I work in disability support so I may use various creams while massaging, I get messy while helping people with washing and toileting, and I feed people which can get messy. I also help people with their yards, cleaning their house, washing their pets, whatever they need.

1 quark (no pairs please)

Yeah, the whole “China is doing propaganda using TikTok” line is kind of like saying Russia is using bots on YouTube. Like, yeah, maybe, sure, but focussing all your efforts on one single platform and ignoring the rest is silly. As the red team you would use as many different platforms as possible, make sure your disinformation output was broad and came from multiple, even opposing, ideological positions, and absolutely swamp the information space with junk. If nothing is reliable people don’t approach things carefully, they just check out. Once people check out it is a win.

Yep, and the while thing is moot anyway because use of the systems does not require ownership, so while the owners can exert more pressure on the algorithm and change what shows up other actors can do the same a little less easily on each platform. Propaganda is alive and well, so maybe try to limit yourself somewhat to a smaller group of people you actually know in person and be critical of information coming in.

Both. China is where most consumer tech comes from, and the rest often includes parts from China as well. Taiwan has TSMC which makes all the big CPUs, but honestly all the small stuff like consumer electronics comes mostly out of China. If they did want to integrate some sort of spying they would have the opportunity, and in the past individual threats to the state of many countries have had supply chain attacks carried out, so it is not an unfounded fear.

That all said, China is run by the CCP, an ostensibly Communist party, so red scare, not to mention Chinese, so racism, and Party, because Americans are against fun, or at least in government they seem to be. China also has an abysmal record on human rights, though coming from anyone in the west criticism is somewhat hypocritical given prison labour, proping up dictatorships, coups, exploiting slave labour, and so on. Nobody is doing a perfect job, nobody is saintly, but there are fair and unfair criticisms against China as a nation state and those do inform some of the fear of their potential for spying.

Now TikTok, Reddit, Meta, etc… There are the really scary tools with far too little attention.

I would recommend checking out audio books as a medium for reading. It allows you to increase the speed to whatever works for you, so 2x for me, and listen to a lot more in a day. It also frees you to listen at any times you have nothing cognitive happening, so dishes, washing, cleaning, etc.

As for single day books, the first book of the Bobiverse series by Dennis E Taylor. I loved the whole series including the recently released 5th book and the first is only 9.5 hours at normal speed, so about 4.75 at double speed.

Also All Systems Red is the first book in the Murderbot series by Martha Wells. The perspective of a SecUnit, a type of sentient cyborg, which has hacked its own programming and removed its limiters so it can act freely. This means no guard rails, no rules, no limits, which results in lots of TV shows being watched and avoiding humans. It is snarky, fun, and interesting. It comes in at 3.5 hours normal time, so 1.75 at double speed.

I don’t know about videos but having a look at the OSI model is a good way to start. It covers the abstract framework for packetizing data including things like the distinction between hardware and software, envelope, encryption, application layer stuff, the whole shebang. The cool thing is by going hardware, network, application you can see where responsibility are and it helps you understand where things can go wrong.

If you are interested there are plenty of CCNA style courses available on the internet, licit and otherwise, and they go into more depth, and the same applies to RHCE/RHCSA material. The training for certifications like that covers what you want to know but also puts it in context, and again licit and otherwise sources are available.

I meant to say language in the linguistics sense, a series of abstract items which can be arranged to convey arbitrary meaning. For example, a dog barking can be a threat display, a warning, playful, sad, afraid, and so on. But can you use barking to create grammar? With grammar you could have labels for items in the world and use various barks to refer to them, make requests, ask questions, and so on. Some types of animals have warning calls that are specific to types of predators, for example an eagle call or a leopard call. Leopards require different responses than eagles so the distinction is very useful and helps others to respond. This is not quite language but is definitely a step in the right direction.

So yes, you are correct, lots of animals can communicate things to each other, but it is not the same as language like what humans have. Could we find an animal that does have language? Or something very close? Sure, but we haven’t shown that yet. Maybe we should focus on giving other animals a chance to develop before we wipe them all out.

I have internal voice sometimes but not others. In some things my cognition is far more verbal, working through something like a monologue or conversation. Other times I may have more of a mental image of something, sometimes more in real space and sometimes completely disconnected from real space. Sometimes it is much more abstract with sensations and emotions with very little in terms of concrete metaphores.

