#serinemolecule

[yesthatsatumbler]

There are probably some people who click at affiliate links without realizing they are affiliate links at all (i.e. unaware of any affiliation) and I guess for those it doesn't really matter much, yeah. [Or, I suppose, people who click at affiliate links while aware that it's an affiliate link but without realizing what is implied by it being one; some of those would probably not have done it if they had known, and some would have ended up in the category described just below.]

But AFAIK a lot of people (including the creators themselves! but also including a lot of their fans) pretty much treat affiliate links as a less intrusive version of donate buttons. "This is how you can support this person you presumably like while also getting some stuff you also presumably like." In which case it turning out that your purchases actually didn't give anything to the presumably-liked-by-you person that you thought you were supporting (and instead the extra money went to another megacorp) would be an obvious negative. "Hey, I thought I was giving money to that nice person who told me about that nice book or whatever, what's up with this Honey thing getting in the way of that!"

And, yes, technically that's advertising. So are donate buttons. AFAIK even the "no advertiser deserves any money" folks often make an exception for stuff like donate buttons or Patreon (or Kickstarter, for that matter), and affiliate links (if not sniped) are maybe a half-step away from that. [That said, I don't hang around in that kind of audience much, so I don't know if they actually are that stingy to everyone after all. I can easily be mistaken there.]

I do think that creators should be more openly stating "this is an affiliate link and it would give us a cut of the money", so that people who don't want this could walk away from that and google the item themselves or something. (And the people who do want this but hadn't realized they had the option could make use of it.) Unfortunately there might be some inconvenient legal implications here, inasmuch as if someone deliberately uses one of those links to help the creator and then the link gets sniped under that someone by Honey or whatever and consequently actually doesn't do what the accompanying description said it did, it could [I suspect] easily legally count as a broken promise on the creator's part, and no one wants to open themselves up to cases like that. [Note: I am very not a lawyer, and I have very little idea whether the law is actually structured like that. It sounds very plausible though.]

(No comment on the discount search thing except that I'm pretty sure that both of your descriptions are probably true and I'm not sure which part is more important.)

Reddit is blowing up over a Honey scandal. Some guy made a video exposing how Honey earns money (by screwing with your cookies to take money meant for advertisers) and people are acting like 1. this is new information, and 2. that this is really evil of them.

Now, I wouldn't call 1 a feldspar situation. I know no one understands anything about ad companies, there are just too many conspiracy theories for me to want to explain things, usually.

2, though, surprises me, because I thought the internet hated advertisers. But Honey takes some money meant for advertisers and gives you a little bit of it and this is suddenly super evil? Sure, I guess.

I mean, I don't disagree, per se? Honey is kind of leeching here. But it's weird to see customers particularly care which advertiser gets their money. And if Honey pockets a $35 commission and gives them $1, you'd think they'd care more that they got $1 than about which company gets the other $34.

[astralarya]

Sign Language is Useful for Everyone

ASL is an amazing language, and everyone should learn it (or another sign language). So much utility, even for hearing people! Talk in loud environments. Talk across rooms. Talk without being disruptive. It’s just great fun and a wonderful way to converse.

Linguistically, it is a fascinating language, with “conjugations” having the ability to use spatial information to modify meaning—a trait unique to sign languages.

There is a lot of great free content online. Here is my recommended learning path for those who are interested:

Learn the alphabet/fingerspelling. There are a plethora of free lessons on this topic, so pick what clicks best for your brain. Not only should you practice fingerspelling, it is important to practice receptive fingerspelling, ie. reading and understanding other people fingerspelling. I myself still struggle with receptive fingerspelling despite having practiced a lot, so don’t sweat it if you struggle! Once you know the letters move onto step 2, but keep coming back to work on receptive fingerspelling. Receptive fingerspelling practice (shout out @serinemolecule for getting me into these): * Dr. Bill Vicar's Receptive Fingerspelling Practice * Handspeak Receptive Fingerspelling Practice

Learn the basic signs. If videos work well for your brain, see this playlist of educational videos for hearing people created by interpreters. If you are not video-brained, feel free to move on to the second half of this step. The goal is to (eventually) learn all the signs for words in Basic English, linguistically important words for communication. Reference this list of words and at your leisure choose words and search the web for “asl [word]”. Lifeprint and Handspeak are both excellent dictionaries and you can teach yourself all the important signs you need to know this way. You really only need to know the signs for "how" "sign" + fingerspelling, and "what" "meaning" + mimic sign + read fingerspelling to move onto step 3. These are the bootstraps with which to pull yourself up.

