>Music and dance
Music and dance is as old as humanity itself.
The peasantry could not afford to pay professional musicians but plenty of people knew how to dance and sing and enough people knew how to play instruments to have a jolly good time.
Occasionally, actors might come to town and put on plays and dramas.
>Decorative Arts
Decorative arts were applied to clothing, housing, religiously symbolic objects, etc.
Embroidery, pottery, basket weaving, carpentry, leatherwork and woodcarving were common skills, often with division of labor by sex.
>Sports
Sports, including martial arts were also practiced commonly.
There were many medieval tournaments allowing people to compete and demonstrate their physical skill in sports like running, log-tossing, or stick-fighting.
There were also team events such as kicking a stuffed leather ball.
Why would something people find fun enough to do as a hobby now not have been fun 500 years ago?
Compare it to say a modern profession like software engineering. Despite it being work, there's plenty of programmers who also enjoy programming and do it for fun on their own time as well as work.
Today's labor is different in that the individual is commoditized. You're indentured to your client, who then accrues a debt to be discharged in an agreed upon time with various contingencies appended, like showing up on time and regardless of completion of your given task (10 baskets/8h) you're nonetheless expected to put in your contracted time.
Basket weaving done in your home, with performance left to your own scruples, and a personalized schedule is leagues different than slaving away for someone else.
>seems to be a broad generalization trying to say we should at least consider any nutjob theory to be legitimate. Lizard people? Flat earth? GTFO!
This issue is something that seems odd to me. Why are blatantly ridiculous theories lumped in with things that have some possibility of truth under one big 'conspiracy theory' label? Things like flat earth and lizard people are so obviously ridiculous yet the media seems to treat theories like that the same as theories that question government or corporate motives or other such things as equivalent.
Kyrie Irving - flat-earther, anti-vaxxer. To some people both are ridiculous positions. Conspiracy thoerists tend to groupp together and tend to pick up additional beliefs
Some people wonder what's the point of believing the flat earth theory, but for people looking for marks to con, it's a great "tool". The FE theory expands to "Everyone is lying to you, your teachers, the scientific community, the government, everyone who tries to tell you the world is spherical!" and "teaches" you to not believe accepted science, because according to them, accepted the science is just a global (ha) conspiracy.
Of course it's not hard to see why Fe'ers end up being antivaxxers. Or believing about pedophile pizza chains and furniture stores..
And those hosts often are not using up to date packages and don't even have up to date security fixes at times.
I recently moved a wordpress site I was working on from a local dev setup onto a live bluehost server and was immediately hit with a bunch of out of date package warnings. As the customer was using some cheap shared hosting service, there wasn't much I could really do about it.
Shared hoster here. More likely the app arbitrarily decided 'these versions of PHP are EOL', where the reality is that they're being maintained by a number of OS vendors.
Too many customers run really old versions of code that need older versions of PHP and so on. We can't not provide them without losing the business. We do of course, make newer versions available.
The other fun one we periodically get is customers doing PCI scans or similar and getting warnings for out of date versions of OpenSSL, Apache, etc. Nope; just backporting showing the old version numbers.
That's sort of funny, as one of the remaining few value pitches for something like Bluehost (versus a $5/month vps) is "somebody else does apt-get update && apt-get upgrade for you".
Every piece of IKEA furniture I've owned has collapsed or fallen apart within 5 years. I've got an old coffee table I carried in on a skateboard when I was like 13 or something that I found during spring cleanup. It's solid and made of real wood. It's been going strong for 20 years now of heavy use and who knows how long it was used before I got it. I can see it lasting another 20 years easily.
Everything in my home as I grew up was Ikea. It is all there still working 20 years later. If what you are buying isn't holding then you bought some brittle stuff, there is plenty of cheap and sturdy things from ikea but they might not be the best looking furniture.
