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I hit a personal blocker with regards to my archival system, and my file tagger projects, so I’m taking a sabbatical-sabbatical and started a project to make a simple unix shell in assembly. It’s very nice working at a lower level, the set of problems are practically more tangible and easier for me to step-through mentally, it’s a nice break at the moment. Currently I’m procrastinating reading up on proper code alignment on 64x Intel systems though :)
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The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles - By Noam Nisan and Shimon Schocken
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Ghost in the Wires - Kevin Mitnick
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The first book is usually called “Nand to Tetris”, right? I’m interested in how you’re getting on with that. I personally kind of, baulked at the mathematics, and ended up winding my own path to operating systems development via osdev.org :)
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Hail_Spacecake
21 days ago
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What Men and Women Consider Hardcore Gaming Are Not The Same
This article is a good argument against treating a lack of gender diversity in video games as a problem to be solved. Men and women are systematically interested in different types of video game experiences, and game creators who cater to one type of experience or the other will naturally have a gender imbalance in the sorts of players who want to play that type of game.
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There’s nothing obvious about it, and re-examining unfounded claims is not bizarre. We know that, historically, plenty of claims made were just plain wrong (consider the anabolic-catabolic “theory”).
Boys and girls had very different /roles/ since the dawn of time for obvious reasons. If you tried, as a girl, to play with the “wrong” toys you could see quite a bit of resistance.
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I’m not saying this is wrong (I haven’t done any research so I don’t know) but it seems very likely that kids are pushed to play with specific toys by society. We label toys as boys or girls, we market toys as being played with by either boys or girls and we give kids toys that we associate with their gender.
I saw a video this year where young babies were placed in a room full of a range of toys. Each time the baby was dressed in either pink or blue and given a female or male name regardless of their actual gender and a babysitter was in the room as well to help them play with the toys. Each time the babysitter would tend to help the baby play with toys stereotypical for their perceived gender. After the babysitter was asked which toys they thought the baby liked and they would say the baby seemed to prefer the toys of the perceived gender regardless of what the babys actual gender was.
Now that’s not really a scientific study but it does seem to suggest that things are not as “obvious” as they seem. It’s a little hard to test because really you would have to raise a kid in an alternative society to see what differences it makes.
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There’s also evidence that toy choice is gendered along the same lines that we in our culture are familiar with among chimpanzees, suggesting that toy choice has something to do with biological mechanisms of gendering bodies that are older than the human-chimpanzee split.
Anyway, this entire article is already presupposing that gendered differences in toys (well, video game tastes, but is a video game not just a more sophisticated toy?) exist and are important. As per the title, what men and women consider hardcore gaming are not the same.
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Could as well be the kids wanted to be nice to the babysitter who helped them play. The type of play also needs to be accounted for. There are studies as well which show that very young kids tend to gravitate to certain types of play.
Of course there’s going to be some overlap and gray areas, but what’s the harm in acknowledging the idea that maybe play and preferences have something to do with biology?
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but what’s the harm in acknowledging the idea that maybe play and preferences have something to do with biology?
There is no harm in thinking maybe it might be true and maybe it might not. There is harm in things like OPs comment stating “It’s a sign of bizarre times that this isn’t obvious.” When it’s extremely complex and not obvious at all.
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There is no harm with acknowledging that they “have something to do with biology”, the difference is how much weight is put on it, and the problems are caused when that is used as an excuse for things like exclusion, whether that’s subtle coercion of “oh I wouldn’t bother with that, because it’s been shown that people like me are bad at that sort of thing”, to the deep personal exclusion of “I will never be able to do X in a good way because of my biology, so I should not try”.
Equally, what is the harm in acknowledging the idea that maybe play and preferences have something to do with culture?
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I don’t know where coercion or exclusion came from here.
And surely society has some effect, but reading something like The Blank Slate makes me think it’a not such a huge factor.
Next someone will probably point out Pinker is a white supremacist or something and I’m done with this already.
