#f&h2

[spreejobs]

Thesis Efficient Deep Neural Networks for Bird's Eye View Perception (f/m/d) (Wolfsburg, DE, 38436)

<p> </p> <p> </p> <div><div style="padding:10.0px 0.0px;border:1.0px solid transparent"><div style="font-size:16.0px;word-wrap:break-word"><H2 style="font-size:1.0em;margin:0.0px"><b>Environment</b></H2> </div><div><p style="text-align:justify">As part of Volkswagen Group Innovation, the AI &amp; Data Analytics subdivision deals with the methodology and concept development of digital services for…

[fencesandfrogs]

general clan culture notes

so as it turns out, you can't exactly develop culture without developing culture. that is to say, it turns out, as i work on the worldbuilding, my clans have developed their own flair, and i wanted to talk about that.

i'm a good a posteriori world builder. i can turn what is and was into something knew with relative ease. that does mean, whoever, that parts of what is get changed.

so without further ado, here are some of the guiding ideas i use for developing the clans for wing & feather.

section one: honor

god i hate; okay, i use honor a lot, especially in "names. leaders. meaning." and it was while editing that post i realized i've kind of...changed the meaning of it. it's a little subtle, but it's there.

at some point, i started using honor to mean "everything associated with something" here's an excerpt that shows what i mean:

they are chosen to honor the kit and the name. silverkit, out of love for trinkets, hoping their daughter would feel loved. graykit, hoping for a peaceful life, like still water. featherkit for a half-thunderclan kit, that they would not forget their blood, even though they would be raised riverclan.

(names. leaders. meaning.)

the idea here is basically, well, riverclan's whole thing is about a constant structure and ever changing details, but we'll get into that. but here, i'm using honor to mean just having a meaning beyond the visual appearance of a kit. later i go on to talk about stormkit, and how any kit named storm after him would have a new meaning.

and i'm sure i'm doing this subtle switch with other concepts but i haven't noticed it yet.

secton two: skyclan

skyclan comes last in most of my posts so this time it comes first. that's because it's kind of doing its own thing. i include it in world building posts for completionism, and because i have a soft spot for leafstar.

so old skyclan is whatever. they're kind of thunderclan/riverclan hybrids in terms of culture. they were always kind of chill. i don't care about them, because as a narrative, skyclan is only good as new skyclan.

new skyclan is about resilence, adaptability, and unity. they follow tradition because it binds them together, and binding them together makes them strong, not because they should follow tradition or anything of the sort.

mostly, though, they're a new group, that by some miracle has remained together. i don't have a ton to say for them here, because the rest of this is more about drawing comparisons between clans, and i've specifically said, "no, skyclan doesn't count. skyclan's whole thing is being unique because that's what makes them them."

section three: alignment chart

so i have this alignment chart and i'm ngl, it doesn't make sense, but i'll try to explain it.

the first axis is spiritual/physical and the second is practical/traditional. these aren't contrasting qualities, they're just a set of descriptors.

basically, spiritual and physical is "are they big on religion? do they celebrate holidays?" and practical/traditional is "do they follow the rules because they are the rules? or because the rules will lead to doing the right thing?" which is a little simplisitc but basically it has to do with where morality is grounded

i think this will make more sense when i describe the clans so don't worry about it too much.

section four: thunderclan

physical and practical. thunderclan is the most militaristic. they're trying to put a strong front in front of kittypets. to that end, the concept of starclan is important, although we'll see that in the other physical clan, but medicine cats and occasionally leaders are the only real connection.

i've always kind of thought the other clans maintained the journey to the moonstone and thunderclan was just like "eh is it worth it tho?"

anyway i don't have a ton to say about any given clan ATM, just discussing general guiding ideas.

section five: shadowclan

spiritual and traditional. that's why they're at such odds with thunderclan. they follow religion so tightly because it is what is moral. and that's why they're so prone to problematic leadership. it turns out "your leaders word is law" is kind of a risky rule if your religion is "defying the code is fundamentally bad"

but i digress, shadowclan is only similar to thunderclan in terms of habitat. they're somewhat more serious, somewhat more concerned about religion. it comes up.

* this is the least relevant in CTD because i need dovewing to like shadowclan for being a tad more relaxed and i know that i've said the CTD and W&F universes are different but i still want to make it explicitly clear here

section six: riverclan.

spiritual and practical. they seem the most religious although both shadowclan and windclan would object to that, because, well, they would say riverclan's religion is pure theatre.

apprentices become warriors become elders at dusk. there is no duty to be completed, only celebration. a new warrior will watch a celebration in their honor, showing they have learned restraint, and when their vigil breaks in the morning, they will be greeted by their friends in celebration.

(ceremonies)

but it's very much not. there's a line in the light that shines on you, one of my inspiration fics, that has really stuck with me, really defined how i think about riverclan, even more than Flighless Dove, Poison Ivy, my whole au inspiration, and this line in particular is guiding:

Any cat with Riverclan blood belonged in Riverclan. Their blood was rare and valuable, even when mixed with another clan. Every descendant of River was laced with the divine.

section seven: windclan

last and only sort of least, physical and traditional. it's not that i don't care about windclan, so much as, i feel like tallstar's revenge did quite a lot of the legwork for me, and now i'm just keeping things consistent.

but i'm constantly saying windclan is practical, meaning it's straightforward, with a defined reason for what they do.

deputies are made when they are needed, and elders at their own request. but moonrise is reserved: a medicine cat needs a chance to speak what they see, and it would be a foolish leader who dared interrupt.

(ceremonies.)

kits are named for prey and plants. harekit for a kit who looked fast and wry, crowkit for a kit with the old power of tunnelers. heatherkit for a kit with a pelt apt for stealth, and barkkit for a kit who looked out of place on the moor. the queen suggests, but the medicine cat confirms. without a blessing from starclan, no name could be a good omen.

(names. leaders. meaning.)

and i think that's the most i can say for this.

[mallowstep]

daisy in “ashes”

or, nonspecifically, what are cats like goldenflower, ferncloud, and daisy getting up to, anyway?

this is tied to my thoughts on medicinery, so if you’re not caught up, a summary: med cats now only spend about 50% of their time doing “medicine” and it’s more osteopathic than in the books.

[1.7k words, 6 minute read]

daisy's kin (i just finished it)

so i just finished daisy's kin and 😗👌 am i happy with it.

i've always been exploring this, like, i'm lowkey obsessed with developing the role of the nursery queen, and...i don't know what i expected, but this was nice to read.

it was good both that thunderclan valued her and hnnng it was so good.

obsessed, i'm obsessed.

but curiously enough, i'm going to refrain from focusing (too much) on the story part of it. i just, this quote stands in my mind

That is important work.

snow, in response to daisy telling her about her role in thunderclan.

like, (a) it is, and it feels so good to read a book acknowledging that, and (b) it is, and i'm really happy that everyone agrees.

so anyway, i feel like the latest warriors release was tapped in to my brain.

first, it had all of this stuff that happens in mtbnsof (squirrelstar, if you don't read my fic/can't keep track of acronyms, which, understandable), or is going to happen in mtbnsof.

i kind of spoiled a lot of stuff in my book notes, but i'm not doing that again, so moving on.

anyway, i wasn't really excited for daisy's kin and spotfur's rebellion, i just wanted the blackfoot novella.

but damn, i was wrong.

i felt like someone had a line into my brain because daisy's life is exactly what i wanted it to be.

i'm going to talk about that in a moment i just really don't want to understate how fantastic it is to see a warriors novella expand and develop these ideas. i strongly urge you to read daisy's kin if you haven't already. it's really, really good. i'm being deliberately vague about the plot to encourage you to read it.

i think this might go as far as repairing the hole in my heart from "leafpool's wish." i don't think there's anything that can fix the brain rot (although the line in SFR, where she's like "adoption is valid," is close), but the hole? that's healing because of daisy's kin.

and y'all already know how much i hate leafpool's wish.

chapter five: advent

so if you don't read my fic "ashes," chapter five (advent) was published april 10th, and the basic summary is it's the first 3 months of holly/jay/lion's life.

it's a chapter i like, we're going to do a quick breakdown. there are spoilers for this chapter, and also probably the future of the fic. depending on when i actually publish this essay, they may or may not have been covered, so read at your own risk.

so the basic summary of advent is this:

ashfur meets his children

daisy apologizes for not supporting squilf

ashfur announces his children to thunderclan

sandstorm offers motherly advice

squilf has a moment where she's like "i'm not ready for this but you are my whole world

cool.

anyway, daisy has this line that i like:

But Leafpool's young, and she's not a queen. I understand.

she's talking to squilf and is kind of..."i'm here for you."

the implication is that leafpool's job doesn't really extend to kits, past their physical well-being.

and later on, daisy (and ferncloud) are the cats squilf leans on. she's the one who provides a lot of support over jaykit, especially when they're all arguing all the time about it.

she's also a support to the kits. they would all die for her.

daisy gives advice about how well jaykit is growing and reassures squilf it's okay to be kind of bored when they're little and sleeping all the time.

she also has this moment:

"Oh, hush," Daisy said, "I'm just proud she knows so many words."

where hollykit says bb curse and daisy is like "ah yes my daughter! she's so smart!"

anyway, daisy is just...

when hollypaw doesn't know what she wants, she's going to ask daisy for advice. she's a neutral party: squirrelflight is her mother, but daisy is in a not-quite-mother role.

she's the one who notices when leafpool is With Kits. that's her job.

she really does take it as a failure that she didn't notice what was going on with squilf. in the clan, her role is to stop that from happening. i mean, no one really blames her because squilf's kits were early and leafpool was there but...it was 100% her job to not have that happen.

if something had gone wrong, she would have taken it even harder.

