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staff:

Hello Tumblr 👋

Today, Tumblr’s owner, Verizon Media, announced that Automattic plans to acquire Tumblr. Automattic is the technology company behind products such as WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Jetpack, and Simplenote—products that help connect creators, businesses, and publishers to communities around the world. 

We couldn’t be more excited to be joining a team that has a similar mission. Many of you know WordPress.com, Automattic’s flagship product. WordPress.com and Tumblr were both early pioneers among blogging platforms.

Automattic shares our vision to build passionate communities around shared interests and to democratize publishing so that anyone with a story can tell it, especially when they come from under-heard voices and marginalized communities.

We look forward to continuing to create products that empower your self-expression and sense of community and that build a better, more inclusive internet. 

We’re excited for our future together!

<3 Tumblr

Some things staff won’t tell you [link]:

  • They’re dumping it for–in the grand scheme of things–almost nothing
  • No, Automattic *isn’t* ending the NSFW ban
  • ‘As for what this means for WordPress, executives from both Tumblr and Automattic will “look for ways WordPress.com and Tumblr can share services and functionality.” We wouldn’t expect any immediate changes, though.‘

I think my main reaction to this is to trust WordPress a bit less. The main appeal of the place for me is that it *isn’t* Tumblr, a separate platform with separate interests.

I’m going to continue my project to create a more stable copy of my Tumblr on WordPress. I’ll probably even continue my plan to start giving them money this winter (what better way to give people an incentive not to screw you over?).

But I’ve been wavering, lately, on whether to *also* look into self-hosting. Not as a Plan A, you understand: I’d *rather* not go through the effort of running the whole infrastructure myself. But I have put (am putting, will put) a lot of effort into making a specifically *Wordpress-compatible* version of my Tumblr, and this WordPress-compatible version is probably distinct enough to deserve its own backup. (After all, if I *did* end up self-hosting one day, that’s probably the software I’d use.)

WordPress export files don’t include images, which would make it a massive pain to re-instantiate my blog using only an export file (not *impossible*–all of the images are also stored elsewhere–but painful, and if I wanted possible-but-painful I’d just re-instantiate from a tumblr-utils scrape), but perhaps a tiny, local server to receive site-to-site exports, not to be made outward-facing unless necessary.

I’m not sure yet what the most practical option is, and how exactly one goes about it. I’ll have to look into it. But I *am* going to look into it.

Tags:

#in which Brin is paranoid #(but what else is new) #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #PSA #Wordpress #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #reply via reblog #oh look an update

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paxamericana:

tumblr_prbhw9hxyv1qzeo2zo1_500

Okay, but now I have to know how self-aware this article is. I have university access to Wall Street Journal, brb.

…

Definitely at least somewhat:
“The charges regularly hitting our credit cards have expanded far beyond video and music-streaming services and, yes, newspapers.”

—

“Step 1: Audit. Log in to your credit card and bank accounts and make a list (or, better yet, a spreadsheet) of all your monthly and yearly subscriptions, along with their charges.

[…]

Step 2: Consolidate to family plans. Have your partner do the same and then cross-reference the lists. I quickly spotted some duplicates in my household.

[…]

When signing up for new services, look out for the ability to disable any auto-renew function, and if there’s a free trial, set a reminder on your calendar just before the trial period ends, so you can consider canceling before you get charged.”


I…I guess it’s good that there are people pointing this out to those who haven’t thought of it? Today’s lucky ten-thousand and all that. And of course, as the beginning of this thread points out, people subscribed to the Wall Street Journal are going to be disproportionately people careless about which subscriptions they’re on.

(even if I *personally* cannot comprehend the kind of mind that would sign up for Amazon Prime without first checking whether their spouse had it already, or for that matter the kind of mind that would not think to inform their spouse that they had Amazon Prime

also, the kind of mind that would not think long and hard about signing up for a $15/month *anything*, let alone this:

“Here’s a hilarious story. For the past three years I’ve been paying $15 a month for an electronic fax service I’ve used… twice. That’s $540. For the same amount, I could have bought 20 rolls of fax paper. Or 10 real working fax machines. Or a plane ticket to Ireland to visit the museum where the world’s first fax machine is on display.”)

((I’m trying very hard to be open-minded about this: I know everyone thinks their own talents are easy))

—

P.S. If I fed it into my financial calculator right, that $10/month service for 5 years has cost you ~$663, if you count lost interest at 4%.

