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

Fate/Extra? More like, What? You Thought Fate Was Already / Extra

Greenfield maintains the MIB are just really good practicioners of enochian magick. We know from Lachman that sometimes secret chiefs have been enemy spies & occultists ‘useful idiots’ like Bennowitz. What if both?

Reality Apathy is like Reality Winner’s depressing mirror-universe counterpart

It seems like every time I reboot, Ubuntu manages to forget about another piece of hardware I have. First it was the USB controller, then the wifi (still not fixed), and now it’s my sound card.

I’d like to see less tech journalism that’s PR or PR-teardowns for companies, and more tech journalism that’s about strange technically-interesting things people do for fun that could never conceviably be productized.

Remember when this happened with latin & it turned out lorem ipsum was being compared to political blogs, like 10 years ago? https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/j5npeg/why-is-google-translate-spitting-out-sinister-religious-prophecies

“After Posadas’s death, Minazzoli began to focus exclusively on political readings of the great scientific Ufologists like Hynek and Vallee.” Yesss

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

Critics of toxic open source culture be like https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/how-noisy-males-control-gnus-cycle-180969596/

National anthems are weird. They’re usually an already-old poem glued to an unrelated foreign folk-tune, and then the poem is about, like, whatever. (Exceptions: Deuchland Uber Alles is actually about Germany)

I feel like I’m repeating myself when I say: knowing the ideological diversity of your enemy is TACTICALLY USEFUL because, when observed closely, any group large enough to be politically powerful is full of hidden fault lines and tense cease-fires

I feel like I’m late to the party in saying this but Colin Dickey’s Ghostland is really good y’all

‘It’s more fun to be a pirate than join the navy’ is accurate, but Jobs failed to mention that any BUSINESS is a navy in this metaphor. A small navy is at a disadvantage. Naval officers who act like pirates are called war criminals.

Smells Like Teen Spirit but every note or chord is B flat - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUD-TrPW-V4

I hope the five people following my ‘misc’ repo on github are happy recieving an email containing only the placeholder commit message ‘xxx’ like 30 times a day.

Onegai Twins is like if David Lynch tried really hard to make an unremarkable harem anime. Everything is just slightly off about it, but not in ways that can be easily articulated.

Isn’t calling your creepy ghost girl Kowai Mitsuko a bit much? Kowai Mitsuko in room 405 is like Victor Scarypants at 13 Mockingbird Lane

periodic reminder that weapons in of themselves don’t have a moral valence & we should think materially about whether or not their use is appropriate to our goals, instead of vaguely about accidental associations. this includes social/memetic weaponry like protest techniques

Re: generalism vs specialism & polymathy – BREADTH IS DEPTH because knowledge is a web, not a tree. It only looks like a tree if you SPECIALIZE.

Bad idea of the day: Scroll back through GUI input events & application states like you scroll back through shell history; inject conditionals and loops; use speculative execution of applications to show projected state from these changes.

Bad idea of the day: A small dedicated machine (like a chumby, maybe based on the raspberry pi) that ships with ipfs & ssb/patchwork, casts from ipfs or peertube to TVs.

Bad idea of the day: A tarot deck formatted like a set of business cards, one for the egregore of each arcanum (major and minor – not just trumps)

‘Sci-Fi Music Felt Like a Vast, Interconnected Mythology’: An Interview with Jason Heller | Hazlitt https://hazlitt.net/feature/sci-fi-music-felt-vast-interconnected-mythology-interview-jason-heller

Knowing that half of The Buggles became The Art of Noise makes me feel like maybe we do live in a comprehensible and ordered universe. But then I look at literally anything else.

People who have been to Japan: what kind of food (if any) is served in/around japanese video arcades? Does american arcade fare like curly fries or nachos exist? Is it japanese-style junk food like takoyaki? One-handed/clean stuff like stuffed mochi, rice balls, meat buns, stuffed bread?

Basically, if the antagonist of your story is actually a person or something person-like, it’s not really cyberpunk, because it’s not about the things cyberpunk is about. If you have an evil government or an evil corporation, it’s not cyberpunk either.

What It’s Like When Elon Musk’s Twitter Mob Comes After You https://www.thedailybeast.com/what-its-like-when-elon-musks-twitter-mob-comes-after-you