(also, ferncloud usually also serves this role, but she has her own litter right now, so that's consuming a fair amount of her time/energy.)

kinship (kind of)

okay, well.

i've been talking about kinship more and more lately.

it's because i'm working on "wing & feather" (aka the jaywing au where dove and jay are siblings), and kinship is a somewhat big deal there.

so anyway, first: my usual preemptive vocabulary lesson:

sraue

litter, littermates.

maach

blood-family unit, sibling (by blood)

maara

den-family unit, denmates (going over this another time)

rru

mother, mother's sister.

rruha

denmother (queen who nursed at same time, or nursery queen)

there, not so bad.

right, so i'm doing a full breakdown of kinship elsewhere, because while the maach side is fairly simple, the maara side is...there are just different rules. they're not more complicated, but they're a second set of rules.

(and then you can have situations where, say, in w&f, by maach, jay and dove are maach with squilf and leaf, but by maara, squilf is rruha to them.)

see so it's complicated.

but we're honing in on rruha for this.

rruha is a term referring basically to any queen who could have nursed you.

using ashes, daisy, ferncloud, and squilf as an example:

if squilf's milk didn't come in (as per canon), fern would have nursed HJL, so ferncloud is rruha to them. (she's also got a maach relationship, but rruha supersedes that.)

similarly, squilf could have nursed fox and ice, so she's rruha to them. (unlike with HJL, she doesn't have a maach relationship to them, because she's not related to ferncloud. the more you know.)

daisy could have nursed either litter (hypothetically? it's a little complicated and the cat bio section is later on), so she's rruha to both.

this relationship is one of the highest ones on the influence later. the maternal relationship (rru) is the only clear trump card. the paternal relationship (seya) can be more important, but it depends on the father.

(the littermate and denmate relationships are also very important, but in a different way.)

so, daisy is somewhere between a grandmother and a mother to pretty much every cat in thunderclan.

god bless you if you ever try to hurt her, because that's a lot of cats who would not let that happen.

queens

alright, so. the crux of it all.

what is the role of a (life-long) queen?

to nurture queens and kits.

it's that simple.

it's just a very important job.

i imagine they train each other, too. goldenflower offered advice and teachings to ferncloud, and ferncloud brought experience of clan life to daisy, and vice versa.

i hope someone takes up residence of the nursery with daisy, because otherwise that's a lot of leadership to just break up.

(as an aside, seriously, this is out of nowhere: i'm still thinking about moonflower's death. it has to be the saddest death in warriors, for me. i think because she's such a mother figure: soft and hazy and kind, and she dies. and she's...you know, you barely thought of her as a warrior. bluepaw still sees her only as mother and then she dies, dies in a raid that you know was questionable, and it hurts so much. moonflower might be the only warriors death i cried over. because it pulled at this raw, primal place of grief and loss.)

cat biology (naturally)

you know, i made this header, but i don't actually remember what i had to say?

huh.

well. there's a nonzero chance i remember later so...

yep remembered.

okay so y'all know. i have fucked over my google for you searching info about cat lactation.

someone better care about this.

okay so.

best i can tell, cats will lactate with kits around, pregnant or not. it helps to be around pregnant queens, but a cat like daisy should have no trouble providing milk for kits where necessary.

now, based on what i know about this (which is more than i want to talk about lest someone accuse me of...eh yeah), this won't be perfect for newborn kits, but it'll keep them alive.

the problem is it's not necessarily going to be instant.

what i'm saying is, the troubles in daisy's kin are valid, considering the nursery is empty.

the long night

okay so i've talked about the long night/"whatever is done only by me" enough and i don't feel like explaining it again.

but basically, it's daisy's job to stop that from happening.

daisy (again, using daisy as a filler for "queens like daisy") is supposed to check in on queens, make sure they're safe, support them.

she will drop kick anyone out of the nursery who threatens that.

and you don't want to mess with daisy because it won't be one drop kick so much as the entirety of the junior warriors.

this is the most important part of daisy's job. crisis de-escalation. tree has nothing on queens.

notes and touches

uh, let's see...oh fuck! going to edit something.

okay anyway.

i'm very sad they let daisy sleep alone in the nursery D:

cats are highly social she didn't deserve that

[noredinktech]

Haskell for the Elm Enthusiast

Many years ago NRI adopted Elm as a frontend language. We started small with a disposable proof of concept, and as the engineering team increasingly was bought into Elm being a much better developer experience than JavaScript more and more of our frontend development happened in Elm. Today almost all of our frontend is written in Elm.

Meanwhile, on the backend, we use Ruby on Rails. Rails has served us well and has supported amazing growth of our website, both in terms of the features it supports, and the number of students and teachers who use it. But we’ve come to miss some of the tools that make us so productive in Elm: Tools like custom types for modeling data, or the type checker and its helpful error messages, or the ease of writing (fast) tests.

A couple of years ago we started looking into Haskell as an alternative backend language that could bring to our backend some of the benefits we experience writing Elm in the frontend. Today some key parts of our backend code are written in Haskell. Over the years we’ve developed our style of writing Haskell, which can be described as very Elm-like (it’s also still changing!).

🌳 Why be Like Elm?

Elm is a small language with great error messages, great documentation, and a great community. Together these make Elm one of the nicest programming languages to learn. Participants in an ElmBridge event will go from knowing nothing of the language to writing a real application using Elm in 5 hours.

We have a huge amount of Elm code at NoRedInk, and it supports some pretty tricky UI work. Elm scales well to a growing and increasingly complicated codebase. The compiler stays fast and we don’t lose confidence in our ability to make changes to our code. You can learn more about our Elm story here.

📦 Unboxing Haskell

Haskell shares a lot of the language features we like in Elm: Custom types to help us model our data. Pure functions and explicit side effects. Writing code without runtime exceptions (mostly).

When it comes to ease of learning, Haskell makes different trade-offs than Elm. The language is much bigger, especially when including the many optional language features that can be enabled. It’s entirely up to you whether you want to use these features in your code, but you’ll need to know about many of them if you want to make use of Haskell’s packages, documentation, and how-tos. Haskell’s compiler errors typically aren’t as helpful as Elm’s are. Finally, we’ve read many Haskell books and blog posts, but haven’t found anything getting us from knowing no Haskell to writing a real application in it that’s anywhere near as small and effective as the Elm Guide.

🏟️ When in Rome, Act Like a Babylonian

Many of the niceties we’re used to in Elm we get in Haskell too. But Haskell has many additional features, and each one we use adds to the list of things that an Elm programmer will need to learn. So instead we took a path that many in the Haskell community took before us: limit ourselves to a subset of the language.

There are many styles of writing Haskell, each with its own trade-offs. Examples include Protolude, RIO, the lens ecosystem, and many more. Our approach differs in being strongly inspired by Elm. So what does our Elm-inspired style of writing Haskell look like?

🍇 Low hanging fruit: the Elm standard library

Our earliest effort in making our Haskell code more Elm-like was porting the Elm standard library to Haskell. We’ve open-sourced this port as a library named nri-prelude. It contains Haskell counterparts of the Elm modules for working with Strings, Lists, Dicts, and more.

nri-prelude also includes a port of elm-test. It provides everything you need for writing unit tests and basic property tests.

Finally, it includes a GHC plugin that makes it so Haskell’s default Prelude (basically its standard library) behaves like Elm’s defaults. For example, it adds implicit qualified imports of some modules like List, similar to what Elm does.

🎚️ Effects and the Absence of The Elm Architecture

Elm is opinionated in supporting a single architecture for frontend applications, fittingly called The Elm Architecture. One of its nice qualities is that it forces a separation of application logic (all those conditionals and loops) and effects (things like talking to a database or getting the current time). We love using The Elm Architecture writing frontend applications, but don’t see a way to apply it 1:1 to backend development. In the F# community, they use the Elm Architecture for some backend features (see: When to use Elmish Bridge), but it’s not generally applicable. We’d still like to encourage that separation between application logic and effects though, having seen some of the effects of losing that distinction in our backend code. Read our other post Pufferfish, please scale the site! if you want to read more about this.

Out of many options we’re currently using the handle pattern for managing effects. For each type of effect, we create a Handler type (we added the extra r in a typo way back and it has stuck around. Sorry). We use this pattern across our libraries for talking to outside systems: nri-postgresql, nri-http, nri-redis, and nri-kafka.

Without The Elm Architecture, we depend heavily on chaining permutations through a stateful Task type. This feels similar to imperative coding: First, do A, then B, then C. Hopefully, when we’re later on in our Haskell journey, we’ll discover a nice architecture to simplify our backend code.

🚚 Bringing Elm Values to Haskell

One way in which Haskell is different from both Elm and Rails is that it is not particularly opinionated. Often the Haskell ecosystem offers multiple different ways to do one particular thing. So whether it’s writing an http server, logging, or talking with a database, the first time we do any of these things we’ll need to decide how.

When adopting a Haskell feature or library, we care about

smallness, e.g. introduce new concepts only when necessary

how “magical” is it? E.g. How surprising is it?

How easy is it to learn?

how easy is it to use?

how comprehensible is the documentation?

explicitness over terseness (but terseness isn’t implicitly bad).

consistency & predictability

“safety” (no runtime exceptions).

Sometimes the Haskell ecosystem provides an option that fits our Elm values, like with the handle pattern, and so we go with it. Other times a library has different values, and then the choice not to use it is easy as well. An example of this is lens/prism ecosystem, which allows one to write super succinct code, but is almost a language onto itself that one has to learn first.

The hardest decisions are the ones where an approach protects us against making mistakes in some way (which we like) but requires familiarity with more language features to use (which we prefer to avoid).

To help us make better decisions, we often try it both ways. That is, we’re willing to build a piece of software with & without a complex language feature to ensure the cost of the complexity is worth the benefit that the feature brings us.

