specproc

It's hard to reach any other conclusion about where this is heading. I don't think we're long off a major breakout event.

These things are weapons. Imagine a government, pointing their data centers at another, and instructing the fleet to do its worst. Digital Hiroshima. I doubt we're far away.

I read Nowhere to Hide recently, really worth it if you can get past Greenwald sticking himself in the middle (start halfway through).

The stuff in there is horrifying, and incredibly cute compared to what's possible now. The bottleneck back then would have been analysis, trivial now.

Everyone in the world, especially our leaders, sit under a colossal, omniscient blackmail machine. I don't believe democracy can exist under these conditions.

None of this has ever worked for me. I still struggle.

What does help is understanding that the problem is often me. Not that the internet isn't a hellscape of addicting design, or that I've not been flex to screens of some sort or another since childhood, but that my level of engagement with it scales with my general wellbeing.

In the recovery world, they talk about HALT: hungry, angry, lonely, tired. I'm worst on my devices when I'm one of those. Oh, or hungover.

Content blockers and greyscale and whatnot are all fine, but I've had most success looking away from technology to help.

I still suck at this, I bet a lot of us do, but knowing myself has been most helpful. Being able to understand why I'm doing it helps me break the circuit and engage more with other things.

It's an ongoing battle though, I hate it.

People are misreading the author's case as annoyance, that they simply don't like apps or the way society is foisting apps on them.

What I read was what they really hate is being forced to have an account with a handful of American companies to engage with the world.

I totally agree, this situation is intolerable. Your average user should not have to be forced to have a phone managed by one of two American companies to get by in the world. I should not be forced to use Facebook to receive updates from my European embassy whilst abroad. I should not be forced, through the network effect, to have WhatsApp installed on my phone.

America is going nowhere good, fast, and we -- as individuals -- are chiefly tied to this deranged shitshow through our spyware-enabled tech.

I'd ban every American tech company from every device in my country if I had the chance.

Seeing as folks are sharing in the thread here's some of mine.

I moved on from Warhammer to 6mm cyberpunk city dioramas. Models mainly from LazyForger.

https://specialprocedures.github.io/

Been painting for years and not come across that one. Thank you kindly.

The writing is hideous, I can see that being the case.

There are multiple legs to The Hobby (tm), the painting and modelling, the game, and the lore.

For me, painting is the fun bit. I find the game broken and totally driven by marketing. Horrible pay-to-win stuff.

Gaming you need people, you gotta get down a shop and say hi. I prefer independents, as they sell other games, but what's available depends on where you are. Even without shops, finding a group isn't that hard, there's an organised one in my very small town. Facebook etc. can help.

For painting, it's easy, just find models you like the look of, the official site can suggest paints, and have a crack. Your first ones won't be great, but it's the progress that's fun. There's an absurd amount of YouTube content. My crew like Cult of Paint.

Lore, I know least about, I find the books unreadable, but the Black Library is vast. The Horus Heresy is the canonical backbone.

A friend actually writes some short stuff on the fantasy side, do him a favour and grab a collection with Jake Ozga.

Good luck.

> It is a self-care luxury that I can indulge when I have some free time.

This is such an incredible source of sadness.

Yeah, glazed immediately. It's not even like I recognised it as generated, there's just no substance.

As a personal rule, I don't touch short form video, much like I keep away from cocaine.

So many dead lads from both my countries fighting American wars, for zero gain to our peoples. That's vassalship, not an alliance.

As someone who spends far too much time questioning the system, I often assume the hoop-jumpers are somehow happier. I wonder if life would be easier if I stopped worrying about the big picture.

> The report stated that the US had concerns about Japanese government market intervention to support the TRON OS and identified two specific markets where TRON was receiving government advantage.

The US government is one hell of a moat.

So many folks in the thread, myself included. Really fun type of project.

I made one of these recently! Total vibe-code, but exactly the sort of thing that I'd never get around to without.

