RobotOverlord525's recent activity

  1. Comment on What is a business/org that is great and ethical in so many aspects that everyone should consider using? in ~life

    RobotOverlord525
    Link Parent
    I seem to recall that laundry detergent sheets are bad environmentally insofar as they have plasticizers in them. The Wirecutter certainly wasn't impressed with them, on a number of levels. They...

    I seem to recall that laundry detergent sheets are bad environmentally insofar as they have plasticizers in them. The Wirecutter certainly wasn't impressed with them, on a number of levels.

    Laundry detergent sheets are sometimes offered as an alternative for people looking to avoid detergent pods, which are wrapped in a polymer called polyvinyl alcohol (PVA/PVOH). While PVA/PVOH is considered a safer choice by the Environmental Protection Agency, some people are concerned that PVA/PVOH doesn’t biodegrade as quickly as claimed, and some would prefer not to use petroleum-derived products.

    But if you want to avoid PVA/PVOH, detergent sheets aren’t the way to do it: To achieve their tearable texture, detergent sheets include PVA/PVOH in their formulas.

    They weren't impressed with their sustainability or water usage, either.

    I've been using their environmentally friendly recommendation, Dirty Labs, instead. It seems to do the job well. (Though I do need to figure out why my daughter ran through so much of it recently when she was doing laundry...)

    1 vote

  2. Comment on US conservative news network Newsmax files antitrust lawsuit against Fox News in ~tv

    RobotOverlord525
    Link Parent
    I think there's some merit to the rather famous quotation often referred to as Wilhoit's law: Or, to put it another popular way: "Rules for thee but not for me." In this case, "Monopolies are good...

    I think there's some merit to the rather famous quotation often referred to as Wilhoit's law:

    Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:

    There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

    There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time.

    For millenia, conservatism had no name, because no other model of polity had ever been proposed. “The king can do no wrong.” In practice, this immunity was always extended to the king’s friends, however fungible a group they might have been. Today, we still have the king’s friends even where there is no king (dictator, etc.). Another way to look at this is that the king is a faction, rather than an individual.

    Or, to put it another popular way: "Rules for thee but not for me."

    In this case, "Monopolies are good unless they harm me."

    2 votes

  3. Comment on “First of its kind” AI settlement: Anthropic to pay authors $1.5 billion in ~books

    RobotOverlord525
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    This is a move in the right direction. I think Cloudflare's recent policy change around AI scrapers, in a similar vein, points in a similar direction. AI companies need the data and they need to...

    This is a move in the right direction. I think Cloudflare's recent policy change around AI scrapers, in a similar vein, points in a similar direction. AI companies need the data and they need to pay for. How they're going to do that, given that they still aren't profitable, I don't know. But piracy is bad no matter who's doing it. If creators don't have ad revenue (in the case of websites) or sales (in the case of book authors), it makes having a healthy job market for those things virtually impossible.

  4. Comment on Survey results on books that people identify as shaping their life/personality after reading them in high school in ~books

    RobotOverlord525
    Link Parent
    Yeah, if nothing else, this article really emphasizes how much of a Philistine I am and was back in high school. These were the ones from that list that I read in high school and what I remember...

    Yeah, if nothing else, this article really emphasizes how much of a Philistine I am and was back in high school.

    These were the ones from that list that I read in high school and what I remember about how I felt about them. (I graduated from high school almost 25 years ago, though, so no guarantees that this is accurate.)

    • Fahrenheit 451: Meh. It's all right.
    • The Grapes of Wrath: Boring! Read the Cliff's Notes.
    • The Great Gatsby: Finished it. Hated it. Very boring.
    • Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: Annoying characters. Very boring. I learned nothing I didn't already know from lectures and history books.
    • The Scarlet Letter: Boring. Might have read the Cliff's Notes.
    • Walden: Looked boring. Didn't even bother. If I had an essay I had to write about it, I think I just winged it based on class lectures about the book.

