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makowo · 1 year ago

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As a much longer follow up to this post, here's this... My Ideas for Two Minecraft Mods ^_^ this got really long so it's under the cut

Circle of Life: Rudimentary mod that adds a basic ecosystem, with as few mobs added as possible but enough to stand out as a bare bones animal mod.

Rather than mobs just existing independently of each other with the player as the focal point, focus in on more instances of stuff like wolves hunting sheep. Foxes hunt rabbits + rabbits are more widespread, wild cats/ocelots should spawn more plentifully and have birds and wild mice to hunt, polar bears should have seals to hunt, etc.

These prey animals can have their own niches, like eating plants and spreading their seeds (making grass/ferns/crops grow naturally and make grass more lively), seals eat fish and may be difficult to kill on your own but with the help of a polar bear, but they can be easily killed and drop seal fat that acts as coal or dried into leather.

Bears and foxes should be tamable as alternatives to wolves and cats respectively. Bears are focused on combat, as they hit harder and have more health (could be mounted as well?), as well as have a faster swim speed. However, they aren't useful in smaller areas, and you can only have two at a time or they get territorial with each other. Foxes are similar to cats in that they don't do combat but maybe could help find buried items or something, tying themselves into archeology. -

Darker Days Ahead: A larger progression mod that adds the Deep Dark as a secondary endgame zone to follow up to the End, and not a glorified treasure zone with a scary guy in it. (I know there's already kinda one of these that adds a deep dark dimension but I hate that mod bcs it's very aimless and bare bones atm)

This mod would have new structures, new types of crops that only cultivate with the aid of sculk, new items for scaring mobs away from you with the call of a Warden Horn, a new set of armor with a focus on utility, and potentially a new dimension which the sculk infection originates from. Definitely more but that's what's off the top of my head

The Ancient City is larger and has more signs of having been a city rather than just a castle sorta area. I'm imagining tying it into villager lore, so there would be decrepit but more advanced forms of villager buildings scattered around or above deep dark biomes, with the Warden hinted at being the basis of the iron golems villagers make.

The main new crop could be a fucked up form of glow berries that spread darkness instead of light, and will give darkness/wither when eaten. They could also be crafted into a 2x2 grid and made into a bundle of berries that can be thrown and make mobs in a small area around the landing point unable to lock onto you and take wither damage for a short time. They only grow on walls made of sculk-infested stone/deepslate, which is made by crafting stone/deepslate in the center of a crafting table with a sculk vein on each space directly adjacent to it. They also spawn naturally in the deep dark villages, but crumble into nothing unless mined with silk touch.

The Warden Horn isn't obtained by killing the Warden, but is crafted with a goat horn, a sculk shrieker, and an item that's dropped randomly by Wardens randomly after taking damage, maybe a part of its flesh or one of the things in its chest. It has a very limited amount of uses (repaired with experience via natural mending) but can be used as a defensive tool to temporarily scare and de-aggro any hostile/neutral mobs in a radius around the player, making them run like skeletons with wolves or creepers with cats. Doesn't work on Nether mobs as they wouldn't know about the Warden naturally.

The armor set would be primarily focused on utility, to not compromise on netherite being the endgame armor. Each piece of armor has its own ability, similar to turtle helmets. The helmet allows the wearer to highlight mobs around them and through walls when they make noise, the chestplate provides temporary Resistance 1 and a small damage boost whenever you gain experience, leggings give Speed 2, Jump Boost 1, and small attack speed boost after taking damage, and boots make you walk without making noise. Wearing the entire armor set gives you Absorption 1 in areas under light level 0 and you can get closer to aggro mobs without them spotting you, with the Warden becoming entirely passive to you unless attacked. There could be tools as well, but I don't have ideas for them right now. I think this would have stats slightly lower than diamond to balance out its strengths, since you can mix it with stronger items for certain benefits.

The new dimension is kinda a point of contention for me because I'm not sure of what it could offer. Definitely a new boss, NOT a new faction for trading, but it could relate to enchantments/magic considering experience plays such a large role here and enchants have no present origin point.

That's all I have for now. one day I will make these ideas or commission them when i get money.

#makotalk #minecraft

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obanicrypto · 6 months ago

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How to Make Your Crypto Work Harder for You with STON.fi Farming

If you’re like I was a few months ago, you might be wondering: "What’s all the fuss about crypto farming?" Maybe you’ve heard about it, but it still sounds a little intimidating. The truth is, crypto farming can be as simple as putting your money into a savings account. But instead of interest, you’re earning more tokens for helping a platform maintain liquidity.

Let’s break it down and make this as easy to understand as possible. After all, crypto is supposed to make life easier, right?

What Exactly is Crypto Farming:Think of It as Growing Your Own Garden

Imagine you’ve got a garden at home. You plant a few seeds, take care of them, and over time, they grow into something valuable—let’s say fruits or vegetables. Instead of just enjoying the results, you put in the effort to nurture your garden, knowing that over time, you’ll get even more rewards.

Crypto farming is very much like this. Instead of seeds, you’re planting your tokens into a platform like STON.fi. These tokens "grow" over time, and in return, you earn rewards—extra tokens for your contribution.

By farming, you’re essentially helping a decentralized platform function. The tokens you stake provide liquidity, meaning others can trade tokens easily, and in exchange for your help, you earn more tokens.

Why Does Crypto Farming Matter

In the world of DeFi (decentralized finance), liquidity is essential. It’s like having enough cash in your wallet to make purchases at any time. Without liquidity, trading or swapping tokens becomes a lot harder. Farming is how we make sure that liquidity is available, and it’s how platforms like STON.fi reward people like you and me for making it all happen.

But here’s the thing: you don’t have to be a crypto expert to get involved in farming. It’s actually one of the easiest ways to make your crypto work for you, even if you’re just starting out.

Why STON.fi Makes Farming Simple

When I first got into crypto, I was overwhelmed by all the technical jargon and complex platforms. But STON.fi stood out to me because it’s designed to make farming as easy as possible.

The platform is user-friendly and clear, so you don’t need to know all the ins and outs of coding or crypto algorithms. It’s simple, intuitive, and gives you plenty of options to choose from. Plus, with STON.fi, you get to be part of a community-driven ecosystem where your contributions really matter.

How STON.fi Works: The Basics of Farming Pools

In a farm pool, you essentially “deposit” your tokens into the system, just like putting your money into a savings account. These pools are what keep the platform running smoothly. Without liquidity (your tokens), the platform wouldn’t be able to handle all the trades and transactions. By contributing, you’re helping everything flow easily.

In exchange for your help, STON.fi rewards you with more tokens. The beauty of this is that, just like with farming, the more you contribute, the more you stand to earn.

Examples of Farming Pools on STON.fi

Here’s where things get interesting: there are a variety of farming pools you can get involved in on STON.fi. Let’s go over a few of them to help you understand the kind of returns you can expect:

1. JETTON/USDt V2 Extended

Rewards: 22,500 JETTON (~$6,000)

Farming Period: Until December 30

Lock-Up Period: 15 days

This pool is for the bold, supporting the growing blockchain gaming ecosystem. If you believe in the future of Web3 gaming, this is a great place to start.

2. hTON/TON V2

Rewards: 30,866 HPO (~$777)

Farming Period: Until December 24

Lock-Up Period: None

This one offers flexibility, which is perfect if you want to dip your toes into farming without locking up your assets for long periods.

3. HPO/hTON V2

Rewards: 61,733 HPO (~$1,600)

Farming Period: Until December 24

Lock-Up Period: None

With no lock-up period and high rewards, this one offers a nice balance between risk and reward.

4. TON/uTON

Rewards: 411 STON + 345 uTON (~$3,700)

Farming Period: Until January 16

Lock-Up Period: None

If you believe in the TON ecosystem, this is a great pool to support its development while earning some extra tokens.

Why I Believe in Farming: Lessons I’ve Learned

When I first started farming, I wasn’t sure what to expect. But the more I got into it, the more I realized that it’s one of the smartest ways to grow your crypto portfolio. Here are some things I’ve learned along the way:

Start Small: Like with any investment, I didn’t dive all in right away. I started with a smaller amount to test things out and understand how farming worked.

Research: Before jumping into any farming pool, I made sure to read up on the token, the project, and the rewards structure. Knowledge is power, especially when it comes to DeFi.

Diversify: I spread my tokens across different pools instead of putting all my eggs in one basket. This gave me the flexibility to earn from multiple sources while minimizing risk.

How to Start Farming on STON.fi

It’s actually quite simple to get started with farming on STON.fi. Here’s how I did it:

1. Choose a Pool: Look at the available pools, read through the details, and pick one that fits your goals.

2. Provide Liquidity: Deposit the token pairs required for the pool you’ve selected. You’ll receive LP (liquidity provider) tokens in return.

3. Start Earning: Once your tokens are in the pool, you can start earning rewards in the form of more tokens. It’s that simple!

Farm now

In Conclusion: Your Crypto Can Work Smarter for You

Farming on STON.fi is one of the easiest ways to get your crypto working for you. It’s like putting your money into a savings account, but better. Instead of just earning interest, you’re earning tokens that help power a decentralized platform.

Whether you’re new to crypto or have been in the game for a while, farming is an opportunity you don’t want to miss. The key is to start small, do your research, and watch your rewards grow. Farming isn’t just for the pros—it’s for anyone who wants to make their crypto assets work harder and smarter.

If you’re ready to start, jump into a farm pool today. Your tokens are waiting to work for you!

#stonfi #ton blockchain #defi #web3gaming

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profile-234 · 5 months ago

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How Lawn Aeration Boosts Soil Microorganisms

When it comes to maintaining a lush, green lawn, most homeowners focus on the basics like watering, mowing, and fertilizing. While these are important, there's another critical aspect of lawn care that often gets overlooked: lawn aeration. If you're unfamiliar with aeration, you're not alone. It’s one of those services that can make a huge difference but is often ignored in favor of more visible tasks.

So, what exactly is lawn aeration, and why should you care about it? Let’s dive into how it benefits your lawn, specifically by boosting the health and number of soil microorganisms.

What Is Lawn Aeration?

Lawn aeration is the process of perforating the soil with tiny holes to allow air, water, and nutrients to penetrate deeper into the ground. This is especially helpful in compacted soils, where roots struggle to grow and absorb essential nutrients. Compaction can occur from heavy foot traffic, frequent mowing, or even thatch buildup.

Aerating your lawn opens up the soil, creating spaces that allow oxygen to reach the roots and improves the effectiveness of your watering and fertilizing efforts. But it’s not just the plants that benefit—soil microorganisms love it too!

The Role of Soil Microorganisms

Soil is teeming with life—mainly microorganisms like bacteria, fungi, and protozoa. These organisms play a vital role in breaking down organic matter, improving soil structure, and recycling nutrients that your grass needs to thrive. In short, a healthy soil ecosystem is the backbone of a healthy lawn.

However, the efficiency of these microorganisms can be significantly hampered if the soil is compacted. Compaction limits the space available for microorganisms to move around, which makes it harder for them to do their jobs. This is where lawn aeration comes in. By loosening the soil, aeration creates an environment where these microorganisms can flourish.

How Lawn Aeration Helps Soil Microorganisms

Improved Oxygen Flow: Microorganisms need oxygen to thrive. In compacted soil, oxygen becomes limited, and many beneficial microorganisms may struggle to survive. Aerating the soil helps to open up the spaces that allow oxygen to flow more freely, which in turn boosts the population and activity of beneficial microbes.

Better Water Infiltration: When water can penetrate the soil more easily through the holes made by aeration, it’s not just the grass roots that benefit. The water also reaches the microorganisms deeper in the soil, supporting their growth and activity. This results in a more efficient nutrient cycle that supports your entire lawn.