Also I can have racing thoughts without it being language. I also have impacts on those racing thoughts from taking Ritalin (ADHD medication) and it is not just the word thoughts but also the flow of other types of cognition.

No, but that is because they don’t have language.

That said, plenty of humans do not have a voiced internal experience. The lack of language does not imply a lack of cognition. I would expect that the brain of a closely related organism, say a chimp, would have many similar experiences generated by the same stimuli. Would they experience green like I experience green? I can’t even say that about a person sitting next to me, but they probably have an equivalent experience.

That said, if we had a way of communicating could we reach agreed terms? I can do that with my cat, so I would think he has an understanding of me and my behaviours along with what tends to happen when I do certain things like clap then shake my hands at the end of a treat session. He knows there are no more treats, he associates that with my hands clapping and shaking, so we communicate. Does he have a voice in his head describing it? Probably not. Does he have Meows? Again, probably not, but he would have a sense and memories of previous times.

The slick shits

Resistance is fertile

Blorg

Robert

Bang twang sang

Diphthong

Telepathic

The cringe minge

Over duress

Stabby yabbie

Endocrine control system

No idea, but I put it together from ideas around algorithmic decision making and anarchistic thought. Design a society where you would be happy to be dropped in as a random person and you can’t have massive power and wealth imbalances. As soon as you get rid of the idea that you will be on top you gain the drive for equality and fairness.

If nobody wants to do a job then people will pay more to not have to do it. In that way people getting paid to do shitty jobs at least get well compensated and that makes the job more attractive, leading to it being less shitty.

There are a bunch of approaches but one I like is to have everyone vote on the relative pay for each role except their own, so customer service doesn’t vote on customer service pay ratio but votes on everything else. Once you have agreed upon relative pay you then take the total budget for pay and divide it among the whole staff according to those ratios. Nobody will vote for the CEO to make 300 times what someone else makes but they will vote for higher pay for jobs they don’t want to have to hire again for, say shitty jobs or complex jobs. This means the hardest to hire for are retained, the ones who make work easier for others are retained, and the ones who are making life hard for others get reduced. It also means nobody will have to feel that they didn’t have a fair shake, they got to vote and voice their opinion but the group has voted. Also, who really feels OK paying someone a pittance? Exactly the type of people who will be pushed out of this type of structure.

Just a quick point for your photos in future. You probably want to try using HDR mode. HDR (High Dynamic Range) takes a set of 3 photos at different light levels and mixes them to squeeze the full range into a photo rather than having some parts completely black and some completely white. Give it a try if your phone camera supports it. You need to hold very still for the photo to work otherwise it will be blurry, but the quality is fantastic if you can be still.

I work in individual support under the NDIS in Australia. The NDIS (National Disability Insurance Scheme) is a system that disabled people can access to fund various needs not covered by our medical system. I help one client who has had a stroke with eating and massage, another client with woodworking and metalworking, another with cleaning and organising their house, and really anything else they need.

It is really flexible and allows us to meet their needs, not what someone else thinks their needs must be.

Very cool. I helped my uncle get a tiny component of an old architecture program he paid a few thousand for working in a VM because literally nobody had made the same type of file converter since them and for some reason nobody minds having one machine running Windows XP on a machine in the corner. His XP machine died so I grabbed the disk and reimaged XP into a VM, brought over the files, and boom, that program runs and will continue to do so on a machine without network access but with a single folder mount point for dropping files back and forth.

Man, it looks like AI art the spelling is so bad. Impressive.

Damn, that sucks. What sort of stuff were you trying to keep running? I haven’t got a lot of old hardware anymore after moving a bunch of times, everything I have is modern old, around to 5 to 8 year mark, so no hardware support issues but also nothing powerful enough to do anything fun with.

Quite a few people here sound like ideal candidates to try ReactOS. It is an open source implementation of the NT architecture and should generally slot in for most software including drivers. It works quite well and plenty of people have managed to get old hardware working on ReactOS that was not otherwise ssfe to connect to a network. It works just like Windows NT and looks very similar but also supports more modern security standards and software.

Consider trying out ReactOS. It is an attempt to reverse engineer a fully compatible Windows replacement which uses Windows drivers and Windows software. It looks verysimilar and works similarly but is completely open implementation of the NT architecture and as such may actually meet your needs while being free software. I would love to hear how it goes if you try it.