Land of wind & skyscrapers

[anintelligentoctopus]

I'm gonna be honest 'cowboys were a sort of itinerant warrior class common in meiji-era texas' always annoys me a bit because it's a funny post but also No They Weren't. They were an itinerant pastoralist class common in Meiji-era Texas. And indeed the wider western region of post-Risorgimento America

[theaudientvoid]

While primarily pastoralists, cowboys are often depicted in conflict with the native peoples of the region, as well as armed bandits, primarily made up of unemployed veterans of the defeated Confederate shogunate. A typical cowboy settlement was ruled by a lord called a sheriff*, assisted by his armed retainers, called deputies. Modern depictions of cowboy society often focus on the sheriff and his men, with minimal attention paid to the peasants they rule. Alternately, bounty hunters, or ronin deputies, may serve as the protagonists in these stories.

*Similar to Japan, the official title used by the lord and his retainers varied from settlement to settlement. Alternate titles included marshall, ranger, or just lawman.

[no-sharks-on-the-sun]

i feel kind of bad reposting any kind of AI writing because of the "sandpaper on the taste organ" feel it has to it, but i do think this is the direction we're headed. i don't write code anymore but i still read a ton of it (likely more), and in the same way i expect over time we will begin to write less and read more as the models get better at writing prose.

i plan on resisting this as long as i can, especially on my tumblr, but i think i should probably shift my norm from "if it's AI-written, it's never worth reading" to "something being AI-written is evidence against it being worth reading, but it can be overruled by stronger evidence in the other direction."

there's also gotta be ways to prompt the models to write better, and i want to encourage people who want to use AI for writing to find them, because even if the content is interesting, the strong form of the AI house style is really, really bad.

[prokopetz]

While mutual grooming operates within a social hierarchy in many mammals, domestic cats are unusual in that subordinate cats receive extra grooming from their superiors, rather than vice versa. It's been hypothesised that this behaviour reinscribes the group's hierarchy by having dominant cats "parent" their subordinates.

This, of course, implies that in fictional settings which ascribe the instincts of real animals to their anthropomorphic counterparts, catgirl BDSM may well involve heretofore unconceived-of innovations in mommy kink.

[bite-my-grimy-fleshy-ass]

I remember as a kid the nearby small town had a "computer expert" who had a full storefront and office. If someone bricked their computer or it loaded with viruses he'd factory reset it for them and try to get it working again. He'd also buy, refurbish, rest, and resell old computers. But the main thing he advertised was if people brought him a computer and a list of programs they wanted installed on it he'd get them all set up. Flat rate of like 20 bucks.

Didn't realize until I was older and like, looking back on some of the tech stuff my mom needed help with and knew more about how software is priced that he was pirating it. Guy had a whole business set up where people who didn't know how computers worked would pay him 20 bucks to install Microsoft Office on their laptop because it was cheaper than buying it in the store and they didn't want to be bothered with figuring out how to install programs even if they could afford them normally. Like that guy was practically printing money well into the early 2000s. Very good hustle. Only small business owner I respect.

[dajo42]

5001 being divisible by 3 doesnt feel right

[dajo42]

[shinyhappygoth]

Shortcuts to determine if an integer is divisible by:

This is a given.

If the last digit is divisible by 2 (a.k.a. even), then so is the whole number.

If the sum of the digits is divisible by 3, then so is the whole number. The recursivity of this means that if the sum has multiple digits, you can add them up again until you get a single digit and see if it's 3, 6, or 9.

Like the rule for 2, but check if the last two digits are divisible by 4.

If it ends in 5 or 0.

If the rules for both 2 and 3 apply.

No shortcut. Alas.

Like the rules for 2 and 4, but check if the last three digits are divisible by 8. (Yes, this pattern keeps going for 16, 32, etc.)

Like the rule for 3, but the sum of the digits (or the sum of the sum of the digits, etc.) must be 9.

If it ends in 0.