Enhanced Nutrient Recycling: Soil microorganisms help break down organic matter into nutrients that grass and plants can use. When the soil is compacted, this process slows down, and nutrients can become locked in the soil, out of reach of your lawn. Aeration opens up the soil and promotes better nutrient cycling, allowing microorganisms to work at full capacity and make essential nutrients available to your grass.

Faster Thatch Decomposition: Thatch, the layer of dead grass and organic matter that sits on top of the soil, can be a barrier to water, air, and nutrient penetration. Microorganisms are responsible for breaking down thatch, but when the soil is compacted, their ability to decompose it is reduced. Aeration helps to loosen up the thatch, allowing microbes to break it down more effectively, resulting in a healthier lawn.

Soil Structure Improvement: The action of aeration creates channels in the soil that can stay open for a period, even after the process is complete. This allows microorganisms to move through the soil more freely, improving soil structure over time. As the soil structure improves, it becomes more conducive to microbial life, creating a self-sustaining cycle of growth and health.

Why You Should Consider Aeration for Your Lawn

Given all these benefits, it’s clear that lawn aeration isn’t just about creating space for grass roots to grow—it’s also about creating a healthier environment for the microorganisms that support your entire lawn ecosystem. So, if you're aiming for a vibrant, healthy lawn, aeration should be an essential part of your lawn care routine.

If you’re in Tilton, NH, and looking for a professional service to help you with lawn aeration, Superior Hydroseeding Liquid Lawns is the best choice. They specialize in aeration services that promote healthier, greener lawns. Their team understands the importance of soil health and can help you unlock the full potential of your lawn by boosting the activity of beneficial microorganisms through effective aeration.

Don’t wait until your lawn starts to show signs of stress—give your soil the support it needs with lawn aeration. Call Superior Hydroseeding Liquid Lawns today, and let them help you create a lawn that’s not just beautiful, but thriving from the inside out!

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pandeypankaj · 10 months ago

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Which is better, Java or Python? And how?

The answer to this debate really lies in the details, which frequently depend on the demands of a specific project and personal taste. In addition, both languages have some strong and weak points that make them better fit for particular cases.

Java

Pros

Performance: Generally speaking, Java is faster compared to Python because of compilation and Just-In-Time compilation. So in computationally heavy tasks, such as the training of machine learning models, this may be decisive.

Scalability: Thanks to its architecture and ecosystem, Java can fit large-scale data processing and distributed computing.

Enterprise-level support: Java is highly adopted in enterprise, having a huge variety of tools, libraries, and frameworks available for data science and big data applications.

Strong type system: Java has a static type system that can help detect errors in early stages of development, thus leading to robust and maintainable code.

Weaknesses

More verbose: Java is more verbose compared to Python, meaning that it takes more lines of code to accomplish certain things. This sometimes increases development cycles.

Slightly steeper learning curve: The syntax and Object-Oriented paradigm of Java are a little bit harder for beginners to grasp compared to the relatively super simple syntax of Python.

Python

Strengths

Readability: The syntax in Python is clean and concise; hence, it will be simpler to learn and comprehend easily even without any significant prior programming background.

Ecosystem: Extremely large ecosystem of libraries and frameworks in Python developed explicitly for data science, such as NumPy, Pandas, Scikit-learn, and TensorFlow. Many common tasks of data science can be significantly simplified with these libraries, and development will go much faster.

Flexibility: Python is such a language that one can do everything from web development to automation and scripting.

Interactive environment: Python's interactive environment, IPython/Jupyter Notebook, is very handy to play around with and to explore data.

Weaknesses

Performance: Python might run more slowly compared to Java in applications that involve heavy memory use because of its dynamic typing and the process of interpretation.

Global interpreter lock (GIL): Because of the presence of GIL in Python, it cannot utilize the power of multiple CPU cores, and thereby the performance may be dictated in that particular aspect.

While choosing between Java and Python for data science, consider the following factors:

Project demands: If your project requires large-scale data processing, performance-critical tasks, or enterprise-level integrations, then Java may fit better. Python would be more ideal in cases of rapid prototyping, exploratory data analysis, or machine learning with a rich ecosystem of libraries.

Team experience: Since your team has more experience using either Java or Python, then it would be probably easier to employ either of these languages.

Personal preference: Of course, the best language is one that helps you feel comfortable and productive.

It is worth noting, however, that there are indeed some pretty heavy hitters on both sides in data science-Java and Python, each by their own merits. Normally, the "best" in a particular case depends on the context in which it operates. Quite often, you can join the strengths of both languages using tools like Python or Java-based Python libraries.

#datascience #machinelearning #python #data analytics #ai

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theydjarin · 20 days ago

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Reasons the Steam Deck rules

1. FREEDOMMMM

This is the biggest reason SD is infinitely better than the Switch. A steam deck is essentially a handheld computer with a dedicated interface for gaming. That means you can do anything you want on it. Compared to the Switch that is by nature completely locked down, and run by Nintendo who will literally brick your entire machine if you do any sort of modding or sideloading. And in addition to software, Valve makes the SD fairly easy to modify hardware wise. If you’re savvy, you can get a cheap Deck and install new hard drive or better screen.

2. EMULATION

The steam deck is a perfect machine for emulation with a few dedicated programs to help set it up. Nintendo barely has any sort of retro gaming, but some of my favorite deck games come from the Gamecube era (SSX Tricky my beloved). You can even emulate switch 1 games, ymmv.

3. THE PRICE OF GAMES

Every time I start to get drawn in by the switch, I have to balk at the cost of the games alone. $70 for breath of the wild? are you fucking serious? Even the indie ports are pricey. SD has any game you could ever imagine at your fingertips, and if it costs too much you can buy it elsewhere (or 🏴‍☠️) and still run the game through gaming mode. There’s even a plugin to help find the best price if it’s lower than on the steam store.

4. CUSTOMIZATION

If you don’t like how something looks or operates, there’s probably a plugin for that. Tinkering on the steam deck is a hobby in itself.

5. NON GAMING

Even aside from its gaming uses, there’s a strong use case for doing anything else on it. You can connect it to a mouse and keyboard or an external monitor to get stuff done. My personal use case is as a video streaming device. I can cast directly from the deck to chromecast, including from VLC player, so I don’t have to worry about remotes and inputs and cables on my tv. I do literally everything from my deck.

6. FLAWS

Okay I do feel the need to recognize the limitations. The hardware is somewhat outdated, so huge graphics intensive games might not have great performance. But I personally mostly play indie games or retro games and it’s totally fine. It also really depends on optimization- for example, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 ran amazingly and that’s a very new, beautiful game. For other games, the deck has great programs for streaming so you can run games on a pc and stream to your deck, or play with cloud gaming services. One of my favorites lets you stream from your PS5 to your deck.

The other flaw is that it can be a bit buggy, especially if you’re tinkering going outside of the typical Steam ecosystem. Some things require a bit of technical aptitude but there are a lot of guides and resources and tools. There have only been a few things I really wanted to do that I haven’t been able to (i never could get the Sims 3 up and running…..)

And finally, it being a handheld, there are just some games that are harder to play without mouse and keyboard. Steam Input is super adaptable and I know a lot of people have figured out great controller layouts, but I personally can’t play most strategy or management games without mouse and keyboard so I tend to just use my PC for those.

fuck the switch 2 get a steam deck instead i am so fucking serious

#long post #sorry i just love my wife the steam deck

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basedfinance · 3 years ago

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Based Friday April 29th 2022 Update 9

Hello Based Community!

As the markets continue their extreme volatility, we would like to continue emphasizing that we appreciate our awesome community! We’re thrilled to be able to continue offering relatively safe and high yields during these turbulent times. It’s because of you, our BASED community, that our peg remains protected.

New Project Milestones

● We reached epoch 300!

● ~25M $BASED in circulation

● ~23K $BSHARE in circulation (70% in the Acropolis)

Protocol GODS — Alpha

As we announced last week, Protocol GODS will allow our investors to use $BASED to mint, buy & sell NFTs on the new marketplace in development with Pod Town.

As our pilot mint with Titan God of Fire, Prometheus, drags closer and closer; we’re thrilled to share a little sneak peak at what’s to come: *NOT A FINAL PRODUCT, ARTWORK USED IS FILLER

Again, we are working with Arkin Tyagi, an extremely talented & well known artist in NFT circles. Things are well in motion and we know you’re all going to love this totally rad art that’s in production!

Instagram arkin tyagi (@_artkin_) • Instagram photos and videos Artstation ArtStation — Arkin Tyagi Behance arkin tyagi on Behance Twitter artkin (@ArkinTyagi) / Twitter

His nft project DeusX (deusxnft.com)

We’re absolutely thrilled about how everything is coming together and couldn’t be more excited to announce more, but that’s all we can share for now. Expect more updates and sneak peaks of the artwork in the near future.

Community Proposal #4: Parthenon Revamp

Thank you everyone for providing so many helpful suggestions for our profit-sharing feature in parthenon-suggestions. If you’ve been attentive to the discord thus far you may have seen this proposal by now:

OPTION A : Profit distribution 1 POOL — Deposit receipt tokens in it, keep getting rewards Lock period: choice of 1 week, 2 weeks, 4 weeks Deposit tax: 1 Week lock — 1%, 2 weeks lock — 0.5%, 4 weeks lock — 0% Withdrawal tax: 1 Week lock — 7% to 0% overtime , 2 weeks lock — 14% to 0% overtime , 4 week lock — 28% to 0% overtime Rewards will be distributed once per week

OPTION B: Battle MULTIPLE POOLS — Deposit in the pools and only 1 pool gets all rewards for the week (distribution once per week) Lock period: 1 week | 2 weeks | 4 weeks Deposit tax: 0 for all pools Withdrawal tax: 1 week — 7% to 0 | 2 weeks — 14% to 0 | 4 weeks — 28% to 0 (BIGGEST TVL POOL WINS ) Win ratio can be calculated using multiplier: 1 Week lock pool — 1x multiplier | 2 weeks lock pool — 2x multiplier | 4 weeks lock pool — 4x multiplier (RANDOM POOL WINS) Multipliers are the same as for TVL win scenario

By an overwhelming majority, OPTION A has won the vote on discord. Some of the team feels that the options were worded oddly and that may call for a revote with a proposal that makes things a little bit easier to understand. We’re also concerned that of all 3,990 BSHARE holders, we got less than 200 total votes on the proposal. We’ll be going over this in our AMA tomorrow about how we will move forward.

We appreciate the community being so patient as we continue working hard to ship you better experiences and new opportunities to benefit from the Based Finance ecosystem.

Some Market News

$BSHARE has been getting lots of love from the top 1,000 FTM Whales! We’re consistently smashing that top 10 volume on FTM network. The Based Finance team is so proud that we’re providing consistent value to the community and that large investors appreciate what our protocol has to offer. We’ll continue pushing harder and stronger to provide better and higher quality experiences for all of our community.

UI Updates Coming

Here’s a little teaser for everyone on some design updates we have coming. These are unfinished samples, just a taste of what’s to come. We’re pushing to have a sleek and unique user experience that makes our protocol easy to understand and navigate. Expect more on this in the very near future.

Katastima

We’re proud to announce that our very own OTC swapper will be going live within the next week. This will allow you to purchase and sell tokens on the market with 0 fees and will even be able to set standards such as a transaction that’s 50% bought on the market and 50% OTC. We’ll be waiting to hear from the community about what assets you want to be able to trade on our OTC market and will ship a detailed update when Katastima goes live.

Reminder of our guide to help you in these turbulent times.

