5434a
8hr ago
Calipers?
I tried with a couple of beard hairs and they read around 0.10mm on 1/100mm range calipers so I expect you'd want a micron scale micrometer to get consistent readings of thinning head hair. That said I would have thought that number of hairs per cm^2 would be a more appropriate metric.
5434a
21hr ago
I've only messed around with micro batches of turbo cider. UHT apple juice, champagne yeast and a few slices of ginger root. I like it dry and strong so it's as simple as waiting til it finishes and then chilling it to clear. I should test if my yeast is still active, I've been thinking about making another bottle.
I made strawberry infused vodka once and that turned out better than I expected if a little overly sweet and jammy tasting. Would have been improved by cutting it back with plain vodka but I'd used all the vodka for making the infusion.
I did look into home stilling but I don't drink enough to make it worthwhile. Unlike @yofuckreddit the information I found made it look cheaper and easier than I expected. The method basically depends on judging when to cut the fractions (heads and tails from the hearts), and the more you spend on a still the more distinctly and efficiently they can be separated instead of having them bleed and smear from one into the other. There's some fairly straight forward chemistry and engineering underlying the process. As I say I lost interest as I don't drink that much and realised it would be quicker and easier to simply buy food grade ethanol to use for infusions (£20/L 95% according to the notes I took, roughly the same price as cheap vodka by alcohol volume). Still think it could be a fun project though. I saw some interesting videos* steeping different size oak pieces for making whisky that indicated a good product could be made quickly using pieces with the correct surface area, which makes sense as beneath the mystique it's basically a wood infusion. On the other hand this is coming from someone who rates UHT turbo cider as perfectly adequate, so mileage may vary. Now where's that yeast...
*Found it: Final Tasting - How does surface area affect the whiskey aging process?
5434a
3d ago
The other, more culture war issue, is that due to the way RLHF works, they will likely be pushing one ideological lens over another. Especially about deep topics like morality, relationships, casual sex, etc.
I'd assume most therapists would hold to similar ideological lenses unless you sought out a therapist directly and explicitly sponsored by a church or similar institution.
I think if the AI could hold a memory of previous discussions it would probably be as good as any therapist in most aspects, possibly better because it's available 24/7 at a low price, but possibly worse in minor aspects in that it can't read the unspoken cues of body language, vocal tenor, implicit context etc and it can't sympathetically offer a box of tissues and a cup of tea. This is assuming the patient is actively engaged and moderately literate and intelligent enough to be able to guide their own sessions. I expect less able patients would need the kind of prompting and closer attention that is more suited to an IRL interaction.
I also expect there are big blind spots I'm missing like how to transfer "notes" from online sessions to an IRL therapist, or how to alleviate a crisis that rises above an initial need to talk things over.
Of course there's also the risk of someone who is already mentally unstable talking to a fake person that's been programmed to be agreeable, but if AI therapy was properly established in its own right I assume it would be operating under a custom prompt to better tune it to the task.
5434a
5d ago
I expect it will be rationalised as being the revised way to protect trans identifying people.
5434a
6d ago
A multi media push for Bluesky is happening today.
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=Bluesky&iar=news&ia=news
Currently listening to BBC radio news with guests talking about "is X over?" To their credit the host is offering some criticism of the move and the possible motives.
Is X over? Is this push organic, or coordinated? Are journalists helping contribute to a more positive platform, or are they running away to a hugbox in an effort to punish Elon Musk for supporting Donald Trump?
I don't have much to say but I thought this was worth a post given these platforms' centrality to the internet culture war and its synergies with journalism. For my part I've always thought Twitter was shit, is shit, and will remain shit, and the same goes for any copycats adopting the same format. I lament the drop off of RSS, which suffered from terrible branding/awareness. I didn't understand the value of RSS until it was already in decline, dismissing it as just more icon clutter below a standard format blogpost next to Facebook, Reddit, Stumbleupon, Del.icio.us and send-to-email share links.
Twitter's rise began with journalists hailing it as the beginning of "citizen journalism", plateaued with it becoming a journalism circlejerk of mutual citationogenics they could profitably mine for clickbait from the comfort of their pillows with no need to undertake difficult tasks like research and real world reportage, and is now being abandoned as those same citizen journalists have increasingly turned against the professional journalist class who lauded them. Reap what you sow, Frankenstein's monster, the student has become the master, etc...
Is it a coincidence this is happening on a Friday night? Sunday night is the typical slot for setting a news agenda for the week, but something like Bluesky might be more suited to a weekend when people would be settling down to a relaxing night of shitposting.
5434a
6d ago
Seemed to me that there were many more significant sections written almost entirely in dialogue. Easily one of the most dialogue heavy books I've read.
