cae_jones
28d ago
I am at least down with giving the Sun something of a lipectemy (heliectemy?) to extend its life. Would prefer it never be completely dismantled, for sentimental reasons. Maybe convert it into a constellation of red dwarves.
cae_jones
2mo ago
<Pedantry> Actually, blind people can feel the heat from the sun, and use it to navigate. A better example would be the moon, stars, or planets.</pedantry>
cae_jones
4mo ago
There's a way to get into your Google profile and view what it thinks of you, and make changes if you wish. I don't remember how, exactly; the last time I tried, I got so annoyed that it thought I only graduated high school that I nearly added my education history, before remembering that I don't actually care for Google knowing everything about me. I think it's something something accounts.google.com, but, it's also Google, so there's probably some encantation that will convince the search box to send you there.
cae_jones
10mo ago
Ability to orgasm seems orthogonal to the quality of one's shape to me. Inability to reproduce seems more relevant, if we're talking about sexual function.
cae_jones
1yr ago
Maybe we should ask GPT4 for a solution? Or at least, whenever someone wants to try a large-scale intervention, they should start asking GPT if it can find any likely downsides.
cae_jones
1yr ago
I pretty much exclusively use my iPhone to do internet things, unless I need to upload or download files (and sometimes I'll just download those to a cloud service via my phone and get to them later).
Don't think I could stand to type so much without Braille Screen Input. And it has had versions where the problems rendered it nigh unusable. A bluetooth keyboard would probably be better, but IDFLI.
cae_jones
1yr ago
So I need to ship a package from the US to China, and a quick search leaves it unclear which if any services do so at present, what with the COVID policy shenanigans. And distinguishing shady from legit on the first page of results seems... like the sort of thing I should seek another opinion on.
So, what should I do to get this package sent?
cae_jones
9mo ago
IIUC, "Lala" is Chinese slang for gay, from what my Chinese teacher said 14 years ago. So we're 3 for 4 on the forced queer-coding.
cae_jones
1yr ago
Oh, hey, I wrote a paper about that guy in high school French, all the way back in 2004. TBH, I didn't even remember he was black, but vaguely remember the other stuff. If I still have that essay on a jumpdrive backup of my HS nettwork drive, ...' I probably won't read it, because I remember barely squeezing out something I thought I could get away with turning in, but I am at least a little confused that I'd forget almost everything but the guy's name.
cae_jones
1yr ago
I heard recently (I forget from where) that the Wicked Stepmother trope was invented well after the fairytales we associate it with became popular, and the original versions had the bio mothers being villainous. IIRC, it had to do with the change in inheritance traditions from Medieval Europe to Renaissance/early modern dramatically altering the incentives.
cae_jones
1yr ago
Yeah... is it [il], or [ij], or some other pronunciation that ignores French phonetics? Or maybe tries for some obscure argument in favor of pronuncing the final e... but again, [ilə] or [ijə]?
I want to expect [il], but that'd render it inaudible.
cae_jones
1mo ago
Hot take: the unfalsifiable identity anchor thing is behind the evolution of Wokism to Transism. You can argue with citations about the forces of Whiteness™, but when trans ideology comes down to gender as a metaphysical / spiritual thing which someone experiences, rather than physical sex or physically detectable brain or hormonal abnormalities, it enters the realm of unfalsifiable identity anchor. Previous attempts at having Whiteness or The Patriarchy fill the role of unfalsifiable spiritual force are less personal, and more antagonistic, whereas Transism is about personal identity.
cae_jones
5mo ago
Fair. I do think there is a preferable middleground between Communism and law of the Jungle, but finding it without painting the planet red has proven challenging.
cae_jones
5mo ago
[citation needed]
I did just learn that it only takes one sentence and a slight amount of context to make me utterly despise a total stranger, so that's ... worrying.
... You're the "you hate it because it's true" type, aren't you?
I hate it because it's evil. True things can be evil, in which case, reallity and we fight until something changes. Reallity has a rather stronger W/L ratio than hunans in general, much less this particular human, and yet, somehow, I'm still not surrendering.
And now I need to find a way to express why I said it's evil. While I generally prefer equality to status hierarchies, I'm not so sure I find hierarchies in general evil. So somewhere between amoral hierarchies and dick-up-your-ass, the problem manifests.
cae_jones
5mo ago
As I recall, you rather dislike HPMoR, but this discussion reminds me of the one time it did make an argument in favor of deontology. ... in chapter 108, and I'm not sure if we have spoiler tags, here?