We are still working hard on Protocol Drachma in the background. We’re going to be shipping more information in the coming weeks. I know that statement might sound like a broken record but we’re building something awesome and appreciate you all sticking with us. The utility for $BASED will continue to grow!

The team, treasury, community, and our partners are constantly working at keeping the peg close. Thanks again to everyone for the continued support. If you’re interested in some more alpha and a little bigger taste of what we’re working on, join us in our Discord tomorrow (April 30th, 2022) for a live voice AMA from a couple members of the team.

Lastly, $TOMB on and Stay $BASED!

#$BSHARE $BASED finance defi crypto $FTM $TOMB hustle wealth dailyAPR dailyAPY highAPR highAPY fantom highfrequencycompound

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galactic-magick · 4 years ago

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Gardens and Crimes: Poison Ivy x Reader

Request: Poison Ivy x female reader? The reader is a vigilante who has a soft spot for plants. They are trying to start a community garden for Gotham, and Poison Ivy takes notice. They bond over that, and eventually the reader reveals that they have to turn her in. Hurt/no comfort, please.

Summary: You start a community garden with Pamela Isley, but find out about her villainous alter ego and have to make a difficult decision.

Words: 1200+

Warnings: fem!Reader, lots of angst, hurt/no comfort

Author’s Notes: Present is in normal text and past is in italics

You didn’t want it to come to this, but as you stand in front of Pamela’s door, you know it’s the right thing to do.

You glance over at the beautiful gardens and flowers surrounding her whole house, vines running up the walls and moss on all the stone. Her greenhouse is full of even more plants, although you may never get to see it all again.

You sigh, knocking on the door, trying to remember all the good memories one last time…

You’re late. You can’t be late.

You’ve been planning this for months, and you can’t afford to screw it up now. You want to start a community garden in Gotham, but there hasn’t been one in years. Your only chance is to bring your idea to the attention of the city board members and get as many people interested as possible, even though most ideas from commoners get shut down no matter what.

Rushing into the room, you start passing out flyers down the row, trying to be as quiet as possible, but your efforts fall a bit short.

“Miss, is there a reason you’re causing a ruckus at our meeting?” one of the board members asks.

You sit down with a thump, shaking your head, “Sorry. Is the citizen suggestion time over?”

“You just missed it-“

“Oh, perfect!” you shoot back up, running to the front of the room. “I have a proposal for a community garden in Gotham. I’ve done all the math and drawn all the plans, it’ll barely cost any city funds and it won’t be difficult to build-“

“Ma’am, I already told you we’re done with suggestions. You may come back next month with you idea,”

“No you don’t understand!” you cut them off again. “Gotham needs something like this. Plants and community make people happy, and it’s so dreary around here most of the time. Have you ever considered that if people were happier overall, there’d be a little less crime?”

“I don’t think that growing some plants is going to solve our high crime rates, miss. I don’t see The Batman killing criminals with vegetables,”

You huff, placing your plans on the desk, “Please at least consider it,”

“Yeah, you should consider it,” a red-haired woman pipes up, strutting up to the front next to you. “I think it’s a great idea,”

“Me too!” someone else calls.

“We should do it!” a few other people say.

You’re overwhelmed by the amount of support in a short amount of time, and eventually the board has no choice but to accept your request and start work on the new garden.

“Thanks for standing up with me,” you say to the red-haired woman as you walk back out to the street.

“Well, ya know, sometimes it just takes one other person fighting for the right thing to inspire everyone else,” she smiles. “My name’s Pamela Isley. Doctor Pamela Isley. I’m an expert in plant life and I’d love to give you some tips on the community garden, if you’d like,”

“Oh my gosh, yes!” you jump in excitement. “Are you free right now, actually? I was going to grab some ice cream if the meet went well, or to cheer myself up if it went bad-“

“Of course!”

You thought you had a soft spot for plants, but Pamela is on an entirely different level. She’s extremely passionate about them, and she knows everything there is to know.

She tells you all her suggestions for the new garden, explaining how to balance the ecosystem best and what kinds of rules there should be for what should and shouldn’t be planted. She agrees with your choice of base soil and the dimensions for the different sections, and she asks you all about your favorite flowers and trees.

You spend way longer there than most people would at a casual ice cream outing, but you’re barely paying attention to the time. You enjoy talking to her more than anyone else in your life, and you might even be falling for her a bit.

That night, though, everything that happened during the day takes a back seat.

You have another job to do as well, and that’s helping the city as much as you can as a vigilante.

You may not be on the same level as the famous Batman, but you’ve put away your fair share of criminals. You know how to fight and defend yourself, and you’ve been able to save quite a few lives.

You’ve been hearing rumors of a supervillain who’s been using plant pheromones to control people, which is right up your alley in terms of interests.

You find one of the victims lying down on the street, and you help him sit up.

“Do you remember what happened?”

“This lady- she made me breathe something in- and next thing I know I’m out here,”

“What did she look like?”

“I couldn’t see her very well, but she was wearing green and had red hair I believe,”

It couldn’t be…

No. You’re sure there’s several redheads in Gotham who like plants. You’re overthinking it.

“Okay, sir, I’m going to help you get to a hospital, okay? They’ll check you out and make sure it’s all out of your system,”

You hoist him upright, calling an ambulance and trying to push away your questioning thoughts.

Within the month the community garden is built, and you and Pamela get to work on advertising and planting your first flowers.

You’ve bonded quite a bit over a short time, and a few of your get-togethers have even turned into dates. She’s introduced you to an entire new world of nature, and you’ve never adored the color green as much as you do now.

All is well and good until the one night on patrol that broke your heart…

“Oh, Y/N!” Pamela smiles, letting you in. “Hey! Did I forget about a meeting or something?”

“No,” you shake your head. “I just need to talk to you,”

“Okay,” she nods, motioning for you to sit down and sitting down herself. “Wait, before you say it, is it because we’re moving too fast? I don’t mind taking it slow if you’re uncomfortable-“

“No Pam, that’s not it. I actually really like you, might love you even-“ you stop yourself. You don’t want to make this harder than it has to be. “But I can’t let you keep hurting this city,”

“What do you mean? Why would I hurt anyone?

“I saw you last night, Pam. You were controlling and killing people in order to break into a lab,”

Her mouth hangs open, “I…I can explain-“

“I tried to stop you, but you got away. I can’t let you get away now,”

“You…you were her? That vigilante?”

“Yes,”

“Ah, I see now,” she scoffs. “You’re one of those stupid crime fighters who couldn’t care less about all of us. You think you’re on this high horse of elite morality so you can lock up whoever you want-“

“That is not true,” you glare. “I do care about you. I even agree with your fight for helping nature. But I can’t let you go about it like this,”

“Please, Y/N, don’t make me go to Arkham-“ she begs, but you’ve already handcuffed her.

“I’m sorry. I have to turn you in,”

A single tear falls down your cheek as she stares at you in disbelief.

“Maybe we’ll find each other again one day.”

#poison ivy x reader #pamela isley x reader #poison ivy imagine #pamela isley imagine #btas #batman the animated series

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mostlysignssomeportents · 4 years ago

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Watomatic, for lower Whatsapp switching costs

Any discussion of monopolization of the web is bound to include the term “network effects,” and its constant companion, “natural monopolies.” This econojargon is certainly relevant to the discussion, but really needs the oft-MIA idea of “switching costs.”

A technology has “network effects” when its value grows as its users increase, attracting more users, making it more valuable, attracting more users.

The classic example is the fax machine: one fax is useless, two is better, but when everyone has a fax, you need one too.

Social media and messaging obviously benefit significantly from network effects: if all your friends are on Facebook (or if it’s where your kid’s Little League games are organized, or how your work colleagues plan fun activities), you’ll feel enormous pressure to join.

Indeed, in these days of Facebook’s cratering reputation, it’s common to hear people say, “I’m only on FB because my friends are there,” and then your friends say, “I’m only there because you are there.”

It’s a form of mutual hostage-taking.

That hostage situation illustrates (yet) another economic idea: “collective action problems.” There are lots of alternatives to Facebook, but unless you can convince everyone on Facebook to pick one and move en masse, you’ll just end up with yet another social account.

This combination of network effects and collective action problems leads some apologists for tech concentration to call the whole thing a “natural monopoly” — a system that tends to be dominated by a single company, no matter how hard we try.

Railroads are canonical “natural monopolies.” Between the costs of labor and capital and the difficulty in securing pencil-straight rights-of-way across long distances, it’s hard to make the case for running a second set of parallel tracks for a competing company’s engines.

Other examples of natural monopolies include cable and telephone systems, water and gas systems, sewer systems, public roads, and electric grids.

Not coincidentally, these are often operated as public utilities, to keep natural monopolies from being abused by greedy jerks.

But the internet isn’t a railroad. Digital is different, because computers are universal in a way that railroads aren’t — all computers can run all programs that can be expressed in symbolic logic, and that means we can almost always connect new systems to existing ones.

Open up a doc in your favorite word processor and choose “Save As…” and just stare in awe and wonder at all the different file-formats you can read and write with a single program. Some of those formats are standardized, while others are proprietary and/or obsolete.

It’s easier to implement support for a standard, documented format, but even proprietary formats pose only a small challenge relative to the challenge presented by, say, railroads.

Throw some reverse-engineering and experimentation at a format like MS DOC and you can make Apple Pages, which reads and writes MS’s formats (which were standardized shortly after Pages’ release, that is, after the proprietary advantage of the format was annihilated).

This is not to dismiss the ingenuity of the Apple engineers who reversed Microsoft’s hairball of a file-format, but rather, to stress how much harder their lives would have been if they were dealing with railroads instead of word-processors.

During Australia’s colonization, every state had its own governance and its own would-be rail-barons. Each state laid its own gauge of rail-track, producing the “multi-gauge muddle” — which is why, 150+ years later, you can’t get a train from one end of Oz to the other.

Hundreds of designs for interoperable rolling stock have been tried, but it’s proven impossible to make a reliable car that retracts one set of wheels and drops a different one.

The solution to the middle-gauge muddle? Tear up and re-lay thousands of kilometers of track.

Contrast that with the Windows users who discovered that Pages would read and write the thousands of documents they’d authored and had to exchange with colleagues: if they heeded the advice of the Apple Switch ads, they could buy a Mac, move their files over, and voila!

Which brings me to switching costs. The thing that make natural monopolies out of digital goods and services are high switching costs, including the collective action problem of convincing everyone to quit Facebook or start using a different word-processor.

These switching costs aren’t naturally occurring: they are deliberately introduced by dominant firms that want to keep their users locked in.

Microsoft used file format obfuscation and dirty tricks (like making a shoddy Mac Office suite that only offered partial compatibility with Windows Word files) to keep the switching costs high.

By reverse-engineering and reimplementing Word support, Apple obliterated those switching costs — and with them, the collective action problem that created Word’s natural monopoly.

Once Pages was a thing, you didn’t have to convince your friends to switch to a Mac at the same time as you in order to continue collaborating with them.

Once you get an email-to-fax program, you can discard your fax machine without convincing everyone else to do the same.

Interoperability generally lowers switching costs. But adversarial interoperability — making something new that connects to something that already exists, without its manufacturer’s consent — specifically lowers deliberate switching costs.

Adversarial interoperability (or “competitive compatibility,” AKA “comcom”) is part of the origin story of every dominant tech company today. But those same companies have gone to extraordinary lengths to extinguish it.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

Just as a new company may endorse standardization when it’s trying to attract customers who would otherwise be locked into a “ecosystem” of apps, service, protocols and parts, so too do new companies endorse reverse-engineering and comcom to “fix” proprietary tech.

But every pirate wants to be an admiral. Once companies attain dominance, they start adding proprietary extensions to the standard and fighting comcom-based interoperability, decrying it as “hacking” or “theft of intellectual property.”