It was a welcome relief toward the second half to read something like "he continued explaining the reason for his frustration until they arrived at the house". Felt like Austen herself was starting to show signs of getting tired of listening to her characters by that point.
5434a
7d ago
Finished Pride & Prejudice yesterday. I was expecting crisp and refined writing but what I got, which certainly was not parallel to, indeed not sharing many aspects with, a style one could generously, or as befits opinion parsimoniously, describe using a range of terms, carefully chusen from the refracted, diffuse spectrum of all potential lexical motifs, as one of focus, indeed moreso not an under abundance of sidewards steps and circumlocution.
Better than Madame Bovary though.
5434a
9d ago
Isn't donating blood supposed to be good for your health too? Within limits, obviously.
5434a
13d ago
Literally just heard this done as the closing number on BBC Radio 4's impressionist show Dead Ringers.
5434a
13d ago
One of my favourite aspects of reggae is that when they get a hit they'll recycle and reinvent it dozens or even hundreds of times. It's become customary to release entire compilations of one instrumental with multiple vocalists taking a turn to record a new song over the top. It's like if, to use pop stars, you had Taylor Swift, Bille Eilish, Post Malone and Lady Gaga all recording over Beyonce's Crazy In Love, topped off with an instrumental remix by Daft Punk. "People like it, let's make more!"
As it is if you want to hear different versions of most artists' songs you have to go to YouTube and either look for live performances by the original artist or covers/remixes by bedroom nobodies, which can be interesting in their own right but they'll never be as polished as a studio recording.
5434a
16d ago
Trans rationale is just a rhetorical three cup trick where the desired outcome is slipped underneath whichever restlessly rotating definition suits the advocate. They'll say whatever improves their position. If it's "men can be women" that's what they'll say, and if you argue that men can't be women they'll slip the ball under a different cup. The left plays the role of the stooge, be that willing or unwillingly.
5434a
25d ago
TikTok has lots of highly engaged users but I assume they're not accomplished politicians, broadcasters, academics, and other leading figures of major social institutions. They might run a brief campaign on TikTok if their social media coordinators recommend it and then duck out again when the moment passes, they don't stay there and engage with other users as peers like they do on Twitter.
5434a
26d ago
Serious journalists depend on Twitter both for material and self promotion. Instagram and TikTok are for tabloid tier infotainment meaning there's very little chance of the content from those platforms polluting the memespace of serious discussions and they can be safely ignored/excluded.
I suspect this is largely because Twitter trades primarily in text and links rather than photos and video. Writing on Twitter typically has a much higher velocity, range, spread and linguistic precision than a set of photos or a linear video (hence why Insta and TikTok posts often include captions for added clarity).
I don't know if the other apps have any similar mechanisms to the retweet function. Seems like mostly all you can do is view, follow, leave a comment and smashthatlikebutton.
5434a
27d ago
You might not endorse homosexuality but I'm reasonably confident you and homosexuals would both agree on the basic facts of the matter: Homosexuals are people who are sexually attracted to people of the same sex. Right or wrong, good or bad, nice or nasty, nobody is arguing about what the term signifies. Nobody is claiming that a man who wants to have sex with men isn't a man who wants to have sex with men.
Transgenderism advocates and trans sceptics don't agree on the ground level. Transgenderists believe that they can stop being what they are and become what they already were if only they weren't what they already are, which they're not, and want to stop being. Trans sceptics think that's self serving circular anti-sense.
Both homosexuals and transgenderists are nonconforming in certain aspects of stereotypical gender expressions but they have radically different interpretations of what that signifies. Gays interpret it as a subjective preference ("I like x"), trannies interpret it as an inversion of objective reality ("x, which is defined as not y, is y, not x").
You might not like gays but I suspect you'd find them that bit worse if they told you their having gay sex with other gays was proof they're not gay.
5434a
28d ago
“I do not want our work to be weaponized,” she said.
By which she means politicised, while herself choosing to act politically both by withholding from publishing and using the frame of threat protection to justify her political choice.
Unless there's some way of cloning it your phone number is effectively locked to a single SIM card, so if you want either handset to receive phone calls to your number it needs to have that SIM inserted.
Hmm, just looked it up and apparently there are ways of cloning a SIM. You could look into that, I stopped at the search results page. SIM cloning is usually done for illicit purposes though so I'd expect it to present additional unexpected difficulties even beyond the incompatability you found trying to use a T-Mobile SIM in your Nokia. It almost certainly won't be supported* by the networks and their vendors though so unlike the T-Mobile/Nokia you can't just take it into a shop and ask them if you can try before you buy.
