ccsnags

Same. HN is the best but even this was something I found from a random face to face in a hotel lobby. I have gotten most of my friends off of the social media feeds. All of them have seen benefits and a couple have seen such a drastic change that they equate it to taking an antidepressant.

I think you are correct.

The more accessible opting out becomes, the more leverage regulator people will have when negotiating with the dominant social order.

Space travel like this is down the road, but it’s only a long road if you are thinking in terms of your own finite existence.

Also, opting out is in demand. From a more immediate perspective, I think that there is a lot of room for innovation around personal privacy and opting out. No system created by humans is permanent. More surveillance means that humans will create systems to subvert it or render it useless. This has already happened in many ways.

A system is nicer to its people when they are there voluntarily. These changes will also work to improve the quality of life of those in the system as well as those outside of it.

Clubhouse interests me. I don’t use social media like twitter, ig, facebook and don’t miss them. Clubhouse seems more interesting than the others. It reminds me of one of my favorite things to do on VRChat, making drum circles and singing songs. Just connecting with people for the sake of it.

Waiting on an invite though. I’d love to check it out.

I think this is the best way forward.

The system needs integrity to work but it needs discipline to maintain it. Now it has neither.

Political pressure creates an us vs them mentality where reality must pass through a filter to get to the public and whoever controls this filter wins. This is the battleground of divide but it is also how we know what’s going on. This is why we have several versions of events and one’s belief in a version is entirely dependent on one’s political views, not evidence. Evidence is tacked on after the fact.

One thing I like to do is give people the benefit of the doubt. This helps me understand where they are coming from in their own words. Most people on any side of any discussion are decent and deserve to be heard.

There’s plenty of hate on Twitter. They won’t go after all hate and they don’t care that you think they are hypocrites.

Stop trying to convince these people of hypocrisy. They aren’t listening to critics and they lack the ability to see the world outside of the tight frame they were provided. We are all like this most of the time but I find that the moral panics have created situations where online communication is not possible along political lines.

Focus on you, not them. People who build ideas from self-reflection are less volatile and not as susceptible to moral panic than those who define themselves by politics.

If all people tried as hard to understand each other as they do framing their political opponents as evil, we wouldn’t be in this place. Interesting times.

If someone believes a lie, is it a lie?

We are in a situation where all sides of the argument are essentially lies (to someone) because of how we have had events framed for us. Is the media responsible? Depends on who you don’t like. Is Pizzagate or Russiagate real? Conspiracies have flown in all directions.

Lie itself is a term that is more persuasive than falsehood. When i hear someone call something a lie i tend to ignore everything that person says.

Iraq having weapons of mass destruction. Lie or falsehood? If you don’t give them the benefit of the doubt, call it a lie. I think using the term lie itself is a self-contained conspiracy theory. One is assuming that what they are hearing is not just wrong, but not worth investigating because the person saying it doesn’t actual believe it.

He is dangerous because his revelations were true.

I’m Appalachian. We have ridiculously low violent crime rates for the levels of poverty we have. I believe that this is a function of population density rather than any intrinsic trait of us hilljacks.

I went to PDX often before the lockdown and I was struck by the lack of housing. I met with mostly contractors and construction people and they either lived in campers or an hour north in Washington. These people were middle class and couldn’t afford that city. I can only imagine how awful it would be to have low income in a place like that.

There is no shortage of land though. It is not Manhattan.

I have had both. Maschine is awesome.

I used to use an MPC and I got to try a Maschine for a bit. I fell in love instantly. It takes the technical power of a full production studio and makes it feel like you’re playing with a toy you’ve had since childhood.

Between that and the synths Native Instruments makes, go with Maschine.

I go out to the Bay Area often and I don’t know many people who fit into this narrative. This article may say more about the author than the Bay.

I can make you a 1 watt space heater for your hamster if you want.

I see you edited it but the image in my head was too cute not to share.

Bothsidism is a straw man argument designed to present arguments that compare practical effects of different ideologies in bad faith and give rhetoric to people who have no business making the argument in the first place.

Dismissing an argument based on rhetorical sophistry is keeping your head in the sand while trying to get others to do the same. It’s reckless.

Decolonization seems to be a Trojan horse for a different type of Western colonization. It’s one thing to take western ideas and make them your own (Botswana). It’s another thing entirely when western influences try to attach themselves to peoples history and culture in order to change them into faithful subjects without a voice of their own.

Everyone is flawed. That comes with being human. It would be nice to live in a society that allows for people to make mistakes without burning them at the stake. This is not the world we live in, sadly. We have to change that by being forgiving and not piling on.

Apologies, in 2020 USA, just put a giant target on your head and don’t seem to be making much of a positive impact. Change that, you change the game.

People like their scalps too much right now.

The problem with the modern economy is that companies can become “too successful” using underhanded and ethically questionable practices. They influence the government to pass laws that can strengthen their hold or eliminate competition entirely. They hide behind a wall of government when it is convenient and act like angels when the people want the government to break them up.

I don’t know what the answer is, but rewarding corruption and discouraging success are not feasible in the long term. Both arguments above seem legitimate.

If there is control over information, how do the masses protect themselves against disinformation campaigns coming from official sources?

Conspiracy theories and baseless nonsense is the price you pay to be able to criticize those in power. It is a price worth paying.