In the decades since Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Facebook were upstarts, luring users away from the giants of their days, these same companies have labored to stretch copyright law, terms of service, trade secrecy, patents and other rules to ban the tactics they once used.

This has all but extinguished comcom as a commercial practice. Today’s comcom practitioners risk civil and criminal liability and struggle to get a sympathetic hearing from lawmakers or the press, who have generally forgotten that comcom was once a completely normal tactic.

The obliteration of comcom is why network effects produce such sturdy monopolies in tech — and there’s nothing “natural” about those monopolies.

If you could leave Facebook but still exchange messages with your friends who hadn’t wised up, there’d be no reason to stay.

In other words, the collective action problem that the prisoners of tech monopolies struggle with is the result of a deliberate strategy of imposing high technical and legal burdens to comcom, in order to impose insurmountable switching costs.

I wrote about this for Wired UK back in April, comparing the “switching costs” the USSR imposed on my grandmother when she fled to Canada in the 1940s to the low switching costs I endured when I emigrated from Canada to the UK to the USA:

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/social-media-competitive-compatibility

Today, there’s a group of tech monopoly hostages who are stuck behind their own digital iron curtain, thanks to Facebook’s deliberate lock-in tactics: the users of Whatsapp, a messaging company that FB bought in 2014.

Whatsapp was a startup success: founded by privacy-focused technologists who sensed users were growing weary of commercial surveillance, they pitched their $1 service as an alternative to Facebook and other companies whose “free” products extracted a high privacy price.

Facebook bought Whatsapp, stopped the $1 charge, and started spying. In response to public outcry, the Facebook product managers responsible for the app assured its users that the surveillance data WA extracted wouldn’t be blended with Facebook’s vast database of kompromat.

That ended this year, when every Whatsapp user in the world got a message warning them that Facebook had unilaterally changed Whatsapp’s terms of service and would henceforth use the app’s surveillance data alongside the data it acquired on billions of people by other means.

Downloads of Whatsapp alternatives like Signal and Telegram surged, and Facebook announced it would hold off on implementing the change for three months. Three months later, on May 15, Facebook implemented the change and commenced with the promised, more aggressive spying.

Why not? After all, despite all of the downloads of those rival apps, Whatsapp usage did not appreciably fall. Convincing all your friends to quit Whatsapp and switch to Signal is a lot of work.

If the holdout is — say — a beloved elder whom you haven’t seen in a year due to lockdown, then the temptation to keep Whatsapp installed is hard to resist.

What if there was a way to lower those collective action costs?

It turns out there is. Watomatic is a free/open source “autoresponder” utility for Whatsapp and Facebook that automatically replies to messages with instructions for reaching you on a rival service.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.parishod.watomatic

It’s not full interoperability — not a way to stay connected to those friends who won’t or can’t leave Facebook’s services behind — but it’s still a huge improvement on the nagging feeling that people you love are wondering why you aren’t replying to their messages.

The project’s sourcecode is live on Github, so you can satisfy yourself that there isn’t any sneaky spying going on here:

https://github.com/adeekshith/watomatic

It’s part of a wider constellation of Whatsapp mods, which have their origins in a Syrian reverse-engineer whose Whatsapp comcom project was picked up and extended by African modders who produced a constellation of Whatsapp-compatible apps.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/african-whatsapp-modders-are-masters-worldwide-adversarial-interoperability

These apps are often targeted for legal retaliation by Facebook, so it’s hard to find them in official app stores where they might be vetted for malicious code.

It’s a strategy that imposes a new switching cost on Whatsapp’s hostages, in the form of malware risk.

Legal threats are Facebook’s default response to comcom. That’s how they responded to NYU’s Ad Observer, a plugin that lets users scrape and repost the political ads they’re served.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/04/553000000-reasons-not-let-facebook-make-decisions-about-your-privacy

Ad Observer lets independent researchers and journalists track whether Facebook is living up to its promises to block paid political disinformation. Facebook has made dire legal threats to shut this down, arguing that we should trust the company to mark its own homework.

Whatsapp lured users in by promising privacy. It held onto them post-acquisition by promising them their data would be siloed from Facebook’s main databases.

When it reneged on both promises, it papered this over by with a dialog box where they had to click I AGREE.

This “agreement” is a prime example of “consent theater,” the laughable pretense that Facebook is “making an offer” and the public is “accepting the offer.”

https://onezero.medium.com/consent-theater-a32b98cd8d96

Most people never read terms of service — but even when they do, “agreements” are subject to unilateral “renegotiation” by companies that engineered high switching costs as a means of corralling you into clicking “I agree” to things no rational person would ever agree to.

Consent theater lays bare the fiction of agreement. Real agreement is based on negotiation, and markets are based on price-signals in which buyers and sellers make counteroffers.

A “market” isn’t a place where a dominant seller names a price and then takes it from you.

Comcom is a mechanism for making these counteroffers. Take ad-blockers, which Doc Searls calls “the largest consumer boycott in history.” More than a quarter of internet users have installed an ad-block, fed up with commercial surveillance.

This is negotiation, a counteroffer. Big Tech — and the publications it colonizes — demand you give them everything, all the data they can extract, for every purpose they can imagine, forever, as a condition of access.

Ad-block lets you say “Nah.”

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah

The fiction that tech barons have “discovered” the “price” that the public is willing to pay for having a digital life is a parody of market doctrine. Without the ability to counteroffer — in code, as well as in law — there is no price discovery.

Rather, there is price-setting.

Not coincidentally, “the ability to set prices” is the textbook definition of an illegal monopoly.

#pluralistic

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qonqr · 4 years ago

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I’m Still Here

Many of you may have been asking yourself where did Silver go? Is anyone still working on QONQR? I admit I’ve been very quiet the past year and from the outside, it looks like not much is going on.

Before I give my QONQR update I want to share a major accomplishment for me. I’m a little less of a hoarder than I was a month ago. As the 11th year anniversary approached, I decided I had too much old QONQR merchandise I needed to get in the hands of my players. However, I hate shipping. I should be the spokesperson for one of those shipping providers that make shipping easy because I hate doing it so much. Many of you know that the player Rayndel has an Etsy store where she sells QONQR merchandise with my permission. I sent her a 65lb (30kg) box of QONQR stuff. Coffee cups, T-shirts, dog tags and stickers. She is liquidating all of it for me. You can find it all right here.

https://www.etsy.com/shop/DragonHoardCrafts?section_id=19648949

2020 and 2021 have been challenging for most people, and I’m no exception. Both our kids are off to college. We are getting older and so are our extended families. Medical issues become more frequent for us and them. The stress of the pandemic doesn’t help. There are days when I can sit at my computer all day, and never write a line of code. Things are hard, they impact our ability to work as hard as we once did.

A little over two weeks ago, QONQR hit its 11th birthday. The milestone passed quietly. I always spend time reflecting on how QONQR has changed my life and the stories you’ve shared about how it has changed yours. We’ve built something great together. Together we keep it going.

Despite outward appearances. Things are happening at QONQR. I am working, albeit at an admittedly slow pace. I’ve let go of the stress of pushing QONQR as fast as I can, and instead I’m working on QONQR at a pace that is comfortable. It is important to me and my family that I end my day without being drained of all my energy by the awful decisions and quality that Apple and Google hand me every day.

The next release of QONQR will include the following features. Many of these are mostly done, so I’m happy to share them, with the caveat that I have no idea when these will actually hit the store. Tons of testing is still needed.

New Sync Lock Rules

Sync lock will now last much longer, perhaps a week or even a month before it automatically expires. Along with that Sync Lock Protection will also last longer. The more times you gain sync lock protection, the longer it will last. We want to protect legitimate family members from daily locks, but also want to avoid situations where multi-scoper can get infrequent help to unlock an army of devices and accounts. In addition to longer locks, Sync lock may also hurt resource collection with your bases depending on how play testing goes.

As with everything pertaining to multi-scoping, it is a blurry line between stopping those who play unfair, and those that are punished for inviting family and friends to play.

Notifications

I have wanted push notifications for most of the past 10 years. In fact, we were very close to having them implemented about 5-7 years ago, but Google changed their push notification system. We used a unified messaging system created by Microsoft to push to both Google and Apple simultaneously. There were incompatibilities between the new and the old Google system for a long time. We gave up on trying to finish that implementation back then, waiting for Google and Microsoft to get their stuff fixed, and it was years before it became a priority again.

I spent most of the past 3-4 months working on notification. This area is quite possibly one of the worst technical implementations I’ve had to work with in all my time working in software. For example, if you kill an iPhone application, you also remove the ability to get push notifications until the next time you start the app. It appears to be almost random when Android will decide to beep your phone when receiving a notification, and when it will be silently added to the notification center. For both Apple and Google, the documentation is frustratingly inaccurate or out of date. There are multiple different ways a notification can be processed depending on whether the application was terminated by the user, suspended by the operating system, in the background or in the foreground. Was the notification scheduled locally or sent from a remote server? Honestly, as a developer, it would be difficult to purposely design a worse system.

The good news is that I believe I have it working as good as it can possibly work. In the next release you will be able to enable or disable notifications as a whole, or selectively choose which notification you want to receive. Notifications will include: Atlantis, New Wire messages, Mentions in Chat and Forums, Bots and Bases Full.

A Major Overhaul to the Scope

The changes to Sync Lock mandated that overheat have additional logic to control bots and energy regeneration. More significantly, if we want to have a notification that your scope is full, so I needed to know exactly when the scope would be full. Currently your regeneration rate is based on the number of launches in the past hour. Launching a few seconds before or after an old launch rolls off that 1 hour mark can mess up the prediction of when you will be full again. To make that prediction accurately, without checking every minute to see, “Are my bots full now”, we changed the formula for when bots will be full, and scheduled a notification based on that time.

The new regeneration is very similar to the old, but we predict you may get 1 or 2 more launches per hour. I’m hedging the formula towards more not fewer launches to make sure this is seen as a positive change.

As long as we are messing with the scope, let’s talk about the Bot Regen Accelerator. Hard core players have pointed out that players who launch on a timer, always hitting the “optimal” launch interval, don’t gain any advantage when purchasing this $0.99 upgrade. In the new release this upgrade will reduce your overheat level by 1 level and you will never be in maximum overheat due to deploying bots. The impact of the upgrade will be noticeable by everyone with this change. The name of this upgrade will probably change to “Scope Coolant” or “Heat Diffuser”. Send me your name ideas.

Subscriptions, Ads and Elite Players

This is a change that probably won’t be in the next release, but it is something I’m thinking about before the end of the year. Apple has had a bug in their subscription logic for years. If you purchase a subscription on an iPhone, then get a new iPhone, you need to cancel the subscription in the App Store, then renew from your new phone. Apple keeps charging you, but the new device can’t see the subscription, so QONQR doesn’t know you are a subscriber. Why wouldn’t Apple fix this? Well Apple only takes half the percentage of a subscription after the first year. By making you start a new subscription, they can double their cut of the money you pay QONQR for the subscription. Another problem with subscriptions is that they result in many support requests because they honestly aren’t 100% reliable in either Apple or Google’s implementation.

Many people know that earlier in the year, Apple introduced a change to advertising that blocks tracking. This is great in theory, and I get it as a consumer that I don’t like to be tracked, but this tracker blocking also blocks my ability to make any revenue on advertising. Why would I continue to give away free advertising?

Elite players are those that have spent over $100 in QONQR over the life of their gaming experience. Over the years the benefits of being “Elite” have dwindled. Features have changed, and incentives have ended. I’d like to invest more time and energy to build features for players that continue to support QONQR but I think it makes more sense to lower the bar and make the benefits for “active” spenders.

