Canadian citizen views - we’re in a bad place and I don’t see how anyone who isn’t already a Liberal voter could love it.

voluble,

Thanks for the link and info.

Not a reply directly to you, but to contrast the dominant view in the thread - what would it matter if even 100% of the crabs died? Sustainability considerations aside - a crab died for my delicious salad, who cares if they die for a life saving vaccine? Who cares if it’s painful and disorienting for the crab, it’s a crab. As humans, why should we prioritize crab life and well-being over our own?

voluble,

Ripple effects, sure, I’m with you there, sustainability considerations, which I haven’t seen anyone mentioning ITT.

I completely disagree with you about the status of humanity. Is it really your view that the well-being of a crab has equivalent moral status to your own well-being?

voluble, (edited )

What I mean when I say moral is, I don’t see why it’s wrong if a bunch of invertebrates are subjugated, in pain, or die in order to provide something that improves the lives of humans. It’s not sad, it’s a good thing. “Oh but the crabs get stressed out, and 30% might die”, yeah, who cares, they’re crabs.

Sure, I’m a human, and I have a particular perspective on these things. But, we are special. Anyone who considers a trolley problem with a crab on one track, and a human on the other and honestly says, “hey it doesn’t matter humans aren’t special”, that’s, unappealing. In a purely academic, cosmic, arrangement of particles sense, OK, nothing is special. But in that condition, the suffering of animals isn’t even a question worth considering.

The fact that so many accounts in this thread are going out of their way to give weight to the well-being of invertebrates, in a conversation about human well-being, is baffling.

Should we be using existing clotting factors in medical settings that don’t rely on the blood of an endangered species that lives in an incredibly volatile habitat? Probably, but crab discomfort is at the very bottom of the list of reasons why.

voluble,

I’ve read good moral arguments for a veganism. I think it’s the right thing to do when it comes to diet. For what it’s worth, this isn’t really a discussion about diet.

It isn’t a decision between a lentil burger and a beef burger, this is an animal resource that can assist in saving human lives. There are other clotting factors used in medicine, and that’s great, let’s use and develop those. But suppose something more lethal and dangerous than COVID comes along, and vaccines need to be produced quickly and globally. I think it would be foolish to wince if we needed to take crab blood to roll out a program that would save human lives.

voluble,

Disclosure - Before you had replied, I edited out the word ‘psychotic’ above, felt it was unfair.

Cheers, thanks for the thoughtful and reasonable reply. I agree with most of what you say. & it circles something I think about a lot but haven’t made much sense of (if there even is sense to make if it), which is, the role of bad feelings in moral decision making.

I think though, the compassion line should be drawn somewhere, sometimes, with moral reason as a guide. To dip into the quagmire of philosophical thought experiments, you know, what if certain humans produced this special clotting factor, and we had to bleed them to get it, and it came with a risk of their mortality? I think reasonable people could agree, that would be an entirely different question to grapple with. So, you know, I would say it does matter, it’s not a black & white thing, where either everything is worthy of compassion or nothing is. The circumstance can, should, dictate the moral approach. Eating meat, fighting in wars, there might be a right or wrong that’s worth determining there. And knowing that, the moral and the practical are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

And totally, I expect people to have differences when it comes to compassion. Suppose I’m just surprised at the outpouring of love for the gross horseshoe crab, in spite of its real usefulness for global human health. Or at least my understanding of it, which I admit, is not very deep.

voluble,

Even though I align with the party on most of their platform, I cannot vote for the LPC under any circumstances, due to their history of broken promises, scandals, ethics violations, horrible handle on foreign policy, blatant disregard for demographics that brought them Parliamentary majorities, lack of a constructive, modern vision for the nation, lack of sincerity, the list goes on and on.

