fubo @ fubo @lemmy.world

No relation to the sports channel.

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Hmm. I can't tell at a glance whether a person has bad arthritis, peripheral neuropathy, hand spasms, or some other reason not to do the things that I would do with my hands. Just because something would be easy for me doesn't mean that I can safely assume it's easy for that other person.

In the examples I'm thinking of -- like the Trader Joe's in my city, or the military commissaries I saw as a child -- you don't get assigned to a register until that register is free; so you're never in a position to get upset over a specific other customer's needs.

"Anti-woke" is a policy position. It means "Anything we can caricature using black English, it is our intention to harm."

Your grocery store should switch to a single queue dispatching to all registers, instead of one queue per register. Queueing theory and human psychology predict that this will reduce the likelihood of customers having heart attacks over another customer's slowness.

Recently most clerks are coded not to summon city guards, but random NPCs may start aggro depending on your race & class.

Thing is, Republicans lose wherever they don't get to cheat. This is for two reasons:

1. Their policy positions are extremely unpopular with Americans
2. Their character qualities range from "bad boss" to "fratboy rapist" to "daddy issues".

And then the news media continue to present Republican policy positions and candidates as if they were normal American behavior by normal Americans.

They're really not. They only win when they cheat.

And it's not just coal and car exhaust, it's field-burning too.

I seem to recall he had a little trouble with some water at one point.

Well that's one way to say you're into incest ...

The Outside is a pretty cool game. There are indeed shops there.

Yes, but my mom has an old phone and can't install stuff.

I think it's a good idea from a security standpoint to have a UX space in which everyone can be confident that everyone's stuff is encrypted; with a very distinct and (yes) inconvenient barrier — in this case, a different app — between encrypted and unencrypted spaces.

Everyone is using lots of different messaging systems: SMS/MMS; specific systems like Signal, Telegram, or WhatsApp; email; maybe Facebook Messenger; etc. It's really important for some users' actual lives that it be totally clear when you're crossing from a secure space to an insecure space. Having the insecure space not be in the same app is one way to accomplish that.

When we need to move data between the secure space and the insecure space, we can do that through copy-and-paste, or even screenshots. It is inconvenient, but that's because it's explicit and intentional, which also means you can't move data from one to the other by accident. That's good.

As a privacy hobbyist, I want to notice what works for the people whose lives depend on privacy: the journalists, activists, sex workers, LSD dealers, etc. I don't have their risks, but I want to contribute to a world where they can be safe.

However, there are definitely lots of different needs and comfort levels. What's a sweet spot for me might be an uncanny valley for you.

I believe them when they say that one reason to drop SMS was that some vulnerable users were mistakenly sending SMS when they thought they were safe by using Signal. That's a serious problem where a person having Signal on their phone could cause them to expose themselves to attacks. That person's life is more important than my momentary inconvenience when my mom is using SMS and my friend is using Signal.

I really wish that there were better options; some sort of incrementally-built web-of-trust like the old PGP model. But right now, Signal is still in a sweet spot for me: yes, it's centralized, but it gets certain specific benefits of centralization while also credibly assuring that the server owners can't do evil with it even if they want to ... and they credibly don't. I can get my family and my housemates to use it, instead of something from Zuckerberg.

As a reminder, Signal is still awesome, is run by cool people who have been doing good stuff for your privacy for many many years, runs on your phone and your laptop and your dad's PC and your buddy's phone of that other brand ...

I know I'm middle aged but ... MP3s? A few megabytes isn't that much these days.

Because America is fucking awesome and they're missing out.

We've got people of all creeds and none, food from places you heard of in the news, dogs and cats living together, the resurgence of organized labor, Lutherans and Jews and Quakers and Sikhs and Catholics all giving free food to who needs it, black dudes and white dudes cuddling, Hindu women dating French atheist women, legal weed, tiny houses, babies with four doting parents getting into someone's legacy college, BBQs with vegan options, consensual weird porn, cops that stopped a fascist coup, wind farms, renewable energy cheaper than coal, neighbors sharing backyard garden vegetables, Loki on Disney+, teenagers with silly hair, some guys practicing kendo in the park, cognitive-behavioral therapy, Dungeons & Dragons becoming too cool for Wizards of the Coast to ruin it, secular solstice rituals, agricultural universities creating new breeds of tomato that are extra nutritious and you can just grow them on your apartment balcony, and lots of other great shit going on

And they were too busy watching "Louder with Crowder".

