Podcast 163 Transcript

A transcript for Episode 163: You must understand! (2020-05-01).

Pronoiac passed the podcast to otter.ai.

Transcript

Jessamyn 0:02 just opening up some tabs. Looking at what number we're on? Can't imagine 163 Has anything to recommend it. Yep. Skip it entirely. It's just the number of a whole bunch of dump boats

Cortex 0:23 all cup of things you all right. All right. This is that yes. Let's let's do it. This is a. This is Episode 163, which is the only time we'll mention that number on this episode of the medical Timothy podcast. I am Josh cortex Mullard.

Jessamyn 1:00 And I'm Jessamyn

Cortex 1:03 Have you considered like introductions? I'm Jessamyn. Jessamyn. West?

Jessamyn 1:07 No, no, no. Jessamyn I'm just Jessamyn. Like, you say Josh cortex marred with Jessamyn Jessamyn. West. That's weird.

Cortex 1:17 Yeah, but that's it'd be you know, funny.

Jessamyn 1:25 One of us is laughing.

Cortex 1:29 I'm taking what I can get these days. Yeah, here we are. It says tell

Jessamyn 1:33 you that I got to put my favorite joke in the newspaper. Do you see that buzz by on Twitter? Remind me remind me. So basically, somebody posted

Cortex 1:43 something about a cat. Was it something about a cat? No. Okay, I'm just pulling.

Jessamyn 1:49 It started with the tiger guy though. Somebody put like took out a classified ad in the paper like business card size. That just said Carol Baskin did it? Right. And I haven't watched that tiger show. But I know enough. That joke, right? And like, that's funny. And it's just stupid. And like, we need to support our newspaper. We love our newspaper. They're really doing good stuff. And so I was like, Alright, I'm going to I'm going to take out some ads in the paper. Right? I have a little bit extra money. One of the things I'd like to support is the paper. And so I put my chicken coop joke in there. Which is of course my favorite. Right? How come a chicken coop has only two doors?

Cortex 2:26 Because if it had for it to be a sedan,

Jessamyn 2:27 right, you know, and then I chickens like

Cortex 2:31 a cat? What? I thought maybe it had something to do with a cat. But it's a chicken by chickens like a cat. Is it? You? I mean, they're both smaller than me.

Jessamyn 2:42 Okay. They're both not in your kitchen right now. Except maybe your cats are actually. Yep. And then I pulled the audience to ask what my second joke should be. And it just became I'll find you link at some point. But it just became like kind of a dumb fun. Joke thread. You know, because I wanted the jokes to be like, simple. I wanted the jokes to be clean. Because for the newspaper write it. Hopefully something a little bit rural. A little bit. I'll just I'll just send you a link a little bit kind of folksy in its own kind of dumb way. And it turned out fine. So basically, my second joke was, how will How come the Scarecrow won an award?

Cortex 3:22 Why? Because he was outstanding.

Jessamyn 3:27 So I like to laugh is what I'm saying.

Cortex 3:31 You gotta laugh. Yeah. Well, here we are on a podcast night cast. Moderators laughing together with salad? Yes, yes. Nighttime. It's still it's still like a sunny afternoon here like, Oh, that's

Jessamyn 3:49 right. It's like Josh said he was gonna have a drink and I made a drink. And this is by probably second drink in 2020. So,

Cortex 3:59 mazel tov. adelsheim I guess. Yes, I'm having a stiff mug of black tea. It turns out as were more my energy level versus needing to do a podcast once this afternoon, so

Jessamyn 4:12 excellent. Excellent. That's fine. Whatever works for you. I mean, oh, sorry. What was what?

Cortex 4:20 I'm drinking out of a tall Moke synthesizer mug that I bought in Nashville. Wait, wait, wait and cross country if you wait, go

Jessamyn 4:30 wait. Have we had this conversation? Probably. You know, I have that same mug.

Cortex 4:35 Yeah, I think we had this conversation. Okay, from

Jessamyn 4:37 Asheville, I guess is where they come from. Yeah, yeah, those are good mics. Yep,

Cortex 4:43 it's increasingly scratched up. And it's kind of that would be sad if there was like it was a mug that had some image that I just want it to be super pristine, but it's like, it's like a beat up synth, which is the best thing in the world. Like it just looks like it's been gigged to death and back. Oh, it's just gonna keep getting more fucked up over time and I Pay it's kind of perfect so

Jessamyn 5:01 speaking of which we have to pour one out for our homie bond Cliff who broke his metal filter mode today

Cortex 5:07 he did he did also we really got to like not lean into pour one out for what was just like it sounds like it sounds like someone died

Unknown Speaker 5:20 yeah

Cortex 5:20 yeah bond close mug broke bond cliff is fine his mug yes yeah he broke his big roundish blue

Jessamyn 5:32 point which I thought was a good one is they're really good mugs like they are they turn out to be good there are good sides they're the right color like how that's hard. You did a great job.

Cortex 5:43 Yeah well that was the problem originally is like the original run sold out and then the folks that were supplying those to tomato didn't have any more. So they were on backorder and I need to check back in like it's it's long past when they were supposed to in theory have come out of backorder but also they didn't come out of backorder or order like at the projected time a couple times. Something like that so I should check back if we can make more of those we will because yeah, they turned out to be really nice we could do those maybe do some mask Metafilter ones too.

Jessamyn 6:20 And Vaughn Cliff needs one yes

Cortex 6:25 well you know you break it you buy it so or you bite you break it actually worked yeah you bite you break it as they say in retail the customer is is always revenue

Jessamyn 6:41 gotta you have a beer there.

Cortex 6:44 Nope I don't know am I running get one at some point. We'll see how this goes.

Jessamyn 6:48 Oh my God speaking of Nope, I did while the site was down briefly while you guys moved over to AWS I enjoyed that stupid video we did so long ago. The the is down and you know it had restless Nomad on the beach. It had a picture of it had a picture of Taz. Like it just I don't know it just it just made me laugh all over again because it was so long ago and I like it look at myself and I'm like my god

Cortex 7:18 like I know it's weird it's weird The time has managed to pass that much like that feels troubling.

Jessamyn 7:25 I live in the same place you know it was weird for me looking at my apartment which is both the same place I live and also you know different because I just gotten here I think at the time and now I'm like heavily moving in and living here so it is very interesting

Cortex 7:49 yeah mostly the insult jazz one to revisiting

Jessamyn 7:54 that one's even class here because you did a really good job with that like that tiny

Cortex 7:58 I put some real like yeah like effort into the started

Jessamyn 8:02 using future if I remember correctly

Cortex 8:06 maybe yeah, I was like future but yeah, it was definitely using it in video stuff at that point Yeah, so I had some thought about that and I lost it No, that's fine. Oh, the AWS thing so that went fine. That's basically the news.

Jessamyn 8:25 Yeah. Big Boss Howie just national Workers Day.

Cortex 8:32 Yep. Yeah, I'm glad to have that that resolved because it was clear wasn't going to happen from Amazon's and easily ever so that's what you get weird legacy accounts and stuff for 20 year old websites. So yeah, for progress on that congratulations.

Jessamyn 8:51 Yeah, like you did it once but then like something didn't work and then you had to do it again. But I don't know what it

Cortex 8:57 was just like the fumble can explain it better as far as the details but I think it's basically just the size of the database the amount of time taken to transfer it if we're going to try and like shut the site down and transferred over was going to be hours when it really didn't need to be so we backed up and like sort of pre cached a bunch of stuff that didn't actually expect to get updated between then and when things went over and then all the transferred a little bit of stuff and went much faster and everything was great. We discovered like you know 50 Little configurational details it was like a set once and never poke it again thing that turns out we had to poke it again after a bunch of follow

Jessamyn 9:37 people it was really it took a while for it to come back up right like that. That was like hell why?

Cortex 9:44 Yeah, yeah, our best guess at this point. So a lot of people what happen is like the site went down for like two hours maybe.

Jessamyn 9:52 And then came down was like a like a DNS redirect. Right?

Cortex 9:56 Well, like it was it was actually genuinely down like we need to took it down, transferred the final stuff over and then brought it up on the new instance and made it public. Any others, you know, after that, like change the DNS to say, Hey, look at the status page or change the, the information on the old server, hey, look at the routing page, the status page. And then like when the new site was up, and it was working was like, okay, update the DNS point to meta filter proper again, and everything's great. And everything's great, except for a surprising number of people ended up having that status page, stick around, even though there was nothing that should have been

Jessamyn 10:34 relevant to stick around a time to live on the DNS was totally fine. Everything. Yeah, we had a cache yet going on.

Cortex 10:42 Yeah, and as far as we can tell, it was somewhere upstream. And it was persistent. And fribble tried a couple things. And I think they may have eventually sort of helped it along by trying to update some stuff. But you know, we had things configured correctly, as far as anything shows, to just promptly sort of long and then, right, like one of Walmart fumbles thoughts was you can set you can set the other the sort of timeout time on a DNS record to an arbitrary number of seconds, essentially. So you can say, Hey, check this every day to see if it's changed. Or check this every hour, or check this every five minutes. And I think is generally speaking, if your stuff isn't changing, you don't really need to have a shorter time than something like, you know, check once an hour check once a day, and you can reduce a little bit of, you know, small bit of traffic and friction.

Jessamyn 11:31 Well, and on mobile, especially like that's super useful, right? You don't want it like getting online all the time and making a whole bunch of checks.

