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  RE: https://cyberpunk.lol/@mxchara/117488539951236475 I wanted to add a side-point about this point of #psychology: scripting is well known by now and I daresay that most people have some ability to perceive that someone is speaking to them in a formalized or scripted manner out of habit. People who've been caught up by cults or fanatical beliefs tend to speak in a "scripted" fashion, while paradoxically accusing their enemies of speaking empty words. Scripted human behavior is...

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  Roughly the same problem afflicts #computer hardware and your bathroom plumbing: through a lengthy process of coalescence and attrition and assimilation and so forth, the basic items and objects and tools upon which the daily lives of the ordinary person (or "the consumer", to use the somewhat offensive language of U.S. politics) are mass-manufactured overseas (i.e. anywhere the people can be lashed into working for the smallest pay) and often squeezed down to just a few brands. So of...

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  this is ridiculous. the sample code which implements this is even worse. why is this all necessary?? #Wayland you fuckin' stink. I can't believe that you managed to make something that makes vanilla #X11 programming seem sensible. (passage from wayland-book dot com) In summary, the following steps will take you from zero to a window on-screen: Bind to wl_compositor and use it to create a wl_surface. Bind to xdg_wm_base and use it to create an xdg_surface with your wl_surface. Create a...

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  One of the great weakness of "Western" intellectual culture and especially that part of Western intelligentsia which is chiefly concerned with popularizing intellectual concepts, i.e. presenting simplified summaries of difficult intellectual concepts to general audiences, is that it's developed no clear sense of how to respond to the durability and invincible appeal of the irrational. The "rationalists" have a peculiarly unearned faith in persuasion. They're not good...

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  Anyone who's had to deal with bullies in ANY domain--abusive parents or guardians or teachers, school bullies, aggressive Christians, techbro bullies, anywhere--knows that the bully has two chief weapons: extreme persistence and the habit of racing for the protection of the authorities at the slightest whiff of genuine trouble. The bully is counting on something very important: "polite society", the social mores that prevail throughout the United States, says that as long as someo...

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  #KDE ought to be more careful. Slop-coding the #Linux kernel is something that more people can be forced to swallow because it's such a central thing and fearfully complicated. This gets into the general issue of why non-corporate operating systems are so much less polished and so much tetchier than corporate stuff like Windows: collectively there's a bewildering variety of hardware, nobody likes to see their particular motherboard or CPU or GPU unsupported, and it's extremely diffic...

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  I love that the #Wikipedia entry for DDR SDRAM doesn't have a single solitary scrap of information about how the stuff is implemented. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDR_SDRAM If you go to the main SDRAM page you get more but again there's the familiar pattern: the "Construction" section of the SDRAM page says nothing about how the stuff is physically made.

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  I feel grateful to Trainspotting for being one of the most convincing depictions of being on the edge of recovery, still unused to life without daily scrounging for numbing substances but sensing for the first time that there's a better life out there if you can get clear of the nonsense and the shouting. You can choose life, it's true. I have known many decades as an addict of one thing and another. Only by degrees have I outlasted the worst cravings. I'm determined to keep using m...

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  One of the ironies of depending so heavily, on my #FreeBSD desktop, on source repositories rather than compiled and ready-to-go applications is that I've compiled a fair bit of #Rust code, and a lot of other weird things, without knowing the slightest thing about the actual language (yet.) A question I find myself asking: was it entirely necessary for Rust to have come up with its own versions of shared libraries and other such packaged code, with their own jargon? But Rust is scarcely the...

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  But if they're so confident that #Claude and #ChatGPT have surpassed the human brain then where are the head-to-head comparisons? These same geeklords talk about #IQ as if it were an infallible and empirically proven method of estimating not merely human intelligence but...everything, basically! They say IQ has immense predictive powers. (etc.)

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  There's been a fair amount of chatter lately on a weirdly specific phenomenon pertaining to the #HarryPotter fandom, which is the strange part played by a certain "Harry Potter" fanfic well known to those engaged with combating the pernicious influence of #effectivealtruism and other "dark intellectual" cult idols which have fed into the fascısm of the #technology sector. (more)