Notices by sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net), page 5
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Monday, 16-Sep-2024 13:43:43 JST 
sj_zero
Yep. Design your shit to last forever and design your shit to be repairable if it does break. 90% of things we replace would never be replaced in our lifetimes after that. "But the companies will go our of business!" maybe or maybe they can try to create stuff we actually want to buy instead of just selling us progressively worse versions of the same shit year after year. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Monday, 16-Sep-2024 13:35:22 JST
sj_zero
Having officially upgraded from 16GB to a whopping 32GB of memory, I'm excited at the prospect of having three chrome tabs open at once without swapping to disk! -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Monday, 16-Sep-2024 12:42:37 JST
sj_zero
I wonder what would happen if someone tried to wire up a European 220v light bulb to an American 120v light socket? The active current regulation chip would presumably try to keep the current the same, and the voltage across each LED would be half, so as long as you're hitting the minimum threshold voltage, you should be driving those LEDs way less. Pick up a 100W equivalent bulb, it's suddenly putting out 50W equivalent, I'd guess you'd have a bulb that lasts more or less forever.
Or maybe not? -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Monday, 16-Sep-2024 10:43:21 JST
sj_zero
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klaJqofCsu4
Relevant -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Monday, 16-Sep-2024 10:39:10 JST
sj_zero
I might be misreading that, but it looks to me like a conspiracy like "The sun rose today, and now this happened. Clearly there's a connection. Very suspicious."
I mean... of course a political campaign sent fundraising texts? -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Tuesday, 10-Sep-2024 02:32:42 JST
sj_zero
Ah, I see what you mean now. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Tuesday, 10-Sep-2024 01:50:07 JST
sj_zero
Of course it does. That's the only reason to have immunity. There's no need for legal immunity from something that isn't illegal.
Now, if you're talking about more limited qualified immunity lower officials have, that's a different question. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Monday, 09-Sep-2024 21:38:50 JST
sj_zero
And it's also true that the same sovereign immunity that protects Trump protects the head of the DHS. The government won't do anything to the people who did bad in office. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Monday, 09-Sep-2024 07:52:56 JST
sj_zero
"Here's Doom 1, except it looks worse than the original and takes more GPU power than existed 10 years ago" -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Monday, 09-Sep-2024 07:14:33 JST
sj_zero
Technology improves, but it doesn't always improve in ways you expect. Steve Balmer discounted the iPhone for business because it didn't have a keyboard, for example. The articles proclaiming that the metaverse was going to take over the world and plots of virtual land were going to be a multi-billion dollar industry have turned out to be as absurd as they looked at the time but there's a little cottage industry of VR uses. A lot of catchphrase technologies didn't end up the way people thought, such as big data, and in practice they had hard limitations that limited their applicability.
It was a surprisingly long time ago now that cloud gaming was going to be the next big thing, but it basically collapsed too. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Monday, 09-Sep-2024 07:01:59 JST
sj_zero
I spoke to my toddler about this and he said: "Father, what have these parents been teaching their children to induce such histrionics? It seems to me that one of the duties of a parent is to provide an environment in which a child can learn and grow without the insecurities of the adult world for a time, and for a child to say and do something so horrific suggests they are failing at that duty."
lol kids say the darndest things! -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Tuesday, 03-Sep-2024 09:49:19 JST
sj_zero
I hate it when people misinterpret the double slit experiment.
Look, Quantum Physics is totally unintuitive and doesn't behave like the macro world, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have rules or that it's a magic spell. It means that it has its own set of rules separate from the macro world.
If you measure things in the macro world you change the measurement by measuring it too. For example, in order to measure a temperature, you have an RTD you run current through that adds heat or a bimetallic element that takes it away. Even something non-touch like infrared requires the object's measurement to change because giving off the infrared light takes energy. This isn't because an all-knowing universe server operator steps in to fiddle with energy levels, it's because the nature of the stuff at the macro level is such that you need to add or remove energy from a system to measure that system. Sometimes like using light to detect distance of a quite large object it's a trivial amount of energy, but start bouncing photons off of something still in the relatively macro realm that is nonetheless not at the quantum level, and you'll make a real mess.