Cortex 11:38 Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's like a, it's a small impact thing, but it's still a thing, you know. So you wouldn't want to leave it at five minutes all the time. There's no reason to check your fucking DNS every five minutes. But if you're making say, a big move, if you're making a change that you know ahead of time, it's a very good reason to set it to a short time so that it'll get picked back up quickly. And, and fumbles theory is that maybe somewhere somewhere along the line was like, well, anything that's short enough, we're just not going to trust that because that's ridiculous. So people may have gotten stuff five days long delay five days. Yeah, yeah, some shit like that. Or who knows? I don't know. But anyway, we seem to be on the far side of that. I haven't heard ongoing reports from anyone. So that's good. Yes. I don't know that there's anything we could have done about it if they had.

Jessamyn 12:22 But if you can't see the site, rest assured,

Unknown Speaker 12:25 it's, it's they're

Jessamyn 12:27 looking at it right now.

Cortex 12:28 Yep. I assure you, we're open. Within shoe polish on a bedsheet everybody loves Kevin Smith. callbacks from

Jessamyn 12:39 try didn't understand it. But I'm glad to hear it's Kevin Smith. And not like Buster Keaton or something.

Cortex 12:45 No, no, it's from it's from clerks. Someone puts gum in the lock of the convenience store or something. So the guy can't open up the store, like window that would show that they're open. So he goes puts up a bedsheet outside saying they're open.

Unknown Speaker 13:03 Yeah, yep.

Cortex 13:07 Back when clerks was the only thing people knew about and everybody's excited about this bold new career that Kevin Smith was gonna have. I shouldn't should talk Kevin Smith, they the funny guy. He's made some good stuff, but but he didn't keep making clerks. Well, except for when he started making clerks again. And I don't know where I'm going with this.

Kind of, kind of I think that's that that may be like a core part of my my concern there is like, you know, I'm not sure that he did. He got bigger budgets, that's for sure. Should we talk about metal filter? Should we talk about some metal filter stuff?

Jessamyn 13:50 Jobs, there are four of them? Yes, two of them are websites and two of them are not.

Cortex 13:56 I think one of the ones that is not is done at this point I checked in with if only had a pink What about that at one point? Or? Or? I think she checked in with me. Because because of a procedural question about like, the best way to like, list a contact information on it or something. Yeah. And I was like, Oh, hey, you know, if no one else is able to do it, let me know. I can probably work that out. But she got it back from someone else. And I think that's all taken care of. So

Jessamyn 14:27 fantastic. Well, none of the above is a math tutor who just wants a very simple website to be mobile friendly, where people can register for an account pay and get access to their stuff. And jet ACUs needs a word plus fra bird per bird WordPress blog moved to a new host, which is funny because I did that two weeks ago and watch me not touch this with a 10 foot. Look. Yep, what a pain in the ass. Something that should not have been a pain in the ass turned out to be partly because of like dumb decisions I made eight years ago and then forgot about. That's Yep. So like, the Vermont Library Association website had two WordPress instances in it. And I forgot about the second one. And it turned out it was important to know about it. Yikes. Yeah. But Mike Finn, I think he's Metafilter user Mike Fenner, he may Oh god, I should have known about this before I started this sentence. Me fight Mike Finn, who may also have a metaphor or name and probably does help me with a lot of it. Because he's like a WordPress jockey who likes to help. And so it was great. It could have been super painful. And it turned out to be much less painful.

Cortex 15:47 Nice. And user rich text, which is a good username is hiring designer for print and web publication. Look sounds like it's remote work. But yeah,

Jessamyn 16:03 I English and Portuguese is rich, because that would be even better.

Cortex 16:08 It could be like, it'd be it'd be, what if it's a person whose last name is text? Anyway, so yes. And they're they're specifically looking for English or Portuguese applications. So great. And that's jobs. That's the jobs news.

Jessamyn 16:24 That's all jobs. That's all. If you've got gig work or other random stuff, you can put it in jobs. There's a lot of people looking for stuff to do I gather.

Cortex 16:34 Come, come, come get some. Should we jobs, come get some projects? Should we talk about projects?

Jessamyn 16:44 Yeah, I had, ah, there was the one that sort of crossed my desk the time that I was working over the weekend. And it turns out, it was as fun as I thought it was going to be, although also somewhat maddening. This was user Andrew Stevens who did a TV opening sequences quiz, very straightforward. And you just look at the opening sequences, if you know the name of the show. The maddening thing is if you get it wrong, you don't learn what the right answer is, until. And WT Mike posted it to meta filter. And there's a long thread of people telling you how well they did in it. Most of those people did better than me. Different little complaints, some people using the spoiler text, which I totally appreciate. And yeah, it was just I don't know, it was kind of like just a fun thread where we all play games together. So I liked it.

Cortex 17:46 Yeah, it's a good time.

Jessamyn 17:47 And I was surprised how many of them I could figure out even for like shows, I didn't really watch but like, kind of shows that were part of kind of the, you know, cosmic consciousness sort of

Cortex 17:58 the fabric of our lives

Jessamyn 18:00 while I won't talk about what the shows are, because then I would be you know, giving something away. But like, you know, like a show I didn't see but like, was just kind of gaming all over the place kind of thing.

Cortex 18:10 I was just using the cotton Bureau, or cotton lobby motto, I think was that is that like the fabric of our lives. It's not like the cotton industries. Marketing phrase.

Jessamyn 18:24 Like literally cotton. I thought this was like some hipster thing. No,

Cortex 18:28 no, no. Just no. Which is a joke that I got from the MakerBot boys making a joke about a vine that I never saw that doesn't exist anymore.

Jessamyn 18:42 fabric of our lives.com Here you go. All right. Yeah, that's the cotton industry. Look at that woman, healthy looking woman.

Cortex 18:51 You know, that reminds me that reminds me of the fucking cheese industry and how they totally whisked out. They used to have Behold the power of cheese, which felt slightly sacrilegious. And I really appreciated that. And at some point, they changed it to the power of cheese. And you know what, I think it was fucking pressure from religious lobbying groups. They were like, hey, nope, you can't say Behold, only only the Lord should be held. And

Jessamyn 19:15 that's my period. Behold, like, I mean, again, Josh, do you have to explain all new memes and religious reference?

Cortex 19:22 No, this is not a meme. This is this. This was my impression of like the sort of, I guess

Jessamyn 19:26 the word Behold, does that have anything to do with the Bible special? As opposed? I

Cortex 19:30 don't know what it has to do with the Bible special. It has a very strong sort of Catholic Christian connotation to be like it like not that it is a religious word, per se. Yeah. Like, you know, it's not Yawei but it's, you know, it feels very strongly associated

Jessamyn 19:51 with saying, Yeah, I like

Cortex 19:54 Biblical stuff, you know, and yeah, so, all right now I'm, specifically be holding the power Probably especially stepping on the toes of the trinity or whatever the fuck. I liked as being pandered to always makes me like a thing. I have eaten the plums by Laszlo Hollyfield.

Jessamyn 20:18 See this, I'm prepared to enjoy it.

Cortex 20:21 I think it's just from today, maybe, maybe this morning. And it's cheap. That is that is the big hotness in AI generated text all the slightly. I think it's related to that. I think that's the same underlying engine. I don't know if that's GPT to specifically or not, because I just don't know enough about the whole territory of that whole AI group. But yeah, that's probably basically the same territory as that. But yeah, it's GPT two is what people have been using to generate a lot of compellingly human seeming text on arbitrary subjects.

Jessamyn 21:00 This is awesome.

Cortex 21:02 It's pretty great. It's it's tricky because like this is this is making me like back off a little bit. A specific issue I have with this is just to say riffs where there's a very specific structure and meter and form

Jessamyn 21:16 array that's gonna wrap up the right way and never

Cortex 21:19 will and you know, people will like erase a line or like, throw out the fucking like, sort of word structure or not stick the landing with a repetition of the so x and so why all these things that just drive me up the fucking wall, because like, it's not a long poem. You can fucking work within the format if people would write cysteine is you cannot fuck up.

Jessamyn 21:41 I totally agree with you there. So

Cortex 21:42 basically that but in this case, like, Yeah, but it's not like they got close, but didn't couldn't be bothered. It's GP to just sort of running with a thing and okay, I'll fucking I'll park my fucking moped for a minute and just enjoy this thing as it is. My anger moped. I guess I have a moped that represents being pedantic is where I'm going with that. I

Jessamyn 22:04 love it. Yep,

Cortex 22:06 that's a thing. Now put in the books.

Jessamyn 22:08 Anger, moped, except when you spell it, people are gonna think you're saying anger? moped.

Cortex 22:13 That's tricky. Yeah. They didn't get it from context that wouldn't like moped wouldn't make sense of it in a sentence there. You know, what we need is 1000 times as many listeners so that there could be like an elaborate wiki keep track of all these things that we declare, rather than just like it passing in conversation, like normal human beings? Yeah. That'd be good.

Jessamyn 22:34 Yeah. So what do you what do you do? What do you do to get x, you know, X time as many listeners,

Cortex 22:44 probably a lot of money and weird stuff. And also, like, a ton more charisma and effort editing. A number charisma. We're charming people, but like, you know. Yeah. I don't know. I, I suspect what it is, is any answer that question that would be true is more work and effort than I want to put into it.

Jessamyn 23:08 So against the rules, and like, you know, something that your ethical character wouldn't allow you to do? That like spin?

Cortex 23:17 Yeah. Okay. That works. Anyway,

Jessamyn 23:22 you started it.