    Despite that, I was reading a lot. (Sometimes in other classes when I shouldn't have been.) But all of it was science fiction that I thought was entertaining. Lots of Star Wars and BattleTech books, but also Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy and maybe a few other non-"shared universe" books. Embarrassingly, I think Starship Troopers' arguments for "earned citizenship" were persuasive to me.

    But I don't think I was assigned more than a few books in high school that I actually liked, much less felt like they affected me. Black Like Me was maybe the only one that did. I remember being very upset by it. I think it convinced me that the American South was an awful place full of hideous racists that I never wanted to visit. (Not the argument the book was trying to make but probably something teenage me took away from it anyway.)

    I enjoyed the abridged version of The Count of Monte Cristo that I read in 10th grade. But I wouldn't say that it affected me in any profound way. Julius Caesar was moderately entertaining to me, which surprised me since I had considered Shakespeare universally boring.

    But that's it. That's all of the assigned reading I can remember having any sort of positive reaction to. The most that all of that assigned reading really convinced me of was that literary fiction was boring as fuck and that I should avoid it. It convinced me that nothing outside of sci-fi/fantasy was worth reading.

    1 vote

  5. Comment on Survey results on books that people identify as shaping their life/personality after reading them in high school in ~books

    RobotOverlord525
    Link Parent
    There's also a sampling bias. This is a list of books NPR listeners/readers say impacted them as high school students. Age is a factor. The audience is another. They're not going to talk about...

    There's also a sampling bias. This is a list of books NPR listeners/readers say impacted them as high school students. Age is a factor. The audience is another. They're not going to talk about popular fiction they read for entertainment. It's going to be biased towards prestige titles—things that are part of the literary canon. And those are all going to be old.

    2 votes

  6. Comment on "Is democracy a fad?" Ben Garfinkel’s sobering forecast for democracy in the automation age. in ~society

    RobotOverlord525
    Link Parent
    Even if we accept the idea that the Roman Republic was a democracy (don't let the "Senate" fool you, it wasn't—the property-holding qualifications for even the lowest magistracies in the Roman...

    There are a few democracies that are significantly older than the US.

    Rome devolved into authoritarian government, but Rome is not the only model for how a Republic will develop.

    Even if we accept the idea that the Roman Republic was a democracy (don't let the "Senate" fool you, it wasn't—the property-holding qualifications for even the lowest magistracies in the Roman Republic were steep), the Roman style of government still wasn't "common" in the ancient world. Democracy as we know it really is a very late-18th and a 19th century phenomenon. As the article observes...

    In other parts of the world, small states with noteworthy democratic elements have emerged from time to time. Certain small states in Greece, as the most famous example, were borderline-proper democracies for a couple hundred years. However, if there was any trend at all, then the trend was toward more consistent and complete dictatorship. States with noteworthy democratic elements tended to lose these elements over time, as they either expanded or fell under the influence of larger states.[4] No sensible person living one thousand years ago would have predicted the recent democratic surge.

    Point is, democracies are historically unusual. Hopefully not an aberration, but I think the author makes a persuasive case for why it might be.

    one of the goals behind the US constitution and bill of rights was to prevent authoritarian government from emerging and taking over.

    I think we're seeing right now how weak those systems can be. The raison d'etre of the Electoral College was to prevent men unsuitable for the Presidency from attaining that office. That's not a very democratic institution, but it's supposed to be one that's anti-authoritarian. And clearly it doesn't work. Likewise, Congress's impeachment powers are supposed to be a check on the executive branch, but they fail if the legislature doesn't have any interest in upsetting the executive's supporters. All of the societal trends driving these are part of the author's overall argument of a trend towards authoritarianism. We humans don't naturally share power. And even when power is shared with us, some of us don't really want it. Apparently.

    1 vote

  7. Comment on "Is democracy a fad?" Ben Garfinkel’s sobering forecast for democracy in the automation age. in ~society

    RobotOverlord525
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    Ironically, I came across this in Dario Amodei's big utopian essay on what AI is doing to do for us. Democracy has only been common for the last 200 years—a blink in the 5,000-year history of...

