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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • No OP, but Anki is an app that you can use with your own custom flashcard packs, or find them online. You review a card and mark how well you remember it, with the hardest ones resurfacing more quickly and easiest ones more seldom.

    Spaced repetition is more efficient because it is based on refreshing something in your memory at the (theoretically) optimal intervals to transfer it from short-term to long-term memory. So at any time, the app should surface the cards you need to see the most.

    It does actually work and isn’t pseudo-science. It got me through the bar exam after law school.


  • Yeah, I had the same reaction - The puzzles were definitely “learn how to think a new way,” my favorite kind. I ended my play on one perspective-shifting pattern puzzle that I was so close to beating, so I kept pushing myself through the motion sickness, and just ended up disabled on the bed feeling ill and unable to move for two hours (without completing the puzzle).

    I tried a bunch of things - permanent reticle in center of screen, disabling walk shake, etc. I still play high-motion FPS shooters with no issue. It’s just some games (The Forest was another). I am guessing it’s a middleware-introduced visual filter that adds 15-25ms delay to screen latency, just enough to mess with inner ear visual/motion sync in sensitive people.




  • It’s actually a fascinating bind Steve/Reddit has put themselves in. Because it is a non-exclusive license, you can affirmatively declare your content is free for anyone to scrape or use.

    After that, if Reddit ever asserts rights over your content by, say, suing Microsoft for improperly using your content in training data, you now have a legal claim against Reddit for interference with either your ownership rights or with a contract via whatever license you have made your content available under.

    Now, maybe Reddit has a claim release in their TOS, but it wouldn’t prevent you from getting an injunction enjoining Reddit from restricting your data from being used by Microsoft.

    It’s kind of academic, because… it’s not really a victory that Microsoft is also training its AI on your data. But, hey, they’re probably doing it anyway and at least this way we get to screw over Huffman for being an ass.


  • I wish I knew as well. I’ve been using Chromecast Audio myself, which works with PlexAmp self-hosting my music.

    The problem is Chromecast Audio has been discontinued for years of course - Google did their Google thing, and unfortunately I never found anything else like it on the market. But you can connect those devices to any speakers and sync multi-room high quality audio very easily. I managed to pick up 4 of them when they did their fire sale, and I think you can find them on eBay for now still.


  • This is a very thoughtful take. I just have one issue, which is the adjustment you’re talking about, where the base becomes less charged, isn’t something we can rely on anymore. The base in many cases doesn’t even understand the reforms, whether they’ve been implemented, or how they affect them.

    For example, the ACA in the US gave health care to tens of millions of people, a huge amount of whom were stupifyingly demanding to not be given health care because it was “Obamacare.” Polls show that those people strongly wanted more affordable health care options, oppose removing the more adorable health care they are using, but also want “Obamacare” repealed.

    Their reality is somehow kept separate from their experience, since their reality is defined by their consumed propaganda and their experience is subservient to their reality.

    All that is to say: we still need to fix the right wing propaganda problem before any solution works, even the logical map in your post.




  • Google shuts down a lot of things, and usually there is nothing to do and parts of the internet break forever. But…I feel like this is one that would be cheap and at least possible to mitigate without Google’s help.

    Crawl for all goo.gl links prior to the 2025 shutdown, cache and enter the link and the redirect link into a database, and create a simple open source in-line replacement extension for browsers that intercepts goo.gl links and replaces them with the real link. These are just URLs, so the database even for hundreds of thousands of entries shouldn’t be huge.

    I mean, I’m not going to do it, but…



  • It’s influencers targeting “outsiders.” There have always been outsiders, whether in the 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s, etc. Sometimes that’s even healthy. But because that only became a source of strongly-defined “identity” and “pride,” often people in the past would grow out of it or use it productively (as a source of empathy for other outsiders) and leave only a small dedicated core group who were vulnerable to being exploited.

    The difference is that now these influencers indoctrinate a vulnerable audience at the right time, and coach that audience into making alt-right talking points a part of their identity. Social media then allows those new recruits to see each other and create a community that self-reinforces.

    There is no equivalent push on the left, because the left assumes that sense will eventually prevail. It was true decades ago, but now there is no reason to believe that - those indoctrinated never have to confront their doctrine, they live surrounded by it.

    So yep, it’s going to keep growing. The only solution I can think of is to regulate news media to penalize lying and propaganda. That itself is nearly impossible to do right, since it will be abused by every right-wing leader if there is any opportunity.