Cortex 23:24 I know, I don't know where I'm going with anything today. I also enjoyed this post this project from Avocet. That is, Nick Cave and the bad seeds song Deanna, except it's all video largely of Deanna Troi. from Star Trek The Next Generation,

Jessamyn 23:41 there's literally two letters and one punctuation mark as the full set of comments here. And it is from you, and I quote, hmm. So it's only from a couple days ago, so other people can get your comments on in there.

Cortex 23:57 It's like I don't know that I don't even know the Nick Cave song. So I had to sort of like listen to the lyrics as it's falling along. But it's a bunch of like, the cuts are all visual puns to like, you know, at some point that song mentions a gun and you know, there's a shot of someone who has some sort of laser rifle and, and so on, and so far. Yeah, I enjoyed it. As evidenced by my peal of laughter in there,

Jessamyn 24:17 huh? Yes. Well, I enjoyed erotics ultimate quarantine house selection. So you've seen those like pick your quarantine house? Kind of Yeah. And they're always like

Cortex 24:32 six house one has. Yeah. And they've

Jessamyn 24:35 all got like one good person, one truly terrible person and a lot of in between people. And this makes them and it is and it is nice, and it is straightforward. And I enjoy it and it was posted to meta filter by Mendelian conspiracy. We were having to explain to somebody in meta talk recently what Amanda lien is like one of those fingers slicers Yeah, that mandolin, mandolin, but it makes me think of it. Yeah. Can I just say that there was actually a quarantine House Twitter meme that went around for librarians. And I was in one of the houses. And that's pretty fucking cool. I mean, kind of, but I couldn't really tell looking at the house if I was like, I was pretty sure it wasn't the good person. Well, and you know, it feels like it's sure it wasn't the terrible person. But then it was just like the filler person. And so there's a whole bunch of people who are picking based on or away from all the other people. And I was like, Hey, come to my quarantine house. Like, it just put me in a really weird position like you don't expect to see yourself in one of those.

Cortex 25:50 I feel like it's, it's a it's a weird thing to because I've seen so many variations on it going around. And some of them are like, oh, one of these, you know, every option, every version of this has one item that super duper sucks, right? And then some regard, I was just like, Oh, hey, here's the here's some different mood boards. You know, so like, there may not have been the presumption servers. Yeah,

Jessamyn 26:15 I was pretty sure there was a shitty person in each of these houses based on my assessment of who I was pretty sure it wasn't me. But like, that's awkward. I still like quarantine houses. The end. And I was inspired and inspired.

Cortex 26:34 Nice little poetry thing that doesn't involve creepy artificial intelligence. Vaca Pinto has been posting Basho poem a day. So classical Japanese. Or yeah,

Jessamyn 26:47 he's, he's using the translations.

Cortex 26:52 I think he's, I think he's writing him. The translations, so yeah,

Jessamyn 26:58 yeah. Sorry, I could read and yet I can't talk and read at the same time. Yes, no, that's beautiful.

Cortex 27:06 Nice stuff there. Ricardo. Yeah. It's been a busy month. It's like people are having to find things to do. But there's been a bunch of stuff on projects. Well, I'm what

Jessamyn 27:17 I'm hoping is some of the benefits or people who I have seen doing things in the world. I am hoping at some point will slow up so that we can get them to put those things on projects. Like I don't know if we talked about this last month, but like in brochure for her, it's like selling it, making masks for people that she's mostly giving away. And like she's got a serious Instagram game, just talking about it and showing people what she's been up to. And it's been really something. Yeah, and so you know, I just I just hope she she, you know, spells it out so that other people who aren't people who necessarily follow her on Instagram, I just think it'd be cool.

Cortex 28:02 Ya know, aibee aibee is read. And he's doing read making.

Jessamyn 28:07 Yeah. And I had to also say that I really enjoyed this one off kind of little project by psidium, which was the stock Ori. So it doesn't do anything, but it looks like it might do something. And he says he has grinned. They say sorry, hold on. David. Oh, David mirror, sorry. I know this guy. Chris mares brother. Oh. And it's just kind of a little April Fool's Z. And then he wraps it up with something something Markov chains, but it's just like a cool thing that looks like it might be a thing. But it isn't a thing. But what it looks like it might be is really cool because he's a really talented kind of designer, graphics person. So I just, I just liked it. Yeah. It looked cool. Do not follow the suggestions.

Cortex 29:03 In my I have not actually consumed in his content, but I've been meaning to entry. This time. posted his YouTube channel restoring 100 to 200 year old word work woodworking plans, which seems wonder

Jessamyn 29:18 if my cousin knows about this, my cousin, the hipster woodworker, because wow, this is so totally. I mean, they're probably friends. But like, wow, really cool project.

Cortex 29:30 This is the sort of thing that I would come across at random as opposed to on malt shop and then turn around and post on the front page. Great,

Jessamyn 29:38 great, great, great. Yeah, malt shop. We want our lawsuit. Yeah, and our lawsuit but like, we settled our terms favorable to us and made the copyright trolls back down and give us a license for the thing. They were telling us. We needed to pay them $15,000 To us, so fuck them. And thank you public citizen and Paul Levy, our free lawyer, thank you very much. I'm very happy about this. If we weren't sort of in the middle of sort of COVID Nonsense, I might write that up. I may still actually I'm talking about like, why which projects people would do projects things? Well, we won our copyright troll site, and I'm very happy about it.

Cortex 30:19 Congrats. user who

Jessamyn 30:23 we been needing to ban Brad like comes and goes kind of like a ghost. Yeah,

Cortex 30:27 I don't know. I haven't seen any more content from from them. So I don't know.

Jessamyn 30:32 I haven't either, but me it was there.

Cortex 30:36 Yeah. I saw I saw like the instigating thing, but I didn't see the follow up stuff that people were mentioning. So anyway, now we're talking vaguely about someone on a different like, anything else from project specifically? Or should we just say, Hey, everybody, go look at projects as much cool stuff and post up on projects, double

Jessamyn 30:50 triple check that there wasn't like a thing because every now and again, like I vote for a project. No, I think the last thing I voted for was vol flex, which from last month, which I still love, so that was it. Yes. All right. I mean, everything is good. But those were the things that stuck out.

Cortex 31:05 Yeah, that's, that's the standard disclaimer. It's like it's you must understand,

Jessamyn 31:10 you must understand, you must understand,

Cortex 31:12 you must understand, let's just say that for about five minutes, try

Jessamyn 31:16 out some different Ren and Stimpy voice.

Cortex 31:19 No, I was actually trying more for like a regency drama thing. Really watching the Regency drama either, so

Jessamyn 31:24 you must understand. You understand?

Cortex 31:32 You must understand.

Jessamyn 31:34 That's good. That's better. I get it.

Cortex 32:02 Yeah, let's talk about what did you understand on on Metafilter? This month?

Jessamyn 32:09 What did I understand? I'm gonna filter hold on closing tabs. Okay, so fizz made the post that I didn't know I needed. But but did need, which was basically kind of a summary of a whole bunch of really good Twitch TV channels that aren't like just watching some man play video games. Really was what I thought Twitch TV was until the current nonsense started. And that's where I go to hang out and play Trivia now. As well as sometimes watch. Prairie dogs run. So that's good. I don't know what else is there. It's really hard. Oh, sorry. There's my comments, seven prairie dog potatoes. But it's kind of hard to find what's there. Like, it's got kind of a YouTube be like trying to push you towards the popular shit, even though there's a whole bunch of stuff there. And so fizz basically did the work. And it's like, oh, here's the 27 24/7 Bob Ross channel, or 24/7 Anthony Bourdain. Or how about public domain copyright free films? How about you know, Chopper town? How about and then the thread is just a bunch of other people talking about other David bull from metal filter has a channel where he does printmaking stuff there. Yeah. And so it's just, you know, I think for a lot of people, Twitch is kind of just not a thing they think about because why would you it's for video games. And more and more people have been using it or I have been noticing that they have been using it, which is probably more likely to do more kinds of information dissemination that, you know, do streaming, basically. And it's awesome. Yeah. 24/7 Beavis and Butthead, like 24/7, feature length animation, cartoons, classical music. So if you're somebody who's really looking to pass the time, and this is the kind of thing you really like, and like I said earlier, and also maybe last month, like you could play Trivia there, like with a bunch of people pretty much every night of the week, which is I enjoy. So thank you for this for this post. And I just, you know, hopefully other people can find stuff that they like to watch there. Spend some time.

Cortex 34:28 It's a lot of content out there. I have really been enjoying today after I saw wax pancake posted, I think must been the XOXO slack this morning. There is a thing from open AI possibly also directly involved in the GPT two stuff. This is where it's all blurred together

Jessamyn 34:50 to like a machine or GPT. Two

Cortex 34:53 is it's it's it's it's a program it's a software library. Sorry for doing sort of text production based on corpus analysis, but I haven't really looked into it enough to be able to describe it beyond that. So I don't know exactly what form it takes. I know it's basically available for general use, possibly going against like API calls into a training database somewhere, maybe I'm assuming, because part of how it works is it is trained on a huge amount of text from the internet. And so presumably, everybody's not like recreating that from scratch. So I don't know the details. But and I don't know if that is tied in with open AI, or if the two are just sort of like in the same. Because again, I don't know that. I don't know the fuck it feels. Anyway, open AI has released this thing called jukebox. And it is something that creates basically new music in kind of the same way that things like GP to T to create new text

Jessamyn 35:52 by awesome and completely horrifying. I've been listening to it while you're talking and oh my god.

