I’m also on Mastodon as https://hachyderm.io/@BoydStephenSmithJr .

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 2nd, 2023

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  • I never had a conversation on geocities, but I do remember you could do some SSI stuff, so maybe it was possible. I think lost my last geocities site password and didn’t care to go through the effort of resetting it in '96 or so.

    You can telnet into the HTTP port basically everywhere that doesn’t auto-redirect to the HTTPS port (and start/resume a TLS session), and there could be stuff in the HTML source (or headers) that a browser might hide from you, at least by default – but I can’t think of how you would use that in geocities to “see private messages”. (In theory you could manually start/resume a TLS session, but a proper telnet client might break on some of the bytes received, and you’d definitely have to figure out how to send some non-ASCII bytes.)




  • I think there’s a lower limit of complexity for sentience, based on memory-persistence, self-firing, and self-recognition. I think there’s no need for moral concern for non-sentient things. (But, that’s just my ethical framework and philosophical worldview; the only “evidence” I’m at all aware of is thin and vague.)

    But, as far as having a subjective experience, I think that might go quite small and alien including fungi and plant or even certain sub-cellular structures. Probably anything that maintains a border and internal homeostasis including parts of the bodies of larger experiencers could be having an internal perspective – and any human words applied so those experiences would tell you more about human bias than the experience.




  • I’m confused, why would “Accurate Noon” be important?

    Why is any particular time important? It serves me to be able to tell time without a clock and synchronize my internal clock with solar activity.

    And for countries that sit far enough from the equator, wouldn’t it be inaccurate regardless?

    No. Distance from the equator doesn’t significantly affect when the sun it at it’s peak. It does affect how high in the sky the peak is.

    Time adjustments (like “daylight saving”) drags the Sun E/W (which is why we “need” timezones). Increasing latitude dags the Sun N/S.


  • I’d rather have accurate noon / celestial time for the few months it is still allowed and still have to switch twice a year than let the government make wrong-noon (“daylight saving”) time permanent. So, many of the “end time switching” movements I actively resist rather than support.

    I imagine things like this aren’t “done and over” because there is no majority opinion.

    RCV / a Condorcet Method might help.




  • bss03@infosec.pubtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldbold words
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    5 days ago

    I wish I learned the lessons from that language 12 years earlier than I did. I still prefer to write personal code in that family of languages, and it made me a better coder even in Java, JavaScript, Python, even C.

    Also, that year is actually the first year it was available and my first year in college; it might have focused me enough to actually go to grad school and start a PL research career. I don’t know if that would be better, but it would be different.

    The people calling out BTC is also a pretty good idea, but I made a little money on BTC, and I’m not sure too much more money would be a positive change in my life. It could be, but I think it might have made me more covetous and more isolated.

    But, I often choose to program instead of playing video games these days, so it’s clearly something I enjoy, even if I don’t currently monetize it.

    Thanks for asking.



  • Investment as a form of collaboration and results distribution is probably fine. Tho, I would not be opposed to limits on size/scale for companies, individual wealth, pay ratios, etc.

    Shorts, options, and other “exotic financial instruments” are worse than gambling because they compel corrupting (withering) behavior.

    I think an active, forceful SEC based by a similarly aggressive DOJ, both focused on benefit-to-working-class primarily and market-health (e.g. lack of rent seeking, monopolistic, or monosoponistic behavior) secondarily, would lead toward a better (for global society) market. I think that could be true even if we continued to allow fairly arbitrary contracts that are those “exotic financial instruments”, options, and shorts.




  • I think the knock-on effect of making some innate, human characteristics undesirable is probably a net bad. That’s very close to labeling persons with those characteristics as sub-human–specifically due fewer “human” rights.

    That said, if I were choosing between gametes or embryos and had genetic information on them available, I do not think it is a moral stance to ignore/discard that information when making the choice. We should be careful to understand our genetic knowledge is still quite limited and, even if our knowledge was perfect, (most) genotypes are not destiny.