| 2018-07-18 19:34:13 ET |
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You could get a 1 terabyte ssd drive for $150 now. Holy crap, we ARE living in the future. I'll post more soon.
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| VR Chat for Android 2018-06-08 01:29:23 ET |
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Hmm, it appears thart the closest thing to VR Chat for Android is something called Virtual Droid but it doesn't appear to support head tracking or anything to make it anything other than an FPS-style chat thing.
Hmm, come to think of it, I don't actually know how VR Chat controls are implemented. I've always pictured some HTC Vive setup but I don't know for sure. Maybe I'll grab my Oculus DK1 back from the local hackerspace and see if it'll work with VR Chat? Decisions, decisions, decisions.
irc still feels more cyberpunk though. Probably because it's a lot easier to type. Not comfortable talking on vr yet. Not until I get a white noise machine.
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| Onions that make you cry 2018-06-08 00:46:09 ET |
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So if you've ever watched a talk by the tor project peeps then you've probably heard the answer to the question of "why keep tor legal?"
The answer tends to be this:
"Good" people are bound by morals. There's nothing really available to people like activists or whatever in countries with repressive regimes or for journalists to be anonymous and whatever on the net.
"Bad" people however can just hack into things and create their own proxies and whatever.
So this answer always interested me because it's obvious in its truth but it also raises the question of "are there illegal darknets?" (where "darknets" are overlay networks that act like a series of proxies like tor or maybe an overlay network totally separate from the clearweb a la i2p or freenet)
Well, today on my commute home, I was listening to an episode of the Cyberwire podcast from, uh, 12 days ago, I think? Last Saturday, I believe.
Hmm, yup, from May 26th.
https://thecyberwire.com/podcasts/cw-podcasts-rs-2018-05-26.html
Basically it's about UPnProxy.
Here's a Wired article about it:
https://www.wired.com/story/upnp-router-game-console-vulnerabilities-exploited/
Akamai's whitepaper link (PDF):
https://www.akamai.com/us/en/multimedia/documents/white-paper/upnproxy-blackhat-proxies-via-nat-injections-white-paper.pdf
Basically you may have heard of upnp vulnerabilities where a router listens for upnp commands on the WAN port instead of just on the LAN. Well, this is a utilization of such vulnerabilities which uses the vulnerable routers as proxies, chained together, to create basically an illegal version of something like tor. I haven't dived into the whitepaper yet. Sleepiness is hitting me while I await for the caffeine pills to kick in. Sipping a shot of rum probably isn't helping but, uh, it's more cyberpunk that way? Just be glad I'm not wearing my mirrored shades.
Terrible joke.
Anyways, just thought I'd post about it. It's very interesting to me since it's something that's been at the back of my head for the past few years ever since I've watched the tor talks on youtube and heard about the Internet Census of 2012 (aka the Carna botnet).
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| Another day, another entry 2018-06-06 23:52:20 ET |
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I remember reading that somebody said that it's a good idea to write every day. Uh, I think it was Heinlein? Heh, "Heinlein" sounds like "High Line".
Anyways
Real life. We're living in real life. And yet it seems quite a lot like fiction. Really absurdist, depressing, uplifting, straight-on fiction. Reality is the original genre-bender.
I'm not talking about politics. I'm talking about that tank.
Well, not a tank but an armoured personnel carrier that was taken for a ride by some National Guardsman
Who was also a guy who apparently was claiming a few years back that tor has a bunch of backdoors. And who tried to make his own fork of it and went off on people when challenged or something to that effect.
Reality is a snowball effect. Or maybe it's how we move through it, every observation building up on past ones? Whatevers.
His twitter feed is amazing. Not sure if it's supposed to be comedic or if it's written by somebody in a manic state.
I should renew my lease, clean, get off my ass and learn.
And I should also write. I should write at least 10% as much as I read.
This reads like rambling thought. It IS rambling thought.
Thoughts are weird. Weird and interesting. So is life.
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| Writing for the hell of it. Haven't written in years. 2018-05-28 01:33:18 ET |
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What to write? I like detective stories (as in mysteries or something where somebody has to investigate), spy stuff and cyberpunk stuff. Maybe a weird mix of that or something? I'll just drift.