In light of all that, what is it about this particular moment that has Liberals getting their knives out? Of all the times to question a leader, why now exactly? Is this a polling thing? Am I out of the loop?

voluble,

I agree on the point that minority governments on the whole are a good thing for the country. Parties should be kept in check. I feel like my tax dollars are fairly spent when politicians are obligated to negotiate and develop consensus. All this incessant posturing in the House is a waste of every citizen’s time and money. But minority governments also lead to blood-boiling accidental absurdities like the BQ holding the reins on matters of national interest.

I have to say that I’m tired of the fear narrative that gets reeled out around elections in this country. No major party has a view to radically transform Canada. In the grand scheme of things, the three major parties are moderate, and I’m not convinced that any of them are literally dangerous. And so, the bland fruit that grows from the tree of our national politics, while not lethally poisonous, is not necessarily nutritious either.

electoral reform

If only some fresh party leader would make that a key promise of their platform. Surely they would use their majority government to make good on that promise.

voluble,

One variable that I think doesn’t get looked at seriously is class size and school funding. Ask any North American teacher, and you’ll get a grim assessment on the trajectory of schooling since the 90’s. When teachers have more students than they can handle, it’s no surprise that things get out of hand.

I’d argue that part of the solution is more teachers per student. This enables better relationships between faculty and students, and better opportunities for mentorship. Build more schools, hire more teachers, pay them well, make school a place where teachers want to be, and where kids can thrive.

But reforming the existing system is a hot potato that neither the left nor right wants to hold, so, here we are. The system itself is degraded to the point that it doesn’t have the resources to self-correct. We need vision, wisdom, funding, and leadership, to steer things in a new direction. I think that would go a long way in preventing a misguided kid from fermenting the idea that murdering people, or their own classmates, is an answer to their problems.

I don’t mean to paint school shootings as simply a rebellion against a malfunctioning system, but, we really need to look at the system and make sure it’s serving the students that have no choice but to be there.

voluble,

If the safety we pay for, and the justice we expect isn’t provided sufficiently by the state, I think it’s sensible to ignore prohibitions of this nature. I don’t personally view them as a misfortune - freedom is a practice.

voluble,

While sensible, I would argue that it is ill-advised (depending on context). One would instead be better suited to protest for this right, or to build grassroots support with the hope of democratically achieving it.

Sure, but it takes energy to protest & there are only so many hours in a day. If you’re fighting for something righteous, alright, maybe it’s worth it. But all that work for something that sits on the shelf at cabelas that anybody can buy? Nah.

the rule of law must be respected unless one is absolutely certain that there is no other choice

I disagree with this. There are laws that are unfair, discriminatory, puritanical, fruits of political gamesmanship, legislative overreach, arbitrary coincidences of time & place, restrictive on activities that harm no one, etc. I don’t think people oppressed by those laws should have to bear the burden of crusading against them. I don’t think disobedience needs to have strings attached.

voluble,

In the context of the States, I don’t see how any new legislative intervention can deal with the 400 million existing guns in the nation. No country in the history of humanity has had to deal with that. My question is, can it even be dealt with?

Maybe I’m wrong, maybe it’s misplaced cynicism. But, seems to me, the vast existing supply of firearms leads to a permanent condition where, a person who wants to do something bad with a gun, will find access one way or another. I genuinely have no idea how that situation gets fixed. “Do what Japan does” - which I’ve heard sincerely spoken aloud - is naive and would not be effective there.

I don’t live in the States, so it’s not my place to navigate the moral issues or make judgements. I just don’t understand how new gun control measures patterned on other countries in very different situations of supply could be effective, and properly target shitbags like the murderer in the OP article, in advance of a killing.

voluble,

Was accidentally poisoned with sodium nitrite once. Can’t imagine it would be a pleasant way to go.

voluble,

"Those people are snowflakes"

  • Person that twitter is currently making every effort to court and cater to
voluble,

Absolutely. There’s nothing special about YouTube’s frontend - it can be replicated by someone with no coding experience, in an afternoon, for free, via a Softaculous module. On the inside, it’s the Library of Alexandria. And unfortunately, it’s owned by a company that understands that reality only as a means to a nefarious end, which is to develop a detailed psychological profile on its users that can be sold to advertisers.

