"Live my truth" is a phrase I heard a lot this summer, constantly on the lips of 20-somethings who had been caught in lies or who had found their beliefs of events to be unquestionably incorrect.

Ann (to Bob): Carrie says you called her a gutterslut.

Bob: I would never say something like that.

Dave: I mean, I was there, Bob. you totally called Carrie a gutterslut.

Bob: Look, it is what it is. Carrie can believe that but all I can do is live my truth.

This works for Bob - he doesn't have to acknowledge being caught in a lie, and he doesn't have to acknowledge that he has spoken ill of others that he is pretending to like. It does not work for Carrie - she's been called a gutterslut and Bob won't own up to it. The problem is, it doesn't resolve the problems Ann and Dave have because when they're with Bob, they're subscribing to Bob's truth. When they're with Carrie, they rely on the ethos of Bob vs. the ethos of Carrie.

What's interesting is that the dynamic plays out with people who are willing to subscribe to the same shared hallucination about truth. In a direct confrontation, Carrie and Bob have to battle out who said what when and where and hope they can convince Ann and Dave as to their version of events. What's noteworthy is that these exchanges took place under the watchful eye of dozens of cameras as everything being said was streamed worldwide to the Internet in real time. Objective truth was not a construct - it was a constellation of media files reviewable by all. Nonetheless, there was a collective assent to honor the fiction that there was no objective truth.

"Live my truth" was interchangeable with "live my best truth". A couple times I heard the phrase "the actual truth" as if every now and then, everyone had to acknowledge the game they were playing and the fact that there are verifiable facts in the universe but the more self-centered among our victims were generally dismissive of this verification.

I think it's a comfortable fiction. By subscribing to the same reality, we have affinity despite the fact that we don't really know how to communicate anymore. It runs into dire difficulty when interacting with someone outside of that collective fiction. "You're late." "If you look at it from the perspective of the traffic I had to deal with and the condition of my car, I'm about as close to on time as anyone could reasonably expect." "You're fired."

It's another example where those whose worlds have been bent to suit them are utterly and completely shit outta luck when they interface with the world at large.

The same scenario you described works just as well if there’s a central SQL db.

It doesn't though. Records can be altered. Names can be changed. Bob owns the fish pond until someone with access to the database erases his name. With a database, the ownership depends on who has access to the database, and how much that organization is trusted. If Frank's party gets swept out in a coup, Charlie can make himself the owner of half the town - after all, he was loyal to the winning side and who's gonna say shit? If Bob wants a loan for fish food, Gary's Happy Imports has only Charlie's word that Bob owns the land he's staking which means Gary's business choices depend on their read of the stability of the Charlie administration.

Let's put a blockchain on it

Frank may be out, but Bob's ownership of his pond is indelible. Charlie can try and say he owns half the town, but Gary can audit the blockchain. So can everyone else. It's no longer worth Charlie's time to shake everyone down because anyone can see he doesn't own shit. Better yet, whatever database Frank used to hold property records dirtnapped the minute the tanks rolled but the blockchain is on 8,000 computers from Arizona to Zanzibar.

Either way, the source of authenticity isn’t inherent to the blockchain itself

Yes. It is.

but to the security of the implementation and the agencies that are providing consensus.

And if 4,001 of them say Bob doesn't own a fish pond, Bob doesn't own a fish pond. But if 3,999 of them say "Bob doesn't own a fish pond" then 3,999 of them get kicked off the blockchain, eat shit, pay their penalties and download the copy of the blockchain that says "Bob owns a fish pond" if they want to continue.

All tech is like that.

Distributed ledgers are not "tech." They are a novel approach to verification that negates falsification. not inhibits, not minimizes, negates.

Okay.

Indelibility is a feature, not a drawback. Here, watch:

In an example like a corrupt government office keeping track of deeds, there’s literally no additional difficulty entering a false record that results from any aspect of blockchain.

Arthur and Bob share a field. At some point in the distant past, Bob's grandpa said Arthur's grandpa could have the pond but never wrote it down. Bob reminded Arthur of this right about the time catfish got expensive and Arthur decided maybe catfish farming was a good idea. They go to Charlie, the local government clerk. Charlie will give the pond to whoever gives his son a better job. et voila it's Arthur's pond and Charlie's son David gets to sit on his ass drinking Red Bull for five catfish a day.

