post_below's recent activity

  1. Comment on Open to collaborate and draw something for you in ~creative

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    Some of these ideas sound a little like gen AI prompts. It's much more fun to see what a human will come up with. Vive la résistance! I don't have a prompt to add but I'm looking forward to seeing...

    Some of these ideas sound a little like gen AI prompts. It's much more fun to see what a human will come up with. Vive la résistance!

    I don't have a prompt to add but I'm looking forward to seeing the results. I'd love to see some of your existing stuff too, please post links!

    2 votes
  2. Comment on I'm alarmed by the apparent lack of an actual deep state in ~society

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    DOGE lacks both the competence and genuine desire to accomplish this. Unless by modern methodology you mean "broken".

    Meanwhile DOGE runs the numbers, makes the reports, and upgrades everything it rampages through from the late 1950s mindset to modern methodology.

    DOGE lacks both the competence and genuine desire to accomplish this. Unless by modern methodology you mean "broken".

    13 votes
  3. Comment on In praise of the ellipsis in ~books

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    I agree with the author. Sometimes less common uses of punctuation can be useful. I think ellipses are great. If you want to use commas and semicolons in odd ways I support you. Less so if it...

    I agree with the author. Sometimes less common uses of punctuation can be useful. I think ellipses are great. If you want to use commas and semicolons in odd ways I support you. Less so if it breaks the immersion without a purpose.

    But then the author goes and says:

    We think we live at a time of an abundance of good writing, but so much of it is really just that… good writing… at which point good is no longer good enough.

    I don't know who the author is, maybe there's some context I'm missing. But if they are indeed the student of literature their framing and references imply then how, in all that reading, did they manage to miss that "things used to be better, people who think things are good now are wrong" is as tired a trope as you'll ever find.

    There is an abundance of good writing. The human race hasn't become dumber or less creative. The biggest differences between now and whichever imaginary point in history the author is referring to is that both leisure time and the population have increased. Another difference is that writers from developing countries have more direct access to mainstream audiences. We have more great writing than ever before, alongside more bad writing.

    Who is this person to indict the near incomprehensively vast and varied creative output of the human race? Or at least the part of the human race that follows style guides.

    But maybe my view is biased in some way, maybe writing really isn't as "good enough" as it used to be. It's a bold claim that demands evidence so surely in the next paragraph they'll support it...

    One thing we ought to encourage in order to break this equilibrium of well-mannered mediocre prose is a better use of the ellipsis.

    Yeah that'll do it... ellipses will reinvigorate the hearts and minds of a generation of authors.

    No support for the premise, instead they seem to double down. Modern writing is mediocre because of style guides? I mean sure, style rules can be restrictive, but are they really capable of snuffing out creativity? Maybe the author and I are reading different style guides. Or maybe we think about creativity differently.

    Like I said, I generally agree with the author's points but why, in a piece about good writing, would you recycle a hopelessly overused trope, make an astoundingly egocentric claim about modern writing, and then try to overfit it to your point with no supporting rationale or evidence?

    I'm not sure that even the great ellipsis can save this hot take.

    2 votes
  4. Comment on Experience with data protection laws (GDPR, ePD, CCPA, etc..) in ~tech

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    Wow 1988, that was a forward thinking law.

    Wow 1988, that was a forward thinking law.

    1 vote
  5. Comment on Experience with data protection laws (GDPR, ePD, CCPA, etc..) in ~tech

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    That's interesting, I wasn't thinking of patient data but it definitely falls under data protection laws. I've never been involved with anything HIPAA related but I've heard often about the...

    That's interesting, I wasn't thinking of patient data but it definitely falls under data protection laws. I've never been involved with anything HIPAA related but I've heard often about the compliance requirements. It's not shocking that in actual practice the protection is haphazard and ineffective. The details are interesting though.

    And yeah, Oracle is a giant amalgamated asshole.

    Thank you for the insider insights!

    3 votes
  6. Experience with data protection laws (GDPR, ePD, CCPA, etc..)

    This is a topic I keep revisiting. It's constantly evolving, with new laws in different parts of the world happening pretty often. And also there's a lot of grey area with vague or incomprehensive...