Cortex 35:59 Yeah, like, basically, the premise is that given the training data it has from scraping a whole ton of songs it can take, basically, who is the artist, and what are the lyrics and try and come up with a song including, you know, notably, if you try and have the synthesized, artists create their own famous song, it's not going to create the same song, but it will sing a song in this, their general style with those words. And so you can listen to, for example, 20 different versions of Elton John failing to write Tiny Dancer the way we're familiar with it, but it still sounds like Elton John singing and Elton John song, with the words of Tiny Dancer, and it's a really strange phenomena. And like I saw I fell down a hole with this and listen to this kind of throughout the day, all day.

Jessamyn 36:49 I feel like I can't tell Jim about this, or else we're never gonna hang out again.

Cortex 36:55 Well, the good news is this, this current setup is as far as I can tell, so computationally intensive that like you can't sit down and just roll up a new one on a whim. It's not like some of the other things have been on the internet, where you were like, Oh, well, okay,

Jessamyn 37:07 now, we do all of our vacation photos, it writes Deep Dream filters.

Cortex 37:14 Like at the moment, the write up for this, if you've read through the text that they've got on the post on open API's page about it is something like nine hours of computation to produce about a minute of audio. So it's not, you know, it's not quick, it's pretty resource intensive process at the moment. So there's no, go plug your own, you can just sift through the samples they've already produced and

Jessamyn 37:34 continue to produce. Everything I've listened to sounds like it's on an old vinyl record,

Cortex 37:38 everything's messy, there's a lot of noise, there's a lot of weirdness. The part of the

Jessamyn 37:44 know what I mean, like, like, messy, musically, is different from being like, there's just scratchy noise.

Cortex 37:50 Yeah, there's a lot. I mean, some of it is trained on like live recordings that comes into it, too. But I think to some extent, they, they do a very clever thing, where instead of taking, if you think of a song, as being, you know, it's at 44 kilohertz, and it's three minutes long. And so you've got like 10s of millions of individual samples to try and sort of sort through. And that's just a ton of data to try and do any kind of predictive processing on but music happens with very short, little emphasis. So what this does is to some extent, it breaks the song down into much larger chunks that it just uses a compression approach to say, Okay, well, what if we took like, three or 4000 pieces of this song and tried to work with that, that's still a lot, but that's why you're using the computer. Because it can do that it can do a lot more stuff than it would otherwise be able to get away with. But the way it does that is by saying, okay, instead of taking 144 thousandths of a second, for this data point, we're going to take, I don't know, 100 milliseconds, or 50 milliseconds or something like that, and treat that as a unit. And so it basically compresses that down to deal with the data. And then when it builds something new, it expands that back out. And that amount of sort of compression and expansion is like a lossy JPEG kind of. Yeah. So I think I think that's where a lot of the noise is, is is sort of coming in, because otherwise it just wouldn't be feasible to do it. I

Jessamyn 39:14 only wish that there was a way on this podcast that we could have you doing this explanation juxtaposed with all of the different songs I've been listening to while we've been talking.

Cortex 39:27 You know, if if you if you copy them and paste them I can make I can make the music for this episode. Various selections from the opening I jukebox. Oh,

Jessamyn 39:35 they sound horrible, and I'd rather be off honest. I love this idea. Jim is going to absolutely lose his fucking mind. But yes, let's move on to some real quick. And then Oh, I

Cortex 39:49 see. I see.

Jessamyn 39:52 This made me so happy. This is trigons post. So Sushant that's great. He kind of showed up hatched from an egg all Christian and sincere and all smooth on the outside and was like, I'm gonna do these 50 states. And so places that hadn't heard of him, were like, yeah, come to South Dakota. We'll show you a great time and then you can do a great South Dakota album, about our serial killers, and then he fucking didn't like he did two albums and then he just whiffed on the rest of them. And so the big question for a lot of people was like, had he ever intended to do those? Or was it always a publicity stunt? And I don't know about that. But Joey Clift decided he was sick, like, I'm still mad, right? Because like, I was like, Yeah, John Stevens album is gonna be amazing. I've like I've never seen him play. But to me, it's like embodied embodiment of like that. Brooklyn's sincerity, right? Which was like, well, he totally meant it at the time. Like, instead of like, Yeah, but did he have a plan? He just said some shit. And then all these people like, you know, laid out for him. And then he just kind of was like, Psych. Now I'm famous. Thanks. So, so fuck him. Joey Cliff did a great. I know, I know. It's really weird. I didn't even know I felt this way until I saw this thread. But then Joey cliffs basically put out a call to kind of like comedian, musician people to do the rest of the 50 stage. And like half of the albums came out in a week on SoundCloud. And they're mixed quality. But oh my god, some of them are a treasure. Like, there was one called too many bikes on the minivan Trail, which is like a cycling ghetto pat that goes kind of near where my house was growing up. And like the Massachusetts ones are delightful, like the Vermont ones weren't out yet. So I don't know. Like, but like, they're just fun. Like they're low fives. Some of them are good and some of them are terrible. One of them is like a 15 minute song looking through brochures. I mean, not really looking through brochures but as if you're looking through the brochures of like every college in Massachusetts and just like there's like It's like 88 lines about 44 women except that it's like 88 lines about 180 Massachusetts colleges it's so fun and the thread is not that big but it's just a nice just a nice thread and I did not know about this would not have known about it except for this post and it just yeah oh my god.

Cortex 42:39 I remember seeing this go by and I just didn't have the time to like dig into it when I forgot about it. So thank you thank you for bringing it back up I favorited it I will go back for it. No i i get you on the like saltiness about it. But I'm also very sympathetic to anybody's like, you are Josh,

Jessamyn 42:54 this is not my side. You know slant I looking at you and your bass. No, no, no, no, no jack, but it could be.

Cortex 43:01 Hey, I carried that on for a while though. I never

Jessamyn 43:04 need to find a while

Cortex 43:07 I made. I don't know, I want to say I made like 40 or 50 those fucking things that the plus it wasn't. So here's the thing. Here's where soothe John Stephens fucked up, okay. He made a number of

Jessamyn 43:22 you didn't promise, anything, everything we got from you, we got for free?

Cortex 43:26 Well, okay, the promise thing is a problem by itself. Like, you know, I would avoid that language in general. But I don't I don't know how much I'm not familiar with the specific language that was used. If he if he stood up on stage and held up his hand and said, I hereby solemnly swear, I will, in fact, make it my life's work to complete these 50 albums, then that's, that's, that's a big swing, but he shouldn't have done that. But like suggesting what you might do it, suggesting that you might do it is also like, Well, you got to look out because here's the thing, if it's a fucking closed set, and you do two of the things in that set, you're already boned. Like, if you do one of a thing in it, like if you do a picture and it's a picture of a character, like it's a it's a rendering of a tarot card, then whatever you've done a tarot card themed image. If you do another image from another tarot card, all of a sudden, you get to pick between doing 78 of those fuckers or being the guy who didn't follow through on the tarot card thing. Like you have to avoid closed sets like that you're otherwise you're just you're setting people up to be salty. It's just you gotta be careful. They everything you should make should be semantically unrelated. That's

Jessamyn 44:38 a press release. And then and then we're like, ah, it was just promotion. So fuck him.

Cortex 44:45 Oh, well. Speaking also of music. I don't actually have like a pivot for it. I found out from a post from filthy life. The that Glenda had to get super into Elvis and has put out an album of Elvis covers. Oh, and like, I don't think I did his thing. I don't listen to Danzig at all. It never listened to like, you didn't listen to his solo stuff. I didn't listen to misfits. So like, you know, the only thing I know about Glenn Danzig is he's sort of short and sort of a meathead and the song mother and really just like the first couple lines of Mother

Jessamyn 45:27 You don't know about forever.

Cortex 45:29 No, no, I don't know. I like Like, like, names more things. I don't know that I just don't think about Glenn Danzig. So the fact that I didn't mark

Jessamyn 45:39 the hell out of that which falls making that the first comment in that thread, but go on.

Cortex 45:46 So yeah, that's all that's that's the thing. Yeah. If you want to listen to Danzig seams drink, like, seeing some Ellis. That's the whole thing or some discussion about dancing.

Jessamyn 45:55 Well, it's another like, self important musician, right? I mean, like, I like dancing. He's fine. The Misfits were important. But you know, aging is tough. For anybody who has an image that isn't an image that will age you don't I mean, like Gibby from the Butthole Surfers is doing a great job. No, it's weird. He's doing a very good job. Becoming an older gentleman in Brooklyn, as opposed to a younger upstart in Texas. But I think metal it's harder for metal you know, those leather pants just they're less forgiving. But yeah,

Cortex 46:32 that reminds me there's a Bruce Campbell trimmed his beard. Oh, the other day. Oh, which is weird. Well, I mean, I just think I think he has a beard sometimes. And he decided to trim some of it and so there's just like a tweet of it. And it's remarkable like the thing that strikes me is like they found a way to make Bruce Campbell's chin bigger. Like just grow grow a little bit of a beard on it, like not not too big. Otherwise, it's a beard but like, you know, it's nice and freshly shorn in this picture and so it's just like a little bit more Bruce Campbell chin and it's it's impressive.

