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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • A lot of software is reliant on very precise timing. The world at large would notice immediately due to the many disconnects, glitches, bugs, desyncs, not to say anything of all the physical processes controlled by machines going wrong. As a simple example consider an industrial oven (or any process really) that is programmed to shut down at 4:39:20 but at 4:39:15 the 1 minute skip happens. An airplanes auto pilot that is suddenly missing the last minute of sensor data to. base its micro steering on. Any big internet service that has to deal with thousands to millions of clients trying to reconnect at once because their previous connection timed out. Bad stuff.

    This would be immediate world wide chaos and likely panic as the cause for all the chaos would be unknown and forever would be. Economic crash likely.

    Think of all the attention and effort the year 2k problem got, but this one is worse and there is no prep whatsoever.


  • Hmmm, it seems the modern way for autocracies to deal with elections is to control the information space. I don’t see election being called off, but major social media platforms boosting one side while attenuating the other goes a long way. We know Musk is all in on this and the other big players like Zuckerberg & Co seem all too happy to oblige. Tiktok is an open ended question at this point.



  • According to the study 37% of participants verify information before sharing it on social media.

    There you have it folks.

    Disinformation campaigns don’t need to be super convincing with the latest tech or elaborate fake outs, although it certainly helps. For the masses (ie election interference) it’s easy enough to to establish narratives, vibes by users simply sharing headlines to fake or manipulative reports. The people that bother to deep check and cross reference sources you typically couldn’t convince anyway. Sadly enough, most users never read beyond the head lines (75% this Facebook study estimates).

    Think of your own feed: how many head lines // posts do you just scroll by w/out ever opening them? Even if you don’t share actively it still can influence the your perception of the world today and shape your mood.

    Social media is eating away at the fundamentals of Democracy 🫠, change my mind!




  • Fun fact: the monikers used for these children in the book are used in coloquial speech to describe children that misbehave or exhibit behavioral discrepencies:

    • shock headed Peter: an unkempt, filthy child
    • fidgety Philip: ADHS or hyperactive child
    • Johnny-Head-in-the-Air: daydreaming, absent mindedness
    • wicked Frederick: cruelty to animals (sociopathy, lack of empathy often reveal themselves this way early on)
    • Soup Caspar: eating disorder, perhaps
    • etc

    The original book was written by a medical doctor dealing with children, go figure!










  • Ah yes, if you’ve ever had the problem of a game’s graphics not working properly but you can’t adjust the graphics because it requires you to launch the actual game and navigate the settings menu you will appreciate that. Most games store and read their settings in an external file and a launcher can provide a meaningful way to edit those. That being said there’s many launchers who actually don’t offer this feature and are just used to shove ads your way or track your behavior.





  • That but it was also just a depiction closer to reality: for instance famine and starvation were a common theme in Grimm’s collection of tales (Hänsel & Gretel, the star money, etc). But in the modern world [industrialized west] we know longer have a direct cultural experience of it.

    Similarly gone down have:

    • corporal punishment, mutilation (the girl without hands, Cinderella)
    • indentured servitude, slavery (Rumpelstilzchen)
    • cannibalism (Hänsel & Gretel); note that this in the context of a famine
    • austerity at old age (the Bremen town musicians)
    • despots abusing their power (Snow White)
    • maternal death, parental absence (Cinderella, Snow White)
    • child labor (Cinderella, Mother Hulda)