alyaza [they/she]
internet gryphon. admin of Beehaw, mostly publicly interacting with people. nonbinary. they/she
- 444 Posts
- 97 Comments
alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgOPMto Music@beehaw.org•Grammys Introduce New Country Album Category, Best New Artist Rules for 20262·25 days agothis is going over hilariously on social media, despite the insistence by the Grammy’s that it has nothing to do with Beyonce’s win last year:
Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. told Billboard that the proposal for the two new categories was submitted previously several times before it passed this year. The new categories “[make] country parallel with what’s happening in other genres,” he explained, pointing to the other genres which separate traditional and contemporary. “But it is also creating space for where this genre is going.”
Traditional country now focuses on “the more traditional sound structures of the country genre, including rhythm and singing style, lyrical content, as well as traditional country instrumentation such as acoustic guitar, steel guitar, fiddle, banjo, mandolin, piano, electric guitar, and live drums,” the 68th Grammys rulebook explains.
alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgMto World News@beehaw.org•Scientists prove that fish suffer "intense pain" for at least 10 minutes after catch, calls made for reforms111·27 days agoi think this topic has about run its course in terms of productiveness, and has mostly devolved into people complaining about being held to (objectively correct) vegan ethics. locking
alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgOPMto Technology@beehaw.org•Pro-AI Subreddit Bans 'Uptick' of Users Who Suffer from AI Delusions21·1 month agosomeone on Bluesky analogized what is happening to how QAnon transpired for most people, which is that the crazification it was causing simmered under the surface until January 6, when it all publicly exploded and the influence it had over a non-trivial block of the population became undeniable. hard to disagree with that!
alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgOPMto Technology@beehaw.org•Mark Zuckerberg and Palmer Luckey end their beef and partner to build extended reality tech for the US military27·1 month agojust a nightmarish headline. get these two the fuck out of here
alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgOPMto Technology@beehaw.org•Brian Eno, creator of the Windows 95 startup sound, calls on Microsoft to sever ties with IsraelEnglish192·2 months agoArt rock legend Brian Eno has called on Microsoft to sever its ties with the government of Israel, saying the company’s provision of cloud and AI services to Israel’s Ministry of Defense “support a regime that is engaged in actions described by leading legal scholars and human rights organizations, the United Nations experts, and increasing numbers of governments from around the world, as genocidal.”
Eno’s connection with Microsoft goes back 30 years—he composed the famous boot-up jingle for Windows 95 that was recently inducted into the National Recording Registry at the US Library of Congress.
“I gladly took on the project as a creative challenge and enjoyed the interaction with my contacts at the company,” Eno wrote in an open letter posted to Instagram (via Stereogum). “I never would have believed that the same company could one day be implicated in the machinery of oppression and war.”
Regardless, Eno clearly isn’t interested in Microsoft’s protestations of innocence: “Selling and facilitating advanced AI and cloud services to a government engaged in systematic ethnic cleansing is not ‘business as usual’. It is complicity. If you knowingly build systems that can enable war crimes, you inevitably become complicit in those crimes.”
alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgOPMto World News@beehaw.org•India says it has launched strikes on Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir6·2 months agoadditional flavor text to this tense situation: Pakistan blamed a terrorist attack on India literally earlier today
alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgMto Technology@beehaw.org•China is building a cyber army of hackers, report finds12·2 months agoYou can post articles critical of the US, EU, Australian or any other government, but if you post a China-critical text you are whatabouted to death.
this will be a blunt comment. people would have no problem if you were doing this, but just in a quick scan, something like 10 of your last 15 submissions on our instance (Beehaw) are you obsessively posting about China–often from sources that are straight up fearmongering and/or guilty of doing literally the same thing they’re complaining China is doing. one of the most egregious submissions you’ve made in this vein is quite literally from the House Select Committee on China, as if the American government’s committee on “competition with the United States” doesn’t obviously have a vested interest in portraying things China does in the most uncharitable light possible (much as China would for America).
separately, and in a Beehaw context: at least from our userbase, you will largely not find disagreement that China is bad–nobody here really needs to be proselytized to the fact that China is an authoritarian capitalist country guilty of acts of imperialism against their neighbors, and probably of ethnic cleansing and genocide in Xinjiang. in fact, partially because of our political disagreements in that space, we do not federate with many of the Lemmy instances you might characterize as “pro-China.” this fact makes it incredibly conspicuous when someone like yourself obsessively posts every neurosis a Western country has about China on our instance. we’ve had a pattern of several users doing this in the past year or so–and at this point it’s blatantly propagandistic and Sinophobic bullshit we’re just not interested in letting people use our instance for.
even if you aren’t doing this for propagandistic reasons, though, and just think you need to push back against pro-China campists on Lemmy or whatever: this is also not your personal anti-China dumping ground, nor is it a place for you to shadowbox with campists who think China is cool. if you are genuinely posting in good faith: diversify your submissions and, if you don’t, at least drop the persecution complex when people push back on your voluminous China posting; if this is just using us as some middle-man in a bigger thing: going forward we’re going to aggressively prune these types of post.
alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgOPMto Technology@beehaw.org•Slate Truck is a $20,000 American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, and no touchscreen2·2 months agothe website for it is pretty comprehensive as far as i can tell
alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgOPMto Technology@beehaw.org•Slate Truck is a $20,000 American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, and no touchscreen22·2 months agothis strikes me as a fascinating idea–with a couple of eyebrow-raising backers–that is probably going to flop spectacularly because it’s too minimalistic to the point of just being cheapskate
alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgOPMto Chat@beehaw.org•how's your week going, BeehawEnglish14·3 months agohere’s your fun fact of the day: the hierarchy of how unchecked your law enforcement is basically goes something like federal police > city police departments > rural police departments > sheriffs of any kind. apparently, while regular police are at least nominally accountable to someone higher up than them, we basically let sheriffs do whatever the fuck they want
whatever recourse you think you have against a PD usually and very explicitly will not exist against a sheriff, even if your governor is sympathetic–most states devolve an incredible amount of power to sheriffs while demanding basically no qualifications or oversight of them. also, most outspoken police you will ever hear are probably sheriffs in specific–they are hugely over-represented in politics because there’s nothing stopping them from opining on politics even where ordinary police chiefs and the like are inhibited. (also their positions are usually elected and partisan, so they are politicians)
naturally, the mixture of election and targeting by the far-right over the past 50ish years means like 85% of these guys are just total cranks now too, because almost all of them represent Republican-leaning counties
alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgMto Technology@beehaw.org•DeepSeek: The Chinese Communist Party’s newest AI advance is making repression smarter, cheaper, and more deadly. Even worse, they aim to export it to the world.6·3 months agoFYI: we’ve banned this user because after communicating our disinterest in being used as an anti-China dumping ground to shadowbox with people who can’t even see our instance, the user responded with a bunch of hostility about people pushing back on them.
alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgMto Technology@beehaw.org•Risks to children playing Roblox ‘deeply disturbing’, say researchers18·3 months agoyeah, no shit, that’s not the same as “your entire company being predicated on the unpaid labor of children who you also let do whatever they want without supervision or actually working filtering features”–not least because you could actually get banned for both of the things i mentioned from 2010, while what’s happening now is explicitly enabled by Roblox as their business model and an externality of doing business. as has been demonstrated by recent investigations into how they work down, they basically don’t have a company without systematically exploiting children
alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgMto Technology@beehaw.org•Risks to children playing Roblox ‘deeply disturbing’, say researchers24·3 months agoit’s been very strange to watch this game i grew up on–pretty innocuously, i should note–gradually morph into one of the most exploitative, undignifying, generally dangerous spaces for children online. the worst stuff i got into on Roblox in 2010 was online dating and learning about 4chan. now the company seems to openly revel in exploiting the labor of children and ripping them off
- Kazumi Watanabe – To Chi Ka
- Sahib Shihab – Sentiments
- Dr. Lonnie Smith - Boogaloo to Beck: A Tribute
- Takeo Moriyama - Smile
- Sevil - Sevil
- Collage - Kadriko
stuff that is basically jazz, even though it isn’t actually:
alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgOPMto Chat@beehaw.org•how's your week going, BeehawEnglish11·3 months agocurrently reading:
alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgMto Technology@beehaw.org•Like to drive fast? Virginia has an anti-speeding device for you.6·3 months agoThen we slap a random-ass speed limit sign down and say “job’s done.”
we don’t actually–the basis we derive most speed limits from is actually much worse, if you can believe that. from Killed by a Traffic Engineer:
Traffic engineers use what we call the 85th percentile speed. The 85th percentile speed is whatever speed 85 percent of drivers are traveling slower than. If we have 100 drivers on the road and rank them in order from fastest to slowest, the 15th fastest driver would give us our 85th percentile speed.
Traffic engineers will then look 5 mph faster and 5 mph slower to see what percentage of drivers fall into different 10 mph ranges. According to David Solomon and his curves, the magnitude of the speed range doesn’t matter as long as we get as many drivers as possible into that 10 mph range.
and, as applied to the example of the Legacy Parkway, to show how this invariably spirals out of control:
North of Salt Lake City, the Legacy Parkway parallels Interstate 15 up to the Wasatch Weave interchange where these highways come together. It’s a four-lane, controlled-access highway with a wide, grassy median and more than its fair share of safety problems.
So how did the Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT) respond?
It increased the speed limit from 55 mph to 65 mph. It said the speed limit jump will “eliminate the safety risk” on the Legacy Parkway.
UDOT conducted speed studies up and down the Legacy Parkway. It found that most drivers were going much faster than the 55 mph speed limit. Channeling the ghost of traffic engineers past, the safety director for UDOT said, “We decided to raise the speed limit to a speed that is closer to what drivers are actually driving. In doing so, we hope to eliminate the safety risk of speed discrepancy, which can happen when you have a significant difference between the speed most drivers are actually traveling and those who are driving the posted speed limit.”
In the case of the Legacy Parkway, the 85th percentile speeds ranged from 65 mph to 75 mph. Based on that and what it deems engineering judgment, UDOT originally proposed raising the speed limit to 70 mph. After community pushback, it settled for 65 mph.
According to the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD), this slight adjustment is acceptable. The MUTCD specifies that speed limits “should be within 5 mph of the 85th percentile speed of free-flowing traffic.”
alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgOPMto World News@beehaw.org•Azerbaijan and Armenia strike deal to end decades-long conflict7·4 months agoa curious development; of course, i would personally bet this does not actually end the conflict
alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgOPMto Technology@beehaw.org•FTC asks to delay Amazon Prime deceptive practices case, citing staffing shortfalls12·4 months agoExcept it’s likely on purpose so they won’t have enough people to look into this and other large cases against corporations that might impact the people buying out the government.
this is exactly what has happened; previously, the FTC was aggressively pursuing anti-trust against Amazon, Google, etc.
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