With these three things in mind, there is a chance that QONQR will move to a monthly “pass” option rather than a subscription. There seems to be a trend with games, where players buy a monthly pass that offers benefits, rather than using subscriptions. Subscriptions are buggy and in the case of Apple, a shady business practice.

The same benefits available to subscribers would remain under the “pass”, but you would have to explicitly purchase the pass each month. Secondary missions may move to the “pass” model with non-pass players getting only a handful of secondary missions per month. Ads would be completely removed from the app in this scenario since they no longer generate much revenue.

What’s in the Plans for 2022?

If you have read my blog over the years, you know that Apple and Google make it harder and harder to stop cheating (primarily multi-scoping). It is being reported that Windows 11 will have the ability to run Android apps. I don’t know yet how that will impact QONQR, but I’m guessing it won’t be good. At best it will have no impact because I’ll be able to stop QONQR from running on Windows, at worst it could be a nightmare.

March 2022 will mark the 10 year anniversary QONQR hit the Apple App Store. I can say with a high level of confidence that QONQR is now the longest running location-based, multi-platform, mobile game.

Personally, I think 2022 needs to be a transformational year for QONQR. I’m not sure we can survive if the game doesn’t change. Apple, Google, and Microsoft have never cared about supporting mobile developers. Outrageous fees and abusive rules (recently acknowledged by the US Congress) have been part of the ecosystem from the start. There are dozens of apps that you can download from the official Google Play store that make it a simple tap to attempt to hack and manipulate an Android app, so players can do something the developer is attempting to prohibit. Once again Microsoft broke the tools I use to help secure the app from hackers, causing weeks of work to find a solution that would maintain the same level of security. Apple and Google both purposely hide information from developers that would help them ensure real people are using their apps instead of bots. They do this under the façade of privacy, but ignore simple solutions that could maintain privacy, while helping developers ensure the integrity of how their apps are used.

I’ve said for years, the only way to stop hackers and cheaters in QONQR is to make it irrelevant. That requires a major shift in gameplay. Together, you the players and me the developer, we need to decide if we want QONQR to have such a major shift. I don’t know what that shift would look like, but 2022 might be the year we figure it out.

2020 was a year of making sure QONQR can survive. Through tons of work that year, massive software rewrites and updates, I was able to cut the cost of hosting QONQR. Today the cost of hosting QONQR all year, matches what we spent in three months during 2019. So far 2021 has been a year of slow work toward significant improvements to the game, but without major strategic impact to your daily playing. I’ve taken my time to avoid burn out. I��m enjoying the pace of my current work week. It has been good for my family and me.

I’m not sure what 2022 will look like for QONQR yet, but I’m excited to try something new. Maybe we’ll break things, maybe we will create something ten times better than what we have had for the last decade. Time will tell. We’ll figure it out together.

Thanks for keeping the lights on.

-Scott (aka Silver)

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techtiger · 4 years ago

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The Role Of Voice Recognition Technology In AI And Machine Learning.

Speech recognition technology is something that has been dreamed of and worked on for many decades.

From the beep-bopping of R2-D2 in Star Wars to Samantha's dissatisfied but charming voice, science fiction writers have played a big role in shaping expectations and predictions about how speech recognition will be in our world...

However, for all advances in modern technology, voice control is a very sophisticated relationship.

It is felt to be historically helplessly clear and nothing but a novelty to simplify our lives. That is until we start to get more into the field of big data, intensive learning, machine learning, and AI technology. Similarly, text to speech is a technology similar to voice recognition that converts digital text into voice. Text to speech technology makes computer to read text aloud from the text document. There are many best free text to speech software that you can use to let your device read for you without looking at the text.

Voice Recognition: A Brief History

As with any technology, what we know today comes from nowhere, someone and someone else.

The first recorded attempt at speech recognition technology was in 1,000 AD. However, the tool that can answer direct questions “yes” or “no” comes back through development.

Although the experiment does not technically involve voice processing in any form, the idea behind it must be part of the foundation of speech recognition technology: the use of natural language as an input to speed up the action.

Centuries later, Bell Laboratories worked to develop "Audrey", which could detect vowel-speaking numbers 1-9.

Later, IBM developed a device that could detect and distinguish 16 spoken words.

These successes have greatly enhanced the dominance of technology companies focusing on speech-related technologies. The Department of Defense also wanted to join the action. Researchers are working steadily toward the goal of making machines more capable of comprehending and responding to our verbal commands.

The history of speech recognition technology is long and winding. However, today’s speech systems such as Google Voice, Amazon Alexa, Microsoft Cortana, and Apple’s Siri are not where they are today, there are no early pioneers.

Thanks to the integration of new technologies such as cloud-based processing and ongoing data collection projects, these speech systems have improved the ability to constantly hear and understand a wide variety of words, languages , and voices.

At this rate, the predictions of future writers are not as far-fetched as we might think.

The Voice Recognition Process: How Does It Work?

Around smartphones, smart cars, smart home appliances, voice assistants, and more, it's easy to know how speech recognition technology works.

Why?

Because it is easy to be misled by digital assistants. Speech recognition is still very complicated.

Think about how a child learns a language.

From day one, they hear the words used around them. Parents talk to their child, and even if the child does not respond, they perceive all kinds of sound signals; Noise, reflection, and pronunciation; Their brain designs and makes connections based on how their parents use their language.

Although it may seem difficult for humans to hear and understand, we train all our lives to develop this so-called natural ability.

Speech recognition technology essentially works the same way. Although humans have improved our process, we have yet to identify the best practices for computers. We must train them in the same way that our parents and teachers trained us. In addition, this type of training requires vision, research, and manpower.

These speech recognition systems take longer and more field data to complete; Thousands of languages, voices, and dialects need to be considered.

To say that we have not made progress; As of May 2017, Google's machine learning algorithm has now achieved a 95% word accuracy rate for the English language. This current rate is a limit to human accuracy, take care of yourself.

What is the best voice assistant?

So far, we have all heard and/or used speech recognition systems; They entered the technological ecosystem to become a means of communication between humans and technology.

Voice input is a more efficient form of computing, as Mary Meeker said in her annual Internet Trends report: Humans can speak an average of 150 words per minute, but can only type 40. Farewell texting and push buttons - we're so busy now bus.

What has become the dominant form of computing is that speech recognition is unbelievable. In addition to regional accents and speech impediments, background noise can make word recognition difficult. Not to mention multiple-voice input.

In other words, recognizing sounds alone is not enough.

These speech recognition systems must be able to distinguish between homophones (words that sound the same but mean something different), to distinguish proper names from separate words ("Tim Cook" is an individual, not merely a search request for a cook called Tim), and more.

Ultimately, speech recognition accuracy determines whether or not they become voice assistants. It certainly answers the question of which voice assistants are the best on the market right now; In terms of speech accuracy, innovation and usability, and compatibility with other smart systems.

Apple’s Siri

Apple's Siri was the first voice assistant launched by mainstream tech companies in 2011.

Since then, it has been integrated into all iPhones, iPods, Apple Watch, Homepod, Mac computers, and Apple TVs.

Through your phone, Siri is being used as a major user interface for automobiles and wireless AirPods earbuds in Apple's Carplay infotainment system.

With the release of Sirikit, a development tool that allows third-party companies to integrate with Siri and HomePod‌, Apple's initiative Intelligent Speaker (after the success of Amazon Echo and Google Home), voice assistant capabilities Become strong.

There is always Siri with you, whether on the road, at home or even literally on your body. This gives Apple a big advantage in terms of adoption.

Although Apple has a big head when it comes to Siri, many users are frustrated by the inability of the device to understand and execute voice commands.

Naturally, being as quick as possible means getting too many errors for a function that does not work as well as the function.

But, to this day Siri is notorious for misinterpreting voice orders, even by providing a list of nearby liquor stores to respond to requests for help with alcohol poisoning.

If you ask Siri to send you a text message or call on your behalf, it can be done easily. However, when it comes to communicating with third-party apps, Siri is slightly less powerful than its rivals, working with only six types of apps: ride-hailing and sharing; Message and call; Photo search; Payment; Fitness; And auto infotainment system.

Why?

Because Apple advises that "users should not use voice commands without human experience, and what can be done to ensure that Siri works well". Is ", Reuters reports.

Siri will open any ride service app on your iPhone and you can book on the go. Gives you options like traveling to the airport and ordering a car.

Focusing on the system capability of follow-up questions, language translation, and re-incorporation of Siri's voice into a more human-Esque will definitely help to iron out the voice assistant's user experience.

In addition, Apple controls its rivals by country in terms of availability and thus makes sense of the slang of a foreign accent. Siri is available in more than 30 countries and over 20 languages - and, in some cases, many different dialects.

By comparison, Google Home is only available in seven countries and can only speak four languages 'simply' (English, German, French and Japanese), although it does support multiple versions of some languages. Alexa, on the other hand, can only handle English (U.S. and U.K.) and German.

Amazon Alexa

Inside Amazon's smash-hit Amazon Echo smart speakers, as well as the newly released Echo Show (voice-controlled tablet) and Echo Spot (voice-controlled alarm clock), Alexa is one of the most popular voice assistants today.

While Apple focuses on areas where it has the capacity and expertise to meet its needs, Amazon does not impose such restrictions on Alexa.

Instead, a voice assistant with a lot of "skills" (the term for applications on your Echo Assist devices) will "get the reliable following, even if they make occasional mistakes and are easy to use." Will try harder ".

Although some users have set Alexa's word recognition rate as a shadow behind other voice platforms, the good news is that Alexa will adapt to your voice over time with those with your unique voice or dialect. The problem can also be solved.

In terms of skills, Amazon's Alexa Skill Kit (ASK) probably pushed Alexa into a bonafide platform. ASK allows third-party developers to create applications and tap into Alexa's power without local support.

With over 30,000 skills and growing, Alexa has integrated Siri, Google Voice, and Cortana in terms of third-party integration. With the incentive to "add voice to your big ideas and more customers" (not to mention the ability to build for free in the cloud, "no coding knowledge required"), it's no surprise that developers are putting content on the skills platform. To

While some may not be able to help draw parallels with Apple's Appstore, it's catching the attention of developers trying to keep content - any content - on their platform regardless of whether it's worthwhile or not.

Its integration with smart home devices such as cameras, door locks, entertainment systems, lighting, and thermostats is another big selling point for Alexa.

Lastly, give users complete control over their home whether they are in bed or on the move. With Amazon's Smart Home Skill API (another third-party developer tool similar to ASK), you'll be able to control devices connected to customers from millions of Alexa-enabled endpoints.

When you ask Siri to add something to your shopping list, she adds it to your shopping list - without actually buying for you. Alexa goes one step further though.

If you ask Alexa to re-order her debris bags, she will go through Amazon and order them. You can order millions of Amazon products without lifting a finger; Natural and unique ability to surpass Alexa's rivals.

Microsoft’s Cortana

Based on the artificially intelligent role of the 26th century in the Halo video game series, Cortana launched in 2014 as part of Windows Phone 8.1, the next major update to Microsoft's mobile operating system.

At the end of 2017, Microsoft announced that its speech recognition system had reached an error rate of 5.1%. It surpassed the 5.9% error rate reached by a team of researchers from Microsoft Artificial Intelligence and Research in October 2016 and keeps its accuracy on par with professional human transcription, with benefits such as the ability to hear text multiple times.

In this race, every inch is important; When Microsoft announced its 5.9% accuracy rate at the end of 2016, they were ahead of Google. However, the fastest-moving year surpasses Google - but only 0.2%.

While percentages and accuracy rates are important, Cortana distinguishes itself from other voice assistants based on real, human-assisted assistants.

