Anything

Kennedy's is good in a boring way. I scorn beige and all those who freely choose it. Truman also gets points.

I have spread wrong info about this before so this is a bit embarrassing to learn. Feel free to round up to the nearest dollar - no one is Getting One Over on you.

Work has made me speak (write, think) like a new dictionary. I remember when my ratio of experienced language in old books to that experienced in life was so high I spoke like a tiny 19th century weirdo.

I'm not sure if I could even explain with any eloquence the meanings of the words I know anymore.

First, a disclaimer: I work somewhere that is relevant to this topic^1^ so I want to be extra clear that I am only communicating my personal views.

Les seems to be (maybe! he can reply if I'm wrongly interpreting) thinking about the sorts of responsibilities We The Public have assigned to entities like social media companies without them really, uh, rising well to meet the challenge. I have been thinking a lot recently about Parler and particularly about how misunderstandings about "digital space" imply very problematic things because they're not tied to how the actual internet works.

So when I've been thinking about this kind of thing recently, I've been having very similar ideas to Les on this part:

It goes something like this - freedom of speech does not imply a right to amplification.

The former is your unfettered ability to speak using your own capacity. The latter is others relaying, repeating, augmenting your speech.

I believe the former is an individual right - balanced by the right of others' expression.

The latter is not a right - because it would essentially demand others be enslaved in service to your speech.

The comparisons are clear. You've always had a right to go shout on a sidewalk. As when, say, to pick a company not carefully at all, Twilio drops Parler, that's fine, because you've never had a right to force a publisher to carry your screed on Algerian mind control tomatoes.

And yet.

And yet.

Put differently, I don't think you get to be preternaturally loud without the help & consent of others. And I think maybe there should be accountability for providing that help & consent.

I think this runs into conflict with notions of common carriage and safe harbor. But I'm not sure these are unalloyed goods. We're building huge, largely unsupervised event spaces that have become chaotic attractive nuisances. They're like empty swimming pools in vacant rental properties - but with scant accountability for the landlord when a kid falls in and cracks their skull.

I think this is a fair analogy, but not necessarily a complete analogy. I've written out and deleted about five different ideas about why at this point, so I'm going to just give you one for now and it may not be that well-worded.

As easy as it is to say that private internet companies are enacting private choices just like an absentee landlord on their own land, there is an aspect here where this doesn't quite match.

You know, there is a concept about public data networks. I'm told the term kind of died once we got to the internet, but I can't help thinking that it's a meaningful concept. The internet was publicly funded, of course, at various times in its development. More than other equivalent research there's something public about it that we have to acknowledge. The internet is better for being an everyone network. It doesn't have to be an unalloyed good for there to be some aspect of the good that is tied to its access being public, and that the public benefits from.

There is therefore some real interest we have in making sure that all children are at least free to traipse about on unfenced properties in a sense, which doesn't quite match the metaphor.

I want there to be some people who do have responsibilities to provide networked computer services with equal availability for all. That work is nobler for its being equally accessed, even if that does mean some awful people benefit from it. Awful people benefit from water treatment facilities too, or phone lines to let them call their awful loved ones. I'm at peace with that. I want a gay kid in a podunk town to get the same big gay internet the rest of us make great even if their local authorities aren't keen on the idea.

At the same time, we're going about it in the exact wrong way when we can see columnists at the national level bemoaning that the U.S. President has been silenced because his Twitter account was suspended. If he wants to hire his own people to hook up his own computers to the internet, he has enough money to do it, and enough people to hire from.

(...well, Parler was apparently one giant Wordpress install, so maybe the tech community, they're not sending their best.... but you don't need startup energy or BigCo talent to serve out a text file of whatever he would have been tweeting, which answers the important freedom of speech question here.)

Anyway, I've been typing enough out here that I have about as much saved in abortive paragraphs in another file, so I'll stop for now. Suffice to say that this is really important stuff, and I think more tech people should be talking about it publicly because we're in the position of understanding the power the industry does and doesn't have.

1: I have literally zero internal knowledge about my employer's relevant involvement or decisions. The internal knowledge about other stuff that I do have from working there is not at all referenced in any of this, so I am merely Jane Q. Public, cloud-knowledgeable techperson.