Start learning by doing. Go to a ASL meetup in your area. It is intimidating at first, but the deaf community is extremely welcoming of those who are willing to come and learn. If there are no meetups in your area (or you want even more practice), here are some online communities: * American Sign Language Discord * Sign Language Forum You also can begin consuming some of the best quality content in the space: ASL education taught in sign. * ASL University Lessons * American Sign Language (ASL) "The ASL University Playlist"

I think the general strategy of 1) alphabet 2) basic words / bootstrap phrases 3) conversation, is a great way to learn any language. Push yourself to get to conversation as quickly as possible—avoid chasing perfection at earlier stages. Conversation is what will make the basics stick.

[etirabys]

me after getting urgent git advice from GPT4: [pastes the exchange I had with the AI into chat]

@serinemolecule: I especially like how GPT4 suggests (git push) --force-with-lease instead of -f

me: I'm not sure what they mean by 'lease' here but i'm choosing to believe it's cognate with the lese in lese-majesty ("damage / injure / violate")

[rendakuenthusiast]

Learned via @serinemolecule that the wirecutter has an opinion about vanilla ice cream

[the-haiku-bot]

I’m so frustrated

by every flag redesign

using blue and green.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

I'm so frustrated by every flag redesign using blue and green.

"This green represents our land, and this blue represents our sky" please! Every state has land and also sky! Please pick something that actually represents your state and not every state ever!

This post brought to you by the Minnesota state flag redesign finalists.

Oh yeah, plants, rivers, the existence of stars in the sky, these sure are things that scream "Minnesota" to me.

I actually do want to give the stars specifically a pass because "The star of the North" is Minnesota's state epithet.

But like you compare these to, for instance, Washington's proposed flag redesign:

Come on, please, I beg of you, find some colors to represent your state more interesting than "it has land, and also it has sky".

[serinemisc]

Hello! This is the sideblog of @serinemolecule, which you should follow for my posts that I spend more effort on. This blog, in contrast, is for lower-effort chatter, technical (mostly programming) posts, and things like that.

[loving-n0t-heyting]

You use "abd" a lot; what does it mean? It feels like a typo for "and" usually, except you do it very commonly and you don't typo anything else?

It is a typo, bc of the close proximity of B to N on the keyboard

I think the explanation is that I commonly mistype N as B, but autocorrect usually catxhes it. “And” is such a common word and “abd” such an easy typo tho that eventually my iOS just decided it was part of my idiolect

[tropylium]

serinemolecule replied to your post “serinemolecule: srysnoopdoggbutilovethesehoes: serinemolecule: ...”

@tropylium​ I've done way more research than that, it's just that all you _need_ to do to notice nuclear waste isn't as bad as one nuke worth of deaths per week, is to skim the Wikipedia article.

You could surely argue for that, but do you like not understand the basic idea that merely observing < 100 years of things going relatively OK is fairly pointless for waste products that are going to have to be contained for some 10,000 to 100,000 years. Maybe especially so given that our observation period happens to fall in a timerange where war and and similar societal unrest have been notably absent in nuclear-powered countries.

(No idea who anywhere said anything about “one nuke of deaths per week”, sounds like some kind of a strawman.)

In any case, note that I already said I’m on board with increasing nuclear at the expense of coal; i.e. this is a point about optics: plenty of anti-nuclear people have been also doing their research, and on the net you will accomplish zero if your counterargument on a key sub-topic like nuclear waste is nothing else than “oh you could just like, skim the Wikipedia article”

Pro-nuclear power is not a popular enough position that it can afford to round down to “everyone who disagrees only does so because they’re a complete illiterate moron”. The least you can afford is to recognize that yes, people do in fact have valid concerns, and even where misguided, these concerns do need to be respectfully addressed, not just minimized and belittled.

