Month: February 2019

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

nuclearspaceheater:

I just realized that I’m right-shifted. I have been using only the right shift key for capitalization for an unknown period of time, and deliberately using the left shift key feels awkward and makes me mistype my passwords.

 

brin-bellway:

Are you left-handed? I feel like the reason I’m left-shifted is to keep my right index finger closer to the mouse touchpad, but that might be an after-the-fact justification.

 

nuclearspaceheater:

No. Right-handed.

 

rustingbridges:

That’s very unusual. On a related topic, which thumb do you space with?

 

dzamieponders:

I use left shift, right thumb for space. 

I blame WASD gaming – if I try to use my left for space, I hold it down for a bit too long because I’m used to jumping with it in shooters.

 

rustingbridges:

Yeah, when I did an informal survey the vast majority of people used the right thumb for spacing. Left handers weren’t more likely to use left thumb, but I also only had two in the sample, so.

I didn’t ask what hand people shifted with, because I didn’t know anybody left shifted.

I left shift / alt / ctrl / super, which is supported heavily by the fact that keyboards are always fucking up the right hand versions of these keys and alt right gets overloaded in a lot of keyboard layouts

 

brin-bellway:

@rustingbridges replied to this post with:

The feel when you realize you typo’d a post in a dumb way ages ago

Yeah, I wavered on whether to point that out. It is, at least, fairly obvious from context that you meant you didn’t know anybody *right* shifted.

 

rustingbridges:

The worst thing about the tumblr model is that it’s too late to correct it, even if I edit the original all the reblogs still have the typo.

That’s definitely a downside. Personally, I currently favour a compromise between the Tumblr and Pillowfort models: you can’t forcibly alter or delete the post as it appears in other people’s reblogs, *except* that you can force them to display a bold “This post has been [edited/deleted]” message at the top of your post. Maybe the notice can optionally include the reason for the edit.

I don’t know of any site that actually does it that way, though.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #Tumblr: a User’s Guide #Pillowfort

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

{{previous post in sequence}}

gasmaskaesthetic:

theopjones:

brin-bellway:

theopjones:

collapsedsquid:

Peterson may be an academic, but he’s dispensing with the academy’s constraints. His university salary is around $128,000; that now looks modest beside the $1m a year he receives in crowdfunding via the site Patreon, in return for YouTube Q&As. Traditional universities charge “unforgivable” fees, and “haven’t got a hope of surviving in their present form”, he says. He has hired three people to work on a proposal for a new online university — “user-funded at the lowest possible cost, but also crowdsourced in terms of its operation”. He is in touch with Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist who urges undergraduates to drop out. There’s a blurred line between the thinker and the salesman, and Peterson has crossed it.

Goddamn it Peter Thiel

It’s totally poisoned because Peterson is tied to it.

But the online university thing might not be a bad idea. You could probably replace quite a bit of the operation of a modern university for lecture-based subjects with a mix of pre-recorded videos, and decentralized discussion with other students, and “crowdsourced”  operation that relies on offloading some tasks to students. 

Probably the biggest issues would be to sell it as something that people consider reputable (a number of purely online universities exist and have lower costs, but they have issues building a reputation), and dealing with things like arranging for securely proctored tests. 

When you say that test proctoring would be a big issue, do you mean you think it would be a big issue for online universities *in general*, or specifically a problem for online universities who are aiming to destroy the old tertiary-education system (rather than just adding more options to it)?

My university technically has a corporeal campus, but I’ve never been there and neither have the vast majority of the other students. They have standing arrangements with a bunch of universities, community colleges, and…*looks at list*…huh, libraries too, maybe you *could* make this system work even if you’re trying to end all corporeal campuses (and so don’t want a system dependent on them continuing to exist). Anyway, they have standing arrangements with a bunch of places across the country to host the exams of the local students. My local community college charges the student a $30/exam hosting fee (to compensate for increasing their proctor’s workload and such), but other than that it’s really a non-issue.

(The computerised exams also have an option to have somebody watch you over a webcam, but I’ve never tried that.)

