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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • Steven Gould - Jumper

    Barring the character names and teleportation it shares little with the movie, though I think the movie wasn’t all that bad tbh. The idea is a kid with an abusive single dad discovers he can teleport. He acts like a kid would, making lots of mistakes, and figures out his teleportation and how to live.

    The novel is a little old so characters are a little shallow and stereotypical but honestly way less than expected. I have listened to the novels before but come back every so often for a repeat.




  • There are three genomes that go into an embryo. One from the chromosomes of the large gamete, the egg, one from the chromosomes of the small gamete, the sperm, and one from the mitochondria, in humans from the egg as well. If you had two XX donors you could make XX kids. If you had two XY donors you could make XX, XY, and YY variants. The only viable ones would be XY and XX, YY would not reach gestation.

    That said, if you took the DNA from gametes from each, removed the nucleus and mitochondria of an egg, added the total gametic DNA from both to the cell, added a mitochondria from either donor, then it should, in theory, be a viable egg like in IVF. This is actually a strategy for dealing with a mitochondrial disease by donating mitochondrial DNA from another source rather than those impacted by the disease. The problem would be there are many ways for this to go wrong and be left with an unviable embryo, so it would likely take many many eggs and many many donated cells to get a single viable egg with the donated DNA. That said, it could technically work.


  • I don’t have photos of myself on the internet and do not participate in group photos. If I see a photo of myself online I know, for a fact, that the person who posted it does not respect my privacy, therefore they do not respect me. I will not trust them with any information about myself and others and in general will cut them out of my life if at all possible. Because of this I don’t have people who violate boundaries they don’t share, so if I said “Actually, I think I may be a woman” or “I have been thinking about leaving the country” they would not immediately judge or try to prevent my doing so, they would let me be and respect my needs. Also because of this I am much more comfortable working on things with these people to make life better and to invest in their wellbeing.



  • What I have always wanted from a phone since Android came out is what I had with my HTC Dream (the first android phone, slide out keyboard, trackball, oh god, I loved it). I had a super chunky extended battery which made it last multiple days on a single charge, or for someone such as myself made it last the full day. My current phone has a 5003mAh battery and is 8.9mm thick. I would happily take something that was 20mm thick to have all that space taken by a battery, which based on the dimensions of the battery is about 0.17Wh/mm^3. The remaining space should provide enough space for about 23500mAh which would bring the total to just under 29000mAh. At my current usage of charging twice a day from about 20% up to 100%, so around 4000mAh x2, and assuming we want to work between 20% and 80% for extended battery longevity, that would make about 17000mAh or just over 4 days of usage. That would be a delightfully chonky phone with the easy ability to keep the charge within the healthy range, not to mention the ability to have it stand on its side or upright without a stand in many cases.


  • Ah, sorry, missed that. So the missed alarm notification is happening way later, like hours later, than the alarm time? That sounds like the background process is being killed in some way. In Android when you set an alarm it uses the intent system to wake itself again later. If this is failing for your alarm app only then it could be an issue with the app, but this looks like the default clock application, is that correct? It looks like you maybe installed it from the play store but it may just be an update, so just checking.

    That all said, if the clock is the only app with this problem then I would address it by replacing the app. If this is impacting other apps I can only think of a few ways that it could be caused but it should be fairly obviously problematic for other apps and solving that is beyond my understanding.

    I would recommend trying another alarm clock app from a source you trust. I would install something from IzzyOnDroid on FDroid but your milage may vary.





  • Yeah, the whole “China is doing propaganda using TikTok” line is kind of like saying Russia is using bots on YouTube. Like, yeah, maybe, sure, but focussing all your efforts on one single platform and ignoring the rest is silly. As the red team you would use as many different platforms as possible, make sure your disinformation output was broad and came from multiple, even opposing, ideological positions, and absolutely swamp the information space with junk. If nothing is reliable people don’t approach things carefully, they just check out. Once people check out it is a win.