Rival services dig into data from devices, your search history, cookie trails you left on the Internet. While this is often useful, it can also be annoying in the form of non-stop notifications or it can scare the smart system into knowing too much about you.

We all saw 2001: the mother of all sensitive computers, the HAL 9000, was murdered with her pale red-eye and soft-butter robot voice.

To prevent this, Microsoft spoke with several high-level personal assistants, all of whom found that they had notebooks with important information about the person they were looking at. It was this simple idea that prompted Microsoft to create a virtual "notebook" for Cortana that would store personal information and anything Cortana approved for viewing and use.

It's not a privacy control panel, but it's exactly what Cortana does and gives you a little more control over what's not accessible.

For example, if you are not comfortable with Cortana accessing your email, you can add or remove access to your notebook. Another special feature? Cortana always asks you if she stores any information in her notebook.

Microsoft has teamed up with Halo developers on visual themes as well as voice actress Jane Taylor for Cortana's voice. These elements bring Cortana to life and form the personality and emotion to a system that would not have happened without that cooperation. Cortana’s personality shines through in everyday use - along with funny reactions from her circuit boards.

In addition to Google Assistant and Google Search, Cortana is supported by Microsoft's Bing search engine. This allows Cortana to chew up the data needed to answer your burning questions.

And, like Amazon, Microsoft has come up with its own home smart speaker, the Invoque, which performs many of the functions of its rival devices. As soon as Microsoft hits the market there is another big advantage - Cortana is available on all Windows computers and mobiles running Windows 10.

Google Assistant

One of the most common responses to a question these days is "LMGTFY". In other words, "Google me".

This only makes sense when Google Assistant talks about answering (and understanding) any questions.

From asking to translate a phrase into another language, to change the number of butter columns to one cup, Google Assistant not only provides the correct answer but also provides some additional context and source information for the website This suggests that Google's powerful search technology supports it, perhaps with a surprising exception.

Although Amazon's Alexa was released two years ago (via the Echo introduction) than Google Home, Google has made significant progress in capturing Alexa in a very short period of time. Google Home was released in late 2016, and within a year, it had already established itself as Alexa's most meaningful rival.

By the end of 2017, Google had stated a 95% word accuracy rate for American English; Currently the highest of all voice-assistants. It turns out to have a word error rate of 4.9% - Google is the first in the group to fall below the 5% limit.

While some have tried to strike back at Amazon, Google has released several similar products for Amazon. For example, Google Home is reminiscent of Amazon's Echo and Amazon Echo Dot's Google Home Mini.

Recently, Google announced some new, important partnerships with Lenovo, LG, and Sony to launch a series of assistant-powered "smart displays" that will once again resemble Amazon's Echo Show.

Nuance’s Dragon Assistant and Dragon Naturally Speaking.

Although Nance did not come with a smart home speaker, their Dragon Assistant, and Dragon natural speech systems have been used as the backbone of speech recognition for other technology companies. "I need to be able to talk without touching my phone," said Vlad Sejonha, chief technology officer at Nance Communications. "It's constantly listening for trigger words and pop up the calendar or create a text message or browser where you want to navigate".

Nance's voice-recognition technology is largely centered around speech systems in the car; Embedded dictation capability and bringing interactive information to the car.

“Another development involves a deeper level of understanding,” says Nance’s lead solution architect John West.

West argues, "Here, the goal is not just to identify speech, but to gather meaning and purpose that enables voice-driven systems to respond intelligently, in a way that meets the needs of the user."

What is the best voice assistant?

Here's what we know

With over 400 million devices using Google Assistant, including Google Home speakers and Android phones, the company's voice assistant is now installed on more than 400 million computers and devices.

Similarly, Microsoft has officially stated that Windows 10 has 400 million active users; Exclude mobiles running a single system.

Since Amazon’s Alexa is only available on their Echo speakers, this number will definitely reduce the number of dwarves competing against Alexa.

On the other hand, with over 300 million iPhones worldwide by mid-2001, Siri took advantage of this space - not to mention the number of people who owned an Apple Watch, MacBook, or iPad.

With the support of millions of pre-existing users for the tech giants mentioned above, a simple software update is needed to integrate their post-voice assistants worldwide.

For example, people with Google's Pixel phones will be part of the Google Ecosystem. They are more likely to invest in Google Home Speaker, so they can get entangled with YouTube, Google Search, Google Maps, and more. Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft users are the same, without the least repetition of what ecosystem and what products they spend on.

It may depend on the use case.

After all, there is no one-size-fits-all winner when it comes to voice assistants.

If you like the Apple-consumer, Siri and its wide distribution across all Apple products will help you.

If you want to make your home a smart home, Alexa already has thousands of software and hardware integrations ready.

If you've been looking for a helper who can answer all your weird and amazing questions, Google Assistant's search engine will find the rest. If you want a little more control over what information your digital assistant has access to, Microsoft's Cortana has that functionality.

Collaboration that sets the bar high

The recently announced partnership between Microsoft and Amazon on August 30, 2017, is the real deal-breaker here.

This is correct. Alexa and Cortana are officially working together. Since both companies do not have popular smartphones (unlike Google and Apple), they have changed their assistants to suit their strengths.

Users can say "Alexa, Open Cortana" on their Echo devices and "Open Cortana, Alexa" on their Windows 10 devices.

Alexa customers will be able to remember Cortana's special features, such as booking meetings or accessing work calendars, picking flowers, or read your work email on your way home.

Similarly, Cortana customers can ask Alexa to control their smart home devices, shop on Amazon.com, and communicate with more than 30,000 skills built by third-party developers.

Therefore, in terms of voice-activation and digital assistants leading this new industry, Amazon definitely takes the cake.

The company not only supports the creation of other voice-activated technologies through their ASK and Smart Home APIs, but they are also the original inventors to create a smart home speaker with a smart home speaker and screen.

In other words, they are moving faster (and moving forward) than their rivals, all of which are new by continuing to share.

Speech Recognition in-Car

Voice-activated devices and digital voice assistants not only make things easier.

It’s also about safety - at least when it comes to speech recognition in the car.

Companies like Apple, Google, and Nance are completely changing the driver experience in their vehicles; Allows drivers to focus on the road with the intention of eliminating the distraction of looking down on their mobile phones while they drive.

Instead of texting while driving, you can now tell who to call your car to or which restaurant to navigate.

Instead of scrolling through Apple Music to find your favorite playlist, you can ask Siri to find and play it for you.

If your car is running low on fuel, your speech system will not only let you know if your car needs refueling but also point to the nearest fuel station and ask if you have any specific brands. Priority to this

Or you can be warned that the petrol station of your choice is too far to reach with the rest of the fuel.

As advantageous as it may seem in the ideal scenario, speech technology in a car is dangerous if applied before high-speed accuracy. The study found that voice-activated technology in cars actually causes a higher level of cognitive distraction. This is because it is as new as technology; Engineers are still working on software kinks.

But, as rate speech recognition technology and artificial intelligence are improving, we can’t stay behind the wheel in a few years.

Speech Recognition Apps and Devices

Voice assistants are making a big difference in our personal lives, according to a recent study by Voice Labs that 30% of respondents cite smart home devices as the main reason for investing in Amazon Echo or Google Home.

This next generation of 'communication' technology provides users with a way to use the clumsy remote control interface.

Therefore, it allows consumers to talk and communicate with their electronics as they further increase the ease of human use and reduce the barrier to access to technology products.

Engineers must work hard to create an abundance of voice-controlled devices that can integrate with the voice technology of leading digital assistants; From appliances and safety devices to thermostats and alarm systems.

Nest, for example, is a company that invests capital in the new voice-technology frontier. “Your smart home should not be dumb,” the company said.

With the Nest Thermostat, you can use the Amazon Echo to control the temperature in your home with simple voice commands. Or, pre-order the Nest Hello Video Doorbell and get the Google Home Mini at no cost when shipping. From alarm systems to smoke and carbon monoxide alarms, Nest Protect thinks, speaks, and warns your device.

Bringing these voice assistants to the office in future applications of speech recognition, beyond the home.

In late 2017, Amazon announced new voice-activated tools for the office, hoping that verbal commands such as "Alexa, Print My Spreadsheet" would extend to normal office tasks. Microsoft's Cortana has begun to handle some other office tasks, such as scheduling meetings, recording meeting minutes, and arranging travel.

Today, only a handful of high-ranking officials have their own personal assistants. With the introduction of AI digital assistants in the workplace, everyone can be one.

To access the company's financial data from last week to last year, please ask your Google Assistant to create a graph showing the year's increase in click-through rates - there are many uses for implementing Digital-Assistant in the workplace.

Think about it - just like electronic computers, voice can go manually through the files on your computer so that paper records can be easily changed shortly before.

Video Games with Voice Control

In these use cases, speech recognition techniques have been implemented with the aim of simplifying our lives, which is also evolving in other areas. Namely, in the gaming industry.

Creating video games is already exceptionally difficult.

Plots, gameplay, character development, customizable gear, lottery systems, worlds, etc. can take years to display properly. Not only that, the game can change and adapt based on the actions of each player.

Now, imagine adding another level to gaming with Speech Recognition technology.

Many companies that create this idea do so with the intention of making gaming more accessible to those who are visually and/or physically challenged, as well as immersing players further in the gameplay by launching another layer of integration.

Voice control can reduce the learning curve for beginners, with less emphasis on recognizing controls; The player can start talking immediately.

In other words: it can now be very challenging for game developers to collect hundreds (if not thousands) of voice data, speech technology integration, testing, and coding to keep their international audience.

However, despite all the goals that tech companies are shooting and overcoming challenges, there are already video games that believe the benefits outweigh the barriers.

Even mobile games and apps are now capable of using voice-activation in addition to the classic console and PC versions. Seaman, starring Leonard Nimoy as a sarcastic man-fish, debuted in the late 1990s, and Mass Effect 3, released in 2012, is just the latest example of speech technology in video games.

What is our history, where are we going?

Speech recognition has made major advances in the last decade; it's been 1,000 years in the voice technology market. Magic eight ball to today.

The intense level of competition we see among these tech giants in the industry and the growing trend of companies creating materials in space indicates that we still have a long way to go.

#voice recognition technology #voice recognition software #using speech recognition

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fuelcut · 5 years ago

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A thought experiment on Silicon Valley’s third era

[ read the tweetstorm if you’re in a rush]

June 19th marks the end of American slavery, July 4th American Independence and July 14th the storming of the Bastille. It’s also my 40th birthday, and I’m exploring what we can learn from the past to help navigate today’s struggles for racial justice and economic freedom.

1940-1980: “Atoms” and the military-industrial-labor complex

My dad arrived in the Bay Area in 1970-1971 to get his PhD at Berkeley - just as the area was being rebranded as Silicon Valley.

Free from the stifling hierarchy of the East, the Bay was America’s center for social, technical and institutional change. Black Panthers policed the police in Oakland, shiny BART trains crossed the Bay to SF where the Gay Rights movement was flourishing. My family tree waited a millennia for India to recognize intercaste marriage. My parents would see radical social change in America across every axis in a single generation. Bold leadership in the 60s expanded civil rights and embraced immigration. They (and I) benefited greatly from an economic and social foundation that had been laid over many decades.

Caterpillar Tractor - founded in the Bay Area - embodied the spirit of this era. It went from liberating France in WW2 to building a massive middle class, unionized labor force. Cat later moved its headquarters to Peoria, Illinois - because in this era, cities across the country - not just the coasts - had the ability to compete. Since WW2, America pursued an intentional strategy of geographically broad-based economic development - via highways, airline regulation and distributed national labs.