My god. Maria Grazia Chiuri really came in here and said "we are going to destroy Dolce & Gabbana at their own game. Bottega Veneta? Bottega who?"

As actual Tarot symbolism the film is only successful in the synthesis of the femme and masc selves of the protagonist, and doesn't do much with any of the other energies. Pairing the fool and justice seemed strange to me. But the dresses! The cosmetics! The architecture! The lighting!!

Excuse me, I'm going to be spending the day sulking that there is no place for this energy in my life.

The context: a Canadian woman makes up stuff on the internet trying to damage people she thinks have harmed her and to damage family and associates of those people. She has mental health problems (according to her family and court filings) and has been brought into court over her posting. The stuff she makes up is targeted for maximum impact: accusations of pedophilia, professional misconduct, etc.

Let's be clear: that impact was real:

A relative of one lawyer said she spent months applying for jobs in 2019 without getting any offers. The woman, who asked not to be named because she feared [the internet defamer], said her bills piled up. She worried she might lose her home.

Then she decided to apply for jobs using her maiden name, under which she hadn’t been attacked. She quickly lined up three interviews and two offers.

The thing is, the NYT is portraying this as a story about tech and I'm not sure that's fair or accurate to do.

Public smears have been around for centuries. But they are far more effective in the internet age, gliding across platforms that are loath to crack down, said Peter W. Singer, co-author of “LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media.”

This seems like a claim that would be great to support with evidence, and none follows. What do you mean by effective? How do we show that? Based on instinct, sure--but like, Karl Rove didn't need the internet to spread rumors about John McCain. Do people take no-name review sites more or less seriously than anonymous letters? How do you disentangle the impact of smears-on-the-internet from other changes in how people get jobs, judge dates, etc.? How do you show that cases like this happen more than their pre-digital analogues?

But hey--arguendo, let's cede the point. Smears on the internet: they're new, they're bad, they're newly bad. How does the NYT frame this problem? Why can't this be fixed?

Many of the victims have tried to get tech companies to remove the abusive posts. Mr. Caplan said they have run headlong into American laws that protect American websites.

There is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. It says that publishing platforms aren’t liable for what their users publish, even if they moderate some content. (Section 230 has become a touchstone in politicians’ fight against Big Tech. Conservatives argue it enables companies like Facebook and Twitter to censor them. Liberals argue it allows the companies to host harmful content with impunity.) And under U.S. law, a foreign court generally can’t force an American website to remove content.

I'm not even sure this counts as both-sides-ing, it's that bad. If there are people on the political left saying a law is bad, and there are people on the political right saying a law is bad, apparently the New York Times does not feel even slightly compelled to go into why it might have been made a law in the first place, or what its effects outside of this story might be. And because of that, a whole lot of people are now going to think: ah, Section 230. That's the law that lets evil people get away with shit on the internet.

Okay, maybe the editor just mangled this. Kashmir Hill, the author on the byline, has done some good tech coverage before, so let's not attribute anything to her ignorance here--editors take out necessary chunks of context all the time, and maybe I wouldn't have been so mad about an earlier draft. What if we read this with a very forgiving eye to anything technical?

Freedom of speech is just... never touched on in this piece. Ever at all.

I described Ms. Atas to Todd Essig, a psychologist who writes about technology and mental health. He said someone like Ms. Atas could be forced into mental health treatment if she posed a physical danger. “But when someone is a threat to themselves or others online, there’s no way for the mental health system to legally intervene,” he said.

“I also see her as a victim here,” Dr. Essig added. “Tech companies have given her the power to do something that has really taken apart her life.”

The thing that has taken apart her life is her own expression which is importantly somewhere on the spectrum between free speech and criminal defamation. Criminal defamation is extremely titchy in U.S. law because of the first amendment, something only mentioned in this piece by the sleazy review company that hosted the defamatory allegations. The first amendment and relevant prohibitions on prior restraint are an elephant in the room all through this piece. Our last President was very big on the idea of suing people for stuff he thought ought to be libel (never mind how often it was true) and the Times was just as scornful of this as anyone. It is irresponsible to present this as A Problem Tech Has Brought Us without giving the context of this as a free speech issue, as an issue of the bounds of criminal defamation.