Tags:

#now if you’ll excuse me I have an accounting exam to study for #adventures in human capitalism #juxtaposition #reply via reblog #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see

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maryellencarter:

senator-mon-mothma:

Star Wars never really explores the cool time-keeping situations that you can end up with in a society that spans multiple planets: 

  • planets with no moon that don’t have a time increment between days and years
  • planets with a dozen moons where understanding their cycles involves university courses
  • multi-planet star systems where the position of the other planet features prominently in calendar systems
  • tidally locked planets with no days (or years, really, because even though they’re orbiting a star they wouldn’t have significant changes in seasons)
  • and not only do they not have days or years, they have no cultural concept of those things and are bewildered by the rest of the galaxy’s obsession with measuring time
  • planets with years so long that they’re useless as a way of measuring age, so people give their age in months instead
  • planets with like 6 hour days where people are used to sleeping frequently for only a couple hours at a time
  • the space equivalent of jetlag involves adjusting to a new day length, not just a new time zone
  • when two planets have slightly different day lengths, the days shift relative to each other, so if you travel frequently between two such planets, sometimes the days line up perfectly and sometimes you have to deal with 12 hours of “jet”lag

And there are tons of interesting cultural implications that go along with using Coruscant time as a standard throughout the galaxy:

  • standard Coruscant dates have basically no correlation to seasons on planets with different year lengths, so to even guess at the weather during a historical date given in standard time you need to do calculations
  • everyone has a different age in local years and standard years, and a different birthday
  • some planets have days much longer or shorter than standard days, so your standard birthday might be spread over a few local days or vice versa
  • stuff like being old enough to drive – it tends to go in round numbers of local years, so even on planets where the rule is “about 18 standard”, you have some planets where it’s actually 17.36 standard years, or 19.1, or whatever works out nicely in local years
  • planets that follow Coruscant standard time and totally ignore natural phenomena on their own planets
  • up to and including days – they force themselves into sleep cycles with nothing to do with the sun rising and setting
  • planets that refuse to use standard time even in official settings, and pilots hate having to travel there because the space port is always chaotic because no one knows what time it is
  • the Separatists try to switch to another time system than Coruscant standard and it’s a total mess but it would be embarrassing to switch back
  • the Rebellion learns their lesson from this and doesn’t try to change the standard time system even though the New Republic government is no longer based on Coruscant
  • people pay less and less attention to standard time as you get farther from the core
  • planets with similar natural time cycles to Coruscant have more prosperous economies and produce more prominent and successful people, although the effect is subtle enough that it goes unnoticed until someone randomly decides to check for correlation

Apparently there’s an entry in one of the official Legends atlases that says Taanab has a 46-hour day. Literally nothing else in canon that I know of does anything with this. I’ve occasionally pondered using it in something, but I always come back to the same question: how the fuck does a farming planet settled by humans function if its day doesn’t match up to human circadian rhythms? Changing the length of day-cycle your body expects is fucking *hard*. Now, a 48-hour day I could see working okay with some adaptations, but 46? No. You’d have weeks where half the planet was farming in the dark.

(I wonder if anyone has ever done experiments on small babies to check whether a circadian rhythm is nature or nurture. Probably they have.)

IIRC it’s “generally mostly nature, but different proportions of nature and nurture in different individuals”. “What time of day you expect to sleep”, “what day length you expect to have”, and “how flexible each expectation is” are all axes along which people vary.

(Most people expect a day length *slightly* longer than 24 hours but by a small enough margin that it’s not a big deal (I guess once it’s close enough to be not-a-big-deal there’s not much pressure to fine-tune it further? maybe?): expecting a day length significantly different from 24 hours sucks about as much as you’d think.)

Depending on the timescales involved and how common moving between planets is, you might wind up with slightly different strains of human adapted to each planet’s length, or maybe just end up selecting for flexible circadian cycles.

(Personally, I suspect I have a baseline noticeable-but-weak circadian cycle masked and/or reinforced by general autistic routine-loving. I strongly prefer to sleep at a consistent time in the short term but have only a weak preference for diurnality in the long term, and pay more attention to artificial cues than to natural ones. I wonder how I’d do on one of those planets that follows Coruscant time and to hell with its own world’s rhythms.)

Tags:

#Star Wars #reply via reblog #circadian rhythms #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #evolution

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

itsbenedict:

Shorts! They’re Like Small, Shitty Pants, That Allow Bugs™ To Feast On Your Leg-Meats.

One of the nice things about Canada is that it’s almost always cold enough that I can get away with leggings without overheating. I own a couple pairs of shorts, but pretty much only wear them for exercise and when travelling to warmer climes.