    Ironically, I came across this in Dario Amodei's big utopian essay on what AI is doing to do for us.

    Democracy has only been common for the last 200 years—a blink in the 5,000-year history of states. In this post, AI policy researcher Ben Garfinkel explores why that might not last, especially as automation reshapes the social contract.

    When I imagine a potential doomsday scenario of automation, this is pretty close to what I'm thinking of. Less Skynet and more robotic-powered authoritarianism.

    3 votes

  9. Comment on Passing the torch - Discord is getting a new CEO in ~tech

    RobotOverlord525
    Link Parent
    Absolutely. The annoying store banners they've added over the last few months have been the hint that they were starting to head down this road. While I'm sympathetic for the need for funding...

    My prediction is that this will lead to enshitification as Discord tries to maximise shareholder value.

    Absolutely. The annoying store banners they've added over the last few months have been the hint that they were starting to head down this road. While I'm sympathetic for the need for funding (just hosting all of the stuff free users upload indefinitely can't be cheap), "notification" style ads are a huge annoyance for me.

    These days, I rarely use any of the voice or video functionality. Instead, it's how my weekly D&D group communicates with one another outside of the game and has been the number one way I chat with my brother and, during work hours, my wife. (We used to use Google Hangouts, but then Google did the Google thing of killing it.) Discord has a lot of handy chat functionality that I appreciate.

    Time to start shopping for a new chat platform, I guess. Ideally one my D&D group can upload images to.

    4 votes

  10. Comment on What's something that makes you feel like we're living in the future? in ~talk

    RobotOverlord525
    Link Parent
    I have a condition that makes typing painful. The fact that I can still work by speaking to my computer is a miracle. (It's also a constantly annoyance, but I recognize that the frustrations of...

    I have a condition that makes typing painful. The fact that I can still work by speaking to my computer is a miracle. (It's also a constantly annoyance, but I recognize that the frustrations of using Dragon NaturallySpeaking are peak first world problems.)

    3 votes

  11. Comment on What's something that makes you feel like we're living in the future? in ~talk

    RobotOverlord525
    Link Parent
    On a related note, if you would like some "fun" reading, I came across this a while back. It's kind of what I was already thinking as far as all of this LLM AI economic apocalypse topic is...

    On a related note, if you would like some "fun" reading, I came across this a while back. It's kind of what I was already thinking as far as all of this LLM AI economic apocalypse topic is concerned.

    (It was, ironically enough, in Dario Amodei's techno-utopian essay that was making the rounds months ago.)

    1 vote

  12. Comment on Long-term experiences with Google search alternatives? in ~tech

    RobotOverlord525
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    I'm curious exactly how this works. My concern would be that, if Kagi strictly searches for exactly what is typed rather than intelligently incorporating synonyms and alternate spellings, it could...

    it searches FOR WHAT I TYPE IN instead of what it thinks I want. If I search for how to solve a bug in DeDRM in Calibre on Linux, the first page of results aren't HowToGeek type articles on how to setup Calibre on Windows.

    for real: your search operators work again!

    I'm curious exactly how this works. My concern would be that, if Kagi strictly searches for exactly what is typed rather than intelligently incorporating synonyms and alternate spellings, it could lead to missing relevant results. For example, a search for "color" might not return results with "colour," or "DeDRM" might not match "De-DRM." This rigidity could make searches less effective, especially when users aren't aware of alternate terms commonly used for the same concept.

    Though, having said that, I'm entirely too aware that Google has gone too far in the other direction with this. I feel like they had a happy medium on it at one point not too long ago but they've lost it.

