daltotron @ daltotron @lemmy.world

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My somewhat spolier-lite to spoiler-free reccomendations:

Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. I'd also recommend the original movie, but it's kind of a different beast.

Really well done series that switches between long expository plot sequences, and really well done action sequences, in a pretty good display of budgetary efficiency. The plot exposition, dialogue, and investigative stuff kind of surrounds the action scenes with an actual sense of consequence and meaning, relative to most anime that I've seen, and the series as a whole is kind of much more grounded than most other anime, which is also incredibly refreshing. The medium is used in this case more to emphasize subtle differences between this potential near-future reality and our own, rather than kind of just, being an engine for bombastic and outlandish animation and repetitive trope-work. The series bounces between episodically structured plots, or, stand alone episodes, and episodes that deal with an ongoing seasonal plot, or character plot, and there's a couple little progressions in there that kind of span the series if you're paying attention. There's not really any arcs, it's just a good, focused show, front to back.

The Venture Bros.

Slow start, but it's also probably one of the better pilot episodes, in my mind, of all time. Plenty of little comic book nerd references in there that are pretty enjoyable, and the comedy is pretty good at times while also tending not to venture into the offensive, except for maybe two or three instances that stand out in my mind, which is maybe somewhat impressive for an early adult swim show. I think, more than that, though, the series' ability to juggle serial plots and episodic plots is kind of mind blowing and insane. One-off episodes and single characters get spun off into entire fully formed characters with arcs and backstories. Stupid jokes get expanded into much larger things than you would expect. It's very well done.

Nichijou

Yeah, this one is pretty good, you should watch it.

I'm still just waiting for windows 11 ltsc, to see if that's any better when it ends up coming out.

I thought it was generally a better go to strat to rub it in your underwear if you want to stay awake

I thought witchcraft trials were a much later period kind of thing, no? Like a pilgrim-era, maybe even post-renaissance kind of thing.

How come I only have 5 bullets for the gun, but the 1911 has a total capacity of anywhere from 7 to 9, and maybe even up to 15? Furthermore, how come the bullets look like classically rimmed revolver cartridges, but are for this 1911? I think I might go for the gun, just because it either doesn't work at all, or is maybe a really interesting piece of mechanical work.

You know I would kind of off the cuff think that probably the optimal solution would be something that prevents general accessibility for the population at large, but encourages, and makes it more easily accessible for those who already have problems with it, and then kind of, chase solutions from there. Of course, I think probably that solution would lend itself more towards a country or state that cares whether or not you're going homeless or sleeping in your car or what have you, because it's generally easier to keep track of less marginalized populations.

This isn't really to advocate for a ban, but there's definitely a kind of fine middle ground between full bans and completely free easy access. I think the thing that strikes me the most as a kind of, huge dick move, is mostly that it's kind of a purely short term financial calculation of, oh, smokers are going to pay a lot more in taxes than in healthcare, and they die quick, so that's economically good. But of course, you wouldn't want a country made up entirely of smokers, and I don't think that would be good, or pay out the best in long term societal, or even purely economic, benefits. I'm skeptical of blanket calls for total drug legalization just as I am skeptical for blanket calls for bans. Usually, there's more nuance to the situation than that, which unfortunately tends to be the thing most leveraged to enforce the status quo or pass bad austerity legislation.

You know, the deriders of this bring up some good points, but I'd also like to bring up the point that digitally secured voting doesn't really need to be a super great solution. It would be great if it was, sure, but it doesn't need to be great, it just needs to be better than the alternative, which is pretty easy, I think. Voting analog is not necessarily a very secure way to vote either, as many people who remember the "hanging chads" issue will be quick to point out. It's also a pretty massive inconvenience for some people, which shouldn't really be discounted as a thing that prevents people from voting. "Oh but if they can't spare the time we don't want their votes anyways", but then you gotta keep in mind that in some places the wait times are gonna be multiple hours upon hours, and maybe days.

In any case, if you still wanted analog voting for any particular reason, you could still keep it open as a backup, which might not be a bad idea generally.

Then let their ammo hoards do the work.

Minor correction to your relatively insane post, but rounds that cook off generally don't have enough velocity to really do any significant damage, especially when they're not exposed out in the open.

A good example of a policy that can kind of make a form of "objective" economic sense for the government to do, but is actually totally immoral, cruel, and inefficient. A good example of why governments shouldn't be run like companies, basically.

Interjecting because this is kind of an easier comment with which to make it, but it does apply to the conversation generally: I think my willingness for this to be the case would probably be dependent on whether or not it means we have to pay more or less, both at a personal level, and a societal level. i.e. does this discourage reckless behavior enough for it to offset the potential economic drain of, say, determining liability?

