uriel238

uriel238 , 4 months ago

Speculating on the vastness of the universe, Alexander wept. Asked why, he replied Is it not worthy of tears, that, when the number of worlds is infinite, we have not yet become lords of a single one?

uriel238 , 5 months ago

Hey, cutie!

uriel238 , 5 months ago

Sturm und Drang was all the rage, then.

uriel238 , 5 months ago

As a Windows 10 user who tried Win 11, it's super gross. I'm hoping to get my shit together enough to convert to linux this year before Microsoft forces my hand.

If Microsoft forces my hand it'll probably mean a month without gaming and I'll be a sad, sad boy.

uriel238 , 5 months ago

So when one of them is voted off, does a screen plate report the exiled contestant is gay? Because if they're all typical straights and the comedy is based on them being at least a bit homophobic.

This reminds me of classic USMC gay chicken, which seems to be a conspiracy to turn all our fresh trained marines totally gay questioning.

uriel238 , 5 months ago

No one's utopia rises from the ashes of a collapsed society. Usually collapse is followed by a run of short-lived autocrats, until one of them (or a coalition) sees the trend and is determined not to be the next dead dictator. They then create a constitution and none of them are elected as the executive.

By then everyone is desperate for some quiet, and no one really cares to be king anymore. (Cromwell was unique in handing the theone of England back to a family with some royal legitimacy, but that was before the ideals of the enlightenment.)

What we haven't tried yet is crafting an ironclad constitution before or during the violence. Were I not a depressed misanthrope with no organization skills, I might have developed an online website that tracked the constitutions of the world (as cross-translated as possible) and made workshops for hypothetical clauses, such as ranked-choice US presidential elections won by popular vote. The point would be to make a site where fledgling states could hammer out ironclad constitutional clauses toward an actual public-serving state. Sadly, I'm pathetic and didn't do this. And no one else has either.

The more prepared grassroots movements are before the collapse, the less churn of warlords the state has to suffer during the aftermath.

Note that corporations, rich masterminds and foreign interests will still offer finances and materiel to shills to take over and serve as a ruthless puppet dictator. These will be your most difficult adversaries. The DPRK shows us how bad that can get.

Anarchism is about building from the ground up with mutual aid organizations, which create the infrastructure that will support labor unions, community service orgs and other public serving interests. Since these serve as a sneak attack on elite-serving establishment, accelleration doesn't help them, though mutual aid will help neighborhoods survive when the collapse comes.

uriel238 , 5 months ago

-25 SAN

uriel238 , 5 months ago

Funny, this is the problem with monarchy that drove western civilization to stop that nonsense. You can have the efforts of ten great (or at least mediocre) kings spoiled by one Joffrey or John of England.

It's how nations established constitutional monarchies and eventually republics.

uriel238 , 5 months ago

Wasn't John forced at swordpoint to sign the Magna Carta... several times, rather, after betraying the previous version, each time expending more lives of his loyalists?

Richard was awful, yes, but John is conspicuously first and last of his name, which, for my point, screams Don't be that guy.

uriel238 , 5 months ago

Eyes when they nucleate naturally. Some eyeless Swiss cheese is sliced and stamped with holes.

uriel238 , 5 months ago

Whenever we have disrupting technological advancements, DARPA looks at it to see if it can be applied to military action, and this has been true with generative AI, with LLMs and with sophisticated learning systems. They're still working on all of these.

They also get clickbait news whenever one of their test subjects does something whacky, like kill their own commander in order to expedite completing the mission parameters (in a simulation, not on the field.) The whole point is to learn how to train smart weapons to not do funny things like that.

So yes, that means on a strategic level, we're getting into the nitty of what we try to do with the tools we have. Generals typically look to minimize casualties (and to weigh factors against the expenditure of living troops) knowing that every dead soldier is a grieving family, is rhetoric against the war effort, is pressure against recruitment and so on. When we train our neural-nets, we give casualties (and risk thereof) a certain weight, so as to inform how much their respective objectives need to be worth before we throw more troopers to take them.

Fortunately, AI generals will be advisory to human generals long before they are commanding armies, themselves, or at least I'd hope so: among our DARPA scientists, military think tanks and plutocrats are a few madmen who'd gladly take over the world if they could muster a perfectly loyal robot army smart enough to fight against human opponents determined to learn and exploit any weaknesses in their logic.

uriel238 , 5 months ago

Our global catastrophic risks are no longer insignificant, and we're seeing in sharp bas relief the tragedy of the commons effect, that people with wealth and power (and control of industry) aren't looking to mitigate the damage they cause, seeking instead to increase their own gains relentlessly.