I'd agree that the U.S.'s regulation of the internet is inadequate! It's particularly because change is necessary that it's so problematic how hard this piece leans on the narrative that "we sure need more regulation of this stuff to fix problems like this, it's just all so new that the laws haven't caught up, and wow that Section 230 sure is bad, huh?"

But sometimes, just sometimes, someone can give you an answer.

(If you remember the tweet about claiming there was applause for being American after the inauguration, go read the link)

I loved Amanda Palmer's music, once. I still love it I guess, even if as I've gotten older I've become unable to listen to Evelyn Evelyn without seeing it from its critics' side and being repelled. Even if it's been more than a decade since she's come out with anything with a melody that grabbed me, I still can't listen to a Dresden Dolls album or Runs In The Family without thinking -- feeling -- fuck, yes. That. (And then her name pops up on the Internet, and... fuck, no. Not that.)

I was always jealous of the particular tone she could express on the piano. When I someday get to live with one again, I hope I'll be able to get closer myself (further from my classical education).

This is not a ‘publisher’, in the sense that a newspaper or radio station are publishers - or if it is, then we’ve stretched the word ‘publisher’ so far as to become meaningless. A human editor chooses ten stories for the front page of a newspaper, and ten stories for the 9 o’clock news, but there is no-one sitting in Menlo Park choosing a hundred photos for your Instagram feed each morning.

This is a great example of a phenomenon that really needs a name if it doesn't already have one. The inscrutability fallacy isn't quite what I mean, but close. To contradict Evans here with some formatting to emphasize that I mean it:

Automating a choice does not mean that a person did not make a choice. Building a system to do a thing does not remove the human responsibility for the thing done.

I need to make a page on my website to gather together all the examples of problems that I think are caused by the facts jointly that a. most people don't understand how technology works, and b. most of the people who do enjoy being treated as wizards and are very content to let misunderstandings lie.

But on the other hand, a phone company does not write rules about what you can say, and social network do write rules, or try to, and they make decisions about what kinds of things should be in your feed, and why. This is not a publisher, but it’s not a phone company either, nor a restaurant.

Governance within private Internet spaces has always been a useful fiction, not a reality of power. This is something that you know when you spend time on Reddit or forums of old. The mods are corrupt! They say they're enforcing abstract principles, but they're actually enacting petty feuds! They have a personal vendetta against my 340-page Sonic fanfic! Facebook may put a shine on this process, but the incentives it has are no more democratic, no less motivated by pettiness and ass-covering, no less motivated by social factors.

Wait, that sounds bad, and it's a bit more cynical than what I mean. What's closer to the truth is that people from a democratic society are very comfortable with the ideas of rules and rights. These concepts make it easier for them to understand how to engage with the Internet and Internet communities. However, the truth is that, governance-wise, it's about as close to going over to someone's house and being told the house "rules" and afforded "rights" as a guest; this language is just being used to convey expectations. It isn't fundamentally "flawed governance" when your host tosses your drunk ass out at 2AM in contradiction of stated policies. The governance was a story you were telling each other to explain what gets on the hosts' nerves, but the reality was the dynamic wherein you were visiting someone else's house and getting on their nerves at 2 in the morning.

On the Internet, the idea of governance often feels comforting because on some level we recognize that big companies have too much power, and interacting with something sterile and bureaucratic feeling is more comforting than realizing that power lives with the caprice of Zuck's pinky. Smaller projects may work harder to not violate a sense of fairness (what up, Lemmy) but that isn't because they're more validly enacting "governance", it's because that's part of what's necessary to make the project appealing to people, and the power dynamics are different. You're more likely to be aware of how things work, and if you get mad about a mod decision, you can go use some other alternative social media that's approximately the same size and shape.

All of this comes to the point that the fact that a bar doesn't bother enumerating to its customers what behavior will and will not be tolerated does not mean that it's doing something much different than a social media site when it tosses out Nazis, and if you think that the enumeration is meaningful, you are way too sympathetic to the stories that tech likes to tell about itself.

I don't have a conclusion here. Leave a comment and tell me I'm wrong?

