dark
Veritas vos liberabit
No bio...
User ID: 1132
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
Glad to see evidence of this (can't find any), but I think we've veered close to CW territory.
https://github.com/tbreuss/dns-blacklist-check
^ Project that uses blacklist with recent commits
Synthesizing the psychedelics themselves, or having a chemist they know do it. TiHKAL was the classic reference on this.
Dark-web sales and purity testing labs? That meshes with the techno-libertarian side of things, but I have no idea how those labs operate and I'm guessing buying drugs online practically requires you to commit a federal crime in the US, which is a pretty big hazard.
For many of the psychedelics active in the μg range, cheap affordable lab tests (low end spectroscopy) will not be sufficient to even detect the compounds of interest. They would just say that the drug is on blotter paper, for example. Expensive analysis defies the point, and it also much more closely monitored, unless you have a friend at a university research center.
Many psychedelics have unclear scheduling around the world, and can be "legally" sold "NOT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION". The US has the Federal Analogue Act that catches a lot of the {1V,1P,1cP,1D}-LSD prodrugs that need to be explicitly scheduled in many other countries. So for LSD (or LSD prodrugs), in the US, I will guess that people with genuinely accurate information on doses are synthesizing it themselves. This carries much higher penalties than simple possession and could be construed as manufacturing or possession with intent to distribute. I personally would not risk the ire of the famously fickle US govermental agencies just to a slightly more accurate read on the dosage of drugs.
Addenddum: Alexander Shulgin, the author of TiHKAL, obtained a DEA Schedule I license to perform his experiments.
In 1994, two years after the publication of PIHKAL, the DEA raided his lab. The agency requested that Shulgin turn over his license for violating the license's terms, and he was fined $25,000 for possession of anonymous samples sent to him for quality testing.
So people do go indeed go around shipping samples to chemists in the US for testing, though I'm guessing for purity/lack of contaminants, not concentration.
Laws are shifting fast though, and I'd expect within a decade, you might be able, under clinical contexts, to access certain psychedelics.
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
GitHub has a half decent censorship record? They usually only fold to DMCA requests (legitimate ones at that). But open to evidence of the contrary I have missed.
Cloudflare is more of a mixed bag. I used to strongly dislike them due to captchas from TOR exit nodes and VPNs, but they have a very robust censorship record, hosting "terrorist groups" and the 8chan until boards/shareholders likely twisted so hard management had their hands completely tied. They offer DDOS protections that allow sites that would otherwise be DDOS'ed to oblivion if they were self-hosted to stay up and available. How would you say they're hostile to the open web?
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
I needed to learn and grok git when I wanted to start contributing to the linux kernel. Read the docs, the source code, and starting using it everywhere to get it into my muscle memory.
I guess when you're purposefully juggling hammers all day, you do start seeing some loose nails around the house.
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
I feel obligated to point out that Haruki Murakami is not Asian-American, he's just Asian (Japanese).
"whose inclusion I find borderline offensive" I wasn't offended at the quality of his writing :P
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
I mean..? It was designed as a hosting service for git repositories. Sources for static websites are kept under version control anyways, is Github Pages that big of a stretch?
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
What? I keep all documents under version control, whether blog posts, journals, or source and whether collaborative or individual. It's the most robust way of preserving changes and examining them over time. Git's even used under the hood for pass, my password manager.
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
Sidenote: I'd really wish people would move away from Medium (thanks heavens for https://scribe.rip/, which circumvents all the obnoxious crap and adds sane typographic settings) and the new kid on the block, Substack. I just saw for the first time a Substack article asking for a subscription (instead of letting me "read it now") and it just broke the cardinal highlighting rule.
Are Github/Cloudflare pages + Hugo/Jekyll/whatever's hot now that hard?
I miss the open web. *sigh*
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
It's not interesting as a proof of identity, more as an extra powerful correlation/fingerprinting attack. Consider the following scenario, you perfectly segregate two identities (separate devices, connection locations, posting times, interests) online. For some piquant, let's assume you have aboveboard beliefs/communications (posts that are kosher for your local authoritarian government) and below-board/seditious ones. Your aboveboard ones often leak your identity location, because why practice aggressive OPSEC when you're asking where's the best place to buy fresh onions near your village (even worse, aggressive OPSEC in these cases could tip off the authorities that someone buying onions around that area is up to no good!)? However, because you don't randomize your writing style, your government eventually is led to suspect that FuckTheGovernment93 is actually the same person as LocalFarmer82. You are arrested by the secret police, tortured and shipped off to a black site.