When you get down to the unintuitive quantum level, the same applies. It isn't because some mystical being is looking down going "oh, looks like a human is watching, better stop surfing twitter", it's because the nature of the stuff at that size is such that you can know how fast something is or where it is but not both, and that's that. As well, sometimes light acts like a particle and sometimes it acts like a wave, and again that's not because the server operator steps in and changes things, it follows rules we can learn even if they are unintuitive.
Some of the earliest work on quantum physics ended up applying to cat's whisker crystal radios. They had to learn a whole new discipline to understand why the crystals behaved in a certain way, and that ended up leading to semiconductors and later microchips. Quantum physics applies in every bit of a modern CPU or GPU, even if nobody's looking at the screen.
When people start saying "Quantum Physics says" and then the craziest shit in the macro world you ever heard in your life, it's the same as the rich guy in the 50s who drank radium infused water because "energy is good, radiation is energy, so load up my water with radiation, doc!" -- it's quackery of a real thing that's used every day for real things. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Monday, 02-Sep-2024 21:35:39 JST
sj_zero
Last week, dozens of piracy sites went down that had shows that weren't on Crunchyroll. This week, those shows are on Crunchyroll.
I'm not making any arguments about why that happened, but it's strange af. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Monday, 02-Sep-2024 09:54:01 JST
sj_zero
I was listening to a video about the new Star Wars stuff that came out, and it brought back up something I keep on tripping over every time the discussions come up: Blazing Saddles.
Blazing Saddles is a comedy Movie produced by Mel Brooks in 1974. The main character is a black man in 1874 who is working on the railroad. He gets himself in trouble, and eventually finds himself the sheriff of a town who hates him because he's black. He goes through a typical western plot of the scheming senator trying to destroy the town to make himself rich, but the twist is that part of the way he was going to do that was by making a black guy the sheriff. Instead, the new sheriff comes up with a plan to save the town by building a fake town nearby and slowing down the bandits by building a toll booth. The fake town is booby-trapped with explosives. The rest of the movie descends into a fourth wall breaking gong show. All throughout, the movie constantly made jokes dragging the racism of 1874 into the limelight as an object of ridicule.
I saw it for the first time a few years ago, and it was absolutely hilarious. It was massively successful at the box office, making 119 million dollars on a 2.6 million dollar budget.
What does Blazing Saddles have to do with the new Star Wars?
Two things:
First, the movie was as I understand it pretty cutting edge for the day, but it was a decade where many cutting edge movies were being put out. It had a black lead, it directly addressed racism as a core plot point, and as I recall it had more n-bombs than the freeside of the fediverse.
Second, 1974 was (sorry, my Gen-X mutuals) 50 years ago. A child born the day that movie came out (sorry! sorry!) are starting to look at retirement, and anyone who saw it in theatres is likely already well past retirement age (sorry Boomers!). The key point here is that it's a movie that's been around for a long time.
Really, there are things we can criticize the boomers as a bloc for, but it's historical revisionism to look at this movie and say "they didn't have black people in movies, they didn't discuss racism, and if they had black people in those movies white people wouldn't watch them" -- obviously all of that is wrong.
Star Wars was released in 1977, and it did a lot of things too -- Everyone knows Princess Leia was one of the early girlboss characters, but besides that the assault on the death star had a lady named Mon Mothra in charge, and in the movie it wasn't a big deal, everyone was focused on the mission.
The Empire Strikes back introduced a black character, Lando Calrissian (If I get the Star Wars names wrong here, I'm not even sorry) who was the black leader of an entire city and a really cool character to boot. Everyone remembers Lando.
In Return of the Jedi in 1983, it explicitly reveals Leia was Luke's sister and also strong in the Force, so if Luke fails, she would be the galaxy's last hope, not directly showing a female jedi because that's not what the story was about, but making it clear girls could be jedis.
The Prequel trilogy introduced Motherfuckin Samuel L. Jackson playing a Motherfuckin black motherfuckin jedi. Everyone was made of planks of wood in that movie, but apparently other media helped flesh out his character as incredibly interesting.
