• 6 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • You’re I guess looking at a feed of everything there is with no anchor to the correct side of politics? Try that with ActivityPub and just ingest the entire ecosystem with no home instance or blocklist and you’ll get lots of this.

    But I think you are right that the Bluesky PDS will not refuse to host you for saying things along the lines of “The US should continue to sell all kinds of weapons to Israel”, whereas a lot of Mastodon instances might be expected to kick you off for expressing this stubbornly common opinion.

    But I’m not sure it’s quite fair to expect a public service to share exactly the correct Overton window that one has oneself. That sort of enforcement on Bluesky is meant to be at the level of the custom moderation service/labeler, not at the data storage layer, since users more or less are meant to control that themselves.

    And if you pick a good labeler it will enforce that only the correct people are allowed in your view.


  • I dunno dude, it’s super weird. Sarah Z has a video about this, IIRC the explanation there was something like, people have latched on to “narcissist” as a thing one doesn’t need to worry that one is oneself but can be tacked on to anybody one dislikes. Also there are demons involved for some reason.

    (Having killed ShortFatOtaku’s Twitter guy, and taken all his stuff, how would “the narcissist” go about extracting the validation??? Sounds made up.)

    (Also it’s always “the narcissist” like there’s just one extremely busy person out there.)

    NPD might make people struggle with empathy, but nobody, who is out there thinking everyone they meet could be “the narcissist” who is out to get them and not worthy of respect or consideration, is themselves killing it on the empathy front.


  • You don’t necessarily have to tell all prospective employers about all experience. If you think your resume is getting bounced from some kinds of openings because they think it is odd they you have this degree, don’t list the degree when you apply to those sorts of positions. Don’t talk about having the degree. If asked point blank if you have a degree, say something about your personal philosophy on why degrees aren’t important, or how your life’s goal would be to get a Ph.D. in art history or some other discrete and personable non-answer.



  • I mean, fundamentally you’re not supposed to obtain income. The system that distributes money is not actually designed to give people money to live, and nobody is really steering it to make it do that. It just happens to sometimes do that. I’m not sure anyone has actually “designed” it to do anything, but it seems at least much better at concentrating money and power than it is at creating plausible jobs or job-housing-food combinations for humans.

    I hope you find some good advice as to how you can get income to survive. I don’t really have any, other than shake all your friends down for jobs (since hiring is usually done by knowing somebody rather than by weighing the merits of an unbiased stream of varyingly qualified applicants) and be prepared to search for employment for many months (a thing you might have had to have started doing before now for best results). But it’s not hard because you are somehow not doing it “right” or the way you are “supposed to”, it’s hard because the problem you are facing it isn’t actually constrained to be solvable. You can do it all right and still not succeed.



  • Do they “give high rankings” to CloudFlare sites because they just boost up whoever is behind CloudFlare, or because the sites happen to be good search hits, maybe that load quickly, and they don’t go in and penalize them for… telling CloudFlare that you would like them to send you the page when you go to the site?

    Counting the number of times results for different links are clicked is expected search engine behavior. Recording what search strings are sent from results pages for what other search strings is also probably fine, and because of the way forms and referrers work (the URL of the page you searched from has the old query in it) the page’s query will be sent in the referrer by all browsers by default even if the site neither wanted it nor intends to record it. Recording what text is highlighted is weird, but probably not a genuine threat.

    The remote favicon fetch design in their browser app was fixed like 4 years ago.

    The “accusation” of “fingerprinting” was along the lines of “their site called a canvas function oh no”. It’s not “fingerprinting” every time someone tries to use a canvas tag.

    What exactly is “all data available in my session” when I click on an ad? Is it basically the stuff a site I go to can see anyway? Sounds like it’s nothing exciting or some exciting pieces of data would be listed.

    This analysis misses the important point that none of this stuff is getting cross-linked to user identities or profiles. The problem with Google isn’t that they examine how their search results pages are interacted with in general or that they count Linux users, it’s that they keep a log of what everyone individually is searching, specifically. Not doing that sounds “anonymous” to me, even if it isn’t Tor-strength anonymity that’s resistant to wiretaps.

    There’s an important difference between “we’re trying to not do surveillance capitalism but as a centralized service data still comes to our servers to actually do the service, and we don’t boycott all of CloudFlare, AWS, Microsoft, Verizon, and Yahoo”, as opposed to “we’re building shadow profiles of everyone for us and our 1,437 partners”. And I feel like you shouldn’t take privacy advice from someone who hosts it unencrypted.


  • It sounds like nobody actually understood what you want.

    You have a non-ZFS boot drive, and a big ZFS pool, and you want to save an image of the boot drive to the pool, as a backup for the boot drive.

    I guess you don’t want to image the drive while booted off it, because that could produce an image that isn’t fully self-consistent. So then the problem is getting at the pool from something other than the system you have.

    I think what you need to do is find something else you can boot that supports ZFS. I think the Ubuntu live images will do it. If not, you can try something like re-installing the setup you have, but onto a USB drive.

