i find the No Kings protests offputting primarily for their rejection of “Do Not Split”. people around me attend them and i’m glad to see those people engaging in things, but they go on to say things like “at one point a group of 4 people in black bloc (one with a “medic” patch) tried to join the march but we walled them off”.

previous large scale protests i’ve been a part of had a natural flow to them: signs and chanting during the day, then as people start to head home it gets rowdier & some time well after dark it turns physical; repeat the next day.

i’m a daytime protestor. but i never felt like my protests were being “taken over”, or that those different groups were fighting for something incompatible with my own aims. there was space enough for me to find a place i was comfortable, and likewise for anyone with different tactics. you can’t have a “mass” movement without having space for all those different masses.

people who wear glasses with text written on the lens are on another level. like “there’s this bit of text floating in the corner of my vision everywhere i go but it’s fine”

but what do you do when you run into something?

just heads up if you’re getting captchas on YT you’ll probably start getting those on other Google services over time too.

it snowballs like this: YouTube decides you’re a bot => you use less YouTube => Google/Alphabet gets less information/fingerprints of you => Google Search decides you’re a bot => you switch to a different search engine => Google Maps decides you’re a robot …

if you’re arguing that violence is a poor way by which to shape a society, preach that to the police. it’s literally what they do for a living.

i want this to be true.

but it’s probably just the TA who’s using it.

My head cannon

intentional or not, the image fits 👍

if it read “what’s the problem”, i’d agree. otherwise, i’ll toss it to whoever’s well-versed in Chicago speech styles. perhaps the passive-aggressiveness of Seattle is coloring my view 🙃

half of the clergy said “what’s your problem”, which would usually mean “the answer to whatever you just asked is so obviously ‘no’ that you’re a bad person just for asking it: what’s your problem”. i have to respect that some topics are simply off-limits for some people: if you’re going to someone asking for advice about a moral quandary and their convictions are strong enough they don’t wanna discuss the topic beyond “hell no”, i don’t fault them for that.

in my head, there’s a direct causal chain:

1. the court presents me with the accusation and the evidence.
2. i declare if the evidence supports the accusation.
3. the judge declares a punishment in response to that verdict.
4. law enforcement delivers the punishment.

if i believe (3) and (4) will function as stated, then it’s equally accurate to say that in step 2 i am deciding whether or not to confiscate $250,000 from this mother and cancel her home internet connection.

but a huge number of people i present this to refuse to admit that equivalence. there is some question about whether weakening the norm might cause more damage than mistreating the mother, but does that even weaken the point? the common answer from those who bring it up is “there’s too much uncertainty to say”: build a complex enough machine, and people are eager to deny the downstream effects of their actions.

(you can overcome most of the degradation-of-norms issue by making this a secret hearing, and still a lot of people will hesitate to admit the equivalence between their verdict in step 2 and the effects of step 3/4)

i’ve had better luck illustrating the point with a less abstract case: the 2000’s called and it’s your turn for jury dury. the case for today is that of a single mother who downloaded some Disney movies off Limewire for her kids to watch so she could get some time to herself to take care of chores.

should the jury find her guilty, you suspect that the judge will fine her $250,000 and cancel her home internet connection. you think such a punishment would do more net harm than good. but you don’t get to decide the punishment (that’s for the judge to announce after the jury deliberates), you just decide the guilty/not-guilty verdict.

you look at the evidence: the mother definitely downloaded those files. what verdict do you deliver the judge?

ourethra

oh god, Cybertruck culture is just incel culture applied to a different topic. different groups, maybe, but the same culture.

crafting a search term has changed over the years though. the old approach of “type 3-5 keywords into the box and get a list of pages that use those words close to eachother” isn’t supported anymore, and the new approach is “type a phrase and we’ll look for things semantically related”.

at that point, the input box isn’t that different from the chatbot box.

that’s a lot to remember and i don’t see the point of it. android girls are perfectly alright with me 👌

what keeps you using Nix or NixOS?

a sort of one-man network effect?

i wanted to load books onto my e-reader (runs NixOS) wirelessly: i already have a media server which i use for TV (Jellyfin). the e-reader speaks NFS, so i enabled NFS on my media server, added the auth to the e-reader’s Nix config, and since all my NixOS devices use the same repo for their config, my laptop and PC both get that NFS setup “for free”. incrementally, that makes everything else easier: i have a MAME arcade cabinet in the other room running Arch. if it had been running NixOS instead, suddenly that task of “load books onto my e-reader wirelessly” would have also solved the issue of “load games onto my MAME cabinet wirelessly”.

once you get going it’s just so easy to keep building incrementally. “tech debt” is a bit less of a thing than with other distros (still a thing, just smaller) because of determinism and nix flake check and so on. honestly once i care enough about not being able to load games onto that MAME cabinet easily, i’ll solve that by flashing it with Nix, and so grows my network effect.

to challenge free will is to challenge the idea of the self. if the universe is mechanistic, and you within it are equally mechanistic, then you can’t point at your mechanism and say “i stand apart from the world.” you are literally but a part of the larger whole.

morality could be compatible with determinism. the most compatible moral frameworks seems to be a type of universalism, which on the surface resembles altruism. there’s nothing special about ‘you’, so you’d never trade someone else’s well-being to make your own better (it’s a nonsensical exchange, like building a house and then selling it to yourself). when confronting determinism, why do people gravitate toward defeatism instead of this more optimistic conclusion?

i switched all my devices to UTC about a year ago when a surprise DST transition caught me in a pissy mood.

it’s fairly internalized by now. i don’t think it’s that much harder than developing an intuition for both Celcuis and Fahreinheit temperatures. sometimes i’ll glance at the clock while at a friend’s house and it says 09:00 and i do a double-take because “how is it already going-to-bed time?” before i realize it meant 9PM local time, not 09:00 UTC (1AM local).

but it’s the things you don’t think about that make it difficult. set your phone to UTC and 24hr time. first thing you’ll notice is that every weather app blissfully ignores your settings, because they’re showing you weather for a specific place, and assume you care about the time local to that place. second thing you’ll notice is that half your IM apps are going to actually be using AM/PM still. they’ll even mix AM/PM with 24hr within the same app. you read “message received 11:20” and it could mean like 3 different things.

not to mention all the physical stuff: car clocks, oven/microwave clocks, … a lot of these in the US don’t even give an option for 24hr time, and “11:20 PM UTC” is just so cursed.

what if joker kills joker?

oof, yeah that’s me & Spotify rn. each time they send me a marketing email i reply to it asking them not to send me marketing materials and i CC all the addresses which would reach a human (support@, help@, marketing@, abuse@, and if i’m feeling pissy then legal@).

and each time i get a human reply instructing me how to unsubscribe, and sometimes we’ll back-and-forth a bit about how that’s not the point. Spotify’s special: most companies will just unsubscribe you and get it over with if you ask, but not Spotify. i don’t really enjoy doing any of this but like you said: some of us have weird obsessions.