Beethoven and Beatles and Michelangelo are all in jeopardy of being lost (assuming we don't go extinct within the next few centuries), so I doubt that anything I do will have the same resilience.

There's a point where I realized the human condition may define its own great filter. To get past the ones we're facing now, we'll have to change our polarized attitudes, and to do that, we'll have to invent some sociological tricks we haven't worked out yet. And damn soon.

Maybe the otters will evolve into the next intelligent social species, and maybe they'll be super cute.

uriel238 , 5 months ago

You can't change a lightbulb unless it wants to change.

uriel238 , 5 months ago

The tower is the Elizabeth Tower, so Large Liz might be appropriate. It's been this way since Lizzie's Diamond Jubilee (it's a Brit thing) in 2012.

Big Ben is the largest bell in LL which was often confused for the tower itself, with much media calling the tower Big Ben when it was actually St. Stephen's Tower, or Sizeable Steve

You can call it whatever you want, but you'll have to explain you mean Big Ben, the giant clock tower unless your friend is up on recent Westminster history.

uriel238 , 5 months ago

It is about as trapezoidal as it is square.

uriel238 , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

Except that before 2012 it was St. Stephen's Tower. Big Ben was the largest bell in the tower.

If there's some point that the tower was officially named Big Ben I haven't found it. Granted that was the popular nickname of it during the 20th century.

uriel238 , 5 months ago

We should switch to base twelve.

uriel238 , 5 months ago

I bought a handcuff key (on a keychain wand) on Cops Plus. The company didn't require confirmation I was law enforcement.

uriel238 , 5 months ago

For transmascs, I'd recommend cargo shorts. It's practically an essential component of the dad uniform.

uriel238 , 5 months ago

Can confirm there are a lot of therapists who fail to get informed about their patients' specific circumstances.

When you get one that breaks client confidentiality, maybe even contacting authorities for no good reason, then you've found one that deserves to lose their licence and get publicly shunned. That or find the corpse of a suicide in their bedroom office one morning.

uriel238 , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

I figured if anyone was killed by this device it would cause a running mess of cascade lawsuits, even if it served as intended and killed the one who signed the TOS.

Then consider if the goggles glitched and activated on a false positive or if someone's kid tried the goggles on for a game.

This is why piracy deterrent payloads only extend to humiliation or stern warnings (rather than destruction of data or hardware). We can't restrict activations to perfectly just situations.

Something to think about as US law enforcement continues to kill Americans at four-plus a day.

uriel238 , 5 months ago

In this case hypothetical, say, if they sold the working goggles as a novelty. Even for most relatively safe electronics there's a long list of don'ts that often rule out normal use (let alone typical use). Infamously VR goggles sometimes cause epileptic seizures even in people susceptible to epileptic seizures.

Some judges recognize no one reads TOS or can understand the legal language. Others (such as SCOTUS) beieve the draconion terms in the TOS are enough to absolve the manufacturer of responsibility.

uriel238 , 5 months ago

I would very like to learn this slam for dark pattern use martial technique.

When I see dark patterns, I can't help but think the designer is antagonistic and is not interested in engaging me but manipulating me. It puts into question the good faith of the whole website / application / web-browser / operating system.

uriel238 , 5 months ago

Saints Row 2, The Third, IV go brrrrr!

uriel238 , 5 months ago

Consistency is not a strong point of the alt-right.

uriel238 , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

Is it a based hunter that goes after renegade furries, or a hunter of renegade based furries? This is an important distinction!

ETA Is based a positive attribute or a derision? Am I completely OOTL?

uriel238 , 5 months ago

Isn't PDF vector (with pixel drop-in elements)? Those should be scaleable to the word size (e.g. 128 bit) But the problem with these like some open world games is a lot of empty space with few exciting features.

1200DPI the size of Germany, or even enough text to fill Germany with 12 point fot would be impressive.

uriel238 , 5 months ago

I don't like sunlight and I'm a real stickler for boundaries, so yeah, all my windows are curtained.

I am probably the vampire of the neighborhood.

uriel238 , 5 months ago

First class flirting!

uriel238 , 5 months ago

I would quote it as $3500 or thirty-five hundred dollars. It's a common practice for radio since $3499.99 is read as thirty-four ninety-nine ninety-nine which is heard as $349,999

This value is too much for any VR/AR goggles in my budget. I'd read this as a thing for very specialized industrial purposes (say CAD/CAM) or a toy for rich people.