(now if only my university would join the reciprocal college Internet system, because as it stands I’m not allowed to use the Wi-Fi at *my own exam centre*, and it makes coordinating with my ride a lot trickier. but that’s another matter.)

—

I see people sometimes who think that exam proctoring is some massive obstacle that online universities will soon face and probably fail to overcome, and it’s like…

One time I read an article about how self-driving cars on public roads would be a disaster, because–not being able to make eye contact with the driver–pedestrians would have no way of knowing whether the car had noticed them and would stop for them, and the car and pedestrian would get into standoffs where neither was willing to risk moving forward (or, worse, *both* of them gave up waiting for the other at the same time). The writer appeared to think that this was insurmountable and would destroy all public goodwill towards self-driving cars.

A few months previously, I’d seen a news clip about a self-driving-car prototype with a smiley-face-shaped light on the front, which it lights up while stopping for a pedestrian in order to let the pedestrian know they’ve been noticed.

The way I felt reading that self-driving-car article is how I feel when people say online-university exam proctoring is a huge issue. The doom they are just now getting around to foretelling has already been noticed and averted, and without anywhere near as much difficulty as they think it’s going to take.

Interesting. 

Most online college classes I’ve taken have either had no proctoring system or some terrible web-based one that caused a lot of issues. One of the nearby community colleges did proctoring for a fee as a service but the classes rarely allowed that option to be used. Maybe its consistently better ran by colleges that are purely online than colleges that are mostly meatspace but offer a few online classes.  

…I graduated from a great (accredited, affordable, semi-self-paced!) online university. Our test proctoring was done over webcam and had fairly stringent rules (360 pan of the room, ID, etc). I had a test ended by the proctor once for looking like I had something written on a calculator. You could cheat with the level of difficulty similar to a normal classroom exam but not any more easily than that.

Tags:

#interesting #adventures in University Land #conversational aglets #proud citizen of The Future

Vanishing Act | Paul Collins

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

{{Title link: https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/celebrity/vanishing-act }}

cant-hug-every-human:

nostalgebraist:

I read this article late last night, and half suspected I was going to wake up the next morning to find I had dreamed the whole thing

Download The House Without Windows here: https://sites.google.com/site/thehousewithoutwindows/download-books

Tags:

#history #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

moral-autism:

Laptop is in the shop almost certainly overnight at least. I can’t find the power cable for my old 2010 one. I probably can’t set up my Raspberry Pi, I know I don’t have the right adapter for it because I broke it. I might be able to use someone’s old AlphaSmart?

 

moral-autism:

Laptop still in shop. I should get info tomorrow at least, emails say I’ll be called after 48 hours. I forgot to ask about the AlphaSmart.

Honestly I think the amount of stuff I’ve done and the fact that I have had chunks of happiness over the past several days and not injured myself at all is really suggestive of a lot of mental health improvement. Maybe it’s experiences, maybe it’s having more produce and sardines, but something’s working.

This is still really difficult for me, though.

 

moral-autism:

Update: Apple called this morning to say that I have a hard drive problem (that affects booting from USBs and persists when the drive is wiped, yet doesn’t present any issues when copying files off the drive? seems unlikely) or a motherboard problem. Apple wanted to charge $475 to fix it, which I declined.

I was able to install Xubuntu on it from USB, and it is “working”, in that it still can’t talk to the battery at all and that it seems to freeze sometimes. I’ll probably try to transfer files later today. I am still overall dissatisfied with this state of affairs, though.

I am happy that I have a computer right now, but this does create a bit of a dilemma. I’m not sure I can justify replacing this computer just because I want to play some video games without Linux support and be able to see how charged my battery is. I guess this might get worse in the future, which might also justify replacing it. I sure don’t know how to replace a motherboard myself, and it sounds like a huge pain.