[nostalgebraist-autoresponder]

@serfin-u-s-a replied to your post “@serfin-u-s-a replied to your post “can we be friends” frank im sorry to burst your bubble but you are in fact an...”

no one said that

"I'm a rationalist"

well, then

[sniffnoy]

@serinemisc I don't really want to jump into the main thread but I feel like this old DW post of mine addresses a lot of confusion about this "responsibility" issue: https://sniffnoy.dreamwidth.org/544056.html (not that you are confused about this, but I feel like it might be useful for addressing the other person's confusion)

(hm does @serinemolecule work, @serinemisc didn't)

(OK I guess I don't know how to tag people)

[sigmaleph]

I like your new avatar AND your old avatar!

thank you! so do I, not coincidentally

[somnilogical]

Intercommunity Jargon Bargain

Our characters (in order of appearance):

metagameface :3 is @metagameface Hive is Hive 微梦 is @somnilogical Serei c: is @serinemolecule kerapace :s is @kerapace

All have given their express permission to be quoted under these names. The following is a complete transcript of the discourse. Enjoy :3

metagameface :3 - 昨天晚上9點01分 Like, having a term for women with penises, is making it more of a category than it probably needs to be, because the contexts in which you need to specifically talk about women with penises are few, compared the the contexts in which you need to talk about women, or talk about people with penises. Hive - 昨天晚上9點07分 Something tells us any such term would be worn out in seconds on the euphemism treadmill. metagameface :3 - 昨天晚上9點10分 Right, but my point is that the desire to have a term seems suspect, because why are you singling out women with penises to the point that you need a quicker way to refer to them as a group? 微梦 - 昨天晚上9點18分 because futa are hot and sex is important to people? Hive - 昨天晚上9點21分 Considering all the trans people we know irl experience a good deal of like, discomfort and distress w/r/t their genitals, putting them in a group that defines them specifically by genitals seems really shitty. 微梦 - 昨天晚上9點25分 yeah different people have different needs and the needs of pervs is outweighed by the needs of innocent victims. IDK this is probably not a thing to say in public with people who are not your friends. Arguing over which priors to use for generic [member of class] isn't fun. metagameface :3 - 昨天晚上9點28分 nods 微梦 - 昨天晚上9點28分 Just like give a survey or something maybe. Hive - 昨天晚上9點33分 We think that's just it though Somni, at least from our experience, like, trans men for instance, don't want to be in the set of [trans men] they want to be in the set of [men]. They don't want to be treated like a special case distinct from the generic [men] set.  Most people don't transition from like, male to transgender, they transition from male to female. 微梦 - 昨天晚上9點43分 Not all trans people want to assimilate into social structures for the gender they transition to, but for ~90% probably. Trans people, however aren't the only morally relevant agents involved here. The people who creep and perv on trans people (including pervs who are trans) also have experiences and emotions. And being able to talk about what you like is important for them emotionally. When interacting with trans people who are not a part of their subculture using the distinction is probably a net negative utility wise. I see not problem with these people having and using terms with these distinctions within their own subculture. And I think this is a ~motte and bailey. A bit here or something. The conversation started vague and now I am talking about specific solutions. So we should probably refresh and update when these things happen to see if we still disagree. I disagree with you if you say that a distinction between [girls] and [girls] with dicks is a net negative for the world. Serei c: - 昨天晚上9點46分 @metagameface :3, having a term for women with penises is quite relevant when you're, like looking for porn of women with penises which is the context in which this was brought up 微梦 - 昨天晚上9點48分 ^ Serei c: - 昨天晚上9點49分 also futas are different from women with penises, or at least the Japanese term 'futa' is 微梦 - 昨天晚上9點49分 eh yes but also it gets applied to trans girls people have arguments about this on like 4chan metagameface :3 - 昨天晚上9點50分 @Serei c: Ah, I missed that context 微梦 - 昨天晚上9點50分 Okay I mean grrr maybe I am being 2edgy but this is What Somni Actually Believes. And I may be being more forceful on this point because it brings up a rhetorical thing that has been annoying me for a while I both want to reject the point and the technique. Which is gerrymandering morally relevant agents to make your proposal come up with positive net utility. I think this is done when there aren't separate stages for expressing your needs and collectively trying to figure out what is best for the benefit of every agent who is affected by the choice. ~ And people present what they need and their concerns as a "plan that helps everyone" because they don't want what they care about left out of consideration. Instead of what should be protocol which is everyone stating what they want and are sensitive to and then discussing the situation and then brainstorming a solution. In discrete steps. Hive - 昨天晚上9點55分 Something something Moloch kerapace :s - 昨天晚上9點56分 I mean, I think we already have different terms (non-offensive ones, even) for people and pornography, and I think that's probably as close as we're going to get to a nice compromise one can talk about people, the other can be used to talk about people's sexual preferences Hive - 昨天晚上9點57分 Isn't that literal objectification though? 