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I don’t know where coercion or exclusion came from here.
Do societal consequences not matter, just because they’re societal?
reading something like The Blank Slate makes me think it’a not such a huge factor.
The Blank Slate, last I checked, ignores a lot of hard evidence done in the social sciences in favour of bashing Pinker’s strawman of the subjects. In addition, I’m not sure how someone can place a single reasonably cited book as a justification for ignoring 70 years of hard evidence. Especially when such a book’s argument is strongly contested.
Next someone will probably point out Pinker is a white supremacist or something and I’m done with this already.
Does someone’s political views not have any bearing on their research? Surely years of study have found bias in study construction extremely easy. I take the attitude that it must be so, for politics is how we view and frame all manner of parts of the world. Whether or not someone is a racist matters deeply as to the purpose behind the arguments that they make, and the ways that they approach certain details. Likewise if I am a monarchist you would surely wish to know that when arguing about matters of state, since my arguments might be led by conscious or unconscious motivations.
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I don’t think Pinker has a political horse in the race, but I do understand he can be misunderstood to have one even if he didn’t. So as far as anyone should care, the discussion could be limited to the science.
I’m just not particularly interested anymore, because something like infant behavior, sex vs gender, toy preference, biology, anthropology, primatology and who knows what “always” gets conflated with coercion and exclusion.
It’s essentially impossible to discuss matters online, text-based, time-delayed and without real interaction. More so when it starts to feel like something someone wants to win. The easiest win is to claim the other party doesn’t care about something not immediately related yet important and he’s therefore a bad person by implication.
That’s why I’m done.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and men and women choose different toys, ways to play, subjects to study and careers to follow.
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Yes as a hypothetical, and in a context where social coercion doesn’t exist your statement would be totally fine and good. Saying it with certainty, even though it runs contrary to the scientific consensus lacks epistemological responsibility. It’s fine to say I’m not sure I agree with the scientific consensus, however it’s irresponsible to say that the scientific consensus is certainly wrong without any evidence. Once you add in the fact that some people will try to use such claims as a way to pressure a demographic out of an activity, then you have the risk of real harm. I’m not saying you’re the kind of person who would do that but it’s important to be aware that people will try to use your message there to exclude others who are wholly capable.
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I mean there’s no reason to believe that there’s real sexual dimorphism in the toys children choose to play with. I’ve seen boys play with dolls and girls play with trucks. Gender is a construct, that’s the scientific consensus and those saying otherwise value tradition over evidence.
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There are also a lot of arbitrary gendered items that change over time or across cultures. For example skirts of some form have been either male or female clothing depending on the culture/location. Also pants have been male clothing but are now neutral.
There are no doubt very real differences between genders. The obvious one being physical strength/body shapes but I am willing to bet that a majority of the differences between genders today are formed by tradition and not biology.
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The differences in gender as you said are formed by tradition. When you talk about physical strength and body shapes however that’s sexual dimorphism, unless you are referring to the cultural mores that pressure men to bulk up and pressure women not to. Sex informally speaking is the bits between your legs, sexual dimorphism is the physiological difference that often (but not always) come along with that like testosterone or estrogen production, gender is the cultural construct we have around sex. You can have sexes without having gender, which I’m sure has existed and you can have many genders within a single sex if you’re like creating a sci-fi culture.
You weren’t wrong in any way I just thought it would be useful to be clear.
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The reason there’s a push to solve it is the profit motive.Given that roughly 50% of women play games if you could create an experience that tailors to both cultures you could make a lot more money than if you didn’t.
Though I personally also enjoy playing games with people with different backgrounds. Sometimes a different cultural outlook also can have refreshing outside of the box ideas. It looks like for example that according to this survey while women value competition and challenge, they also value looking good while doing it, and going all the way to completion. That would mean if you want to hook women, make sure to add robust customization options or ways to build or design things. I think the completion aspect is already in most games, cheevos. Notice that they don’t disvalue destruction, but they find it less interesting than a well written story.