My hope is that the cost of server storage and delivery will become inexpensive enough that YouTube can be forked and maintained by a nonprofit like the Wikimedia Foundation, who sees user generated content as a means to the enrichment of human experience. I’m not optimistic though, the history of the Library of Alexandria is instructive.

voluble,

The problem really is that storage for video media is insane compared to storage of document or even photo data.

Yep, and add to that, 500 hours of video is uploaded to youtube every minute & they serve over 2.5 billion monthly users. The scale really is unfathomable.

If people here haven’t read into it, it’s incredibly interesting to look into the way the Internet Archive works. In particular you have to begin to concern yourselves with how long it takes for HDs, SSDs, and other media to degrade in time.

Where can I read more about this? It sounds interesting.

voluble,

Thanks for the links, I’ll check them out. Persistence of data seems like an interesting issue.

voluble,

Following the theory that the leadership at twitter actually hate the users and are decimating the platform on purpose for the lols, maybe the outcome you suggest is the plan.

Part of me believes this theory, because it’s hard to imagine how someone even with the explicit stated purpose of destroying twitter could have topped the recent developments. It’s almost as if what they’re trying to do is embarrass and degrade the users.

voluble,

I don’t know anything about anything, but part of me suspects that lots of good funding is still out there, it’s just being used more quietly and more scrupulously, & not being thrown at the first microdosing tech wanker with a great elevator pitch on how they’re going to make “the Tesla of dental floss”.

Georgia prosecutors have messages showing Trump's team is behind voting system breach (www.cnn.com)

Atlanta-area prosecutors investigating efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia are in possession of text messages and emails directly connecting members of Donald Trump’s legal team to the early January 2021 voting system breach in Coffee County, sources tell CNN.

voluble,

I’m not a fan of either of those individuals. I know Stone has claimed to have played a part (he claims a lot of things and frankly I don’t trust a word that comes out of his mouth), but are you saying Trump was tied to the Brooks Brothers riot in 2000? That’s news to me, and I would be interested to read more about that if you could point me in the right direction.

voluble,

That oft repeated claim of parallelism between the US Democrats and the CPC might have been more true in the past. I think there are significant differences nowadays as Poilievre plays with populist rhetoric and policy ideas. Considering the voting base the CPC is attempting to court, I’m not sure those two political parties are really in the same boat.

As a 14-year long user, the new Fisher Price UI makes me sad :( What have they done to you, Reddit? (i.imgur.com)

Notice there is only 1 full headline (from /r/NoStupidQuestions) visible, it doesn’t even show the full post. There are 3 of those “trending” boxes but only 2 of those even fit their headlines because they are like 3 words long, they cut off anything longer including the description...

voluble,

I think when companies that originally offered something unique and desirable get large enough, they necessarily lose touch with what made them indispensable. Dollar signs lead to a notion of growth that summons a many-tentacled cocaine-caked Moloch of feature creep, tech bandwagon hopping, information siloing, data harvesting, advertiser worshiping, and corporate evil that is, at best, indifferent to user experience, but more typically actively antagonistic to it.

voluble,

They exist. Inform yourself on the Internet Research Agency, one of Russia’s state sponsored troll farms. A handful of their activities are well documented in factual records. ‘Dems’ weren’t crying about it, every rational person who doesn’t want foreign interference and disinformation flooding our spaces is concerned about it. This should not be a partisan issue whatsoever.

voluble,

Sounds like you’re on the right path, and I know you didn’t ask, but just wanted to chime in. I love cooking, and have both stainless and cast iron skillets. The circlejerk for cast iron is strong, but I have to say, it’s genuinely the best available non-stick pan once it’s seasoned properly. I can make a perfect omelette, sear scallops, steaks, sautee vegetables, & use it as a pan for oven roasting chickens and roasts. I use it for bread baking as well. They’re cheap (compared to clad cookware) and I’m not sure I could damage my pan even if I wanted to. They’re extremely sturdy, and hold heat very well. I clean mine with cold water and a stiff bristle brush, dry, lightly oil (when it looks like it needs it) & it’s ready to go.