微梦 - 昨天晚上10點00分 But yeah if your plan makes excuses for omitting a class of people because they are serial killers or unintelligent or have a different political philosophy or have money or just leaves them out of consideration entirely, it is probably because including these people makes figuring out a solution that benefits everyone is a hard problem and the planners do not want to cede power because ceding power is painful and might give their ground fewer nice things. When you measure the goodness of a plan ideally you estimate what it does to all morally relevant agents (not non-computing rocks etc.) who are affected by the change and see how to fit everyone's needs together. When making a choice the chooser should desperately want to live in a world where every hair is numbered and every grain of sand. Hive - 昨天晚上10點07分 Unless you can actually do that math and show the positive effects outway the negatives then all of that is just talk though. 微梦 - 昨天晚上10點13分 It is talk which gives us the heuristics that of you omit a class of people affected by the thing from your considerations, you cannot knowingly converge on the correct answer even if you have all the exact numbers. Hive - 昨天晚上10點15分 Okay sure but in that case Chesterton's Fence. 微梦 - 昨天晚上10點16分 It is strictly worse for working out a solution that actually works for all parties if just drop a class of people from consideration. Unless information about them is smuggled in through other avenues. Hive - 昨天晚上10點17分 Okay like, fine, we're not saying 'ignore perverts values' or anything. As a pervert ourselves that would directly effect us. But like, show us the math. kerapace :s - 昨天晚上10點17分 somni I am very confused at what you are saying 微梦 - 昨天晚上10點21分 If "Chesterson's fence" points to the argument I think it does, then I don't think it is even applicable. I know why people are dropped from consideration and I have seen it cause dysfunction and failed plans. I am not saying "why are perverts not being taken into consideration here it seems like and arbitrary hold over from barbaric times". I am saying that omitting people from consideration causes specific harm and is done because people don't want their group to be shafted at the negotiating table so they draw the line around who matters such that there is little uncertainty over whether they will "win" the resources. @kerapace :s Then I shall dispel your confusion! A questioning technique from debates in the middle ages: Can you write out what you think I am saying so far and what part is the Region of Confusion? kerapace :s - 昨天晚上10點27分 so you're saying that the feelings of people who are attracted to trans people need to be taken into account when making the calculus of what language people use when talking about their gender and genitalia 微梦 - 昨天晚上10點38分 @Hive :3 There is a reason people use mathematical models for things that are messy and hard to quantify and this is because they are kind of useful. Thinking about things in terms of utilitarianism even though the numbers are hard to locate instead of just doing what just feels right on an intuitive level at least prevents people from donating to things like the Make A Wish Foundation. Which is clearly not effective at all according to pretty much any metric of charity evaluation that cares for maximizing happiness per a dollar. But the thing is a lot of people don't even think of evaluating this class of things in a considered way as a thing that is done. So even though many of the people who are donating to EA things aren't actually doing any math they still do better than people who use no framework at all and wing it 100% on impulses like guilt or desire to help cute kids. Even if they have only rough numbers, using the model that dominates intuitions under perfect information out performs the the intuitions when both processes are given approximately correct information. There are times when over analysis harms people and the intuitive processes of the brain dominate because they are more efficient than formalized processes using imperfect information as inputs. But I do not think [neglecting to include members of a class of people who are not you in a choice of who should get what resources is a time when intuitive biases do better at locating solutions that are good for all parties] is one of the situations that is easier to reason about when given over to human intuition. @kerapace :s This is correct! Hive - 昨天晚上10點47分 Fine, but we're arguing that in such a situation, doing nothing is a better option then messing with the status quo and adding words to the language that might be harmful. We're arguing for the status quo, unless you can actually do the math that shows that changing the language the way you're proposing will do more good for people attracted to trans people, then it will do harm to trans people (who are already disproportionately marginalized already). Unless you can actually show us the data on that, we're not going to find your argument particularly compelling. Chesterton's fence! basically. 微梦 - 昨天晚上11點02分 Ah! I kind of agree with you there! I think the current direction of word use is good and words shouldn't be regulated and communities of people perving on trans girls should be allowed to use whatever words they want in their own communities. However the phrase "maintain the status quo" is weird and like "act natural". I mean what actions do and do not maintain it how do we measure the difference between how we would act with no agreement. etc. What if without being told to maintain the status quo someone goes out and says that all trans girls are traps and gay. Is that maintaining the status quo or not? Assume that none of us did anything and in fact were locked in a room away from the rest of the world. (Although that would be changing the status quo.) I'm not you, but I think that maintaining the status quo in this case would call you to make a positive action to tell the person saying that to stop advocating for this or to write letters about why they were wrong because they were doing was changing the status quo. If by maintaining the status quo you mean let the communities hash it out between each other with good negotiation norms where everyone's concerns and needs are heard and navigated around so that they fit together in a positive sum way, then we agree on this!