Fast forward two years and the catfish market is bust. Arthur no longer wants to pay Daniel five catfish a day because they aren't worth the price of raising. Charlie goes to Bob and lets it be known that land records are variable and poof, Arthur is out of a pond.

Let's put a blockchain on it

Daniel is still getting his five catfish a day, but now GriftChain records that parcel 12345 went to Arthur as recorded by Charlie on 12/31/45. If Charlie wants to resell it to Bob, we need Arthur to be a party to the transaction. For that matter, Bob can bring up the transaction to Frank, the regional auditor, to point out that the initial transaction was corrupt, invalidating the whole thing. It's no longer Charlie's word against Bob, it's there in the GriftChain ledger. And Arthur can see this, Bob can see this, Charlie can see this, Daniel can see this, Frank can see this, and anything that gets recorded is recorded forever and is unfalsifiable.

I've got like four SQL databases on my network. They all corrupt with appalling regularity. I can tweak the shit out of them whenever I want. Their principle utility is not their inviolability, it's their ability to reorganize and query a large dataset. If you want inviolable data, you pay more for that: I was messing with that shit back in 2000 for tracking photos and ownership and edit history and revision control is not the same thing as consensus.

Yeah - you can falsify records. But the false records are forever. The fraud is there... forever. The fraud can be reversed with another transaction, blockchain isn't Vaal the god computer, but the address that falsified it is identified forever, too. If you have a credential that allows you access to the blockchain, and you use that credential to enter false data, every other transaction you made with that credential is now subject to audit. In order to get away with it, you have to get away with it forever. it doesn't make crime impossible, but it radically alters the economics of forgery to the point where for a broad sector of goods it will no longer be economically viable.

I have never once called blockchain anything a silver bullet. Ask mk, it took him a good two years to get me to come around on the very idea of it. There are lots of technologies that are solutions in search of a problem. Blockchain is a solution in search of an implementation which is another matter entirely. No, there's absolutely no point in putting your deed on Bitcoin, it moves impossibly slowly and what the fuck is the point. Bitcoin is a black market instrument through and through.

But it's not "just a database." And reducing it to such will never improve your grasp of it.

Sounds cynical, I know. But here, walk with me:

1) Backintheday, music was distributed on vinyl. Vinyl has some distinct advantages: a good disc on a good deck through a good system sounds really good, whereas on a CD, pretty much everything in the digital stage is identically mediocre. Vinyl also has some distinct disadvantages: pan the bass too far to one side of the stereo field and your record will skip. Use a dull lathe and it sounds like ass. Exceed the RIAA profile for your equalization and introduce artifacts. So "mastering" was the art of getting your music from "studio format" to "consumer format" where consumer format was transistor radios, 8-tracks and Montgomery Ward console entertainment systems. It was basically a way to get your music into "the real world" and reflected some "optimization" of the full spectrum of sound (multiband compression, soft-knee limiting, RIAA EQ, etc) in order to use every part of the dynamic range available to you.

2) When Sony introduced the Compact Disc, every playback system was as good as every other, and that playback system's baseline was right about at "reasonably good vinyl setup". There were a few hiccups while engineers around the world learned the wonders of dither, but by and large, 16-bit, 44.1kHz digital is a big step up from K-Tel. So now everything sounds pretty good and everything has pretty good dynamic range, but we still want it to "pop" on the radio and MTV, because how else are we going to sell the disc? So "RIAA curve" fell by the wayside and "maximize loudness" became the main principle.

3) Every single one of us now listens to MP3s. Our standard playback is tiny, shitty earbuds and a 320kHz lossy bitstream. The DACs on iPods and iPhones have sucked pretty hard since '08 (whenever they rev'd the last hard disk-based player) but let's be honest - they're taking the place of cassette tapes. And those shitty little headphones are orders of magnitude better than non-shitty headphones from even 10 years ago, thanks to the development of really good, really cheap neodymium magnets. Either way, the art of taking a bitstream lossy is its own "mastering process" and we have much less control over it than we really need (thank you Fraunhaufer) and it has not a lot to do with making the music fit into a given dynamic range and quite a lot to do with making it fit into a given bandwidth.