Even worse, consider a more aggressive scenario that's actually plausible in the modern age: you only have one identity that's completely distinct from your day-to-day activities. There is no other public content to compare to. However, because your government has access to your online schooling records/past essays/whatever writing you performed during mandatory schooling, they still manage to figure out FuckTheGovernment93 is you. Same outcome as above.
I'd like to make a meta-comment here; I got this thread in the daily volunteer janitorial duties. Without context, I see consensus building, cherry-picked (though not insufficient) evidence to support his claims -- No Chinese-Americans are not just high IQ whites seems to be the one real claim of the entire post, which the subsequent evidence feels so disconnected from I almost forgot about it --, vague weakmanning.
That said, on a quick read, and without seeing his name, it wasn't even clear to me whether he was pro or anti East Asian. The first two sections seem to suggest that the babies are a lot tougher/more stoic than Europeans, not a priori a negative trait. The last section, without context, could read as evidence of East-West cultural incompatibility or discrimination. Initially, when reading the title, I thought he was going for Chinese don't just have higher IQs, they are more resilient/industrious in general. This falls apart in the third section, where he's hammering the trope of East Asians = seen by Westerners as emotionless/cold/disconnected, which I think vaguely passes muster? There's considerable asymmetry in general cultural exports between East Asia and the US after WW2/Korea.
He's begging the question with Where are the great East Asian-American novelists?, but taking a step back, my main exposition to Japanese/Chinese culture has been self-sought (barring reading Sun Tzu when I was a young teenager, who's become a ubiquitous prototype of eternal Eastern wisdom) and entirely autochtonous. I've briefly perused top 25 best books in Asian-American literature and don't recognize a single title (except for a Murakami book, whose inclusion I find borderline offensive).
I believe I rated this as Bad, maybe an extremely charitable Neutral, but I feel this showcases a shortcoming of the hyperlocal view the volunteer system offers: not only am I unable to immediately view his previous posts (which in my opinion are significantly easier to classify without context) -- they are two clicks away, context then profile --, but am also not necessarily aware that this is a toned-down/more indirect version of the usual manifesto, for which he was already warned.
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
Yeah, I think we disagree on the premise (whether it's trolling or not), which then colors our view of the rest of the incident. -- Sidenote: @ZorbaTHut, any chance for troll prediction markets with a karma reward system? Or actually more generally, karma system based around correctly predicting/adjudicating moderation results (i.e., extended comment judgement requires you to slide a probability bar for each of the outcomes).
I personally hate the type of feeling based analysis that pervades forums (it feels overwhemingly X-tribe, so much more than before, halycon days, blah blah blah). I think polling (modulo polling bias) and other analytics can give much better insight into dynamic and culture progressions than any rudimentary glance over a few threads. Since this is the "Something Shiny" thread, maybe optional polling built in to themotte.org? Recurring, get a sense of trends over time. With a system like that, you can conclusively* answer questions like are Blue Tribe folk actually leaving in droves? Maybe they're actually becoming Grey/Purple/Red as they spend time here. Maybe there never were that many, and they got busy with other things in life. Maybe they're actually more common, just more moderate in tone and therefore stand out less. These datasets are now all a SQL query away. I hope the custodians use it wisely.
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
Huh, any Japanese care to chime in about how widespread these are with various generations?
The part about parents going to get away from their kids is an amusing dynamic, in my eyes.
I'll dial back my tone a few notches so we don't talk past each other. I think you've started this thread out of genuine concern for the culture of this place, which is a good common starting point.
I suspect if the political valence had been flipped he would've received at least a more neutral/positive response
Maybe..? I really feel like the trollbait tone attracted more disparaging replies. Picture
I have some Young Earth Creationist friends (who I love dearly) and they are offended by some of the Ice Age movies. When they see Ice Age content (including streams and clips of the new Ice Age 2: The Meltdown game), it can be offensive and threatening for them.
Downvotes are the online equivalent of an eye-roll or a sneer. You're not (at least, necessarily) dignifying the thought with a fully-formed response or counter-argument, but you're shaking your head as your counterpart speaks. Now prof_xi has strolled into the temple and yelled Sibboleth, and though the Gileadites did sneer, they did not slay him.
The Culture War Thread aimed to be a place where people with all sorts of different views could come together to talk to and learn from one another.
[...]
But once you remove [spam, bots, racial slurs, low-effort trolls, and abuse], you’re left with people honestly and civilly arguing for their opinions. And that’s the scariest thing of all.
