@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I knew from the get go it was going to be an annoying thing to track down, which is was, but that made it take even longer because I avoided trying.

@shreyan@twtxt.net I agree re: AR. Vircadia is neat. I stumbled on it years ago when I randomly started wondering “wonder what’s going on with Second Life and those VR things” and started googling around.

Unfortunately, like so many metaverse efforts, it’s almost devoid of life. Interesting worlds to explore, cool tools to build your own stuff, but almost no people in it. It feels depressing, like an abandoned shopping mall.

@shreyan@twtxt.net Oh? Tell me more if you feel up to it.

@prologic@twtxt.net What? There’s literally a “Religion, heritage, and values” section on his Wikipedia page.

@prologic@twtxt.net I’ve not looked into the Bluesky protocol, so I don’t know what to think specifically. But this guy definitely is not impressed lol

@prologic@twtxt.net I think those headsets were not particularly usable for things like web browsing because the resolution was too low, something like 1080p if I recall correctly. A very small screen at that resolution close to your eye is going to look grainy. You’d need 4k at least, I think, before you could realistically have text and stuff like that be zoomable and readable for low vision people. The hardware isn’t quite there yet, and the headsets that can do that kind of resolution are extremely expensive.

But yeah, even so I can imagine the metaverse wouldn’t be very helpful for low vision people as things stand today, even with higher resolution. I’ve played VR games and that was fine, but I’ve never tried to do work of any kind.

I guess where I’m coming from is that even though I’m low vision, I can work effectively on a modern OS because of the accessibility features. I also do a lot of crap like take pictures of things with my smartphone then zoom into the picture to see detail (like words on street signs) that my eyes can’t see normally. That feels very much like rudimentary augmented reality that an appropriately-designed headset could mostly automate. VR/AR/metaverse isn’t there yet, but it seems at least possible for the hardware and software to develop accessibility features that would make it workable for low vision people.

@stigatle@yarn.stigatle.no @prologic@twtxt.net @eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club I love VR too, and I wonder a lot whether it can help people with accessibility challenges, like low vision.

But Meta’s approach from the beginning almost seemed like a joke? My first thought was “are they trolling us?” There’s open source metaverse software like Vircadia that looks better than Meta’s demos (avatars have legs in Vircadia, ffs) and can already do virtual co-working. Vircadia developers hold their meetings within Vircadia, and there are virtual whiteboards and walls where you can run video feeds, calendars and web browsers. What is Meta spending all that money doing, if their visuals look so weak, and their co-working affordances aren’t there?

On top of that, Meta didn’t seem to put any kind of effort into moderating the content. There are already stories of bad things happening in Horizon Worlds, like gangs forming and harassing people off of it. Imagine what that’d look like if 1 billion people were using it the way Meta says they want.

Then, there are plenty of technical challenges left, like people feeling motion sickness or disoriented after using a headset for a long period of time. I haven’t heard announcements from Meta that they’re working on these or have made any advances in these.

All around, it never sounded serious to me, despite how much money Meta seems to be throwing at it. For something with so much promise, and so many obvious challenges to attack first that Meta seems to be ignoring, what are they even doing?

@eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club interesting, because some people are writing articles declaring the metaverse dead: https://www.businessinsider.com/metaverse-dead-obituary-facebook-mark-zuckerberg-tech-fad-ai-chatgpt-2023-5

@shreyan@twtxt.net probably ~1k up to 1.5k. One I found had 64G ram and 12C / 16T for 1.1k

@prologic@twtxt.net have trued to get a RasPi lately? Them things are Unobtainium

@prologic@twtxt.net It’s a fun challenge to see how many words you can say without expressing any ideas at all. Maybe this GPT stuff should be trained to do that!

@prologic@twtxt.net maybe it doesn’t fool you, but it fools lots of people and has for thousands of years. That’s why politicians (for instance) keep doing it.

@prologic@twtxt.net

Let’s assume for a moment that an answer to a question would be met with so many words you don’t know what the answer was at all. Why? Why do this? Is this a stereotype of academics and philosophers? If so, it’s not a very straight-forward way of thinking, let alone answering a simple question.

Well, I can’t know what’s in these peoples’ minds and hearts. Personally I think it’s a way of dissembling, of sowing doubt, and of maintaining plausible deniability. The strategy is to persuade as many people as possible to change their minds, and then force the remaining people to accept the idea because they think too many other people believe it.