The narrative fallacy is just a way for people to describe errors caused when conclusions are based inadequate information. It is an ancient and mundane idea with analogs across time and cultures.

The article mentions the biological nature of it, but I interpret that as the biological reality that humans are not omniscient, thus are always susceptible to filling in the gaps between empirical evidence with unsubstantiated prose.

They consider offense to be harm because they seem to want to justify violence against their political rivals.

GIGO is a principle i learned at audio engineering school and it applies to all input/output relationships across multiple disciplines.

Have a 4k tv but only a 1080 cable box? Your tv will only show 1080.

Did you record too much compression on the master track? Now you have to deal with that in the mix.

GIGO is any time you get an input that will never give a desired or expected output. In circuits, its easy. It works or it doesn’t. In data science, GIGO can be hidden by hiding the assumptions made to reach the level of knowable information from the data provided.

Data scientists have a huge uphill battle right now. It is far more complex than looking at the numbers and trying to find patterns. People can find patterns in clouds.

3D printing becomes more viable as people use it. Right now it is pretty niche, but many groups are doing it on an industrial scale.

If every household or building had one, the parts could be crowdsourced from every machine that could make them.

The difference between where 3D printing and injection molding technology is right now is that 3D printers have scaled down in size and cost to the point of consumers being regular folks.

As for right now, 3D printing can help but it won’t be the savior of mankind.

Yet

Good catch. I have turned a game into matching stories with their headlines.

This is fun to do with buddies over email. Get any newspaper. Cut out the stories and cut off the headlines. Now try to match them. You will often ask yourself questions like “how did they get this from that?” I like to blend stories from different sources, including known misinformation, and seeing what happens.

Without doping the story with the headlines sensationalism, the mainstream news is actually pretty tame.

This was never a priority.

In fact, they increased production and got a host of veterans hooked on the junk.

That was the issue the whole time. There were no defined conditions of victory.

On the ground, victory or defeat weren’t on the table. When we were there, we just wanted to come home in one piece.

Large companies can combat this by aligning its incentives to include worker well-being and retention as part of their equation.

Unhappy workers and revolving-door hiring costs real money. Quantifying these values in terms of dollars can be helpful for creating a work place that encourages personal growth and increases positive feedback for workers in terms of money/bonuses for all levels.

You have to put worker relations in terms of money to get the needle to move, but when you do, you will be shocked how much good you can do for the workers if you can quantify their unhappiness and morale.

Doing the right thing is often just a matter of paying attention to the right metrics. Not every company is short-sited on labor. Companies are in a position to create win-win scenarios for its workers and the bottom line if the incentives are aligned.

It isn’t a win for those people that voted against it. I worked blue collar union jobs throughout my 20s in private and public sector. That experience has made me critical of unions. I will never vote to unionize and I will always buck unionization.

The article itself provides more than one coincidence, but they are making some assumptions that seem to be stretching what the evidence is able to provide.

I dug a little deeper and found a host of interesting things but like the article, there seems to be a bit of embellishment in what they can know with the evidence provided.

The important take away is that we shouldn’t assume less technologically advanced civilizations don’t have complex systems of communication. I think much of the stories of our past are important, even when they seem to be fantastic.

If Aboriginal storytelling has the ability to stay consistent over time, the structure of such a thing would be valuable to the modern world.

I think it is more of a social problem we can’t solve with code.

As methods of communication get cheaper and more accessible, it opens the world up to see what humanity is, not what humanity wants itself to be.

People that maliciously attack those online are broken people. Broken people exist in reality, thus broken people will exist online.

Google and Facebook can write code to stop harassment, but they can’t do so without marginalizing people who are already on the fringes of society. Plus, their system can be gamed. The output of such changes would mean that it would stop some harassment at the cost of losing accessibility for everyone and a meta game playing in the background that costs the corporations engineering resources.

The best answer right now, in my opinion, is to create tools to fight harassment, but give those tools to the users of the site rather than automated algorithms. A good example of this is a mute feature. Other tools like customized word filters, block lists and safe lists can also help empower users.

It’s pining for the fjords.

Number of drinks is not a good way, in my experience. It’s a detail that isn’t important unless you are trying to game your own standard. You will convince yourself that your arbitrary line makes you ok.

Hangovers turn into waking up drunk at some point. For me, they were a reason to drink. Withdrawal is like a hangover that lasts for weeks. The whole time, you will want a drink.

My bottom was the realization that my alcoholism was a way of checking out of my life. Once I realized that, I just had to start doing other things and dealing with the problems I tried to drown.

When you are in the pit of addiction, the first things you need are positive alternatives to drinking. It could be AA but I went a different route. I am not a meticulous scheduler, but I had a rigid schedule for the first few months. I even planned out my free time. I put myself back out into the world, and found that I loved it and the people in it.

Early to late twenties for me. I struggled through AA but I found it to be too defeatist. I couldn’t get clean framing the problem the way that they do.

The turning point for me was a joke by a stand up comedian that kind of glorified being a drunk. Doug Stanhope had a line similar to “addiction is just a thing you like doing more than living your life”. I chose to live my life. I got hobbies, took classes, worked a lot and I got through the first few months by staying busy. Over time I balanced out my life schedule (also finding out I have workaholic tendencies).

Everyone’s path is different. I can’t believe mine has worked for 6 years. AA isn’t for everyone, but it works for many. It should be the default first option for people wanting out.