“Robinson”!?!

I’m sorry but you’re going to have to hand in your passport.

Ideally you duct-tape a grenade to each of your “decoys” so it doesn’t really matter either way which target they choose to prioritize

Sympathize with their plight if you find doing so worthwhile, but also recognize their response isn’t helping.

Maybe they’re just a fan of death?

…Or maybe they mean threatening death itself— As in, like “Stop killing my friends, Death, that’s really not cool, and I’m going to start stealing your Death-beers from your Death-fridge if you don’t stop”.

…There’s probably an ecological definition for “community” that you could try to transfer over… I think in cases where a large group of individuals don’t actually interact with all of each other either directly or indirectly, but are nonetheless relevant as a grouping because they share a particularly contextually prominent set of traits (E.G. “Plays Video Games”), then “population” might be a more appropriate term (if a bit sterile).

Aligning power over systems with stackholders impacted by those systems is usually good for avoiding hostile incentives which result in hurting people, yes. Plus to some it might axiomatically be morally good.

https://reddit.com/r/gamedev/s/mLv9uIQ1vO

That just redirects to thread 16j21jg. They’re generating opaque unique IDs so they can track permalinks now?

…Am I not allowed to use “y’all”, north of the 49th parallel? Do we have to bring back “thou” so “you” can be plural again? Or is this part of the Quebecois plot to force everyone to parler en français donc nous pouvons utiliser “vous”? C’est bien, anyway, j’suppose.

Oh. Funny. I was actually wondering when I posted this if anyone would take me seriously— Though I was imagining my abusers pretending to take it seriously in bad faith in order to hurt my credibility, and then how I would then have to explain myself to well-meaning people who might just be less familiar with the Linux-side systems I mentioned.

I was joking. Saying cmd.exe uses WSL→X11→xdotool→GUI to operate is a bit like saying “Every Toyota is secretly powered by a tiny little Honda with a tiny little man driving on a treadmill that’s connected to the wheels under the hood”. (xdotool is basically just a keyboard and mouse macro thing— So maybe you can imagine how silly it would be if you typed in cd or ls/dir or whatever and it just took over control of your mouse and clicked on the “File Explorer” from the “Start Menu”.) It would be such an absurd and Frankensteinian design that I find the thought of it intrinsically funny.

Sorry for the misunderstanding.

Fun fact: Every Windows command line command actually just spams xdotool through the X11 server on WSL in order to do the equivalent action through the Windows GUI.

The kind of media I don’t have backup of is from my Handycam tapes since they no longer make the software and I don’t know how to digitize them in any other way.

Do this if desperate, but see below first: Magnetic tape cassettes? Are they standard? Then just stick them in an audio player and record the signal— Or actually, they’re probably 8mm, or DV, or something— So then rip the reader head out of an audio player, scroll through the tape at a constant rate, and digitize that signal (for as many tracks as needed). Don’t do anything silly, like using too much force or sticking too strong a magnet next to them, of course. As long as you’ve got the signal, you can worry about decoding it later if you lose the originals— Get some nerdy college student to figure it out, or wait for someone else with the same problem to post their GIT repository.

Easier: Check if the Internet Archive has a copy of the software. It looks like they have quite a few Sony Handycam CDROMs. Maybe you’ll find a compatible model. Run it on an old Windows VM or computer if you need. “No longer make the software” sounds odd; Software like that is made once and then distributed.

(Or: Presumably you can still watch the tapes? Does the camera not have video output that you pass through some sort of capture box? — Though that of course would be lossy.)

Or: Wikipedia suggests the “Handycam” brand was used for multiple format standards, like “Video8” or “Hi8” or whatever. So just search Nile.com (or your personal favourite exploitation-powered online storefront) for “NameOfFormat Digitizer”, and wait for the order to to arrive. Here’s a couple articles from the first search results: IndieWire, VHSConverters. Here’s a machine that supports a couple formats, and has licensed a very reputable brand KodakPhotoPlus. And here’s a service that will apparently do it for you: LegacyBox. — Pricey, maybe, but how much time and money are you already spending, and how much are the tapes worth to you?

Crazy how a single event sometimes reminds people of bigger problems, huh?

Digital media, where we store basically everything we care about, is hugely, hugely volatile, unreliable, and fragile. But you never notice it until you’re reminded of it, and then you really notice it. This story reminded people of it.

The reminder to stay grounded is probably also healthy, but I do think you’re missing the point of this comment thread.

Definitely fly both at once, or overlay them tastefully or something, instead of going full pride-version.

Mutilating the country’s flag in order to show your “patriotism”, as certain groups do, is… Certainly an interesting symbolic choice.