    This is a topic I keep revisiting. It's constantly evolving, with new laws in different parts of the world happening pretty often. And also there's a lot of grey area with vague or incomprehensive language that hasn't yet been tested in courts.

    I recognize that it's a bit of a niche topic, but I think there are a lot of us at Tildes who have to think about it. After all it potentially impacts anyone maintaining or building a non-platform web presence. It also applies to less obvious things like running an advertising campaign that involves media requested from a server you control (which can therefore potentially log requests).

    For my part, I've needed to research laws relating to PII in order to come up with policies and practices in various contexts. In broad strokes it's pretty simple but as you get into details what I continue to find is that there are a lot of conflicting opinions both from professionals and lawyers. A lot of it is still open to interpretation.

    I'm wondering what kinds of experience other tildenauts have around data protection and PII? Have you implemented solutions? Do you wonder about it for your own websites? Have you been involved with it at companies where you've worked? Do you have questions about it?

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

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    I apologize for any pain I've caused

    I apologize for any pain I've caused

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

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    Prescriptivism is largely pointless. No matter how good your arguments, people will go on using language however they want. And more power to them. As you say, though, the rules are important when...

    Prescriptivism is largely pointless. No matter how good your arguments, people will go on using language however they want. And more power to them.

    As you say, though, the rules are important when learning a language and I agree that you should know what they are before you break them.

    However, language is about communication and how you use language changes the way that people hear or read you.

    For example, if you write "your welcome" there is a large part of the english first language speaking population who will read you as possibly undereducated, or at least language arts challenged. They might not think it's a big deal, or care very much, but they will absolutely notice. Which impacts your attempt at communication and you won't even know it's happening.

    A smaller subset of people will care quite a bit if it happens to be a particular pet peeve of there's. They might rationally understand that it shouldn't annoy them but they'll still be annoyed.

    So in that way the rules matter even if they're dynamic. Ideally they should be broken with intention rather than ignorance.

    Edit: typo, seemed right to fix it

    16 votes
  9. Comment on If you sharpened a particularly stiff carrot, could you kill a vampire with it? in ~talk

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    So really the question is "Can I kill a vampire with my super homegrown carrot that was as hard as wood and really existed I promise" :) The real challenge is keeping the vampire inert and docile...

    So really the question is "Can I kill a vampire with my super homegrown carrot that was as hard as wood and really existed I promise" :)

    The real challenge is keeping the vampire inert and docile while you grow your super carrot. I guess you'd also have to keep it out of the sun and away from priests and italian food so it doesn't die by other means before you can carrot it. Can vampires starve? You might have to feed it too.

    Why not keep a stockpile of super carrots? Because there's presumably enough water and sugars in even a super carrot that its structural integrity would be undermined by microbes and dessication.

    You definitely couldn't use a regular carrot unless you had some sort of high velocity projection method that didn't destroy the carrot via air resistance and friction before it arrived at the vampire, or was able to accelerate the pulp to skin, connective tissue, muscle and bone piercing speeds.

    At that point you could kinda use anything. So I guess what I'm saying is maybe but you're making killing this vampire exquisitely hard for yourself and it's likely that natural selection would interfere with your plans.

    1 vote
  10. Comment on US voters were right about the economy. The data was wrong. in ~finance

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    This is a lucid framing of the situation, thanks for taking the time to post it. We can't rely on the democratic party to internalize any of this and do something useful with it in a reasonable...

    This is a lucid framing of the situation, thanks for taking the time to post it.

    We can't rely on the democratic party to internalize any of this and do something useful with it in a reasonable amount of time. It's possible of course but they've had decades to figure it out. At the end of the day their (figurative) paychecks depend on not understanding it.

    But that doesn't mean the general public can't understand it, and change their political (and media) priorities as a result.

    We need human-centered policies. Those are unacceptable to big donors and corporations

    Your post made it clear but I want to stress it anyway: this is the core problem.

    29 votes
  11. Comment on Phishing tests, the bane of work life, are getting meaner in ~tech

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    You're right, almost all of the time. The problem is the rest of the time. There have been exploits that could compromise a machine solely from a webpage visit that were used in the wild. They're...