In other words, the reasons we came up with "mastering" are long gone. Even the last holdout - "mastering makes all the tracks on an album sound similar to each other to improve the album-listening experience" - is completely nonsensical in the modern world. Most people no longer listen to albums, and most bands that care about albums record them themselves. The era of an album being cut in six different studios by nine different engineers is over and it is never, ever coming back.

So, that's why "mastering" exists. Now, three stories:

1) A friend of mine wanted to be an engineer - we'll call him Bob. He was a MicroSerf; he could just go out and buy $40k worth of gear without thinking about it. I took Bob to an AES meeting about "mastering" in which we listened to three qualified mastering engineers butcher the shit out of someone else's material and he said "shit, I can do that." Found out later Bob had actually signed one of my other friends (not a mutual friend - we'll call him "Bill") to "master" Bill's album (http://www.myspace.com/smphq/music/albums/hacked-10390009) without really knowing what to do. Bob had me over and I explained the "principles" of mastering and let him be. Bill later told me that Bob had done the best mastering job he'd ever heard. When I told Bob this, Bob laughed - he'd tried a few things, he'd bought $2k worth of plugins, and in the end, he just spent nine hours drawing fader rides in Logic.

2) I went to an AMPAS event once where Bernie Grundman was speaking. Bernie has been one of the go-to guys for mastering for about 40 years now. And he's talking about theory, and he's talking about practice, and he's talking about all the subtle, beautiful things mastering can do, and then he says "and here's a great example" and proceeds to play Michael Jackson's "Rock with You" off of "Off the Wall." And it was beautiful - light, airy, almost jazzy. I was ready to eat my words and think "okay, when people really know what their doing - " when Bernie interrupted my thoughts like the record scratch in Allie McBeal with "and here's what it sounds like when it's been mastered: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z040cAt98zE And I thought "yeah. There it is. Smashed to within an inch of its life, and nobody even noticed."

3) I'm "mastering" a movie soundtrack right now. I mix it, get it within the limits, and then pass it through some heinous, monstrous preset built into Logic. That preset has linear phase EQ, multiband compression, multiband limiting and a brick wall limiter in it and their "final movie mix" is fuckin' aggressive. I took out the EQ, reset the multiband limiting and use the brick wall limiter as a clip gauge - if I hit it, I change the material. See, I have to hit DIALNORM and I can't pass +9 (ref -20) or the mix gets rejected by distributors. That's a broadcast thing. But more importantly, it's a supacheap zombie film and the guns need to sound like guns while allowing the movie to sound like a movie. Even with that, though, the best way to "master" it is to take out half the bullshit that Dolby thought it needed by default.

"Mastering" is largely bullshit. You don't need it. Don't try.

Look at it this way: You've got a system of interconnected players. There's "you", "other drivers on the same autonomous network", "other drivers on different autonomous networks", "other drivers not on autonomous networks", "life safety vehicles", "local jurisdiction", "state jurisdiction", "national jurisdiction," etc.

The situation you're describing covers "you" and "other drivers on the same autonomous network." There are lots of players that aren't covered. They all have "rights" governed by their social contract and actual contracts through citizenship, licensure, etc.

Let's come up with some players:

- Adam is Google SelfDrive Carbon (cheap)

- Bob is Google SelfDrive Diamond (expensive)

- Charlie is Delphi Autocruise (untiered)

- Dave is in a '77 Nova

- Elliott is a cop

- Fred is a long-haul trucker

- Google is a company too smart to get themselves in this mess, but bear with me.

Adam is going to work. Bob is also going to work, but Bob has the added advantage of fucking Adam over whenever he feels like it. This is likely to create seething resentment of Google by Adam, but we'll disregard that for a moment. So Bob is bombing down the interstate and Google tells Adam's car to pull over out of Bob's way.

Adam is going to cut in front of Charlie, if he can. Charlie's car has accident avoidance. But is Google going to let Adam's car drive aggressively enough to risk an incident? If it can be proved that they did, Google can be sued by Delphi.