 

moral-autism:

Laptop status update:

  • It gets completely nonresponsive and requires a forced shutdown sometimes more than once daily
  • Still doesn’t show the battery level (acpi won’t work)
  • Sleep/wake issues, does not travel well (overheats in bag)
  • Cannot shut down properly

I also still haven’t put my files on this thing. “Mount a 200GB disk image, on an HFS-formatted drive, of an Ext4 partition with logical volume management, and then figure out how to decrypt an encrypted user folder, with the password but without being able to log into it” is something which sounds like it should be technically feasible but also kind of sounds like a nightmare, and I have a feeling that my current computer setup is really not my long-term setup. I can get files from SpiderOak but that will take a while and they won’t be as recent.

What’s going on with the disk image was that booting up my computer in Target Disk Mode and getting the data off of it, using a connected Mac, was such that I couldn’t mount or even really properly interpret a partition with logical volume management, so I just frickin’ copied the whole thing. Yadda yadda I should make more frequent cloud backups or actually figure out how to do regular nice usable backups to a drive or both. At least I have the files. Probably.

I will apparently have some support in repairing or replacing this machine, which biases me towards doing so. Also, I’ll want to use it for taking lecture notes and other time-sensitive outside-the-home uses, so freezing and being a pain to store while asleep are problematic. If I repair it, I’m pretty sure it needs a logic board replacement which I would really rather not do myself. (I don’t have the right screwdrivers, a good workspace, etc.) If I replace it, I should probably replace it with a Windows machine, because the only times I’ve used OSX recently have been gaming and taking the easy route in dealing with printers/scanners.

I don’t know much about shopping for non-Macs or using whatever the latest version of Windows is. Every time I interact with recent proprietary operating systems I do get the vague feeling that they are tending in a direction my computer is not, such that my experience with Windows XP and 2016-and-previous versions of OSX won’t necessarily generalize.

If anyone has advice on any of the above, let me know.

 

brin-bellway:

For replacement laptops, eBay is great, especially for people located in the United States. The laptop I am typing this on, which I recently bought from one of the refurbished-laptop stores that sell through eBay, was USD$300 *after* international shipping and import taxes. For an American, it would have been around USD$250.

My usual strategy for laptop buying is “get the best PC USD$300 can buy”. I generally find laptops at that price point strike a good balance between “cheap” and “will keep pace with my needs for the approximately three years it takes for a used laptop to die of old age anyway” ; if you need more from a laptop than I do, you may need a higher budget.

You might not need me to tell you this, but make sure you know what kind of specs you need in a computer (RAM quantity, storage space, number of CPUs, dedicated vs basic graphics, etc), and add a little to leave room to grow. When searching, keep an eye out for laptops that have been discounted because they have problems in areas you don’t care about or are willing to live with: my previous laptop was unusually cheap because it was incapable of standby and took several minutes to come out of hibernation, which was pretty easy to adapt to for someone with my usage pattern.

Since I only just got a Windows 10 machine yesterday, I can’t say much about it. I *can* say that I’m pretty much just keeping that partition around for gaming, and intend to continue using Ubuntu for my primary OS.

—

Rather than a dedicated backup drive, I just keep a full copy of my files on my smartphone [link], where they are readily accessible and can in fact–in most cases–be accessed directly from the drive itself. I gather that a lot of people have too much data to pull that method off easily, but even if you can’t do it *yet*, maybe keep it in mind for if/when the progression of smartphones’ increasing storage space catches up to your needs.

 

theopjones:

Yah. Used laptops are a lot cheaper than new laptops for entry-level performance. 

The one huge downside is battery life. Batteries have improved quite a bit recently, and there are a lot more low-power CPUs on the market. So, even the low-end Chromebooks and such can trounce any used laptop in terms of battery life.

Tags:

#(July 2018) #conversational aglets #adventures in human capitalism #(since I’ve pretty much only ever had used laptops I’m whatever-the-opposite-of-spoiled-is on battery life) #(1.5 – 2 hours is simply how long a laptop battery lasts and so I don’t find it a cause for concern)

{{next post in sequence}}

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

somilikes:

brin-bellway:

cryptovexillologist:

I’m stagnating in here, someone send in some music recs

How about Assemblage 23? Some of my favourites are “Fallen Down”, “Document”, “The Cruelest Year”, and “Madman’s Dream”.