It's much easier to make a convincing-sounding argument to violate a rule, than to find a genuinely good and acceptable reason to violate the rule. Even profoundly intelligent people are vulnerable to deception, biases, temptations, etc, and that makes deontological injunctions a valid defense against those failure modes.
In my experience, the downside is that, when breaking a rule fails to have any noticeable negative consequences, it becomes easier to break the rule in the future. One might argue that this is a sign that said rule wasn't worth having in the first place, to which I must point out that the way the brain associates actions with outcomes can only predict so far ahead on incomplete information. See also: the crack and opioid epidemics, small lies that turn into a house of cards you're forced to live in, how the whole free love and hookup culture things turned out...
cae_jones
6mo ago
I had no idea it was changing. I got up somewhere between 1 and 2, hopped on my computer at what I thought was 2:00AM, then the next I checked the time, it was nearly 2:00AM again. No notifications or anything; it was all done so quietly, I had to check the default calendar to confirm it was for DST.
Had I slept through the first 1:00AM entirely, I'd probably have completely failed to notice anything until someone said something.
cae_jones
1yr ago
Huh, reading these general social expectations now is similarly irritating to what it would have been 15-20 years ago. I think I'd've been better at articulating why back then, though in an annoying self-righteous way that is just cringy, but still... this somehow summoned my early 2000s teenaged rebellion mode. I'm not sure what to make of this.
cae_jones
1yr ago
My thou-obsessed pedantry is set off by all of those "thy <vowel>"s. It's "thine economics" and "thine international," thou genie-summoner.
/pedantry
cae_jones
1yr ago
McDonalds of sex
"Food, folks and fun" indeed...
Though, this begs the question of how places where prostitution is already legal are fairing. I haven't heard of any major differences between NZ, the Netherlands, Nevada, Denmark, and the rest of the world that are attributable to their approaches to sex work.
cae_jones
1yr ago
This comment makes me sad, because Caillou is flippin' adorable and the one thing in French I can actually keep up with... but you're not wrong. :(
cae_jones
6mo ago
This. When 9/11 happened, it was abundantly clear to me that the hijackers were villains, fullstop. But it bothered me more when the Bush administration used every excuse in the book afterward to justify invading not one, but two countries, though neither seemed to hold up under scrutiny. Evil people doing evil is bad and tragic, but not that weird. The alleged good-guys turning into trigger-happy invaders, though, is almost like betrayal.
Please notice that I have not expressed any opinions on Israel Vs Palestine, here. Just citing an example of the explanation for disproportionate judgment.
cae_jones
8mo ago
Re: energy, I've become fond of interorbital kinetic exchanges, partly because they make the otherwise stupidly costly outer planets potentially profitable, but also because you're basically taking natural flywheels and converting them into power / propulsion / etc. Is it still hydroelectric if the water is contained in Uranian plastic dropped from an altitude of 20AU?
Luna tends to get treated as the stepping stone, and Mars the destination, but it seems more likely that Luna becomes a major center for industry/population, and Mars is the stepping stone to the rest of the system. At least Luna is close enough for a meaningful relationship with Earth.
If I may digress briefly, latest models of the history of the Solar System seem to find a significant role for most planets in the backstory to habitable Earth. The complex dance of the giants shaped the inner system in detail, and Venus dropped Theia onto the Earth to create the Moon. Conspicuously missing from all this, though, is Mercury, which also conspicuously is often relegated to an enormous materials depot in speculations on futurism. Now, the anthropic principal doesn't require that everything we see be an important aspect of our prolonged ability to see it, but if there were a simpler way, it would seem more likely that we'd be in that simpler system, so I can't but wonder at the anthropic implications of Solar System architecture that we've yet to discover.
FTR, my reaction to the idea of medically altering the identity bits is something like "Could you kill me in a less horrifying way, please?"
That said, my issues are more age than gender, and the mental aspect is a significant part of that (which only grows more ... perplexing... over time). The trouble though is that it's hard to define what fixing that would look like. If I'm imagining a magical mind-alteration solution, I like to include a daily "revert the alterations, reflect on how they work" period, because that crap is scary and I expect easier to get wrong than not. I have no idea how this could be accomplished in reallity, other than simulations. But I'm not sure much of mine could be resolved outside of simulations. Ugh. Reallity is better than not existing, but I still complain.
All of which is to say, I get the vicious reactions you get for suggesting altering it mentally rather than bodily. I'd prefer people not be so vicious about it (I'm here and not there for reasons), fwiw.
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