(Mind you, bugs routinely bite through my leggings, so I’m not sure shorts would actually make things much worse on *that* front. But I own mosquito-net pants now, so that’s a thing when necessary.)

I don’t get people who actively like shorts: clothes are (if done right) comfy, why do you not want to be covered in them? If temperature weren’t a concern, I would wear turtlenecks and hoodies and sweatpants, like, all the time. I feel more confident and better able to handle stuff in long sleeves: I think it might be similar principles to weighted blankets.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #bugs #clothing #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #our home and cherished land

Letters grouped according to how similar the lowercase version is to the uppercase

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

sigmaleph:

the-real-numbers:

aeiously:

  • Smaller version, the ideal situation: Cc Oo Ss Uu Vv Ww Xx Zz
  • Quite similar, pretty good!: Bb Ff Hh Ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Pp Tt Yy
  • OK, I guess can see how they got that: Dd Ee Nn Qq
  • ????????: Aa Gg, Rr

Ordered from worst to best

have you ever tried to write something case-sensitive by hand (e.g. the password to the office wifi)

lowercase-uppercase similarity Is Bad Actually

#idk maybe people can make their handwritten letters look different in different cases  #i cannot but my handwriting is notoriously bad

I don’t think I have much trouble with case-sensitive handwriting? At least if I’m actively trying to be clear about which case is which.

3828b2bd2cb863ebc1acdcf35bd85e7a4ca94ed3

^ a randomly-generated mixed-case string

I do often blur the distinction between f and F if I’m *not* actively trying to be clear, though.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #language

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overlordtulip:

A few months ago, it came to my attention that, for many people, helplessness is a central cause of anxiety, such that a good way to reduce their anxiety is to reduce their sense of helplessness.

This is deeply bizarre to me. For my part, I tend to find helplessness actively comforting, and situations of helplessness to be among those where I have the least anxiety. If there’s a situation whose outcome I’m unable to affect, then I can just relax and let it resolve itself, rather than worrying about exactly what actions to take and how they’ll affect the outcome.

(For example: asking for things from people who I’m not accustomed to asking for things from is often a high-anxiety activity for me; but waiting for a response after asking, when there’s nothing more for me to do, is low-anxiety.)

I’m now kind of curious how many other people have the arrangement I have rather than the apparently-default helplessness-increases-anxiety one. And also how the apparently-default one works, because my model of its internals is currently pretty weak.

I’ve thought about this too, and I think the way it works for me is that *uncertainty* increases anxiety. Helplessness decreases uncertainty about *what to do next* but increases uncertainty about *the outcome*: which of these effects is bigger depends on the situation.

Waiting for a response to a difficult email is worse than writing it, because if I haven’t sent the email yet I *know* there’s been no response and I at least theoretically have ways I can tweak the phrasing and such to make them more likely to respond well, but if I’ve sent it the response *might* arrive at any time and *might* be bad, and I have no further methods of weighting the probabilities in my favour.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

official-voice:

tumblr_pklctvhx8g1vn3gkeo1_500

 

sigmaleph:

gudroo:

this is the last year that we can make this stupid joke so im going to make the most of it and post it every day until 2020

the good news is, after the end of next year, we can start making ‘hindsight is 2020’ jokes

…I just realised that if anything, “I hate when people ask me what’s going on, come on guys I don’t have 2020 vision” is actually funnier than the versions about what they’ll be doing in X years.

(though I’m not sure how much of the humour depends on already being familiar with the genre?)

This meme still has further heights to reach.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #puns

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transsexualite:

Is it just me or does 90% of gendering occur at restaurants and fast food places

 

transsexualite:

petition to force restaurants to replace “sir/maam” with “mortal”

 

transsexualite:

okay but like fucjing imagine rolling up to the drive thru and a brooding cashier says “your total is $11.60, mortal”

 

shacklesburst:

who’s spreading rumors i’m mortal?!

 

dagny-hashtaggart:

In which the big golden M stands for both “memento” and “mori”

 

serinemolecule:

Come to Asia! It’s really only Indo-European languages that have gendered honorifics. In Japan, service workers always use “Honored Guest”.

If you watch anime, notice how words like “senpai” and “-san” aren’t gendered at all.

Linguistic gender was invented in Proto-Indo-European as a neat party trick to make it clearer which pronoun referred to what. And then most languages in the world came to be descended from it. But the languages that aren’t don’t make random words gendered.

My native dialect of English technically *has* sir/ma’am but doesn’t use them much†, and it weirds me out when my co-workers call customers “sir” and “ma’am”. I just don’t call customers anything: there’s really no need to add *any* word to the end of, to use OP’s example, “your total is $11.60”.

