20, they/she, math+CS student

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • That would be a fair point if we were talking about like, small businesses in markets that are well-suited to competition, but that is not mpdern ISPs.

    Iirc, much of the backbone of the US’s fiber optic cable network is publicly owned anyway, it’s just the “last mile” that’s privately owned, which is the local lengths of fiber that run through neighborhoods to individual residences. But most of this infrastructure was also heavily subsidized by the state, so the way I see it, ISPs are essentially leaches that extract rent from a system paid for by the people and (directly or indirectly) built by the state. Why should we let them collect profit from a network they didn’t build when we could own the entire network publicly and set monthly rates to break even, rather than generate a profit (which would keep prices very low, as seen in Every Other Country with mainly state/municipally owned ISPs).


  • I think they’re trying to apply the same logic that’s applied to internet platforms like YouTube, Twitter, etc., where the platform is only non-liable for copyright violations on their platform if they have a good-faith system in place for preventing copyright infringement and responding to DMCA requests. I don’t think this logic should apply to ISPs, frankly the entire internet is far too large of a place to be monitored by any one company for copyright infringement, and I’d rather ISPs be nationalized and treated as public utilities than try to fit them into the same legal framework as social media companies.

    That being said, even if the courts decide they should be forced into that same legal framework, ISPs could easily satisfy their legal obligations by simply blocking access to copyrighted content via their DNS service (which can easily be worked around by using an alternative DNS). There’s no legal reason why ISPs would be expected to block individual users from their network, and even if there were, ISPs shouldn’t be allowed to exist anyway, the state (and therefore the people) paid the lion’s-share of the cost to lay all that fiber-optic and copper cable across the country, so the state should own that infrastructure and operate it in the interest of the people (Internet access would be considered a human right and publicly owned ISPs would only have prices high enough to break even, not generate a profit).







  • Didn’t they already put ads in the Windows 10 start menu? Every time I see a fresh Windows 10 install, it’s got candy crush and a bunch of promotional links to Microsoft apps in the windows store (office, Outlook, etc.) in the start menu.

    Tbh my biggest gripe with Windows 11 isn’t even the ads, you can disable them or – like I did back when I used Win11 on a spare partition for VR gaming – just install a start menu replacement like startallback. My biggest gripe is that they removed the fullscreen launcher and mobile/touch optimized metro app system (ik windows store apps exist, but they behave like regular windows apps, which is awkward on a tablet when you’re using it without the keyboard cover). I liked that Windows 10 basically kept all the Windows 8 tablet features, but made them optional so that you can have a full desktop experience on a tablet. Now windows 11 just feels kind of poorly designed and clunky on a tablet PC.

    I ended up installing ChromeOS on my tablet through Project Brunch just to get a decent, polished-feeling tablet interface (with android apps, which is a huge plus since that’s already a massive library of touch-optimized software). I run NixOS on my main PC, but for the tablet it was either Linux+GNOME (GNOME is the only desktop DE with acceptable touch support imo, especially paired with the cosmic shell extension for automatic window tiling), or ChromeOS, and I tried a bunch of different distros (including open-source chromiumOS distros like FydeOS).

    In the end, I liked FydeOS, but ChromeOS through Brunch Framework has extra features I’d rather not live without (like Android phone connectivity), and FydeOS has borked touch support on the OpenFyde releases, so I’d need to use the proprietary Fyde For You builds with specific drivers for the Surface Pro 4, but those cost money after 90 days, and if I’m using a proprietary OS, I might as well pick the free one. If you’ve never used ChromeOS, it’s basically like if stock Google android had a good desktop mode and could (easily/officially) run desktop Linux apps.



  • You’d need some sort of translation layer to allow older versions of the Android userland drivers in the container to talk to the modern Android userspace drivers. Or you could write new userspace drivers inside the container that interact directly with the hardware, but this would likely be expensive and insecure. Definitely doable tho, especially for a company as large as Google.

    Especially on Pixels, with the generic system image feature (allows for booting generic, non-device-specific android images), if the container is built with the same userland drivers as a generic system image, it might not even need any special effort/attention to run, though iirc GSIs are pretty recent, so you wouldn’t be able to run software for anything before like, Android 12 or 13 probably.