Plugged it into Sonic Pi, wired it up to play samples on gestures. Got a nice installation brewing at some point.

*Quasi-experimental, see my comment below. Excuse the sloppy language, it's a while since I've done one.

It's not as good as an RCT, but lifetime sugar consumption, as the article points out, is not something you can randomise.

OK, quasi-experimental, a discontinuity design, surely? It's not purely observational, as you've got (albeit imperfect) treatment and control, built around (presumably very similar) people born on either side of a cut-off, simulating randomisation.

Observational would be simply looking at sugar consumption across a cohort and having that as a covariate.

The fact someone else gathered the data has nothing to do with it.

Edit: It's a widely-used research technique, which attempts to address this correlation-causation issue without having to do RCTs.

https://medium.com/@arun.subram456/causal-inference-regressi...

It's an experimental study. These designs attempt to create a treatment and control to account for this problem.

Others in the thread point out how it's not easy to implement, but there is a methodological attempt at casual inference in the design.

Ouf, username checks out. Thanks for the warning, wishing you health.

Yeah mine too. Swear to God I'm not a bot, folks. I just use Firefox and a bunch of extensions.

Actually pretty pissed off about that. A site like this should understand their audience is technical.

Discovered bouldering in my forties, after neglecting my body for years.

Fantastic sport, I'm stronger, fitter, and more flexible than I've ever been. It's fun, social, relatively cheap, and way less of a grind than the gym.

I think the key point there is "viable experiments", most digital marketing people I've encountered are not into things like deseasoning, controlling, heck, you say "regression" and they blank. Not accounting for trends and covariates would give a misleading impressing even with high quality data.

The "think of the children" framing in all these cases troubles me. Adults experience harms from these platforms too.

We see problems with addiction, political influence, extremist rabbit-holes, fraud, and yes, buying tonnes of unnecessary crap because they're basically a non-stop stream of advertising.

Children are certainly particularly vulnerable, but my Dad's social media habits are what really worry me, and the societal implications of nations hooked on rage-bait.

The nineties was a very different time. There was generally a lot more goodwill towards America on all fronts, the collapse of the Soviet Union was framed, and in some quarters accepted, as something that would lead to global peace and prosperity. That America was left standing was deemed to be a validation of its economic model.

There was genuine optimism at the time, we were coming out of the shadow of thermonuclear war. Globalisation was discussed as a global phenomenon, less about America specifically, and more about networks and opening of borders.

Also Linux was unusable by any but the beardiest.

Today, after 30-40 years on top, it's hard to see America as anything other than an incredibly dangerous threat to global stability with an utterly broken economic model. On the geopolitical front, it's squandered this goodwill time and time again, and gets worse with every new presidency. Domestically, we've seen our economies hollowed out, bought up, and skimmed at every turn.

The challenge the world faces now is the question of how we unplug ourselves as this increasingly deranged machine becomes ever more aggressive and hostile.

Thanks for your work there.

Dear writers, please don't give me "## The Big Picture"

Ducks suck, Corvids are where it's at.

I regularly feed bits of my sandwich to the jackdaws near me, they'll catch it out the air.

I pay for content: gig and cinema tickets, merch and digital albums from artists I like or know. I buy loads of books, magazines, digital and physical games, art I can hang on my wall. I've even started a bit of a CD collection.

At times I've had Spotify, Netflix and Mubi subscriptions. As a UK-resident with a TV, I pay for the BBC.

I feel I more than adequately contribute to cultural production.

In some ways, the current situation suits me fine. I take the free stuff where I'm technically capable. I'll block the ads, pirate to my hearts content, use yt-dlp, BPC, userscripts.

I'm not not paying for stuff, but I've enough financial pressures already, thank you very much. I don't see why I should send all my money to (mostly) US corporations, who've farmed and resold user-generated content.

> The best matches were the ones that we only allowed grenades, bazookas, mortars and other few basic short range weapons.

The connoisseur's choice.