Jessamyn 47:06 The guy who had kind of a slightly big chin, and I think he was like, very sensitive about it. I never know like if people like because like that can be a good thing, right? That can be like a Dudley do right thing or it can be like a like, I am not having

Cortex 47:21 my clients a car collection is why that was my Jalen. Oh, that was terrible.

Jessamyn 47:26 I know it's kind of I think the notable dude who has that yeah, just slightly bigger. And I never think about it.

Cortex 47:35 He's got the big chin but he's got like the wide chin like he's got a big chin with like his he's got flesh, mutton chops is what he's got. Yeah, I got to forget that I came up with that image

Jessamyn 47:50 I liked this post by I am Joe spleen. You know, one of our antipodal mefites edits, basically, New Zealand went into a pretty serious lockdown. And they've they've exhibited some really good leadership and how to manage this. Their Prime Minister the lady in charge of New Zealand is pretty amazing. And but then there's this one guy, who basically just had a whole bunch of took a whole bunch of multiple exposure pictures under the guise of having the boys over. And it's just you know, pictures of himself and it's just like a series of tweets. But really, it's kind of a series of like really good kind of weird interesting photographs. And I am Joseph Lee kind of sewed them together in an a pretty nice post. And I thought it was pretty good. I liked it.

Cortex 48:41 Yeah, these are adorable. Yeah. Good work guy in New Zealand.

Jessamyn 48:46 Yeah. I other people do it. Like there was some Reddit picture that was like the last comment and it's basically one guy with like, eight of him you know, me and the boys still having fun? And then somebody was

Cortex 49:02 Yeah, this isn't doesn't look like you're doing social distancing.

Jessamyn 49:06 Yes, yes. Which

Cortex 49:10 the internet will always the internet will always had that sort of content for us. I enjoyed another fifth post. That was about big dumb games, big dumb video games, which like on the one hand, it's like it's a it's a readable article, you know about sort of playing big dumb games and whatnot. Sort of making the game not really know if

Jessamyn 49:36 game maybe means but

Cortex 49:40 big big big triple A adventure experiences you know things like Grand Theft Auto Oh, okay. Looks

Jessamyn 49:50 like Yeah,

Cortex 49:53 yeah, like light light, like games that are absolutely not perfectly trying to be smart taught narratives. You know? Right, but they're trying to be, they're trying to be big, and they're trying to just be fun. And they're trying to like, like the just cause games.

Jessamyn 50:07 Well, I guess that's part of the debate now, kind of looking at this thread is like, what is a big dumb game? Exactly?

Cortex 50:13 Yeah. And like, it's a great discussion, because like, basically, people have a lot of great suggestions and a lot of experiential reports on what they've been playing and what has worked and what hasn't, but also like, yeah, no one's gonna totally agree. And also, people have been really enjoying things that maybe don't feel like exactly a big dumb game, but they've been enjoying the fuck out of it. So it's just a nice chatty video game thread, which is a common occurrence when physical scalar opposed to no appreciate that every time Yeah, it

Jessamyn 50:40 was good. I actually got a tip from me fight not even intentionally to meet it. But I think I was reading, you know, there's a lot of meta talk threads about, you know, different people's experiences, positive, negative, or whatever. But one of the positive threads was somebody was talking about, you know, they've been doing more kind of group gaming with some of their, like, old friends and their new friends getting together on board game arena, which is just like, basically kind of a website, you can go play board games together, like simple, let's say, but like Jim and I both, like, for whatever reason, just really like it. Like it's just kind of the right level of not too hard. But you get a badge every now and again. And like, you know, we play Scrabble most of the time, but sometimes you're not up for like a 45 minute thing, you know, but getting to play Yahtzee for like 10 minutes or like learn a new game that maybe you didn't know, on a free website. That's fairly straightforward. Totally awesome. So I got to, you know, send send a note to whoever it was brash tack, basically to be like, hey, thanks. Thanks for boardgame arena. It is terrific. So yeah, made me happy.

Cortex 51:46 That's excellent. Got a couple of others. So we were talking about this in the pre roll a little bit, but I, I'm going to share a post that I made, because I just really liked the thing I posted about my posts, as most of my posts are at this point. I've been posting more often in general the last few years. And it's partly because I'm putting a lot less work into framing them and just saying, Oh, hey, here's a good link, I should make a post

Jessamyn 52:11 exactly that same thing this month. So So go on, it's a good it's a

Cortex 52:15 good process, it gets me to post instead of meaning to get around to posting and the thing I posted about is this goofy improv comedy half life thing where Half Life is a game that came out in like 1997 98, something like that big revolutionary game. At the time, Half Life two was a big game after that steam who, or valve who made that started the Steam platform, which is now like the hugest video game store on the Internet. In the meantime, they sort of haven't been great about continuing to make half life games, but that's a whole other story. But the original Half Life, someone loaded it up and played. It's with a VR setup so they can move their hands around and gesturing. It's a first person shooter. So like you're looking through the perspective of like looking through their mask and seeing their hands. And normally you play Gordon Freeman, a taciturn scientist, who reluctantly becomes a gun toting murderer of aliens and evil soldiers trying to save the world. And in this instead it is a wisecracking screamer who is like trying to stay in character as a confused grumpy Gordon Freeman while talking to various characters who normally in the game would just have canned lines and like you would walk past them but instead they're hanging out and giving them a hard time and doing weird stuff and you know it's like whether you like this or not is really just gonna depend on whether you like it or not, but I found absolutely fucking delightful Yeah, if it's if it's your thing then you've got like probably four or five hours total of it's I've watched about half of it so far but I listen to the first like 25 minute bit and that's enough to know if this is what you want. I loved it and there's a scientist in there who in the game you know, says hello garden Maria you know come into the test chamber and whoever's doing the streaming like playing in this like this three or four people who are clearly playing together to make this happen while the guy records the stream just has that scientists voice down and he does some of the canned lines like he does say hello garden you know music ropes can be used to navigate large pits and stuff which I don't think it is actually in the game but he says a bunch of stuff that sounds like it could be a canned line along with stuff that obviously superduper is not yeah and he just starts saying hello garden inappropriately all the time. And it's it's hard to it's it's one of those things where like, you keep doing a dumb thing until it's really funny after you're like getting tired of it. Yeah, it does that very successfully. And hello Gordon is one of the things and boy I just really enjoyed watching this stuff. Maybe you will too.

Jessamyn 54:48 Well my like one off link that I saw late at night right as I was like putting my computer to bed and it's like, I just posted it and then was like me double check that timestamp matches you Now it's like 10 o'clock at night, I'm talking about, but was, I just I saw like this post that had a kind of a terrible video capture of Nirvana playing at mantaray, which was kind of like a big club and like the Boston Cambridge area 30 years ago, that night, you know, like 30 years ago, this was what music was in Cambridge. And you know, Nirvana was a band that was like, fairly important for a kind of a brief actually period of time. You know what I mean? Like, they weren't actually a big band for that long. But they were super important feeling to a lot of people and so getting to see this old show, and then of course, getting to post it to metal filter, where there are other people who are also my age, who may have also like, I didn't see this show. In fact, I never wound up seeing Nirvana because they played in Hampshire, and it was $3. It was just too expensive. And so it was just really interesting hearing a couple other people. It's kind of a, you know, chatty thread, about other Nirvana bands circa the same time. And it was, it was just me, I enjoyed. I enjoyed it. And it made me happy that I posted just a single link. Bad video post because it came out good.

Unknown Speaker 56:26 Yeah, that's, that's excellent. Yeah. And

Jessamyn 56:29 the in the pandering to Jessamyn category. There's, I believe it's Iris Gamble's gorgeous libraries post for National Library Week, which was, Holy God, the shittiest. National Library Week, there has been because so many libraries are closed, librarians are getting laid off. A lot of librarians got laid off literally on National Library Workers Day, which was Wednesday or Thursday. And it was just like, Okay, I get it. Things are tough all over. Why do we think libraries are exempt from this? But like, people just knowing kind of anything about library culture? Like you could have waited like three days, right? Like, how is it gonna make you feel to get another job and then have to be like, hey, National Library Week, remember, this is when 400 of us got laid off from the giant city libraries situation. And so it was just nice to get to be in this thread. Look at some beautiful libraries. You know, hop around a little bit with like, Google Arts and Culture to have some other people share some pictures. Yeah, library stories. The end was nice.

Cortex 57:39 That's excellent. Yeah. mentioned in passing of a passing. John Conway died. Oh, the lifeguard earlier this month. Yeah. Which

Jessamyn 57:51 you started laughing.

Cortex 57:54 You said the lifeguard. Yeah, but that's the thing. It's his thing. But it's also like the thing he is famously known for hating being his thing.

Jessamyn 58:03 Oh, this guy.

Cortex 58:06 Guy, right. Yeah. Well, that's the thing, like, you know, like,

Jessamyn 58:09 life petition, but He also invented this like, stupid dot game. And that's all anybody knows about him.

