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cat with newspaper meme

I should learn Latin

in reply to Daniel Filan

Current plan is to buy the Lingua Latina per se Illustrata books and go thru them also listening to scipio martianus' pronunciations of them, but only actually do that if continue to feel like it a few days from now.
in reply to Daniel Filan

I think this would also allow me to more forcefully assert my contention that "Italian" is a woke larp.


a friend just told me about Framework laptops and it seems like a compelling philosophy of laptop design: it's modular and user-serviceable, and indeed they ship it to you in bits with a screwdriver 😅

Curious if anyone here has had any experience with them. Some reports on the internet that they have fan noise / temperature troubles?

in reply to Ben Millwood

They're popular enough among hacker-types that typical linux compat issues seem to be mostly ironed out (suspend/resume, graphics, wifi, etc.).

The main reason I'm not using one is because I want a silicon root of trust that can attest to the integrity of the whole effective TCB of the platform, and only their chromebook variant has a plausible story of even attempting to (TPMs don't normally cover the embedded controller firmware), but last I checked the chromebook variants has pretty limited max specs (not enough ram for comfortably compartmentalizing desktop workloads into VMs with the desired granularity). This is understandable, since chromebooks are thought to be a low-end market segment, but still unfortunate.

in reply to Ben Millwood

I bought a Framework several months ago and I love it. I installed Debian. I was also worried about whether there were practical downsides, but to me the problems have been indistinguishable from the other laptops I've used.



I've had a pretty fun first week of actually using my #hamradio license! My computer has now talked directly to computers in fifteen countries on four continents! Still working my way up to talking to other humans 😅


Recorded a podcast with Divia while I was staying at her house but there was a glitch and the audio is not recoverable, so you all are never going to know which denomination is right about Christianity.


Early 90's NYT crosswords are built different. I've been working through the earliest Saturday puzzles that are available in the app, and I finally solved one with no assistance, after trying 9 others. I can ~always solve modern Saturdays; I wonder if the difference is more in the cultural context or in the absolute difficulty.
in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun

I'm now pretty sure they're harder. I've switched to doing Mondays, which take me twice as long as modern Mondays. I think roughly three to five clues are notably dated in a given Monday puzzle; the rest are basically the same kind of clue as in a modern puzzle, just usually later in the week.


At ProgressCon. Had to help explain to another attendee what a "soyboy" is. I guess that's a good sign?


new #hamradio development: I'm pretty sure that this screenshot indicates that my computer successfully talked to a computer in Japan:


I wonder if I should modify my policy of arriving at airports one hour before departure for domestic flights, shaving down that margin to 50 min or so. I feel like I never brush with missing a flight and I tend to spend a bunch of time waiting around.
in reply to Daniel Filan

Then yeah, seems reasonable – the biggest variance on wait times is typically security, TSA pre cuts that down a lot in most airports, and the rare cases that cause a significant delay there are likely to delay a lot of people, which means a good chance the flight will be delayed as well. And domestic flights are typically pretty easy to reschedule if you miss them, unlike international.

There are caveats if you're at an unfamiliar airport or checking bags, but I imagine you're accounting for those already.

in reply to Daniel Filan

I recently had the unfortunate experience of an unreasonably long pre-check line at Newark airport. There was a lot of "wait, *this* is the pre-check line??” There were even signs advertising that you could skip this line if you get "pre-check clear." Everyone has a fastpass, so they invented a fasterpass.

(I think it would've been ~30-50 minutes of total waiting in the line if I hadn't apologeticly wormed my way up the line, explaining to people that I was about to miss my flight)




I made it to the finals of the Fog of War Chess Championship!




Midnight Sun - Yoshitaka Amano: Icon Aloft (1990)
From this tweet: https://x.com/xe0_xeo/status/1847019755355439221


A Thousand Cranes (full moon detail)
by Kayama Matazō (1927–2004)
Found at this tweet: https://x.com/marysia_cc/status/1846685050236244376


in reply to Sam FM

I think the thing that happened to my Stardew game is I ended up romancing an NPC because I felt like the game wanted me to, but I wasn't really into it, I just wanted to grow crops. Now I have a girlfriend but I felt bad for stringing her along so I stopped playing the game :P
in reply to Ben Millwood

don't date unless you want to: good advice for Stardew and life in general


does anyone want to play Factorio Space Age with me when it releases next week


Some #hamradio updates:

  1. Because US amateur radio licenses are public and include addresses, you can see a map of everyone with a license. It's way denser than I would have expected in Berkeley:

    And hey, there's @Daniel Filan with his fancy Extra-class license a bit further down on the map!