I understand the firearm issue is a touchy subject, especially in America. I've always been taught to understand a firearm is a tool, an especially dangerous one designed to kill things. Unless you're target shooting or something, if you pull a gun out and point it at something your intentions are to kill whatever you're pointing that gun at.
It's not something that should be taken lightly and it's not something you should do unless it's a last resort.
That being said, i went through the firearms safety courses and did all the necessary steps to be able to acquire a firearm here, it was through school, there was a chance we'd be working in remote areas with grizzlies and cougars, in many cases a firearm would have been necessary for protection. I chose not to get the license because there was not a situation where I'd need it.
I've met many gun owners in my life. Most of them were quite responsible and understood exactly what the consequences of wielding a firearm is.
Then there's those people who acquired them illegally who had zero regard for any safety when it came to their firearms and used them irresponsibly. I won't be around those people if they have their gun around.
As far as the protection aspect goes, if you live in a relatively stable country and area in the country low on things like home invasion and crime, sure it's probably not necessary.
Then, there's places like some areas in south Africa, where someone I know's brother lives in a fortified compound with automated machine gun turrets and guns stashed in every drawer because when the thieves come, they'll show up in a group armed with automatic rifles, cut your phone lines, and murder you and your whole family for whatever money or anything valuable you have.
Yeah, that's pretty much how it was. I remember not wanting to rollerblade much after my friends started getting into skateboarding for that reason. That and they were inconvenient because you had to carry your shoes around with you or the rollerblades once you changed to your shoes. It was easier, and cooler looking, to carry a skateboard. I do remember enjoying them though. They were fun to rip around on.
I did grow out of skateboarding though, then that longboarding craze came out and I never really got into it.
Funny enough, these days, I'd probably be more willing to go rollerblading somewhere than skateboarding if I had the chance.
With a stock, store bought android rom with google play services and such?
It might help anonymize your device.
If you sign into a network regularly that you use with devices you sign into google with, or a network google associates you.with, they might correlate you with the device.
If you follow your normal routine of locations, browsing or other behaviour google is aware of, google may associate the device with what it knows about you.
It's kind of hard to say though, Google's data collection is somewhat opaque in regards to things it collects to associate you to other things.
I have noticed a few occasions where google has given me suggestions or ads based on searches i've made or on devices that I'm not signed into or associated me with data available only from such devices, other times not.
This is just anecdotal though so make of it what you will.
You are only "just [a] number" for a very brief period. As soon as you generate enough data points[1] to establish a recognizable subset of your pattern-of-life, the not-signed-in account can (and probably will) be correlated with your other accounts, some of which probably have data that identifies the real "you".
One of the most common mistakes people make when discussing the data collected by someone like Google is only considering the data in isolation. In reality, data is often combined with other databases.
[1] The minimum number of data points might can be very small: handful of timestamped locations at your home and job is probably unique, matching browser fingerprints if you used the same browser for logged-in and not-logged-in activity, or - as this is Google and their OS - maybe even simply a single even: hearing a MAC address known to be om your home wifi over the radio.
Someone with more writing and artistic skills really should make a comic strip or something about this. One we could share with less technical people.
Even technical people really don't seem to understand how far data aggregation can go. Multiple small information points are collated into profiles, you need to be Jason Bourne -levels of vigilant to not create a trackable fingerprint online.
An informative comic would be great. I have unsuccessfully tried to create a video game mechanic (ludonarrative) that demonstrates how data aggregation can be exploited. Giving people a little bit of personal experience on the other side trying to [ab]use data could be a very effective teaching tool. I suspect most people (including, as you mentioned, most technical people!) have never really thought about how personal data might be used as a weapon.
The amazing game "Papers, Please" demonstrated that a game based around an educational ludonarrative is not only possible, but can also be be relatively popular. Unfortunately, just like drawing, video game design is difficult.
> you need to be Jason Bourne -levels of vigilant to not create a trackable fingerprint online.