Wifi and 4G are the phone's means of connecting to the internet. Turn them off and you'll still have cell tower service for plain phone calls and SMS texts. You'd have no email, no browser, no doomscroll apps, no internet dependent notifications, but your "offline" apps will still work (things like the camera, timers, alarms, step counters... maybe maps? GPS will still work but it depends if you have the map saved locally for offline use).
I don't know what your skill set is like, and I've never done this, but I think an IfThisThenThat app should be able to do what you want with some simple rules that add up to "If it's between 5PM and 5AM then switch off wifi and 4G", or "if GPS is not [at the office] then switch off wifi and 4G".
*By "not supported" I imagine it could likely raise a flag of suspicious activity if two devices show up using the same SIM card simultaneously. One at a time would okay, but then that defeats most of the purpose of not having to swap the SIM between them.
5434a
1mo ago
The problem is you'll have to physically swap over your SIM card every time. Actually, now that eSIMs are a thing I wonder if it's even possible to bounce between handsets in the way you're looking to.
If all you want is offline time then it's a lot easier to just switch off internet connectivity. You can probably get an IfThisThenThat app that could automate regular online/offline times. A quick search suggests it can be done natively in iOS.
5434a
1mo ago
Updates are always interesting.
Speaking of mining and updates, I wonder what happened to that guy who had a physical mine? I think it was gold deposits IIRC.
5434a
1mo ago
Interesting. So the tension between seeing yourself one way while seeing yourself acting in a contrary way... Is it possible to integrate that in a decoupled manner or must it be a case of altering one of the aspects to produce a more stable sense of alignment? Is there any refuge in the irrational via humour and laughing at one's own absurdity?
what is more important, getting the thing done or getting it done your way?
I suppose it comes down to dependency vs self sufficiency.
It's kind of demeaning, per OP's examples, to have friends set up dates and jobs for you or resorting to open invitation public events to meet people. I won't argue that it can't be effective but there's something about the means tainting the ends. Do you deserve that job, or are you a charity case who couldn't do it on his own merit?
And with some extension the ends in turn taint the means; are you friends because you like that person, and are you at this event because it's interesting in itself, or is it because you had an ulterior need that you're using them to achieve.
The mature attitude is probably to recognise that it's an amount of both and that it's not that important in the end. But the ego likes things simple and binary, and there's a degree of maturity in accepting that the ego doesn't disappear just because we can recognise when it's irrational.
5434a
1mo ago
Tangentially, would you say that for a man to train in BJJ, or boxing, or firearms is empowering?
I don't disagree with the various criticisms of feminism and its habitual maneuvering to wriggle out of apportioning some responsiblity for women's choices to women themselves. But the motte of empowerment is simply that these decisions that women make are now made by choice. Being obliged or pressured to take a job, or have kids, or get a divorce, or pose naked isn't empowering. Being allowed the choice to do those things is where the claim of empowerment comes from.
It's not meaningless. It's just that it's only trivially meaningful. Women have been empowered to choose what they do where previously they weren't (or weren't seen/believed to do so). Being empowered to vote doesn't mean you have the same power as the winner of the election, but it's better than having no say at all. The confusion is that empowerment is spoken of as if it were akin to exercising power itself rather than exercising a limited choice. "Girl power!"... to choose between working a hundred hours for one boss or working one hour for a hundred bosses. Either way you're going to work.
5434a
1mo ago
All I can say is that it's surprisingly easy to get genuinely blacked out, no memory drunk while remaining capable of walking and talking. All it takes is drinking too much spirits too quickly, and it's not as much as you might expect if it's consumed fast enough.
5434a
1mo ago
It's an overly sweet bubblegum flavour drink that makes cherryade seem sophisticated and grown up.
I think a better formulation of the question is: Can men who pretend to be women justifiably expect identical treatment as women? I'd say the answer is no, they can't expect it, they can attempt it and expect push back if/when their pretence is revealed.
Can men walk around dressed in women's clothes? Yes, I don't think a person's outfit requires the consent of other people assuming it adheres to basic modesty. That doesn't mean other people have to approve of it though, they just can't formally prevent it.
Can men wearing women's outfits walk into a women's toilet and expect to be treated as if they belong there? No.
Can men become so skilled at pretending to be women that they successfully deceive people into thinking they belong there? Yes, some of them can.
Does that mean they really do belong there? No, they're men.
And finally, some men and women are not accepted in their own toilets. You should't start masturbating at the sink or shitting on the floor, grabbing people to dance with them, asking them to show you their dick, tipping the bin over, smashing the fixtures or offering around a plate of finger foods. Being the correct sex is not an unrestricted licence to misbehave in a single sex area. Pretending to be the opposite sex is one of those unacceptable behaviours.
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