Also, returning to this horror, it’s such an odd and dismaying assumption that I (or anyone) would only have work to talk about with other people.

Man, I’ve read like a million books*. I have loads to talk about that has absolutely nothing to do with work. I can chatter for hours without once thinking about my career. Are most people’s brains so empty they can only talk about work with their friends? Just…how? Have so many really been so overwhelmed by neolib prerogatives? I don’t want to believe that but the evidence points the other direction.

*In reality, it’s around 10,000-20,000 books, though I’ve not kept an exact count.

My first tweet here! A couple of small dragonfly, taken a few years ago with Sony A7 and sigma 150mm macro. #sony #macro #nature #photography #macrophotography #dragonfly pic.twitter.com/YRYaXCaRlJ

— Claudio Rossi (@Claudio69263991) November 20, 2020

Cool photo, but those are damselflies.

Why are some people so obsessed with this idea that free speech is being limited at this moment when completely fabricated conspiracy theories are gaining wide traction? It is like an information free for all dystopia.

— Angie Schmitt🚶‍♀️ (@schmangee) November 20, 2020

Limiting speech won’t solve this. Don’t know why the left has been such a fan of this lately. They love foot-shooting, I guess. Anyway, only ameliorating the underlying conditions that cause these manias will solve the actual problem.

Second, many actual events and occurrences that definitely happened are now labeled “conspiracy theories” because the panjandrums wish to change the narrative and history itself. Therefore I am very, very wary of handing over broad censorship powers (public or private) to the people who wish to alter the record and have already demonstrated the desire and the capability to do so.

I will never really get on board with the liberal cry for censorship.

Can’t sleep so obsessing about the fact that most TV shows about adult friends have each character have completely different jobs. How did these people even meet? Why aren’t they shown to have friends they made at work? What do they even talk about? pic.twitter.com/8oTWvtSLu3

— Janie Larson (@RedQueenCoder) November 20, 2020

You can tell from things like this how weird the world has become, and how captured by the algorithm and neoliberal pre-pod tendencies people have gotten.

It used to be not uncommon at all to be friends with people with very diverse jobs. My dad was barely social and he had friends in the 1980s who were: a schoolteacher, a doctor, a plumber, a tree trimmer, a natural gas delivery driver — and others that I am forgetting now.

This was a very, very common thing before the world got so stratified and algorithm-ized.

What strikes people as highly unusual and well-nigh impossible now was not very long ago just the way things used to be. In the contemporary environment, though, where you can’t fight the neoliberal algorithm and social class defines all, to many people having friends outside of work is literally unimaginable.

It has been strange indeed to watch this transition, and furthermore to watch people forget how the world once was (Janie herself is too young to remember this).

Fearing Drama, Mozilla Opens Public Consultation Before Worldwide Firefox DoH Rollout.

There should be drama, because DoH is absurd and user hostile — just like all of the other initiatives Mozilla her perpetrated in the past decade or so.

But I wanted to highlight this false dichotomy, of XUL vs. security. I agree that XUL needed some work, or perhaps needed to be replaced. But it’s a false choice to claim that all customization possibilities must be eliminated because XUL was showing its age.

One does not equal the other.

The truth is that Mozilla wanted to punish its users and take away control. This was the real motivation and had nothing to do with security. It’s possible to write something customizable and secure; truth is, they just did not want to.

And it cost them everything.

Fuck Mozilla and fuck the Firefox developers.

The Black Hole information loss problem is unsolved. Because it’s unsolvable.

I generally like Sabine’s work, but this isn’t even close to true. It’s unsolvable now, and maybe it always will be. But we’ve thought a lot of problems were unsolvable that we’ve since solved.

And she’s also not really right about information loss — time irreversiblity and information loss are the same thing. If a quantum process is time irreversible, then initial state information is gone forever. Is one a better phrase than the other? I don’t see why it matters much, though of course physicists prefer “time irreversibility” because that’s closer to how their equations are most commonly formatted (though it’s possible to format this in an information-theoretical way too, just not regularly done because it’s much harder and not taught that way).

I don’t understand why this is an issue. She takes Hawking radiation for granted, which has never been observed and very possibly never will be, but concludes that we cannot ever solve the time irreversibility problem of black holes? That doesn’t really make sense.