Caterpillar didn’t just give Peoria a chance, it also gave my dad a chance to put down roots in America by sponsoring his green card. There was no H1B limbo. The nexus of military, industry and labor unions brought immigrants, Women and Blacks into the workforce - with paid apprenticeships (not exorbitant higher education) and technically-focused community colleges paving the way for millions. My mom learned COBOL while her toddlers played in the back of class. Even Hunter’s Point in SF was vibrant during much of this period. (Of course, it was far from a halcyon era - the war machine had massive human cost globally and civil rights were far from evenly enforced in America.)

And while atoms reigned supreme during this era, the military and government patiently invested risk capital in advanced manufacturing, semiconductors and software/networking to prepare America for its future.

1980-2020: “Bits” and global capital, jackrocks and polarization

In 1980, Reagan was elected President - and I was born. This would also be the peak of private sector labor employment in the US and the beginning of global capital (and the multinational companies they backed) as the leading force in forging the social contract.

They promised us that countries with McDonald’s would never go to war with each other. Indeed the Berlin Wall fell, Asian laborers got jobs and Americans could buy cheap stuff at WalMart. Global capital (bits) put atoms inside shipping containers and sent them around the world - abstracting consumers from the manufacturing base.

The writing was on the wall for unions.

As a middle schooler, I saw Cat management and labor (UAW) locked into a multi-year strike over the future. The front line was not in a boardroom or on the picket line. It was neighborhoods, schools and community groups. I remember when a classmate whose dad was in the union talked about how folks in the factory were peeing on effigies of management - including my dad.

Naturally I knew which side I was on. Cat needed wage concessions and freedom to operate to be globally competitive. I’d read Akio Morita, TPS and Lee Iacocca. I worried about Japan Inc. eating our lunch (yes as a 12 year old!) UAW workers and families were much more grounded. They needed a livelihood and wanted certainty for their future.

---

War continued to wage into high school. We came home one day to find “jackrocks” outside of our driveway - a tool used in feudal Japan to thwart the advancing armies - horses, chariots - etc. of those in power. In <60 years, Caterpillar had gone from transforming America’s agrarian society to becoming the enemy of American workers. We had the GOP’s Contract with America (stored in my Trapper Keeper) and Clinton signing NAFTA within a couple years. Both parties supported global capital and global capital supported both parties. Maybe jackrocks worked better than voting?

Corporate America soon figured out that if your workers were in China, Mexico or the South, it’s harder for them to stick jack rocks in your driveway. If your kids go to private school or you live in a quasi-private suburb, they’ll be insulated from the wrath of the have-nots in heavily policed, declining urban centers. No peeing on your effigy or having your kid hear about it!

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After college, I became an analyst at Bain & Company. Once an auto parts company hired us to do a “portfolio review”. I meticulously compared the costs of building mirrors in Eastern Michigan or Malaysia - creating a zero defect Excel model. Guess which location won? The auto parts company - like Cat - had the freedom to choose where to put jobs.

But what freedom did the workers have? Marie Antoinette once said “let them eat cake”. The elites of our era now say “let them move”. Social capital is critical for folks navigating change. The educated elite take the portability of social capital (embedded in college degrees and iMessage threads) as a given.

But place and social capital are deeply intertwined especially if you’re poor or a minority. While the deep introspection elites once had during 2016 has now been paved over by new crises, we should never forget that there’s a cost to society of losing its manufacturing base and jobs. How do you model the costs of broken families, drug addiction and a polarized electorate in Excel?

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I grew disillusioned with management by spreadsheet. But I saw a bright spot on the horizon: tech. I remember opening my first iPod, getting 1000 songs in my pocket and believing that America had a shot at leading a new generation of consumer electronics when everyone a decade earlier had written us off in favor of the Japanese. Perhaps tech could bring jobs and prosperity back to the country? I wanted to be part of it.

So I moved to the Valley in 2004 and joined a VC fund. I saw how the VC funding model that Silicon Valley was built on incentivizes high-risk, high-leverage and massive-scale. It encourages companies to cherry-pick top-end talent (immigrants, marquee college grads) to build the differentiated bits. Pick the highest leverage point in the stack, outsource everything else - by building in China and/or pushing the last-mile to an ecosystem that you can control at arms length.

Tech companies could more than pay back the largely fixed costs of software / semiconductor design from the large and homogenous American market. This dynamic attracted massive amounts of private risk capital and enabled aggressive expansion abroad. This model didn’t work for everything (I got burned with cleantech) - but it worked amazingly well for broad swaths of enterprise software, consumer services and marketplaces. I saw how tech could be an incredible lever for wealth creation. But every visit back home to the Rust Belt made me wonder - wealth creation for whom?

---

2020+ - A thought experiment on institutional innovation and putting people first

July 14, 2020 - Q2 Earnings - CEO, MEGA TECH CORP - Hi everyone. These aren’t normal times. We’re not going to talk about our 10Q on this call. We’re here to talk about the next 10 years. So if you’re here for DAUs, ARR or CPC, you can drop off now. 

We’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the race, health and economic crises our country faces. Over the last few weeks, I’ve asked our exec team to leave their homes, their Zoom calls, their DoorDash deliveries - to join protests and explore our community through new eyes.

Race & Place: On Juneteenth, we biked from Sheraton Place to Hunters Point to Tanforan. We saw the real life impact of redlining, mass incarceration of Blacks and the lack of jobs from decades ago - and how our headquarters sustain - rather than disrupt - the region’s policies of de facto segregation. We also remembered how political demagogues once imprisoned our neighbors of Japanese descent. We see today how their rhetoric affects our Black neighbors and colleagues. What might it do tomorrow to folks without legal status in ag/service industries that California depends or the H1Bs we depend on? What does diversity & inclusion mean in this context?

Jobs: The next Friday we biked from SRI to PARC to Sunnyvale and Moffett Field. Our industry once dreamed of a bicycle for the mind and embraced technical education and apprenticeship as a path in the door for Women and Blacks. Meanwhile we’ve pushed vast swaths of work to contractors or platform-mediated transactions - making it harder to use up-skilling as a talent lever like manufacturing employers did in the last era. What’s the impact on income mobility? At what point will 40 million unemployed Americans affect our share prices and the stability of society?

Climate: On Independence Day, we biked on the Bay Trail past landfills, superfund sites and the 101 - alongside poor and minority neighborhoods with terrible health outcomes. We talked about the Bay Area weather forecast for 2060 “fire with a chance of flooding”. We passed abandoned railways and dreams of regional transport - the result of which is folks commuting hours each way from the central valley to work service jobs in our campuses. We wondered about the long run political consequences of isolating our employee base inside the WiFi confines of a private bus network. Where is the voting base to drive institutional change? How many axles or tires will our commuter buses need to keep them safe from jackrocks on the 101?

Health: Last week, we rode from the old Permanente cement quarry to 101 (built by the same cement workers.) We talked about how Kaiser - a private employer of low-skilled workers - internalized their healthcare needs, pursued disruptive innovation and faced fierce clashes with the medical establishment. We thought about how COVID is exposing the brittleness of our employee’s isolation inside a private insurance bubble. No one can be healthy in a pandemic without competent public health infrastructure. Meanwhile, the growing cost of private healthcare makes it harder for tech - let alone the rest of the country - to employ American workers across the wage spectrum - exacerbating job loss and instability.

And as we spoke with others, we saw how the issues that Silicon Valley faces are not unique to one metropolitan area or one industry. It just happens to be the ultimate archetype of Global Capitalism and de facto segregated American metros.

What we now see - more clearly than ever - is that our entire company, our entire industry, our entire Valley - is built on a flawed foundation.

We can no longer just focus on the magical software bits and hope someone else figures out racial equity, employment, climate and health. This is Joel Spolsky’s Law of Leaky Abstractions on the ultimate scale. The abstractions are failing - and we’re seeing bugs and unintended consequences all around us. And the more we invest to deal with one-off bugs, the more likely we are to calcify change and imprison ourselves inside a failing stack.

It’s like we decided to build the world’s notification service on Ruby on Rails - or building an iPhone competitor on Windows CE. Fail Whale everywhere. Unfortunately, America’s democratic institutions are in poor condition. They are struggling to deal with inequality let alone looming environmental disaster. A polarized electorate - particularly at the national level - leads to populism and makes it hard for these institutions to execute meaningful, long-term plans.

We talk a lot about speech, misinformation, fairness of targeted ads etc. But it’s becoming clear that UX, linear algebra/training data and monetization in our products is just the tip of the spear to address polarization. We believe polarization is a product of the underlying conditions of civil rights, education, health and climate debt that affect Americans differentially based on race, wealth, neighborhood and region. e.g. If we care about justice, how far does focusing on the fairness of employment ads get us in a world when many people lack the skills and negotiating power to secure a living wage?

So will today’s peaceful protests for racial justice expand into tomorrow’s revolution(s) for economic freedom? If you don’t think things are bad now, think about what happens when the stimulus checks run out. Take a look at the amount of debt in the public sector, use any imagination about COVID, work out what happens to their tax base / pension returns and consider the impact on public services, public servants and their votes. MMT better be a real thing. Maybe we didn’t start these fires, but that refrain won’t save us when the flames come our way.

We’re done debating why we need to act. It’s clear America needs our help. Let’s talk about how we’re going to rise to the occasion. Our mantra will be “internalize, innovate, institutionalize”.

First, we’re going to internalize our problems. I’m here to tell you that issues of racial and economic justice are not just moral issues but they’re financial issues. Racial debt, education debt, health debt, climate debt will hit us harder and harder each year. (By the way, revolution probably won’t be great for your DCF models.) So we’re going to recognize these off-balance sheet liabilities - which amount to a few hundred billion in the US alone over the next 10 years for a company at our scale.

Second, we’re going to innovate against these systemic problems - but our only shot at making progress is if we realign the entire company’s mission to address them. This is not about optics. This is not about philanthropy. This is not another bet. We’re putting all our chips behind one bet - America. It's the country that backed us in the first place, it's where most of our people are and most of our profits. The job for our existing products, platforms and cash flows will be to advance four areas: place / race, skilling / manufacturing, health / food and climate / mobility - starting in America. The board will measure me based on job creation and diversity. It should go without saying that we’re pausing dividends and buybacks for the foreseeable future. Every dollar will serve our mission. Every senior leader will need to sign up for our new mission - and those who choose to stay will receive a new, back-end loaded, 10 year vesting schedule. We want them focused on the long-term health of society - not the whims of Robinhood day traders or strengthening the moats of existing products. We will need to invent entirely new ways to operate and ship products. As Joel Spolsky said, “when you need to hire a programmer to do mostly VB programming, it’s not good enough to hire a VB programmer, because they will get completely stuck in tar every time the VB abstraction leaks”. We need engineers, designers and product managers that will look deep into the stack, confront the racial, job access, health and climate debts that our products, our companies and our communities are built on top of. This is not about CYA process to protect cash cows or throwing things over the fence to policy. We will need to innovate across technical, cultural and organizational lines. This requires deep understanding and curiosity. This will bring more scrutiny to our company - not less. Not everyone’s going to be on board - so for the next 12 months, we’re giving folks a one-time buyout if they want to leave.