The same can be asked of vaping, but with different caveats. Does it work out that it costs less over time for us to regulate vapes, regulate flavors, etc. , compared to if we chose not to regulate them, or chose to regulate them more liberally? It might be somewhat difficult to totally regulate against consumer purchase and mixing of chemical flavoring agents, and such regulation might also increase adverse health outcomes, as it would've been, generally, easier to enforce safety standards on the supply side. Increased taxes might lead to increased costs foisted onto the consumer which, again, might lead to a larger unregulated market developing, which can cause other problems.

I'm not saying regulation shouldn't be done, I think it's broadly a good thing, but I think it's also usually the case with these sorts of things that everyone tends to form opinions, and legislate, based on mixtures of hip shooting public sentiment and whatever their "common sense" tells them, rather than creating regulations around whatever would result in the most net benefit, or, the least net negative. Most of all, people tend to shoot first with regulation, and then never even ask questions later about what the effects were, but I guess that's all getting off a little bit into the weeds on the flaws of overly brittle political systems.

If the military and police are the right leaning ones who agree with the greasy brainwashed boomers, I'd think more that said military and police are the major problem in that circumstance, and not the greasy brainwashed boomers.

Yeah. Strikes me as the laziest possible explanation for a thing, and it always seems to ironically come from people who are convinced that they're better than others because they're working harder or trying more.

It is now year-round bulking season, and I'm loving every minute of it, jerry.

Biggest difference between your conventional fat dude and a sumo wrestler is the nature of their fat deposits. Regular fat dudes, no exercise, have what is called "visceral fat", where the fat is beneath the skin, and exists in between the organs. Sumo wrestlers have subcutaneous fat deposits, just right beneath the skin, as a sort of layer between the organs and the skin. It truly matters less whether or not you're fat, and more whether or not you're active, and have a good dietary composition regardless of potential caloric excess.

The only major limitation on this that I might qualify is that overweight people will probably have to put more effort into flexibility and strength exercises, especially in their lower body, their ankles, their knees, for the same reason that extremely tall people tend to have similar injuries. There's also the problem that it tends to be harder to cut back later in life, and so you can kind of see a huge onset of lots of visceral fat if you keep up the same lifestyle choices while cutting back on the activity, or even keeping the same level of activity as your metabolism slows down, so that's something to also consider.

People also have made points about how the excess of simply carbohydrates, like high fructose corn syrup, and palm oil as a preservative in highly processed american foods, and food deserts, are contributing factors to why americans tend to be super fat. This is true. The other side of this coin also tends to be that american civic infrastructure doesn't tend to keep you as active as perhaps other countries might, so there are less opportunities to burn calories without making a kind of committed lifestyle choice centered around that.

In any case, I do find it really, sad, and funny also, that people tend to treat obesity as a kind of personal moral failing, rather than treating it like any other kind of public health problem, or epidemic. Reminds me of how they treated HIV.

Oh, do me next, do me. Open source adversarial models trained to detect and actively label things which it detects as belonging to AI. Probably would end up looking like a browser extension or something. Ublock, but for AI, basically.

Sidenote, but you know what has been incredibly fucking annoying? And I guess this is a combination of reddit having kind of always been shitty and oh we only find out more recently, or sort of, on aaron schwartz's death, for early signs, and, people choosing to use it in the first place. I kind of hate the mass removal scripts that people have used to delete all their comments, especially since you can't use unddit to see what it used to be because of the API business. I haven't had to break out the wayback machine quite yet, it hasn't gotten to that level of dire straits (not that I think the wayback machine would necessarily help for a lot of it), but there's a shocking amount of really good technical information and advice that has been deleted off of the internet as a result of people protesting reddit. Especially because the tech-literate are more often going to be the ones who use those scripts and end up leaving.

You know, I do dislike people who aren't willing to give certain games a chance, for what I deem kind of illegitimate reasons. At the same time, most of the bad faith people who are dissing a game because it's the hot button thing, or who are dismissing a game because they saw someone else give their reasons, and thought those were good, those people probably weren't interested in the first place, especially the former group.

What I do hate more than anything, though, is when someone suggests that I need to have watched a movie for it's full 2 or 3 hour runtime before I can make a judgement on it, or that I have to have completed a game before I can make a judgement. Fuck off, I can't be assed to watch or play every dogshit movie or game you're engaging with, just so I can call it shit. You weren't going to believe me anyways, even if I did do that! The same of all what I said in the first paragraph is also true in reverse!

