Bad idea of the day: creating ads that target things that are in dictionaries but could never be sold in order to identify people who use dictionary-based chaffing techniques

The end of a world of nation-states may be upon us | Aeon Essays https://aeon.co/essays/the-end-of-a-world-of-nation-states-may-be-upon-us

Hey, remember using twtxt? I still like the idea.

Why Foley Artists Use Cabbage and Celery to Create Hollywood’s Distinctive Sounds - Gastro Obscura https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-are-film-sound-effects-made

The NSA Just Released 136 Historical Propaganda Posters - Motherboard https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/43548d/nsa-historical-propaganda-posters-foia

70 Long-Lost Japanese Video Games Have Been Discovered in a 67GB Folder of ROMs on a Private Forum - Motherboard https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/a3anja/labyrinthe-japanese-game-discovered-on-private-forum

Have you tried accusing the outgroup of using the problem to introduce a solution that is worse than the problem?

Have you tried using markov chain monte carlo to perform a weighted random walk of solution space?

Have you tried reframing acceptance of the problem as a form of costly signalling, and using the problem as a gatekeeping mechanism?

with enough samples, it shouldn’t be hard to extract a content filter’s opinions, for example you could use your botnet to map what twitter really considers bannable and then generate maximally bannable tweets

You can easily tell actual dream girls and guys from fake ones by their complete inability to function in daily life, where dream logic just isn’t so useful

@freemor@freemor.homelinux.net I always throw YouTube URLs on MPV for watching. It makes use of YouTube-DL and let you choose audio lang and subtitles.

Bad idea of the day: Use eliza as your therapist for an hour a day for years, then train a markov bot on the logs.

This Man Committed Paradise Lost to Memory for Mental Exercise http://nautil.us/blog/-this-man-memorized-a-60000_word-poem-using-deep-encoding

Rarely do tidally bound worlds invent the lightbulb. The day side does not need it, the evening side evolves architecture that makes the most efficient use of light, the near night side (only recently colonized) is lit by gargantuan mirror arrays

It’s interesting to think about how habitual migration patterns break the close association between culture and geography. There’s a psychogeographic wormhole between Fairfield County, CT and south Florida, & used to be one between there & upstate NY.

Yet in our closet, the secret passage led directly into Hell. When we were young, we used it to scare the other kids with their regular fantasylands, as we got older we sometimes went there alone to remind ourselves how much worse it could be.

embots: like sexbots, but instead a superstimulus for empathy; often used on the streets as beggars or political activists (which is why sometimes, the cute animal rights girl in front of you explodes in a shower of sparks and broken parts as yet another victim of anthropol)

Bad idea of the day: use those ear-mounted accelerometers that normally wake people who are dozing off at the wheel to instead redden the display, replace desktop background with surreal and dreamlike images, fade in quiet calming ambient music, raise the thermostat

Bad idea of the day: use eye tracking to save power by blanking the parts of the display not within the light cone of the fovea

Bad idea of the day: a dual-layer LCD (like the 3d TVs from a few years ago) that uses the top layer exclusively for hover behavior

Bad idea of the day: a gesture based interface that uses DSP on the audio produced by a theramin to identify gestures, while playing that audio for learning feedback

This Twitter Bot Is Generating Jokes and It’s Funnier Than You - Motherboard https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/j5kmzy/headlinetron-comedy-twitter-bot

This Twitter Bot Is Generating Jokes and It‘s Funnier Than You - Motherboard https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/j5kmzy/headlinetron-comedy-twitter-bot

‘It’s an Anime Titty Holocaust:’ Steam Is Cracking Down on Visual Novels - Motherboard https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/evkxdk/steam-banning-adult-anime-visual-novel-huniepop

Mood: using the mobile version of the website on desktop because you don’t live in california

I have a newsletter I never use, & a script for crossposting links that also makes a link archive. I’m tempted to figure out how to automate taking the links I post for a particular timeframe, sticking them in the newsletter, and sending them off.

Making Interactive Fiction: Using Generative Prose - sub-Q Magazine https://sub-q.com/making-interactive-fiction-using-generative-prose/

Voices on the left are rising in the US. Why aren’t they in mainstream media? - Columbia Journalism Review https://www.cjr.org/analysis/nyt_opinion-left.php

My Brain Keeps Turning Thoughts into Memories - VICE https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3kjxpb/my-brain-keeps-turning-thoughts-into-memories

Using Vim’s Conceal Feature to Make Code More Readable (For You) – Every Man a Debtor https://alok.github.io/2018/04/26/using-vim-s-conceal-to-make-languages-more-tolerable/

What should you do when Google gets into bed with the US military? | WIRED UK http://www.wired.co.uk/article/google-microsoft-amazon-us-military-ai-conflict

To summon a demon together with its counter-aspect, use a lemniscate. Or rather, don’t, or have a plan for separating them very quickly, since they will try to annihilate each other with extreme prejudice.