Let’s say you want, for whatever reason, to get a lot of people to accept an idea that you know most people find horrible. The last thing you should do is express the idea clearly and concisely and repeat it over and over again. All you’d accomplish is to cement people’s resistance to you, and label yourself as a person who harbors horrible ideas that they don’t like. So you can’t do that.

What do you do instead? The entire field of “rhetoric”, dating back at least to Plato and Aristotle (400 years BC), is all about this. How to persuade people to accept your idea, even when they resist it. There are way too many techniques to summarize in a twt, but it seems almost obvious that you have to use more words and to use misleading or at least embellished or warped descriptions of things, because that’s the opposite of clearly and concisely expressing yourself, which would directly lead to people rejecting your idea.

That’s how I think of it anyway.

@prologic@twtxt.net Yes, and you enjoy the best seafood every day if you want it!

@chunkimo@twtxt.net @prologic@twtxt.net I don’t think I need Jesus. I need more sleep 😴

@prologic@twtxt.net hmm, dunno about the recency of that line of thought. I suspect though that given his (recent or not) history, if someone directly asked him “do you support rape” he would not say “no”, he’d go on one of these rambling answers about property crime like he did in the video. Maybe I’m mind poisoned by being around academics my whole career, but that way of talking is how an academic gives you an answer they know will be unpopular. PhD = Piled Higher And Deeper, after all right? In other words, if he doesn’t say “no” right away, he’s saying “yes”, except with so many words there’s some uncertainty about whether he actually meant yes. And he damn well knows that, and that’s why I give him no slack.

There are people in academia who believe adult men should be able to have sex with children, legally, too. They use the same manner of talking about it that Peterson uses. We need to stop tolerating this, and draw hard red lines. No, that’s bad, no matter how many words you use to say it. No, don’t express doubts about it, because that provides justification and talking points to the people who actually carry out the acts.

@xuu@txt.sour.is LOL omfg.

This is the absurd logical endpoint of free market fundamentalism. “The market will fix everything!” Including, apparently, encroaching floodwater.

I do have to say though, after spending awhile looking at houses, that there are a crapton of homes for sale for very high prices (>$1 million) in coastal areas NASA is more or less telling us will be underwater in the next few decades. I don’t get how a house that’s going to be underwater soon is worth $1 million, but then I’m never been a free market fundamentalist either so 🤷 Maybe they’re all watertight.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org that could definitely be a track in an ambient song, no question whatsoever.

The exhaust is amazingly soothing to look at, even though it’d vaporize your entire being in milliseconds if you were anywhere near it.

@jmjl@tilde.green I explain the favicon trick in https://mckinley.cc/blog/20210824.html

@prologic@twtxt.net nice

@bmallred@nahongvita.run the run was fine and no issues from it. but taking note that after the run my son stepped on my right foot and it has been extremely painful since. even walking the kids back and forth has been a chore.

<SP> image test no.2 #html

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<SP> image test #markdown

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@abucci@anthony.buc.ci Ben Shapiro has plenty to be ashamed of not the least of which is selling his home to Aquaman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9FGRkqUdf8

@prologic@twtxt.net yeah man, of course!

@prologic@twtxt.net https://twitter.com/ardenthistorian/status/1625653951776292864?lang=en

@prologic@twtxt.net When you unpack what he’s saying in that video (which I’ve watched, and just now re-watched), and strip away all his attempts to wrap this idea in fancy-sound language, he is saying: it would be better if women were viewed as property of men, because then if they were raped, the men who owned them would get mad and do something about it. Because rape would be a property crime then, like trespassing or theft. Left unspoken by him, but very much known to him, is that the man/men who “own” a woman can then have their way with her, just like they can freely walk around their yard or use their own stuff. In his envisioned better world, it’d be impossible for a husband to rape his wife, for instance, because she is his property and he can do almost anything he wants (that’s literally what “property” is in Western countries).

It’s so fucked up it’s hard to put into words how fucked up it is. And this isn’t the only bad idea who bangs on about!

@prologic@twtxt.net Maybe so, but that’s not because of the people who are objecting to Jordan Peterson, that’s for sure. You really need to read the articles I’ve posted before going there. Really.

@prologic@twtxt.net It went there because you are supporting bad people who themselves operate at the level of outrage. You cannot have a “debate” about the ideas of someone like Peterson or Shapiro, because those ideas should not be considered debate-worthy. Rape is not OK, period, the end. It is not up for debate or discussion. Yet Peterson acts as if it is. That is abhorrent, and unacceptable in 2023.