The city outside the shaded window gleamed in the cold winter night. The twinkling of the building lights in the wind gave the illusion of activity when most of the city was at rest. The window was large, taking up almost the entirety of the Western wall of the office, with a temperature control unit and a big glass desk, with a computer on it, breaking up the almost panoramic view. A figure sat, facing that window, in a nice comfortable chair. The figure, male, early 30s, just sat there, breathing slowly, peeking through the slits between the shades as if relaxing. Or waiting.
Out of his periphery, he saw a red light stop blinking and go dark. He waited for a few more seconds, pulled the flash drive out of the computer, got out of his chair and, in the dark, adjusted it close to where it stood when he had arrived there, then opened the office door, made sure it was locked from the inside, and shut it behind him. He once again thanked the gods that this was a reentry floor via the emergency stairwell as he popped through the emergency exit door and picked up the briefcase leaning against the wall on the other side. He speed walked up three flights to the emergency reentry above him, walked out of the stairwell, towards the elevators, and soon he was headed back down to the building lobby.
"Found my briefcase, thanks!" he told the night guard who had let him through the turnstiles earlier. He had always managed to maintain an average face, an average look for a situation, and this let him slip into the stew of familiarity that must exist in the minds of public-facing people. A familiar face that was familiar through its similarity to the plethora of faces one might see if one stayed in one place for too long. Find the archetype and you can blend in like a chameleon on a tv static wall.
He stepped out into the night and kept walking, turning down the streets in a spiral pattern, always walking in the direction against the flow of traffic as an easy way to catch anybody following him on foot or by car. He didn't care about the city cameras; this wasn't that kind of job. The risk was low and only building security were the most likely possible threat at the moment but they were nowhere to be seen. This seemed clean.
He stopped by a public garbage can, held the briefcase against it with his knee, and quickly took a cell phone out of his pocket, popped in a battery, turned it on, grabbed the briefcase and started to walk again. He dialed and logged into the voicemail, skipped the first message a second or two in, deleted the second message, hung up and turned off the phone. A block later he pulled the battery again and made his way home.
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| Cyberpunk films and soaring kite thoughts 2018-05-21 01:08:30 ET |
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Am watching the movie "Anon" on Netflix. 98% interest match. Netflix seems to know that I don't mind watching movies that match my interests even if they have horrible flaws in them like a terribly muted color palette, a director who doesn't shoot enough angles for the editor to work with, dialog spoken like actors on the verge of a xanax overdose, and stereotypical noir shots spread thicker than frozen butter.
But, fuck, it's cyberpunk and filmed in New York.
It actually does match what I hoped to watch: A cyberpunk detective film set in what visually looks like the 70s though this one takes place in a visual 1940s/1950s. Still, beggars can't be choosers and the pacing is actually surprisingly good for something that feels like an arthouse flick.
I saw a scene with a kid flying a kite. It made me want to write this down. Why?
Because kites hold a special significance for me. Ontologically speaking. I remember playing with kites when I was younger. I remember holding it and it felt like it would never fly but then you do the proper moves and it would soar in the air and strain against the string. Seeing a scene of a kid flying a kite reminded me of that. Of the parallel of having an object that you knew would work but every time thati t did it felt almost like magic because, hey, you throw it in the air and it falls right back down.
It reminds me of a quote from the Invisibles comic book. Something to the effect of:
"It's always a surprise when it works, isn't it?"
So, yeah, kites represent that for me. Something that works every time you do the right procedure but something that doesn't seem possible when held in one's hands.
Gah, it's hard to explain.
Anyways, back to the movie, I need to be up in 4.5 hours.
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| 2018-05-14 23:18:50 ET |
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I'm listening to interviews on Youtube in the background so this might be a bit disjointed.
Heh, fuck, this is always disjointed, ain't it?
So there are things and ideas I want to talk about and explore but don't really have a medium for. So I'll use this.
It's always a pain to start a train of thought. No, not always a pain. Only Siths deal in absolutes. loldongs.
I guess I'll jump right int othe thought. How "we" (whatever "we" is) approach motivation. I don't mean motivation to succeed or anything like that. I mean literal motivation. In a behavioural psychology sense.
