Charlie Loyd @vruba@everything.happens.horse

@doriantaylor Like if you want to be reductive about computers, that’s the conventional thing to point to. Roughly comparably, if you want to be reductive about humans, you conventionally say flesh and blood or flesh and bone, not, say, “mostly water” or “a bunch of cells” or “just great apes” or whatever. There’s a conventional level to point to. Why? (Rhetorical, thoughtful, not looking for a detailed and literal answer.)

@doriantaylor Yes, absolutely. Or electrical charges, or Turing machines, or any of the other things that ordinary computers ·are·. Somehow binary is the one people always seem to point to. And it’s fun to think about the reasons for that.

@doriantaylor No worries. I’m just saying it’s interesting how much people in ordinary speech bring up binary as a ·layer· of abstraction – not a choice or method, where isomorphism matters, but a level. Not binary as opposed to trinary, but binary as somehow more diagnostic or distinctive than all the other things in the stack that make computers like that.

@doriantaylor I feel like we’re having two different conversations here. But I agree with the one you’re having, and that’s good enough for me.

@doriantaylor I would go further and say it was a pretty good insight. But it doesn’t really address what I said, does it?

@doriantaylor I still think it’s weird how much people like privileging binary as an especially important layer of abstraction. “It’s all ones and zeros” is no more true than like a dozen other things you could say about even computers in the commonly understood contemporary style.

@meetar Good, evening.

Found it.

I’m like 90% sure Sir Thomas Browne makes this point somewhere in “Hydriotaphia”.

Kind of humbling to hold something in your hand, even just a chunk of cheap tea, that might last longer into the future than the Marvel movie timeline itself.

@midendian @numist Is there a (struggling for terminology here) characteristic timescale to the shimmer that defines the optimal fps for defeating it? Like presumably in even a lossless video, most frames would be practically wasted.

@grahamsleight @meetar

@meetar This whole time I was assuming you meant Windows the operating system.

Out-take from that last @salkinjorts:

@harrisj we were suck dorks back then

@meetar you must really hate that big latte

Have just been made aware of a deep-sea crab that eats trees; please respect my privacy in this difficult time: https://orbi.uliege.be/bitstream/2268/28764/1/2009%20Hoyoux%20et%20al%20-%20R%c3%a9gime%20xylophage%20et%20microflore%20digestive%20de%20M.%20andamanica%20des%20bois%20coul%c3%a9s.pdf