[wicker-and-scrap]

If you're curious why these work:

The basic principle is that if A is divisible by N, and B is also divisible by N, then A+B and A-B are divisible by N. So we want to split the number you're testing into a number we know is divisible by N, plus a small number that you can just look at.

2 and 5: the number is in base 10, which is 2*5. You can split the number into a number ending in zero, plus the last digit (9876 = 9870 + 6). The number ending in zero is always a multiple of 10, so it's a multiple of 2. So the whole number is a multiple of 2 if, and only if, the last digit is also a multiple of 2. (And the same for 5.)

4, 8, 16...: do the same, but split off the last n digits (9800 + 76, 9000 + 876). The number ending in n zeroes is a multiple of 10^n, so it's a multiple of 2^n. Then check the last n digits.

9: Much more interesting!

If you sum the digits of a two-digit number, what happens? You're subtracting some number of tens (whatever is in the tens place), and adding the same number of ones, which is the same as subtracting nines. If there's a third digit then you're subtracting hundreds and adding ones, which is subtracting a multiple of 99. And so on: each digit corresponds to a power of 10, so when you add it to the digit sum, you're subtracting 999... which is a multiple of 9. So the starting number is the sum of its digits, plus some multiple of 9. (This works because 9 is 10 - 1.)

And the sum of the digits has a sum of its digits, and so on until you get to a single digit. So the original number is that digit plus a big stack of nines, which is divisible by 9 only if the single digit is 9.

3: Same as 9, except at the end the single digit has to be divisible by 3, so it can be 3, 6, or 9.

All of these methods work in any other base, too--in base 16, the 2 trick works for 4 and 8 as well, and the 3/9 trick works for 3 and 5 because 3*5 = 16 - 1.

[the-real-seebs]

i have friends who used to nerd-snipe me. we'd go out for dinner, and if there was a wait, they'd ask me a question and then have fun waving hands in front of my face, etcetera, until i came back with an answer.

one time they did "how does casting out nines work in other bases" and it was a good five minutes before i came back with "it works with N-1 and its factors", and then i spent the entire meal trying to explain why it was obvious.

[processes]

[argumate]

truly disturbing words; feels like Altmanism has been in my vocabulary this entire time just waiting to be used, cannot be unread.

[landofwindandskyscrapers]

10/24 10 A.M. Fire Rooster Random Musings

Wow, it’s been more than a month since I posted something. Guess time flies when you’re having fun1 I do have a list of things I eventually wanna blog about - I actually did like Nolan’s Odyssey 2, Slay the Spire 2 continues to be fantastic, Pale Lights just had a season finale which was overall good, go read the cathedral of portals it’s really quite good… But I don’t feel like it right now, honestly. So these are going to be random things I’m thinking about as I write them. The first is how much of your personality seems subsumed by the fact that you’re a parent - except I take offence at that and think it’s fake. Right now, my son is the most interesting thing going on in my life! The one which has the most events (like pooping - no seriously, it’s become an actual event) It’s also the one people are most interested in hearing! Look, in a conversation with anyone there’s a limited amount of things to talk about unless you want to use their brain, go in a specific direction in mind, or go unsettlingly deep with strangers. Hence, baby talk and talk about babies. But from the inside of my own head, what I generally care about is what I care about, to be a bit lapalissian. Online novels like the cathedral of portals , how the Ukraine war is going, whether/when I’ll achieve Ascension 10 with all characters in Slay the Spire 2, whether I can make Claude cowork churn out an entire videogame for me…. Overall, my son is a surprisingly small part of my life. A huge part, admittedly. But less than society made me expect (and kind of dread, honestly). Subscribe now 1 fun in this case meaning dealing with a desperate baby screaming in your face 2 With the caveat that it’s a Nolan film with all that that entails, and that it takes liberties with the source material. But if you can get over that, I liked it on its own merits even though I disagree with that world view that spawned via https://ift.tt/2raxE6z

[lousolversons]

me watching 'gratuitous' sex and violence and ''problematic representation'' in my shows and movies made for adults

[coulsonlives]

[stunflsk]

[trangoldin]

Literally the main civilizational achievement of the Romans is being the first to build what we might consider a State in the Western world. Everything else is just them loving autocracy and slavery and eating endangered species.