Going much more speculative here:

Some of the parameters for attention seem to include:

• Speed and rhythm of attention shifts. Am I focusing solidly on one thing? Or am I switching back and forth between several things, like a student driver who must keep track of their feet and their hands and other cars and pedestrians and signals? When I am distracted, how reliably do I return to an intended object of attention? (I say "rhythm", but "melody, meter, and rhyme" might be a better analogy.)
• The ratios between attention on different sorts of targets: external (senses, objects in the world, people saying words at me), bodily (stuff my body is doing: motions, itches, weird inner ear noises, gait, hunger), and reflective (stuff my mind is doing: inner voice, memory recall, making plans, worrying about that weird inner ear noise).
• The strength of episodic memory formation; and the subjective passage of time. Short-term memory is how we perceive time passing; people who are not forming short-term memories (e.g. alcoholic blackout, senile dementia, high psychedelic doses) don't notice time passing, experience frequent deja vu, repeat the same "discovery" over and over, etc.; they may have extended attentional focus on a single object because they're just having the same thought repeatedly without forming memories.

No.

I can drive, listen to music, and have a conversation but it starts to overload my brain at that point, as most of my attention is focusing on driving.

The usual computer analogy is multitasking, in which the kernel rapidly switches from one process to another. A single CPU core may switch between running code for my browser, my chat program, the temperature monitoring process, and the wifi driver; this happens so quickly that it appears to me that all of them are running "at the same time".

Attention also shifts quickly. When you are doing two things "at the same time", attention is switching back and forth between them! You're not really constantly attending to the music and the road; ideally you switch back to the road often enough that if something surprising happens there, you can respond to it in time.

We know from experiment that when people have more distractions going on while driving, they actually do respond slower to surprises on the road. Eating a bagel with the radio on and your kids in the back seat is actually hard, and really does slow down noticing the dog that just ran out into the road.

Attention is a feature of minds, wherein a mind can have awareness of lots of inputs (senses, internal thoughts, emotions, etc.) but dedicate most of its "thinking power" to only one or a few things from its awareness at a time.

("Attention" is narrow; "awareness" is broad. You can be aware of the color of the wall next to you, even if you are not attending to it.)

What does attention do? Attention selects; attention shifts. You can switch from focusing on this sentence, to your breathing, a sound in the distance, the taste of your coffee, your plans for the day, the texture of your socks.

Shifting is not a bug; it is what attention is for. That is why we have it.

There is a rhythm to attention shifts. They can happen quicker or slower; and more or less suddenly. This rhythm differs from person to person, activity to activity, and with emotional and hormonal changes.

Some people are more aware of their attention shifts than others. Some people feel more control over their attention shifts than others. Some people's attention shifts are more or less in tune with classrooms or offices or other environments that expect certain sorts of tight control.

Meditation allows us to notice and gently alter the parameters of attention.

Spontaneous attention shifts are important! If a loud bang and the smell of sulfur happen from the closet next to you, your attention will probably no longer be on reading this message. If a loved one bursts into the room weeping in despair, your attention will no longer be on reading this message. If the smell of baking pies drifts into the room, your attention will no longer be on reading this message. (At least, if you're like me. Mmm, pies.)

Focus is also important. When someone "gets in the zone" they may not notice many things that otherwise would grab their attention. They might even fail to attend to the smell of pies; and the weeping loved one would take a little longer to grab them than otherwise.

Attention works along with self-awareness. Attention does the shifting; self-awareness creates the sense of continuity: even though you are sometimes reading and sometimes thinking about pie, you still have the sense that you are the same person. Even though there is not really any such thing as "a self" (q.v. anatta), it is pretty useful to remember that "you" have a body and that it is pretty similar to the body "you" had yesterday.