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I haven’t heard that particular complaint, but one I hear often is that it’s quite absurd to have a genre lineup that resembles something like “action,” “comedy,” “drama,” and “not for men,” as if “not for men” were its own genre (it’s obviously not literally called that, but you provided your own example above). Deciding to use a “not for men” genre immediately creates its counterpart, “for men,” which is every other genre.
You logically have two choices here:
- Accept the dichotomy and make explicit the implicit labels: “action for men,” “comedy for men,” “drama for men,” and “not for men.” You’ll have to train your brain to see this everywhere, as the implicit labels are extremely implicit. Along with appeal to the targeted demographic comes license to exclude the other – after all, if your genre is “not for men” then you don’t care if your movie makes men uncomfortable (this is different than making it desirable for not-men). If your genre is “action for men,” you don’t care if your movie makes women feel uncomfortable. It’s not for them.
- Reject the dichotomy, and distribute the “not for men” qualities into the core genres – “action for men” just becomes “action”. Along with this comes the lack of license to exclude. This has made some movie watchers/videogame players mad – even though there is still plenty of content around (and more being made every day), the consumers of the previously “for men” genres see this as dilution and loss. Some of the things they liked excluded people, and instead of trying to untangle the good from the bad (or learn to coexist with new expressions of things they liked before) they’ve decided to double down and defend everything.
Whichever decision you make will impact how you see the modern media landscape.
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Currently most of my reading has been juggling political philosophy books.
My main list is: The Origins of Capitalism, Carceral Capitalism, Why I’ve Stopped Talking (To White People) About Race, and October (by Mieville)
However, I usually keep on having to stop reading these, because, in the case of Meiksins’ book, the density, and in the case of the rest, people have a habit of being disgusting creatures when The System tells them it’s acceptable. One part of October describes how, in the run-up to the revolution, a right-wing ‘protest’ where they locked a town-full of jewish people inside a church and set it alight…
So for the inter-rim between those books, I’ve been ripping through Whipping Girl, it’s ridiculously accessible and a very good deconstruction of gender and how society deals with it. I also recently obtained a copy of Bruce Lee’s “Fighting Method” for fitness reasons.
Another book I obtained recently was Morton’s “Humankind: Solidarity with non-human people”, which rather surprisingly turned out to be a Marxist argument for the better-treatment of animals. The first five pages demonstrate the author has clearly done his philosophical research, however, so I am rather looking forward to it.
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The Origins of Capitalism is an excellent book. The way it traces the development and solidification of institutions, and the way they channel human behavior and potential, dissolved a whole bunch of my preconceived notions about the nature of things.
You might also like A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David Harvey
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Been looking for some books like this (and the Mieville has been on my list for some time), those look worth a shot - thanks. I have the same problem with political/history books, for what it’s worth’ I can only take so much depressing history before I need to clear my head with something lighter.
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just got Bullshit Jobs
https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-bullshit-job-boom
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Ahh! I’ve been waiting for him to finish that book. Thank you for reminding me.
Have you read Ellen Wood’s book “The Origins of Capitalism”? I found it to be adjacently interesting.
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This blogpost is a good example of fragmented, hobbyist security maximalism (sprinkled with some personal grudges based on the tone).
Expecting Signal to protect anyone specifically targeted by a nation-state is a huge misunderstanding of the threat models involved.
Talking about threat models, it’s important to start from them and that explains most of the misconceptions in the post.
Were tradeoffs made? Yes. Have they been carefully considered? Yes. Signal isn’t perfect, but it’s usable, high-level security for a lot of people. I don’t say I fully trust Signal, but I trust everything else less. Turns out things are complicated when it’s about real systems and not fantasy escapism and wishes.
In this article, resistance to governments constantly comes up as a theme of his work. He also pushed for his tech to be used to help resist police states like with the Arab Spring example. Although he mainly increased the baseline, the tool has been pushed for resisting governments and articles like that could increase perception that it was secure against governments.