    So I don’t see a problem from just clicking the link

    You're right, almost all of the time.

    The problem is the rest of the time. There have been exploits that could compromise a machine solely from a webpage visit that were used in the wild. They're increasingly rare, because of course software companies have learned from those mistakes, but it's not safe to say it will never happen again. Future vulnerabilities are a given, as are undiscovered current ones.

    We definitely don't want people to think it's ok to click suspicious links. Not only because of the (admittedly low) chance of an immediate exploit, but because it increases the chance of that second click, which has much better odds of compromising you. Companies are absolutely right to discourage clicking links in questionable emails, or anywhere else. And we should keep telling our elderly not to click!

    10 votes
  12. Comment on reCAPTCHA: 819 million hours of wasted human time and billions of dollars in Google profits in ~tech

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    Small aside, there are actually viable free alternatives. Cloudflare's solution being one, hCAPTCHA is another. Lots of others, but those two are probably the most widely adopted.

    Small aside, there are actually viable free alternatives. Cloudflare's solution being one, hCAPTCHA is another. Lots of others, but those two are probably the most widely adopted.

    4 votes
  13. Comment on Why Gen X women are having the best sex in ~life.women

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    Disclaimer: Not a woman. I just thought this thread deserved more comments. It's an interesting article/topic and you posted great questions to get things started. For me, and for the...

    Disclaimer: Not a woman. I just thought this thread deserved more comments. It's an interesting article/topic and you posted great questions to get things started.

    Share your thoughts about the impact of age on your sexuality and desire;

    For me, and for the non-representative sample of women I've known, it just keeps getting better. You learn so much about sexuality as you go.

    Has/have you and your partner(s) discussed your age and its effects on your desires;

    Yes, and there doesn't seem to be a decrease, though that day will no doubt eventually come.

    Have you separated from a spouse or partner(s) for reasons you attribute to incompatible sexual desires

    Not once. In my experience as long as there's good communication and chemistry sex isn't often the deciding factor in a relationship. Which isn't to say that intimacy isn't a hugely important part of the relationship.

    Do you feel you need, or have you sought, medical intervention for the changes around perimenopause/menopause?

    Obviously I can't answer this one, both because I'm a dude and because I haven't arrived there with anyone yet. I am curious about it though, what the experience of (for example) hormone therapy is like. Upsides, downsides, caveats and etc..

    Has what you look for in a prospective sexual partner changed?

    I've always been after romantic relationships rather than just sexual partners, but if I were to be looking for a purely sex partner one of the factors would be self awareness. Sex and communication are inextricably linked and people who know themselves are better at both.

    Do you feel comfortable thinking of yourself as still sexually attractive to your preferred partners?

    I think this is really important post 30. It's easy to get caught up in western cultural beauty standards and let that convince you you're not sexy anymore and it is so completely not true. For all the obvious reasons that transisition is a lot easier for men... who you weren't talking to in the first place :)

    The objectification and co-opting of women's sexuality for marketing is oppressive. Whereas being sexy to someone you trust and respect is empowering.

    It's been great to see love, sex and romance among people who aren't 25 depicted more and more often in entertainment and culture. I think we're collectively getting over the idea that these things are mostly for young people. When I was 25 we all understood that older people had sex, probably. But it felt like the cultural norm was that they should be discrete about it because no one wanted to be reminded of it. It's been a big shift.

    The recent shift in the way older women's sexuality is depicted has also been great to see. The idea, that felt pervasive not so long ago, that you could have sexy older men but that sexy older women were a compelling but somewhat distasteful anomaly was just dumb.

    From a male perspective: As I've aged I've been profoundly grateful to continue to find my peers attractive. The trope of men trading up for younger women because (presumbly) they don't find women their own age attractive anymore doesn't seem be be based on anything other than their own insecurity.

    10 votes
  14. Comment on reCAPTCHA: 819 million hours of wasted human time and billions of dollars in Google profits in ~tech

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    I feel that you skimmed both the original post/article and my post a little too fast. Here's a quote: Almost a trillion! It's fun making up numbers! And here's the full quote about pixels and...