[commiemartyrshighschool]

It's pretty great that this dude also thinks the Romans all lived in colonnaded temples and not what were essentially 5-over-ones (with strict height limits imposed for safety).

[trangoldin]

LITERALLY

[landofwindandskyscrapers]

A distressing disconnect from reality

[bambamramfan]

Why free markets beat capitalism

Freedom is good; greed is not

[morlock-holmes]

This needs to go even further, in my opinion.

Rent-seeking, cartels, and monopolies are all things that are good for business, but by definition not most people.

Part of the reason that Disney puts out crap remakes of their properties is that they have a century plus monopoly on all of their beloved cartoons. If you want to make a Lion King movie you go to Disney. Are there people who could probably make a way better realistic CGI Lion King movie? Almost certainly, but they legally aren't allowed to compete with Disney.

One of the fantastic things about capital being property is that if you make a bunch of money with your existing capital you can buy more capital, which makes more money, and eventually you get big enough that you can simply buy the capital of any of your real competitors.

Every firm wants to be a monopoly. Boeing has weathered a bunch of their planes catastrophically failing and killing people because they have exactly one competitor, and that competitor doesn't have the resources to supply all of Boeing's customers.

So the planes explosively decompress occasionally, but what's the other option? Just stop flying people around?

The benefits of Capitalism to society in general stem from competition. But competition is bad for any given specific owner of capital (And in some ways for workers and the bourgeois as well) and so enormous resources are dedicated to choking it off.

[morlock-holmes]

I mean, really the paradox of Capitalism and even Free Markets is that intense, cut-throat competition on the market is good for society as a whole, but bad for the specific individuals who are getting their throats cut.

Like, Labor unions are an anti-competetive measure to prevent laborers from undercutting each other on a free labor market.

Because "undercutting" is a rather bloodless word for "You got fired from the coal mine because you demanded too many safety measures and they hired me because I am on the verge of total destitution and I feel like I have no choice but to get black lung in exchange for a few pennies which barely keep me out of the gutter".

Like, all of society being run as a vast Hobbesian war of all against all has a number of downsides, believe it or not.

[creekfiend]

I was in Mormon brain jail concurrently to when Elizabeth Smart was kidnapped and held, as it turned out, like 20 miles away from us. We would see billboards when we were driving past in our big white institution van, and we would see magazines in the checkout aisle, on the rare occasions we were allowed to enter shops accompanied, about Elizabeth Smart being held somewhere by some guy. This teenage girl who had been kidnapped and brainwashed and held basically in the next valley over. I don't remember how long she was with him, but this was when everyone was freshly looking for her and panicking about how she had been abducted and was being held against her will and brainwashed. Her picture was EVERYWHERE.

So. Imagine dozens of other teenage girls, being held against their will and brainwashed in Utah, seeing these billboards and going, "huh. I'm having a complicated emotional reaction to all of this. It's possible that I might unpack that in two to three decades."

Both of these situations arise from the same societal attitudes. This guy wanted a teenage girl to be trapped with him and unable to leave, regardless of her feelings on the matter, and for her to act a certain way and comply with his desires. He took her from her home and forced her to be somewhere she did not want to be and would not let her go, and he tried to turn her into a different thing. The difference in societal reactions to when one specific, unauthorized guy does this, compared to when someone's parents pay a fancy sounding institution to do it for them, tells you a lot about how we think about the autonomy of teenage girls.

In Utah, the reason these types of institutions are allowed is because their youth rights laws are abysmal even compared to the rest of the US. Children aren't people, they're the property of their parents. Elizabeth Smart's parents didn't want her to be kidnapped, so it was bad. Our parents did want us to be kidnapped, so it was fine.