I'm enumerating all these things to show that Star Wars already hit all these notes before many of the actresses rambling on about diversity were even born. They're acting like they're doing something really amazing that will change the world, but the world already changed, and it was the Baby Boomers that changed it. These people are walking into the middle of Washington DC and pretending they founded America.
In short, it's literally not progress. Considering how poorly done these diversity roles are done and how poorly the media is taken because they focus first on pretending to be groundbreaking and then maybe sometime after with making something people actually want to see, it's worse than nothing because we already have had competent people make good works people look back on fondly. When a bad piece of media carries your message, it hurts the cause as much as a good piece of media carrying your message helps your cause.
The marketing juggernaut has taken stuff that just kind of "Was" and changed it into a bullet point for the marketing blurb. "Star wars 4: we no longer murder women and minorities, and we're also no asbestos free!"
I also feel like it lets people who aren't nearly as competent as their parents generation pretend they're doing something important when in reality they're just failing to live up to the standards of those who came before. "Well even if our movie sucks you need to watch it because we have black people!" -- Nobody cares. If you take Star Wars as a whole continuity, there isn't really any sort of real minority that isn't somehow represented. What they're doing isn't important, which is a deathblow because it also isn't competently produced or entertaining.
Some might call the problem tokenism, I think that's wrong -- the problem isn't necessarily tokenism, it's worse: With tokenism, you include a black character to meet a quota. That can mean the black character is a token addition but otherwise inoffensive (and in fact can end up as a great character in their own right under a good writer). This is an active, religious thespiannic diversity. It's shouting from the streetcorner so everyone can see you being ever so pious. And as part of the performative aspect it stops being inoffensive and starts actively trying to be offensive. You see it in the interviews around the modern movies -- nobody's seen the movie yet, but they're railing against fans who hate the movie, especially "STRAIGHT WHITE MEN" because they hope that muckraking will cause controversy and attacking the core demographic of the film was a good way of doing that. Thankfully, people are getting wise to the grift, and so instead of getting outraged when these people say stupid things, they just ignore them, and now that the money is running out we're seeing the trickling of a sea change. It goes beyond merely performative, and into the thespiannic -- like a stage actor screaming their lines so everyone in the back row can hear.
"Oh, this movie [that was just announced and nobody knows about yet] there's so many people attacking me, I got death threats!" uh huh? On the Internet, even? Sounds scary. And they were just lurking, waiting to jump on you, they didn't even wait for the film to be announced! Horrifying.
If you're actually breaking barriers, you don't get full backing of the Hollywood hype machine. The suits aren't going to want to support you because you're trying something new and dangerous. In that sense, Gina Carano's actions are more cutting edge than any of the management approved controversy being drummed up, and they fired her and blacklisted her.
This concept of "Safe edgy" is interesting to think about, but it isn't new. TV in the 90s was filled with TV shows or advertisements pretending they were pushing the edge when in reality they were doing exactly what the execs wanted them to be doing. Once you know what you're looking at (Don't you DARE spell "Extreme" with an E at the beginning because we're XTREME here! "No way!" WAAAAAYYYY!) the verisimilitude (appearance of being real) breaks down and you realize you're looking at a square pretending to be edgy and cool. And to be clear on something, there was a lot of fake edgy back then, but there was also a lot of real edgy and those guys were constantly one quip from having their show canceled by the networks. A lot of them didn't make it, but they left behind great works.
The veneer of fake edgy hid milquetoast products back in the day, and often you'd get your XTREME LEMONADE and find that it was competent lemonade, not great but not horrible, just boring. I think part of the problem today is that fake edgy often is a mask over a mask; You're obviously being fake and so under that mask is something, but the boring underneath the fake edgy mask is the actual mask over what is often the absolutely horrible people inhabiting Hollywood and other media industries.
But we found that in the following decades that a lot of our heroes in Media were terrible. You'd have some actress up on the big stage and she would make a point to heartfeltedly thank Harvey Weinstein who that actress probably needed to do something unspeakable to in order to get the part, right before they paid lip service to whatever social cause is trendy this week. We didn't know, but they did and they were complicit. And anyone who thinks that that was an isolated incident and that everything is fine now is in denial. For all the "we just love women and minorities!", it's a paper thin facade intended to cover up the window through which you can see Jeffrey Epsteins private island.