Cortex 58:15 Yeah. And I mean, really, he just sort of popularized this formulation of it. And it just turned into a humongous thing. And it's like, I don't know how much that he was like bitterly loathing at so much because he famously got grumpy about it. I mean,

Jessamyn 58:28 bitterly loathing for mathematicians, I think, well,

Cortex 58:31 I don't I mean, there's a mathematicians who've been like, really, really, like shittily angry about stuff. I don't know if Conway was like that. Or if he just like, got tired of people asking him about AI. Because he did a ton of work. He had this huge career. He's a great sort of popular communicator about mathematics, which is part of why life took off I think, is because, like, his presentation of the whole thing was very compelling. And people saw Oh, hey, neat. Plus kindness and I'm extend just a right place, right time thing. Yeah, anyway, long career died of apparently COVID-19 related stuff. It was weird, sort of, like first day or so when the news broke, because it was really just people sort of mentioning having heard on Twitter, in a way that you're like, Wait, so but there's nothing for this. But like, I was talking about that with a couple people on on Twitter at the time, because I was like, oh, man, yeah, like, I heard this news. And they're like, Wait, is this is being reported anywhere? You know, what's going on? Right? You know, is this real? And the thing that struck me about that is like, that is a totally reasonable thing to wonder about when you hear that someone famous has died. But that's part of how we think about like press management of fame. And like John Conway is a famous mathematician, but he's not like a famous person, right? Yeah, he's famous for his work, not for his popular availability to the cultural awareness. And so like no one was like rushing out a press release about his death. He had family members who had been with him he had been ill. He passed away. They told some people who told some people Yeah, so someone on Twitter mentioned having heard it from someone else. And that's normal. Like if Yeah, like, like if you were I died. That's how it would work. There would be no immediate press release. People who knew us we just like tell it was weird, like go to death. But I was just talking to coach the other day. So you know, momentum already? Won. Yes. But I'm saying you wouldn't have went out inside of an hour. Like you would have an obituary in the paper you would have like, you know, some of the updates and pages, someone that update your Wikipedia entry, but like, it wouldn't be like, Oh, no, we gotta we gotta hit the news cycle, right?

Jessamyn 1:00:42 And nobody would have had well, I don't even want to start predicting, but nobody would have had my obituary written and ready to go. I'm like looking at the fucking urn with my face on it on my friend.

Cortex 1:00:54 Do not have an obituary ready for me. I wrote yours. Like, I thought we Oh, man. I feel like a fool.

Jessamyn 1:01:03 I don't even know his birthday, Josh. Facebook anyway.

Cortex 1:01:40 Do you want to talk about AskMe Metafilter.

Jessamyn 1:01:43 Should we I just want to mention one more thing that brought me joy do it which was DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince reuniting via zoom for brand new funk. Like, there's a lot of people, especially famous, famous people who are using this time to kind of share what they have in order to make other people's lives. You know, give giving you something fun to watch that makes you happy, right? There's been a lot of notable DJs on Instagram. We all know John Krasinski with some good news. And if you don't like come over to fanfare, and let's talk about it, but just a lot of these kind of, you know, they seem impromptu, but they're probably heavily put together. You know, Saturday Night Live at home has just been, you know, it's been two episodes, but pretty amazing. Between the first and the second. And this was one of the ones by W city, Mike, that I just kind of pulled out and was like, you know, it's just fun. And as systematic abuse says in their first comment, like number one, I can't believe I just watched that. Number two, I can't believe these old as Hollywood cats still have skills? Because they're super fun and dumb. So yeah, fun and dumb. And I appreciate it. It's one of the things I like finding a metaphor because like, I don't have time to look at the internet and figure out where these things are happening. But I like it when people bring it to my attention. So thank you. Thanks. Yeah.

Cortex 1:03:12 All right, shall we? Shall we discuss?

Jessamyn 1:03:14 I'm on Metafilter. Ready to ready to get into it ready to move? Do it all right. Oh, you mean? Oh, me?

Cortex 1:03:24 Yeah, no, it sounds sorry. Set you up as good as I know, oh,

Jessamyn 1:03:28 well, here was the thing that I learned. And I didn't really know. And I was hoping there was a resolution and it looks like they're totally hasn't really been one. But basically, it's by user. Ooh, that's seven m. So I hope you can hear all seven of them. Basically, their dog yips at the TV all the time. And it's making the dog crate, it's making the people nuts. And like, it would be easy if we could find a TV the dog can't see. And like I've heard that dogs can't understand old TVs. But what does that mean? Give me some information. And what I was hoping is like I bookmark this, you know, tags, dog TV, and that I would come back and some dude be like, oh, yeah, what you need is this or that. But it doesn't it doesn't really seem like there's an obvious answer. Although Dobbs got kind of a best answer. Basically, he like How about your virtual reality headset, and you can watch Netflix on that, oh, and your dog can't see it, which would actually work. And so people talk a little bit about, you know, refresh rates and whatever. It's unclear. But I did like that idea. Because I was thinking about this, right? I was I was talking to my librarian. We had like, we had to talk about some website stuff. And she sent me some snarky email like so I suppose I can't call you because she knows I hate the phone. And it's like this fucking joke with her. And finally, I was like, I just can't hear people well on the phone and it's kind of hard for me. And I guess that sounded enough like, kind of qualifying disability language? And like, I don't know, I don't have a hearing problem. But like, I may have kind of a processing problem, I don't know. But like, remember when phones used to be like, you could both hear each other talking at the same time? Are you young enough to old enough to have remembered that? Like, landline? Yeah, yeah, like a landline phone, you can both hear each other and both talk? Like you and I kinda can on this talk. But like, Yeah, can't if you're on a cell phone?

Cortex 1:05:35 You know, I have not. I have not consciously thought about that with a cellphone. And I don't know how long and I'd like to the point where I feel skeptical of that idea.

Jessamyn 1:05:45 I feel like it's true. But maybe I need to do more reading on it. But to me, I feel like, if I'm not hearing myself, or there's a little bit of a lag, and somebody starts talking, and I've got kind of a quick response rate, there's a whole bunch of like, oh, no, you go. And it's Yeah, I wonder frosting to me, whereas I don't have it like with this conversation we're having now. But to me, it feels like a cellular phone thing. And like kind of thing, too. I noticed.

Cortex 1:06:14 It's definitely a zoom thing. And like zoom zoom has just enough leg that like when you get a little bit of friction there, it gets fucky like it's because because we are so used to like the very narrow margins on sort of like response and repeat stuff. And zoom can have, you know, a little bit of leg like, honestly, this probably has a little bit of leg sometimes for us, but we don't notice too much. Because we don't do I can't believe I'm making this claim. But realistically, we don't do a lot of talking over each other in a way that like requires very nimble reflexes, like if the two of us collide in something like then, you know, we sorted out and that's fine. But also, I think the the lag on this is usually pretty low, even though it gets a little bit decent every once in a while. Yeah, well, and

Jessamyn 1:06:59 I feel like the the line doesn't shut down. When I start talking. Like, I feel like I hear you for both time

Cortex 1:07:04 and zoom definitely fucking does that. And that's my biggest problem with with larger calls with Zoom is the fact that as soon as two people are like going at volume, you just can't really hear fucking anything. Yeah, I don't know. It's weird.

Jessamyn 1:07:19 Yeah. So, man, that just that just made me think about it in terms of like dogs and TV and like technology and whatever the stuff is, but and then like the librarian, and I chatted on Zoom, and it actually was fine. But it's funny because she won't be on the video camera, which I think is why she hates zoom. Because everybody's always like, come on beyond the video camera. And like, I don't care if she's on the video camera, but maybe she feels that pressure. Whereas on the phone, I just can't hear anybody. And it's just like

so I had a couple infrastructure administrators that I liked, for sure weak infrastructure, weak ones by Jeff. And not just Jeff but like, Jeff period. And basically that line that you know, if you're next in line, behind somebody, that ATM and money is left in the ATM and you take it that stealing and the bank will find you. And Jeff's like, is that really against the law? And like do banks really do that? And so it's interesting having people chime in on that, because of course, there's a whole bunch of kind of nerds, which are like, Yeah, but like, how does that work? And blah, blah, blah, like, it's not super clear, some little punk in a rocket, which is a really good username, by the way, is like, look, you know, banks have whole departments looking for fraud and theft, but other people are trying to figure out like, how does the money get stuck there? Like, how does it work? Blah, Jim, James got a slightly odd story. It's just I don't know, it was interesting. And there was no total resolution, but there was a lot of people talking about it. And then second infrastructure post, which was by toast Qi, another username. I really like. What if you have a really bad car problem somewhere where there isn't a breakdown lane, like a tunnel or a bridge? What if Well, it turns out, there's, in many cases, a plan. Like, you know, bridges and tunnels have cameras, because it'll fuck everything up. And so a lot of times, and so somebody, u 220 604. A B is like, Hey, if you're at the Golden Gate Bridge, there's a tow truck at the end, that waits there. That will just go their job is to push you off the bridge if you get stuck on the bridge, basically.

Cortex 1:09:46 That's a pretty good solution.

Jessamyn 1:09:47 Yeah. So you wait in your car, and then they're savvy later on the thread who's like, I work with my State department of transportation, like the state has to have coverage of the thing and then we'll monitor it during heavy I'm so that they can move like a wrecker or a tow truck out, or whatever. And basically, they're also like, please, by the way, stay in your car, much better idea. But it was good because if you're somebody who's anxious about driving or especially anxious about driving over a bridge or through a tunnel, the fact that there's a plan and you don't necessarily have to worry about it is probably something that can give you peace of mind. Oh, wait. There's another infrastructure. One I didn't even notice. Gosh, this is from non steroidal anti inflammatory drug. And basically, how come you can't like write a bad check on the Treasury and empty it. And in fact, there's a very I'm surprised you let all these posts through Josh, honestly. But basically, you know, I mean, because the whole deal is right, like they're writing tons and tons of $1,200 checks to people in the United States for stuff. So what what's the process and then sock, my puppet and a Nancy have some really good information talking about why that is true. So if you're curious about that, they will actually explain it to you in a in a really in a really good way. I liked it. It's very short thread. Very good thread. I learned some stuff.