    I feel that you skimmed both the original post/article and my post a little too fast. Here's a quote:

    while generating massive profits for Google through its tracking capabilities and data collection, with the value of tracking cookies alone estimated at $888 billion.

    Almost a trillion! It's fun making up numbers!

    And here's the full quote about pixels and fingerprinting:

    "Re-captcha takes a pixel by pixel fingerprint of your browser, a realtime map of everything you do on the internet."

    I left out the second part the first time around for brevity, but it's an outright lie. A reCAPTCHA snippet cannot make a map of everything you do on the internet, let alone a real time one. Chrome could, Edge could, even an ad network has better coverage than a JS snippet confined to a small subset of pages.

    There's a difference between dramatic language and making stuff up. Literally everything in that quote is wrong.

    11 votes
  15. Comment on At what age do you consider someone to be an adult? in ~talk

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    What is an adult? I think people have a lot of different definitions, to the point that it's an abstract term. 18 is legal adulthood, 21 is sort of 'full' adulthood in that you now have all the...

    What is an adult? I think people have a lot of different definitions, to the point that it's an abstract term.

    18 is legal adulthood, 21 is sort of 'full' adulthood in that you now have all the privileges. But I don't think many people over 30 see 21 year olds as full adults.

    Someone mentioned 25, as the age when brain development is considered finished. But of course that number has gone up over time and recent studies suggest it continues until at least 30. So who knows? I do like the insight that our brains are far from finished developing at legal adulthood. Biological maturity seems like a pretty good definition. So that would be 30+ with the most current science, maybe it will be adjusted up again at some point.

    But is adulthood more than brain development? If I think about times in my life that I considered myself an adult, I'm not sure the current me agrees that I was, in fact, an adult. I fully expect that to keep happening.

    Eventually you arrive at a point where no casual observer would accuse you of being anything other than an adult, maybe that's adulthood? I suppose that's early to mid 30's.

    Or maybe adulthood is a spectrum that you never reach the end of.

    11 votes
  16. Comment on reCAPTCHA: 819 million hours of wasted human time and billions of dollars in Google profits in ~tech

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    Google's data collection and monetization sucks, I want to say that up front. It's frustrating, though, when people intentionally misrepresent tech, relying on the ignorance of their audience. For...

    Google's data collection and monetization sucks, I want to say that up front.

    It's frustrating, though, when people intentionally misrepresent tech, relying on the ignorance of their audience.

    For example:

    Re-captcha takes a pixel by pixel fingerprint of your browser

    A browser doesn't have pixels. Do we mean browser window? Maybe the canvas? If so, that's not what a fingerprint is. A fingerprint in this context is a compressed pseudo-unique indentifier based on multiple metrics. It's used to identify non logged in users across sessions and websites. A screenshot (so to speak) is not useful for this purpose.

    That may sound like I'm quibbling over small details but presumably the researcher(s) knows exactly what these terms really mean, or if not they aren't qualified to be doing the research. My guess is that it's the former, and they're after attention for their work via hype.

    The study revealed that reCAPTCHA extensively monitors users' cookies, browsing history, and browser environment (including canvas rendering, screen resolution, mouse movements, and user-agent data) — all of which can be used for advertising and tracking purposes.

    All of those things are valid metrics to look at when trying to identify bots and malicious behavior. Also those lovely moments when a CAPTCHA doesn't present any challenge and just passes you are the result of looking at the above data points (and more).

    It's true that they're also useful for tracking, but the implication is that reCAPTCHA is just a scam. Which I believe the author well knows isn't the case. It goes on to estimate wasted user hours. And sure, CAPTCHAs are annoying and G's implementation has all kinds of issues, but some form of low effort bot identification is absolutely necessary. The wasted user hours of the alternative are much higher.

    I don't personally recommend reCAPTCHA but any decent alternative solution is also looking at as many data points as possible. It's just common sense.

    It does matter whether or not they retain that data, how long they retain it for, and whether they share it with 3rd parties. But according to Google they don't sell reCAPTCHA data. I'm not suggesting we trust Google, but we can kinda trust how expensive the GDPR (and similar) has made it to lie about that sort of thing. And anyway G doesn't need to monetize that data, they have more ubiquitious ways to collect the same data and more. Ways that are covered by different privacy policies.

