Catzilla. Truly a loaf incarnate.

deleted by creator

With due respect, it is time to go outside.

When I fall off my routine I lose a ton of progress. That first hundred K after a long rest absolutely sucks for me. I won’t run on an injury, but I understand the fear of the pit.

Individual data points like “I take pilates”, “I work nights and weekends”, and “I live in Smalltown, ST” might not mean anything on their own, but if you can connect this data to a single person, then realize there’s only one pilates studio in Smalltown, then look up their hours and notice there’s only one day class on weekdays, you can make a reasonable guess as to a regular time when a person is away from home. This is called data brokerage.

This is a comically contrived example; the real danger is in the association of countless data points spread across millions of correlated identities. It’s not just your data, it’s the association of your data with that of your friends and family. Most people are constantly streaming their location, purchases, beliefs, and affiliations out to anyone who cares enough to look. Bad actors may collate their data and use it to take advantage of them, and the only move they have is to ask for prohibitive legislation. As if we don’t already have prohibitive legislation.

Anonymity is expensive, inconvenient, and fragile, but it’s the only mechanism that protects individuals from the information economy, which I would put right next to ecology in terms of critical 21st-22nd century social problems. It also helps us resist censorship, but that’s a different essay.

He cannot protec
Nor can he attac
But he is a little hat

And Jesus said, “verily, I say unto you, know thy audience.”

That’s a good thing. Discord is chugging its way through the last half of the Web 2.0 service to social media pipeline. It’s a VC-funded multimedia enterprise extended around a novel technology core optimized for its original service offering, real-time voice/text. Nobody is immune to bloat, but because Matrix is a protocol standard, not an app, users have the option of sticking with minimal clients and servers that won’t (necessarily) get destroyed by feature creep.

If you’ve tried Element and thought “ah, slow Discord,” maybe have a scroll through https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/. I don’t want to get off topic but all my favorite software is standard/specification-based.

https://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/

Don’t wait in town.

All it is necessary to do is to abolish all other forms of taxation until the weight of taxation rests upon the value of land irrespective of improvements, and take the ground-rent for the public benefit.
~ Henry George, Social Problems

Home slice I respect the grind but I gotta be real with you I haven’t bought a GPU since the Obama administration

Oh my God! That’s awful! Which ones?! Which sites, specifically, though?! You know, so I can call for bans.

It’s also not clear how the law will be enforced or to what extent.

No shit. Isn’t that the point? Use outrage to justify the growth of an impenetrable body of law addressing all social and economic behavior, then selectively enforce subjective interpretations to satisfy powerful groups and remain in power. So it goes for any population center whose rapid growth creates the illusion of independence.

Can we sell NYC to Canada yet? We’d make a bundle, they wouldn’t even be mad, and I’d sleep a lot better with the border of a superpower between me and a stack of nine million people who think privacy is a sin.

Well pardon me if I politically digress in the LOTR memes group, but it might get worse before it gets better. Encryption, for example, is an inherent existential threat to authoritarianism, and there is global bipartisan support for law which would (or already did) criminalize it under broad or subjective circumstances. The exponential growth of industry puts massive economic strain on political systems, and those explicitly designed to be procedurally overthrown (via representative democracy, for example) may adapt by creating unconstitutional political tokens such as, just off the top of my head, internal revenue systems designed to destabilize opponents’ campaign finance systems, aggressive zoning practices intended to control demography, and deficit spending courtesy of international geopolitical entanglement backed by informally declared unconventional warfare.

It’s irrational to refrain from criticizing the left wing, which, in the US, supports all of the above practices when the White House is blue. So does the right when it’s red. We have to get past this shit. Industry exacerbates otherwise manageable resource asymmetry. We need to put our cultural differences on hold while we purge the bias and clientelism from our internal revenue systems. Only then will this pressure to enforce subjective values subside to a level where it can be managed by individuals and their technology.

* dons wizard hat

You think you’re joking, but peer-to-peer, capability-based distribution is the future of web design. Federation protocols (like ActivityPub, on which run Lemmy, Kbin, Mastodon, et. al.) are a big step up from single points of centralization like Reddit and Twitter, but most implementations are still fundamentally client/server architectures which give server owners power over users. Some of the people who invented ActivityPub have already moved into a new phase of distributed systems architecture. “Second-party” is not a terrible way to think about it.

