Amateur typesetting enthusiast.

  • 10 Posts
  • 255 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 3rd, 2021

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  • Android strives to be a lightweight OS so it can run on a variety of hardware. The first version of the OS had to squeeze into the T-Mobile G1, with only a measly 256MB of internal storage for Android and all your apps, and ever since then, the idea has been to use as few resources as possible.

    Emphasis mine. Now, I know graphics improvements and support for various versions of Android take up a lot of the space used, but gee willikers! It’s amazing to think it began with storage requirements far under a single gigabyte.


  • Luke Smith’s videos are generally a good catalyst for examining one’s own thoughts on a given subject matter, disagree as I might.

    It would be interesting to get numbers on how much of any given series children watch(ed) and their ages, as I but rarely caught episodes of any of the cartoons mentioned. I am far more familiar with books that do the same, like The Magic Tree House (children’s series) and the numerous Sherlock Holmes stories. I wouldn’t be so quick to ascribe to the episodic format of any given media the blame for instilling a false sense of permanence andor futility in anyone. I would be much quicker to look at how recent and rapid technological advancements have altered our perceptions of our lives.

    Continuous cartoon consumption, as it is now more an on-demand experience than ever, may be symptomatic of something more fundamental, say, how quickly the rewards of hard work oughta be reapt.


  • And some more, after a few more months of looking at more built-ins in the documentation:

    • calculator - great for most simple desktop calculator needs
    • ps-print--with-faces - creates a postscript printout of the current buffer or region

    Unfortunately, the ps-print--with-faces commands do not preserve the markup features of org-mode, but the structure of the buffer or region is faithfully displayed, save the occasional wrapping of a long line or `?’ in place of an unrecognized character. If you have a printer, this can allegedly even deliver postscript printouts directly to it! It’s not exactly a novel idea; elvis has boasted such a feature for a good while, but it’s nice to see Emacs has it built-in as well!




  • I would fully agree that other internet protocols are much better suited to information not meant to be broadcast publicly.

    Civility is great, and should be highly encouraged. That’s largely why I like Lemmy. Each instance can guide its community in line with its values, whatever those may be, block offenders, and generally forge the space it wishes.

    However, I think Besse’s comments on setting the correct expectations in the public sphere are worth considering.

    For a different internet example: all the messages I send in any chatroom on an IRC server will inevitably be logged by someone, especially in popular rooms. Any assumption to the contrary would be naïve, and demanding that people not keep a log any of my publicly broadcast messages would be laughed at by the operators. It’s a public space, and sending anything to that space necessarily means I forgo my ability to control who sees, aggregates, archives, or shares that information. My choice to put the information into that space is the opt-in mechanism, just how books or interviews do the same offline in print.

    It’s not so much the protocol as it is how making things public fundamentally works.


  • I think Besse makes a great point here:

    I think blurring the lines between public and private spaces is the opposite of informing consent. Cultivating unrealistic expectations of “privacy” and control in what are ultimately public spaces is actually bad.

    I tried to single out the world wide web, as opposed to the internet at large, because the two are not synonymous. It’s rather absurd to publicly serve webpages to any querying IP address and maintain that the receiving computer is not to save said pages to disk.

    All this to say: I find it difficult to argue that web publications should or could be exempt from aggregation and archival (or scraping, to put it another way). I understand that the ease with which bots do this can be disconcerting, however.

    If we stay with the cafe bulletin board, getting a detailed overview of all the postings on the board is akin to scraping the whole thing. If we extend our analogy instead to a somewhat more significant example, library catalogs do the same with books, magazines, and movies.

    This is the cost of publishing, be that in print or online. It must be expected that some person has a copy of every- and anything one has ever written or posted publicly, and perhaps even catalogued it. A way around this might be to move away from the web to another part of the internet, like Matrix, as alma suggested.

    I assume the non-consensual collection of various (meta-)data is what you refer to when talking about intrusion and money making. Lemmy, like many projects, seeks to offer an alternative to corporate, data-gobbling social media sites, but doesn’t eliminate the ability to search through its webpages.


  • And here’s the point at which we go off the rails (towards the end of the thread; the earlier section is quite well expressed):

    Most people in tech do not want to hear this, because it invalidates the vast majority of their business models, AI/ML training data, business intel operations, and so forth. Anything that’s based on gathering data that is ‘public’ suddenly becomes suspect, if the above is applied.

    And yes, that includes internet darlings like the Internet Archive, which also operates on a non-consensual, opt-out model.

    It’s the Western Acquisition, claiming ownership without permission.

    It’s so ingrained in white, Western internet culture that there are now whole generations who consider anything that can be read by the crawler they wrote in a weekend to be fair game, regardless or what the user’s original intent was.

    Republishing, reformatting, archiving, aggregating, all without the user being fully aware, because if they were, they would object.

    It’s dishonest as fuck, and no different from colonial attitudes towards natural resources.

    “It’s there, so we can take it.”

    We then have some reasonable responses from others in the thread:

    Rich Felker @dalias@hachyderm.io

    Re: Internet Archive, I think many of us don’t believe/accept that businesses, organizations, genuine public figure politicians, etc. have a right to control how their publications of public relevance are archived & shared. The problem is that IA isn’t able to mechanically distinguish between those cases and teenagers’ personal diary-like blogs (chosen as example at opposite end of spectrum).

    Arne Babenhauserheide @ArneBab@rollenspiel.social

    *snip*

    This is the difference between the internet archive and an ML model: the archive does not claim ownership.

    Finally, a thought of mine own:

    Sindarina seems to fundamentally miss the central idea of the world wide web, that is, publically sharing information. This does not mean the work may be used for any purpose whatsoever, as the content of many websites is either copyrighted or CC-BY-SA. But publishing anything on the www or in print, opens it by necessity to aggregation and archival. I routinely save webpages to disk.

    To run with the cafe analogy that has been brought up, one cannot post a note to the cafe’s bulletin board and at the same time expect that no one else may take a photo of it, then perhaps share it with some acquaintances.

    This is a far cry from the data harvesting done by Google, Microsoft, Apple & co., or the dubiously collected data used to train “automated plagiarism engine[s],” as Arthur Besse put it not too long ago.










  • There is likely a way to stream local (public) radio stations using a browser, granted one likes the music of at least one station that does so. I find this provides excellent recommendations and tons of helpful information about the picks for the playlist, which itself is typically logged by time.

    This provides no built-in download option, though if great recommendations are the focus, nothing beats public radio.