And if it's just a toy for rich people, it's not going to be well supported. If it's a CAD/CAM tool or a tool for disabled accessibility then all the software will be proprietary and overpriced as well.

uriel238 , 5 months ago

I am totally guilty of infodumping. When it's about a topic that sparks joy (in me), I call it geeking out as in I geeked out about about my Star Trek card game at the party and no one seemed to understand or mind too much.

uriel238 , 5 months ago

So here's a question: How do I photograph the moon to get its features and not a blurry luminous blob?

uriel238 , 5 months ago

This Star Trek card game. It's called Fleet And Federation and imagines what would happen if a setting like the original series was a well-edited reality show (which allowed me to mix in navy events and Hollywood development events into the mix). It's a co-op game that tries to operate as a fast(er) action TTRPG, the end result of occasionally getting face time with my old gaming crew but not having time enough with them for a proper TTRPG campaign (or even a run)

I worked on it a long while before giving up for lack of local playtesters and venues. In retrospect (having since learned more design theory online), F&F would suffer a bit from quarterbacking, but otherwise was fairly viable a working game.

That said, I was quite proud of countless diegetic elements of the game and would sometime have to explain it to someone, but first explain what the hell F&F was so that they'd know what I was talking about, and by then their eyes were thoroughly glazed over.

uriel238 , 5 months ago

I have a Samsung phone! But it's one or two years before the smart-moon-photographing-software scandal, so I have to actually figure out how to use the advanced settings of the camera.

uriel238 , 5 months ago

I have an urge to cry.

uriel238 , 5 months ago

I LOVE IT! IT'S MUCH BETTER THAN CATS! I'M GOING TO BUY NEURALINK™ FOR ALL MY FRIENDS!

uriel238 , 5 months ago (edited 13 days ago)

I have [a] conservative family.

To be conservative in 2024, you have to dismiss that some people in our community are miserable and every day we leave them to their fate is heinous.

In the US, a failure to vote [against] any given Republican (by voting [for] an opposing democrat) is another step towards autocracy and genocide. Every Republican in office is a force towards the Heritage Foundation's 2025 project, by which they will unmake the meager democratic features and civil rights that remain in the US.

Conservatives believe, by the natural extrapolation of their positions and behavior, I have no right to exist. (Curiously, this includes my own father, who simultaneously facilitates political efforts seeking out my extinction while expressing a dissonant interest in my well-being. He doesn't dare connect the two in his mind.)

uriel238 , 5 months ago

We're past the point of averting the climate crisis. We're now at the point where any effort to mitigate climate change, to reduce emissions, is damage control. But there's little doubt of a global population correction, likely in my lifetime, and probably defining the latter half of my grandson's life.

The risk for human extinction due to ecology collapse is no longer insignificant. More likely we'll be reduced tens of thousands. Civilization is going to collapse, and all that we do today, culture wise, is unlikely to survive.

Others have thought about this more than I. A good deep dive is The World Is Not Ending by Sophie From Mars (on YouTube) who points out that we're more inclined to imagine the end of the world than we are the end of capitalism. She imagines two outcomes; one in which we embrace mutualism sooner and one in which we hold onto our capitalist values and grind industry until the last possible moment.

I think the general response of the international community to Greta Thunberg's call to action demonstrates pretty well what the climate response movement is up against: The aristocrats and plutocrats that control our industries and nations will not listen to anyone that doesn't drop on them with nine feet of rainfall and 115 MPH winds. And even then they haven't budged.

Now from my perspective, it's not a matter of willpower, but whether our species is capable of organizing a response to the climate crisis when it threatens established edifices of economic and political power. All signs say that we just have not worked out a sociological method to change minds who would rather die and see their own species go extinct before giving up their own wealth. It's a fox and grapes situation, and may well doom the human species.

The human animal has demonstrated itself unable to be able to choose reason when wealth and power are on the line, and then once we pry it from the cold dead fingers of our elites, we can't trust anyone else who has it momentarily not to abuse it. And that is the great filter that will kill us.

uriel238 , 5 months ago

White hats can be prosecuted via the CFAA. they usually aren't (most of us are guilty of CFAA penalties) but some companies got sour to fixing their web security and instead would sue and push to prosecute.

So in the early 2010s the white hat community went gray to survive. And companies that don't pay their bounties oe cause trouble don't get pen tested by white hats (at least not when wearing a white hat).

uriel238 , 5 months ago

I was going to say Andorra after a bit of military adventurism. Could be some deunified fiefdoms after some billionaires bought land and noble titles. France doesn't take shit like that well. Spain may not care much.

uriel238 , 5 months ago

Donkey Power is an important unit used by Macho Business Donkey Wrestlers.

uriel238 , 5 months ago

When the Snowden releases came out the promise was the NSA was only using their massive surveillance machine to hunt down Islamist terrorists.