This is intensely cool and I am slightly sad I do not have the right kinds of friends to do it with. Well, maybe I do? But I don't feel like I can ask that much time of people. So many episodes! And reading!!

Perhaps it's doable if you only have one every other month or so?

Requires a good deal of trust in your sandal-wearer, but nothing a bit of crypto couldn't fix.

Exactly as scalable as Parler.

He made me in his image. He claims that it was only because his perfectly hemispherical skull was a convenient shape for manufacture, but that doesn’t explain the thousands of man-hours developing my skin analogue.

Is there a name for this genre of comedy horror that would not be horrifying at all if it were not somehow parallel to the world in which we live, floating alongside us?

This has been open in a browser tab for ages while I stew over it.

One group of theorists, the rationalists, has argued that science is a new way of thinking, and that the scientist is a new kind of thinker—dispassionate to an uncommon degree. As evidence against this view, another group, the subjectivists, points out that scientists are as hopelessly biased as the rest of us. To this group, the aloofness of science is a smoke screen behind which the inevitable emotions and ideologies hide.
Strevens offers a more modest story. The iron rule—“a kind of speech code”—simply created a new way of communicating, and it’s this new way of communicating that created science. The subjectivists are right, he admits, inasmuch as scientists are regular people with a “need to win” and a “determination to come out on top.” But they are wrong to think that subjectivity compromises the scientific enterprise. On the contrary, once subjectivity is channelled by the iron rule, it becomes a vital component of the knowledge machine. It’s this redirected subjectivity—to come out on top, you must follow the iron rule!—that solves science’s “problem of motivation,” giving scientists no choice but “to pursue a single experiment relentlessly, to the last measurable digit, when that digit might be quite meaningless.”

Shape discourse, shape the world.

Isn't the whole idea behind the technology that it allows people to do more with less so that you just don't have to throw people at problems? Are Silicon Valley engineers, or those in China's tech industry, nothing more than glorified bricklayers who instead of getting calluses simply get repetitive stress injury?

First, f off with denigration of the trades. As if software engineering is a trade apart just because you had to take calculus before they let you design a WidgetFactoryInterface...

Second, engineers are less than bricklayers because bricklayers have a union. They get paid for overtime. Their union has negotiated health benefits corresponding to their employment-related health risks.

This is a really quality article on the topic. I've been playing around with dithering recently (c.f.) and it's very cool to learn more about the mathy aspect.

One thing I've wondered about is the potential in dithering that isn't stable over time, or, better, that is semi-stable. Animation effects could be very cool if not too visually overwhelming; I'm thinking of how some pixel art has been animated by cycling a color palette.

If you invoke "folk punk" or such I become simultaneously interested and embarrassed. Because, well, there's this... but there's also this, and I have a generic brand queso dip soul.

I think I'm realizing I want to contribute not to open source, exactly, but to the thing that needs to learn from open source. This paragraph really spoke to me:

In my head, there was a clear connection between the diy punk movement of the 80's and the folk revival of the 60's and 70's. Punk culture was all about doing things yourself, which meant you had to learn how things were done in the first place. For example, if you want to tell people about your favorite bands and find other music fans, then you might make a zine. And in the act of making zines, you were led to learn about traditional printing, type design, layout techniques, and more. Learning about older skills gave you tools for your modern passion. Similarly, for folk-hippies in the 60's dreaming up societies based on love, there was value in learning the techniques of earlier, simpler societies. These techniques could be used to run their communes, or at least to help fire up the visions for them.

So the tildeverse isn't interesting because of command line nostalgia, but because that older technology is small and can be made accessible cheaply.

Anyway, this whole piece is worth reading. The Fediverse, the tildeverse, Neocities, the [Indieweb] movement, hell, peer to peer browsers--they're all coming from different angles at the vast potential of what can be done when we break away from for-profit corporate-controlled platforms. Different philosophies and different emphases are good.

I'm thinking a lot about one part of this piece about Facebook.