I know, that's a lot to think about from just a bunch of idiotic hollywood actors pretending they're saving the world by selling you a shitty movie, but it isn't like I'm interested in the movies themselves anymore. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Sunday, 01-Sep-2024 20:56:20 JST
sj_zero
Yesterday I posted a big thing talking about why nobody wants to win the next US election, but I want to make a slight correction: I wrote that "Most alarm lights that haven't had masking tape put over them by the government are screaming imminent stagflationary depression, maybe one of the worst in American History", but I think we're already in that depression and have been for a while.
If they're lying about the inflation rate (which I've written at length that they are), and it's actually been 15-20% per year and not 20% over 3 years, how would that change the way we look at the current economy? Well for one thing, it would mean that every developed country is in double digit recession and has been for years. So some might say "but employment is at record levels!" -- well, if we assume arguendo that they aren't fudging those numbers, it makes perfect sense from a market economics standpoint -- If you are a business and your labor costs are going down 15-20% per year, why not keep that labor? With the labor getting cheaper every year for the same or greater output, it's just rational decisionmaking to keep everyone working. It's the same as what libertarians have said for years about the minimum wage -- if there was no minimum wage there might be 100% employment because you'll even hire the most useless worker if it's for a dollar a year.
I think we can look at the tent cities that never existed in many communities before as evidence that things are not as rosy as the government claims. I've never seen that before in my life, and now they're everywhere.
Instead of looking at my post as talking about the economy from the viewpoint of actors who are in bed with the government. For them, the actual economy doesn't matter as much as the numbers since that's what they'll look at to discuss reality. We saw that recently when the press was attacking individuals for saying things are bad when the numbers claim otherwise -- "The numbers say you're not doing so badly!" oh well then I guess I don't live in a tent this year! Great! I'll tell the bank! -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Saturday, 31-Aug-2024 20:04:31 JST
sj_zero
In private, some Republicans are saying it would be better if Trump loses the next election.
From a non-partisan standpoint, we're cutting it really close. Most alarm lights that haven't had masking tape put over them by the government are screaming imminent stagflationary depression, maybe one of the worst in American History, and everyone with eyes and basic math skills can see the looming sovereign debt crisis. Nobody wants to be holding this hot potato because whoever is in power at that time is almost certainly going to preside over a disaster and there's nothing to be done about it.
From a totally non-partisan standpoint, Kamala Harris is a terrible candidate for President. She speaks to the American Public like they're 4 year olds, her record as Vice President is basically free real estate for the Republicans, she was the least liked vice president in US history, her only primary campaign was the weakest of all the Democrats on stage with her dropping out first, There are better people within the Democratic party to run, but they didn't and they aren't -- instead they installed Kamala more or less by fiat. I think part of the reason for that is they're not stupid and they know full well winning the next election is a phyrric victory, and whoever is president during that term is effectively ending their political career so might as well let the weakest candidate either lose and end her career or win and end her career. In so doing, they keep their powder dry for the next viable election cycle.
Notwithstanding concerns that Trump will try to crown himself dictator (concerns that I think the conservative response to January 6th prove unfounded -- conservatives want to conserve the constitution and violating that would not go over well), he's only got one term left as president, and he's getting quite old so this is probably his last kick at the can so regardless of whether the party wants to win or not, he clearly does. He seems to be going all-in on a big tent strategy this time, which is why he's brought former democrats like RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard into the fold and adopted compromise positions on wedge issues such as abortion. Personally, as long as he retains his core identity and brand, I think it's a winning strategy, insofar as such a thing can exist. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Saturday, 31-Aug-2024 03:01:10 JST
sj_zero
I just saw data that 99% of employee contributions from Fox News and Wall Street journal parent company news corp go to Democrats.
Controlled opposition much? -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Friday, 30-Aug-2024 20:47:22 JST
sj_zero
I was thinking in the shower about the idea of a "fidelity floor".
