fiat_lux @ fiat_lux @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

Imagine this. It's 1993. 3d computer images are extremely expensive to make and rare, and 3d animations are so time consuming that even the biggest budget movies only use tiny amounts of it. Even 2D computer generated stuff is rare.

The music videos are all just people with greenscreens set against backgrounds of hand-cut film with hand-drawn effects and special lighting and physical effects like smoke-machines. Songs are played with physical instruments, with maybe some electrical processing. And they're about love and tell stories, or they focus on the melodies and combinations of instruments.

And then one day you see this, without warning on saturday morning TV, in between those other music videos:

Hocus Pocus - Here's Johnny (1993)

It was a total mindfuck at the time. Now it's just an adorably quaint and slow-paced historical example of a music video.

Do you put your face in it? I miss doing that.

All data is scrapable. It's just a matter of how difficult it is to scrape and whether it's worth the effort.

Assume anything you see or input is being captured, because it almost always is, even if it's just because WiFi can trace your physical outline, or a street camera saw you unlock your phone, or your fingerprint is can be copied from a door handle.

The only place that data is mostly still secure is literally your brain, but even then, that can be compromised with a bottle of booze.

how in the world did they not better safeguard and isolate user data?

It's realistically impossible to 100% do this, unfortunately. 20+ year old security flaws are discovered alarmingly frequently, and once the wrong person knows about the right exploit, they can automate entire global attacks. Automated attacks make up a lot of global internet traffic.

Imagine there are physical medieval castles with moats with crocodiles and turrets and an entire defending army with ballistas... but doors randomly appear in the external walls, and bridges instantly construct over the moat, and entire sections of walls can disappear unexpectedly. When there is an infinitely replenishable enemy army attacking that castle, they're going to get in eventually. That is what the internet is, but digitally.

Humans write code, and humans aren't perfect, so neither is their code. And anything Humans make or do, a different human will try to destroy or exploit it, that is guaranteed. It's a problem we've had for as long as we've been organisms.

Exactly. If organisations (private, public and other) had to maximise for social betterment, they would release annual reports measuring it. There might even be entire industries dedicated to auditing measurements of social betterment.

But no, we're stuck using a system of 'value' based on the prestige of owning shiny rocks and control of the areas where those shiny rocks are found. And finding new uses for things and people that aren't the desired shiny rocks so that you may demand and acquire more shiny rocks as others in the same time duration.

If a majority of countries can successfully ditch the gold standard and allow fiat currency - as they did a century ago, that means the world is also able to redefine what fiat currencies measure. There's nothing actually stopping us from requiring social and environmental impact to be included in the calculation of financial valuations, except the people who have a vested interest in keeping the current equations.

Even without technological intervention, we know some kinds of chemical exposure and cancers can alter chromosomes and literally change your X into a Y or vice versa. Or even turn it into a different shape than X or Y. Sometimes it a chromosome just goes missing entirely. Genetics are not always good at following the rules and they can break or perform strange new equations with mistaken values whenever a new cell is made. Organics are messy like that

Chromosomes delete, combine, duplicate, change and/or fuse bits of other chromosomes in unexpected places more than you might expect. It can happen to an embryo a few cells big right through a person's life.

Given the male sex is defined by the presence of any Y chromosome though (if we go by chromosome sex determination alone), if an arm breaks off the 46th chromosome after the embryo is established as XX, that XX foetus can develop as XY. Has it changed sex in the womb since it changed chromosomes? Are they female because they were conceived as XX, or male because they were born XY? It happens.

And if a foetus has Chromosome mosaicism, with both an XX and an XY embryo that fused into one foetus, it can be born with both sets of working genitals. Because they usually determine sex visually, they might only see the XY genitals and classify it as male. But the blood tests will sometimes show XX and sometimes XY, as much as 50% of the time if the fusion happened early. Which sex is that person in that case, and are they only 1 sex?
Are they still male becaude they have a Y if the first implanted embryo with XX chromosomes absorbed a smaller XY embryo, and therefore the final body is mostly XX?

And If a person with mosaicism as an adult surgically removes their XY-typical set/parts of their body including genitals, are they still XY? Even if the XY cells can be removed completely because they're only a small part of the person? Because that can happen too.

It only gets more complicated and uncertain from there, because there are a lot of variables at play when there's loads of organic data manipulation. But weird shit can and does happen for reasons we don't yet understand or know about. Depending on how you define sex and the point of sex determination, it is very likely someone has already changed sex.

Legal business contract stuff, most likely. Different countries have different employment law requirements, so Mozilla would realistically need legal representation in those places. That gets pricy fast.

I'm also excluded, for what it's worth.

The thing is, a car-dependent world makes this worse for people, not better.

As someone who also can't drive, I totally agree. But the only existing infrastructure I can use right now to get somewhat direct access to a location is a taxi. Even if I had a few thousand dollars to casually drop on a mobility scooter... stairs. Fucking stairs everywhere. And reception desks/bars made for 1.8m tall standing humans. And furniture packed so tight that you can't get past it, or just the casual rental bikes scattered in the middle of a footpath that has no curb cuts. Everywhere.

Shutting down the roads before providing viable substitutes and/or appropriate facilities is short-sighted and a terrible idea. And for me and many others, a terrifying prospect.

one of the best things we could do would be to permanently turn our CBDs into pedestrianised zones. Places where drivers are entirely allowed to go if they want, but where they have to expect to be driving very slowly because pedestrians get complete right of way.

