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@yanklbonkl

(he/(any?), mid 20s) came for the memes, stayed for the memes

There is a common mistake by people who do not understand physics: They think the universe is a big collection of objects. But the truth is that the universe is a collection of relationships of objects, a big relational structure with only one person at the center, God, who cannot be grasped. God is not a person, He is the big relational structure that He is the only person.

academic publishing explained

A) this is hilarious and kids are fucking incredible comedians with devastatingly frank takedowns of adult nonsense

B) for people in the tags, I am absolutely certain it’s not “I sell paper”!!! It’s “hice el paper” = “I made/did the paper”

>First, we’ve discovered that about a quarter of all the internet connection in or out of the house were ad related. In a few hours, that’s about 10,000 out of 40,000 processed.

>We also discovered that every link on Twitter was blocked. This was solved by whitelisting the https://t.co domain.

>Once out browsing the Web, everything is loading pretty much instantly. It turns out most of that Page Loading malarkey we’ve been accustomed to is related to sites running auctions to sell Ad space to show you before the page loads. All gone now.

>We then found that the Samsung TV (which I really like) is very fond of yapping all about itself to Samsung HQ. All stopped now. No sign of any breakages in its function, so I’m happy enough with that.

>The primary source of distress came from the habitual Lemmings player in the house, who found they could no longer watch ads to build up their in-app gold. A workaround is being considered for this.

>The next ambition is to advance the Ad blocking so that it seamlessly removed YouTube Ads. This is the subject of ongoing research, and tinkering continues. All in all, a very successful experiment.

>Certainly this exceeds my equivalent childhood project of disassembling and assembling our rotary dial telephone. A project whose only utility was finding out how to make the phone ring when nobody was calling.

>Update: All4 on the telly appears not to have any ads any more. Goodbye Arnold Clarke!

>Lemmings problem now solved.

>Can confirm, after small tests, that RTÉ Player ads are now gone and the player on the phone is now just delivering swift, ad free streams at first click.

>Some queries along the lines of “Are you not stealing the internet?” Firstly, this is my network, so I may set it up as I please (or, you know, my son can do it and I can give him a stupid thumbs up in response). But there is a wider question, based on the ads=internet model.

>I’m afraid I passed the You Wouldn’t Download A Car point back when I first installed ad-blocking plug-ins on a browser. But consider my chatty TV. Individual consumer choice is not the method of addressing pervasive commercial surveillance.

>Should I feel morally obliged not to mute the TV when the ads come on? No, this is a standing tension- a clash of interests. But I think my interest in my family not being under intrusive or covert surveillance at home is superior to the ad company’s wish to profile them.

>Aside: 24 hours of Pi Hole stats suggests that Samsung TVs are very chatty. 14,170 chats a day.

>YouTube blocking seems difficult, as the ads usually come from the same domain as the videos. Haven’t tried it, but all of the content can also be delivered from a no-cookies version of the YouTube domain, which doesn’t have the ads. I have asked my son to poke at that idea.

fastest reblog in the west

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A punk rock wizard that has boots with magical sigils on the soles. When they stomp they lay down spells on that surface.

schrodinger's chekhov's gun. a detail in a story that looks like it should have some big payoff but it's too early to tell if that's relevant or if the author just has a passion for lovingly describing guns.

schrodinger's chekov's occam's razor: you find an inconsistent or inaccurate detail in a work that would be brilliant if it was foreshadowing a plot twist later on, but it's too early to tell whether the author expects you to be smart, and the simplest explanation is that they fucked up

D&D alignment is famously dumb, to the point where in literal decades I've only ever heard it discussed to dump on it or joke about it, but designing esoteric cosmic alignment systems for RPGs is very fun in that it appeals to the nerd's natural delight in taxonomy and mysticism. anyway my favourite one that I ever came up with, which I have yet to deploy in a finished work but still want to, is an alignment trinity that goes like this:

  • ROCK: associated with moralistic heroes and heroism, personal virtue, romanticism, himbos, babyface wrestlers, beach bodies, unarmed combat or purely cosmetic weapons, doing the simplest or most ethical thing without regard for the consequences, hot-blooded shonen protagonists who are 14, even numbers, the colours red and green
  • SCISSORS: associated with "bad guys", cunning, pragmatic and ruthless self-interest, heel wrestlers, "edginess"/antiheroics, lethal weapons (especially blades and guns), surprise attacks, lies and betrayal, decisive lateral solutions, the ends justifying the means, odd numbers, the colours black and blue
  • PAPER: associated with bureaucrats and institutions, "The Man", proceduralism for its own sake, dense codes of law, deciding what to do on the basis of abstract theory, Ayn Rand villains, inconvenient traditions, intellectualism and pseudointellectualism, co-optation by the establishment, art that only makes sense if you know art history, nonsense as distinct from lies, domestication of conflict, non-integers, the colours white and yellow

These form a kind of daoist element phase pattern where one is considered to "beat" the other and things transition according to that pattern, in the expected way.

This hits what I think is a sweet spot for design, where it feels plausibly transcendental in the sense that you can kind of let your eyes unfocus and genuinely imagine that these categories embody deep wisdom about the nature of the world, and it's elegant in that the aesthetics line up with the names of the categories in both metaphorical and literal ways, but it's also just visibly incredibly stupid and a joke, so you can enter into a superposition of taking it seriously within the narrative while considering it stupid and deflating.

Annals of US city governance, we are finally embracing the radical notion of trash bins:

The new rule is part of the city’s broader plan to move trash into containers, a simple yet revolutionary change in New Yorkers’ trash habits. To do so could easily cost the city hundreds of millions of dollars over the next decade. City officials must buy new specialized trash trucks and stationary containers, while also increasing the frequency of residential trash collection in large swaths of the city.

"Specialized trash trucks and stationary containers" how will we develop this frontier technology??

Other cities like Barcelona, Buenos Aires and Singapore have already embraced trash containerization.

Genius sentence, the way its structured to imply only the best of the best in modern cities have piloted this crazy idea. Soon NYC will be on the elite list of cities not dumping bags of trash openly on the streets! If you find yourself asking "wait why has this not happened yet", well:

City officials found that it was possible to use trash containers on 89 percent of the city’s residential streets, but it would require removing 150,000 parking spots 

So, yup.

something something developed country something

We are so rich we can afford to support rat populations into the millions unlike sick continent Europe.