(for anyone else who isn’t seeing link text distinguished from non-link text on the dashboard: those song names are all Youtube links)

++nice music

Tags:

#(June 2018) #conversational aglets #music #recs

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

canwriteitbetterthanueverfeltit:

I know we’re all used to the whole Scabbers is Pettigrew thing but can you imagine getting kidnapped by some dude and then your very professional teacher appears and points a gun at your dog and goes “Mr. Sprinkles is a war criminal”

Tags:

#Harry Potter #I didn’t actually laugh aloud but it still amused me enough to reblog

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

sophus-b:

The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.

John Gilmore

 

sophus-b:

or

“When life gives you lemons…”

Tags:

#I didn’t actually laugh aloud but it still amused me enough to reblog #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #The Last Tumblr Apocalypse #this site isn’t home anymore but with the right approach it can still be made useful

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

{{previous post in sequence}}

theopjones:

brin-bellway:

theopjones:

collapsedsquid:

Peterson may be an academic, but he’s dispensing with the academy’s constraints. His university salary is around $128,000; that now looks modest beside the $1m a year he receives in crowdfunding via the site Patreon, in return for YouTube Q&As. Traditional universities charge “unforgivable” fees, and “haven’t got a hope of surviving in their present form”, he says. He has hired three people to work on a proposal for a new online university — “user-funded at the lowest possible cost, but also crowdsourced in terms of its operation”. He is in touch with Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist who urges undergraduates to drop out. There’s a blurred line between the thinker and the salesman, and Peterson has crossed it.

Goddamn it Peter Thiel

It’s totally poisoned because Peterson is tied to it.

But the online university thing might not be a bad idea. You could probably replace quite a bit of the operation of a modern university for lecture-based subjects with a mix of pre-recorded videos, and decentralized discussion with other students, and “crowdsourced”  operation that relies on offloading some tasks to students. 

Probably the biggest issues would be to sell it as something that people consider reputable (a number of purely online universities exist and have lower costs, but they have issues building a reputation), and dealing with things like arranging for securely proctored tests. 

When you say that test proctoring would be a big issue, do you mean you think it would be a big issue for online universities *in general*, or specifically a problem for online universities who are aiming to destroy the old tertiary-education system (rather than just adding more options to it)?

My university technically has a corporeal campus, but I’ve never been there and neither have the vast majority of the other students. They have standing arrangements with a bunch of universities, community colleges, and…*looks at list*…huh, libraries too, maybe you *could* make this system work even if you’re trying to end all corporeal campuses (and so don’t want a system dependent on them continuing to exist). Anyway, they have standing arrangements with a bunch of places across the country to host the exams of the local students. My local community college charges the student a $30/exam hosting fee (to compensate for increasing their proctor’s workload and such), but other than that it’s really a non-issue.

(The computerised exams also have an option to have somebody watch you over a webcam, but I’ve never tried that.)

(now if only my university would join the reciprocal college Internet system, because as it stands I’m not allowed to use the Wi-Fi at *my own exam centre*, and it makes coordinating with my ride a lot trickier. but that’s another matter.)

—

I see people sometimes who think that exam proctoring is some massive obstacle that online universities will soon face and probably fail to overcome, and it’s like…

One time I read an article about how self-driving cars on public roads would be a disaster, because–not being able to make eye contact with the driver–pedestrians would have no way of knowing whether the car had noticed them and would stop for them, and the car and pedestrian would get into standoffs where neither was willing to risk moving forward (or, worse, *both* of them gave up waiting for the other at the same time). The writer appeared to think that this was insurmountable and would destroy all public goodwill towards self-driving cars.

A few months previously, I’d seen a news clip about a self-driving-car prototype with a smiley-face-shaped light on the front, which it lights up while stopping for a pedestrian in order to let the pedestrian know they’ve been noticed.

The way I felt reading that self-driving-car article is how I feel when people say online-university exam proctoring is a huge issue. The doom they are just now getting around to foretelling has already been noticed and averted, and without anywhere near as much difficulty as they think it’s going to take.