We're getting more of these in Sydney CBD, and thankfully the council is getting more proactive in providing more public seating, but I can't go there much or for long enough to visit maybe 1 or 2 businesses. From an atmosphere / community standpoint, I really love them. From a medical standpoint, I associate them with a high likelihood of pain and injury, and so I avoid them. I can't even imagine how expensive it would be to try to get a taxi going through multiple streets encountering those few pedestrians who think "fuck your taxi fare, cars must obey me, you should be walking too, so i will block your path intentionally", even though I would much rather be walking like everyone else. I've already copped abuse getting out of a taxi that was dropping me off because it was 'illegally stopping'.

We need ways of allowing people to do much more than just stand and walk in a public space before many people can realistically use those public spaces. Increasing the amount of those before making them accessible will hurt a lot of people, I'm just one of them.

Once a week? Fuck no.

If you mean shutting down entire suburbs, definitely not in the foreseeable future. For the same reasons the ABC keeps breaking the law requiring them to provide transcripts and/or captions for media published online. They have forgotten, or worse, they are ignoring people with disabilities exist and should be part of the conversation.

I have zero objection to single streets being shut down to have community festivals/events, but in a world where many many people struggle with mobility, there needs to be some form of semi-direct access.

Or we at least need lots more public seating of differing types/heights, public toilets that aren't fucking rented port-a-loos, group tables that have space for wheelchairs, locking stations for mobility equipment that aren't just for pushbikes and that aren't placed haphazardly in the way of foot traffic on the skinny broken footpath, etc. You know, infrastructure and shit.

Also, be better, ABC. Cheap automated transcription tools exist, and it doesn't take many people to check for accuracy and add it to the media player and page. You're literally legally obligated to do this. There are even businesses you can hire to do that with turnarounds in under an hour. For fuck's sake, the royal commission report just came out about this sort of shit.

"Australian businessman" is an underwhelming choice for the headline.

It was Anthony Pratt the paper and packaging multibillionaire who joined Mar-a-Lago in 2017, and has been heavily involved with global politics for a long time.

I'm sure he learnt many other financially useful things in conversations with the heads of Australia and the US.

I love meeting cats glaring at me through windows. Especially if I say hello and they reply.

There was a video clip of a woman speaking about supermarket looting that made me start questioning my total pacifism. This is a different video transcript from her but, on the same topic. I really appreciated how she laid it out.

... So if I played 400 rounds of monopoly with you and I had to play and give you every dime that I made, and then for 50 years, every time that I played, if you didn’t like what I did, you got to burn it like they did in Tulsa and like they did in Rosewood, how can you win?
Kimberley Latrice Jones on the topic of the social contract.

It's the wrong day for me to answer that question too honestly, but I understand your point. Keep on dreaming and living the dream, friend.

Ah shit, my brain just totally glossed over which late night tv host named Jimmy from New York around 50 who always wears a suit it was. Thanks, I appreciate the call out.

As much as I would love for that to happen, money just gets shuffled around between companies and people like cards at a casino. It's exceptionally easy to launder it when you're that wealthy.

And then even if you do somehow manage to remove all his assets, he still maintains his existing social networks and connections, which may be enough to get him back to a similar position.

Prison is necessary if he has committed financial crimes. Anything less is merely finger-wagging.

Vuvuzelas and mimes are surely free speech, in the land of the free and the home of the brave. 🇺🇸 /s

Archive.today version - but it's also just copy pasted quotes and the YouTube link from book promoter's media release posing as journalism. Please don't give the Kimmel video or this article clicks.

Fuck Jimmy Kimmel too for platforming and enabling amoral grifters.

The Rolling Stone should also reconsider posting PR media releases as articles. I'm sure the delta on the media release vs. final version would be... minimal. They're amoral grifters just as much as Trump, Hutchinson and Kimmel for the same enabler reasons.

But given how toxic the Kimmel work-environment is, it's not surprising Kimmel is buddying up to a piece of shit. Scum collects on the surface like that.

Chaos, Comedy, and ‘Crying Rooms’: Inside Jimmy Fallon’s ‘Tonight Show’ - Rolling Stone, 7th September 2023, the same magazine just under 1 month ago.

Edit: formatting Edit 2: there are too many new-york-based late night tv hosts named Jimmy for me to remember properly. Serves me right.

Ain't no staffers got shit on a handful of people with vuvuzela following the representative around whenever they're in public. Rotate the shifts, 1 hour each, and you only need 24 people daily for permanent vuvuzela brrrrrrr heralding their elected official of choice.

I would also enjoy watching a legion of mimes mockingly reacting to representatives in interviews, if the vuvuzela is too 'public nuisance'.

Or both. Both would be great. Public shaming could be a very creative and cathartic outlet.

More than a little systemic racism strengthens the cycle of abuse, even if individual protective orders can be easily justified or the person signing off on one has only the best intentions. Otherwise, I totally agree.

For what we can do now, a shiny new Royal Commission report into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability has a bunch of specific recommendations around both the justice system and First Nation peoples with disability that would be very helpful.

Given First Nations peoples under 65 have a 35% disability rate, 3 times higher than the rest of Australia, it seems a good and timely starting point.

Clown fish start life as males, and become female in adulthood. Gobies can switch back and forth between male and female. So far, we know of maybe 500 species of fish that can change sex.

I understand people are not fish, but I'm not sure we should be so quick to declare something about people "can't be changed" with enough time, knowledge and science. Sex and gender are both complicated systems with lots of opportunity for unexpected variations affecting seemingly unrelated parts of a person.

It's even possible for your body to have more than one set of chromosomes, it's called Chromosomal Mosaicism and is detected in around 1-2% of pregnancies. Not all of those pregnancies make it full term, and not all mosaics are retained by the foetus, but in a world of billions of people it still ends up being a lot of people who are sexually diverse.

Biology is not simple. Do not underestimate the weird things your body can randomly surprise you with.

Maybe if their constituents actively annoyed them about it for long enough? Far-fetched, but it might just work.