Notices by mhoye (mhoye@mastodon.social)

And I have some complicated feelings about this, that are definitely at the intersection of notional masculinity and identity threat, (❤️ @grimalkina!) and I kind of feel the same way about a lot of modern computing:

This used to be tactile, it used to be _sensual_. The hands on the stick shift snapping it into place, putting a hand on the computer to see the fans were working right, to feel the hum and the temperature of it. And that sensuality was a connection, a kind of intimacy.

But EVs don't make any noise at all. They make some noises at low speeds deliberately, there are safety regulations about this now - but otherwise why would they?

This is demoralizing enough for some enthusiasts that they even wax enthusiastic about fidget-stick placebos like this (sort of embarassing, IMO) "manual EV prototype":

https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a45754176/toyota-manual-ev-prototype-drive/

The thing is... cars have been faking engine noise for years.

What a BMW driver hears is _nothing at all_ like the sound the car makes. Pollution, efficiency and and safety regs - and performance, every watt that goes into moving air to make noise is a watt that doesn't make it to the tires - all combine to make engines quiet.

But BMW drivers want growly, so: the sound system knows exactly what the engine is doing and generates synthetic engine sounds it pumps through the speakers.

Vroom.

I'm not a Car Guy, but it must be kind of demoralizing for Car Guys to be seeing these sharp-lined rumbly-engined supercars getting blown out by relatively inexpensive family haulers that barely make noise at all.

https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a63689417/lightning-lap-2025/

We used to joke about putting buggy whips in the new horseless carriages, but you genuinely see a lot of that in electric cars, careful tweaking to imitate the nuances of gas vehicle behaviour instead of just... being EVs.

"Men only want one thing, and it's"

It's intimacy. Men only want one thing, and it's intimacy. But sex is the only socially sanctioned way that straight men can seek out intimacy without running the risk of being called a fag.

And it's awful; the internal rot of toxic masculinity. But when I see so many professional computer-touchers talking about building furniture or learning to cook or bake or or, I get it. I understand wanting that tactile connection to the world, how losing it feels.

And to Carl Sagan's point about being trapped in the grip of the bamboozle, it is harder to admit the pain of this than it is to just stew in it.

But having grown up with that physicalism, a relationship with stuff that hummed and growled and warmed and hissed and scratched and clanked, having that side of the experience dissolved down to a car you start with a button and the sterility of a computing that reduces you to pawing at a piece of glass if it's even in the same room... I understand.

Remember, kids: if you work hard, save your money, invest prudently, keep that rainy day fund around and remember that you're saving for the long term, then you can lose more money in six hours than both your parents together made in the best years of their lives because a bunch of ignorant racist shitheads in an entirely different country elected an illiterate bankrupt game-show-host huckster to their highest public office and there won't be a damn thing you can do about it except ride it out.

@GossiTheDog Are you serious, does it verbatim say “or whatever”?

@mcc Gankra’s “c isn’t a language, it’s an interface” post should be required reading for anyone who brags about their proximity to the hardware.

https://faultlore.com/blah/c-isnt-a-language/

“Societal collapse is inevitable” my wayward cowardly son _change_is inevitable. Society is _how we navigate change without_ collapse, and the sooner you start acting like society is a thing you participate in, nurture and support instead of the thing on the other side of the glass that delivers your groceries and send you bills in the mail the sooner you’ll stop feeling quite as lonely, tired and frightened all the time.

Your alienation is not your destiny.

I say again: the US dollar’s unique position as a global-norm fiat currency means that Americans are buying real physical goods from all over the world with tokens made of nothing more than the Federal Reserve's notion of stability and the abstract idea that America is worth something, and they’re tearing this down because it’s somehow grievously unfair, and what they’re tearing down is the Federal Reserve's notions of stability and the abstract idea that America is worth something,

"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back."

- Carl Sagan, "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark."

( @grimalkina ...)

Incredible to think that this is all happening within the institutions that control a global-norm fiat currency.

The US, without exaggeration, is buying real physical goods from all over the planet with printed tokens made of nothing more than the Federal Reserve's notion of balance and the abstract idea that America is worth something.

And their government wants to throw that all away because somehow it's "unfair" and a "bad deal."

“We’re firing all the people who weren’t working on important things. We’re keeping everyone who told them what things to work on. This means we will move faster and make better decisions. This is so difficult for me personally.”

- every layoff announcement.

Relatedly: don't forget that office and networked printers aren't really "printers" and haven't been for decades; they're networked servers that happen to output printed media. They store userID and datestamped logs of everything anyone prints on them, and nobody throws out logs.

Stay safe out there.

In case this is useful to somebody:

Because of corporate collusion with law enforcement dating back to the 80s, all colour printers put tracking information on their printouts, whether you're printing a colour document or not, encoding information that ties printouts back to the specific printer used.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots

In 2018, scholars at TU Dresden created a tool to re-anonymize color-printed documents by obscuring that data:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3206004.3206019

The tool: https://github.com/dfd-tud/deda

How many dangerous turning points in a row do people need to see before they realize they're looking at a death spiral?

My daughter tried to drop Jolkien Rolkien Rolkien Tolkien on me just now, but I was prepared and counterattacked successfully with George Reorge Rartin Martin. The situation may yet escalate.

@jrconlin @dalias @jwz

Fail2ban with timeouts set to weeks it is then.

@jrconlin booooo. But thanks for the link.