    Then you have to boot to that and zfs import your pool. ZFS is pretty smart so it should just auto-detect the pool structure and where it wants to be mounted, and you can mount it. Don’t do a ZFS feature upgrade on the pool though, or the other system might not understand it. It’s also possible your live kernel might not have a new enough ZFS to understand the features your pool uses, and you might need to find a newer one.

    Then once the pool is mounted you should be able to dd your boot drive block device to a file on the pool.

    If you can’t get this to work, you can try using a non-ZFS-speaking live Linux and dding your image to somewhere on the network big enough to hold it, which you may or may not have, and then booting the system and copying back from there to the pool.



  • There are a lot of missing steps people don’t really understand yet R.E. how this all amounts to something complicated like “a liver”. But we think that the basic building block of it is that there are gradients of chemical concentration that some cells set up, and then other cells react to the level of the chemical and decide to different things. There’s a famous analogy of the French Flag Model, where the different stripes of the French flag are imagined to emerge from how far you are from the left edge where a “morphogen” chemical is coming from, because cells detect and react to different concentrations of the chemical in different ways.

    And the cells do these things because the DNA programs them to do it. Some genes produce proteins that can turn around and bind to the DNA that encodes other genes, and make those other genes produce more or fewer proteins of their own. Proteins can be made so that they bind or unbind DNA in the presence of other proteins, or particular chemicals, or which can function to turn one chemical into another. So you can have little logic circuits made out of genes that measure chemicals and turn other genes on and off. And you can have little memory circuits based on which genes have things bound to them and which ones are currently on or off, so the cells can remember what it is they decided to be. And so the cells are programmed to differentiate into progressively more specific cell types over time depending on what signals they see, with the morphogen gradients or combinations of them allowing the cells to have some idea of where they are in the body.

    And the proteins are these little squishy clicky things, like long strings of magnets that will snap into certain shapes, or that can swap between a few shapes. They can be shaped so they fit really nicely against certain shapes of DNA sequence or other proteins, or so that they fit really nicely against small molecules with a piece pushing on the molecule in just the right place to make it easy for an atom to break off the end of it or whatever. And because they live in this weird tiny world where everything is constantly vibrating around and banging against everything else (because of how tiny the volumes get when you shrink the lengths to cell size), this is enough for them to find and stick to the stuff they are shaped to stick to.

    Then depending on genetic variation between people, the proteins involved can e.g. have different set points for the concentrations they react to, and that can translate into the threshold between cells deciding to do one thing or another moving around in the body, and in turn translate into people having e.g. a wider or narrower region of their face decide to be a nose.





  • I’m going to go with “be normal”.

    Linux is unusual in a way that Windows is not. In a lot of areas (games, interfacing with weird hardware), Linux uses up one of your three innovation tokens in a way that Windows doesn’t. You are likely to be the only person or one of a very few people trying to do what you are doing or encountering the problem you are having on Linux, whereas there is often a much larger community of like-minded people to work with who are using Windows.

    Sometimes the reverse is true: have fun being the only person trying to use a new CS algorithm released as a .c and a Makefile on Windows proper without WSL.

    But that’s kind of why we have Wine and WSL: it’s often easier to pretend to be normal than to convince people to accommodate you.



  • I think you can keep doing the SMB shares and use an overlay filesystem on top of those to basically stack them on top of each other, so that server1/dir1/file1.txt and server2/dir1/file2.txt and server3/dir1/file3.txt all show up in the same folder. I’m not sure how happy that is when one of the servers just isn’t there though.

    Other than that you probably need some kind of fancy FUSE application to fake a filesystem that works the way you want. Maybe some kind of FUES-over-Git-Annex system exists that could do it already?

    I wouldn’t really recommend IPFS for this. It’s tough to get it to actually fetch the blocks promptly for files unless you manually convince it to connect to the machine that has them. It doesn’t really solve the shared-drive problem as far as I know (you’d have like several IPNS paths to juggle for the different libraries, and you’d have to have a way to update them when new files were added). Also it won’t do any encryption or privacy: anyone who has seen the same file that you have, and has the IPFS hash of it, will be able to convince you to distribute the file to them (whether you have a license to do so or not).




  • And it doesn’t cause other problems like outsmarting the brain systems that are supposed to be attaching your intelligence to the interests of your body? Or the people inconveniently stopping you from snorting cocaine constantly until you die? And there’s no level of intelligence you reach where you note that higher levels are unlikely to be any more use to you in achieving your actual goals, versus spending that button-pushing time on other tasks? And all this intelligence is free and doesn’t require any energy input to run in your head? And at some level you become intelligent enough to impart these abilities to your descendants or to just never die? And you reach a level of intelligence where you can fight off the CIA before you reach a level of intelligence where you interest the CIA?

    People don’t generally reason about things like “intelligence” as an abstract value from zero to infinity, because we don’t encounter such things very often. What we do encounter is people trying to scam us. If you present someone with something that appears to be a 100% obvious perfect move with absolutely no drawbacks whatsoever, they mostly correctly conclude that they just aren’t smart enough to understand the catch.