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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Downvoting to save words in your reply - nice. Have another upvote.

    Your most recent reply actually conveys meaning/makes a specific versus broad point. To that point, I don’t necessarily think they were making a eugenics based argument (though I would agree with you in dismissing an argument based on that) since they didn’t explicitly state the reason for mentioning the movie was because they believe in some idea of politics being genetic versus simply being most effectively passed down via social means from one’s parents while living with them through adolescence. Call me crazy, but I think most of the folks posting here should be given the benefit of not assuming they’re talking about eugenics until they are explicitly promoting it versus something more widely accepted, such as the aforementioned idea that it’s highly likely that parents pass down their politics through social means to their children. I could, of course, be wrong and maybe they were intending to make a eugenics based argument, but they weren’t specific enough to divine that. All of that said, I should edit the phrasing in a sarcastic comment I made elsewhere about removing oneself from the gene pool being a bad strategy since I probably wasn’t clear enough to get across that I was using the very real right-wing perspective where they favor their “good genes” over others’ “genes” for added effect.

    Your initial (decidedly vague) comment, as quoted, presents a false choice as if the person you were replying to was worrying about a future problem that is totally disconnected from the current topic of discussion, but they’re not and I don’t think the person you were replying to gave any reason for one to infer that they were ignoring the current issue in favor of some future issue. If they were talking about disconnected topics/problems then what you were saying would make more sense (or if you had been more specific, like in your followup, that would help too). It’s as if the person noticed a ceiling was leaking and exclaimed to someone suggesting to just put a bucket under it “Ignoring a leak is exactly how my neighbor ended up needing to replace their roof, I don’t think the bucket plan is a good plan in the long term!” and you were there to reply “Don’t tell them to worry about the roof, they need to fix the leak!” It’s not wrong, it just doesn’t really say anything or lead to further thought beyond the loop and comes across as a “calm down!”


  • Self-selective removal of oneself and those of probable left-leaning male partners from the gene pool* is certainly one strategy left-leaning women could try in the fight for a political environment where their rights are protected and progress further. Probably a terrible strategy, but certainly one that could be chosen.

    I respect any individual’s bodily autonomy and am not trying to make a statement in favor of men having a right to access or anything like that. It’s just an illogical movement if the goal is a society that has more individuals likely to support women’s rights - the gamble that thirsty men of the left will somehow save the day or that it would affect men on the right is kind of silly unless we’re assuming that there is a statistically meaningful amount of (secretly) left leaning women out there choosing right wing men as partners. (I wonder if anyone has tried to focus a campaign on seeing if the latter group exists in a sizable amount and can be convinced to be vote left - somebody should look into that and see how it works out. /s)

    It’s almost like 4B is something that the right wing would push to further their current advantage in household size in the US…

    *I am not seriously implying politics are a matter of genetics (though parents commonly pass down their politics to children in their household via social means), but plenty of people on the right do believe in their own “good genes” versus the “bad genes” of the left and I’m leaning on their perspective for sarcastic effect here.







  • The best part is if you have Google Home/Nest products throughout your house and initiate a voice request you now have your phone using Gemini to answer and have the nearest speaker or display using Assistant to answer and they frequently hear eachother and take that as further input (having a stupid “conversation” with eachother). With Assistant as the default on a phone, the system knows what individual device it should reply to via proximity detection and you get a sane outcome. This happened at a friend’s house while I was visiting and they were frustrated until I had them switch their phone’s default voice assistant back to Assistant and set up a home screen shortcut to the web app version of Gemini in lieu of using the native Gemini app (because the native app doesn’t work unless you agree to set Gemini as the default and disable Assistant).

    Missing features aside, the whole experience would feel way less schizophrenic if they only allowed you to enable Gemini on your phone if it also enabled it on each smart device in the household ecosystem via Home. Google (via what they tell journalists writing articles on the subject) acts like it’s a processing power issue with existing Home/Nest devices and the implication until very recently was that new hardware would need to roll out - that’s BS given that very little of Gemini’s functionality is being processed on device and that they’ve now said they’ll begin retroactively rolling out a beta of Gemini to older hardware in fall/winter. Google simply hasn’t felt like taking the time to write and push a code update to existing Home/Nest devices for a more cohesive experience.







  • Intention doesn’t always carry over well via text, but going from “shocking” and “I guess…” to “Do you not understand…?” comes across as a bit condescending/aggressive. Perhaps you thought I was being hostile? Or, perhaps I’m misreading the intent.