  • Both. China is where most consumer tech comes from, and the rest often includes parts from China as well. Taiwan has TSMC which makes all the big CPUs, but honestly all the small stuff like consumer electronics comes mostly out of China. If they did want to integrate some sort of spying they would have the opportunity, and in the past individual threats to the state of many countries have had supply chain attacks carried out, so it is not an unfounded fear.

    That all said, China is run by the CCP, an ostensibly Communist party, so red scare, not to mention Chinese, so racism, and Party, because Americans are against fun, or at least in government they seem to be. China also has an abysmal record on human rights, though coming from anyone in the west criticism is somewhat hypocritical given prison labour, proping up dictatorships, coups, exploiting slave labour, and so on. Nobody is doing a perfect job, nobody is saintly, but there are fair and unfair criticisms against China as a nation state and those do inform some of the fear of their potential for spying.

    Now TikTok, Reddit, Meta, etc… There are the really scary tools with far too little attention.


  • I would recommend checking out audio books as a medium for reading. It allows you to increase the speed to whatever works for you, so 2x for me, and listen to a lot more in a day. It also frees you to listen at any times you have nothing cognitive happening, so dishes, washing, cleaning, etc.

    As for single day books, the first book of the Bobiverse series by Dennis E Taylor. I loved the whole series including the recently released 5th book and the first is only 9.5 hours at normal speed, so about 4.75 at double speed.

    Also All Systems Red is the first book in the Murderbot series by Martha Wells. The perspective of a SecUnit, a type of sentient cyborg, which has hacked its own programming and removed its limiters so it can act freely. This means no guard rails, no rules, no limits, which results in lots of TV shows being watched and avoiding humans. It is snarky, fun, and interesting. It comes in at 3.5 hours normal time, so 1.75 at double speed.


  • I don’t know about videos but having a look at the OSI model is a good way to start. It covers the abstract framework for packetizing data including things like the distinction between hardware and software, envelope, encryption, application layer stuff, the whole shebang. The cool thing is by going hardware, network, application you can see where responsibility are and it helps you understand where things can go wrong.

    If you are interested there are plenty of CCNA style courses available on the internet, licit and otherwise, and they go into more depth, and the same applies to RHCE/RHCSA material. The training for certifications like that covers what you want to know but also puts it in context, and again licit and otherwise sources are available.


  • I meant to say language in the linguistics sense, a series of abstract items which can be arranged to convey arbitrary meaning. For example, a dog barking can be a threat display, a warning, playful, sad, afraid, and so on. But can you use barking to create grammar? With grammar you could have labels for items in the world and use various barks to refer to them, make requests, ask questions, and so on. Some types of animals have warning calls that are specific to types of predators, for example an eagle call or a leopard call. Leopards require different responses than eagles so the distinction is very useful and helps others to respond. This is not quite language but is definitely a step in the right direction.

    So yes, you are correct, lots of animals can communicate things to each other, but it is not the same as language like what humans have. Could we find an animal that does have language? Or something very close? Sure, but we haven’t shown that yet. Maybe we should focus on giving other animals a chance to develop before we wipe them all out.



  • No, but that is because they don’t have language.

    That said, plenty of humans do not have a voiced internal experience. The lack of language does not imply a lack of cognition. I would expect that the brain of a closely related organism, say a chimp, would have many similar experiences generated by the same stimuli. Would they experience green like I experience green? I can’t even say that about a person sitting next to me, but they probably have an equivalent experience.

    That said, if we had a way of communicating could we reach agreed terms? I can do that with my cat, so I would think he has an understanding of me and my behaviours along with what tends to happen when I do certain things like clap then shake my hands at the end of a treat session. He knows there are no more treats, he associates that with my hands clapping and shaking, so we communicate. Does he have a voice in his head describing it? Probably not. Does he have Meows? Again, probably not, but he would have a sense and memories of previous times.