As Zoz said, "Don't Fuck It Up!"[1]. Any type of OPSEC has become extremely difficult. Even technically knowledgeable people that risk consequences of failure far worse than being tracked by Google screw up their OPSEC.
yes. exactly. i guess xkcd must have already done something on this given the depth of knowledge that guy has on the internet.
if nothing, if anyone knows that guy, he can do it in 3 panels i'm sure.
how far does pi-hole and similar tech help in this regard? i am genuinely curious about their role in reduction in data collection or at least preventing its exfiltration
I get some of the conspiracy theories that pop up and why people might believe them, but this ivermectin crap has never made sense to me. In what way is an anti-parasitic drug supposed to help a viral lung infection?
I've asked a few people that believe in this ivermectin nonsense to explain exactly how this drug helps against covid. I've yet to receive any explanation as to the mechanism by which ivermectin treats covid that didn't devolve into some unbelievably stupid shit about pleomorphic bacteria and viruses not actually existing.
Why this has taken off just leaves me scratching me head. It just makes no sense.
> A 2011 study investigated the impact of ivermectin on allergic asthma symptoms in mice and found that ivermectin (at 2 mg kg−1) significantly curtailed recruitment of immune cells, production of cytokines in the bronchoalveolar lavage fluids and secretion of ovalbumin-specific IgE and IgG1 in the serum. Ivermectin also suppressed mucus hypersecretion by goblet cells, establishing that ivermectin can effectively curb inflammation, such that it may be useful in treating allergic asthma and other inflammatory airway diseases
> Ivermectin has also been demonstrated to be a potent broad-spectrum specific inhibitor of importin α/β-mediated nuclear transport and demonstrates antiviral activity against several RNA viruses by blocking the nuclear trafficking of viral proteins. It has been shown to have potent antiviral action against HIV-1 and dengue viruses, both of which are dependent on the importin protein superfamily for several key cellular processes.
≥In what way is an anti-parasitic drug supposed to help a viral lung infection?
While I have no interest in making a case for ivermectin and covid, you might be interested in the vast, highly relevant field of repurposed drugs. A fair example might be salicylanilides, eg niclosamide - a drug pretty exclusively used for a particular tapeworm, but being repurposed for incurable gonorrhea, c-dif, h-pylori and other conditions.
I can understand an anti-parasitic drug having an effect on bacterial infections. Bacteria falls under what we classically define as 'life'. Bacterial, fungal and parasitic infections share much more in common than viral infections.
Viruses are a completely different form of life that causes illness in a totally different way to other forma of infectious organisms.
Not really wanting to delve into the touchy issue of this particular ai fuckup, but it got me thinking about the issue of using ai to compartmentalize and categorize things in general.
This is a very obvious example of how bad it can be. Regular complaints from people about ai recommendation engines and most other similar ai driven tagging systems exist.
What i wonder though is on a more subtle level, how these ai categorizers are quietly altering our perceptions of things and the world?
We notice when it's something obvious like the story in the OP, but how many quiet little mistakes do we just ignore or not notice that on a subconcious level are changing the way we think about or classify things.
More and more it seems like society and all things are being neatly placed in little boxes, where they're filed, stamped, indexed, and numbered by fancy algorithms operating without much human oversight, until something like this happens.
How much of this is subconciously affecting human perception of the world?
>Music and dance Music and dance is as old as humanity itself.
The peasantry could not afford to pay professional musicians but plenty of people knew how to dance and sing and enough people knew how to play instruments to have a jolly good time.
Occasionally, actors might come to town and put on plays and dramas.
>Decorative Arts Decorative arts were applied to clothing, housing, religiously symbolic objects, etc.
Embroidery, pottery, basket weaving, carpentry, leatherwork and woodcarving were common skills, often with division of labor by sex.
>Sports Sports, including martial arts were also practiced commonly.
There were many medieval tournaments allowing people to compete and demonstrate their physical skill in sports like running, log-tossing, or stick-fighting.
There were also team events such as kicking a stuffed leather ball.