This nation-state angle didn’t come out of thin air from paranoid, security people: it’s the kind of thing Moxie talks about. In one talk, he even started with a picture of two, activist friends jailed in Iran in part to show the evils that motivate him. Stuff like that only made the stuff Drew complains about on centralization, control, and dependence on cooperating with surveillance organization stand out even more due to the inconsistency. I’d have thought he’d make signed packages for things like F-Droid sooner if he’s so worried about that stuff.
A problem with the “nation-state” rhetoric that might be useful to dispel is the idea that it is somehow a God-tier where suddenly all other rules becomes defunct. The five-eyes are indeed “nation state” and has capabilities that are profound; like the DJB talk speculating about how many RSA-1024 keys that they’d likely be able to factor in a year given such and such developments and what you can do with that capability. That’s scary stuff. On the other hand, this is not the “nation state” that is Iceland or Syria. Just looking at the leaks from the “Hacking Team” thing, there are a lot of “nation states” forced to rely on some really low quality stuff.
I think Greg Conti in his “On Cyber” setup depicts it rather well (sorry, don’t have a copy of the section in question) and that a more reasonable threat model of capable actors you do need to care about is that of Organized Crime Syndicates - which seems more approachable. Nation State is something you are afraid of if you are political actor or in conflict with your government, where the “we can also waterboard you to compliance” factors into your threat model, Organized Crime hits much more broadly. That’s Ivan with his botnet from internet facing XBMC^H Kodi installations.
I’d say the “Hobbyist, Fragmented Maximalist” line is pretty spot on - with a dash of “Confused”. The ‘threats’ of Google Play Store (test it, write some malware and see how long it survives - they are doing things there …) - the odds of any other app store; Fdroid, the ones from Samsung, HTC, Sony et al. - being completely owned by much less capable actors is way, way higher. Signal (perhaps a Signal-To-Threat ratio?) perform an good enough job in making reasonable threat actors much less potent. Perhaps not worthy of “trust”, but worthy of day to day business.
And yet, Signal is advertising with the face of Snowden and Laura Poitras, and quotes from them recommending it.
What kind of impression of the threat models involved do you think does this create?
Who should be the faces recommending signal that people will recognize and listen to?
Whichever ones are normally on the media for information security saying the least amount of bullshit. We can start with Schneier given he already does a lot of interviews and writes books laypeople buy.
What does Schneier say about signal?
He encourages use of stuff like that to increase baseline but not for stopping nation states. He adds also constantly blogged about the attacks and legal methods they used to bypass technical measures. So, his reporting was mostly accurate.
We counterpoint him here or there but his incentives and reo are tied to delivering accurate info. Moxie’s incentives would, if he’s selfish, lead to locked-in to questionable platforms.
I’m sorry, but this is plain incorrect. There are many expansions on IRC that have happened, including the most recent effort, IRCv3: a collectoin of extensions to IRC to add notifications, etc. Not to mention the killer point: “All of the IRCv3 extensions are backwards-compatible with older IRC clients, and older IRC servers.”
If you actually look at the protocols? Slack is a clear case of Not Invented Here syndrome. Slack’s interface is not only slower, but does some downright crazy things (Such as transliterating a subset of emojis to plain-text – which results in batshit crazy edge-cases).
If you have a free month, try writing a slack client. Enlightenment will follow :P
Per IRCv3 people I’ve talked to, IRCv3 blew up massively on the runway, and will never take off due to infighting.
And yet everyone is using Slack.
There are swathes of people still using Windows XP.
The primary complaint of people who use Electron-based programs is that they take up half a gigabyte of RAM to idle, and yet they are in common usage.
The fact that people are using something tells you nothing about how Good that thing is.
At the end of the day, if you slap a pretty interface on something, of course it’s going to sell. Then you add in that sweet, sweet Enterprise Support, and the Hip and Cool factors of using Something New, and most people will be fooled into using it.