    The author never establishes that Google is ignoring data privacy laws and monetizing reCAPTCHA before going on to estimate how much money they've made from the data. That's just silly.

    Revealing aspects of big tech's data collection empire is a good thing, but there's no reason to mislead people to accomplish it. That's part of how we end up with legislation that does nothing useful while wasting everyone's time (i.e. pre GDPR cookie banners) versus better informed legislation that actually works (most of the rest of the GDPR, CalOPPA, PIPEDA, etc..)

    There were years of misinformed reporting that led up to those cookie banners and related laws that failed to protect users in any way because cookies were never really the problem. To this day the general public doesn't understand the difference between 1st and 3rd party cookies. And really the language should have never involved cookies in the first place, that's just one of various methods of 3rd party data collection.

    Whereas the GDPR, which came after European legislators had started to listen to people that understood the technology, recognizes that the core issue is data collection itself, along with how that data is then handled and monetized.

    Do the same analysis of data collection and monetization by 3rd party advertisers and advertising networks, which have very different privacy policies and can often fly under the regulation radar, and you'd have something useful to contribute to the data privacy fight.

    33 votes
  17. Comment on What books do you recommend for someone looking for positive vibes or casual amusement or escape in ~books

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    Don't stop at Hitchhiker's guide, Douglas Adams has other good ones like Dirk Gentley's Holistic Detective Agency, The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul and Last Chance to See. See also, Lamb by...

    Don't stop at Hitchhiker's guide, Douglas Adams has other good ones like Dirk Gentley's Holistic Detective Agency, The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul and Last Chance to See.

    See also, Lamb by Christopher Moore. It belongs among the great humorous novels of all time alongside the work of Adams and Pratchett.

    2 votes
  18. Comment on How would you moderate this scenario? in ~tech

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    Well said, I want to add that moderation works best when it's swift and decisive. The longer you leave the post up for, the bigger the potential backlash when you remove it. Any time you give...

    Well said, I want to add that moderation works best when it's swift and decisive. The longer you leave the post up for, the bigger the potential backlash when you remove it.

    Any time you give space to "but but free speech!" you're really unintentionally giving space to trolls and their supporters.

    One thing that forum goers sometimes lose sight of is that the stakes are low. Not having "punch a nazi" posts isn't taking away anything important or valuable. But if the conversation is allowed to be about free speech, now you're talking about human rights and suddenly the stakes are artificially high, and emotions with them.

    1 vote
  19. Comment on Are we witnessing the takeover of a country right now? in ~society

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    We should keep in mind that they haven't succeeded at any of their theoretical goals yet. As @snake_case implied, Trump and co fail way more often than they succeed. Whatever the ultimate goals...

    We should keep in mind that they haven't succeeded at any of their theoretical goals yet. As @snake_case implied, Trump and co fail way more often than they succeed.

    Whatever the ultimate goals are, if there are any besides enriching themselves and grabbing power, this timeline is crazy.

    14 votes
  20. Comment on App/browser extension idea if it doesn't already exist: likely bot database in ~tech

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    One thing to keep in mind... what people call 'bots' are more often actually humans in poorer countries. Bot has just become a catch all term for low effort posts and 'fake' accounts for purposes...

    One thing to keep in mind... what people call 'bots' are more often actually humans in poorer countries. Bot has just become a catch all term for low effort posts and 'fake' accounts for purposes of karma farming or political manipulation or etc..

    From a technical perspective I'm not sure there's a good way to reliably identify these kinds of users from a browser extension. You'd need access to data only the platform has or, at the very least, full post history on every account. Even then you'd have to make hard decisions about false positives versus false negatives.

    Or alternatively you could crowdsource it. The challenge there is reaching the critical mass of users necessary to make it work while being mostly useless until you get there.

    In either case the heavy lifting would need to be done by a service you built and hosted rather than in browser.

    One other option, ironically, would be using an LLM bot to evaluate the text. A lot of the posts are clearly made by people who can barely write or understand english and an LLM would likely do a good job of identifying them. I've been wondering why people, and Redditors in particular, continue to upvote those posts.

    5 votes