Cortex 1:11:23 That's good. I want to read that. Yeah, you should. I really enjoyed this. Very quick one and done type. My, I guess it was two and done. Question. From Griffin lover saying, I was given this tape by a bus driver and rocker with 30 years ago. Can anyone translate it so I can identify the artist and gwy here came and said, Oh, hey, it looks like it's Amir soror. And here's some links as some stuff off it. Like, you know, in you know, like, in 1530 minutes, you know, just like there and so yeah, Griffin leopard was like, Wow, I'm literally in tears right now. Oh, yeah, just a great little Hey, they asked me did the thing. Get that thing again.

Jessamyn 1:12:06 And now go find more music by that person. And that was just a nice person helping them out. And that was awesome.

Cortex 1:12:14 I liked it. There was also a follow up later on. They ran out of water a while ago. Yep. beverage. de vos followed up on a question from a couple years ago. Yeah, wanted to get a gift for their 80 year old Italian American Barber. And so they followed up with it. Well, he did retire after all. And also, here's some feedback on the thread. And thanks for all your suggestions. So now what we're going to do is you're going to bring up and describe a question you like and not expect me to respond because I'm getting a glass of

Jessamyn 1:12:57 water. That sounds great. So do it back to what we were talking about before with the Fresh Prince and DJ Jazzy jazz, because of course, Jazzy Jeff is the DJ, Fresh Prince is the rapper. That's why their album was called. He's DJ, I'm the rapper, because a lot of people thought Jazzy Jeff was What Will Smith's name was, but it wasn't. But back to this question about how they do those things on Zoom, where they're kind of looking like they're all doing the same thing. But they're not really all do it like, like, what it looks like is that you're watching a whole bunch of people do a thing together on Zoom. Like a music thing or something that requires like pretty precise timing. But realistically, that's not exactly what you're looking at. And so this was a question by Kenneth Cole Amin. Keita call Amin Keita, call me probably. Cake cola mean, and basically how because a lot of people have asked me to filter for the last month I've been like, I want to play with my band. How do we do it together over the internet? The answer is fucking don't.

Cortex 1:14:09 I had that conversation with my band. Jim is like what if was like, nope, nope. Trust me, it's gonna happen.

Jessamyn 1:14:15 It doesn't work. Your best bet is like the call each other on the phone like you just can't do it. And so basically, they were like, how did the Hamilton cash then do this live from everybody's apartment rendition of Alexander Hamilton. And so they basically sort of explain how, how that how that thing works, that they're all kind of sinking to the same track, but then they play that track over over the top. I mean, really, what I would like just as a kind of a nerd person living through these times, would be for everything that I watched that is like a technological marvel like this where everybody's syncing up and doing like Saturday Night Live, right? Saturday Night Live at home. I want to like I feel like I know how Old Saturday Night Live went together. You know, I know how they move between scenes. I know how they move between sets. I know how they dressed people. I know how they put on wigs and all the stuff. But I am really curious how some of those things are like synced together technologically. And I would love to see more of those. How we did the fun thing you just watched? Yeah, thing. You know, like it's clear on Saturday Night Live at home, for instance, that everybody got dropped, shipped, like decent microphones, lights, like a whole bunch of stuff to put in their houses, it's less clear where they are, like, some of them are at home, clearly, but some of them are clearly someplace that maybe is their home, but it's definitely not in New York City. You know what I mean? And so it's an interesting, I just want to read more behind the scenes about this. And so this AskMe Metafilter thread kind of touches on that. But doesn't really, there's no definitive, here's the link. But there is some people talking about how Yeah,

Cortex 1:16:03 yeah, I'm right there with you. I'd love to see more details on exactly how it's done. Because it's like it's it's, it's the fact that it is kind of a subtle problem is what makes it interesting, because like, if you see someone like the guy in New Zealand with the post photos together, no one's looking at this thing. Wait, how did they get four guys who looked so alike? Or how did he occupy forces like, Well, no, obviously, it's an added photo. Right? Like the same thing

Jessamyn 1:16:29 in Photoshop. So I can, like put it together, even if I didn't do that exact thing.

Cortex 1:16:33 Yeah. And people have been doing goofy, like, one person multiperson like plays and musical bits on Twitter, too. And, you know, you're like, how do they do it? Well, they did it by, you know, planning and knowing how it went and, and doing all the parts and editing. But the live music thing, like we're so used to the concept of live music, and people have so rarely tried to accomplish the process of long distance, remote, live music together that they just don't know, it doesn't work. And so the idea of having to compensate for these problems in a remote thing doesn't jump out. So obviously, it's like, oh, well, this is a pickle, Oh, this must have been accomplished through a certain amount of planning and like, you know, trickery rather than like, oh, well, they just did that. You know, it's like, it's, there's no reason people would know that. You couldn't just do that. So yeah, it's it's an interesting thing. I too, would like more information on the specific details. I think that'd be cool.

Jessamyn 1:17:27 Yes. And then speaking of nonsense, a little bit. I'll build on a linen, linen. I've met him I do not know how his name is pronounced. Basically, I feel like in science fiction, I've seen machines where characters have to do kind of technobabble to open up a machine swap cards, whatever. But I'm trying to find examples of people who do that technobabble justifications for what they're trying to be doing. I just want to like, see this and learn about it. And so apparently, there's a lot of it happening on Star Trek, Stargate franchise, you know, weird circuit breaker stuff. Neutron flow, flux capacitor, reverse polarity. I guess there's a whole thing on TV Tropes. Oh, yeah. And so there's just a whole bunch of good, good sort of advice. And then he kind of clarifies much later in the thread. I'm looking for, you know, justifications for stuff. You know, why, why they would have to do this kind of nonsense stuff. And so that was good and interesting.

Cortex 1:18:35 Yeah. Yeah, they just glancing through here. There's stone shop basically suggesting, like, the reason this is such a thing is like, hardware was a lot more large modules to deal with, you know, right back in the day. Right. Right. Right, actually would have to sort of like, because like, Yeah, I mean, the original big rooms, scale computers, you'd literally had to get inside and fuck with the transistors or not transistors, but you know, tubes and whatnot. So yeah. Yes. It's interesting, because it's so pervasive, but I wouldn't have known offhand any specific episode of like, I want to say literally, the entire Star Trek canon, basically, is the answer. Especially, like, you know, I feel like next generation but yeah, like, beyond that, I wouldn't know one off has like, just don't watch all of it. Because you know, right, those scenes will be there.

Jessamyn 1:19:29 It is really interesting. What you mentioned, like, I never really thought about that. But that the older sci fi just because we were, what our current knowledge of machines was at the time, the whole idea that everything would be super, super tiny, and you'd be messing around with frickin clean rooms and tweezers. Just wasn't that wasn't the future that was represented. You still had these big chunky things like in 2001. that needed to be chunk, chunk, chunk, chunk, you know, put from one place to another in order to accomplish things,

Cortex 1:20:01 yeah, you're being futuristic, but you're working within the like, paradigm of the present in sort of trying to design those things. There was a question from the otter later that I liked and didn't really get much of an answer. And like I answered with my lack of a good answer, but it was basically what is the name of that? No, you're thinking of sort of chain Pong, Twitter game?

Jessamyn 1:20:32 I love that game on Twitter. I didn't know it had a name.

Cortex 1:20:36 No, as far as like, there's three answers, including the outer layers follow up. And it basically comes down to well, I guess it's sort of the Know Your thinking of game, I guess, but I don't know the name of it. You know, like, no one came up with a definitive answer besides just sort of calling it that,

Jessamyn 1:20:53 right. Because it's super fun. Because basically, it's like, there's one thing and somebody's like, oh, it's like this. And they're like, no, no, no, it's like this. I mean, I remember seeing people playing a game like that. I swear to God, like on Zoom, you know, like, where you would have a word, and then you would have to think of a word that kind of sounded like it in your head and then say, a definition for it. And then somebody would have to both get that and twist it to be their next one.

Unknown Speaker 1:21:19 Yeah.

Jessamyn 1:21:22 But yeah, wow. Well, I hope somebody can figure it out. I mean, yeah. Who's,

Cortex 1:21:28 I mean, maybe there's nothing else to figure out. Maybe there's just like, people like it's one of those games that you know, by doing it, rather than by saying, Oh, hey, you know, we should play,

Jessamyn 1:21:36 right? Yeah, I always like see it happening on Twitter. And I'm always like, you know, like, the, like the kid who's, like, slightly too young to play, like with the big kids being like, Oh, this looks fun. Once my time to jump in, wait, oh, hey, like, I can never I can never find it when it's starting. I'm always just trying to, you know, I think

Cortex 1:21:57 to start it, if you want to be there long on the ground floor,

Jessamyn 1:22:01 it is really funny. Like, I interact a lot on Twitter. And there's a whole bunch of people I interact with a lot on Twitter, both people who I know personally, but also kind of the larger library, Twitter, but like, there are some people in library Twitter and larger Twitter who are really good at just asking a question, you know, like, what was your first haircut that had a name kind of thing? And then everybody's talking about, you know, being 11 years old with their first Dorothy Hamill haircut or whatever. And like, I'm just not that person. I don't know why, like, I have tried. It's just not my people are not those people, for whatever reason, even though like we'll all play grab ass on somebody else's Twitter thread. For whatever reason, whenever I tried to be like, hey, what about you know, like something that would be kind of a list generating thing? I just might people aren't this generators. I never know why that is.