Can't I just talk about a thing without getting enswamped in some dumbass, about how what I'm saying isn't valid? Can't you just contest the claim itself, instead of always blowing it up to be some sort of overarching thing that reaffirms your biases because whomstever is destroying your epic gamer cred? Gat dahmn. I just wanna be able to talk about games, and what I like and don't like, without having to put the "oh all of what I'm saying is subjective" disclaimers everywhere. Can we go back to that? Can I not have to, redditor style, post about every possible alternative angle someone could attack me from for a second? Can people be also try to at least be funny when they're mad on the internet?

I think it's probably not a great procedure, but at the same time, I, maybe weirdly, don't give a shit at all, for the most part. I don't really care because it was done to me at such a young age that there's not really any way I could possibly remember it, and so I don't really harbor any residual feelings about it. There's also not really a comparison to be had, here, since I can't really get my foreskin back, so there's not like, an A and B test that you can run on a person to be like "oh yeah does this feel better or does this feel better" type of thing.

You know, on the plus side, my dick looks, like, normal, to me, so that's neat. That would probably be the case if my penis were uncircumcised, too, but the uncircumcised penis looks kinda gross to me on a purely aesthetic level, I don't like the reciprocating skin, looks weird, looks like a pig in a blanket type of thing. Probably a result also of, I think probably a good majority of porn, at least in america, featuring circumcised dicks. Or, a majority of porn I've looked at, anyways.

So overall, I don't really care. I don't know why people kind of would care generally. I think it's probably not a good procedure, certainly, and I think it's kind of weird that we do it and that it's so common, and basically, seems to be pretty much unjustifiable, but I also haven't received a comprehensive or compelling argument against it, other than "the sex is better", which, you know, again, not really any way of A B testing that, for me. On an individual basis, it doesn't matter. It would only really matter, I would think, if you were kind of, hyper-insecure about the fact that you've been circumcised.

Just kind of extrapolating from what I understand, which is obviously not a lot, as I'm sure some sap will enlighten me to, it also doesn't strike me as being a surgery that's probably going to do that much damage. Mostly cosmetic, mostly just a flesh wound.

Still don't think it should be done, probably, but the overwhelming amount of people mad about it kind of indicates to me that there's something else going on about it. I think, probably, this is a pretty common edgy antitheist type of stance to have. The stance itself isn't really edgy, but it is sort of a common stance for edgy antitheists to have, is what I mean. I also use antitheist here instead of atheist, because I consider most atheists to not give a shit about god, while most antitheists I would consider to have a kind of brainrot inflicted by traumatic religious upbringings, or just kind of by ambiently having, predominantly christians (but this can also be applied to islam, or really whatever religion), be shitty to them. Which is fair, since christians are pretty shitty a good amount of the time, perhaps a majority, even.

Certainly though it does give me pause, especially when you get, as I've heard it, enlightened atheist types, that try to kind of argue that religion is the fault of, say, some major wars in history, the crusades, black death, whatever. That seems to me like blaming the wind, or stones. It's a deterministic element that just kind of arose out of humanity's latent need to explain the natural world around them, I would think most materialist (presumably) atheists would be able to understand that, but I think we've maybe become so swamped in this kind of post-history scientific materialist perspective as the default that we've kind of forgotten how weird everything is at face value, and how weird being conscious is. But I could go on that rant for hours, so.

Another inherent problem with BCI is that it’s not seamless. It takes a lot more concentration to operate a mouse with your mind than it does with your body. People don’t really understand how much of their movement is handled by their spinal chord instead of the brain.

People have a hard time utilizing interactive spaces when we separate them from physical input. Which is why a lot of people struggle with VR,. When your physical senses like proprioception don’t reflect the interactions the same as our visual senses we can become physically ill.

I always got more the sense that musk was looking more for some sort of, mass adoption for this technology. Ghost in the shell, matrix type shit, that we're still probably like, a century away from. If we don't boil ourselves first, anyways. But that also might be marketing mumbo jumbo from him, and none of that really kind of solves any of his short term problems that he'd have, which you've done a good job pointing out, and are probably more relevant.

The toughness of figuring out use is definitely a good point, and it's one you see all over the place with all manner of disabilities. It's sort of unnatural enough to learn how to use a keyboard and mouse already, and those are relatively simple technologies, which is to say nothing of the maybe months of training it would take to learn how to use a prosthetic limb. I think maybe kids, children, could learn and pick up on stuff much faster, but I really don't think it would be a popular decision to decide to start testing your BCI on kids, even if you were to reach a state where it was benign, useful, and guaranteed to be stable.