Down side to cast iron pans is that they need some care in the initial seasoning stages, and it stinks up the house when you season them (do it outside on the bbq if you have one!). It’s a bit messy to keep them oiled. They’re heavy and not ergonomic. Can’t use them to simmer acidic sauces because that actually will soften and strip the seasoning, so I use my stainless for that. Get one, season it correctly, and you’ll never look back.

voluble,

True. And unfortunately certain privacy measures can make it easier to digitally fingerprint you as a user. Also my mind is still blown since I learned about canvas fingerprinting. EFF.org describes it as follows:

Canvas fingerprinting is invisible to the user. A tracker can create a “canvas” in your browser, and generate a complicated collage of shapes, colors, and text using JavaScript. Then, with the resulting collage, the tracker extracts data about exactly how each pixel on the canvas is rendered. Many variables will affect the final result. These include your operating system, graphics card, firmware version, graphics driver version, and installed fonts.

These settings are different from one computer to the next. But they tend to be consistent enough on a single machine to clearly identify a user.

voluble,

We’ve always been at war with Eastasia.

voluble,

Managed a shop for over 10 years and took on duties to the point that the owner was only there for a few hours a week in the morning to check emails. The store did record business during the early covid days, and never closed the doors for a single day. The staff was stretched thin, stressed, and everyone was working like crazy and a bit nervous about health because we had a couple older guys working with us and nobody knew the harm profile of covid at that time. The owner bought expensive store improvements (with profits, and fraudulently claimed federal covid benefits) instead of paying the staff, or even saying thanks in any way. See ya!

I want to report them for the fraud thing, but I’m the only one who knows about it aside from the owner, so they’d know it was me who reported it.

voluble,

Uncarbonated liquids are dead simple to titrate, it’s true. For a carbonated product like beer, it’s actually a much more complicated problem than it seems. The amount of foam you get on a keg pour of beer is effected by a lot of variables - how clean the lines are, how cold the lines are, how long the lines are, the diameter of the lines, whether you’re using beergas or co2, how old the beer is, if it’s keg conditioned or force carbonated, how recently the keg was moved into refrigeration, how cold the beer itself is, if it’s the first pour of the day or if the tap has been running frequently, the mechanical design of the faucet, the temperature, cleanliness, shape, and size of the glass it’s going into, and more. It’s really fiddly business, I can’t see how a push button system could take everything into account and render less wastage than a human operator with a feel for the system. Draft systems are voodoo, ask me how I know.

Anyway companies typically have an unrealistic expectation of what draft wastage ought to be. I would advise any bar to expect something like 15% wastage at minimum on professional draft equipment, more if they’re using bargain grade hardware anywhere in the system, but ownership doesn’t want to hear that.

voluble,

Would be curious to know your thoughts about fragmentation - I’m not an nfl guy but I follow hockey and mma, and I think there is a shared issue, where, a handful of communities will crop up across multiple instances, all essentially following the same subject matter and material. Seems to me this will make for smaller, less active conversations that are spread around, instead of having one canonical hub where fans can go and you can get a robust community and lots of people chiming in. What do you think? Is this actually an issue? If it is, is it just a side-effect of decentralization that fans will have to deal with?

Cheers, thanks for modding. I’ve never done it but I imagine it’s hard work.

voluble,

All sweeping generalizations are bad!

