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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • A poly group (also known as a polycule) is a network of polyamorous people’s relationships. Polyamory, in case you’re unaware, is the practice of having multiple romantic or sexual partners at the same time, in contrast to monogamy.

    If you were polyamorous and wanted to graph out your relationships, you could do it a few different ways. For example:

    • Just you and your partners. If any of your partners are also in relationships with each other, you’d draw lines between them as well.

    • Extend an extra level and include all of your partners’ partners (known as metamours), again connecting any pair on the graph who are partners.

    • Extend that further and include all of your partners’ partners’ partners (no specific term for this as far as I know). This would likely include people you don’t personally know, and it would be difficult to build a complete graph of all their relationships.

    Etc.





  • I see this as kind of like the “loudness war” in radio.

    It’s not a conspiracy or anything, it’s just the networks and producers adapting (correctly) to how people actually watch/listen to stuff.

    Audiophiles can complain all they want about low dynamic range, but if you’re listening to radio in a noisy environment (like a car), high dynamic range is actually fucking awful.

    Similarly, there’s nothing inherently wrong with watching a show when you can’t give it your full attention. Sometimes I watch TV while I’m doing chores, or even during my workday. You know what’s great for that? Those stupid competition shows where they narrate everything on screen, and have five instant replays plus recaps after ad breaks. I never feel like I’m missing anything even if I ignore 80% of the show. I’d never sit down and really watch this stuff though. My brain would rot. It’s just a step above white noise.














  • I don’t want AI in my browser even if I can turn it off for the same reason I don’t want my refrigerator door booby-trapped with an explosive even if I can turn it off.

    Bugs happen. Configuration changes happen. User error happens. Software is complex, and I shouldn’t need an intimate knowledge of every goddamn app I run to be sure it’s not siphoning all my data off to god-knows-where. I use hundreds of programs on a daily basis. It is completely untenable to carefully configure every single one, stay abreast of constant updates and changes, and spend 76 full working days reading every TOS I am subject to. And of course, all their policies and defaults are subject to change without notice, so nothing I learn today will necessarily apply tomorrow anyway.

    I want to be confident that my web browser is not — either by design, due to a misconfiguration, or due to a bug — sending my data to OpenAI. I do not want a booby-trapped browser, even if I can turn off the booby-traps. I do not want my fridge to explode, so I don’t buy fridges with built-in explosives. Seems pretty simple to me.

    I also want to be confident in the same for others. If I deploy a browser to 100 employees’ machines, or even just my mom’s, a little opt-out checkbox under Settings will not give me any peace of mind.