Web Excursions 2021-10-02
We’re Shaped by Our Sexual Desires. Can We Shape Them?
The incel phenomenon is a particularly concentrated form of the misogynistic poison that is aerosolized throughout the general cultural air.
Such men feel that they have a right to sex, but so have many men—and, until very recently, the law was often on their side.
(Nobody was convicted of marital rape in the United States before 1979.)
Our sexual marketplace is explicitly and brutally judgmental,
especially now that dating and hookup apps make it easier than ever to “shop” for partners
according to a set of predetermined preferences—
as if shopping for groceries by category online—and such “preferences” tend to involve race.
Certain bodies confer status to those granted access to them
Female desire isn’t seen as an appropriate subject for feminist critique.
Sex positivity rules the day:
whatever a woman claims she wants is, by definition, a good thing, an expression of female agency,
so long as it takes place within the bounds of consent
Women had an absolute right to follow their own desires, within the limits of consent.
This was sex positivity,
and it anticipated the advent of feminism’s third wave,
the one that we are largely still surfing.
There is already a term for categorical attraction to “the other”: fetishization.
There’s a term, too, for preference based on guilt rather than on desire: pity.
The first is anathema to love, the second to sex, and both are anathema to dignity.
Erotic desire, Angel argues, does not sit within us, fully formed, waiting to be mined like ore.
It takes shape through a process of exploration, and, ideally, collaboration.
(They don’t call it “intercourse” for nothing.)
But this kind of happy discovery is compromised for many women.
One clear reason is the threat of male violence.
A less obvious culprit is the safeguard that contemporary feminism has formulated to defuse that threat: affirmative consent.
When Black History Is Unearthed, Who Gets to Speak for the Dead?
There’s a strange overlap between people who don’t want to think about the history of slavery and people who fixate on the politics of race only in terms of slavery,” Brown said. Both assume that “the conflicts of the past are necessarily the conflicts of the present and the future, as if somehow the descendants of the slaveholders and of the slaves are supposed to be aligned with their ancestors forever.”
There is therefore no path to equality without measures aimed at repair: restorative history, reparations, the return of remains. But these measures sometimes advance the anti-democratic idea that ancestry is destiny.
'Google' is most searched word on Bing, Google says - BBC News
The EU accused Google of using Android's success in the smartphone market to make Google the default search engine.
But Google says its service is simply the most popular.
"We have submitted evidence showing that the most common search query on Bing is, by far, 'Google'," lawyer Alfonso Lamadrid told the EU General Court.
"People use Google because they choose to, not because they are forced to.
Always-on Processor magic: How Find My works while iPhone is powered off
All chips and various embedded devices Apple manufactures run a real-time operating system, called RTKitOS.
The AOP on the iPhone is no exception.
All the iPhone needs to have Find My enabled while it is "off"
is some basic power control as well as
a Bluetooth chip
that can send Bluetooth LE advertisements.
Moreover, these advertisements require secret key material bound to the Apple ID on the iPhone.
There might be a difference in currently supported devices and chips that could in theory support this feature
On the AirTag, this key material is stored via the U1 chip.
Apple calls the nRF on the AirTag "Durian" for a reason.
They don't like it, they don't trust it, but it's cheap and low-power.
Most time, U1 is on sleep, and from time to time they wake it up.
This is not the design on the iPhone. On the iPhone, keys are stored in the Secure Enclave (SE).
The Find My protocol has a couple of interesting mechanisms to protect your privacy.
It has been fully reverse-engineered and there's an open-source implementation.
Moreover, the AirGuard app enables you to identify Find My BLE beacons on Android.
If you're afraid about locations leaking via Find My, you can simply disable it on your iPhone.
NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites
seanhunter:
Non-fungible doesn't mean something can't be divided,
it means a specific one just can't be substituted for another one.
An example: If I trade oil, one barrel of oil with a certain spec is fungible with another barrel of oil with the same spec.
The spec for oil types standardises particular grades and then people trade a standard barrel size
(called a bbl which is short for "blue barrel" because they used to be painted blue).
"Brent" and "WTI" are different grades.
If I sell you some oil you don't care which specific barrel you get as long as it's the same kind of thing.
Likewise if you borrow 10 dollars from me you can pay me back with any combination of notes up to the value of 10 dollars, you don't have to give me back the specific bills I gave you.
On the other hand, things like art are not fungible.
If I loan a Van Gogh to a gallery I very much want the same piece to be sent back to me after the exhibition is done.
It's not ok for them to send me something else.
Even if it's "sunflowers" (since Van Gogh painted a few of those and they are quite similar), I want the actual one I loaned to be sent back to me.
Normal bitcoins or ETH are fungible whereas NFTs are non-fungible.
The specific one you have matters usually
because it represents a digital proof of ownership of some specific resource (a bored ape or whatever).
jameshart:
People stopped buying [physical] things a while ago.
So for people who have grown up in a digital-subscription world, they might just have a fundamentally different mental model of ownership -
one which is more compatible with NFTs as a reasonable idea than the paradigm us old ‘thing owners’ have.
if you grew up digital native and the only things you’ve ever been able to buy are non transferable digital pointers to rights to use something,
maybe the idea of a transferable digital rights pointer seems like a crazy innovative new idea that changes everything?
Ruby removed “Participants will be tolerant of opposing views” from its CoC
Remove abuse enabling language · ruby/www.ruby-lang.org@8ff5273 · GitHub
1. **Always** be friendly, considerate, tactful, and tasteful. We want to
- keep this list hospitable to the growing ranks of newbies, very
- young people, and their teachers, as well as cater to fire breathing
- wizards. :-)
+ keep this list hospitable and safe for everyone.
- * Participants will be tolerant of opposing views.
* Participants must ensure that their language and actions are free of personal attacks and disparaging personal remarks.
- * When interpreting the words and actions of others, participants should always assume good intentions.
+ * Participants should speak and act with good intentions, but understand that intent and impact are not equivalent.
- * Behaviour which can be reasonably considered harassment will not be tolerated.
+ * Behaviour which can be considered harassment against protected classes will not be tolerated.