Conspiracy theories are the result of the same legibilitization process described in ‘Seeing Like a State’: it replaces actual mechanism with a simpler one & drops details that don’t fit, for the sake of ease of representation

Why There’s No Place Quite Like the American Garage - Atlas Obscura https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-architecture-of-garages

We will never know what it’s like to be the person the K-Mart PA system’s 1994 holiday playlist wants us to be.

What It’s Like to Be a Bot “ Real Life https://reallifemag.com/what-its-like-to-be-a-bot/

Amiga like OSes on QEMU http://zero.eik.bme.hu/~balaton/qemu/amiga/

One of those cult cinema distribution companies owns an actual video store – and it’s only like an hour or two from my house. I’ll have to make a trip out there at some point…

Cesar Sayoc and others on Twitter are behaving like bots. https://slate.com/technology/2018/11/cesar-sayoc-twitter-humans-behaving-bots.html

Science Is Full of Mavericks Like My Grandfather. But Was His Physics Theory Right? - The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/science-full-mavericks-like-my-grandfather-was-his-physics-theory-right/574573/

Bad idea of the day: style transfer every frame of the new suspiria to look like the old suspiria

For #NaNoGenMo I converted two of Stravinsky’s ballets to tone-poems by converting note frequencies to word frequencies. I dare somebody to do a dramatic reading of these; it’ll sound like an Underworld track: https://github.com/enkiv2/misc/blob/master/nanogenmo-2018/stravinsky.md https://github.com/enkiv2/misc/blob/master/nanogenmo-2018/stravinsky_pg.md

In one sense, ‘the computer revolution is over’ because the period of exponential growth behind the tech ended 10 years ago. In another sense, it hasn’t begun: we have sheltered ourselves from the social and intellectual ramifications of computing. Documents are still simulations of paper, & capitalism still exists. So it’s like that period where printing presses existed but everybody used a faux-calligraphic font.

Acting like an extravert has benefits, but not for introverts | Aeon Ideas https://aeon.co/ideas/acting-like-an-extravert-has-benefits-but-not-for-introverts

Isn’t it great that outlook just prevents people from emailing jar files to each other? Like, it’s not as though people occasionally need to send each other internal proprietary jars that aren’t conveniently hosted.

Love it we have a “contract” developer but he is not in the right group to push commits to the code repo. When I suggested that he be added to the right group one of the other developers was like that will give him access to everything. I’m sorry but what is everything? It’s not like he can pull from any of the repos as it is. Right now he just can’t commit.

It really pisses me off when people use ‘infinite’ to mean ‘really big’. If something’s actually infinite, adding more to it produces the same number (like in Hilbert’s hotel)

Bad idea of the day: a database of maps of conceptual spaces that are drawn like maps of physical spaces (ex., xkcd’s map of the internet & Knuppe’s map of the fields of mathematics)

Acting like a psychopath is great for male CEOs, not so much for women | Ars Technica https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/10/acting-like-a-psychopath-is-great-for-male-ceos-not-so-much-for-women/

SisterWriter is so weirdly lazy at times. Like, just rotating a cut 90 degrees and doing a static panning shot… Though, the characters are constantly off model and rarely animated or properly posed, so that might be for the best…

The protagonist of Bunny-Girl-senpai is almost the Kyon-style deadpan snarker (not distinct enough to really be a variant yet, like in Denpa Onna) but I can’t tell if it’s an attempt at reconstruction like in Seiren…

Language is a technology & we ought to start acting like it

If the Rich Really Want To ‘Do Good,’ They Should Become Class Traitors Like FDR https://longreads.com/2018/10/18/review-of-winners-take-all/

Is there already a term for going into a piece of media with the expectation that it won’t be a waste of time / there’s something to be gained by paying attention & thinking? (Like ‘good-faith viewership’?)

Bad idea of the day: an extension that replaces ‘OK’ on every button with ‘Dolt’, like God & the original Macintosh UI team intended

Seminars on Long-Term Thinking are hit-or-miss (like TED talks) but the latest with Julia Galef is pretty good.

Apparently hot take: automation tools don’t obviate abstract discussions about how best to think about decisions (like ‘should translations be precise or should they be accurate’ or ‘what is the good’) but make them more important.