Elizabeth Smart’s kidnapper’s crime was that he didn’t go through the established system for kidnapping and brainwashing teenage girls. This is not even a little bit hyperbolic.

[creekfiend]

Some ppl are confused about this, I recommend at the very least reading the Wikipedia article on the troubled teen industry. For more info, you can listen to Paris Hilton's podcast Trapped in Treatment or the Salt Lake Tribune's podcast Sent Away (or both). This is something you probably should know about if you have any interest in mental health treatment or youth rights in the USA. (Thanks Kuzu for the latter two recs!)

The types of institutions I'm referring to, which operate primarily in Utah, accept kids who have no criminal history or history of drug use, which is usually a requirement in other states, or that is my understanding of how it worked at the time I was imprisoned. And I am equally against them in both cases, to be clear. 👍

[janmisali]

the thing about copyright abolition is that. what makes theft bad is that something is taken away from its rightful owner. in this sense, copyright infringement is literally not theft, because making a copy of something doesn't tangibly cause the original owner to lose anything that they would otherwise have. copyright enforcement, on the other hand, does take away people's access to what should be theirs. anyone who makes art while employed by a corporation and is unable to sell their work because it does not belong to them, anyone who's been sued by a pop musician for making music that sounds vaguely similar if you don't allow the jury to listen to the actual songs, these people have far more in common with victims of theft than anyone whose copyright has been infringed

[janmisali]

like the thing with the film rights to MLK's speeches being owned by spielberg / dreamworks, that's not actually an instance where copyright law failed to protect artists. that's the system working as intended. MLK's speeches were his intellectual property. when he died the rights to that intellectual property transfered to his family, and his family decided to sell those rights to dreamworks, thereby functionally preventing anyone else from legally using those speeches in a film for the next several decades. no crime was committed, nobody was tricked into anything, that's just how intellectual property rights work

[andromedaaap]

Path to the Light: Liberation

[ivy-michaels]

I do think it's super revealing that things like SSRIs aren't called addictive even though they have a physical dependency mechanism and withdrawal can literally kill you if done suddenly and incorrectly.

[ivy-michaels]

#the worst part is they don't even get you high they just make you feel slightly more normal

I mean that's the entire thing about the social construct of addiction, isn't it? It's not really about the meaningful health effects, its about whether something is fun or not, because fun = evil.

[mysharona1987]

[okiitos]

Rescue professional here:

If you need rescuing or help, DON’T FUCKING MOVE. You are so much easier to find when you stay put.

[thegreenpea]

Credits: @foxes-in-love

Your most important survival skill is asking for help

[existential-dread-in-the-am]

Goddamn preach this

[rogue-cyberman]

"Your most important survival skill is asking for help." THIS, it makes me so damn pissed off when parents try and normalize that asking for help is a taboo thing!

[isthescavengervideocute]

This feels important to reblog

[aorish]

I do think teenagers who want to look at porn should be able to look at porn, and i don't understand what arguments there are against this. it's not clear what them being "minors" has to do with anything, other than that no politician has to worry about courting their vote.

[aorish]

below age 12, most people aren't seeking out porn. Above age 17, there seems to be common consensus that people who want to look at porn should be allowed to.

so, from a public health perspective, what exactly is so special about ages 12-17 that we need to restructure the whole internet to prevent only people in those age ranges from accessing porn that they want to access?

[calellon]

i'll forever miss how the internet felt before you had to second-guess the authenticity of every single piece of media you came across. silly videos used to be just silly. fun was coincidental. wonder was just wonder. digital art had character and soul. AI has taken the taste out of everything and irreversibly poisoned the creative sphere and the people still pushing it forward are the doom of both joy and the quality of being.

[brazenautomaton]

But everyone already was lying to you? They staged videos all the time. They weren't coincidences. They made shit up for clicks and karma. They Photoshopped images for attention and sympathy.