theneverfox
@theneverfox@pawb.social
- Comment on Anon hates smartphones 17 hours ago:
The problem is the chipsets, which include the radio. They have their own proprietary code, including some built in firmware. Along with things like roaming, negotiating frequencies, requesting MMS downloads and other niggly details, you have stuff like handling sim cards, emergency services modes, and public alerts. All of which I’ve heard are lightly documented and a pain to work with… It’s a lot of compatibility layers built up over the years
You can get a Linux phone today, the consensus just seems to be it’s not ready as a primary phone
- Comment on Pretty interesting when you really think about it. 1 day ago:
Sure, but go to a city and you’re just another import. Go to another country, and you’re just “the foreigner”. Through almost all of human history, you could just kinda leave your past behind if you just ran away
- Comment on I'm literally a thinking lump of fat 1 day ago:
Consciousness is the AI assistant in meat mecha suit.
It seems like we make decisions, but we don’t. Think of a decision you’ve made - you think over it, you sleep on it, you imagine outcomes and might decide intellectually - but you don’t lock it in. That just happens - sometimes it even flips at the last second, and you don’t know why you did it - for better or worse
Our brain does a lot of preprocessing - vision, hearing, balance, walking, language…
Our conscious minds preprocess time. It turns our senses and our experiences into stories, abstract predictions, laterally pattern matching, and ultimately - analysis and recommendations
- Comment on I'm literally a thinking lump of fat 1 day ago:
But that’s kind of my point - we do have evidence. As much as we have for humans, at least
Koko the gorilla is what made me start to question all of this back in grade school. This gorilla learns sign language, and is shown picture books with cats. She asks for a cat for Christmas, despite never having actually seen one. They give her a toy one and she gets angry.
Months later, they bring in kittens. She picks the tailless tabby and names it “all ball”. It was her pet all its life, she would take care of it and even told the keepers it had ear mites
On a foggy December morning, one of the assistants told me that Ball had been hit by a car. He had died instantly. I was shocked and unprepared. I didn’t realize how attached I had grown to Ball, and I had no idea how the news would affect Koko. The kitten meant so much to her. He was Koko’sbaby. I went to Koko at once. I told her that Ball had been hit by a car; she would not see him again. Koko did not respond. I thought she didn’t understand, so I left the trailer.
Ten minutes later, I heard Koko cry. It washer distress call—a loud, long series of high-pitched hoots. I cried, too.
Three days later, Koko and I had a conversation about Ball. “Do you want to talk about your kitty?” Iasked. “Cry,” Koko signed.“ Can you tell me more about it?” I asked. “Blind,” she signed. “We don’t see him anymore, do we? What happened to your kitty?” I asked. “Sleep cat,” Koko signed. A few weeks later, Koko saw a picture of a gray tabby who looked very much like Ball. She pointed to the picture and signed, “Cry, sad, frown.”
Koko described herself as “fine gorilla person”, she painted and joked and understood mortality.
Why is Koko special? Because she was interested in communicating, and so was her keeper. That was decades ago… Back when we rarely accepted animals were even sentient, let alone sapient
I’ve watched a video where a dog described it’s dreams, and one where a cat lied and negotiated for a treat before being convinced over the course of minutes to willingly take it’s medicine to make the “hurt go bye”.
My childhood dog was well behaved, so we’d let him in or out when he scratched on the door. We stopped paying attention… We only caught him exploring the suburbs when a neighbor called us. One day we were driving and saw him miles from home, so we followed… He kept to the sidewalks, avoided people, and looked before crossing the street. So we let him have his secret life, and he never got into any trouble… We wouldn’t have known otherwise, because he timed his adventures well
My mom’s dog used to watch dog shows, and smiled wide when I put a medal around her neck jokingly… Not when I put my keys around her neck, just the medal - I did ABACAB testing, just the medal got that reaction.
You can explain away all these things, or you can entertain the idea. Maybe Koko was the exception or my mom’s dog just thought the medal was pretty, or maybe she dreamed of winning a dog show.
We can’t even philosophically nail down sapience, and yet we don’t have a second Koko… Because we barely try to meet them where they are, and dismiss every success as an anomaly
The evidence is everywhere, we just seem to ignore it
- Comment on I'm literally a thinking lump of fat 2 days ago:
How can we truly know this though - we don’t even really understand sapience on a philosophical level, let alone on a scientific one. The word itself is based on homo-sapien, and ultimately it means “why are we the most special”. It’s been a constant game of moving goalposts
Here’s a paper on animal metacognition. The intro is worth a read
Moving on to more common examples of metacognition, think of the many videos of dogs feigning injury when their human has an injured leg. That’s the same as your example with eating slower
There’s also a recent study I read where they trapped a rat in a tight cage, and another rat would learn to let them out. Then they added chocolate chips - the other rat would usually eat most of them before letting the other one out - but would save at least one
There’s even videos of a dog having a conversation with those word-pads, where they had to be convinced that their owner was human and not a dog, but was adamant that the small dog was a cat
We hold ourselves back, because we’re always starting from the perspective of humans being more, or that animals would act like us if only they were smarter… But ultimately, they have different priorities
Only recently have we started to look for things like language, culture, meta cognition, and every other “human” trait with an open mind. And we find it, everywhere
Whose to say dogs don’t wonder where we go all day, why they get left behind, and ponder their life as a dog?
