@nyquildotorg@fedia.social
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nyquildotorg

@nyquildotorg@fedia.social

Mobile-addicted. Web-dependent. Digital Plumber. Nerd. He/him. No-coiner.

Citizen of various fediverses over the years, this one since my first Mastodon account in January 2017. Alt-text enthusiast, lover of having his mind changed.

If you engage to disagree with something I've posted, it probably increases the likelihood of a follow. (But chances are pretty good, anyway.)

Boosts and quote-boosts welcome.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

nyquildotorg, to random
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More studies are starting to show harmful links between fluoride levels in water and mental health conditions, which is one of those things that just feels accurate. But as soon as you start talking about health effects from fluoridation you sound like a crackpot, and if you suggest maybe not putting shit in the drinking water you sound like a malicious crackpot.

So here's a compromise. Instead of removing fluoride from our drinking water, we can just add maple syrup to it in addition to the fluoride. Then the cavity levels will go back up, and when the cavity levels go up the mental health issues must go down, right? 🙄

nyquildotorg,
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@tpherndon I am fine with putting fluoride in toothpaste, ostensibly a "medical" product designed for the maintenance of teeth.

My objection is adding any medicine to the drinking water of entire populations.

nyquildotorg, to random
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Ok, this one feels like it's probably fake, however it also seems to be fulfilling my prophecy from 8 months ago.

RE: fedia.social/notes/9k8wbwdjnawy0860

nyquildotorg, to random
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"I got banned for editing my StackOverflow answers."

Excuse me, whose StackOverflow answers?

nyquildotorg, to random
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Looking forward to memes that jailbreak Recall simply by scrolling across your screen.

nyquildotorg, to random
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I like to think I was pissed off about search engines pivoting to answer engines pretty early in the game, likening the resultant slurry of not-real info to the "grey goo" that doomers predicted would be covering earth as a result of nanobots indiscriminately consuming materials to turn them into other things.

So here we are now with screenshots of all-knowing answer engines confidently spitting out fake shit that they learned by reading fake shit that other answer engines confidently spat out. Cue me thinking how easy it would be to just make fake screenshots of even more unhinged shit, which made me wonder how many of the viral ones have been fake, which once again gets us to fake news about the fake news about the fake news.

nyquildotorg, (edited )
@nyquildotorg@fedia.social avatar

As long as companies can charge money for showing things to users, the temptation to show them more of whatever it's profitable to show them is always going to result in people believing things that aren't true. Every time.

Selling eyeballs 100% got us here.

nyquildotorg,
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I haven't verified any of those viral AI answers, because I understand that the more people use those things, the more incentive to use those things those companies have.

But I believe them all, because as a student of humanity, what I've learned is that the stupidest outcome is pretty much always going to be the result. Every one of them I've seen demonstrates exactly what I've been predicting for 20+ years, starting around the time Google started selling ad slots self-serve.

I guess maybe this is just confirmation bias talking, but it really is playing out exactly like I suggested it would.

nyquildotorg, to random
@nyquildotorg@fedia.social avatar

I've heard a couple small rumblings of people realizing that Substack email lists apparently don't have a necessary approval mechanism, meaning that you can sign 'victims' up as subscribers.

This reminds me of the time I was experimenting with jwz's dadadodo Markov chainer, using it off-label as a poetry generator.

I thought it'd be interesting to use an email inbox as a dataset, which then made me want to start filling that mailbox with weird data. That's when I discovered that Yahoo! Groups lists could be signed up for without authenticating.

nyquildotorg,
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So once I knew that anything I found on Yahoo! Groups was fair game, I built a little tool to subscribe a target email address to a handpicked list of Groups about a very diverse group of subjects. It worked really well.

What would happen is I'd run the script, then like 1,000 "thank you for subscribing!" emails would come in. And then over the course of a week you'd just get thousands and thousands of messages about all sorts of weird shit.

I used it maliciously once and then felt terrible about it.

Anyway, it'd be a shame if someone were to subscribe high profile people to massive amounts of hateful Substack shit for them to report.

nyquildotorg, to random
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I once read that the show Baywatch (1989 - 2001) was greenlit via a video montage of girls in swimsuits on a beach while Don Henley's hit "Boys of Summer" played.

