Fantastically Blue Fox! @Azure@vulpine.club

Geography over affinity, though, that seems way more problematic. People who like weird, confusing fiction or weird confusing programming languages IN ANN ARBOR are not my ideal discursive set. Locality doesn't really help, because, because programming is one of those topics where textual communication makes it /better/ than in-person interaction.

In that case I really do think the problem isn't a lack of 'friction' it's disinformation piggybacking itself on systems built to push 'engagement' for the sake of 'engagement'. In that sense she identifies the wrong problem. Me communicating to you isn't bad. The system that rewards and promotes anything that sparks lots of emotion is bad.

So! This happened: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/3k9q33/the-internet-needs-more-friction

Some of her points are /quite valid/.

Not everything needs a push notification. I'd dare say most things that have push notifications now don't need them.

I'm not clear on who is best to decide what DOES have a push notification. My instinct is to have them /ALL/ turned off by default with the user having to turn them on explicitly. Perhaps each type of notification gets to prompt the user, explaining its purpose, once, giving them an option to enable it that defaults to 'no' and after that they have to go find it and explicitly turn it on.

I certainly don't want to leave up to the content providers, since even though they legitimately have understanding of the design of their systems, they have a perverse incentive to maximize engagement. Or even to just have the user see their logo/name often so they recognize The Brand.

Defaulting to no should help the user keep from overwhelming themself due to fear of missing out. Since having your attention shredded is harmful, having the attention-preserving choice be the default seems Good.

Sheesh. It took me two days of feeling stuffy and coughing and sneezing before I remembered I own an air purifier.

Why no one will ever hire me as a Humanist minister:

Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today before the uncaring cosmos that sees not what we do, nor does it care. That bathes us in the light of a thousand stars that give us life for no particular reason. We are here to scream our impotent defiance against the absurdity of being by carrying out the sacrament of marriage.

(From a roleplay.)

Being a linguist means finding you've been making noises like a teakettle boiling over at work because you just noticed that you round your lips when pronouncing 'sh'.

And so the streets became unusable as every thoroughfare descended into a forever war between superhuman intellects bent on being artistic and grandiose wizards of filth and the Paladins of Cleanliness in shining array, anticipating their moves, adapting to their strategies, standing with an appendage waiting to snatch each piece of litter before it hits the ground.

Soon, both sides began to consume all resources of civilization, houses torn brick from brick, people bone from bone to create new collages of litter.

Metamaterials were engineered to be as hard to pick up as possible. Nanotech banana peels that deconstructed the trash receptacle they were placed in, causing it to explode into even more litter inspired greater, grander research projects to counter them…

Imagine a world of conscious, artificial beings made to enjoy cleaning bathrooms, picking up litter, or other unpleasant tasks.

Sitting. Slouching against the wall.

Because humans are just too clean. There's a little mess now and then, but nothing you can really get your heart and soul into. No filth to declare war on and annihilate.

(Perhaps humans used to be dirtier but seeing critters scurrying in to pick up anything they drop made them feel self-conscious about littering.)

Obviously, the only solution will be to create a subspecies of automata that enjoy littering in perverse, wild, and exuberantly creative ways.

I know some people dislike the scope creep of systemd, but at least in the case of containers, it's made cgroups and namespaces widely used without them being shackled to a bogus distribution format.

Gosh darn it.

I am subscribed to your mailing list.

You have your own website.

So why would your mall direct me to a Medium post?

What is wrong with you?

I know nobody else did, but I really liked Kings.

That kind of tonal dissonance appeals to me.

Between the snow and the streetlights it feels as bright as day outside at midnight.

Dreamed that Thomas Malthus went to Australia and visiting the newly discovered continent full of life and expansion made him quite optimistic, so much so that he wrote a boomster manifesto about growth without limits.

UNFORTUNATELY, that caused the exact same kind of catastrophe that the book he didn't write caused. So he became a dark wizard, extending his life for hundreds of years and living in a flying castle, engaging in research while the world starved below so that, eventually, during the late 1980s he could steal the body and soul of Madonna and perform a mass sacrifice of the audience at a huge concert to ride the wave of life and emotional energy backward in time to prevent himself from going to Australia in the first place.