Charlie moves over and gets in front of Dave. Dave isn't paying much attention and catches it late - he rear-ends Charlie. Delphi can still sue Google, but now Dave could sue both Google and Delphi.

Fred was asleep - his truck is driving itself. It slams on the brakes and performs a precision panic maneuver to end up on the margin so that Charlie and Dave aren't street meat. Fred can likely be fired for being asleep. Fred's trucking company can sue Google and Delphi, and maybe Fred can sue his trucking company.

Elliott watches this pigfuck of an operation and files a report. The highway patrol subpoenas Google's data and discovers that none of this shit would happen if Google wasn't favoring Bob. Meanwhile Bob has caused a pile-up simply for owning Google Diamond, which makes him a likely target of litigation, which adds to the existing caselaw against Google Diamond so his insurance rates go up. Meanwhile, he's not actually any faster to work since the only person he has power over in this entire pigfuck is Adam.

This all came about because Google chose to not drive the best they could in two separate instances solely so they could make a buck. There will be plenty of curious litigation associated with autonomous vehicles anyway - the costs/benefits analysis of Google sticking their neck out on this one just doesn't pan out. Neither will it pan out for anyone else - the acquisition cost for a network of the scale necessary is staggeringly high and you don't jeopardize its certification for penny-ante shit like this. And that's really the bottom line - because it's a network, rather than an individual car system, everyone has to be on the same page. Scribble on that page and it's scribbled for everyone. Remember how Audi had to virtually retreat from the US market because mmmmmmmmmaybe their gas pedals were getting stuck? This is like that, only voluntary.

It won't happen. Not in any country on the planet. Autonomous networks will drive to the best of their legal abilities, period.

Awww shucks what a happy-go-lucky heapin' helpin' of bullshit.

Back before the Internet discovered Bob Ross, back in '01 or '02, back before they had a social media consultant and a Youtube channel and all the rest of it, I decided I wanted to have a Bob Ross. I decided that would be ironic. So, from the ground up, where do you start? Well, I emailed my local PBS station, who gave me the media coordinator for Bob Ross, Inc, which did not yet have a website but did have a thriving business in art supplies.

The semi-brusque lady I spoke to on the phone informed me that they received multiple queries per week on acquiring a Bob Ross and that they all received the same information: Bob Ross would not sell his paintings, he provided them to PBS stations that had done particularly well during pledge drives of his show, and that occasionally when a PBS station was closed down or went through bankruptcy they became available on the market but it was a rare thing and as the executor of his estate they had appointed an agent at Sotheby's to handle such sales, would I like her number?

Bob Ross Inc. makes several million dollars a year and has since the '80s. I remain a big fan of Bob Ross, am delighted that he's got a second existence, begrudge them no success but this aw shucks act is a little disingenuous.

I just learned yesterday that the lyrics were written by the son of Robert Altman (the director of the movie M*A*S*H), when he was 14 years old.

From Wikipedia:

The song was written specifically for Ken Prymus (the actor playing Private Seidman), who sang it during the faux suicide of Walter "Painless Pole" Waldowski (John Schuck) in the film's "Last Supper" scene.[1][2] Robert Altman had two stipulations about the song for Mandel: first, it had to be called "Suicide Is Painless"; second, it had to be the "stupidest song ever written".[3] Altman tried to write the lyrics himself, but found that it was too difficult for his 45-year-old brain to write "stupid enough".[4] Instead he gave the task to his 14-year-old-son, Michael, who apparently wrote the lyrics in five minutes.[5][6]

I don't think they succeeded in making the stupidest song ever written.

I just found a great interview with Mandel:

JW: How did you work on the project?

JM: I was brought in before the movie was even shot, which was highly unusual. In most cases, you’re the last one in the line to see the film when scoring it. So Bob and I were sitting around getting rather ripped one night. Bob said to me, "You know, I need a song for the film. It’s that Last Supper scene, after the guy says he’d going to do himself with a pill because his life is over, because couldn’t get it up with the WAC the night before." I said, "A song for that?" He said, "Yeah, that Last Supper scene where the guy climbs into the casket and everybody walks around the box dropping in things like scotch, Playboy and other stuff to see him into the next world. There’s just dead air there."