  • Also Monitor Lizards. They’re the most intelligent squamate reptile (group that includes all living reptiles except turtles, crocodilians, and birds, who are archosauromorphs), except for possibly the cobra. But, they’re still cold-blooded, so I can just nap on a hot rock without eating for 2 days and be Fine. They do get Stupid when the temperature drops too much (lowers their metabolic rate, and intelligence uses lots of energy), but I live in Florida, so that’s fine💀. They’re also one of the only lizards that can both breathe and walk at the same time (apparently most squamate reptiles use the same muscles for breathing as moving their forelimbs?? Wack.). This is how they became so intelligent, there was more O2 coming into the body, so the overall metabolic budget to evolve stuff like Large Brain became much larger.

    Also they’re adorable, monitor lizards can be so friendly, curious, and playful, they’re like the Lizard version of cat imo. I really want one, they even like to cuddle (humans are Warm, and they’re smart enough to recognize and trust you enough to want cuddles). I’m gonna get a cute little Ackie monitor once I graduate college I think.


  • Spider would be cool tbh. Tho what if you get their fucked up reproductive process where the female lays dozens or hundreds of eggs at once and also maybe tries to Eat her male partner, depending on species.

    Or like, you lose your teeth and have to eat by injecting caustic fluid inside Whole Organisms to dissolve their tissues and slurp them up with your Newly-Formed palps/pedi-palps.

    You might get venom, which is cool, but most spiders are only venomous to other arthropods because most spiders hunt primarily arthropods (occasionally small amphibians or reptiles for larger species, a couple tarrantulas are known to opportunistically hunt rodents or bird hatchlings, but they don’t have venom to begin with, so whatever). Unless you get a black widow or brown recluse or something. A dose of that vemon from a human sized Black Widow or Brown Recluse chimera (the Type of Thing you are now) would like 99% be enough to kill a person




  • If you want cool eyes, go with the Mantis Shrimp tbh, they’ve got like 7 or 8 different cone cells for everything from ultraviolet to infrared. IIRC scientists don’t think their brains are powerful enough to fully use all that info at once, but I feel like connecting that to a brain that’s like 1000x as powerful would fix that.

    I’d hope you’d just get the extra cone cells and not compund eyes tho, compound eyes would be Difficult for a human to adopt to, since our visual cortices evolved to process two high resolution visual streams and not like, 100 shitty visual streams.

    I think you could just plug an eye with extra cone types directly into a human brain tho, there are people born with tetrachromia (4th cone cell that extends a bit into the ultraviolet iirc), and they can utilize information from the extra cone cells perfectly fine.

    Afaik, the human eye lens absorbs most UV light, so people with tetrachromia can’t actually see much UV, but it does give them way more precise color vision overall, because instead of infering colors based on 4 values (red, green, blue, and overall brightness), you’re adding a 5th value for violet, which makes colors that look similar to baseline humans easier to tell apart. There are people with no lens on their eyes (either a birth defect or they had to be removed) who can fully see UV radiation tho, I don’t even think it requires tetrachromia, the blue cone cells are very slightly sensitive to UV if none of it is absorbed by the lens.


  • Bats, I want their crazy advanced immune system and interferon production. Bats are tiny mammals with a metabolism even faster than a rat/mouse due to the high energy needs of powered flight. Typically, small mammals with this fast of a metabolism will live like 2-5 years, because cell division is so rapid that after only a few years, the cells’ DNA becomes too damaged to continue. However, bats have insane immune systems. They’re immune (asymptomatic carriers) to nearly every virus capable of infecting them because their immune systems produce so much interferon that any damage to the DNA (eg from a virus inserting code for its own reproduction into a cell) is corrected almost immediately. This process also partially repairs damage from cell-division, meaning that bats can live up to ~40 YEARS depending on the species. If a human had that ability, it would be like living to 400 or 500 years old, and being immune to nearly every disease (between native viral immunity, and antibiotics for bacterial infections)