    2 votes

  13. Comment on Texas officials report that an unvaccinated child has died of measles in ~health

    RobotOverlord525
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    If you've ever wondered why people don’t change their minds in the face of overwhelming facts, there are two books that I read last year that I think answer the question better than anything else...
    • Exemplary

    If you've ever wondered why people don’t change their minds in the face of overwhelming facts, there are two books that I read last year that I think answer the question better than anything else I've seen. I've mentioned them before. The first is How Minds Change by David McRaney and the second is Why We're Polarized by Ezra Klein. In short, more often than not, belief change isn’t about logic—it’s about identity.

    As Klein writes,

    Human beings evolved to exist in groups. To be part of a group, and to see that group thrive, meant survival. To be exiled from a group, or to see your group crushed by its enemies, could mean death. Is it really so strange that we evolved to feel the life-and-death stakes of group belonging and status?

    Klein explains that political and social beliefs are tied to group identity, meaning changing your mind often feels like betraying your community and, more to the point, risking exile from it. This is why people resist facts that challenge their group's views. McRaney digs even deeper into the psychology, showing that traditional debate fails because of motivated reasoning, the backfire effect, and identity-protective cognition. Instead, real change happens from self-reflection that only happens when we don't feel threatened (psychologically on an individual level as well as in the sense of our status in our social groups). Rather than bombarding people with facts, McRaney uses the example of "deep canvassing" (and similar techniques like "street epistemology") to show techniques that are shockingly effective at changing people's minds by connecting an issue to their own experiences, provoking reductions in cognitive dissonance. Further, a great example referenced repeatedly in the book is how public opinion on gay marriage shifted rapidly—not because of better arguments, but because the broader culture changed and it didn't feel like a betrayal of group identity to change stance on the issue.

    So how do we make it so that vaccination isn't politicized and therefore linked to group identity? I wish I knew. It's going to require powerful forces within conservatism itself to do that. (To say nothing of the generally left-leaning "wellness" community.)

    McRaney, towards the end, says,

    We’ve seen many ways to get people through the natural mind-change process—and we’ve seen the persuasion techniques that deliver the best results. We’ve learned to counter the effects of tribal psychology; create better online worlds to tap into what gave us the ability to change our minds in the first place; use the genetic gifts of assimilation and accommodation, reasoning, elaboration, perspective-taking, and social learning that give argumentation the power to change the minds of people bound within SURFPADified and tribal ideologies. Scaled up, these paths to change disturb the status quo when the network effects we’ve discussed create the conditions that make cascades of change unpredictable. But no status quo is eternal. Every system occasionally grows fragile. The key to changing a nation, or a planet, is persistence.

    At any one time, for any given system, thousands of us are banging away at it hoping to make the difference that changes the world, but no one knows where the vulnerable cluster is at. No one can will the system to cascade for them.

    The system must become vulnerable. When it is, with so many people banging away, it is inevitable that someone will start the cascade that changes everything, but that someone isn’t preordained. You need no special privilege to start striking at the status quo, because no one is in control. What you are in control of is whether or not you stop striking. And if the change you want to make is big, you may need to strike all your life.

    9 votes

  14. Comment on Google may be close to launching YouTube Premium Lite in ~tech

    RobotOverlord525
    Link Parent
    Interesting. I wonder if that's related to that heatmap that displays "popular" parts of videos. (Naturally, the end of sponsored segments are very popular.) I don't think I've ever been able to...

    Interesting. I wonder if that's related to that heatmap that displays "popular" parts of videos. (Naturally, the end of sponsored segments are very popular.) I don't think I've ever been able to skip right to that most popular point exactly, but maybe that's just reflective of how much my YouTube watching is on my TV. I'll have to keep an eye out for it.

    1 vote

  15. Comment on Looking for low-precision, mouse-only Steam game recommendations in ~games

    RobotOverlord525
    (edited )
    Link
    My wife is absolutely addicted to Brotato and I feel it'd probably work in this situation. She plays it WASD (no mouse) and I play it with just the left stick on a controller. Seems like it could...

    My wife is absolutely addicted to Brotato and I feel it'd probably work in this situation. She plays it WASD (no mouse) and I play it with just the left stick on a controller. Seems like it could be played fine on a touchscreen since it's possible to play with just a mouse.