Tesla exaggerated EV range so much that drivers thought cars were broken (arstechnica.com)

Tesla has consistently exaggerated the driving range of its electric vehicles, reportedly leading car owners to think something was broken when actual driving range was much lower than advertised. When these owners scheduled service appointments to fix the problem, Tesla canceled the appointments because there was no way to...

voluble,

“Thousands of customers were told there is nothing wrong with their car” by advisers who had never run diagnostics, Reuters quoted a source as saying. Advisers offered tips to customers on how to increase their mileage by changing driving habits

Holy shit, can you imagine being told this by your vehicle manufacturer when requesting a service appointment?

voluble,

I like NoScript exactly for the rabbit hole it opens! Now I’m very aware of what scripts are running on which pages! Actively blocking blatant ad scripts & data scraping scripts makes me feel good.

voluble,

I didn’t know this, that’s really cool.

voluble,

Dark thought, but maybe that was the plan.

voluble,

Can someone shed some light for me? I’m a noob and I’m not sure I understand what is being proposed by google here. From what I can tell, they’re proposing a cryptographically signed token that details information about a website user’s ‘environment’, which I take to mean, their device OS and browser information, for the sake of verifying their humanity for website owners and advertisers. Isn’t this sort of information already collected when a user visits a webpage, and doesn’t google (or whomever) already collect and use this data (and more) for fingerprinting? How is this new proposal different, and something to be specifically concerned about?

I know there are anti-fingerprinting browser privacy addons that spoof this information, or prevent its collection. Is the concern that these tools will become inoperable?

For the record I don’t like google or any company collecting any fingerprinting information, but it’s already being done widely and in an unregulated manner, isn’t it?

voluble,

Then ecommerce sites. “You must have DRM enabled to be allowed to buy anything.”

I’m actually not sure about this one. Money is money. If I’m a vendor, and a bunch of bots want to give me money, I say bring it on. Why would any ecommerce vendor add that layer of friction, which could actually prevent a user from buying something from them? What’s in it for the vendor?

Seems to me the more likely anti-consumer hell is a points dystopia leveraged by monopolistic companies. Like apple, microsoft, or disney moving to some sort of loyalty points system where you can only buy their products using a currency and credit system that they control. Like, ‘stream this movie using your disney points card’. We’re not far off from that really.

voluble, (edited )

The thought here is that, a website could be programmed to, for example, only be accessible to users of chrome (or even an android device), correct? Other than google itself, why would any website want to do such a thing? Is the idea that google is trying to bring users to chrome, by blocking google services on other browsers? That could be really transformative for the web, because then you’d have microsoft doing the same thing with edge, apple doing the same thing with safari, other companies like fb or whatever launching their own bespoke ‘browsers’ to access their services. Will users actually put up with the degree of fragmentation that this move might bring? Won’t it just push users to the ‘old internet’ where you can simply go to a website and interact with it?

Sorry, I’m kind of talking out loud here trying to wrap my head around this. I see people grousing about DRM and ads, and I’m struggling to connect all the dots.

voluble,

Right, if this sort of browser wall thing happens (which, the doctrine of enshittification seems to dictate that it probably will), and it can’t be spoofed or worked around. Alright, I’m seeing the issues here. Thanks for chiming in with your thoughts. This is a huge deal, if it goes in this sort of direction.

voluble,

I think karma whoring is a real problem for that site. Any post that reaches a popular critical mass gets slammed with people trying to make a quick joke or pun for upvotes, and so even commentary on popular news stories was filled with fluff, memes, or basic circlejerking. The karma system also incentivizes this really shitty dunking culture that is so bad for discourse.

It might come here eventually if lemmy gets popular enough. But even if it does the platform as a whole is just more righteous and worthwhile. It doesn’t exist as a commercial entity to drive engagement in order to satisfy advertisers, and that’s something really unique and different in our day & age.

voluble,

I hear that. Cheers, stranger!

voluble,

better tools for moderation

Where have I heard that before?

voluble,

14 is code for ‘the fourteen words’, a racist white separatist slogan that I won’t reproduce here. 88 is a symbol for nazism - h is the 8th letter of the alphabet, hence, 88=hh, or heil hitler. If you see someone with an 88 tattoo, this is what they are signaling.

voluble,

I’d be curious to know your experience with that game. Me and some friends have been playing it and the grind is just insane, to the point that I can’t really enjoy it because progress feels so glacial. Whenever people speak positively about it I feel like I must be missing something.

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