(Boss, Meta-Boss, and Boss^3 have all witnessed me talking to customers a fair bit, and none of them have ever complained about this. Boss^3 specifically complimented my customer interaction!)

—

†I’m not sure I can articulate or whether I even consciously understand what the exceptions are, but I think it’s something about the power differential needing to be *vast*. People who are only a level or two above you in the social hierarchy don’t get honorifics; those are for, like, CEOs and political leaders. (or maybe it’s about them needing to be very highly ranked in absolute terms: I poked my intuition with some more hypotheticals and it seems to feel less weird to call a barely-above-you man “sir” if you yourself are already pretty high up)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #language #death mention #gender #in which Brin has a job

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quoms:

American currency pet peeves power ranking

3. The fact that pennies still, somehow, exist in 2019

2b. Nickels are easily mistaken for quarters, a result of American currency designers’ longstanding embrace of the idea that money looking different is somehow a deficiency

2a. All bills same size and color (cf. 2b)

1. A dime is incredibly small in comparison to a penny (in fact it is nearly the smallest coin I have ever handled, second only to a Georgian 1 tetri coin worth 0.36¢) yet worth ten times as much! Who the fuck allowed this! On what Earth!!!

 

ponteh2dhh1ksdiwesph2tres:

bad post, no mention of dollar bills

 

rustingbridges:

I’m actually going to disagree with on almost all of these points

  1. small coins are, actually, good, because they minimize the burden of carrying around all these random chunks of metal. this is the actual reason nickels are bad.

2a. color okay, but bills being different sizes is just displeasing. I get that blind people like to know how much money they have but they just fit together so nicely!

2b. this has never happened to me

  1. just because I’m able to tolerate the government putting xenoestrogens in my water supply doesn’t mean I’m gonna let them start rounding up prices to the nearest nickel. it’s bad enough that none of the “99¢” pizza shops give you a penny. $3.99 for a gyro my ass, it’s $4. anyway I’m not gonna tolerate a world where we have 96¢ pizza places. just no

 

brin-bellway:

Who said anything about rounding *up* to the next nickel? I was just talking last week [link] about exploiting round-to-the-*closest*-nickel laws to get 52c items for 50c.

(Our bills are all the same size, but different colours and marked with Braille-like dots.)

 

rustingbridges:

Exactly: the rounding will introduce an element I have to care about and track, or else be exploited for a percentage or two by people who care more or have enough volume for the marginal cents to matter.

I am not in favor of increasing transaction costs.

 

brin-bellway:

(see also this other branch)

True, although there are very few cases in which someone worried about every last percent would be paying cash at all [link]. Even most employee-discounted fast food costs enough to be cheaper with a credit card: only the *very* cheapest items are worth even *considering* paying cash for.

(Maybe somewhat more cases in a place like NYC, with more street vendors? Vendors are *starting* to take credit cards now that there are card readers that use smartphones as their infrastructure connection [link], but there are still many who haven’t done that yet. And come to think of it there’s those Chinese restaurants that give you a 10% discount for paying cash, but that would be big enough to wash out other considerations and make it worthwhile to pay cash *regardless* of whether it’s rounded in your favour or not.)

Payment optimisation is a fun game, but I get not wanting to penalise people who hate playing it: the rest of us can always get it out of our system by becoming player merchants in MMOs and stuff like that.

—

From a seller’s point of view, it’s tricky to ensure that round-to-the-closest-nickel comes out in your favour, although that might be from being a franchise (prices set by people many levels above the actual store owners). As of yesterday evening, we’d *lost* 15 cents that day on cash rounding two of which went to me. That’s an unusually large number: on most evenings that I see the figure it’s a couple of cents in one direction or the other.

 

rustingbridges:

Even most employee-discounted fast food costs enough to be cheaper with a credit card: only the very cheapest items are worth even considering paying cash for.

If there’s no fee, at what point is it worth considering? You still get your 2-3% edge by paying card if that’s what you’re after.

Firstly there’s tons of cash only food places, and the additional heap of stores and bars with high card minimums, so it’s not like you can be cash free without really limiting your options.

Secondly, I personally often prefer to make small transactions by cash. Sure, I lose a few cents, but it’s often faster. Credit card fraud also, while not costing you any money if you catch it, does cost time in catching it. Also being able to just walk out of a restaurant and not have to wait for the check to go round is often worth it imo.

It’s not about getting the absolute biggest edge, necessarily. I just don’t want to give up something more in exchange for nothing.