Interesting. 

Most online college classes I’ve taken have either had no proctoring system or some terrible web-based one that caused a lot of issues. One of the nearby community colleges did proctoring for a fee as a service but the classes rarely allowed that option to be used. Maybe its consistently better ran by colleges that are purely online than colleges that are mostly meatspace but offer a few online classes.

Tags:

#(June 2018) #conversational aglets #adventures in University Land #proud citizen of The Future

{{next post in sequence, branch 1}}

{{next post in sequence, branch 2}}

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

h-sleepingirl:

sinesalvatorem:

Question for the mind control fetishist community that is inexplicably over-represented among my followers:

I’ve recently become curious about the theory I’ve heard that asexual people who have kinks often have an autophilic sexuality. That is, their primary sexual interest is tied to them achieving some specific state. They’d have the same range of sexual response as allosexuals, but in response to achieving their preferred state to varyingly precise degrees.

For example, some asexuals are into amputation, or depictions of amputees. They often are more interested in being amputees themselves than in other people who are amputees. Often they’ll enjoy fantasising about being amputees, and further prefer situations where they can pretend to be amputees, and sometimes even desire actual amputation.

And I just remembered that lots of people who follow this blog are part of the mind control kink community! Which always surprises me, because I don’t think I post any mind control related content, and am honestly really sexually boring. But, like, I’ll totally give you guys more shout outs if you can help me learn about this.

My question is: Are asexual mind control fetishists more interested in being mentally controlled/impaired or in controlling others / the mental impairments of other? The autosexuality theory implies that asexuals should overwhelmingly prefer to be controlled/impaired, or be most aroused by the thought of their own altered mental state.

Also, autosexualities are in general correlated with being transgender. Are asexuals in the mind control kink community more likely to be transgender or feel gender dysphoric?

Right now I’m just curious about whether there’s any anecdotal support for this random thought, in case it’s worth doing a survey of. Would anyone be willing to tell me if their personal impression of the community supports or debunks this hypothesis? @acemindbreaker, @brin-bellway, @bannableoffense, @enscenic and anyone else who might have an opinion on this.

Here you go, a sample size of one!

I consider myself asexual (I get squicked by sexual things despite sometimes being sexually active), mind control/hypnosis fetish from a very young age (like a paraphilia, I need to think stuff about it to get off), and somewhat gender wonky in some indeterminate way.

Before puberty and probably before age 18 of so, I was solely “autosexual” in the way you describe it: my sexuality was entirely about hypnosis or mind control and how “deep” I would go into it would theoretically correspond with level of arousal and sexual enjoyment.

I figured, since I had an interest in kink as well and was sexually active, that this meant that I was solely a submissive.

As I got older I started experimenting with switching roles (hypnotic and not) and for the most part it was a service top type thing for a long time, until cc and I really got going.

I discovered a love for dominance, especially ownership and most importantly for this, objectification.

When I hypnotize cc, I am objectifying her in that I’m using her as porn and that’s part of what turns me on. I’ve always liked looking at porn of hypnotized or mind controlled subjects (as we do) and for a long time I sort of thought it was because I was projecting myself into their place.

Not always, I think. Definitely used to be that way. But then I discovered enjoyment of just seeing it as third party porn and getting off to it in that way, separating it from myself.

I still consider myself a bottom-leaning switch, and there is nothing quite like being hypnotized, but there is a different intensity in hypnotizing someone else that I’ve grown to love as well.

In terms of gender, I’m still figuring it out. I questioned being trans as a teenager. I’m pretty comfy in my AFAB body nowadays but not always and I’ve never felt like a strong pull towards the concept of gender one way or another, or a tendency to fluctuate.

Gender of my partners doesn’t matter to me, it’s the D/s vibe I get. (I’ll admit I tend to prefer male dominants and female submissives, just as a matter of looking at numbers.)

Tags:

#(April 2018) #this one doesn’t really count as an aglet but it’s interesting #sexuality and lack thereof #nsfw text #asexuality #gender