At the end of the day, Slack works just well enough Not To Suck, is Hip and Cool, and has persistent history (Something that the IRCv3 group are working on: https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/batch/chathistory-3.3.html)
The time for the IRC group to be working on a solution to persistent history was a decade ago. It strikes me as willful ignorance to disregard the success of Slack et al over open alternatives as mere fashion in the face of many meaningful functionality differences. For business use-cases, Slack is a better product than IRC full-stop. That’s not to say it’s perfect or that I think it’s better than IRC on all axes.
To the extent that Slack did succeed because it was hip and cool, why is that a negative? Why can’t IRC be hip and cool? But imagine being a UX designer and wanting to help make some native open-source IRC client fun and easy to use for a novice. “Sisyphean” is the word that comes to mind.
If we want open solutions to succeed we have to start thinking of them as products for non-savvy end users and start being honest about the cases where closed products have superior usability.
IRC isn’t hip and cool because people can’t make money off of it. Technologies don’t get investment because they are good, they get good because of investment. The reason that Slack is hip/cool and popular and not IRC is because the investment class decided that.
It also shows that our industry is just a pop culture and can give a shit about good tech .
There were companies making money off chat and IRC. They just didn’t create something like Slack. We can’t just blame the investors when they were backing companies making chat solutions whose management stayed on what didn’t work in long-term or for huge audience.
IRC happened before the privatization of the internet. So the standard didn’t lend itself well for companies to make good money off of it. Things like slack are designed for investor optimization, vs things like IRC being designed for use and openness.
My point was there were companies selling chat software, including IRC clients. None pulled off what Slack did. Even those doing IRC with money or making money off it didn’t accomplish what Slack did for some reason. It would help to understand why that happened. Then, the IRC-based alternative can try to address that from features to business model. I don’t see anything like that when most people that like FOSS talk Slack alternatives. Then, they’re not Slack alternatives if lacking what Slack customers demand.
Thanks for clarifying. My point can be restated as… There is no business model for federated and decentralized software (until recently , see cryptocurrencies). Note most open and decentralized tech of the past was government funded and therefore didn’t face business pressures. This freed designets to optimise other concerns instead of business onrs like slack does.
The argument being made is that the vast majority of Slack’s appeal is the “hip-and-cool” factor, not any meaningful additions to functionality.
Right, as I said I think it’s important for proponents of open tech to look at successful products like Slack and try to understand why they succeeded. If you really think there is no meaningful difference then I think you’re totally disconnected from the needs/context of the average organization or computer user.
That’s all well and good, I just don’t see why we can’t build those systems on top of existing open protocols like IRC. I mean: of course I understand, it’s about the money. My opinion is that it doesn’t make much sense to insist that opaque, closed ecosystems are the way to go. We can have the “hip-and-cool” factor, and all the amenities provided by services like Slack, without abandoning the important precedent we’ve set for ourselves with protocols like IRC and XMPP. I’m just disappointed that everyone’s seeing this as an “either-or” situation.
I definitely don’t see it as an either-or situation, I just think that the open source community typically has the wrong mindset for competing with closed products and that most projects are unapproachable by UX or design-minded people.
Open, standard chat tech has had persistent history and much more for decades in the form of XMPP. Comparing to the older IRC on features isn’t really fair.
I have to disagree here. It shows that it is good enough to solve a problem for them.
I don’t see how Good and “good enough to solve a problem” are related here. The first is a metric of quality, the second is the literal bare minimum of that metric.
I’d dispute that. People who become interested in Signal seem much more prone to be using F-Droid than, say, WhatsApp users. Signal tries to be an app accessible to the common person, but few people really use it or see the need… and often they are free software enthusiasts or people who are fed up with Google and surveillance.
More likely sure, but that doesn’t mean that many of them reach the threshold of effort that they do.
IRC isn’t decentralised… it’s not even federated
Sure it is, it’s just that there are multiple federations.