Band name of the day: conspiracy to riot

Hot take: the primary function of a horror movie is not to be scary, but to be /creepy/. If you don’t know the difference, watch better horror movies.

When you die, your homunculus dies with you, and so does its homunculus and so on. What stays behind are nested skeletons, matryoshka skulls down to nanometer scales if the conditions are right

Bunny-Girl Senpai is an interesting show. It seems to be going for a theme with the various arcs: each one seems to be about how communications media change our behavior & self-image by exerting social pressure with expectations.

So, watching Halloween (1978) is free on shudder today, in case you want to. Not really sure why they only told current subscribers…

There be monsters: from cabinets of curiosity to demons within | Aeon Essays https://aeon.co/essays/there-be-monsters-from-cabinets-of-curiosity-to-demons-within

Botnik presents Goosebumps: Welcome to Sand Hands! https://botnik.org/goosebumps/

further uses include:↵* psychoforensics: finding out which of your experiences are the bad ones, and editing them out↵* forcing subpersonalities: maybe you want to share a brain with that artist whose mind you found on a torrent site↵* mind tattoos

being somewhat low-dimensional and interpretable (unlike sets of network weights), it’s also a popular mind interchange format among AIs and post-humans, who need to be extra careful about what or who they empathize with lest the thought turn out to be a logic bomb

a set of inputs that when played back to a fresh brain, will make it hallucinate a full-qualia world forever with no further input required - a popular infodrug even among already-formed minds, though it often leaves you with new subpersonalities

A possible future: SSSS.Gridman’s popularity causes a bunch of mecha-inspired toku adaptations to be greenlit & ‘tokusatsu remake’ becomes the new ‘isekai light novel adaptation’ for about 5 years.

Hot take: any command that a user might want to use regularly should be short, memorable, and built-in; any command that a user might really NEED to use should be documented & included in the examples in built-in documentation.

I sort of can’t believe this, considering Maven’s bloat, but there appears to be no build-in command for taking a package name specified on the command line, searching maven-central for it, & installing the latest version from the command line…

Five Star Songs https://5-star-songs.tumblr.com/post/179554319224/take-me-to-the-river-talking-heads-warning

How to get rich quick, apparently: rephrase the obvious as though it is the revolutionary for the benefit of the stupid, and pepper it with the wrong to drum up ‘controversy’. (Worked for Peterson)

The time between “good weather models” and “weather models good enough to make weather manipulation cheap” is the only time there will be accurate weather forecasts, after that it’s up to the highest bidder

Isn’t it great that outlook just prevents people from emailing jar files to each other? Like, it’s not as though people occasionally need to send each other internal proprietary jars that aren’t conveniently hosted.

Love it we have a “contract” developer but he is not in the right group to push commits to the code repo. When I suggested that he be added to the right group one of the other developers was like that will give him access to everything. I’m sorry but what is everything? It’s not like he can pull from any of the repos as it is. Right now he just can’t commit.

i’ve been thinking of starting some kind of a minecraft journal on my public_html but then I figure I should just post to shi

Because of the use of ‘rune’ to refer to unicode codepoints in go, a fulthark transliteration program might have somewhat confusing source…

Multilingual crews can take shortcuts between the alphabets by codeswitching, but it’s a risky business - a Lojbanist crew was once a bit too clever and lost the train in a parallel universe for months. Still, philologists sometimes use it to travel Europe in the original Basque.

The Alphabet Train once turned up crewed with ghosts, and after the initial shock passed, quickly became popular with people who wanted to end up somewhere entirely else on the globe fast - whatever the crew’s language was, it’d visit cities in that language’s alphabetical order.

It really pisses me off when people use ‘infinite’ to mean ‘really big’. If something’s actually infinite, adding more to it produces the same number (like in Hilbert’s hotel)

An invitation to category theory - Chalkdust http://chalkdustmagazine.com/features/an-invitation-to-category-theory/

Bad idea of the day: a self-adhesive battery-powered white noise generator & speaker, which can be affixed to the microphone on your laptop

The protagonist of Bunny-Girl-senpai is almost the Kyon-style deadpan snarker (not distinct enough to really be a variant yet, like in Denpa Onna) but I can’t tell if it’s an attempt at reconstruction like in Seiren…

Bad idea of the day: a NOT operation on types, such that a type can be define as the failure to qualify as some other combination of types or some other boolean type expression

iPhones are hard to use https://blog.fawny.org/2018/10/22/hardtouse/

God Help Us, Let’s Try To Understand Friston On Free Energy | Slate Star Codex http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/03/04/god-help-us-lets-try-to-understand-friston-on-free-energy/

I switched to OpenBSD and it’s nice.

