i would prefer SiO2 personally, also known as silicate. It has the most straightforward and boring mineral composition but a nice sheen and it clearly shows the other person values efficiency as much as i do.

I think a regular work week should be reduced to 30 hours/week, people can work longer but everything above that is overtime and paid accordingly.

The tone of the ads this year felt almost like lampshading. Like if we acknowledge the problem, we’re wise to what the audience is feeling, but we’re not going to do a damn thing to address it.

like, i heavily disagree with you there. i tend to think today that the only thing to actually improve the world is to spread information and with it awareness about the situation.

action doesn’t even matter. once the information is obvious enough, the action will carry through with itself.

During the Super Bowl, Anthropic ran a dystopian AI ad about dystopian AI ads featuring an AI android physical trainer hawking insoles to a user who only asked for an ab workout. Not to be outdone, Amazon ran a commercial for its AI assistant Alexa+ in which Chris Hemsworth fretted over all the different ways AI might kill him, including severing his head and drowning him in his pool. Equally bleak, the telehealth company Hims & Hers ran an ad titled “RICH PEOPLE LIVE LONGER” in which oligarchs access such healthcare luxuries as facelifts, bespoke IVs, and “preventative care” to live longer than the rest of us. It was an anti-billionaire ad by a multibillion-dollar healthcare company.

Turn on the TV today, and you will drown in a sea of ads in which capitalists denounce capitalism. Think of the PNC Bank ads where parents sell their children’s naming rights a la sports stadiums for the money to raise them

oida wos

has anybody footage of these videos? i’d be very curious

interesting! :P

Blade Runner - the beloved classic sci-fi has Harrison Ford pinning a woman who says no to a wall and sexing her up as the romantic climax of the film.

I’ve never seen a Blade Runner movie but America does have a consent problem.

what about Margaret Thatcher?

turns out if you make rules, people comply with them. that, however, does not change anything about the underlying reality of the human nature.

GUIs are nice. we are made for visual perception. don’t feel bad about it.

often, when one sees things presented visually, such as all the files in a directory, it makes much more sense much faster than if one has to read the filenames on a console.

GUIs are actually superior for human-friendlyness in many cases, but their functionality is limited and also they can’t be scripted. also it’s much faster to write a CLI program than a GUI program (at least for me).

it’s one thing to convince you to buy something and it’s an entirely different thing to condition to you accept that genocides are necessary sometimes; vote against your own interests or else the other team will win; propagandize you against foreign political enemies; distract you from global rings of oligarchical pedofiles who torture, rape, kill and eat children for funsies; and many other things.

like, i see what you mean but i’m afraid that modern society doesn’t see it that way. “moral relativism” (a.k.a. post-structuralism) states that there is no absolute truth, neither is there an absolute set of ethics; and as a consequence, it must be possible to negotiate these ethics on the “free market of ideas”, a.k.a the internet where big influencer institutions pay to sway your opinion. It’s all just a market game: Buy and sell opinions, and see which ones perform best as a consequence.

astroturfing

i mean that’s what it’s there for? always has been

like, how else do you think companies on the internet make money? by manipulating public opinion

what does GNU Taler do exactly? is it just another blockchain-like cryptocurrency scheme? Does it require a traditional bank to provide some kind of API? How does institutional oversight work?

been saying this too

Zen is basically the scientific method, without the institution around it

sounds like a good thing. man do i miss actually going out and meeting people. i mean, i can go out, but i’m mostly alone, idk where everyone else is, the world feels so empty, devoid of people in it

redereferencing

omg, what a word :o :D

but in general, yes you’re right, adding DIDs to the game is interesting, and making the DIDs also valid URLs is even more interesting. I have been thinking about a similar DID mechanism, where the DIDs are not URLs but public cryptographic keys. this way, each human could prove that many accounts are all signed with the same key, and therefore belong to the same human.

Edit: oh wait i think the official(?) DID specification (here: https://www.w3.org/TR/did-1.0/) actually already expresses this concept:

Each DID document can express cryptographic material, verification methods, or services, which provide a set of mechanisms enabling a DID controller to prove control of the DID. Services enable trusted interactions associated with the DID subject. A DID might provide the means to return the DID subject itself, if the DID subject is an information resource such as a data model.

excuse my german dialect but i gotta release some steam: des duad weh beim lesen. aua.

I’ve started thinking that it’s not so much about blackmail after all, instead it’s about connections and relationships.

Consider this: Epstein clearly had thousands of customers. I don’t have any actual number in my head, but clearly it must have been a lot and seemingly everybody knew about it. Like, if you look at how many people are related to all this, it’s impossible to think that nobody knew anything. Probably, a very large number of people knew what was going on; but nobody bothered to do anything about this. Why? Because they didn’t care. To them, it was just business as usual, everybody’s all in on this anyways, those that aren’t have no actual power, so who’s gonna do anything?

Like, even if it did get public, i’m pretty sure most of the people involved felt certain enough that nothing bad would happen anyways. Considering there were mostly no consequences till today, they’re mostly right, i’d say.

Instead, they just used the parties and connections as a networking platform, getting to know other influential people and stuff. That’s IMHO the bigger reason why mossad is involved in all of this. Not for blackmailing purposes, but to be in the center of a network of connections that gives them a lot of strategic influence in the world.

Realistically, that doesn’t happen. At least not if we consider mathematics to be the useful kind of mathematics. The stuff that helps you do statistics/finances/engineering. Because that type of mathematics is based on reality and for the mathematics to be inconsistent would mean that reality is inconsistent, and then we have much much bigger problems.

As for the higher abstract maths (which is closer to philosophy anyways) yeah such things have happened many times and led to revolutionary insights each time. An example is when we started basing everything on set theory (which in medieval times did not really exist). But that’s a philosophical question, not one that concerns daily life.

yeah i guess so.

basically either a keyserver, or you give your key manually to all your friends with a QR code scan or sth

that’s pretty interesting!