Another approach we take is making decisions locally. A single team might evaluate a new feature, and then demo it and share it with other teams after they have a good sense the feature is worth it. Remember: a super-power of Haskell is easy refactorability. Unlike our ruby code, going through and doing major re-writes in our Haskell codebase is often an hours-or-days-long (rather than weeks-or-months-long) endeavor. Adopting two different patterns simultaneously has a relatively small cost!

Case studies in feature adoption:

🐘 Type-Check All Elephants

One example where our approach is Elm-like in some ways but not in others is how we talk to the database. We’re using a GHC feature called quasiquoting for this, which allow us to embed SQL query strings directly into our Haskell code, like this:

{-# LANGUAGE QuasiQuotes #-} module Animals (listAll) where import Postgres (query, sql) listAll :: Postgres.Handler -> Task Text (List (Text, Text)) listAll postgres = query postgres [sql|SELECT species, genus FROM animals|]

A library called postgresql-typed can test these queries against a real Postgres database and show us an error at compile time if the query doesn’t fit the data. Such a compile-time error might happen if a table or column we reference in a query doesn’t exist in the database. This way we use static checks to eliminate a whole class of potential app/database compatibility problems!

The downside is that writing code like this requires everyone working with it to learn a bit about quasi quotes, and what return type to expect for different kinds of queries. That said, using some kind of querying library instead has a learning curve too, and query libraries tend to be pretty big to support all the different kinds of queries that can be made.

🔣 So Many Webserver Options

Another example where we traded additional safety against language complexity is in our choice of webserver library. We went with servant here, a library that lets you express REST APIs using types, like this:

import Servant data Routes route = Routes { listTodos :: route :- "todos" :> Get '\[JSON\] [Todo], updateTodo :: route :- "todos" :> Capture "id" Int :> ReqBody '[JSON] Todo :> Put '[JSON] NoContent, deleteTodo :: route :- "todos" :> Capture "id" Int :> Delete '[JSON] NoContent } deriving (Generic)

Servant is a big library that makes use of a lot of type-level programming techniques, which are pretty uncommon in Elm, so there’s a steep learning cost associated with understanding how the type magic works. Using it without a deep understanding is reasonably straightforward.

The benefits gained from using Servant outweigh the cost of expanded complexity. Based on a type like the one in the example above, the servant ecosystem can generate functions in other languages like Elm or Ruby. Using these functions means we can save time with backend-to-frontend or service-to-service communication. If some Haskell type changes in a backward-incompatible fashion we will generate new Elm code, and this might introduce a compiler error on the Elm side.

So for now we’re using servant! It’s important to note that what we want is compile-time server/client compatibility checking, and that’s why we swallow Servant’s complexity. If we could get the same benefit without the type-level programming demonstrated above, we would prefer that. Hopefully, in the future, another library will offer the same benefits from a more Elm-like API.

😻 Like what you see?

We're running the libraries discussed above in production. Our most-used Haskell application receives hundreds of thousands of requests per minute without issue and produces hardly any errors.

Code can be found at NoRedInk/haskell-libraries. Libraries have been published to hackage and stackage. We'd love to know what you think!

[loloftheday]

Saw the vet today. He said I should stop eating my delicious cardboard scratcher, then he called me “unruly.” F that guy. Mom said I cost as much as a 2008 Honda Civic, but I’m aiming for Tesla status. I can’t wait to get home & scream at my girlfriend next door.

[0-9]

package.jsonが複数ある場合(npm or yarn) workspaceへの移行方法

最初からworkspaceで開発する場合、何も考えずに設定すればいい。

ただ、開発が進んでからworkspaceへ移行する場合、何も考えずに移行すると依存関係で問題が発生する可能性がある。

簡単な移行方法

一番上のpackage.jsonでworkspaceの設定を行い、各lock file(package-lock.jsonやyarn.lock)を削除すればいい。 （もし、package.jsonでresolutionsを指定している場合、まとめて一番上のpackage.jsonに指定する）

ただし、この場合、各lock fileで指定されているversionは無視されるため、意図せず依存関係が更新される問題が有る。

依存関係が更新されても良い場合、この方法で更新して良い。

安���な移行方法

もし、依存関係が更新されると困る場合、以下の方法で移行する。

package.jsonの依存関係から "^" を削除する できる限りパージョンを固定する

lock fileを作り直す yarnの場合 rm -f yarn.lock && yarn 、 npmの場合 rm -f package-lock.json && npm i する

lock fileの差分を確認し、問題ないか確認 ここで動作確認も行なう

すべてのlock fileを削除し、workspaceへ移行する 3で動作確認ができれいれば安全に移行できる

ある程度のバージョン更新は行われるが、ある程度安全に移行できるはず。

[evieveevee]

What We Lost: Returning to Tumblr in 2020

On December 17th, 2018, Tumblr banned 'adult content' across the site, marking the end of an era. The ban was the result of a cavalcade of issues which reportedly made maintaining NSFW content unfeasible for Tumblr. Now, it's 2020. I'm back on Tumblr, and I can't help but meditate on what we've lost both on Tumblr, and across the globe in 2020.

Part One: Tumblr and Adult Content

*Things we lost to the flame Things we'll never see again All that we've amassed Sits before us, shattered into ash

— Bastille, "Things We Lost In The Fire"*

A bit of personal history: Tumblr was the primary community I used in various forms from 2012 onwards, associating with various fandoms, doing what I could to design interesting things. The various communities I was involved in intersected with social justice communities, and eventually I dug into those further and tried to learn to better myself in the process, starting along the path to becoming the person I did.

Part of that process was also learning to love my own body, a thing I was not particularly good at and still struggle a bit with nowadays. One of the ways I did this was by making 'adult content', or more plainly, pornography. It was a unique opportunity to experiment with femininity and sexuality - something I'd been very closed off from as part of my upbringing - in a supportive, fun environment. Experimenting with my self image first in this way, in semi-private, led to me experimenting more publicly and eventually embracing aspects of that as part of my day to day life. That's right: making pornography was part of what led me down the path to figuring out I was trans and embracing that part of me.

Making porn on Tumblr was a great time; the adult content creators and consumers community on the site was largely supportive of queer people and sexuality, different body types, all manner of things. It was - in my experience - a healthy and fun place to be, and certainly one of the better places you could be on the internet for a visual medium like pornography. Tumblr's format made it easy to share both adult content you made yourself, and stuff you were curating. Vex Ashley wrote that "this sharing was so desperately vital for women and other marginalised people whose sexualities are often overlooked or infantilised in media about sex in preference for the tastes of the traditional porn consumer – the straight white guy" in a eulogy and love letter to Tumblr's adult content communities.

Tumblr's format remains novel to my knowledge as well: the notion of having a large image-focused feed which also allows for easy sharing and curation, gorgeous, high resolution pieces and photos to be uploaded with relatively little compression, custom arrangements of photosets, and personalized theming of your blog. There was, and remains, lots of potential for expression on Tumblr., and its focus remains unique. Twitter and Mastodon's focus is on what's written, Wordpress doesn't have the sort of interlinking of blogs that Tumblr does, and Facebook is... Facebook (read: evil).

I think the novelty of that format is what made the announcement of the ban on 'adult content' so impactful. Even looking back at the framing of it is gross: the post posits that 'adult content' is something which is negative, and says that removing it is working towards a 'more positive' Tumblr. There appears to be an attempt to try and strike a balance in allowing conversation about sexuality and such, but this is the killing blow. A huge portion of the community, including countless queer and furry artists, needed to find a new home online.

3 months after the ban had hit, traffic had reportedly dropped off 20%. Recent data from SimilarWeb, the outfit which published that initial data, shows that visits to the site have dropped off a little bit more, but have stayed otherwise pretty consistent. August 2020's data shows about 317 million visits. [1] In other words: any hope that this move would allow Tumblr was dashed. A massive portion of the userbase deleted their accounts after archiving them; Tumblr and the internet at large had lost a massive, vibrant chunk of community, and it was completely in vain.

I lost contact with a bunch of those folks I was following on Tumblr for years. The mass exodus left both people who wanted to find and share artwork and adult content and the people who made it completely adrift. Years later, some artists are still picking up the pieces. Archaic policy like SESTA/FOSTA being brought into the picture has left very few standing when it comes to adult content, Twitter included. Who knows how long that will last? If something happens to change the way that Twitter handles adult content, for example, what options do casual creators like myself have?

Fortunately, platforms like OnlyFans exist. But even those are at potential risk from legislation like the EARN IT Act, not to mention the danger this poses to Twitter and to the internet at large. OnlyFans and its ilk, as they exist right now, are fantastic for sex workers because they offer pay-gating and a variety of features to make sure sex workers get paid. But they leave those of us who want to be able to curate the content they enjoy or casually create their own content freely without real options, and without real community.

We stand to lose a lot, and as always people in the margins will be the ones most impacted: the queer, the people of color, the disabled; all will suffer greatly if adult content is found without a home. Media dealing with queer themes is enough to be considered "adult content" by some and it's not hard to imagine what we could be staring down the barrel of here.

What have we lost in eliminating platforms like this?

Part Two: 2020 and the World

*These are the things The things we lost The things we lost in the fire, fire, fire.

— Bastille, "Things We Lost In The Fire"*

Meditating on what we have lost seems to be a running theme for the year 2020.

January: New Year's Day. In Aotearoa New Zealand, smoke covers the skies from a fire a literal ocean away. The Australian bush has been on fire, part of one of the most and it has turned the skies of a nation not it's own orange at midday, across thousands of kilometers. What did we lose in those fires? What stories and history? What wildlife, what species? What will remain afterwards? What will grow anew?