    It's surprisingly entertaining for a game whose gameplay consists only of moving your character and buying randomized (roguelite) upgrades. I've got 97 hours on it, my wife has 195. (My brother got it for us and has around 25.)

    2 votes

  16. Comment on Google may be close to launching YouTube Premium Lite in ~tech

    RobotOverlord525
    Link Parent
    I've seen tipping as an option on YouTube sometimes now. Not often, and certainly not on my TV, but it's occasionally there. I've never used it, though.

    I've seen tipping as an option on YouTube sometimes now. Not often, and certainly not on my TV, but it's occasionally there. I've never used it, though.

    1 vote

  17. Comment on Google may be close to launching YouTube Premium Lite in ~tech

  18. Comment on Google may be close to launching YouTube Premium Lite in ~tech

    RobotOverlord525
    Link Parent
    I have Premium and don't use ReVanced or Sponsorblock. There's definitely nothing to let me manually skip, much less automatically skip, sponsored segments.

    I have Premium and don't use ReVanced or Sponsorblock. There's definitely nothing to let me manually skip, much less automatically skip, sponsored segments.

  19. Comment on Grammar errors that actually matter, or: the thread where we all become prescriptivists in ~humanities.languages

    RobotOverlord525
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    Hear, hear. Spoken language is a human universal (as is language evolution) but written language is no more than a tool that we have developed in order to represent that. To some extent, a written...

    Hear, hear. Spoken language is a human universal (as is language evolution) but written language is no more than a tool that we have developed in order to represent that. To some extent, a written language fails when it fails to properly represent the spoken language as it evolves.

    I remember being incredibly amazed in high school that Spanish is as phonetic as it is. But this isn't any accident. It's due to reforms by the Real Academia Española, which standardized spelling based on pronunciation. (They also invented the very cool inverted question mark and inverted exclamation point that I've long been jealous English doesn't have.) English isn't as phonetic as Spanish because we don't have an equivalent body to perform spelling reform. American English got a slight spelling reform in the 19th century, but that was basically it. As a result, written English is failing to evolve to keep up with the evolution of spoken English. (To be clear, I'm entirely too aware of why we will never have meaningful spelling reform in English. The written language is, for better or worse, frozen for as long as we keep using the Roman alphabet.)

    Given that, I don't think it's entirely inappropriate pedantry in order to correct written English when it's "breaking the rules" in a sense of failing to properly represent spoken English. (Though to be completely honest, I am guilty of engaging in indefensible levels of pedantry on a regular basis, as my wife and my brother can both attest.)

    2 votes

  20. Comment on What were some artists, groups or albums that had an influence on you before you were old enough to choose for yourself? in ~music

    RobotOverlord525
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    When I was young, my parents listened to a lot of '80s pop music. They had some cassettes we listened to in the car a lot, too. Michael Jackson's Off the Wall and Thriller (but not the title track...

    When I was young, my parents listened to a lot of '80s pop music. They had some cassettes we listened to in the car a lot, too. Michael Jackson's Off the Wall and Thriller (but not the title track because it scared me) and some Billy Ocean album come to mind. But we listened to the radio a lot, too, so I got exposed to all the Top 40 stuff from the '80s.

    I spent many years not listening to pop music (I started to hate it in the '90s when I discovered metal in high school), but I looked some of it up on Spotify some years back and it was a huge nostalgia hit. Amusingly, my daughter really likes it. (And doesn't like my '90s/early-'00s metal art all.) I like to tell myself that '80s pop music is just fundamentally better than '90s pop music.

    Curiously, I never could tolerate the '50s and '60s pop music ("oldies") that my mom also used to listen to. Everytime she put Elvis on it drove me crazy. I have a theory that she didn't listen to as much of it when I was really young as she did when I was in, like, middle school. But I could be wrong. Whatever the case, the '80s pop stuck but the older stuff didn't.

    1 vote