>>If there’s no fee, at what point is it worth considering?<<

Since the maximum savings from using cash is 2c, with a 0.5%-cashback card the threshold beneath which cash is worth considering is $4. I recently obtained a 1% card, so the threshold is now $2.

(2% cards are either not worth the fees or straight-up unavailable to someone who, as an individual, makes maybe $10k/year and spends maybe $2k. (That’s not to say that I’m saving 80% of my income: most household purchases are simply made by other household members, and in some cases I am financially backing them. If your parents are going to the grocery store and you chip in some money for it, that doesn’t get put on your card and doesn’t count towards making a high-tier card useful enough to you to be worth the annual fee. My commute has by far the fewest stores along its route of anyone in my household, so I’m rarely the most efficient choice of buyer.))

—

As for cash-only places, like I said I think I tend to encounter those less, not living in a big city. (Though I certainly do keep enough cash on hand for them, since I encounter them *occasionally* and also want to be prepared for the possibility of a card reader breaking.)

And anyway, if cash is the *only* option (or if you’re paying cash because you find it more convenient) then you don’t need to expend effort on tracking the “is this rounding up or down” variable, since it doesn’t affect your decision either way. (Unless you were willing to buy the thing for X but not X+$0.02, which doesn’t seem like it would come up much. Or I suppose if you’re trying to prepare exact change in advance, but in that case hidden sales tax is a bigger problem.)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #long post #adventures in human capitalism #fun with loopholes

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{{previous post in sequence}}

quoms:

American currency pet peeves power ranking

3. The fact that pennies still, somehow, exist in 2019

2b. Nickels are easily mistaken for quarters, a result of American currency designers’ longstanding embrace of the idea that money looking different is somehow a deficiency

2a. All bills same size and color (cf. 2b)

1. A dime is incredibly small in comparison to a penny (in fact it is nearly the smallest coin I have ever handled, second only to a Georgian 1 tetri coin worth 0.36¢) yet worth ten times as much! Who the fuck allowed this! On what Earth!!!

 

ponteh2dhh1ksdiwesph2tres:

bad post, no mention of dollar bills

 

rustingbridges:

I’m actually going to disagree with on almost all of these points

  1. small coins are, actually, good, because they minimize the burden of carrying around all these random chunks of metal. this is the actual reason nickels are bad.

2a. color okay, but bills being different sizes is just displeasing. I get that blind people like to know how much money they have but they just fit together so nicely!

2b. this has never happened to me

  1. just because I’m able to tolerate the government putting xenoestrogens in my water supply doesn’t mean I’m gonna let them start rounding up prices to the nearest nickel. it’s bad enough that none of the “99¢” pizza shops give you a penny. $3.99 for a gyro my ass, it’s $4. anyway I’m not gonna tolerate a world where we have 96¢ pizza places. just no

 

brin-bellway:

Who said anything about rounding *up* to the next nickel? I was just talking last week [link] about exploiting round-to-the-*closest*-nickel laws to get 52c items for 50c.

(Our bills are all the same size, but different colours and marked with Braille-like dots.)

 

rustingbridges:

Exactly: the rounding will introduce an element I have to care about and track, or else be exploited for a percentage or two by people who care more or have enough volume for the marginal cents to matter.

I am not in favor of increasing transaction costs.

(see also this other branch)

True, although there are very few cases in which someone worried about every last percent would be paying cash at all [link]. Even most employee-discounted fast food costs enough to be cheaper with a credit card: only the *very* cheapest items are worth even *considering* paying cash for.

(Maybe somewhat more cases in a place like NYC, with more street vendors? Vendors are *starting* to take credit cards now that there are card readers that use smartphones as their infrastructure connection [link], but there are still many who haven’t done that yet. And come to think of it there’s those Chinese restaurants that give you a 10% discount for paying cash, but that would be big enough to wash out other considerations and make it worthwhile to pay cash *regardless* of whether it’s rounded in your favour or not.)

Payment optimisation is a fun game, but I get not wanting to penalise people who hate playing it: the rest of us can always get it out of our system by becoming player merchants in MMOs and stuff like that.

—

From a seller’s point of view, it’s tricky to ensure that round-to-the-closest-nickel comes out in your favour, although that might be from being a franchise (prices set by people many levels above the actual store owners). As of yesterday evening, we’d *lost* 15 cents that day on cash rounding two of which went to me. That’s an unusually large number: on most evenings that I see the figure it’s a couple of cents in one direction or the other.

Tags:

#adventures in human capitalism #(deliberately echoes a video-game tag!) #home of the brave #our home and cherished land #in which Brin has a job #reply via reblog

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