April: Aotearoa New Zealand hits the peak of COVID-19 related lockdown with the entire nation moved to Level 4, meaning that nothing except truly essential services, such as roadworks, pharmacies, and supermarkets were open. During that time, I thought a lot about how some of my favorite small shops were doing; the bakery with astonishingly good pies, the charming dollar store which always has a few things that catch my eye, the coffee cart near one of the local parks every morning. As a nation, Aotearoa acted early to deal with COVID-19 with a strong hand, and it was risky for all of those small shops across the country. What would we come out the other side of the lockdowns having lost, both in terms of human cost and cost to the places around us?

May: Following the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis Police officer Derek Chauvin, massive protests against police brutality, racism, and white supremacy break out across the United States of America. Daily protests have continued to the time of writing in some cities. George Floyd is one of 781 people killed by police in 2020 at the time of writing in the United States alone [2]. 1099 people were killed by police in 2019 [3]. What incredible lives and stories have been lost in the process? Are those stories being told now? How do we prevent this from happening again? (Hint: defunding the police will be a start, and supporting the cause now is a good choice too.)

It is now September: The incompetence of the US Government has allowed COVID-19 to spread beyond control, leaving tens of thousands of deaths in its wake; lives and stories which must be remembered and their stories carried on by others. The western coast of the United States is on fire, blanketed in smoke and ashes. Massive west coast cities like San Francisco gain an apocalyptic feeling as the skies turn orange, like they did for me in January. Friends of friends lose everything in small Oregon towns. The costs of the prolonged fires will be paid by people all up the coast; it's their health outcomes which will suffer. What will we lose as a result of this in the future? What can we do to make things better?

I want to be clear: this is not a comprehensive list, and is centered around the things that me and my social circles have been aware of and talked about. Even with that consideration, we have to reckon with massive, ongoing, and far reaching concerns. The loss felt as a result of all of the above issues is staggering, and far reaching, and we must fight to ensure that loss is not in vain. Voting alone is not going to solve these concerns, and there's more to concern yourself with than any one person should have to cope with. There's not a magic bullet to solve all this stuff though.

Rather than pretend that I have one, I want to propose a couple things to close this out: one bit of advice, and one plea for yourself and others.

The advice: pick your battles carefully. Pick issues you want to focus in on, and fight for those things to make things better where you live, and in your social circles. Choose things to care deeply about first. Keep caring about them.

The plea: think carefully about the questions I've asked throughout this piece, and think about the things in your life and communities that you have lost. Think about how to make sure those losses are taken with you and learned from; to take lessons learned and better yourself and the people around you. Think about the things you don't want to lose, and how to fight like hell for them.

Move forwards to something, and some place better than where we are now. Stand united with the people around you, and press on.

*Do you understand that we will never be the same again? The future's in our hands and we will never be the same again.

— Bastille, "Things We Lost In The Fire"*

If you enjoyed this piece and want to support my work, please contribute to my Ko-fi. If you are interested in re-publishing this piece on another site, please contact me either here or via my business email.

References

[1] Data provided by SimilarWeb; accessed on 15/09/2019 at 5:30am. (https://www.similarweb.com/website/tumblr.com/)

[2] Data provided by Mapping Police Violence (https://mappingpoliceviolence.com); accessed on 15/09/2020 at 4:08am NZT

[3] Data provided by Mapping Police Violence's (https://mappingpoliceviolence.com) database, downloaded on 15/09/2020 at 4:08am NZT. Count obtained using the following formula:

=COUNTIFS($'2013-2020 Police Killings'.F:F,">=1/1/2019",$'2013-2020 Police Killings'.F:F,"<1/1/2020")

[datamattsson]

A Vagrant Story

Like everyone else I wish I had more time in the day. In reality, I want to spend more time on fun projects. Blogging and content creation has been a bit on a hiatus but it doesn't mean I have less things to write and talk about. In relation to this rambling I want to evangelize a tool I've been using over the years that saves an enormous amount of time if you're working in diverse sandbox development environments, Vagrant from HashiCorp.

Elevator pitch

Vagrant introduces a declarative model for virtual machines running in a development environment on your desktop. Vagrant supports many common type 2 hypervisors such as KVM, VirtualBox, Hyper-V and the VMware desktop products. The virtual machines are packaged in a format referred to as "boxes" and can be found on vagrantup.com. It's also quite easy to build your own boxes from scratch with another tool from HashiCorp called Packer. Trust me, if containers had not reached the mainstream adoption it has today, Packer would be a household tool. It's a blog post in itself for another day.

Real world use case

I got roped into a support case with a customer recently. They were using the HPE Nimble Storage Volume Plugin for Docker with a particular version of NimbleOS, Docker and docker-compose. The toolchain exhibited a weird behavior that would require two docker hosts and a few iterations to reproduce the issue. I had this environment stood up, diagnosed and replied to the support team with a customer facing response in less than an hour, thanks to Vagrant.

vagrant init

Let's elaborate on how to get a similar environment set up that I used in my support engagement off the ground. Let's assume vagrant and a supported type 2 hypervisor is installed. This example will work on Windows, Linux and Mac.

Create a new project folder and instantiate a new Vagrantfile. I use a collection of boxes built from these sources. Bento boxes provide broad coverage of providers and a variety of Linux flavors.

mkdir myproj && cd myproj vagrant init bento/ubuntu-20.04 A `Vagrantfile` has been placed in this directory. You are now ready to `vagrant up` your first virtual environment! Please read the comments in the Vagrantfile as well as documentation on `vagrantup.com` for more information on using Vagrant.

There's now a Vagrantfile in the current directory. There's a lot of commentary in the file to allow customization of the environment. It's possible to declare multiple machines in one Vagrantfile, but for the sake of an introduction, we'll explore setting up a single VM.

One of the more useful features is that Vagrant support "provisioners" that runs at first boot. It makes it easy to control the initial state and reproduce initialization with a few keystrokes. I usually write Ansible playbooks for more elaborate projects. For this exercise we'll use the inline shell provisioner to install and start docker.

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config| config.vm.box = "bento/ubuntu-20.04" config.vm.provision "shell", inline: <<-SHELL apt-get update apt-get install -y docker.io python3-pip pip3 install docker-compose usermod -a -G docker vagrant systemctl enable --now docker SHELL end

Prepare for very verbose output as we bring up the VM.

Note: The vagrant command always assumes working on the Vagrantfile in the current directory.

vagrant up

After the provisioning steps, a new VM is up and running from a thinly cloned disk of the source box. Initial download may take a while but the instance should be up in a minute or so.

Post-declaration tricks

There are some must-know Vagrant environment tricks that differentiate Vagrant from right-clicking in vCenter or fumbling in the VirtualBox UI.

SSH access

Accessing the shell of the VM can be done in two ways, most commonly is to simply do vagrant ssh and that will drop you at the prompt of the VM with the predefined user "vagrant". This method is not very practical if using other SSH-based tools like scp or doing advanced tunneling. Vagrant keeps track of the SSH connection information and have the capability to spit it out in a SSH config file and then the SSH tooling may reference the file. Example:

vagrant ssh-config > ssh-config ssh -F ssh-config default

Host shared directory

Inside the VM, /vagrant is shared with the host. This is immensely helpful as any apps your developing for the particular environment can be stored on the host and worked on from the convenience of your desktop. As an example, if I were to use the customer supplied docker-compose.yml and Dockerfile, I'd store those in /vagrant/app which in turn would correspond to my <current working directory for the project>/app.

Pushing and popping

Vagrant supports using the hypervisor snapshot capabilities. However, it does come with a very intuitive twist. Assume we want to store the initial boot state, let's push!

vagrant snapshot push ==> default: Snapshotting the machine as 'push_1590949049_3804'... ==> default: Snapshot saved! You can restore the snapshot at any time by ==> default: using `vagrant snapshot restore`. You can delete it using ==> default: `vagrant snapshot delete`.

There's now a VM snapshot of this environment (if it was a multi-machine setup, a snapshot would be created on all the VMs). The snapshot we took is now on top of the stack. Reverting to the top of the stack, simply pop back:

vagrant snapshot pop --no-delete ==> default: Forcing shutdown of VM... ==> default: Restoring the snapshot 'push_1590949049_3804'... ==> default: Checking if box 'bento/ubuntu-20.04' version '202004.27.0' is up to date... ==> default: Resuming suspended VM... ==> default: Booting VM... ==> default: Waiting for machine to boot. This may take a few minutes... default: SSH address: 127.0.0.1:2222 default: SSH username: vagrant default: SSH auth method: private key ==> default: Machine booted and ready! ==> default: Machine already provisioned. Run `vagrant provision` or use the `--provision` ==> default: flag to force provisioning. Provisioners marked to run always will still run.

You're now back to the previous state. The snapshot sub-command allows restoring to a particular snapshot and it's possible to have multiple states with sensible names too, if stepping through debugging scenarios or experimenting with named states.

Summary

These days there's a lot of compute and memory available on modern laptops and desktops. Why run development in the cloud or a remote DC when all you need is available right under your finger tips? Sure, you can't run a full blown OpenShift or HPE Container Platform but you can certainly run a representable Kubernetes clusters where minishift, microk8s and the likes won't work if you need access to the host OS (yes, I'm in the storage biz). In a recent personal project I've used this tool to simply make Kubernetes clusters with Vagrant. It works surprisingly well and allow a ton of customization.

Bonus trivia

Vagrant Story is a 20 year old videogame for PlayStation (one) from SquareSoft (now SquareEnix). It features a unique battle system I've never seen anywhere else to this day and it was one of those games I played back-to-back three times over. It's awesome. Check it out on Wikipedia.