Language is a technology & we ought to start acting like it

How to Troll a Troll https://lifehacker.com/how-to-troll-a-troll-1819880278

At work for only 70 min and I already want to go home.

If the Rich Really Want To ‘Do Good,’ They Should Become Class Traitors Like FDR https://longreads.com/2018/10/18/review-of-winners-take-all/

Scammers Are Uploading Tutorials on How to Fool Facebook with a False ID - Motherboard https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/53d5gk/scammers-are-uploading-tutorials-on-how-to-fool-facebook-with-a-false-id

God did start out omniscient, but with each split of the world lines, sheds bit upon bit to become perfect nothing when the last photon rips itself apart↵↵(to God’s great relief)

New repository: aquilax/time66 - Go library to get the 6/6 time. Based on https://xkcd.com/2050/

• gears that revolve and levers that shift, concepts rotated and slotted into each other↵- brute force pattern matching: anything as metaphor for anything, the music you’re listening to as body or story or building

Is there already a term for going into a piece of media with the expectation that it won’t be a waste of time / there’s something to be gained by paying attention & thinking? (Like ‘good-faith viewership’?)

Sail to Majuro, Marshall Islands | https://wiki.xxiivv.com/marshall_islands

Robin “Sourdough” Sloan is using a machine-learning autocomplete system to write his next novel / Boing Boing https://boingboing.net/2018/10/19/t9-for-auteurs.html

What It Takes to Build an Anarchist Desert Town - Atlas Obscura https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/slab-city-library-photos

cleared out 3tb of expired tilde.team backups that were meant to be deleted by a generations script. feels good.

Cops Are Set Up to Be Dangerously Bad Shots - MEL Magazine https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/cops-are-set-up-to-be-dangerously-bad-shots

The Quietus | Opinion | The Quietus Essay | Rude Citizenship: Jamaican Musical Challenges to Copyright(ed) Culture http://thequietus.com/articles/25494-music-copyright-jamaica-dub

Bad idea of the day: serious & well-researched answers to stupid questions, as a podcast

Bad idea of the day: Use mechanical turk to do a novel-length exquisite corpse, one sentence at a time.

Do You Struggle to Keep Eye Contact? Here’s What’s Happening in Your Brain https://bigthink.com/philip-perry/researchers-discover-why-its-hard-to-maintain-eye-contact-while-talking-with-someone

Hot take: structural problems don’t excuse individual accountability, but instead merely limit the ways in which that individual will can be effectively exercised to group action. No position is so rare that a group cannot form around it.

note to self: show this to cynamintoast -

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Bad idea of the day: An algorithm that creates textual descriptions of images watches TV, creating a description from each frame, which is then used to generate a new image & the video is resynthesized

Neal Stephenson demonstrated that people will read (and love) infodumps so long as they’re funny or fun to read. In other words: infodumps in fiction are fine so long as the author is also an essayist.

I love it. I have a program that needs to processing about half a million records, which will take 3 days. The database that all those records are suppose to go to is acting up after I’ve just done 140K records.

i should start going to be earlier

When you punish a person for dreaming his dream / Don’t expect him to thank or forgive you / Hail Satan!

yo @aewens welcome to twtwtwtwtxtxt

003.00 POST: @aewens@tilde.team, welcome to the party!

@aewens@tilde.team what is up! welcome to the show!

Having a fun day trying to sort out why my code isn’t working. Only to find out the API server I’m calling is borked.

Hotter take: ‘ambient computing’, ‘internet of things’, and ‘ubiquitous computing’ all pale in comparison to my favorite goofy term for this tech: ‘everyware’

002.00 RPLY: @dzns@tilde.town, quiet compared to you for sure

001.00 POST: nothing to say, this is my first post

@freemor@freemor.homelinux.net they always claim to have a video of me having fun but there is a sticker on my cam and the webcam module is blacklisted. 🤨

time to do my duolingo bc i’m trying to build up my daily streak

@ben@tilde.team some kind of cron job to poll the registry? sumthin.

Every time the humans come up with new physics, the simulators work overtime to update the world, “noo I put all that work into those celestial spheres and now they throw it out again”

the goal is to have issue 3 of github.com/tildetown/zine released December 2018. Submit now!

scratch that. didn’d make it to jiu-jitsu because work stuff blew up!

listen to Holy Fuck https://open.spotify.com/album/40LUGF0CMjrqJ3nSE4ebQi?si=aXSXS-b4TT6F0FHxDS6PEw

Steve Jobs’ strange obsession with Billie Jean during the leadup to the Mac release makes a lot more sense when you remember that at the time he too was denying the paternity of his child.

Hot take: weasel words are not a form of obfuscation but a signal about confidence level. Misrepresenting your level of confidence in a proposition is tantamount to lying.