  2. Today I managed to hear my first trans-pacific signal, from Nauru (a tiny island country 5,000 miles from here). Apparently it's what's called a "DXpedition", where a group of radio amateurs go on holiday in order to help other amateurs check "rare" countries off their lists. Unfortunately from their website, it looks like they're transmitting with more than ten times as much power as I have (or at least they brought equipment for broadcasting at that power level), so this isn't much evidence about whether I'll be able to have a full conversation with them or not.
This entry was edited (7 months ago)


mildly amusing UI hiccup in the Friendica 2FA options menu: github.com/friendica/friendica…

in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun

I like this because it starts of feeling like it might be a joke about weird alphabets, but then falls to pieces in a kind of pleasantly absurd way.


AI Art Turing Test


I enjoyed this!

I got just over 50% correct, ie little better than chance. Clearly I don't know shit XD

Regardless of 'can you/can't you tell', my favourite pictures in this were all AI-generated, including both some I really thought were human, and some I correctly identified as AI.


astralcodexten.com/p/ai-art-tu…

in reply to Amber Dawn

I got 77%

I'm realizing a decent amount of real human art might involve strange out-of-place choices

in reply to kip

Correctly identified as AI: 18

Correctly identified as human: 19

Labeled human as AI: 4

Labeled AI as human: 7

(This might be off by 1 or 2, because 1 or 2 things in Scott's answer key didn't seem to perfectly line up with the test?? I think????)



Calling things unofficial names as a positive practice


in reply to Amber Dawn

Similar incident maybe not known to the Americans: they ran a poll to name a polar research ship, where people could write in suggestions. Someone suggested the name "Boaty McBoatface", and this won by a landslide. However, the powers-that-be boringly decided not to honour this :p (They called the ship RRS Sir David Attenborough)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boaty_Mc…

in reply to Amber Dawn

There's a line in a Dessa song ("Dixon's Girl") that I particularly like:

"There was a snow storm in Jackson
When you and I met
At a club called Saint Sebastian's
But the sign said something different"

Why would a club in Mississippi be unofficially called "Saint Sebastian's" and officially called something else? Makes u think.

(St. Sebastian is the unofficial patron saint of homosexuality.)



Chronotypes as orthogonal to 'what do you feel like at different times of day'


in reply to Amber Dawn

I normally ~ can't get out of bed before 10am without fairly extreme inner violence. But also, my life feels much more wholesome on the rare occasions when I do organically go to bed early and wake up early.
in reply to Chana

More or less? Very rarely (maybe twice in the last five years) I've managed to get on a streak of waking up around 8am, that lasted maybe 5 days.
in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun

Yeah interesting, I'm somewhat similar, inasmuch as if left without an alarm, I'll tend to get up after 9, maybe later, but I feel better when I get up earlier (usually 7.45-8.30 type of time). I solve this by using the Alarmy app, which has various tricks but the one I use is, I have to run downstairs to scan a barcode to make the alarm stop. This is very annoying and coercion-y in the moment, but I get over it quickly, and I do feel better that way, fall asleep more reliably, etc.


Managed to get my 100ft antenna up the tree! Briefly listened to some old dudes almost a thousand miles away in Vancouver, talking about their radio equipment
in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun

Initially read this as "100ft up the tree" and was going to ask about technique employed to achieve such :)
in reply to Soccum Speleodontidae



I feel like a fun troll for modest epistemology extremists would be: "Wow, you sure seem confident in 'modest epistemology', for someone who isn't viewed as an expert on epistemology. I'm going to adopt the views of the most widely-recognized thinker who seems to have anything to say about this topic"
in reply to Ben Millwood

I mean, sure, but my mind unfairly translates that section into "yeah, you're right, but I can't be bothered to actually change my mind just because of something like that. Don't @ me."