@prologic@twtxt.net Because they are rightwing assholes with a huge platform and they are literally HURTING PEOPLE. People get attacked because of things people like Shapiro and Peterson say. This is not just idle chitchat over coffee. They are saying things like it’s OK to rape women (and NO I am not going to dig out the videos where they say that –that’s up to YOU to do, do your own homework before defending these ghouls).

@prologic@twtxt.net

Taking Jordan Peterson asn an example, the only thing he “preaches” (if you want to call it that) is to be honest with yourself and to take responsibility.

This is simply untrue. Read the articles I posted, seriously.

In a tweet in one of the articles I posted, Peterson states there is no white supremacy in Canada. This is blatantly false. It is disinformation. Peterson has made statements that rape is OK (he uses “fancy” language like “women should be naturally converted into mothers” but unpack that a bit–what he means is legalized rape followed by forced conception). He is openly anti-LGBTQ and refuses to use peoples’ preferred pronouns. He seems to believe that women who wear makeup at work are asking to be sexually harassed.

He’s using his platform in academia to pretend that straight, white men are somehow the most aggrieved group in the world and everyone else is just whining and can get fucked. The patron saint of Men’s Rights Activists and incels. I find him odious.

@prologic@twtxt.net nah, not inclined to do that. The articles suffice–have a read of those when you get the chance.

@prologic@twtxt.net I’ve read half, skimmed the others. Mostly I was going for scale–look at all those headlines. These are horrible people who say horrible things on a regular basis.

@prologic@twtxt.net omg yes! They are both ultra-right-wing assholes! The worst of the worst! Please tell me you don’t listen to these guys’ brain poison?

Also thanks to @darch@neotxt.dk for the new version of the yellow plugin https://lien.sus.fr/IGFM5

@prologic@twtxt.net

• 12 Reasons Why No One Should Ever Listen to Jordan Peterson Ever Again
  

• Why Jordan Peterson Is Always Wrong
  

• Here’s why Jordan Peterson is the f*cking worst.: “his ideology quickly morphed into one that reinforces hatred, discrimination, and the oppression of marginalized groups”

• ANGRY WHITE MEN MAR. 30, 2016
A History of Piers Morgan’s Terrible Opinions

• Shut Up, Piers

• Piers Morgan Is Now an Asshole of Record-Breaking Proportions

You’re posting Piers Morgan/Jordan Peterson videos lmao???

@prologic@twtxt.net I know very little about it, but speaking secondhand, it looks like there’s a single centralized server now and they’re still building the ability to federate? Like, the current alpha they’re running is not field testing federation, which makes me think that’s not a top priority for them.

<sorenpeter> and then the message

@Phys_org@feeds.twtxt.net using the phrase “machine learning” in this article is misleading and bandwagoning. They used a neural model, which neuroscientists were doing long before “machine learning” became a popular term.

@carsten@yarn.zn80.net any photos on how it turned out?

Trying to work out if it is possible to churn out an atom file to update mastodon with twtxt

@prologic@twtxt.net yes, I agree. It’s bizarre to me that people use the thing at all let alone pay for it.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de

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@carsten@yarn.zn80.net That’s a dissembling answer from him. Github is owned by Microsoft, and CoPilot is a for-pay product. It would have no value, and no one would pay for it, were it not filled with code snippets that no one consented to giving to Microsoft for this purpose. Microsoft will pay $0 to the people who wrote the code that makes CoPilot valuable to them.

In short, it’s a gigantic resource-grab. They’re greedy assholes taking advantage of the hard work of millions of people without giving a single cent back to any of them. I hope they’re sued so often that this product is destroyed.

@thecanine@twtxt.net wow this is horrifying. What happened to Opera? It used to be my favorite browser but now they’re like that one cousin who started getting into drugs, and then got in trouble with the law, and then before you know it they’re scamming old ladies out of their pension money.

@darch@neotxt.dk Made up is not the same as lie. That’s obvious isn’t it?!?!

I am going to try to install the twtxt Yellow extension from Søren - https://lien.sus.fr/iaxgN

@shreyan@twtxt.net my condolences for the pain you no doubt will inflict upon others that will have to maintain whatever you write in Ruby.

@darch@neotxt.dk So a fiction novel, which is labelled “fiction”, is a lie? I still don’t understand. The word “lie” entails an intention to deceive, but fiction writing does not intend to deceive.

@carsten@yarn.zn80.net You are conflating “aiming your eyes at” with “viewing art”. These are fundamentally different activities.