eBay, Organized Crime, and Evangelical Christians: The Ethical Minefield of Studying Ancient Civ… https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/9kgxjp/ebay-organized-crime-and-evangelical-christians-the-ethical-minefield-of-studying-ancient-civilizations-hobby-lobby-irisagrig-iraq

How to Write Personalities for the AI Around Us https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/05/02/how-to-write-personalities-for-the-ai-around-us/

As the bombs fall, we retrace our steps backwards so that when they play recordings from our time, they’ll think that around us, cities were falling out of the clouds and crystallizing on the ground

These People Are Selling the CIA’s Internal Board Game to the Public - Motherboard https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/vbxkd8/cia-board-game-techdirt-kickstarter

Disrupting the Commons: Dockless Bikes and Scooters Create Layers of Community Instability - Motherboard https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ne9gxd/electric-scooters-san-francisco-limebike-the-commons

@kas@enotty.dk, I didn’t think you are affiliated with it. Just wondered as I didn’t see what was special about it but I had to use a search engine to find out that the OS is Android. :D

Memetics does provide a useful way of understanding cultural evolution - Dr Susan Blackmore https://www.susanblackmore.uk/chapters/memetics-does-provide-a-useful-way-of-understanding-cultural-evolution/

The Book No One Read - Issue 28: 2050 - Nautilus http://nautil.us/issue/28/2050/the-book-no-one-read

“Look at how large they are, they must be so old! Maybe their drone is just an extremely slow chirp, and if a few of us followed one for a few years, we could decipher it!”

Sorry, for being quite noisy now but it is really fun using #twtxt over #xmpp, am very proud it somehow works even when I’m no programmer.

TIL that the technology for viewing US census data summaries is called DADS: https://factfinder.census.gov/help/en/data_access_and_dissemination_system_dads.htm

The reason it’s a bad idea is that the kind of people who badmouth poststructuralist methods as unscientific will do so even while using them. (See: Jordon Peterson)

I Lived Exclusively Off Doomsday Prepper Food for a Week - MUNCHIES https://munchies.vice.com/en_us/article/vbx399/what-does-prepper-food-taste-like-v25n1

Cramulus | In the future, dolphins, elephants, and several… http://cramul.us/post/172758639737/in-the-future-dolphins-elephants-and-several

Remembering the ’70s activist group that tried to save us from the tech industry | The Outline https://theoutline.com/post/4029/computer-people-for-peace-history

Mass Surveillance Memes Show Our Collective Anxiety Over Government Spying - Motherboard https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/zmg3ky/surveillance-memes-nsa-fbi-facebook

I wonder if the recent Charlie Wartzel-spawned increase in the use of the term ‘infocalypse’ will affect the popularity of the music I’ve been releasing under that name for the past eleven years…

Post-textual ideologies disseminated as games that build subtle intuitions not expressible in language, rearrange your worldview in a few hours of immersion, leave you with “Did you like being this person? Join us for more”

If You’ve Met Aliens While on DMT, These Scientists Would Like to Hear From You - Motherboard https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bjpjxm/dmt-aliens-study-johns-hopkins

Using Ethics In Web Design — Smashing Magazine https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2018/03/using-ethics-in-web-design/

Finally I can use twtxt from my mobile. :)

Bad idea of the day: use the luma channel from one VCR and the chroma channel from a different one

The shady data-gathering tactics used by Cambridge Analytica were an open secret to online marketers. I know, because I was one - The Verge https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/25/17161726/facebook-cambridge-analytica-data-online-marketers

Thursday is the appropriate day to make sacrifices to Compound Interest. Use a gold altar cloth. Compound Interest prefers sacrifices in the form of burning dollar bills, but twenties will work in a pinch. If you cannot make money, store-bought is fine.

Hot take: mere exposure & availability bias have ramifications for action – the more we do a thing or see it done, the easier it is for us to imagine doing it when planning. Cuts both ways: we could open up possibilities, but we should be careful with which we open.

laurie anderson is the original radical american artist - i-D https://i-d.vice.com/en_us/article/qvx887/laurie-anderson-is-the-original-radical-american-artist

White Supremacy, Black Liberation, and the Power Dynamics of Gun Violence - Waypoint https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/kzxevx/white-supremacy-black-liberation-and-the-power-dynamics-of-gun-violence

Never Use a Warning When you Mean Undo · An A List Apart Article https://alistapart.com/article/neveruseawarning

For Me, David Bowie Lives On - GARAGE https://garage.vice.com/en_us/article/zmwap9/for-paul-gorman-david-bowie-lives-on

Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader History: Useful At Certain Times https://tedium.co/2018/03/06/uncle-johns-bathroom-reader-history/

What Ancient Sparta and Modern Small-scale Societies Have in Common http://nautil.us/blog/the-point-of-mens-cults

Social engineering is engineering. When you design software used by people, the community is not an externality – it’s shaped by your design, & therefore your responsibility.