    At any rate, keeping in mind the things that don’t carry across over text, I wasn’t disagreeing with you and was merely speculating in a parallel fashion about those that don’t return and/or are deemed unacceptable defection by the leadership in Pyongyang. I haven’t picked over my initial comment but it’s possible that I put a period somewhere a question mark was supposed to go or something. Regardless, I apologize if I came across as trying to argue against what you were saying, it was not my intention. I don’t tend to process things in a strictly linear progression and that translates to words that come out sometimes a bit disordered seeming or perhaps seemingly lacking in explicit context where it might be needed to ensure clarity in what I’m saying.

    To answer the question rather than treat it as rhetorical: It’s quite possible that I don’t know how North Korean defection usually works because I’m not North Korean nor a policy analyst/SME specializing in North Korea. I read the article and your comment and found myself speculating, given the situation and deepening ties with Russia (who are objectively experts at tracking down dissidents abroad) about what policy and procedures might be in place now the event of would-be permanent defectors that end up becoming anti-Pyongyang mouthpieces or are high rank enough to leak meaningful intel to an adversary (I doubt they are sending any such people to Ukraine). But, I’m not an expert, I’m just a person speculating and commenting because I enjoy doing so and seeing what others have to say (including you). Thanks for sharing the article, have a good one.




  • ding ding ding The microwave analogy they were going after makes no sense. I mean, there are semantics at play and I could have explicitly mentioned I wasn’t talking about firmware in order to exclude things that are essentially calculators and clocks but I didn’t anticipate someone going the direction of absurdist bespoke microwave OSes given that firmware alone is enough. Even at that level, you have examples like Seiko Epson inventing precision timed ticket printers for the 1964 Olympics - they’re still dominant in the arena of commercial printers to this day, yet they have allowed other manufacturers to adopt their ESC/POS language as a standard that’s still widely used across brands today, allowing for feature parity on the software functionality side from competing brands while Epson competes on the hardware reliability side. (This isn’t an endorsement of Epson, their consumer printers are trash because they’re not Brother laser printers lol.) Spoiler alert, the price tag of a commercial printer doesn’t have much to do with it being compatible with network standards (???! - standards being the key word here) and has more to do with reliability and general feature sets (in that order once competition exists for a device, see Epson vs feature identical Beiyang (insert other generic clone brand here)) and the same would hold true even if we decided to network our microwaves in some scenario where we’re also automating food going in and out of the microwave.

    All of that said, if I were to modify what I was saying while keeping the sentiment the same, I would just simplify it by saying “no hardware vendor is allowed to lock their hardware to running specific software” (doesn’t mean they have to provide technical support for errors in another vendor’s software) since that gets at the root of the issue. But, going back to the original sentiment, open standards that have nothing to do with specific hardware are clearly better. Look at Apple vs x86 vs ARM, specifically Apple during the period between PowerPC (at least there were partners here, so the chips had lives outside of Apple hardware) and their M-Series - they wouldn’t have had an excuse not to offer something like BootCamp during the x86 era given that their OS clearly was able to run on off the shelf PC components and the inverse with Windows and Linux being able to run on their hardware was also clearly true. Is it a good thing that Apple hardware is once again locked in to running only their software?


  • Here me out, iMessage on any OS, wait, no, not just that, how about no hardware vendor is allowed to produce software that only runs on their hardware and for any given core function the hardware must prompt the end user with a competitive selection of capable apps to accomplish said function (to be downloaded and installed upon selection) instead of coming with a default option enabled. Let’s get crazy and say that any hardware vendor must allow software they produce for their own hardware to be uninstalled and replaced by software of the end user’s choosing.

    I’m talking some “treating United States v. Microsoft” as legally binding precedent" shit.

    Meanwhile, regulators be like… .

    (Side note: what’s up with the bullshit where Apple makes an Android-native AppleTV app that will install on a phone fine but is blocked from running once it detects it’s not an AndroidTV device? Apple acts like it would be an undue burden to make iMessage for Android (and pretends they didn’t make the decision to not release an Android client with their hardware business in mind) but their Apple Music app somehow runs better on Android than it does on iOS…)


  • This seems like the thing that could be accomplished with just a QR code or NFC tag. Sleep As Android (alarm app) allows you to set up alarms so that you must get up and scan a QR code or tap a NFC tag in order to stop an alarm - no brick needed. It’s not a huge leap to expand that functionality to other use case scenarios (maybe this already exists, I haven’t looked into it). It seems kind of silly to have a service and retail device for something that can be handled locally on-device with BYOH for the unlocking mechanism.

    edit: others have pointed this out already