[tokensfortalkers]

The Horror Fluffy

victorian-era horror game where you need to find a mysterious threat that lurks in the night and give it a makeover for an upcoming debutante ball

~via

Inspired by:

Mechanics #WinterIntoSpring

Layout Mothership RPG Player Survival Guide

Atmosphere Seasonal-Power-Outage Childhood Game Nights

The Horror Fluffy by shwac

pdf @ shwac.itch.io/f

[etauthenonprogrammercoder]

[GAS]正規表現にマッチした一部を置換する

概要

ノンプロ研 の VBA チャンネルのお題に、巻き込まれ事故した感じで解いてみたよ。 お題は (全角) カッコ内の (全角) カンマのみ、読点 「、」に変更するというもの。 一番難しかったのは、カッコとカンマが全角であるということに気づくことでしたね。

まとめとコード

最初パッと思いついたのが正規表現だったけど、正規表現はマッチした部分をまるっと全部置換しちゃうからなぁ～って、念の為リファレンス読んだら「第二引数として関数を指定することができます」なる表記が。 replace の正規表現にマッチした部分に replace あてればいいんじゃん？！ できんの？！できたー！の結果がこちらです。

function myFunction() { const text = 'A，B，C（D，E，F，G，H，I）J（K），（L，M），N（O，P，Q），R，S（T，U，V，W），X，Y，Z'; const replacer = (match) => match.replace(/，/g, '、'); let newText = text.replace(/（.*?）/g, replacer); console.log(newText); // A，B，C（D、E、F、G、H、I）J（K），（L、M），N（O、P、Q），R，S（T、U、V、W），X，Y，Z }

フラグ方式で解いたこれはおまけね。 三項演算子は正直好きじゃないです。

function myFunction() { const text = 'A，B，C（D，E，F，G，H，I），J（K），（L，M），N（O，P，Q），R，S（T，U，V，W），X，Y，Z'; let isInbracket = false; let newText = ''; for (const char of text) { if (char === '（') isInbracket = true; if (char === '）') isInbracket = false; isInbracket && char === '，' ? newText += '、': newText += char; } console.log(newText); // A，B，C（D、E、F、G、H、I）J（K），（L、M），N（O、P、Q），R，S（T、U、V、W），X，Y，Z }

意外と楽しかった。 String.prototype.replace() - JavaScript | MDN

[argentdandelion]

Child Psychology and Chara

(Sprites from the sprite resource of CrasherGale, who has since left Tumblr)

(Made with consulting from Keetah Spacecat.) (WARNING: This article covers Chara's possible motives for knowingly eating a lethal dose of poisonous flowers. It thus covers some dark material.)

Some fan works depict “Chara” (the default name of the Fallen Child that will be used in this article) as violent and demonic even before the completion of the Genocide Route. It’s possible this interpretation comes from a lack of familiarity with child psychology, or disagreeing on Chara’s age and thus age-appropriate moral awareness. Furthermore, there’s little evidence Chara acted demonic before the Genocide Route. Sometimes, kids are little sociopaths—and that’s not a sign they’re pure evil.

Basic (Canon) Information

Canon Details:

Hated humanity.

Felt very strongly about that, but never talked about why.

With Asriel, poisoned Asgore by putting buttercups in a pie rather than cups of butter

Laughed upon hearing Asgore was really sick

Apparently does creepy faces sometimes

When Asriel had absorbed their SOUL, wanted Asriel to use his “full power” on the humans

Has a sophisticated vocabulary (“vanquished”, “absolute”, “consequences”, etc.) and formal way of speaking for a child

Climbed Mt. Ebott, a mountain it's said travellers never return from

Chara's reason for doing so "wasn't for a very happy reason".

Extrapolation:

Made the Mr. Dad Guy sweater

This is based on how Asriel just calls Asgore “Dad”, and how Chara may be reluctant to refer to Asgore as just “dad” due to being adopted when they could remember their original parents.

Chara’s age is 8-12.

This is based on Chara’s planning abilities and sophisticated vocabulary.

Chara hated humanity and was “very clear about that”: this is one of their few canon traits. However, dying a gruesome death by buttercup poisoning does seem quite a lot to do out of just hate. Most people wouldn’t go so far as to die to destroy something they hated.

While wanting to destroy humanity was surely motivated least partly by hate, the particular intentions of the plan and how well they would execute it would likely depend on age. Assuming an age range of 8-12, Chara would likely be in the Stages 2, 3, or 4 of Kohlberg’s developmental stages, with Stage 3 being the most likely.

The apparent purpose of the buttercup plan was to “free everyone”. That is what Asriel emphasizes in the VHS tapes, and also what the Angel of the Prophecy is said to do.

In Underline, Growth Spurt, Dogs of Future Past: Chara Origins, Chara’s motives were initially explained or mentioned to Asriel in ways more sympathetic than punishment, vengeance or simple hate. It’s unclear whether Chara had the mental ability to anticipate Asriel reacting badly if they said their motives were one of those three, or whether Chara just reloaded whenever they got a bad outcome.

Kohlberg’s Stage 2

Ages 5-7 or 9, or Ages 4-101

“People at Stage 2 are self-protective, dominant, exploitative, and opportunistic. The need to love and to be loved is gratified on the basis of reciprocal altruism.”- The Moral Development of the Child: An Integrated Model

Though those in Stage 2 may sometimes seem as if they lack morals, they do have some sense of right action. The stage is defined by fair exchanges and pragmatic reciprocating, with moral reasoning guided by a sense of “fair play”. Stage 2 reasoning shows a limited concern for others, but only to the point where it might further the individual’s own interests: it’s a “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” mentality. Thus, it’s not based on loyalty or intrinsic respect.

Chara’s needs or interests might include punishing/inflicting vengeance on humans for one or more of these reasons: treating Chara specifically badly, sealing monsters underground long ago, or their wicked deeds in general. According to this source, vengeance is in fact considered a moral obligation at this stage.2

Though collectively punishing all of humanity/a minimum of six people doesn’t make sense (assuming that minimum of six people didn’t abuse Chara), it might make sense if Chara is ages 8-10. Kohlberg based his work on Jean Piaget’s own work on moral development in children, though Piaget’s had fewer stages. Those in the first of Piaget’s stages (approximately from age 5 to age 11-12) believe in collective punishment, so, if one person in a group does something bad, it would make sense to punish everyone in that group.

Due to the principle of reciprocity, Chara may also have thought they should “return the favor” to monsterkind by sacrificing themselves for monsters’ freedom. However, because this stage is characterized by pragmatic reciprocity, such an altruistic perspective does seem unlikely at this age (and death by buttercups was an awful way to die).

--

GlitchTale

In the GlitchTale episode Continue, Chara tells Asriel that Frisk isn't the goody two-shoes they thought they were. Chara didn’t force Frisk to do the Genocide Route; Frisk did so themselves. When Frisk reset, all the hate (which is both a substance and a feeling here, like Determination) built up in that route went to Chara.3 Chara says it makes them sick that Frisk thinks they’re above consequences, wants to make “the little murderer” pay for their actions, and also believes that Frisk shall use all of Asriel’s friends as toys forever. This relates to the idea vengeance is considered a moral obligation in Stage 2.

--

Underline

In one timeline, Chara crossed the barrier with Asriel by holding hands, and some humans attacked Asriel because he was a monster. Later, during a horrific reliving of this event, Chara stabbed (who they thought was) a human. Chara believed humans thought themselves above consequences, and wanted to make them regret what they did. (Later, Chara’s motives were different. As a soul absorbed by Asriel, Chara wanted to destroy humans because they considered humans “the real monsters” who would destroy their family.)

Kohlberg’s Stage 3

Age Estimate: 7-13.

People in Stage 3 are aware of shared feelings and expectations, which are more important than individual interests. Those in Stage 3 believe people should live up to the expectations of the family and community and behave in “good” ways. To do right is to conform to social expectations, such as showing concern for others and following rules set by others to win their approval. Belief in the “golden rule” is one aspect of Stage 3. The reasons for doing the right thing is to maintain rules and authority and to be seen as a nice and good person by others.

If Chara believed they were expected to be “the future of humans and monsters” and/or “the angel of the prophecy”, that would count as an expectation of the family and community. Thus, Chara would believe they had to break the barrier by any means necessary because that’s what the angel of prophecy and/or the future of “humans and monsters” should do.

By this perspective, the buttercup plan would have seemed like a good, moral plan to get Asriel past the barrier to obtain more SOULs. Chara’s hatred for humanity might have made this plan easier to do, especially if Chara planned from the start to get more human SOULs by killing.

However, part of this stage is belief in the “Golden Rule”, and “do unto others as others would do unto you” doesn’t really apply, since Chara (as a SOUL absorbed by Asriel) wanted to kill humans but wouldn’t want humans to kill them in turn.

--

Dogs of Future Past (WARNING: This section is slightly darker than usual.)

In Dogs of Future Past: Chara Origins, Chara was raised in a cult. Chara tried to be “good” and obey the cult’s teachings and the claimed desires of The Player, a godlike being the cult worshipped. The cult said The Player would wipe away all those whose hearts were filthy with wickedness (that is, kill them) and would do so “soon”. Sometimes, Chara seemed to think The Player’s desires were valid, to the point they questioned why The Player hadn’t destroyed wicked people already. Yet, after the callousness and cruelty of the cult members, Chara concluded everyone in the cult was a bad as everyone outside it.

Later, Asgore calls Chara (and Asriel) “the future of humans and monsters” in front of a crowd of monsters, which causes them all to cheer. Chara interpreted this as a crushing responsibility to do the best thing for monsterkind. Later Chara concluded they were what the Player was playing as/conflating their identity with the Player's, and so executed the buttercup plan. Their original parents repeatedly told them how "selfishness corrodes the heart". Chara may thus have thus believed a sense of self-preservation was selfish, and fulfilling monsters' apparent expectations was worth more than their individual life.

Kohlberg’s Stage 4

Age Estimate: 10-15, on average.