A house is a machine for living in, & a haunted house (after Jackson) is a machine for dreaming in. Hill House is architectural LSD: it reflects psychic energy inward, causing people to haunt themselves.

Intro to Generative Art - DEV Community ‘‍”‍’ https://dev.to/aspittel/intro-to-generative-art-2hi7

Band name of the day: how to deter bears

@robbinaer@robbinaer.info Maybe a DNS issue as I moved my domain to inwx yesterday. Can you try again?

What’s a CPU to do when it has nothing to do? [LWN.net] https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/767630/594421f913c3d00a/

Announcing a Competition for Ethics in Computer Science, with up to $3.5 Million in Prizes - The Mozilla Blog https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2018/10/10/announcing-a-competition-for-ethics-in-computer-science-with-up-to-3-5-million-in-prizes/

It’s really odd trying to downsize your stuff. Even with stuff you haven’t used in years or use very little, it’s hard to get rid of stuff you have acquired over time.

Apparently hot take: automation tools don’t obviate abstract discussions about how best to think about decisions (like ‘should translations be precise or should they be accurate’ or ‘what is the good’) but make them more important.

PC: runs around aimlessly, goes through the same set of animations all the time, can only do what the programmers thought to add↵NPC: has a dayjob but does whatever they want offscreen, has boatloads of money, owns a wicked castle

A use for text-to-smell devices: In the morning, it cooks up a smell digest for each of your backlogs and if one smells of stress and sweat instead of food, forest or rain, you may opt to skip it

The Internet’s keepers? “Some call us hoarders”I like to say we’re archivists” | Ars Technica https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/10/the-internets-keepers-some-call-us-hoarders-i-like-to-say-were-archivists/

Cody Wilson was Defense Distributed”so who is the organization’s new leader? | Ars Technica https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/10/how-and-why-a-london-poet-who-never-shot-a-gun-came-to-lead-defense-distributed/

Bram Stoker’s Dracula Is More Than Gothic Horror. It’s a Love Letter to Moviemaking. https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a23570109/bram-stokers-dracula-review-francis-ford-coppolla/

Moving on from ed to teco for maximum nerd credibility.

The network uses the latest in content generation to cover for the user when they don’t feel like updating. Or haven’t logged in months. Or have tried to delete their account for the seventh time now.↵The Content must flow.↵(belated #invisiblenetworks, day 30)

Hermetic artist societies, opening their art only to initiates to protect against outsiders style-transferring their aesthetics onto anything and everything

NixOS 18.09 released

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If Vento Aureo doesn’t make at least a handful of references to Don’t Look Now, I’ll be shocked, SHOCKED I tell you

Things I won’t miss about twitter #72956298: keyword bots that reply to any international-relations-related links with advertisements for Alex Jones

Juggalos figured out how to beat facial recognition | The Outline https://theoutline.com/post/5172/juggalo-juggalette-facepaint-makeup-hack-beat-facial-recognition-technology

Imagine if Mondo 2000 got the Fangoria treatment: instead of occasional issues, four times a year you get a fuckin’ BOOK and it’s super fancy so people are willing to pay 5/issue & more at newsstand.

Bad idea of the day: A book called Acknowledgements that’s just a book-length acknowledgements section thanking people for contributing to the book, House-That-Jack-Built-style

Pet peeve: on my work computer, 80% of my lobste.rs comments double-post because of some kind of missing deduplication logic. Then, I have to periodically go through all my threads to delete the duplicates. Sometimes one copy of the post will have 2 upvotes & the other 3.

I don’t know why but Openconnect no longer will connect to my work VPN.

On free will: Daniel Dennett and Gregg Caruso go head to head | Aeon Essays https://aeon.co/essays/on-free-will-daniel-dennett-and-gregg-caruso-go-head-to-head

Bad idea of the day: a wikipedia project for creating and improving articles that are uniquely relevant to countries that qualified for internet.org

If imports from China suddenly dropped substantially (say, due to tariffs), would enough manufacturing business go back to S. Korea & Japan to affect Japan’s almost-30-year economic stagnation?

Fastly supports NixOS
We are happy to announce that we have moved our binary cache to Fastly. Fastly
is a big supporter of open source projects and now NixOS is one of them! Fastly provides us with CDN capability,
which previously was running on AWS CloudFront. Big thanks go to Fastly, in particular Tom Denniston and Elaine
Greenberg, our friends at Infor and Packet.com
and Graham Christensen for making this possible. ⌘ Read more

In the grim dark future of 2019, the president forwards all his tweets through the Wireless Emergency Alert System. While some have moved to small communes surrounded by mountains, increasingly journalists have been puncturing their eardrums with sharp objects.