- Comment on I'm literally a thinking lump of fat 2 days ago:
It’s crazy to me how much this holds us back, and the amount of cognitive dissonance involved
Take pets. We look at them acting shifty around the sock they know they aren’t allowed to play with, and say “she’s thinking about it”. We avoid words like “walk” because they’ve understood one of the meanings of it. And usually not just the meaning, but the difference between tone and context - most won’t react the same to “should we take her for a walk” and “is he able to walk”. My mom’s dog knew all of our names, and the difference between “soon”, “tomorrow”, and “the day after tomorrow” - she would watch the door all day on the right day
And yet, most people will share all of these observations and turn around to dismiss it as “she’s just a dog”. For them it’s just association and behavioral conditioning, but the same things are different for humans because we’re extra special. Clearly her acting shifty before stealing the sock isn’t planning or considering, it’s instincts fighting against training
But only humans can ever understand, only we make choices. Because we’re extra special
- Comment on I'm literally a thinking lump of fat 2 days ago:
Heh. It was unintentional, next time it won’t be
- Comment on I'm literally a thinking lump of fat 2 days ago:
I never understood this weird hangup, it’s like people struggling to reconcile free will with deterministic actions to a being outside normal time. Of course you’ll make the same choices if you rewound time and changed nothing… You’re the same, the universe is the same down to the last particle - how does that conflict with the idea of agency?
Consciousness is an emergent property. One neuron is complex, but 1000 can do things one could never do alone. Why is it so surprising that billions, arranged in complex self organizing structures, would give rise to something more than the sum of its parts?
Maybe there’s a quantum aspect to it, maybe there’s not… It seems like it’s all based in this idea humans are so extra special that surely there must be special laws of the universe just for us
- Comment on Iraq War was preceded by the largest worldwide non-violent protests in history and the war happened anyway. 1 week ago:
I think it absolutely laid down the base for the modern progressive movement - mistakenly believing protests do anything on their own
Occupy was huge, it was global and persisted for a long time, but it didn’t have any teeth - people just stopped paying attention and eventually police cleared people out
No one (rich) was losing money, no one (rich) felt threatened or inconvenienced in any way. They made their feelings known… But most people had no idea why or what they wanted, and politicians don’t actually care what you want. They didn’t even organize enough to be a voting block or clearly communicate their message
- Comment on how badly could a pelican fuck me up in a fight? 1 week ago:
I wouldn’t worry to much about pelicans. Fun fact - pelicans try to eat people sometimes. They basically try to eat every animal, because they have no sense of scale for their food they can swallow. And they don’t risk much by trying - most large animals have the same incredulous reaction we do
They are not very bright birds nor very quick ones. They are also not very agile. And as a bird, they have hollow bones and you could kill them with a solid fist to the chest… I once saw the aftermath of two shin high dogs tearing one apart. On a small balcony. There was blood everywhere… The dogs were covered in it, completely uninjured and very pleased with themselves
I wouldn’t worry, even if they have the sharp bits that could injure you, they lack the instincts to use them properly
- Comment on Mitochondria 1 week ago:
It also separates raw protons from hydrogen atoms and somehow turns it into spinny-motion, which it then turns into chemical energy with incredible efficiency. It’s a wild piece of biological machinery
- Comment on Mitochondria 1 week ago:
A freestanding building containing one or more power generators
- Comment on Blizzard may have violated the UK GDPR following my 2019 Data Erasure Request 2 weeks ago:
FWIW, I respect you for going this far, and doing so intelligently. It might just be a little thing, but it’s fighting for your rights. Every inch matters, because they’ll take them all from us if they can
- Comment on Blizzard may have violated the UK GDPR following my 2019 Data Erasure Request 2 weeks ago:
Smart…well damn, if they’re that blasé about it I’d consider it a public service to escalate. You could contact Microsoft’s legal department, they might take it more seriously
You could also reach out to an organization like the ACLU in your country, they may or may not do anything with it, but they’ll probably make note of it at least. It could push them to take action in the future
- Comment on Insurance agent making a last stand in downtown NYC, after being cornered by policyholders (2026) 2 weeks ago:
It’s not like it’s a real war. We get to go about our lives, because they need us, we don’t need them. We just have to make feelings known, maybe organize into unions and political action groups
The most impactful thing we could do is nothing. If everyone takes a month off work, refuses to pay rent and fights eviction in court, the economy would go “poof”. They can’t fight us directly - they’d lose all of the power they love so much
They get to deal with the like people they’ve made desperate. They get to be afraid of the consequences of their actions, to fear walking the streets freely. They can live in their little bubbles of wealth, but in the end that need means locking themselves in a golden cage. They can hire all the security they want - that just means they’ll be shuttled from the airport and back in reinforced cars, only able to feel the Sun in their locked down compounds