The on-again, off-again Facebook executive Chris Cox once talked about the “magic number” for start-ups, and how after a company surpasses 150 employees, things go sideways. “I’ve talked to so many start-up CEOs that after they pass this number, weird stuff starts to happen,” he said at a conference in 2016. This idea comes from the anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who argued that 148 is the maximum number of stable social connections a person can maintain. If we were to apply that same logic to the stability of a social platform, what number would we find?
“I think the sweet spot is 20 to 20,000 people,” the writer and internet scholar Ethan Zuckerman, who has spent much of his adult life thinking about how to build a better web, told me. “It’s hard to have any degree of real connectivity after that.”
In other words, if the Dunbar number for running a company or maintaining a cohesive social life is 150 people; the magic number for a functional social platform is maybe 20,000 people. Facebook now has 2.7 billion monthly users.

What can it mean to try to find your 20,000 instead of leaning on the 2 billion?

What can be done with notepad and a few angle brackets?

On the one hand, I'd want to get them. On the other hand, that would force me to confront just how many domains I have at this point.

Worth reading and yet...

the no-man’s land of love – that minefield of unreturned calls, ambiguous emails, erased dating profiles and awkward silences – must be minimised. No more pondering ‘what if’ and ‘why’. No more tears. No more sweaty palms. No more suicides. No more poetry, novels, sonatas, symphonies, paintings, letters, myths, sculptures. The psychological man or woman needs only one thing: steady progress towards a healthy relationship between two autonomous individuals who satisfy each other’s emotional needs – until a new choice sets them apart.

The juxtaposition of suicides and paintings here seems self-aware, and yet still objectionable.

In the Regime of Choice, committing oneself too strongly, too early, too eagerly is a sign of an infantile psyche. It shows a worrying readiness to abandon the self-interest so central to our culture.

This is far too kind to the infantile psyche in question. I can't tell you how many adolescents I knew in my adolescent days who leaned on their limerence to protect their own brains from all the stuff they'd rather not be thinking about, which was uncalculated self-interest in its own way.

The trouble is, a bubble bath cannot substitute for a loving gaze or a long-awaited phone call, let alone make you pregnant – whatever Cosmo might suggest. Sure enough, you can have IVF and grow into an inspiringly mature, wonderfully independent single mother of thriving triplets. But the greatest gift of love – the recognition of one’s worth as an individual – is an essentially social matter. For that, you need a significant Other. You’ve got to drink a lot of Chardonnay to circumvent this plain fact.

This is a messed-up view in my opinion. You don't need romantic love to feel recognized as worthy as an individual. In my life, that came from family and friends in years of singledom, and very little Chardonnay was involved. For all the scathing references to therapy in this piece, the author doesn't seem to grok the underlying principles. She writes: "Attachment is infantilised. The desire for recognition is rendered as ‘neediness’. Intimacy must never challenge ‘personal boundaries’." This sounds like some kind of hell involving dating in New York, and does not resemble the relationships of the people I know.

While incessantly scolded to take responsibility for our own selves, we are strongly discouraged from taking any for our loved ones: after all, our interference in their lives, in the form of unsolicited advice or suggestions for change, might prevent their growth and self-discovery.

This does not make sense in a way that makes me wish the author were more plain-spoken about exactly what she's thinking of. I would bet all the money in my checking account there is an Incident underlying this sentence.

I feel like I can say this because I have a good relationship with my parents even though it's something we've had to work for. Because of that, it's not me under the microscope here.

But oh my god how does this guy live with himself. "Are there valid reasons why adult children might cut off contact? Yes, obviously. But what we see is <proceeds to write thousands of words about how the people invoking these valid reasons are indoctrinated by therapists, societal inequality, and, um, bourgeois striving, and we should put their reasons in scare quotes>"

In my survey of 1,600 estranged parents and grandparents, I found, as have others, that parents explained their child’s estrangement for reasons often quite different from those commonly cited by estranged adult children.

No, It Is The Children Who Are Wrong.

But wait, Maya, don't you put a high premium on expertise? Couldn't this reflect real dynamics that your social circles simply haven't exposed to you?

Well who should I consult if not the author of The Lazy Husband:

Dr. Joshua Coleman, author and clinical psychologist, understands that a happy marriage is a balanced marriage. And now, in his refreshingly honest and straightforward style, Coleman reveals exactly how women can motivate their husbands to become better partners and better fathers. [...] By following these proactive plans, you too can achieve a happy, well-balanced marriage. Just remember, you can do less by getting your husband to do more.