The Internet’s keepers? “Some call us hoarders”I like to say we’re archivists” | Ars Technica https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/10/the-internets-keepers-some-call-us-hoarders-i-like-to-say-were-archivists/

Elites like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos think they’re being philanthropic. But they could do so much more. - Recode https://www.recode.net/2018/10/3/17930990/anand-giridharadas-winners-take-all-book-changing-world-kara-swisher-decode-podcast-jeff-bezos

Computers can solve your problem. You may not like the answer. - The Boston Globe https://apps.bostonglobe.com/ideas/graphics/2018/09/equity-machine/

Moderan reads like if dril was a battle-cyborg & tried to write his autobiography but kept on getting distracted by how COOL it is to PLASTIC-WRAP THE EARTH.

Hot take: disambiguation in symbolic AI is probably a mistake, & we’d be better off with systems that pun uncontrollably because they operate on the locus of concepts rather than on their boundaries. You know, like a person.

Can somebody with access to SciAm or Nature summarize the substance of this SciAm article ‘Subliminal Messages Can Cause Forgetting’ for me? Is it just something stupid like ‘priming can interfere with reencoding via jamais-vu’?

Non-programmers have invaded the programming area. It wouldn’t be bad except some of them wear way too much perfume or cologne. Feel like I need a gas or filter mask.

!!Con seems looks like a fun conference: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE7tQUdRKcyYK5q1bw_YlrnqOFv6_EOF-

@sdk@codevoid.de you know the more I think about it, it might make sense to have it the twtxt file. It would just need to be a comment line something like “#follows sdk gopher://codevoid.de/0/tw.txt” on a single line. That way it would be easy to parse out those follows by finding the #follows.

This book is pretty good but Alex Wright keeps calling things like codex formats & indices ‘literary hypertext’. No, that’s just text. Yes, I get that hypertext is more text than text; that’s why it’s hyper.

Learning BASIC Like It’s 1983 https://twobithistory.org/2018/09/02/learning-basic.html

In case you were wondering, indeed, Female Prisoner Scorpion is a MUCH better movie than the title makes it sound like. (It is exploitation, but it is ALSO surreal impressionistic gothic horror. Also, every frame of this damn movie is gorgeous.)

@freemor@freemor.homelinux.net This is completely contrary to what people want. People don’t care about how something works. They want to use something that’s premade and that they can use without learning anything about it. Decentralization is a technical Detail, nobody cares about. Just like security or freedom. It’s all nice to have if it comes for free, no time investment and no convenience cuts. So the only way to establich decentralization is by making it better, cheaper and easier to use than centralized services. #sadtruth

Why do most new cool things depend on hipster tech like nodejs? sigh #dat

Hot take: there are (somehow) no /mature/ GUI toolkits, but even under that low bar, there’s lots of variability – and webtech makes TK look like the Sagrada Familia.

When a social structure is flat (like twitter) all friction is between people & there’s no ‘natural’ adjuticator except a powerful & unaccoutable adjutication class. When it has cliques (like mastodon) it can be broken down & adjuticators are limited in power.

This is what filter bubbles actually look like - MIT Technology Review https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611807/this-is-what-filter-bubbles-actually-look-like/

So, the Pseudomonarchia is like A Thing in anime, isn’t it… Using goetic demons as comic relief characters is something I see occasionally but it wasn’t until You’re Being Summoned, Azazel! that I realized that it wasn’t just like 3 guys doing it.

Translit is a little like bittorrent, if bittorrent used literally the same bytes for AMVs and trailers as for the corresponding scenes in the show/movie. Transcopyright is like assembling AMVs from your own DVD boxed set based on a list of instructions & leaving a gap if you’re missing a disk.

Hey guys any of you have an idea why the udev daemon is pinned slightly above 100% CPU like all the time now?

When you don’t think cybernetically, you ask questions like ‘did X cause Y or did Y cause X’ when actually most persistent things have self-perpetuating loops and cause themselves/each other. This will mystify you because aristotlean ‘first cause’ hierarchy shit baked your brain.

What It’s Like to Download Your Facebook Data - The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/09/download-your-facebook-data/565736/

It’s not just that press coverage of things you already know about is bad. You only notice it when you know more about it than the journalist – who is a professional outsider. Question is: when the author knows slightly more than you do, would you like them to dive deeper?

@kas@enotty.dk Have you done something with nncp? I like the idea, but somehow i don’t find a use case for it… :)

It‘s Looking Extremely Likely That QAnon Is A Leftist Prank On Trump Supporters https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanhatesthis/its-looking-extremely-likely-that-qanon-is-probably-a