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

Hey, remember using twtxt? I still like the idea.

though, with decent enough systems science, it’s perfectly possible to block the entries and starve them↵but you probably won’t like the generation after that

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.

intricate like a fractal, but resembling itself nowhere at all, information so compressed that your eyes start dropping frames near it

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

We spend an enormous amount of time and effort teaching children about animals – even ones that only exist far away (like tigers and elephants and giraffes) or that have been extinct for tens to hundreds of millions of years.

branches of christianity whose holy symbol has so many crossbars that it looks more like a yagi antenna, the more crossbars the better they say but in their imagery they’re revering centipede jesus or something

Tourist Trap is apparently on Shudder now. Even though it’s not Giallo, I recommend Giallo fans give it a watch: much like Profundo Russo & other pre-Suspiria Argento, it combines messy storytelling with some beautiful, surreal, and terrifying shot composition.

Whenever you’re near the sample, the geiger counter’s ticking turns regular, modulated, like some kind of radio hail

embots: like sexbots, but instead a superstimulus for empathy; often used on the streets as beggars or political activists (which is why sometimes, the cute animal rights girl in front of you explodes in a shower of sparks and broken parts as yet another victim of anthropol)

Bad idea of the day: a dual-layer LCD (like the 3d TVs from a few years ago) that uses the top layer exclusively for hover behavior

QOTD: “Like any extension of the human psyche, machines are scary things[…] When you take the scary human psyche and magnify it hundreds or thousands of times with technology, it’s really nightmarish”

pro tip: when you tie a part of reality to a social construct (like tying life to money, or violence to law, or technical decisions to industry hype) you risk huge ramifications unless the ‘real’ portion is the primary driver. social constructs are too floaty.

A temple that does the same thing with sound that cathedrals do with light: Different notes wherever you go, entire spaces audible if you’re in the right place, a whirligig in the form of a boiling rose sounding like wind in the leaves of a brass tree

Jordan Peterson is like a pack of tarot cards: stare at him hard enough for long enough and eventually you’ll see a message that is both true and profound. But, as with tarot cards, if you attribute that message to any intent on Peterson’s part, it brands you as foolish.

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

Bad idea of the day: a system for sharing playlists of things that aren’t audio or online video, like themed triple-features or reading lists, so you can curate or browse that kind of human recommendation

and when two wizards love each other, their aspects intermingle, a giant spider grows scales of gold while the clockwork starts looking more organic and web-like

if you know what to look for you may find touch-chameleons here, they feel like stone or clay when still on the ground but if lifted up, feel like another hand

Band name of the day: Machine-Like Men Are Still Toddlers

Bad idea of the day: creepypasta in the form of a walkthrough for a nonexistent game from an alternate universe where a game like that described is normal

I would like to wish all of you a very happy international socialist solidarity day

Checking out Tilix. Looks good so far but I have not yet found keybindings for split terminals vertically or horizontally like in Terminator. 🙄

I then passed an empty bus. Even its display said empty. I was too tired but I feel like if I had boarded it, it would’ve taken me to those quarters where they don’t render the matrix and it would’ve been just me, gray nothingness, and the sound of my footsteps on default texture

@leo@server.gkbrk.com where are all these accounts on server.gkbrk.com coming from? Is there an Webinterface or something like that?

Not news to anybody paying attention, but I still feel like it’s worth a visibility boost: https://developers.googleblog.com/2018/04/text-embedding-models-contain-bias.html

GitHub - geophile/osh: Osh (Object SHell) is a command-line and API toolkit combining cluster access, database access, and data slicing and dicing. Sort of like awk and cssh morsels wrapped up in a Python crust. https://github.com/geophile/osh

I Lived Exclusively Off Doomsday Prepper Food for a Week - MUNCHIES https://munchies.vice.com/en_us/article/vbx399/what-does-prepper-food-taste-like-v25n1

just updated twtxt from 1.2.1 to 1.2.3 - looks like there were some config file changes

Post-textual ideologies disseminated as games that build subtle intuitions not expressible in language, rearrange your worldview in a few hours of immersion, leave you with “Did you like being this person? Join us for more”

If You’ve Met Aliens While on DMT, These Scientists Would Like to Hear From You - Motherboard https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bjpjxm/dmt-aliens-study-johns-hopkins

Simplicity
That is a screenshot of my macOS desktop. It could be simpler, but as it is it does what I need, and want. When I need to use an app, I simply hit command (⌘) space and start typing the app name to launch it. That is, I use Spotlight.

Wouldn’t it be great that iOS could be customized like that too? Preferably it would be a setting, that would allow to turn off the visibility of all, or any app on the phone. Then, to open an app, one would use the [Spotlight]( … ⌘ Read more

Bad idea of the day: An RPG whose stats are traits like alienation, shadow integration, neurosis

Is every anime containing WcDonalds as a trademark-free McDonalds expy now retroactively progressive? Like, even SAO? (Hint: no)

a sudden smell of gasoline, the birdsong starts clipping, the sun becomes blocky, blurry, smears across the sky like a video glitch

rain falls from the fourth dimension and its drops wink in and out of existence, make reality ripple like a pond

Optimizing for anything other than human happiness seems like a recipe for misery. Of course, no existing political system really seriously attempts to optimize for human happiness.

I feel like Netflix’s adaptation did a pretty good job of keeping that social & political focus, and even frontloading it a little bit by injecting backstory from the second and third books.

GitHub - automerge/automerge: A JSON-like data structure that can be modified concurrently by diff… https://github.com/automerge/automerge

Why We’re Drawn To Time Loop Stories Like ‘Groundhog Day’ - Digg http://digg.com/2018/time-loop-movies-shows-books-groundhog-day

The young ones, not brought up in the physical world, find our notions of object permanence quaint. Their scapes are not rooms and buildings, but gardens of colored light that look like mental noise to us

The Deep Roots of an … https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/deep-roots-italian-song-sounds-like-english-american-medieval-comedy-nonsense