deathmtn

Another tent city to detain children forcibly separated from their families. And again, they are being tried without legal representation.

In roughly the last third of this episode of Idle Thumbs, the hosts answer a question from a Reader: Can using playtesting data in game design go too far? Their answer was no because humans aren't slaves to data. They are informed by it, but they are still human beings that can consider data but still make reasonable decisions that are informed by experiences other than current data.

Listening here nine years in the future, it occurs to me that now data often does not have a human interpreter. Google and Facebook and others just let machines that influence millions go nuts with data, unchecked. The human judgment happens when the systems are built, then for the most part, it transforms into whatever it may, consequences be damned.

For the most part, the initial human judgment is "do whatever increases engagement," which of course, leads to the promotion of dangerous conspiracy theories, reply-generating Nazi tweets, and harassment.

Just noticed "kitchen" and "chicken" have the same phonemes in a different order.

Giving up on reading Calculus Made Easy (an olde timey calculus book) and On Photography. Good books; don't have time right now. #bookqueue

Was gonna start using Goodreads to track books I started that I want to finish some day, but they do not have any sort of data export available. I've learned my lesson about this and am just going to keep queues and reviews in a text file and here.

A Google employee petition against being the tool of an oppressive state.

I guess they're working on it, but I'm disappointed to see only 384 signatures, with very few managers (not counting program managers). C'mon, Googlers! C'mon, management! Stand up for people who aren't waited on by chefs and surrounded by fountains of gold! You can work anywhere if need be!

But great respect to these 384.

Twitter has made it difficult to programmatically get a hold of one's old tweets, even though they show up in their site's search. It could be an accident, or it could be that they want to use that data.

Fantastic riffs from Tomb of Finland, a band with a brilliant name.

And conspiracy theorising, as Jan-Werner Müller and others point out, is part of the inner logic of populism. Populism, remember, is based on the claim that society is divided between “the people” and the illegitimate elites who rule and exploit them.

Not that it's anywhere near the order of magnitude of a threat as right populism, but you see this among tankies as well. By asserting that all facts we have are poisoned, they are able to fill in that space with things like, "North Korean citizens are actually living well."

10-5-5. Stopped early: determined to keep my ramp-up smooth and non-injurious.

Hmm. Twitter's making it difficult (accidentally?) to delete/retrieve older tweets via API.

Looks like Twitter has suspended the account for Land of Contrasts. (That's why it's been double posting to the web lately. It hits an error when trying to post to Twitter, and so it retries the whole thing again. Which is a bug.)

You can always find it on the web and in RSS, if you want to stay abreast of information like what people like about Saginaw, Michigan.

Whoops. godtributes is actually here.

In various situations, I see occasional requests for people to change something in a thing operated by someone else. I have to say, even if the requester is angry about the thing, "If you don't, I will [threat goes here]" is always a bad template for a first request.

If it's something blatantly egregious, like Nazi-promoting content on a platform, OK, I can see going that route. Maybe the maintainer will not see it the way of the requester, and force is the only way.

If it's possibly an oversight or a borderline case like the use of a word that was previously not sensitive until a very recent news event (this happened a bunch of times with godtributes, this kind of threat-first approach is not the best route to change.

The maintainer will resent being threatened. They may step back, then do what they think would do if they had not been threatened. But it takes effort on the maintainer's part to resist fighting back against a threat.

No one likes being threatened, and thus, no one likes to listen to someone that is threatening them.

A corporation, however, does not take threats personally. It only evaluates the probable impact of the threat on profit and growth.

That said, it gets a little more complicated than that because there are cases in which there are people within a corporation that will act on a request using normal human reactions. In that case, it may be worth just requesting instead of threatening.

Some grim numbers on monopolies in America. I've believed the mobile OS situation (99% Apple and Google) has been hurting things in many ways for quite some time.

A few surprising things, though. PetSmart and PETCO are 47% of tpet supplies market share. 70% of the Internet porn market share goes to a single company. Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway is 52% of mobile homes.

As a side note, I really like how the list of industries is shuffled each time you go to the site.

I would've liked to see the B2B software services industry to see how much Amazon has of that. Also, I'd like to see a healthy industry as an example, if there is one.