...oof.

Mad Men

I too have mistaken wanting to have weird sex for thinking I cared about a man talking about his job.

I love Mad Men in a stupid, grandiose way, in a way that’s about history and the moon landing and the feelings you only have driving at night and wishing I could have known my parents before I was born and wanting to be good enough at something that it punishes everyone who has ever hurt me. I will be partway through a rewatch of this show up until the day they put me in the ground, where I will hopefully be buried in every single dress Megan wore in Season six onward.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

We have so much less choice about what influences us, what we pick up and carry through the rest of our lives, than we think we do. By the time we’re old enough to decide to consciously construct a personality, so much of who we are has already been decided by things to which we didn’t even know we were forming attachments. A single repeated habit can so easily become the text of a whole life. I was so malleable when I was very young, so dangerously sponge-like, that anything I stood next to for too long became a feature of who I am, indelible, coming along for the rest of the ride like my lungs and my height and my eye color, there whether I like it or not.

I've always liked to see this kind of thing less as a saint brushing people off and more as giving a heads up. Do you suppose there's a set of people this might help take COVID more seriously?

It is... good? It is... cool? Oh my god I don't even have the app but I want the sweater

It is cute

who is the designer??

giving experiences might be good for your relationship even if you don't do the thing together. COVID complicates this this year, though. overindividuation is a problem: the nerdiest person you know may still prefer a generic useful gift to a Nerd Gift, You Know, Because They're A Nerd, and giving different gifts to different people on your list doesn't...really...matter. or worse: anyone get pegged by their relatives as an X person? you know, where X is dolphins, or owls, and gradually your house fills up with dolphin figurines and there's no nice way to explain that you maybe don't even particularly like dolphins.

the things I've been thinking about this year are:

• consumability: am I giving something they have to keep in their apartment that used to be a fine size for their life and now feels like an office-prison? is there something I can give them that they can use up?
• individuating, but from my end: what is the best gift that only I can give? what am I likely to be better at picking out than other people? multiple people on my list might benefit from such a gift.
• delivery: an e-gift certificate has the least satisfying delivery ever but at least I know it's gonna get there and get there on time. gmail lets me schedule ahead of time, too.

I don't know quite why but this strikes me as a hilarious version of a blazon. This then raises questions about whether there are ways to configure PlantUML such that this image might be generated with a dramatically different appearance, and who should specify the equality comparison...

Boy that title looks a bit unparseable... but my commitment to lowercase is unwavering.

The thing about this interview that's really spectacular is the tone that -- is it ironic? It's not satirizing the Tiddlywikiers, but it might be satirizing the iPad owners because I certainly felt owned by....

... I mean, I bought a paper-texture screen cover for the iPad and I own the Ergodox EZ that sponsors the series.

Gently owned, like a "pre-owned" car.

Anyway.

I should probably write something up eventually about the idea discussed herein about a plurality of virtual avatars. I think I have something broadly waved at the topic on my very fetal page about Internet.

(Lemmy, you're getting this post under c/anything because I'll be damned if I spend too much longer trying to categorize that which resists categorization)

If I had to guess, and I don't have to guess, but I want to guess,

I would think that we've gone about making software the wrong way. There's a lot of software that would be great for people and it doesn't exist. But we're not making it, and we're not getting closer to a world in which it gets made. These days the closest it gets to existence is in Excel. (If you know why you should cringe at that, you're part of the problem.)

We did a lot of stuff to make software an efficient tool for industry. Efficient and effective. Complexity was introduced and managed through professionalization. The way we did it increased the amount of people for whom software is this accepted inscrutable presence in their lives. People who think they understand software see this as such an extreme axis of superiority that they start assuming they have a good understanding of the rest of people's lives, too. They start thinking they understand "systems" and then look at society and think it's a "system" and start going about their normal approach, you know you can get really far with a low-order approximation...

Maybe comparisons to the priesthood are sort of the right shape, but unfair to priests. This comparison should not be made with the Gutenberged Protestant Afters, much as the technological comparison itches at you to make it, but the heterogeneous and varied Befores.