““Right” is helping maintain social order by doing one’s duty, obeying laws simply because they are laws, and showing respect for authorities simply because they are authorities.” -Psychology Second Edition, by Hockenbury & Hockenbury

Stage 4 reflects a belief that rules maintain the social order and that the social system will break down if people do not follow rules. At this stage, doing good involves following through on what one has agreed to do, for the good of the larger social system.

If Chara believed it was their duty to free monsters, Chara may have believed any tactic that would enable them to fulfill that duty was justified. On the matter of "following through on what you have agreed to do", perhaps Chara thought Asriel ought to follow through with the buttercup plan they had agreed to do together, to the point of (potentially) manipulating him to ensure he complied.4

--

The Chara of Dogs of Future Past: Chara Origins is, of all the applicable Chara interpretations the author has studied, the closest to this interpretation. However, Stage 3 is better-supported in the work.

Caveat

Kohlberg's work has been criticized in various ways. In the scope of this article, there's only one major flaw: Kohlberg’s early studies were done purely on male subjects. It’s therefore possible his work doesn’t reflect the development of moral reasoning in girls. The book Psychology Second Edition (by Hockenbury & Hockenbury) points out that, in general, men and women may approach moral matters from slightly different perspectives. Many works do not describe or specify Chara as a boy or girl, or openly define Chara as neither, so which perspective to take is unclear.

Conclusion

If Frisk talks with Asriel in the playable epilogue of the Pacifist Route, Asriel will eventually come to terms with his decision to resist Chara’s control and not kill the humans attacking him. Asriel realized that if had killed them, it would have started a war with humanity.

Some suggest war with humanity was the whole point of the buttercup plan, and particularly point out the detail that Chara requested to see the golden flowers of their village before dying. It is, however, likely Chara couldn’t foresee all the consequences to monsters from their plan, including the immense emotional suffering for their family members. Thus, as far they knew, the plan was a good and moral one.

Related Reading

Flowey and PTSD (Part 1 and Part 2)

Age Estimate Source 1, Age Estimate Source 2 ↩︎

As Voltrathesparking pointed out, this does bring up some questionable motives: if Chara's goal was vengeance, how could they be sure vengeance would be executed if they died? Wouldn't they want to see the look on humans' faces as they/Asriel destroyed them? Some works presume the two Waterfall history plaques unreadable in the game (the one in the artifact room and the one defaced by Nice Cream flavors) provided the information that a monster that absorbed a human SOUL had control of its body split between the two SOULs. However, this remains speculation. ↩︎

It’s possible the hate substance itself made Chara feel hate spontaneously, and it was up to Chara to put reasons to it. (See this GlitchTale analysis) Nonetheless, this would reflect Chara’s, well, character. ↩︎

For more information, see this Nochocolate post, as well as this counter-post. ↩︎

[ohto-ai]

哪个男孩子不想拥有一个git同步的网站呢？

服务器创建git用户

addusr git passwd git

创建信任关系

Tip: 每次提交就不用输入密码了

本地创建key公钥证书

ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "zhuguangfeng.thatboy@gmail.com" cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

复制公钥到服务器

ssh-copy-id -i .ssh/id_rsa.pub git@thatboy.info

如果不识别ssh-copy-id指令，可以手动替换(建议加在authorized_keys结尾)

scp -p ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub git@thatboy.info:~/.ssh/authorized_keys

赋予权限

chomd 700 .ssh cd .ssh & chmod 600 authorized_keys

Tip: 可以修改git用户的权限，比如禁止登录等

修改ssh认证

sudo vim /etc/ssh/sshd_config RSAAuthentication yes #开启RSA认证功能 PubkeyAuthentication yes #开启公匙认证 StricModes no #不强制要求登录用户和文件拥有者用户相同

初始化git仓库

su root cd /usr/repos && git init --bare website.git chown -R git.git website.git

本地测试推送

略（git bash/github-desktop）

git@thatboy.info:/usr/repos/website.git

服务器clone

略（git账户）

git@thatboy.info:/usr/repos/website.git

利用钩子编写自动执行程序

touch /usr/repos/website/hooks/post-receive chmod -R 777 /usr/repos/website/hooks/post-receive vim /usr/repos/website/hooks/post-receive

内容如下

#!/bin/sh git --work-tree=/usr/website --git-dir=/usr/repos/website.git checkout -f

设置nginx目录

Tip: 需要管理员账户修改nginx.conf

sudo vim /usr/local/nginx/conf/nginx.conf

修正http和https为正确目录

# http部分 location / { root /usr/website; index index.html index.htm; } error_page 404 /404.html; location = /404.html { root /usr/website; } error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html; location = /50x.html { root /usr/website; } # https部分 location / { root /usr/website; index index.html index.htm; } error_page 404 /404.html; location = /404.html { root /usr/website; } error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html; location = /50x.html { root /usr/website; }

打完手工

sudo /usr/local/nginx/sbin/nginx -s reload

在本地修改好网站即可通过git提交修改，可以避免每次都要手动同步被修改的文件的痛苦。

补充

网站目录可搬迁，注意一下钩子的指令，最好执行一次以同步。

如果使用hexo等工具搭建可以更方便的修改提交哟，这里针对的是自己写的静态网站。

[loloftheday]

Saw the vet today. He said I should stop eating my delicious cardboard scratcher, then he called me “unruly.” F that guy. Mom said I cost as much as a 2008 Honda Civic, but I’m aiming for Tesla status. I can’t wait to get home & scream at my girlfriend next door.

[kazushuu]

FLIRT for both

##       **F   :   FLIRT.**   is your muse good at flirting? how do they flirt?>>       **“** ……………………………………. **”**      **“** …with my mouth. goodbye. **”**>>       **“** b-being   *sexy & suave*   is not my call at all… i’m sorry… **”**> yeah they’re both awful at being … seductive.> although out of the two of them, shuu is naturally villainous and speaks in riddles, paired with his aura, his voice, and his laugh, which whether he likes it or not makes him painfully hot.> but the problem is that all of that is unintentional. if he actually feels something intimate and wants to express it, he turns into mush just like kazuaki.> this is actually important, because even *anghel higure is devastated at witnessing these adults’ try to compliment one another without looking like two flustered schoolgirls,* respectively, which is why he made wallenstein and neg much more flirtatious and charming.> i’ve got to say though, if you put a bit of wine in shuu or kazuaki, they manage to muster the courage to keep a series of flirts going for longer than 3 seconds. it’s not any less amateurish (bottom-like) but i think they both find each other ridiculous. spoken words are not their suit. if anything, kazuaki can flirt via writing, which can vary from robust poetry to “hey shuu what r u wearing haha send pics wink wink”> shuu on another hand varies from “your…shampoo…smells nice…hoho” to “(insert long poetic monologue about how he wants to be possessed and taken by kazuaki which results in both of them crying. probably.)”. and, you know, implications about wanting to eat kazuaki, which is up for their interpretations.

[cosmicdatabase]

Mars is the next step for humanity – we must take it

Not the Red Planet but Utah, one of the more Mars-like areas on Earth. Ashley Dove-Jay, Author provided

Ashley Dove-Jay, University of Bristol

Elon Musk has built a US$12 billion company in an endeavour to pave the way to Mars for humanity. He insists that Mars is a “long-term insurance policy” for “the light of consciousness” in the face of climate change, extinction events, and our recklessness with technology.

On the other hand, astronaut Chris Hadfield is sceptical: “Humanity is not going extinct,” he told me. He added:

There’s no great compelling reason to go, apart from curiosity, and that’s not going to be enough to sustain the immense cost necessary with the technology that exists right now.

But I question our future, stuck here on Earth. Our environment is a highly balanced system and we are the destabilising element. Pursuing “green” initiatives is no long-term solution to the wall we’re hurtling towards, they’re speed bumps. If this is where humankind is destined to remain, then we shall find ourselves fighting over whatever is left of it.

Politically speaking, sending humans into space brings nations together – the International Space Station stood as the physical manifestation of the reunification of the USA and Russia and is now a platform for broader international co-operation.

Space exploration is also inspiring: during NASA’s Apollo programme to the Moon, the number of graduates in mathematics, engineering and the sciences in the US doubled. Igniting the imagination of that generation helped propel the US into the dominant position it’s held since the 1960s. What could a Mars programme do?

The Moon is not a stepping stone

Wouldn’t the Moon, so much nearer than Mars, be a better first step? Actually, no – it’s just too different. It’s better to test hardware and train people in analogs on Earth, such as the geologically similar high-altitude desert in Utah or the cold and dry Canadian Arctic desert. Why the European Space Agency has declared the Moon a stepping-stone to Mars is beyond me, as doing so increases the cost of a Mars programme hugely.

It takes about 50% more energy to put something on the surface of the Moon than it does on Mars. The Martian atmosphere can be used to slow down approaching spacecraft, instead of the need for extra fuel to slow the descent. It would also mean developing two different sets of landing techniques and hardware. There are reasons to go to the Moon, just not if your ultimate destination is Mars.

Even colonising the Moon is questionable: it simply hasn’t the resources to sustain an advanced colony. Mars has fertile soil, an abundance of water (as ice), a carbon-dioxide rich atmosphere and a 24-and-a-half hour day. The Moon’s soil is not fertile, water is as rare, it has no effective atmosphere, and a 708-hour day. It’s feasible to introduce biological life to Mars, but not the Moon.

T-shirts on Mars

With only a relatively small push, Mars could be returned to its former warm, wet, hospitable state. Raising the temperature at the south pole by a few degrees would see frozen CO2 in the soil begin to gasify. As a greenhouse gas, it would further raise the temperature, gasifying more CO2 in a self-sustained global-warming process.

Eventually, water frozen into the soil would liquefy, covering half of the planet. After about a century, Mars would settle down with an atmosphere about as dense as the lowland Himalayas and a climate suitable for T-shirts.