The one foundational principle of this place, the shibboleth of Mottizens, is the belief that if it can be said respectfully and civilly, it can be said here. This is a bastion of (moderated) free speech. The Motte left reddit (amongst other reasons) because of increasing admin attention, notably around transgender CW conversations. The Motte has survived the Pharaoh chasing them across the Red Sea (r/ssc -> /r/TheMotte) , and wandering the desert for 40 years (r/TheMotte under a fickle and vindictive YWVH/spez), before finding its Promised Land here. An entire Exodus just to keep worshipping at the altar of freedom of expression.
prof_xi wandered amongst the Israelites to ask how people felt about them Moabite thots and gods. He waltzed into a mosque to ask help for his friends who are putting together a Mohammed sculpture visible from space.
I believe that my trans friends should be able to browse the internet without seeing content they deem hateful/disturbing
This is about as antithetical to the spirit of this place as you can get. And as far as a response to the desecration of local idols go, that thread managed to remain essentially constructive and, in my opinion, exceedingly charitable.
What's on display here isn't Red tribe bias lynching a befuddled Blue tribe newcomer, rather overly polite entertainment of a pretty conspicuous troll.
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
Scandinavia doesn't surprise me here. I had a Swedish friend whose parents started charging him rent when he turned 18 (not unusual in the US, unheard of in Southeastern Europe/Asia).
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
Asia is facing its' own fertility crisis, but I think it's safe to say that almost universally, family housing isn't conducive to premarital sex. My point was rather that if it's a norm, it's not particularly unattractive, as it is in the US. Are Japanese, Indian or Chinese refusing to date because their counterparts still live with their parents?
Also, I can't say I've witnessed this in Asia, but Brazil, for instance, has the whole love motel thing going on, where entrepreneurial businessfolk set themselves out to allow the generationally entrapped to tryst and frolick away from the watchful eyes of their progenitors.
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
I'm personally a fan of the Wellness Wednesday thread as one of the best random internet stranger advice sources. It escapes the rage-bait/circlejerk flair that the r/*advice subreddits almost universally share.
This isn't a culture war issue.
"Queer interest groups call for social censorship of topics based on witchhunt of the week" sounds like a plausible lede to any CW thread effortpost. Sure, there's a personal spin, where the interest groups are instead his friends, but that's about as CW a topic as you can get without going into "my friends are being beat up by $OTHER_RACE every other week, any (Wellness Wednesday) advice on arming myself for the coming race war?".
That said, not a single comment actually bites and turns it full fledged CW shit-flinging fest, he evens gets a concrete solution with uBlock rules.
As for the downvotes, I'll be charitable and attribute them to a natural response to an obvious troll post. The writing style gives it away
How can I support my trans friends while also being okay with people enjoying the new Harry Potter game?
How should I feel about streamers who choose to play the new Harry Potter game on stream? In some sense they have disregarded my friends' feelings and excluded them from their community!
The level of detail - trans friends (who I love dearly) - coupled with the admittedly amusing false dichotomies is a dead giveaway. There was no need to go into that level of detail to get meaningful advice - "my friends are getting offended because content-creators have different views than them, what should I do" would have sufficed and would have nonetheless garnered, I reckon, substantially the same response.
Arguing that Jesus was gay at $IVY_LEAGUE might not be trolling, but walking into a Texas church and asking the pastor whether there's any evidence to support that claim sure is.
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
This is outlandishly culturally biased. Essentially everywhere except North America, people live with their parents until they save up to buy a house/move in with a partner. They may temporarily move out for schooling and whatnot if it's not close to home, but the expectation is certainly that they stay and save while they're close to home (were you going for a meta cheap shot about Asians/South Americans/Middle Easterns being inferior romantic partners by inference?).
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
Male loneliness: Porn/AI companionship/tailored OnlyFans content. Bona fide prostitution where it's legal.
Male violence as a result of loneliness: I was going to go for an easy slam dunk, but the literature is unclear here. It appears that the proportion of young males is a stronger predictor of political violence than whether they are married or not. Barring that caveat, women exclusive spaces (i.e gyms/classes/... workplaces..?), burbclave type housing arrangements. Maybe easier to just hope unmarried does predict political violence and go short political stability and long volatility.
Mating malaise: dating apps that "solve" this (expect the bizarre proliferation of feature equivalent but community disjoint dating apps to continue), private colleges (already predominantly female, many there essentially just as an exercise in rubber-stamping and with the hope of finding a husband that's not from their hometown shithole), startups that will "solve" fertility crises (I expect government funding for these to explode in the next 2 decades or so)
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
Most of his references are to landmark philosophers on media, i.e. Baudrillard and MacLuhan (they were both way ahead of their time, they lived in the era of TV but saw trends that would persist into the age of the net), which he does explicitly call out. Also, the title is a reference to one of Baudrillard's keystone works.