He points out that many popular views are self-defeating, and is like "well surely all these self-defeating views can't be wrong!" But, like, yes they can? And also this is an especially apt case, since the question is directly about what-to-believe! You're not even really going up a meta level.

in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun

Yeah I don't necessarily buy his counterargument either, just wanted to point out that it has been discussed :P

I guess in fact if you believe in epistemic modesty, deferring to the fact that most people don't believe in it doesn't actually fix your problem, because that tells you to not defer and follow your own beliefs, but then your own beliefs tell you to defer again. It's not just that it recommends that you don't use it, it's actively paradoxical.

I think you and I probably disagree about how much it matters to have an inconsistent / seemingly arbitrary "do epistemic modesty unless it's paradoxical, then don't" rule. I think I can make it sound more reasonable if it's something like "it's surprising if you alone are right while a large number of relevant experts are wrong, so usually reject this thesis, but in some cases this rejection is even more surprising / obviously incorrect, so in that case you have to stick with your beliefs".


in reply to Daniel Filan

There's also a statue of Columbus outside the court, as well as an obviously tilted lamp post. I wonder if they're going for an aesthetic of bad things.

in reply to Daniel Filan

Court houses have this kind of Objective Beauty that I find offputting. I think it's something to do with

1. marble floors are too noisy and squeaky
2. hallways are too echoey, makes you feel exposed
3. not enough windows
4. half the people there are miserable for various reasons

(I expect that people in a supreme court are less miserable than in the average court, but more miserable than in the average office building)



Some ads in Time Square:
- move to Thailand
- Kalshi live Trump vs Harris odds

in reply to Daniel Filan

Oreo Coke doesn't sound like something I'd enjoy, but Coke Oreos could be interesting? I tried the pop rocks oreos recently, which was certainly a memorable experience :)


Cold take but the trains in NYC are better than the BART
in reply to Daniel Filan

Say more - I agree but curious why you think this. I think the BART trains feel way cleaner (the newest MTA trains are clean but the rest feel old / grimy - which is a vibe but not one everyone likes)
in reply to Chana

Honestly I forget what I was thinking when I wrote this, but probably just that there are many more stations near where I would want to be and that they seem to run more frequently. Also the thing where you can just use your credit card is very convenient as a visitor.



Should I try to learn more things systematically?


in reply to Amber Dawn



Daylio (popular mood tracking app; I've been trying it for about two weeks) is pretty nice. It feels wholesome to spend a couple minutes reflecting on my day in a kinda structured way, even though so far I haven't really gotten any insight out of it.

My guess is that it feels healthy for some reason like, if I'm spending a little metacognition on (nonjudgmentally) remembering my day, it feels clearer that I care about myself, and maybe that I'm not trying to erase parts of my experience.

I've been a little surprised to notice that most days have been "good" over those two weeks. No "rad" days yet, but also only two "meh" days, and no "bad" or "awful" days. I would have expected that my modal day was "meh". I might just have been lucky recently, though.

in reply to David Mears

Still positive! Have continued using it, and I really like that it feels relatively cheap to do but still informative. I think the feeling of wholesomeness dissipated slowly, and now it mostly just feels like "a thing I do".


Have you ever wanted to do something like cp -r, but doing something different for certain subpaths?

... You haven't?

Well here is how to do it anyway:

find . -false \
      -o -path . \
      -o -path ./log -exec ln -s /home/friendica/{} $out/{} \; -prune \
      -o -path ./view/smarty3 -exec ln -s /home/friendica/{} $out/{} \; -prune \
      -o -name .git -prune \
      -o -type d -exec mkdir $out/{} \; \
      -o -type f -exec cp --reflink=auto {} $out/{} \;

that is: don't do anything with ., with ./log or ./view/smarty3 populate them with a symlink and then don't descend any further into them, ignore any .git directory anywhere, and with any other path, copy it normally. (The -false is just so I can start every line with -o.)

(This example in particular could be ~mostly replicated with rsync --exclude and putting in the symlinks afterwards, but minor modifications would make that not work anymore; also, it's possible to combine the two symlink branches in this case, but it's ugly.)



