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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • On a related note, I think libraries do need a bit of a facelift, and not just be “the place where books live”. It’s important to keep that function, but also expand to “a place where learning happens”. I know lots of libraries are doing this sort of thing, but your average person is probably still stuck in the “place where books live” mindset, as you allude. I’m talking stuff like 3D printers, makerspaces, diybio, classes about detecting internet bullshit, etc.


  • Threads like this, with highly upvoted comments like

    americans are more propagandized than they think citizens of the DPRK are

    They also use sarcasm try to push the narrative that North Korea is actually just fine, OK?

    Guys you don’t understand; the West has spoken; we MUST hate North Korea, our governments have already decreed it so.

    Many of them are also seemingly physically incapable of communicating without hexbear’s custom reaction images, which is a weird behavior common to many cults. Makes it harder to communicate with the outgroup.

    I think LW is defederated from them (or vice versa) so you can’t post over there, but for further examples, try making an account over there and saying that maybe, just maybe, Putin did a bad thing by invading Ukraine, and they’re defending an imperialist.



  • From here:

    On occasion, a writer will coin a fine neologism that spreads quickly but then changes meaning. “Factoid” was a term created by Norman Mailer in 1973 for a piece of information that becomes accepted as a fact even though it’s not actually true, or an invented fact believed to be true because it appears in print. Mailer wrote in Marilyn, “Factoids…that is, facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper, creations which are not so much lies as a product to manipulate emotion in the Silent Majority.” Of late, factoid has come to mean a small or trivial fact that makes it a contronym (also called a Janus word) in that it means both one thing and its opposite, such as “cleve” (to cling or to split), “sanction” (to permit or to punish) or “citation” (commendation or a summons to appear in court). So factoid has become a victim of novelist C.S. Lewis’s term “verbicide,” the willful distortion or deprecation of a word’s original meaning.










  • For a direct replacement, you might want to consider enums, for something like

    enum Strategy {
        Foo,
        Bar,
    }
    

    That’s going to be a lot more ergonomic than shuffling trait objects around, you can do stuff like:

    fn execute(strategy: Strategy) {
        match strategy {
            Strategy::Foo => { ... }
            Strategy::Bar => { ... }
    }
    

    If you have known set of strategy that isn’t extensible, enums are good. If you want the ability for third party code to add new strategies, the boxed trait object approach works. Consider also the simplest approach of just having functions like this:

    fn execute_foo() { ... }
    fn execute_bar() { ... }
    

    Sometimes, Rust encourages not trying to be too clever, like having get vs get_mut and not trying to abstract over the mutability.


  • Oh also, it was kind of strange how little he mentioned AI. I like how he wrote that the AI wasn’t trusted to be a Swordholder because it was “too logical”. Completely missed the boat on ChatGPT. “Write a play in which Harry Potter pressed the button to destroy humanity, and then act it out” or something like that would be all it takes.

    It was also strange that hundreds of years in the future, humans are still doing hard manual labor. Where are the robots?




  • Use Tor for everything. Search for “disposable email”, find a service that you can use in Tor. Sign up through Tor using that disposable email address for any service that you want to post to. Be aware that some services try to deny access to Tor and/or disposable email addresses. Try a different service or a different disposable email provider if you encounter that.

    You should define your threat model. Longer essays can probably be deanonymized with stylometry. The above will probably work fine up to maybe the NSA taking an interest in the origins of the essay. You can probably post something to the Fediverse and reputation-wash it to a larger audience by saying “look at this link that i have no affiliation with”, but it’s more likely that someone would figure out that it’s you. You can use the Tor method to post on Reddit, but many subreddits will have automods that delete posts from new/low karma users.