a dyke who hacks on things. she/xey/ey. beka_valentine@kolektiva.social bekavalentine@cohost.org
Sep 15 • 58 tweets • 8 min read
a fun fact about solar electricity generation for space stations is that you don't really need photovoltaics, which are very difficult to manufacture and have a relatively short lifespan and have lower performance when heated
what you _need_ is energy input, which the sun provides, and as long as you have _some_ mechanism to convert that to electricity, you're good to go
Oct 9, 2023 • 36 tweets • 6 min read
check out this cute video about learning to use BASIC to program a trs80
back then, computers didn't come with operating systems and lots of builtin software, you couldn't download software from the net, at best you could buy it on tape or eventually floppy if you were lucky enough to have an appropriate reader
May 4, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
a related, but i think distinct, phenomenon is how "honest" means "hurtful"
people who loooove to be "brutally honest" are always extremely negative and pessimistic and hurtful. their unyielding honesty is never brutally positive or optimistic or kind
on the one hand think of the sort of new atheist type of person, the bill mahers of the world, etc who feel the desperate need to "be honest" in all things all the time and yet somehow this really just means being extremely negative or hurtful or whatever
some people very seriously and deeply need to believe in the genetic or hormonal basis of sexuality because otherwise they feel like they cannot justify their existence
we like to think that we humans are smart and rational and scientific, and these people are just stupid etc
but they're consummate empiricists, while you're an anti-empiricist!
they saw with their eyes and remembered with their minds and have *first hand empirical evidence*!
May 3, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
in his Lost Elegants episode of @ttforall, @conal elliot talks about loops as a discrete time thing and how continuous time is more natural for what time is but (maybe??) loops can't really fit into that mold
so i wonder how we can think of loops..
typetheoryforall.com/2022/05/09/17-…
...and what they compute, in relation to continuous time, if anything, and what the various algorithms that rely on loops look like from a temporal perspective
like, certainly some loops are merely implementation for recursive equations etc.
every day I see more and more shit going on that convinces me that the US is steadily collapsing. public institutions are increasingly meaningless and powerless and its only a matter of time before people realize this and a phase change happens
all of these things have phase change qualities. there's a steady shift in something, some slow but steady increase in whatever the thing is that matters, something about people's beliefs are comfort around things
analogous to temperature increase in water, say
Apr 19, 2023 • 15 tweets • 3 min read
if you're confused by my point in this thread about how production quality went down but also you can still get high quality stuff, think a bit about average costs vs actual costs
if all the items of a certain sort that you can buy are of a generally high quality, then the quality of an item of average cost is going to be high
but if the quality varies very highly in proportion to price, and goes below that previous quality, then the quality you get..
Apr 19, 2023 • 29 tweets • 5 min read
sometimes when looking at the history of the Luddites, and the narrative around them, you'll see comments like this, "we are better paid than in the 1800s", or you'll see related comments about people being better off or having greater material wealth
they're interesting to consider, not just at a surface level but at deeper level. like, is there truth to this? ARE we better paid now? more materially wealthy? and if so how is it related to capitalist automation? etc
Apr 18, 2023 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
at no point did the luddites try to "destroy automation" or anything to that effect, thy sought to restrain capitalists
who wrote the history books that taught you this? capitalists, of course
and it's a standard capitalist propaganda move to equate automation and capitalism, as if they're the same thing
Apr 17, 2023 • 30 tweets • 5 min read
the Luddites were 100% correct about everything but you'd never know it because the standard narrative about them is mostly fake and misrepresents both their concerns AND the outcomes of the changes they were concerned about
I'm quite serious when I say this about the Luddites. their main concerns were:
1. power looms and stocking frames were being used by capitalists to turn textile work into a de-skilled trade, that would make workers more interchangeable
Apr 15, 2023 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
there was always this unfortunate thing in interactive graphics where rendering ability always entailed realism, whereas resource constraints seems to promote novelty in the visuals
it's a fascinating phenomenon. i mean don't get me wrong there's plenty of weird live rendered stuff, but it seems to me like high quality in live graphics means the weirdness is inherently realistic too
i mean take bioshock infinite. gorgeous graphics with lots of weirdness
Apr 15, 2023 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
FMV and pre rendered backgrounds became really popular because of a neat quirk in history: CDs became commonplace before computers were powerful enough for good live 3d rendering, so only high quality *non-interactive* content -- video and high res pics -- was possible
around the time of the birth of this kind of game, we also had 3D graphics be, at BEST, the original Doom
now, Doom was ground break to be sure. but it wasn't even remotely as good looking as pre rendered scenes and FMV
these are both from 1993
Apr 6, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
it's always wild to be how obsessed certain people are with penises. the emphasis on them in certain strains of feminist discourse, as if penises are magic rape causers, and as if rape doesn't happen without penises
it's a very serious problem that those varieties of feminism have. precisely why these folx have this obsession i can't say, maybe some unprocessed trauma, but they will literally deny that people have been raped if it didn't involve a penis, no matter what happened
Apr 5, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
actually, here's @GeoffNunberg'ss gTalk about this subject from 2006
one thing of note? republicans REALLY won the language war so hard that even nunberg, who studies this stuff, uses the "working americans vote republican" spin
which of course we all know is not true, working class americans are not especially right wing but the PR from republicans is so heavily saturated with the canonical imagery of "working class", which in the propaganda usually some blue collar labor, construction sites, etc
Apr 5, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
millenials cosplaying as boomers to complain about millenials and zoomers lol
there's a bunch of really interesting ideas that emerge from thinking about how ChatGPT can be made to interact with itself in various ways. I believe what's going on here (OP plz correct me if I'm wrong) is that the bot is asked to pretend to access itself??? or maybe it has..
the answer they give when theyre asked is not a secret: renting it out now would require lowering the rent bc no one can afford the asking price, and they don't want to lower the rent and set the expected price for the *next* tenant that low as well etc etc
i'm sure there's more to it than that but the fact is that there *are* lots of empty properties and they *could* rent them out of the price was low enough but they *dont*, just empirically. any space that is empty for an extended period of time is being kept empty
Mar 15, 2023 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
i honestly think that ChatGPT is powerful enough and illusory enough to be dangerous and we haven't even begun to see the horrible things that can be done with it
like, you could absolutely turn ChatGPT into the perfect phishing bot and social engineer the hell out of people in ways that are infeasible now without actual human training
it probably wouldn't be *quite* as good as an actual person in conversation, but good enough to be risky