There won’t be a war, but there will be more desperate people if nothing changes. If they want to feel safe walking the streets, they just need to take less so everyone else has something to lose
- Comment on New report claims gamers spend more time watching videos about gaming than playing games 2 weeks ago:
If you go on twitch now, I’m guessing minecraft, COD, and WOW are all in the top 10, if not top 5, for gaming streams. All owned by Microsoft, among many more
Would it hurt Microsoft game sales? Definitely. Microsoft has the leverage, and they’ve been fucking around for a while and haven’t found out yet. It would be a stupid thing for them to do, but I wouldn’t put it past them
Twitch is also not doing amazing. Streaming is expensive, and they’re trying hard to get their revenue up…they’re not on solid footing with Amazon right now
- Comment on Blizzard may have violated the UK GDPR following my 2019 Data Erasure Request 2 weeks ago:
I think you’re going about this wrong. You need to represent this as a potential legal issue so they pass it off to the legal department, who will then do things to cover their ass
You don’t want to threaten, just make it legalese enough to make customer support get nervous. Something like citing GDPR sections and expressing your concerns that they have not properly complied with your legally mandated request, then officially requesting all data they still have on you and citing that section of law
- Comment on Sniper Elite Resistance dev defends asset reuse - “if they’re there to use, why not use them?” 2 weeks ago:
This seems really dumb. Yes, reuse your assets in the next game, but also make new ones. Then I get more variety, plus I get some of the nostalgia from the last game
- Comment on Obsidian's new first-person RPG Avowed channels Baldur's Gate 3 in one key way: "The core of RPGs that makes them special is missable content" 2 weeks ago:
That’s the thing though - bg3 isn’t praised because it’s good relative to the state of the industry. It’s a game that did everything right, not just comparatively but in general
- Comment on CENSORED!!!!!!!!!!1 3 weeks ago:
The fuck did I just read?
- Comment on Score 3 weeks ago:
IDK, in a dystopian capitalism end state blowing shit up while giggling sounds like good mental health to me
- Comment on AND THEY DIDN'T STOP EATING 3 weeks ago:
Exactly, do you want them to know we polluted ourselves to death? That’s just shameful
Now, if we accidentally unleashed an ancient parasite? That’s just unfortunate
- Comment on Steal Her Look 4 weeks ago:
Well, FWIW, I drank my own pee. It tasted like mushroom tea… Then the next time, it tasted like piss. Very much night and day
- Comment on Plasticccc 4 weeks ago:
Probably so they can be stored carelessly in dirty warehouses that may or may not control for humidity
- Comment on Watching passport bros get bodied by SEA women is a complete mood. Get rekt manlet. 4 weeks ago:
I just think this is sad.
This is a person who believes if they go to Southeast Asia, they can easily find a life partner who fits their expectations about what that means
There’s nothing intrinsically wrong about that - it’s very naive, but only that. It’s not intrinsically racist or sexist - they might also be racist and sexist, in which case I’ll feel significantly less bad for them.
They might also just be genuinely clueless and/or neurodivergent… Propaganda works. Especially on those who haven’t been inoculated through experience or instincts
- Comment on [Thread] Mental Math 4 weeks ago:
Nah, we just went up and fixed it. I think I did it while the guy on the ground eyeballed it… It’s weird how it’s impossible to see up close, but from 40 feet away humans can tell to a fraction of a percent, I was tapping it with a wrench to dial it in based on the intensity of hand gestures. Honestly, we were more impressed by how he spotted it at a glance, it’s not like we did shoddy work - it was barely not tongue click, as he put it
It helped that I liked the engineer. Always cheerful and he gave me mini multi tool pliers for my birthday. Totally unexpected and not expensive, but I’ve got them right next to me right now, I still use them years later. And he was like that to everyone - he was a stickler for the details, but actually took an interest in us as people
Just a good guy all around. It’s hard to be upset with someone like that, even when they make you redo work now and then
- Comment on [Thread] Mental Math 4 weeks ago:
I remember we once installed something on a beam 40’ feet up. While waking through an inspection of many such things, the engineer stops, cocks his head for a second, and says “that’s not quite straight”
And then it wasn’t. Like a cast of manual breathing, the thing I had been frequently walking past for weeks was suddenly wrong, ever so slightly
- Comment on [Thread] Mental Math 4 weeks ago:
No, you feel a house. Think of how many houses you could feel at once #shrinkearthtoagolfball
- Comment on Anon falls through the cracks 4 weeks ago:
Nah, when you jam up the machine in an unexpected way, more likely than not they’re going to keep it quiet. A manager isn’t going to want to go to their boss with a problem no one noticed… It’s going to do nothing to benefit them and it’ll make their life harder
All you have to do is play dumb. Insubordination is one thing, waiting for orders is just having a job with little autonomy. If you maintain you were just a good little cog waiting to be reconnected to the machine, they’re better off sweeping it under the rug.
They might get upset instead, but what are they going to do? Sue you for not being more proactive? They’d probably lose more in legal fees than they could get back from most people
- Comment on fuckery 5 weeks ago:
Or it implies that eternal love cannot exist or cannot exist in the presence of a never ending fuck, leading to the surprise in the statement