But since then they've passed tips to local precincts regarding loose cash in transit so that it can be seized and used by police departments for margarita ice crushers and other luxuries. The NSA itself gets a cut of the take.

This is to say NSA efforts are being used to rob Americans using asset forfeiture, which is about as far from for good or in support of a good cause as you can get.

uriel238 , 5 months ago

As with much of the federal government, the NSA's information security is lax and outdated, and strict records that are supposed to be kept about who looks at what are not actually filed.

We're pretty sure Russia and China are unofficially privy to any data they want.

NSA was supposed to be an INFOSEC department, making sure that Eve was out of business. That changed after the PATRIOT act (though the movie Sneakers predicted this change in mission). The eliptic curve scandal was a dead giveaway.

That said, at this point NSA leaks stuff to other law enforcement, and fourth-amendment protections are circumvented with parallel construction. Asset forfeiture puts the proof of innocence on the prior owner, so there are no rights to begin with. (Though this is changing state by state.)

uriel238 , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

Yes. I assumed you were assuming some of us would hold some of the usual centrist justifications for NSA, e.g. there are some serious meanies out there who might want to 9/11 or Pearl Harbor the US again, but risks of this could be drastically reduced by not engaging in military adventurism for sake our our industrialist plutocrats. Essentially, if the US stopped being an outrageous and brutal dick to the rest of the international community, then the numbers who would attack our civilians would be drastically reduced to fringe militant ideologues.

So yes, there are no valid justifications for NSA. It exists because the state and the legal departments of the state regard the US public as an enemy.

uriel238 , 5 months ago

Apparently you don't read TechDirt, which I have for over a decade now, and NSA had been active in shenanigans and lax securityy since the wiretapping scandals of the aughts, and in 2023 has been leaking stuff to FBI without warrants (which is supposed to be unconstitutional but between the PATRIOT act and the Federalist-Society-dominated SCOTUS, we may be no longer legally protected from NSA surveillance as an unreasonable search).

The FISC has always been a rubber stamp court, so it shouldn't be necessary for law enforcement to circumvent warrants for NSA information, but it turns out it's just easier using the NSA backdoor access.

I will admit to a certain degree of cynicism. When official channels tell me something is secure or handled with respect to all ethical and civic concerns, and investigative journalists tell me the opposite, I trust the journalists more than I do the official channels. But then I've been through the aughts and the George W. Bush administration when the only sources of actual facts were from foreign sources, because the native news agencies were terrified of reprisals for failing to toe the line.

It's why when people are alarmed today that the fascist autocrats are here and SWATTING their political enemies, I can only quietly sip my coffee from the corner.

uriel238 , 5 months ago

Yes, there's a balance that has to be struck between protection and liberty. Years ago I speculated what could happen if everyone was chipped into a system that monitored their vitals, with the resulting data we could track morbid outcomes (say heart attacks) to their core roots and then track people who are currently experiencing early warning signs and show the TRUE POWER OF PREVENTATIVE MEDICINE

The problem is, of course, so much data can be used for purposes against the interests of the public, and will once there are technicians privy to all that information. This was the original business model of Google: no-one looks at the data except its owner (e.g. I get to look at my own contacts lists) and Google profits from analysis of multiple data points. Only the police got the power of courts to look at the data, to the point where they wanted everyone who happened to websearch a given name, or whose phones were in a radius of a crime scene at a certain time.

You don't want to be a non-white or a known protestor who had business near a crime scene in the US.

So yeah, until we're able to lock up data so no-one but their intended audience has the capacity to read it, even when a court writes a warrant, we can't trust such all-encompassing systems, especially if the state is at risk of turning into an ideology-driven regime. (England, for instance, still has hard feelings between Catholics and Anglicans, and the Irish / UK border is a bit tense these days.)

uriel238 , 5 months ago

Eh. As someone who knows the vagina as the canal part, I'd expect that slapping it is a bit on the kinky side and involves toys.

Slapping the vulva is a more common thing and doesn't require toys (unless you really need the rider's crop sting).

In a general sense yes when a woman refers to her vag it can be slang for the whole kit and kaboodle. But then getting technical can be confusing. Mind you, I freak out when my recipe books have conflicts between their written instructions and illustrations. So it may just be me.

Pussy wasn't great as a colloquialism even before Trump ruined it. Though now I think of feminist punk rock and art like Pussy Riot and Hole.

uriel238 , 5 months ago

This is what I hoped to see. Apple's at actual risk of harm (or pissing off its shareholders) by messing with the EU.

Here in the States, our regulatory departments are entirely captured so there's little to stop corporate anti-competitive shenanigans.