I also think musk probably doesn't understand how BCI probably won't help much for easing human-computer interface, because it sort of, puts the onus of everything on the person, as being at fault for not being able to interface with the perfect, "flawless" machine, rather than just viewing them as another kind of being, with distinct, even somewhat hardwired limitations. Humans can't really split their attention and do dual processing, they can only focus on one thing at a time, and that strikes me as a pretty big limitation on the amount of data that you're going to be able to extract from someone with one of these interfaces, even if it was effortless to use. If you want them to be able to walk around and still be a functional person, anyways, and not be insane and schizophrenic maybe. I think we also have been saying that we can solve a lot of those processing problems much easier on the computer side with these horrible organoids that are stitched to mice and computers and stuff. So that would be pretty neat.

In any case, to me, this would all seem to be a little bit overkill, for those intentions, when you could just get everyone to learn stenotype, if you really wanted to "increase output". Which, again, I'm not sure would really work.

That's also all taking musk strictly at face value on his intentions, but I'm pretty sure the guy likes rockets and electric cars because he has a retrofuturist "I'm the great man of history" kind of deal going on, so I don't think I'd put it past him to think that having a plug that goes into your brain and puts you in the matrix would be a "cool" idea.

Whoever keeps throwing in the shit about law enforcement in these stories, which I think was actually a security officer for the embassy, drawing a gun, is doing a pretty good job of distracting from the main issue of what this guy lit himself on fire and died for. Doing a much better job than all the whinging about how he was mentally ill, and how this won't change anything, and how there's no clear cause, that mainstream news outlets are doing when they cover this type of stuff, if they cover it at all.

I would also like to kind of point out here, that "this won't change anything, this guy was mentally ill, he killed himself for nothing", is really only true if you decide it to be true. We get to decide whether or not this motivates us to do something or not. We get to decide whether or not we let this affect us. Whether or not we do something, to make sure this doesn't happen again, you know? And that's mostly, in my mind, the purpose of this kind of protest.

Maybe it makes the institutions think about what they're doing, probably not, since, if they were gonna think that, they should've probably thought that about the 20,000 or so palestinians that have been killed. This protest is mostly engineered to get you mad, and sad, and to make you, the viewer, think about why this is happening, and think about what you can do to stop it. Not just deflecting immediately to whether or not it was effective, because by doing so, you let it not be as effective.

Brings to mind the discourse against, really any form of protest that I've seen. You could take the george floyd protests, for example. So, sure, the government throws in agent provocateurs, in order to turn what would otherwise be peaceful protests, which would shut down any traffic into and out of the city, and would choke off any economic activity (puts pressure on businesses, utilities, puts pressure on local government, which needs to please these people who don't really care about the protest but want things to go back to normal).

But by doing so, right, by causing those passive forms of damage, but also by causing active forms of damage, say, burning a big box store down, right, the public showcases that, if a certain legal decision to, say, let derek chauvin off, occurs, then there will be potentially more protests and more destruction, which provides great incentive against that decision occurring.

Now, in this case, there's not as clear of a process, because there's not as clear of repercussions if they decide to do nothing. About the only thing that might happen is that this might happen again, which, might, by some process of media coverage, put enough pressure on politicians to cause this to stop, if it becomes a political issue. The same thing is happening with mass shootings, which aren't a greatly impacting issue, by the numbers, right, they're much less than that of road deaths, heart disease, other forms of gun violence.

But they are so horrifying to the american public and to really anyone of moral conscience, that they should serve as a clear marker that something is wrong, and something needs to change. Serial killers create a similar effect. It's almost like a kind of terrorism, using that word without judgement, here. That's the power of these protests. We've already seen it spread across a bunch of news media, even though it's being reported about as poorly as you'd expect.

I'm not particularly sure that repeat incidents would do any good, and I think I'd generally be opposed to that, as should anyone, but, an instance of self-immolation is what caused the arab spring. This sort of thing isn't ineffective, I think it does a disservice to aaron bushnell to say otherwise.

If you want to stop this sort of thing from occurring in the first place, you should really try to understand why it was happening, instead of brushing it aside.

No, typically they’re just sensors on a cranial harness.

Do you mean EEG stuff, or are you referring to like, inter-cranial implants, which I don't know shit about?

Yes, there’s no real advantage to making it permanent other than convenience. However this convenience is imo massively outweighed by the very real possibility of meningitis. It’s crazy that they got approval to transect the blood brain barrier for an implant. Other implants do this, but that risk is being weighed against things like potentially deadly seizures, not mild convenience.

Do you mean counteracting potentially deadly seizures, or causing them? Also, there's probably too many other problems to list about the technology generally, but since you seem like you know what you're talking about, could you give me like, a kind of general overview on BCI, or your opinion? Maybe like, challenges, what you see as being the most promising stuff, that sort of thing?