The terraforming of Mars, to a world not unlike ours. Daein Ballard, CC BY-SA

The technological hurdles

Hadfield warns that “we need to invent a lot of things” before going to Mars, and that “there’s no great advantage to being the early explorers who die”. Few would disagree with that, but what are the challenges a crewed mission to Mars faces?

Radiation: An astronaut would receive a lifetime allowable dose of radiation in a single 30-month round-trip, including 18 months on the surface. But this is only equivalent to increasing the lifetime cancer risk from about 20% to 23%. As the majority of this is received in transit between planets, with proper radiological protection on the ship, it would actually be (radiologically speaking) healthier for an astronaut to live on Mars with a radiation dose of 0.10 sieverts per year than to smoke on Earth at 0.16 sieverts per year.

There is no single practical solution to the radiation problem. One strategy I helped develop was to optimise the internal layout of the equipment and structures in the Mars habitat module to minimise exposure – placing existing bulk in all the right places. This reduced exposure by about 20%, without adding any mass. Even taking empty sandbags, packing them with Martian soil and putting them on the roof would be a simple and effective measure on Mars. Radiation is an issue to tackle, but it’s not a deal-breaker.

Power: “We need a compact energy source,” says Hadfield. “We cannot be relying on the tiny bit of solar power that happens to arrive at that location.”

While the solar energy reaching the surface of Mars is about half that on Earth, this isn’t a show-stopper. A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that to power the equivalent of an average US household on Mars, even through dust storms, one would need an array of solar panels totalling six metres square – very achievable.

Mars receives between 500-700 Watts of solar energy per square meter in daylight. Mars One

Reduced gravity: The effects of microgravity on astronauts’ health have been studied for decades, and a range of techniques have been developed to mitigate the wasting effects on muscle and bone.

With Martian gravity around a third of that on Earth, it would take astronauts a couple of days to acclimatise, and perhaps a few months to fully adapt. NASA and ESA have been developing an under-suit that compresses the body to overcome the negative effects of a reduction in pressure and gravity.

Gravity Loading Countermeasure Skinsuit. NASA / ESA

However, biological adaption could be made easier if microgravity were avoided altogether. The spacecraft could be spun in-transit to generate an artificial gravity that slowly decayed, simulating a transition from Earth to Mars gravity (and vice versa) over the six-month journey.

Ultimately, until humans are actually living on other planets it’s unlikely we’ll solve or even recognise all the subtle long-term health problems associated with reduced gravity. And who’s to say what the advances in bio-engineering and technology will make the human body capable of when that time comes?

The social hurdles

Life on Mars: If there’s life on Mars, even if it’s microbial, should we be allowed to spread to the planet, potentially risking its extinction? I find this question strange – as Chris McKay put it: “We commit microbial genocide every time we wash our hands”. We engineer and farm the complex life around us as systematically and as cheaply as possible. Billions of people eat the carcasses of organisms that were thinking and breathing only days before. Why, all of a sudden, should Martian microbes be given such sanctity? It should certainly be studied, but it shouldn’t prevent our spreading.

Back contamination: Conversely, the question of whether some Martian plague might accidentally be introduced to Earth should be taken seriously – but not blown out of proportion. There’s only a remote chance that Martian life might be hazardous. The things that kill us do so because they’ve evolved in lock-step with us in a continual evolutionary arms race. Any Martian life will have evolved independently and is unlikely to be capable even of interacting with Earth life on a molecular level. As Robert Zubrin put it: “Trees don’t get colds and humans don’t get Dutch Elm Disease.”

Sunshine (2007) epitomises psychological difficulties and human fallibility in deep-space. Fox Searchlight Pictures

Psychology: Depending on relative orbits, sending a message between Earth and Mars can take between three and 22 minutes. This loss of real-time communication will leave astronauts feeling cut-off and alone. Hadfield says that it’s vital to keep up crew morale and motivation:

Once you get any distance away on any sort of voyage, the epic-ness disappears, the reality becomes the foreground, and the applause is long gone.

Cost: A crewed Mars programme would cost the equivalent of a few weeks of the US defence budget. The US plans on spending about ten times more on nuclear weapons than on space exploration over the coming decade. The UK government spends about as much on gastric band surgery through the NHS as it does on its space activities.

So while a Mars programme certainly has challenges to overcome, the technological gap between us and Mars is far smaller than it was for the Moon programme in the 1960s. And the prospects the Red Planet holds for humanity are far greater.

Ashley Dove-Jay, PhD researcher in Aerospace Engineering, University of Bristol

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Follow @cosmicdatabase

[asphaltapostle]

What I have long predicted is now coming to pass: Google believes it should assume control.

Out of all the technology companies that have made my knees knock and my voice hoarse and my [Tweets manic](https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&q="google" %40ficklecrux&src=typd) as a technoheretic in the past several years, Jumbo Google would easily take home the winning trophy for Dystopian of the Millennium. I have been rehearsing an especially dear pet prophecy of mine, unsolicited, to family, friends, and podcast guests since 2011 in which I end up arguing quite convincingly that Google is a dead ringer for the 16th-century Vatican: an inherently self-isolating organization with an absolute monopoly yielding gargantuan levels of essentially passive income from a service which nearly everybody transacts with, but only Google understands (and is therefore assumed to be its only possible provider,) which inevitably develops such a distance from the rest of the populace and their way of life (in tandem with total notoriety and celebrity among them all) not intentionally out of malice, but from the delusion of mythically-bestowed philanthropic duty that is borned of and compounded by this economic and cultural isolation in a perpetual accumulation of power and wealth that radicalizes the monopolizers — the majority already highly predisposed to zeal as they would’ve needed to be in order to find themselves in this singular, universally powerful position over every other class — and leaves their egocentric minds to wander exempt from all criticism save for that of fellow radicalized monopolizers, who together begin to feel more and more comfortable wondering aloud about themselves in increasingly fantastic presumptions: what if all of this was bestowed upon us because we are superior to them? What if it is our divine responsibility as superior beings to take charge and shepherd the common people as our sheep — for they cannot possibly know as well as we what is truly best for them?

You see it, right? And you can feel a very specific flavor of terror that is both awed by the scale of the circumstances created by so few human minds and sincerely amused by the absoluteness of your own inability to alter them in any way. Perhaps you even recognize this taste as one perfected by Christianity’s ancient advertising business, but Google knows so much about you that it’s rumored to’ve been selling user data to the Judeochristian God for some time now at a 10% discount, and so we extrapolate and anticipate, yes?

Of course, it’s admittedly satisfying for me to deliver you to this godfearing place in the most perverse look what I saw first that you didn’t see because you’re just not as bright but lucky for you, I’m so fucking generous with my wisdom sort of thinking around which the entire personas and livelihoods of fringe movement fanatics are built upon, but this is my one thing, okay? I’ve been waiting years for the right time to formally argue this theory in depth, and — thanks to this year’s public spotlight finally pivoting on the giants who’ve been silently swallowing their competition and relentlessly forcing their already ridiculous margins higher and higher in relative obscurity for decades, the time has come, indeed. The common people’s trust in Google had a godawful week.

Don’t Be Evil

On Monday, Gizmodo reported that twelve frustrated Google employees were quitting the company in protest of their work assisting the Department of Defense to “implement machine learning to classify images gathered by drones” for the detail fleeting Project Maven, despite some 4000 employee signatures on a letter addressed to CEO Sundar Pichai requesting (in full) that he “cancel this project immediately,” and “draft, publicize, and enforce a clear policy stating that neither Google nor its contractors will ever build warfare technology,” citing the infamous “Don’t Be Evil” motto, which Google then proceeded to remove from its code of conduct for the first time in 18 years the day after the New York Times article went to press, on April 5th.

On initial approach to the abstract of this story, from the ass to our thoughts arrives an easy narrative of a Silicon Valley mutiny comprised of twelve brave, conscientious souls who’ve been eaten up inside by their complicity in the filthy deals made by their power-obsessed CEO over scotch and cigars in a dark D.C. study — kept awake for months by the sound of his puffing cackles at satellite images of dead toddlers in a bombed-out street.

Ah ha, we say. That man is no good, and he just wouldn’t listen! They knew they didn’t have a choice… They only did what they had to do…

The reality of internal disagreements at Google, though, manages to be even more theatrical. The sheer volume of correspondence must surely be beyond anything capable of the enduser’s imagination, so let’s phone a friend: my favorite peek into the day-to-days of inter-Google existence is an old blog post by Benjamin Tilly on his first month at the company in which he was compelled almost immediately to describe in great detail how best to “deal with a lot of email in gmail” at peak efficiency using shortcuts and labels. “As you get email, you need to be aggressive about deciding what you need to see, versus what is context specific.”