Ever listened to music from the 1940s? It doesn't quite sound right. On the other hand, starting around the late 1950s, sound recordings got increasingly high fidelity to the point that you could slap an old audio recording on a new MP3 and the audio might be out of date but it sounds just fine.
Same with film. Early early film looks like crap, but very quickly it became good enough, and today a remastered version of Snow White can be sold on the market. If you think about it, that movie is old enough to be a great grandfather, but the masters can create media that's just fine.
Even the Internet has something like this. Early early video was really poor since it had to be playable or downloadable on a 56k modem or less, but I pretty routinely watch videos from 10 years ago, and if they're a decently recorded 480p, that's good enough for my eyes.
This even occurs with video games. The Atari 2600 might not really be something a kid would play today, but SNES games are at a level that kids may be fully OK playing a final fantasy or a Super Mario World. GOG has an entire business model on selling games that are decades old because they're just fine.
The reason to think about this idea is copyright law. Early books did degrade over time, and early recordings did too. But as forms of media hit a fidelity floor, they become timeless. That timelessness is beneficial in a work of media, but if you give a company a virtually unlimited monopoly on that work, then some conglomerate can own an increasing amount of our cultural history, and I think there's something important in that fact we need to think about. If your great great grandmother sang a song from Snow White and you integrated that song over generations, doesn't it seem odd that you might die of old age before the public owns that song?
To an extent I think it's a great argument for creative commons or for dedicating works to the public domain (something I've written into the legal page of The Graysonian Ethic, releasing it to the public domain or licensing it as Creative Commons Zero 15 years after first publication), letting someone own that much of our culture isn't healthy from a societal standpoint. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Friday, 30-Aug-2024 11:53:18 JST
sj_zero
Absolutely true. It's been really strange seeing the massive shifts just in the past 5 years. It's like.... major parts of ideologies just suddenly change completely. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Thursday, 29-Aug-2024 23:02:47 JST
sj_zero
Some people are confused as to how anti-vax sentiment can be considered progressive, since the dominant narrative has been that anti-vax is a right wing idea.
That only happened very recently. Prior to the pandemic, the largest constituency of anti-vaxxers were progressive women who were worried about the effects of vaccines on their children since they're drugs produced by big pharma who have several blockbuster examples of selling things that turned out to be horrible such as thalidomide. It appeals to the anti-corporate sector of progressivism, and there would be an element where instead of using big pharma chemicals they'd prefer to use more naturalistic methods to stay healthy such as diet, exercise, and herbal supplements.
There's data to back up the idea that anti-vaxxing is more of a left-wing idea, and that's the fact that many breakthrough cases of preventable diseases such as measles and mumps are in states such as California which have a lot more adherence to progressive ideology.
The right wing version of anti-vaxxing is actually a misnomer since it's typically only the one set of vaccines they're concerned about, and most right wing "anti-vaxxers" will fully vaccinate their kids except for the one. In reality it's more just linguistic propaganda being used to try to shame people into doing what they're told.
It's a simple logical argument: "Some As are B, which does not imply all As are B" some vaccines are effective and useful, but not all are. And some vaccines are particularly useful for some people at some times, but not as useful generally -- If you're bitten by a rabid dog, a rabies vaccine will save your life, but typically we don't blanket vaccinate people for rabies because the exposure to rabies is very low (most people will never be at risk), and the vaccine is highly effective after the initial bite if it's given quickly enough. Like many things, it's a decision relying on personal circumstances as well as blanket categorizations.
Some people go "But doctors said it was ok!" but doctors also prescribed thalidomide to pregnant women so let's chill out and accept that it's ok for people to use their brains and think for themselves even if they come to conclusions we don't agree with.
It is a first principle of medical interventions that every medical intervention has the potential to cause harm. Even something with no active medical ingredient such as sugar pill has recorded side effects due to placebo effect, and once you start injecting manufactured substances into the body the risk increases considerably. Therefore it's sensible to be careful about choosing medical interventions whose benefits outweigh the risks. That's true whatever your political ideology.
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