Wearing or sporting an American flag gets all the wrong kind of attention. I really don’t want to deal with it. Frightening minorities and getting thumbs up/nods from racists isn’t really my thing.

Then stick it next to a rainbow flag, or a Statue of Liberty, or a peace sign, or the date of the Emancipation Proclamation, or any of the symbols that y’all actually do still have for actual freedom.

It’s all about the messaging. Make it clear: “This is the flag of the nation, for everybody in the nation, and anyone who flies a mutilated version of it is a coward.”

There’s a slim chance someone with a regular American flag isn’t a nationalist twat.

Y’all should really reclaim that. It’s a good flag, and it’s supposed to mean some things that are actually quite nice.

Idk. It’s probably morally grey at best, but the military is at least honest that they kill people. Air pollution apparently kills 6.7 million people annually, compared to every war put together killing just 0.1 million people annually over the last decade. But the difference is that if you work in air pollution you get to run slick ads bragging about how clean you are, whereas if work in murder-machines you’re more directly confronted with the reality and the gravity of what you’re doing— The latter may be scarier, but the former feels much more gross.

I agree, but by now there’s probably no reason to make people write those kind of things. It’s likely that no human oversight is needed at all. Astroturfing can now be nearly completely automated.

Probably I’m just picking semantics, but that kinda is the good reason to make humans write those kinds of things. Astroturfing is bad, so needing to pay an entire human to be able to do it imposes a cost that limits its spread and application. I guess that’s also what you’re saying.

But that’s a very small gain considering the massive loss of trust in the web and making it a glitchy, spammy, scammy experience.

I’ve been passively wondering how long it will be until I have to start adding before:2023 to get remotely useful web search results on any topic. Don’t know what to try yet if I need to look up something from after that.

On the contrary, I believe our inherent ability to trust each other is one of the main pillars of civilization, and undisclosed use of LLMs heavily undermines it.

Oh yeah, definitely. I just meant that as an ironic silver lining, the damage would probably be worse if there wasn’t already some level of dishonesty and deception in society, because then we’d be too pure to have any defences against LLMs.

It’s a standard USB device. It interacts with MacOS only via the USB bus, following the standard/spec. If it craps its pants and fails catastrophically when it receives specific, valid USB commands, then it doesn’t matter whether it’s only MacOS or TempleOS that sends the commands that trigger that particular failure case. It’s still the drive’s fault, because it’s failing to do its literal one and only job of safely storing your data over USB.

E.G.: If MacOS can trigger the failure now, then there’s no guarantee that any future update to Windows or Linux won’t also trigger the same failure.

That is exactly the type of content LLMs were designed to excel at generating.

Hm. It’s also exactly the kind of disingenuousness that that humans have spent a couple million years evolving to try to detect, though.

I wonder if the LLMs are going to win this. Maybe more likely: When everyone realizes that the entire Internet is being flooded with even more bullshit, we’ll just stop trusting it, and the LLMs will more or less have put themselves out of a job.

It would be funny if the propensity for humans to lie to each other meant that we were basically already inoculated from this terrifying new category of machines that we’ve designed to lie to us too.

PCM, ASCII, and straight RGBA bitmap encodings aren’t going anywhere. By extension, derived formats like WAV, UTF-8, and word processor files and webpage HTML are mostly fine too. The formats are structurally simple enough that even if the associated file extensions were somehow to be forgotten, all you’d need to do to invent them again is hand the file to a bored nerd over the weekend.

I think you kinda got the BBC and NASA problems backwards. The BBC’s had a couple of prominent incidents where digital “preservation” that was supposed to be eternal couldn’t even be opened anymore after a couple of years, like their Domesday Book/Project application thingy. They’ve also lost a bunch of old shows, like early Dr. Who episodes, I think. NASA didn’t just forget how to read the Apollo tapes; they overwrote them to reuse the tapes, as was their standard practice at the time. The original signal and tapes were very HD (or analog), but most of the videos we have today are from the TV camera that they pointed at their own TV screen last-minute when they realized they didn’t have an adapter for broadcast— The equivalent of a grainy cell phone photo of a screenshot, basically.

The BBC and NASA incidents happened in an era before computers were a ubiquitous commodity product. So, everyone and their cat was basically inventing their own obscure single-implemention proprietary file formats at that time. Nowadays we have established technical standards, as well as formats that have already sorta stood the test of time based on their utility and simplicity— and millions of people who already know how to read them— so that particular vector for bitrot isn’t really as much of an issue anymore.

…That said, I think I sorta missed your point. What you’re really saying is that stewardship of digital records is much trickier and riskier than stewardship of physical records— and that results in stuff being lost. And that is absolutely true.