Cortex 1:22:55 Different people are different people.

Jessamyn 1:22:56 Yeah. It's just it's an interesting thing I've noticed and I've always been vaguely curious about it. Yeah. Or if I say like, so how's your day going? Like, nobody tells me. You know, like, if, if I start with some anecdote, like, Ah, did this, how's your day going? But what I really want to know is how people's day is going. But I think people are used to it as a rhetorical device, so I never hear about it. Yeah.

Cortex 1:23:18 Yeah, it's tricky. Tricky. You have to like sort of mutually map that territory. Yeah. There was a question from Walker Westridge that feels like a thing of the moment, which is helped me paint a mural. Please God help me. There issue is, yeah, the issue there is not so much, you know, they they decided to paint a mural on the wall, their house, which I think hey, that's a great idea. Do that. The longer painting? Yeah, it's like a rough, Adobe, or something. Texture,

Jessamyn 1:23:54 you know, the agility level required?

Cortex 1:23:57 Yeah, cuz it's a rough surface. It's tricky to paint that and you need to do something other than just using a paintbrush like you normally would. And I had thought other people had thoughts. There's

Jessamyn 1:24:06 some really good advice in that thread.

Cortex 1:24:09 Yeah, thank you. I feel good about pushing the sponge thing. I also really, I'm glad someone mentioned paint pens, because that's the thing that I haven't really used, but does seem like really

Jessamyn 1:24:18 good thing. And you could probably get them like through the mail, which is nice. I mean, anything you get through the mail makes this stuff easier.

Cortex 1:24:25 Yeah. Because I mean, speaking as someone who uses paint brushes a lot over the years, you know, paint brushes are great, but they're great at the specific things they're great at and that's not necessarily painting anything coherent on difficult surface, right. Very different reason. Yeah. So So yeah, but yeah, so and, you know, hey, if you've been thinking about painting some on your wall, read this, right, get some ideas and go for it. I figured, like, let's get some frickin wall murals out here. Yeah.

Jessamyn 1:24:52 Ya know, like props to anybody who's doing something creative. Forgot about this thread that just went up yesterday. Which is arts. I love this. It's from sciatica. Like many folks here, I don't have a straightforward internet setup, which I'm sure is like most of us, right? And so basically, they've got a complicated house internet of thing devices, Linux box gamer shit, routers, satellites, blah. And then they're like, what happens to this whole setup? Like if something happens to me and my spouse needs to deal with this? Like, what should I be doing? Like, should I like set up like a network? Map? Or do I just need to do something different? And so they got a lot of good advice for people, including myself, who has strong opinions about leaving cryptic bullshit behind that other people need to deal with mom and dad. But it's an interesting thread. It's one of those kind of everybody gets a right answer. thing, but like, people had some really sort of good advice, like, well, what is your spouse want? And like, what kind of stuff do they need versus what kind of stuff might make their life easier? Like, here's some things to think about. But I think for a lot of, you know, aging engineers, that is a really sort of kind and conscientious thing to think about.

Cortex 1:26:08 Yeah, it's a thing.

Jessamyn 1:26:11 Got more tea, water.

Cortex 1:26:13 I got some water, which is helping, but we might have to wrap up pretty soon anyway. Anyhow, anyhow. Yeah, I guess we're

Jessamyn 1:26:20 good. But like, I pushed it back, because like, I mean, I mean, because Jim, and I usually like nine o'clock is usually our like, we're gonna spend a couple hours doing whatever we do in the evening separately. And you know, that I was like, Oh, hey, like, I gotta push this later. And like, really? What else am I going to do? Right? Like, it's not like I have something to do tomorrow. Like, I can go I can stay up fucking late. You know what I mean? Like, I just like he's, he has to work tomorrow, but he's always up later than I am. But it was a little funny where I was like, I need an extra like, 15 minutes or whatever. And then I was like, this is not those times. This is new times. It doesn't matter. Stay up. You didn't get dressed today. Seriously? Yeah. Oh, and watch the foreigners on HBO. Norway. It's very good. All right. That's my advice.

Cortex 1:27:13 Is it on fanfare?

Jessamyn 1:27:15 Good question. Somebody just told me about it. And I'm not even sure how you would watch it like I don't know how HBO works we we steal things from the internet

Cortex 1:27:23 but nobody knows how HBO works well, it's like to this day

Jessamyn 1:27:29 said you know don't don't share don't share drinking glasses share your Netflix passwords. And but it's just it's basically about like something happens and people from like stone age times Victorian times and like I don't know 1000 ad times start showing up in modern day Norway and do and do not work in with the community well, and it's kind of a you know, procedural cop drama, and it's good like six six episode miniseries, but you would like it. But like, I don't know, if you have HBO Can you watch HBO? Norway?

Cortex 1:28:07 i i? If it exists, I might be able to watch it. I have an indirect process of reviewing things that exist so I'll look into it. Yeah. Like the cages person I know about like casual piracy, but like, you know, as long as they don't mention it, then it's not really anyway.

Jessamyn 1:28:29 It's important to let people know it exists. But I mean, for something like HBO, Norway, either if you have HBO, you can get it or if you're in America, you can't get it at all, in which case I feel a

Cortex 1:28:40 lot more maybe you can find it during the brief window someone puts it up on YouTube before it gets deleted and then they repeat it endlessly.

Jessamyn 1:28:47 Trying to find is what I'm saying.

Cortex 1:28:50 The thing that the thing that is I just checked not on fanfare that I've been enjoying media wise is the podcast you're wrong about.

Jessamyn 1:28:59 My friend listens to that and loves it.

Cortex 1:29:02 It's nice. I'm enjoying it. Angela's been listening to it and she was like most of the way through the content they have up so far on they're doing a whole series on the OJ Simpson thing the whole thing with the the murders and the trial and whatnot. And so they've been doing some like deep dives like an hour or two at a time on various people involved you know, they initially talked about Nicole Brown Simpson and they talked about Paula Barbary who was OJ Simpson. Girl girlfriend right at the time of the murders, right? Yeah, talking about Marcia Clark and Kato Kaelin and

Jessamyn 1:29:38 people think they know certain things about some of that because there was kind of like one media.

Cortex 1:29:43 Yeah. And like the premise of the show is basically people get like a media perspective on a thing, especially a thing that happened like, you know, 1015 2030 years ago and didn't necessarily you actually get a good nuanced view of the people involved. And so they sort of dig in and talk about like, what actually happened, who was actually involved? What do we know about these people beyond just that weird glancing, you know, media mentioned, they got amid some thing. And they do a pretty good job about it's interesting. Like, yeah, I'm coming into it after they've sort of built the show a little bit. And the show has apparently developed sort of a theme of like, well, a lot of these stories aren't so much about the things you did, didn't know or had wrong about history. But the things you didn't know and had wrong about, basically women badly treated by it's a real recurring theme. And there's a lot of that involved in like looking back at the OJ Simpson trial. But they're also doing sort of like, we want to do some more content during this whole thing right now. And so one of the CO hosts, Sarah Marshall, I want to say, is, has been working on a book on the Satanic Panic. And so they're doing readalong, essentially, in several episodes of the classic, quote, nonfiction, unquote, Michelle remembers, which was like a Yeah, key text of the whole Satanic Panic thing. Yeah, it's her and a guy named Michael Hobbs. Who is a Huffington Post reporter, if I remembering correctly, just the two of them sort of, depending on which subject they're covering, you know, one or the other of them digging in on something. And yeah, so they're just sort of reading through his book and discussing basically how terrible it is and how fucking amazing it is that this was somehow the seed of a moral panic rather than something that everybody understood was absolute mind boggling horseshit written by a guy who ended up marrying his patient from this essentially abusive therapy relationship. So it's like, anyway, so but listen to those two threads right now. And they've got a bunch of stuff that I'm also going to go back to what I run out of that, but yeah, I've been really enjoying it. It's a good listen, it doesn't. It doesn't like they've talked about not wanting to be to True Crime me on it, which I appreciate because there's a lot of like, crime podcast is right. Ooh, and then the crime you were to hear this part. And they're more like, they kind of cringe whenever they talk about the terrible stuff. Like they're talking about it because it's like the context, but they're not like, oh, and waited to hear how cut off her head was. You know, it's like, yeah, so anyway, I've been enjoying it. It's good. Other people might enjoy it too.

Good. Yeah. I don't think there's anything huge for Meditec there's like, support threads and discussion threads and chatty threads. And we posted about the server downtime, but like it's over and it worked. So hey, whatever.

Jessamyn 1:32:39 I'm participating in the current swap this this month. I'm looking forward. I didn't want to overdo it. So I only took three people, but there's a whole bunch of people swapping cards, and that's always a good time.

Cortex 1:32:50 Yeah. Yeah. And I enjoyed doing that one off for the card, the COVID cards. But doing it every once awhile feels like it might be my my pace. So yeah, yeah. Okay, well, Metafilter it's there. It's here. It's us. It's you. We did the Thing and Thing is done.

Jessamyn 1:33:08 Thanks for being with us.

Cortex 1:33:10 Yeah, I'll talk to you next month Jess. All right. We'll wave goodbye everybody.

Jessamyn 1:33:19 Oh my God.

Cortex 1:33:20 Not if I Oh, my God, Josh. You first

stuck the landing, stuck the landing