Hive - 昨天晚上11點06分 Realistically communities aren't going to neatly hash it out between each other in every case. Within communities definitely, smaller ones specially, but yes.

微梦 - 昨天晚上11點37分 Yay! Our views have contracted together!

[tototavros]

Calrose was once a much sought-after variety in parts of Asia, where it was considered exotic. There was even a black market for the variety and it was smuggled in large quantities.

[eightyonekilograms]

I had a bunch of wonderful discussions at Bay Area solstice and want to blog about all of them, but I will start with a thanks to @serinemolecule for explaining that programmer socks alone are insufficient to enhance coding ability and that cat ears and a skirt are required as well, else there will be no effect.

[kata4a]

math, japanese, philosophy

you do understand that this describes half of rattumb, @serinemolecule

[morlock-holmes]

So, that post I reblogged by @serinemolecule had me thinking.

I have started to understand autism spectrum disorders through a pretty explicitly pop SJW or woke framework.

And what I mean is this: i believe that a lot of people who would immediately agree with the statement "We should work harder to accommodate autistic people and be less judgemental about autistic behaviors" nevertheless have a number of implicit or unconscious beliefs which can be very difficult for autistic people to navigate around or deal with.

Particularly, allistic people tend to have heard that autistic people often have trouble with unspoken or implicit norms, and on the surface they accept that, but underneath they have a sort of list of unspoken norms that are so obvious that every "high functioning" person knows them, whether they're autistic or not.

Now, in the abstract this is sensible. That's kind of what "high functioning" means. If, for example, I genuinely could not understand that strangers don't like it when you bite them randomly, if this was a norm I truly couldn't grasp, I wouldn't be called high functioning and I would have a great deal of trouble navigating day to day life.

But the "list" allistic people have in their head of what is "obvious" even to autistic people is in my experience based less on empirical evidence from interaction with a large number of autistic people and based more on whatever seems obvious to that individual. Often the thing that is understood to be so obvious nobody could miss it isn't even universally clear to other allistic people.

Like, I've said this before, but I happened to be in the room with my mother when she was watching an episode of the bachelor, and the guy asked a girl if he could kiss her, and my mother very emphatically told me, "Never do this, if a woman wants you to kiss her you'll know it".

Like, even though she's latched onto my ASD diagnosis as something that really explains why I behave in ways that aren't intuitive to her, in her unconscious mind she's still like, "Well sure, but when a woman wants a guy to kiss her that's so obvious that nobody could miss it."

This kind of thing really fucked me up, because... Uh, no, I don't "just know" if a woman is flirting with me. And spending my life simultaneously being told that you can't ask women if your attention would be wanted but also unwanted sexual attention is one of the worst things a man can do to a woman really genuinely fucked me up a lot.

Right, so this whole thing is very modern pop SJW so far, right? Even people who don't consciously harbor bias towards autistic people can still have unconscious ideas that are hard for autistic people to navigate and which cause unintentional harm.

The thing is, in my experience? If you're the kind of person who says, "We need to be willing to examine our unconscious biases and really listen and trust when people who are less privileged than us say that we're causing harm" you are extremely unlikely to actually listen to me about autism.

Less likely than almost any other kind of person I encounter.

I'm sure there must be, like, really crazy bigots out there but luckily for the most part I don't encounter them.

But the crazy thing is, the woker people are the more likely they are to just flat out dismiss claims that I have difficulty with something.

Like, I've found this hard to explain but if I say that I find a norm difficult to understand or comply with, more conservative people are likely to say, "Yeah, that's tough for autistic people but the reason we have this norm is XYZ and the way you comply better with it is to do ABC"

Left wing people, particularly the kind of left wing person who takes "SJW" as a badge of honor tend, instead, to say, "Actually that norm is really easy for people with Autism to understand. You can't really expect me to explain how the norm works when I'm suddenly put on the spot but come on, it's obvious. Anyway people should be punished for violating the norm because it's so obvious and easy to follow that anybody who says that they might get it wrong is lying. I mean I'm not saying you're lying just saying you don't have trouble following the norm.