About two years ago I got a ham radio license. I haven't done anything with it so far, but I just ordered my first HF radio transceiver, and materials for a ~100ft temporary antenna in my back yard (I'm extremely lucky in that my new house has a 120ft tree in the back that I can lift a wire into).

We're approaching a peak in the solar cycle, which means that over the next year or so it will be unusually possible to communicate over extremely long distances. You can look at dxmaps.com/spots/mapg.php (especially the "10m" and "40m" tabs) to see real-time examples of the kind of distances I'm talking about: In the evenings, if my setup works well, I'm expecting I'll be able to have conversations with people in Japan, Australia, and New Zealand, without any intermediate infrastructure at all. This is such a wild thing to be able to do; I'm really excited.

in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun

Ben Weinstein-Raun tagged Ben Weinstein-Raun's status with #hamradio


About two years ago I got a ham radio license. I haven't done anything with it so far, but I just ordered my first HF radio transceiver, and materials for a ~100ft temporary antenna in my back yard (I'm extremely lucky in that my new house has a 120ft tree in the back that I can lift a wire into).

We're approaching a peak in the solar cycle, which means that over the next year or so it will be unusually possible to communicate over extremely long distances. You can look at dxmaps.com/spots/mapg.php (especially the "10m" and "40m" tabs) to see real-time examples of the kind of distances I'm talking about: In the evenings, if my setup works well, I'm expecting I'll be able to have conversations with people in Japan, Australia, and New Zealand, without any intermediate infrastructure at all. This is such a wild thing to be able to do; I'm really excited.




I wonder what proportion of 2030 Nobel Prizes will go to Demis Hassabis.


A crystallization of a realization that's been percolating for about a year:

Credit and money (at least representative money, though I think also ultimately fiat money and even sort-of commodity money) are fundamentally the same kind of thing: they're markers of trust in a specific entity, to uphold specific but highly-fungible commitments.

They basically only differ in which entity is being trusted.



the other day I was feeling bad about expressing needs and had a moment of "oh, I have cast myself as Gandalf", and it felt insightful at the time; it doesn't feel as insightful now but I am going to explain it anyway

The Gandalf archetype is capable and wise, and can solve your problem whether your problem is a giant fire demon or a moment of wavering courage, having both material and emotional skills. Gandalf is seen as important and respected by his peers, but he doesn't exactly want anything himself, it be a little bizarre for him to be needy at anyone. He worries on behalf of the world, and everything he asks of others is what the world needs, that he is simply a conduit for, not something for him personally. He wields and channels forces greater than any individual, in response to threats greater than any individual, and he as a person ends up abstracted almost entirely away.

sorry if you know more about Lord of the Rings than I do and this seems wrong to you; this status is not really about Gandalf :P

in reply to Ben Millwood

someone asked me how I feel about this casting and I want to clarify that it's bad for me, but I'm not yet clear on whether it's bad because though it would be good to be Gandalf, I'm not and shouldn't pretend, or whether actually being Gandalf isn't even good


Have been flossing for a week after a dentist appointment put the fear of God into me and damn, that shit is still bloody and painful. Hope it doesn't persist too long I guess?

Googling this, people say it subsides in a week, but I feel like the fundamental problem is that it's hard to get the floss into the cracks between the teeth, meaning that when they do get in it's with high speed.

Actually googling just now apparently the thing I am doing is a flossing mistake? I don't know how successful their proposed alternative is tho...

in reply to Daniel Filan

I have found that some brands/styles of floss feel comfier than others, you could experiment with some different types?
in reply to Daniel Filan

I got trapped in a cycle of it hurting every time I flossed, so I didn't want to floss again until the pain went away, so I never got back to flossing regularly. Eventually I gave up on strong floss and bought little brushes that are like toothpicks with bristles. I don't have any external evidence on how well they work, but they get between my teeth without hurting 🤷‍♀️


Hishida Shunsō (1874 - 1911)
Twilight, 1901
Found on X: https://x.com/marysia_cc/status/1843521957448589396


Bullshit or Confusion?




The caption of this picture in this news article seems kinda biased