I will note aside that Simulacra and Simulation, of Matrix fame, is an absolute must-read if you're interested in social media/advertising/market of "signs".
The fourth stage is pure simulacrum, in which the simulacrum has no relationship to any reality whatsoever. Here, signs merely reflect other signs and any claim to reality on the part of images or signs is only of the order of other such claims. This is a regime of total equivalency, where cultural products need no longer even pretend to be real in a naïve sense, because the experiences of consumers' lives are so predominantly artificial that even claims to reality are expected to be phrased in artificial, "hyperreal" terms. Any naïve pretension to reality as such is perceived as bereft of critical self-awareness, and thus as oversentimental.
Sound familiar?
If your attacker is particularly skilled/motivated (or maybe this has changed with new tools, too lazy to duck it now), stylometry is also a hard to work around threat. It isn't as easy to use at scale (queries of the type: sort all users on Twitter whose writing most resembles this sample, descending, a la perceptual hashing), but if you can narrow down with communities that a person is likely to be a part of, it can be a pretty fast iterative search.
People particularly intent on segregating online identities often either take on affected styles (harder than it might seem at first, especially with 100% consistency!) or use a scrambling tool (rudimentary form of this used to be roundtripping translation).
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
Passwords are hard. Pwned host computer is game over for almost everyone, barring some Qubes-type VM segregation setup. The passwords need to be entered in plaintext somehow. You can limit the extent of a breach by keeping your entire password db on an offline machine and lazily QR code'ing it across to the live machine whenever it needs a refresh. Password db encrypted with a gpg smartcard is also pretty good (though not as good as the offline setup, unless you need to tap per decryption like with a Yubikey, in which case I'd rate it as only slightly inferior).
I think you forgot the most important tip however: the more secure your setup, the higher the risk of you locking yourself out of your accounts/backups/encrypted storage. Find a way to dump your secrets in plaintext that fits your threat model (all of them, including TOTP secrets - ie, what generates your 2FA codes). This might be a box in your apartment with a backup at your office, or a safety deposit box, for instance. On the other end of the paranoid spectrum, a engraved titanium plate inside a waterproof container encased inside a block of concrete dumped in the middle of a remote lake works as well.
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
A lot of advice on both sides has been given in other threads, so I'll try to shed some light with an anecdote or two.
One of my friends dated a girl like this: sweet, caring and kind day-to-day, but became a monster when drunk. A combination of undiagnosed BPD and low tolerance for alcohol due to SSRIs led to quarterly, then monthly, then finally almost weekly blowups. She would get belligerent, messy, self-destructive, would actively fight off/try to escape from people trying to help her, it was a simple nightmare. For some people with BPD, alcohol is the perfect stimulant/depressive/uninhibitive cocktail to get them to show a really dark/animalistic side of their condition. Independent of the alcohol, it can begin manifesting in other areas of life.
Alcohol tolerance can shift wildly from person to person and from day to day, depending on food and water intake prior, rest and wakefulness, exercise, etc. People tend to find comfort in keeping up with others, because that keeps their consumption in check (they should only really get as drunk as they next guy/gal). If you're consuming more than everyone else, hard to act surprised when you get sledgehammered. I've had friends of all ages get surprised once in a while by how hard 8 to 9 drinks can hit. In an environment where alcohol consumption is ubiquitous (i.e. the West, South America, and large parts of Asia), getting a bit too drunk is inevitable. @MathiasTRex brings up a good point, the fact that her friends let her get away from them in that state is unacceptable. The number of delirious drunks that jump/fall off high ledges, or even just stumble and hit their hand and suffer permanent damage, would shock you (ask a cop/EMT from your area if you're curious).
From your post, it's not entirely clear if she falls more under the former (alcohol highlights {un,under}diagnosed condition) or the latter (sometimes can't keep up with the social drinking, and somewhat stupid/irresponsible drunk). In either case though, going forward, extra caution is definitely warranted around alcohol.
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
LLMs tend to do fairly well at this type of small dataset classification problem, has there been any investigation into GPT-3's API for this?
There's a built-in sentiment analyzer, and it's fairly straightforward once you've munged your dataset to get a rudimentary (or not!) classifier, outputting logprobs.
Some documentation is available here, if you're curious.
There's another repo with essentially the same name, so they're not super vigilant about these as far as I can tell. These all seem to be shutdowns in light of negative media attention.
I'll revise my assessment of Github on censorship from "half-decent" to "media/percetion sensitive".
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