Now we have a bit better idea of the aggressive emailing that was a sure constant on a normal workday at Google in 2010, so it must’ve been deafening after 8 years of Gmail development as 4000 employees no doubt vented, debated, and decided to organize last month, though without making much headway because the leadership’s response was apparently “complicated by the fact that Google claims it is only providing open-source software to Project Maven,” this new knowledge having significant effect on our mind’s image of Sundar Pichai’s activities in Washington: he is now swapping seats with a frustrated Colin Powell in order to install OpenOffice onto his desktop from a flash drive, and we recall that Google’s Googleplex headquarters resembles nowhere in modern life more than a brand new playground built in a design language borrowing heavily from Spy Kids. And though these Twelve disciples are unnamed for the moment, a few of them could immediately land book deals by going public, and every single one would always have by default not only the badge of “I landed a job at Google,” (which is really to say I have hit Life’s maximum level cap,) but “I worked at Google for a while, but ended up quitting to do something else,” which is guaranteed to make you the most interesting, intellectually superior person present in whatever crowd for the rest of your life. The ultra-cool Sarah Cooper quit Google to become a comedian and even got to talk to Kara Swisher! I won’t pretend to understand big tech’s diminutive bastardization of prestige, but “more than 90 academics” jumping to publish an open letter (adjacent to a huge DONATE: Support the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots button) in which they “write in solidarity with the 3100+ Google employees” who’s terrible boss decided to help some lackeys in the Pentagon set up their email and didn’t text back for a whole hour doesn’t sound 100% sincere. Notably, I don’t know how or why the fuck 90 people would go about collaborating on a single document, but if it really was managed, they definitely used Google Docs… At one point, it was fun to think about the history of the friendly side-scroller-playing garage ghouls and dorm dorks who gave cooky, wacko names to their dot com startups in parody and defiance of the lame-ass surname anagrams on the buildings of their established competitors, but those who’ve stuck around have only done so by becoming expert at SUCKING UP EVERYTHING around them, and it pisses me off every day how worried I am that my species will finally be done in by a company with a name like Yahoo! and be known only to a bunch of adolescent interdimensional silicon blobs 30 million years in the future as that bipedal race who remained dignified until the last 0.01% of their reign on Earth, when in way less than a single generation, they all just went FUCKING INSANE and blew themselves up because they suddenly hated all sense.

“Google” is perhaps the worst of these to have to shout in fear and/or anger in your last moments as it sounds in American English like you’ve startled your subject with a ticklish pinch followed so immediately by an esophagus-busting chokehold that the two events appear simultaneous, and in real English English, it almost always sounds like a parent speaking of a character on a pre-K children’s television programme whom they find quite foul and upsetting, but will manage to refrain from expressing so otherwise because they know that Teletubbies shit is the most quickly forgotten stage of television viewership. It’s fascinating how exclusive the word “Google” is to American English because in everything else it really is complete nonsense, but lets halt all etymological discussions right now because we’ve only now just finished with Monday.

The Soul Ledger

On Thursday, all of my Google experiences, suppositions, and soul-detaching screenshots were usurped when a thoroughly alarming internal company video called The Selfish Ledger was leaked to The Verge, which I watched once then and do not want to watch again for the sake of this piece, but I will. Though the big V has been disappointingly timid for years about editorializing — when tech journalism desperately needs some confident, informed opinion more than ever — Vlad Savov’s accompanying article should be read in its entirety, to which I can add my own terror where he perhaps could not. The production style is technically identical to that of the very popular thinkpiece-esque, motion-graphics-paired-with-obligatory-sharpie illustrated videos which you find playing at max volume on your mom’s iPad from where she’s fallen asleep on the couch at 9PM, but the repeating stock string soundtrack multiplies one’s discomfort as such that we would all end up in the fetal position without remembering the transition were it not for the appearance of trusty old Dank Jenkins, who’s face I thankfully associate heavily enough with his infamous down-and-out Tweet to be a welcome respite in attention before the very scary hypothesis for which it’s been buttering me up, as best summed by Vlad:

> The system would be able to “plug gaps in its knowledge and refine its model of human behavior” — not just your particular behavior or mine, but that of the entire human species. “By thinking of user data as multigenerational,” explains Foster, “it becomes possible for emerging users to benefit from the preceding generation’s behaviors and decisions.” Foster imagines mining the database of human behavior for patterns, “sequencing” it like the human genome, and making “increasingly accurate predictions about decisions and future behaviors.”

The next time the what if they do something scary question comes up in a casual conversation about Google, you’ll have something a lot more substantial than just speculation. Or will you? The Verge reached out for comment and got an awfully convenient response.

> This is a thought-experiment by the Design team from years ago that uses a technique known as ‘speculative design’ to explore uncomfortable ideas and concepts in order to provoke discussion and debate.

Wow! Leave it up to grand ole Googe to reveal the ultimate excuse for just about any suggestion or behavior, though it does seem almost deliberately uncomfortable, doesn’t it? No matter — whether or not this video was ever about a project or tangible product development, or simply to explore uncomfortable ideas because it is proof that the company has reached that critical Vatican stage — if you’ll remember — where they now feel comfortable exploring Very Bad, but Very easily made Real Ideas amongst themselves about what would happen if they allowed their system to nudge its users around a different, slightly less optimal route to the bar, let’s say — without their knowledge — in order for the system to collect traffic data for the sake of its own interests? Which would be, technically, in the interest of all Ledger users now and in the future, so why not?

> The ledger could be given a focus, shifting it from a system which not only tracks our behavior, but offers direction towards a desired result.”

This, my dear privacy-obsessed friends, is the real issue with data collection — its power over huge groups by way of their behavior and it is never going to be remedied in any significant way by ad-blockers or VPNs because the EndUser shall always out number you 50 to 1, even decades from now. EndUser does not understand — or, crucially, have any desire to understand anything technical about what leads to the PewDiePie videos playing on his filthy screen. Here’s a great opportunity to escape Silicon Valley’s technolibertarianism and resign your Darwinian empathy in favor of meaningful and truly-effective action: if you want to avoid a future Google Church (or Google Government, more worryingly,) you should invest your time, effort, and knowledge into electing officials more capable of understanding and regulating Big Tech.

Google Government

The internet as it stands is made possible by Google as the goto resource for online advertising. In 2016, “Google held 75.8 percent of the search ad market, bringing in $24.6 billion in revenue from search ads,” according to Recode. By 2019, “that’s expected to grow to $36.62 billion in revenue, or 80.2 percent of the market.” Google’s edge in user behavior and targeted advertising combined with their extensive resources available developers to integrate independent platforms with Google’s software services at various levels makes it very difficult for any advertising-funded individual or organization to compete online without dipping in to the Google universe. YouTube — a Google property since 2006 — has actively invested in and supported a new career path entirely within their own platform that is rapidly becoming popularly aspired-to by young children, while the reality of existence as a full-time YouTuber is far less glamorous than the immediately-visible surface would indicate, and the effort already expended by my generation in its pursuit has already made us insane.

So, what would the internet look like if Google didn’t exist? We know they’ve been working with the government now on various projects, but what if some terrible exposed transgression of theirs suddenly warranted an immediate shutdown and seizure of all Google properties? Well, we know from a post on Quora by Googler Ashish Kedia that even 5 years ago, the sudden absence of Google for “2–3 mins” set the internet into a bit of a panic, reducing overall traffic by 40%. In the time since, we’ve all grown exponentially more dependent on Google properties: billions of people rely on Google Maps for directions and, thousands of companies (including the Pentagon and other government institutions) rely on Gmail and GSuites for intercommunication, file sharing, task management, etc., and more and more academic institutions rely on Chromebook devices running connection-dependent operating systems. It’s not much of a stretch to argue that Google’s sudden disappearance would constitute a Civil Emergency in the United States, which will only become a stronger and more serious incentive for regulatory bodies to look the other way.

Though the tangible results of advertising have been quantified significantly in the past 20 years, one can’t help but wonder after watching YouTube ads for the new Mercedes-Benz S-Class on toy unboxing videos if the companies who spend big bucks on Google advertising understand where their money is going, but they know that if they don’t advertise there, their competitors will. This, of course, is a fundamental practice of a monopoly, and it’s yielded Google so much fucking money that they cannot possibly spend it fast enough, as evidenced by their investments in life extension — so that, perhaps, they will have more time on Earth to figure it out.

When you build a collection of the world’s smartest people in a self-sufficient environment that discourages exploration of other lifestyles and ideas, and you sustain the society with a gargantuan, relatively low-maintenance revenue stream, you create a culture which is not only well-primed for isolationism, but is also extremely inefficient. In fact, with its vast collection of abandoned products and properties, Google must surely be one of the most inefficient companies in history. Thinking back on recent software releases along with its recent entries into the hardware space, Google is also one of the worst competing tech companies. Very little aside from Gmail, Google Photos, Google Maps, and Chrome have found their place or garnered significant usership. Google Play Music is unintuitive and impossible, Google Allo and Google+ are all but forgotten addendums to other services, and Google Search — its core, original function — has been out of control for years, and all of them are designed blandly and excruciatingly tiring to look at.

Google Shun

If this all has stirred nothing more in you than a desire to eliminate Google from your own online life as much as possible, there are alternatives in almost every one of the sphere’s they dominate. As of late, DuckDuckGo has accumulated a fair amount of buzz and coverage as a private, more relevant alternative to Google’s plain old search engine. Though it is clever enough to list us as the first result for “extratone,” I’ve found it simply insufficient as a replacement in my own life because, essentially, it rarely delivers what I’m looking for. By contrast, Dropbox Paper is such an elegant cloud notetaking and word processing software that it makes Google Docs look simply idiotic (and warrants its own review very shortly.) For getting around, know that MapQuest is not only still around — it’s now a very competitive mobile navigation app.

I, myself, have allowed Google as complete of access to my information and behavior as possible because I believe “privacy” is a completely futile endeavor if one wishes to be a part of society, though I do often use alternatives to Google services simply because I fucking hate the way they look. If you want a more complete list of services and software that allow one to shun the Google God entirely, you’ll be forced to seek out less dignified sources like Lifehacker and Reddit and decide if the additional time you’ll spend using most of them to accomplish the same tasks is really worth your digital angst.

If Google were to be more explicit with its users and staff about its aspirations to take over control of our lives, there will be little to do but accept the future they intend to create because they’ve long been too powerful to control. In the meantime, I’d suggest you continue to use whatever software works best for you and refrain from wasting your time fretting on conspiratorial suppositions of what the tech industry may be doing to “invade your privacy,” because there is no longer any such thing, nor will there be ever again. However, I would also urge to you worship your own Gods, whomever they may be, for Google will never be worthy. I, for one, shall only pray to our Mother Sun.

#social #google #future #web #privacy

original post