The Radical Left-Wing Theory That the Government Has Unlimited… https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a34n54/modern-monetary-theory-explained

An experiment in two-way direct linking using Hy… https://timsherratt.org/research-notebook/historic-hansard/notes/two-way-direct-linking/

Cloudflare Terminates Servic… https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/59kgv5/cloudflare-terminates-service-to-the-pirate-bay-of-science

How We Make Gods - Issue 57: Communities - Nautilus http://nautil.us/issue/57/communities/how-we-make-gods–

How not to replace email https://jamey.thesharps.us/2018/02/16/how-not-to-replace-email/

One day we may figure out not just genetics but wholesale biosphere design, and then it won’t be “What does it mean to be human” but “Should there be a place for humans”, “What if we used another type of chemistry”, “Why should it be our native biosphere that survives”

‘Doki Doki Literature Club’ Fits i… https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/kzp7gy/doki-doki-literature-club-history-visual-novels

Google, please don’t! (although I’m not using gmail) https://www.blog.google/products/g-suite/bringing-power-amp-gmail/

@leveck@leveck.us, I just use the standard client (wrapped in a local script for tweeting).

@leveck@leveck.us, I often use twtxt.xyz but when I am at my laptop at home I use the client as I have my terminator always opened.

[…] In modern magic, mundanium (an aluminium alloy) has mostly supplanted cold iron as the go-to antimagical material. In fact, a large mass of it can be used to enchant cold iron in a setup not unlike a sacrificial anode […]

Converting a PDF to JPG (using ImageMagick) ⌘ Read more…

[Updated] BlueGriffon Tutorial: Design a website using the open source BlueGriffon web editor ⌘ https://www.thesitewizard.com/bluegriffon/bluegriffon-2-tutorial-1.shtml

Linguistics Using Category Theory | The n-Category Caf&#… https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2018/02/linguistics_using_category_the.html

The young ones, not brought up in the physical world, find our notions of object permanence quaint. Their scapes are not rooms and buildings, but gardens of colored light that look like mental noise to us

I always stayed ten feet away from our pressure cooker, i was always too frightened to use it… :)

I always stayed ten feet away from our pressure cooker, i was always too frightened to use it… :)

Da Share Z0ne’s Admin Wants You to … https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mbpyyb/da-share-zone-the-devils-level-admin-dril-interview

More Than 750 American Communities Have Built Their Own Int… https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/a3np4a/new-municipal-broadband-map

The Story of ‘Hyperch… https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bjyav3/the-story-of-hyperchess-a-3d-chess-game-inspired-by-star-trek

A Demented Trading Bot Tweets Absurdist Marke… https://creators.vice.com/en_us/article/59p9nd/demented-trading-bot-absurdist-market-advice

Lurking in an orbit hidden between our satellites, the alien quietly watches, extremely interested yet content to never exchange a word with us

GitHub - yaronn/blessed-contrib: Build terminal dashboards using ascii/ansi art and javascript https://github.com/yaronn/blessed-contrib

Visualizing Data Using t-SNE - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJVL80Gg3lA

John McAfee Appears to Move … https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/9knnpz/john-mcafee-twitter-coin-of-the-day-cryptocurrency-markets

How the Modern City Disadvantages Women http://nautil.us/issue/56/perspective/your-city-has-a-gender-and-its-male

A look at Barbara Kruger and Jenny … https://catnormoyle.com/2011/02/02/a-look-at-barbara-kruger-and-jenny-holzers-use-of-typographic-art/

We need tools that will encourage us to do what Jefferson did to his bible with razors and glue. These tools will be discouraged and limited for the same reason that these practices were discouraged on the bible.

Steve Jobs has been dead for 10 years but Apple (& the rest of us too) still hasn’t recovered from poor decisions he made in 1981. Come on guys, get with the program.

GitHub - mewo2/ketchum: Use word vectors to interactively generate lists of similar words https://github.com/mewo2/ketchum

This Is the Most Important Fallacy You’ve Never Heard Of http://nautil.us/issue/55/trust/the-resulting-fallacy-is-ruining-your-decisions

Web app developers: OF COURSE I DIG THESE TRAIN TUNNELS WITH A JEWEL-ENCRUSTED GOLD DECORATIVE COCKTAIL FORK. EVERYBODY DOES. WHAT DO YOU EXPECT ME TO USE, A TOOTHPICK?

If you cannot use it to trivially put a pixel at an X,Y coordinate, YOU SHOULD NOT WRITE A COMPLEX UI IN IT, EXCEPT AS A JOKE.

As the year draws to a close it becomes ever more clear: nothing has prepared us for the Strange Times.

Bad idea of the day: mirror all google fonts on ipfs and then use an extension that rewrites the urls to use that version. Alternately: use an extension that downloads them via tor.