I don't really have anything to say about that other than that I think it makes perfect sense.

nyquildotorg,
@nyquildotorg@fedia.social avatar

I can only assume that Baywatch Nights (1995 -1997) worked the same way, but that montage featured shots of guys in tight jeans snooping in business locations while [song placeholder]* plays.

*: do you have a suggestion for this song? Leave a reply below!

nyquildotorg, to random
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The good news is we found a backup earth, but the bad news is we've already somehow filled it with microplastics 😔

nyquildotorg,
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@tekhedd gotta get DARPA moving on an Earth2 trainz, cars and helicopter after the wrap up the moon cars, moon trains, and moon helicopter programs.

nyquildotorg, to random
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Driving past a Mary Jane's House of Glass just now, their marquee says "yes, we have mushrooms!" which made me wonder if they're just selling dried rishi and lions mane or whatever.

daveshea, to random
@daveshea@cosocial.ca avatar

Wait so let me get this straight. The full RATM lineup (minus Zack) teamed up with Chuck D and B-Real to release an entire ass album together in 2017 and I’m only just finding out about this now?!

https://open.spotify.com/album/2tdK7VRcq6ATSgnxdYV17X?si=w7pxAfjiQAq0m-_7Nwo6lg

nyquildotorg,
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@daveshea they did a tour too!

nyquildotorg, to random
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Finally got around to watching Summoning Salt's History of Tetris World Records and it did not disappoint. I've always enjoyed this series, even when covering games in which I have no interest, but Tetris is a whole other thing for me.

There's a lot worse ways you could spend 2 hours than watching Summoning Salt cover some incredible Tetris players.

nyquildotorg,
@nyquildotorg@fedia.social avatar

If you saw the headlines about the kid who "beat" Tetris a few months ago, this video will provide a ton of context explaining just what that meant, including some surprisingly dramatic turns along the way.

nyquildotorg,
@nyquildotorg@fedia.social avatar

This video also does a great job of explaining some of the new innovative play styles, like "hypertapping" and "rolling," that have emerged in the last few years to overcome some of the physical limitations of how fast you can move pieces.

nyquildotorg, to random
@nyquildotorg@fedia.social avatar

Today I ran into one of my unhoused neighbors for the first time in a couple weeks. I'd been talking to him quite a bit every few days for a while, because he was in really bad shape.

Anyway, today he was dressed up nice and told me he took my advice about trying to get copies of the ID documents that'd been stolen from him, and that now he has an apartment and would like to invite me over sometime.

nyquildotorg,
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I've been having a lot of mental health struggles lately, but it feels good to be crying about something good for once.

nyquildotorg,
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In downtown Vancouver, WA, there are a lot of unhoused people, and they often stake their claim in the same spots to sleep every night.

Seeing someone with a sleeping bag in the same doorway for a month and then never seeing them again has been really hard for me, so that this guy actually seeked me out to let me know he got an apartment meant more to me than he could ever know.

nyquildotorg, to random
@nyquildotorg@fedia.social avatar

Many people over the years have commented on how my complete and total disdain for "the notch" on Apple phones is inconsistent with me downplaying the annoyance of "the crease" on folding phones.

One major difference: the crease is a requirement for the most basic functionality of a folding screen phone: the screen needs to fold in half.

The notch only exists because Apple couldn't get the under-screen fingerprint sensor working in time for the iPhone X.

FaceID is not a requirement for using a phone. Folding in half is a requirement for a folding phone. Apples and oranges 🤷

nyquildotorg, to random
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En-dless-shrimp-ification

nyquildotorg, (edited ) to random
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Lol at Dave Winer discovering "a whole industry revolving around 1/6 scale Scarlett Johansson heads and bodies to stick them on."

(1/6 scale is "Barbie-sized," and people have been doing custom "head-sculpts" of celebrities for decades and decades.)

nyquildotorg,
@nyquildotorg@fedia.social avatar

@techphotoguy yeah. Crotchety as ever, but I find I agree with him less and less over time.

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