Pain, pleasure, those sorts of things.
And the notion of "power". "Power" is a bullshit word. "Power-hungry" people are just people who want to scratch an itch on a phantom limb that never existed. "Power" is the same word as "freedom". The one word that encompasses what people tend to mean by both words is the word "ability".
People want ability.
Anyways, that's a side conversation. But, uh, if I remember the quote, "political power comes out of the barrel of a gun" or something like that. It's attributed, or so I've heard, to Mao. ("Speaking of vegetables, how is the Chairman?" - Duke) And it's a common concept shared amongst people: that "power" comes from the threat of physical violence, from negative reinforcement. Striking the dog with a rolled-up newspaper when it shits on the carpet.
Not everybody thinks that's the only thing power really is but a lot of people seem to. Yet there's positive reinforcement too. Animal trainers have switched to positive reinforcement over the past century since it works so much better than negative reinforcement. The dog will shit indoors when it notices the punisher is no longer around. The positively reinforced dog won't shit on the carpet when the rewarder is no longer around because it respects the wishes of the rewarder. Or something like that.
But that's still not abstract as what I'm thinking of.
I'm thinking of Emperor Norton.
He's the most popular example of "humor" "power". It's not positive reinforcement, it's not negative reinforcement. It's something completely different.
We have these responses, reactions, and stuff and we don't have a vocabulary to describe them. "For the lulz" as the reason for itself is interesting.
What's really in the back of my head?
Well, back in the days of old, there were groups that would figure stuff out and keep it secret as a way to gain "power" over others or to just be able to do things like others can't. Old guilds that would keep things to themselves. Mathematical secrets; secrets to building weird structures; acoustics; astronomy; whatever have you. I always wonder if there's some sort of group that has some weird primer to all this weird psychological stuff that we share but don't realize or have the words for.
When we have a word for something then it makes it easier to hold the concept in one's head and to manipulate it in relation to other concepts to figure stuff out.
When I moved to the US, a word that confused me was "fun". "Did you have fun?" "It is fun." It's such a weird concept. Not the concept of "joy" or whatever. But the word "fun". It describes a complex series of emotions. It's not just joy or whatever. Hell, "joy" sounds very extreme. "Fun" isn't extreme. It's casual. But it's such a weird concept. Especially "having fun". Not "experiencing fun" as an emotion but having it. But let's go back to "joy" or "sadness". You ever distance yourself from those words? As if you're trying to explain them to some alien AI? Sure, there's a chemical component to what causes us to feel the way we feel but the actual emotion. What exactly is it?
We have words for them and thus grasp them as a concept out of the sea of vagueness. But there are other feelings and emotions that we don't really have words for. Like why do some feelings and emotions motivate us to do something and others don't? Like why am I happy to just lay about doing nothing if there's an easy action I can do to make myself happier (like putting on a movie, for example)? There's no true effort involved yet why does one happy thing motivate me and another one does not?
There's also "love" as a vague concept. I use that as an example because of the David Bowie song "Soul Love" where he seems to run into the same problem of a lack of language for describing complex emotions:
Stone love, New love, Idiot love, love of love, Soul love, All love
Many concepts that have to be explained in additional words to relay the meaning across.
I've had conversations with relatives lately about how English does a much better job than Russian in relaying concepts. "Roadkill" was an example given." In Russian, at least to the Russian known by my relatives, there's no singular word for "roadkill". It's not just Russian.
If you go to the Wikipedia page for Roadkill and switch the language to Chinese and then translate what the Chinese letters for "roadkill" are (動物因道路致死現象) then you're left with the following phrase: "Animals died of roads" which is reminiscent of the French "word" for Roadkill which is: "Mortalité animale due aux véhicules" which probably means "animals killed by cars".
You just drive by dead animals on the road and then, boom, you learn the word "roadkill" and the dead animals all get grouped into a singular concept which you can relay with the word "roadkill".
Uh, whatevers. This is getting too long. This is stuff that's been rummaging about in my head. There's no point to it other than exploring the ideas by writing them out. I wonder if there's a word for that?
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