WASM (WebAssembly) is one of the key technical breakthroughs that will facilitate much richer distribution; it allows many languages to run natively (fast) in common browsers. No longer will we all be necessarily bound to the abomination that is Javascript. With WASM, backend guys like me can run our fancy languages/databases right on your browser, building stronger meshes of user computers acting like lighter versions of federated servers. Together with Free Software ─ the legal right to share and change code ─ this technology represents the democratization of the Internet.

So why hasn’t this glorious revolution happened already? Well, WASM support is still not ubiquitous and there are still serious architectural challenges whose solutions are very much in progress. Security is a big one. With centralized infrastructure, the most efficient way to handle security is a concept called ACLs (Access Control Lists), which are like firewalls ─ lists of rules for who can do what. With ACLs, each node has all the tools and a copy of the rules. This does not work when you want powerful nodes to run independently under the control of complete strangers.

The way forward is Capability-Based Security, which includes three big ideas:

1. Each node has only the tools that it needs.
2. When a node needs a new tool, it has to ask its neighbors to borrow it.
3. Just because a node is borrowing a tool doesn’t mean it can share it with others.

Cryptographically-enhanced capability-based security makes the computational power of individual nodes irrelevant to their role in the larger system. WASM contains an implementation of this idea ─ it’s called WASI (WASM System Interface) ─ but there are different approaches with different tradeoffs. The one I’m studying right now is called Spritely Goblins, developed by some of the people who invented ActivityPub. You can read more at https://spritely.institute.

Avocado oil is great for popcorn. It doesn’t add any flavor but I love the resulting texture: very crisp and clean. I like using red or blue corn because the contrast is visually appealing. You want long, skinny kernels to get the butterfly popcorn. Personally I’m crazy for cheesy popcorn, and the secret there is to find cheese powder with some savory herbs like oregano. I also love to do it with Kashmiri (floral hot Indian chili) powder.

Important edit: Do NOT under any circumstance use chili popcorn to spice up Netflix & Chill. This is a snack for lonely degenerates who don’t even masturbate daily any more. It’s for watching war documentaries and French New Wave, not pervy cartoons and superhero throwdowns with a plot designed to be ignored while you finger your frenemies. You won’t look worldly and sophisticated while you’re driving somebody to the fucking hospital. Be responsible.

The issue isn’t the composition of the object but rather property and contract. The prosthetic limb comparison isn’t bad in my opinion, except this would be an experimental prosthetic limb that patients agreed to test with full knowledge and consent that it could be removed without their permission.

Again, I would hate to be in that position, but if I agreed to it, I understand my legal options would be limited. Again, this isn’t a company ruining someone’s life over a little money, this is a corporation unable to continue operating. Again, please consider the fact that a corporation which can treat epilepsy went backrupt because it couldn’t afford to do business in the regulatory environment of the health industry. I don’t understand how adding more subjective laws with hand-waved economic foundations is supposed to help this situation.

I can’t imagine what it’s like to live with epilepsy, nor to have a debilitating disease reenter your life after you’d become accustomed to its management. In her position, I imagine I would be doing everything I could to regain access to life-changing technology. Sympathy for Rita Leggett doesn’t make this story “dystopian,” nor is it a violation of anyone’s rights.

It was a trial! All participants agreed to have the device removed. If they didn’t, they’d be walking around with unsupported hardware in their brains, because the system that hardware was connected to was dissolved. Representing this legal outcome as a human rights violation is a predictable dilution of human rights.

Ienca likens it to the forced removal of organs, which is forbidden in international law.

There’s a vital difference between the removal of a body part and the removal of a tool you agreed to host, on condition of its release, before changing your mind. NeuroVista used novel technology to make meaningful progress in the treatment of epilepsy! Our response to this should be to encourage others like them, not to build bureaucratic restrictions hindering new innovators.

Companies should have insurance that covers the maintenance of devices should volunteers need to keep them beyond the end of a clinical trial, for example.

Who would insure this requirement?! Indefinite support of novel technology? Be serious. This article absolutely breezes over NeuroVista’s bankruptcy like it’s a little inclement weather. The fact is that biotech research is nearly illegal by default. Try to restrain your distaste for industrialization long enough to imagine starting and running this company:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6763675/

Does anybody have a magnifying glass I can borrow