JW: But if I recall, the scene features just a guy singing with an acoustic guitar.

JM: Right. Bob said, "We’ve got one guy in the shot who can sing and there's another guy who knows three chords on the guitar so we can’t use an orchestra." Bob also said the song had to be called Suicide Is Painless. "Since [Capt.] Painless commits suicide with a pill, that would be a good title," he said. Then he said, "It’s got to be the stupidest song ever written."

JW: What went through your mind?

JM: I said to myself, "Well I can do stupid." Bob was going to take a shot at the lyrics. But he came back two days later and said, "I’m sorry but there’s just too much stuff in this 45-year-old brain. I can’t write anything nearly as stupid as what we need."

JW: So who wrote the lyrics?

JM: Bob said, "All is not lost. I’ve got a 15-year-old kid who’s a total idiot." So Michael Altman, at age 15, wrote the lyrics, and then I wrote the music to them. It was the first scene in the movie that they were going to shoot. They had to have the song for it as a pre-record, so the actor could mouth the words, allowing for a dub later.

Is human memory analogous to a hard drive, though?

Misses the point.

So let's say Bob and Sue each spend sixteen hours a day in conversational English. They're exactly as intelligent and exactly as apt as each other. If you test them, you'll get the same scores.

Now let's switch Sue to French for two hours a day. Same amount of effort, all else held equal. Bob is going to get fourteen more hours a week speaking English than Sue is. Sue is going to know a lot more French than Bob - but Bob will have an advantage.

Obviously, there's a lot of variables here. Obviously, education isn't linear. If Bob and Sue are graduate students, you likely won't see a difference - but if Bob and Sue are toddlers, you will. If your vocabulary is in the tens of thousands of words, the expansion is going to be barely visible. If your vocabulary is in the hundreds of words, however, it makes a difference.

Never mind the spinning platters - the bus has limited bandwidth.

See, and here you are, thinking I'm hostile. I'm not. I'm tired of the entitlement. We're all tired of the entitlement. There was a user on here that I didn't get along with. We were both strong personalities. Lots of people followed us both. We'd tried, on at least two occasions, to work through our differences and failed. We were better off not interacting with each other, despite the fact that we often posted similar content. And so it was, in 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014.

But then 2015 came around and the newbies hounded her off. She deleted her account this time because we gained enough assholes that she couldn't hang. She didn't feel commenting in other people's posts because she got hounded. So she's gone now, and Hubski is lesser for it.

You talk about my "ideal" use of the mute function. Isn't "ideal" what we should all strive for? Shouldn't the design of the site encourage "ideal" use? 'cuz see, we didn't have "block" until _wage was gone because the rest of us were able to use the tools available to maintain a civil discourse. It wasn't until the propagation of bad actors required stricter personal moderation tools.

You're right. It's not about you. But you posted the thread, so you will be used as an example. If you don't care that much, why all the soul-searching? If not everyone is that thoughtful or discerning, why do you care who they mute or don't?

Li'l secret: If Alfred has Bob muted but not Charlie, and Charlie really wants Bob's opinion on Alfred's post, Charlie can shout-out Bob and Bob will be able to reply to Charlie. This has two effects: the first of which, if Alfred really hates Bob, he might start muting Charlie. But if Alfred respects Charlie, he'll either let it slide or maybe even reconsider muting. Hey - he might even PM Charlie and Bob together so they can work their shit out. You can google "hubski muting" and see all this. It's not like zero thought has been put into the functionality, and it's not like your objections are new. The fact of the matter is, the system as it stands has evolved to reflect the interests and intent of the people who use it the most.

Hubski is not based around subjects. At one point, mk actually got rid of tags, making it entirely about people. It was an experiment, and it was a failure, but it definitely demonstrated where the focus lies. Hubski is about people, and regardless of how knowledgeable two people are, if they can't get along they're not going to add anything to the discussion. Case in point: I gave you a differing opinion, and you took it as a personal attack. the majority of your response is buried under hurt feelings.

That's why mute exists.

God says, "I sent you a truck, a boat, and a helicopter! What the hell more did you want from me?"

-Nat Tokington