deathmtn

I went to a talk at school about executive functioning. (I learned that people’s frontal lobes are not fully developed until they’re 25.)

There was a side discussion about using rewards for task initiation (e.g. actually starting when asked to put away your toys). There’s a hesitance to use these because you don’t want to reward something that kids should be doing anyway.

The point was made: But what’s the alternative? There are a lot of tasks that aren’t intrinsically motivating to people that haven’t yet developed a sense of long-term consequences.

You can also scale down rewards over time. I brought up the possibility of using virtual rewards that have zero marginal costs, like points or tiers. These can be scaled infinitely, no matter how much inflation happens. The problem is, the kid has to believe in them, the way people believe in cryptocurrencies.

These near-virtual rewards already do exist, though, in the form of stickers! Other parents confirmed that they can work as long as fifth grade.

Mormon missionaries appear to have some directive to chat up members of the same gender on the T. They have some set of opening statements that the pick from, then move slowly toward inviting the “chatee” to some event. It looks very much like hitting on people, except, to give them credit, less manipulative.

Interesting hiring criterion used by Repulsion:

Local punk Dave 'Grave' Hollingshead was recruited as drummer, after Carlson and Olivo saw an article about Hollingshead being arrested for grave robbery.[3]

It's not unlike Mr. Burns hiring a dog as vice president after hearing about him on the local news. Of course the difference being that "Grave" turned out to be a good drummer. Then again, that dog was probably a decent vice president.

There's a drum kit at work, and it's really fun. I sort of wish I had played drums when I was young, but then again, it's nice to save some visceral (yeah, I used that word) worlds to explore for middle age.

Blood Incantation is extremely death metal. And yet, it looks like they've landed with non-death-metal listeners? Or at least one very self-aware one that writes for a popular blog.

I don't remember whether or not I mentioned Slop Cube, so there it is! It's still a WIP, but I'm satisfied with the visual part.

10-4-4-4-3-3.

There was an anomaly in the 2018 Georgia state election: The apparent dropping of 128,000 Black votes for lieutenant governor.

In most states, whenever there is a question about the results of elections, the problem can easily be solved by viewing the paper trail. Even electronic voting machines used across the country produce some form of a paper ballot.

Not in Georgia.

Georgia is one of five states that exclusively uses unauditable machines with no paper trail. The majority of Georgia’s machines are touch-screen voting systems. Not only are they old and out of date, they are cumbersome and easily hackable. For each election, Georgia’s voting machines are loaded with software that is controlled by the secretary of state’s office. At the end of the election, the voters have no way of verifying the results.

In 2017, after a security flaw was found in Georgia’s election servers, Coalition for Good Governance and other parties filed a lawsuit against Kemp and other Georgia entities on behalf of five Georgia voters. One of the most important goals of the lawsuit was to examine the data on the servers to see if they had been tampered with.

On July 7, 2017, according to court documents in the case, Curling v. Kemp (pdf), someone wiped the state’s election server clean.

Then they wiped the backup server.

This could possibly be explained by a mistake, rather than intentional election rigging. But we can't know. We can never know how voting actually went in any of those five states.

On one hand, I'm impressed by this (presumably ML-generated) fake marketing blog. Look at that post!

Putting this all together requires expertise in SEO. It helps to learn and understand what content works best for them and ensure that they are re-using it regularly in future. However, its difficult for first time internet marketers. Suresh Prasad, the owner of Suresh Prasad L.P. affirms that “satisfying search engine results is not a cheap undertaking. However, when allocating your funds, it is essential to put them on a place where you will get the highest bang for your buck. Putting time and effort into SEO is a wonderful investment.”

That's exactly how those posts go!

But it looks like it was created by an agency that actually does SEO. Their web site is very smidgeo dot com. Who knows, maybe the generated SEO blog was actually doctored, but if not, it's sad that yet another talented group of people is going to just push garbage on people more effectively than previous garbage pushers.

I haven't kept up with the world of Macs. Recently, I've had two reintroductions.

The first: using a loaner Mac at work for a weird task that requires this old ramshackle app that only runs on OS X.

That virtual Esc key is jarring; hitting a bunch of keys that give (at least a little bit), then slapping that space on the touch bar shocks me out of whatever I was thinking about every time.

The second: this post, which reports that, apparently, Macs have made no real improvements in the last three years?!

Ignorant of their teleological duty to constantly improve, the computers that we interact with daily have either stalled or declined in the past five years.

Take for example the new MacBook Pro, Apple’s 16” top-of-the-line laptop. Three of its headline features - a scissor-mechanism keyboard, a physical Escape key, and inverted-T arrow keys, are not new. They existed in every MacBook Pro produced between 2006 and 2016.

So the main selling point of this new, $2,399 computer is that it fixes some of the unforced errors that Apple made in 2016.

Kind of amazing, but not completely surprising. I've noticed that Apple, despite having tremendous resources, does not take much care on their products that they think are not strategically important.

I remember (around 2010 or so) being amazed at how polished iOS and the iPhone were. I was equally amazed at how terrible developer.apple.com was. That's the web site iOS developers used to do things like getting their provision profiles to distribute their apps.

Despite the oft-quoted Steve Jobs saying about caring about the back of the cabinet, ehhh, Apple isn't actually like that.

10-4-3-3-2-2. I realized I've come down to doing these only twice a week. I gotta make more time to work out.

A good article on animating SVG gradients. I wasn't even sure in the abstract how a gradient could be animated before I found that.

10-4-4-4-4-4. I think it’s been a while since I’ve been able to do every rep in every set!

A coworker actually apologized to me for a previous heated lunchtime discussion about housing! In which I'm sure I threw some heat. This is actually the second time this has occurred. (Last time, it was with someone else about functional programming.) People are really nice!

Though this was a good outcome, I think I really need to remember to avoid letting things escalating. With my kid as well, actually!

My new knuckle tattoo: DEESCALATE