Third, we can’t do any of this by ourselves. The problems are too big. Our role will be to provide enlightened risk capital (from our balance sheet or by re-vectoring operating spend) alongside R&D, product, platform leverage to help leaders and innovators pursue solutions in these areas. Of course we will work with our peers and the public sector wherever possible - buying/R&D consortia, public-private partnerships, trusts, etc. But the new era and landscape demands that we explore institutional models beyond global capital/startups, labor unions, NGOs or government. We need models that can more flexibly align people and purpose, that innovate on individualized vs. socialized risk/reward - and that ultimately help build and sustain local, social capital. It’s difficult to say what these will look like - but increasingly figuring this out will be existential for our core business too. Right now, it doesn’t matter if you’re designing the best cameras in Cupertino or the best way to see their snaps in Santa Monica - we’re all just building layers of an attention stack for global capital. Our Beijing competitors have figured this out. ByteDance is already eating our lunch. They’re using the same tech inputs as us - UX, ML and large-scale systems - which are now a commodity - but with vastly lower consequences for the content they show - creating a superior operating / scaling model. They’re not internalizing social or political cost.   What we need in this era is the accumulation stack - where each interaction builds social capital. This is not about global likes. This is about local respect. We’ll create competitive advantage when we build products that reach across race / economic lines to harness America’s amazing melting pot and do so in ways that build livelihoods / property rights for creators and stakeholders.

With this operating model in place, we’re committing to fundamental change in four areas:

Place & Race - We’re done with de facto segregation. Over the next 10 years, 100% of our jobs will be in diverse communities that embrace inclusive schooling, policing, housing and transit policies. (Starting tomorrow, we’re putting red lines on our maps around towns with exclusionary zoning.) This is not about privatizing cities or an HQ2-style play to extract concessions. This is about investing our risk capital and our reputation to innovate alongside government. How do we bring world-class education to neighborhoods with concentrated poverty? What is the future of digital/hybrid charter schooling? Unbundled, community-driven public safety? We’ll embrace “remote-first” as a means to this end. The Bay will become one physical node alongside others (e.g. Atlanta, DC, LA) creating an Interstate Knowledge System that develops diverse talent across the country. We’re going to coordinate our investment with leading peers - since after all, this isn’t about cost savings or cherry-picking. It’s about broadening our country’s economic base.

Skilling & Manufacturing - We will 10x the tech talent pool in 10 years - by inventing new apprenticeship models that bring women, minorities and the poor into the workforce. We’ll start with our existing contractor base, convert them to new employment models with expanded benefits and paths for upward mobility. Next, we will invent new productivity tools for all types of workers - from the front office to mobile work to call center - that brings the power of AI and programming to everyone. These will be deeply tied into new platforms for work designed from the bottom-up to build social and financial capital for individual workers and teams. Last, we’re going to manufacture most of our hardware products - from silicon all the way to systems - entirely in the US within 10 years. This will require massive investment, collaboration and innovation. It may require a revolution in robotics - but we will pursue this in a way that makes the American worker competitive - not a commodity to be automated away. If we’re successful, the dividends of our investment here will have massive spillover benefits to every other sector of manufacturing in the US - autos, etc. - including ones we have yet to dream up.

Health & Food - We’re not going to tolerate a two-class system for healthcare anymore. As we convert our contract workforce to new employment models, we’re going to have to innovate on the fundamental quality/cost paradigm across our benefit stack. This may feel like a step down but it will put us (and the rest of society if we’re successful) on a fundamentally better long-term trajectory. Food is part of Health, and we’re going to innovate there too. Free food for employees is not going to come back post-COVID. Instead, we’ll use our food infrastructure to bootstrap cooperatively-owned cloud kitchens. We’ll provide capital to former contractors - mostly Black and Hispanic - to invest and own these. We’ll build platforms to help them sell food to employees (partly subsidized), participate in new “food for health” programs and eventually disrupt the extractive labor practices we see across food, grocery and delivery.

Climate & Mobility - Lastly, we’ll be imposing a carbon tax on all aspects of our own operations - which we’ll use to “fund” innovation in this space - with a primary focus on job creation. This is an area where we’re going to be looking far beyond our four walls from the beginning. As a first step, we’re teaming up with Elon and Gavin Newsom to buy PG&E out of bankruptcy and restructure it as a 21st century “decentralized” utility. It will accelerate the electrification of mobility - financing networked batteries for buses, cars and bikes along with charging infrastructure - and leading a massive job creation program focused on energy efficiency. Speaking of mobility, private buses aren’t coming back after COVID. Instead, we’re teaming up with all of our peers to create a Bay-wide network of electric buses (with bundled e-bikes) that will service folks of all walks of life - including our own employee base. Oh and one more thing - we’re bringing together the world’s most advanced privacy/identity architecture and computational video/audio to bake public health infrastructure directly into the buses. For COVID and beyond. None of this is a substitute for competent, democratically accountable regional authorities. This is us investing risk capital on behalf of society - with the goal of empowering these authorities. Yes the New York Times will have a field day with this. Maybe in time they’ll leave their bubble, enter the real world, see the sorry state of their institutions - the behavioral health and infrastructure crises on their crumbling streets - and get on board. Until then, our job is to be patient longer than they can be inflammatory.

Open technology for global progress - While we have to prioritize America given the scale of problems, the intent is not to abandon the rest of the world or hold back it’s progress. We feel the opposite - that over the coming decades each country’s technology sectors will thrive. To get there, we will continue to invest patiently - hiring, training, partnering, investing and innovating - but with a clear north star to help each country develop local leaders in new areas. Long-term, we’ll continue to contribute open technology that others can build upon.

America should be the proverbial city on a hill for everyone - not a metaverse for the rich with the poor dying in the streets. We don’t have much time so we’re getting to work now. See you next quarter.

----

This call may be imaginary but none of this is sci-fi or requires MMT. What it requires is us to care. To act. Join me on bike rides to explore our past and discuss what tangible actions Silicon Valley’s leading companies can take in the coming quarters and years. Logistics here for rides on June 19, June 26, July 2 and July 10!

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ithinkthingsaboutstuff · 6 years ago

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Going Rogue:In Lock-Up With You

This is a fic series, that looks at the ecosystem of Arkham asylum, How the rogues interactions with one another and how therapy is or is not administered. The partnerships, the connections, the feud’s and the all the madness that rest inside the padded walls.

Going Rogue:

part 1: In Lock-Up With You.

The gates at Arkham always screech but not the squeaks you would usually find on an old rusted gate. The sounds that came from Arkham always have an element of dread, the gates here howled with more than scraping metal. Sounds so loud and so haunting like the screams of all who came before could not leave as their souls got stuck to the gate and are now forced to try and shake their way out. Arkham much like its gates is full of sounds that can’t leave, behind the bars hides monsters and underneath those monsters hide the shattered shells of men and women, or at least that’s what they say.

‘So, how are you feeling today Victor?’

The man or rather what is left of this man, rubs his thumb on the back of his left hand, the sound of scrapping ice accompanying the movement. The young doctor in front of him churning in her seat in both impatience and an effort to warm herself.

‘Feeling?’

His voice vibrated like a whispering echo bouncing off metal walls.

‘My feelings were frozen, along with my Nora.’

‘Yes, Nora, how is she?’

‘I do not know, no one will tell me, they just keep her away, behind glass, beyond my reach.’

‘I’m sure they are working hard to cure her.’

‘Oh, yes, they will try, and they will fail, as they have failed time and time again, but nothing any of them do, will ever be as much as I am willing to do to help my Nora. So, until they realise that, Nora and I will remain frozen together.’

The doctor shakes her pen across the page in front of her, the speed of which she wrote was a symptom of the cold icy room and her wish to move the session along as to not stay longer then she absolutely had to.

‘I see, we need to do more work on that, ok, how have you been in your cell, are you comfortable?’

‘I will not die in the night if that is what you mean, but your notion of comfort is something I have all but given up on.’

‘Now Dr Freeze that is a very defeated mind set, there is no need for hopelessness.’

The man looked at the doctor his eyes glassy and cold, his blue face veiled in white granite, his stare full of icy indifference.

‘It must be very simple to say that, when you are the one who is able to leave this place, able to feel the autumn breeze, able to feel the light of the sun on your cheek and the warm embrace of the one you love. Oh, no, Doctor it is not hopelessness I feel, or rather anything I feel that troubles me, It is what I no longer feel, what I no longer have, what I no longer can hold in arms, warmth that is forever out of my reach, that, Doctor, is what troubles me.’

The doctor shifts in her seat and looks at her notes and then to her watch. She then looks the man in his frosted eyes.

‘I think that’s as far as you and I are going to get today, I have to go see my other patient, now.’

She rushed through her words as she gathered her papers, uneasiness filled her but the tension did not faze the man before her as if it froze before it could reach him. He sat there, starring, waiting, as she left him there.

‘The young are so impatient, just as we once were, Nora.’

The doctor went into the hallway where the guards were standing shoulder to shoulder either side of the door, she then took off the large parka letting out a shiver as she did and placed it back on the hook that was next to the guards.

‘Chilly isn’t it?’

She said to the guard as she brushed some ice off the now hanging coat.

‘The room or the thing in it?’

He answered with a soft chuckle, she ignored his comment.

‘He just has such an icy shell, I feel I need a lot more time with him, but I have my other patient to see.’

‘Right, you got the laughy one next, good luck with that maniac.’

Before she could answer there was a loud commotion making its way up the hall.

‘Unbelievable, unacceptable, It was a lucky guess nothing more, you hear me, Batman, you have not out smarted me, you have only postponed your defeat at my hands, you hear me, you hear me.’

There he was, a big black shadow making its way silently down the hall, he was not an unfamiliar presence but always a commanding one. Darkness pulled into him swallowing light creating a thick blank void that surrounded him. He glided down the hall with a struggling man cladded in green.

‘Ngyma’s back,’

One of the guards sighed,

‘Yep, just can’t help himself,’

The other replied.

‘Ha, yeah, I mean the guy holds the record for breaking out of this place, he never gets caught and we don’t know how he keeps doing it. If he would just lay low and get out of the city, he would be sitting pretty on an island somewhere laughing it up, but no, got to poke the bat, ever damn time, It’s just getting sad.’

‘Crazy is as crazy dose huh, so who won the pool?’

‘I think Dan, he had two weeks,’

‘How much was it this time?’

‘About six hundred and two shift changes,’

The other man gave a long approving whistled in response.

‘Not bad.’

The Doctor thumbed her notes as The Bat dragged the other man down the hall, The Bat made everybody nervous, like you had to be on your best behaviour even if you were afraid of him, especially if you were afraid of him. The Bat would come and go, to drag somebody in or to drag something out of somebody. He got dear dreary Arkham to bend to his will, something she did not often do, but Arkham was always kind to those who knew how to speak to her, and The Bat always whispers just the right things.

As The Bat moved past the two men and the doctor, Edward Nygma still struggled in his grip, He had caught the prince of puzzles in the midst of a bank robbery or was it a museum heist or was it a city wide scavenger hunt, the truth is it does not matter as the point is never the physical goal but rather the thrill of the game. A game that Edward Nygma always wins, except when it comes to The Bat for The Bat never plays by the rules. Down the hall they stumble as they reach deeper into the asylum and the rooms became increasingly familiar, Edward started to slowdown and loosen with each step he knew that Arkham’s loving embrace was about to take him once again, so he did not fight it.

‘Oh, to be back home again, mind you Batman, having Arkham for a home is much like having a muse for a mother, you become weak at her magistery and awe at their beauty, but there is no warmth, no real love found here, just somewhere familiar to whittle away your mind, while you wait for the feeling of Jamais vu to creep in and take you.’

The Bat still dragged him silently through the halls, he had loosened his grip, nowhere near enough for a chance to escape him, but a bruise will not be left now that Edward has stopped fighting him.

‘Now don’t be like that Batman, you know how this goes by now, you drag me in, I stay for a while, I break out, you and me play a few games, you cheat I end up back in here, and round and round we go.’

‘I will find out how you keep escaping, Nygma,’

‘Oh, I’m sure you’ll try, but that my dear Batman is one of my many riddles you cannot solve. Speaking of which, how about another, I make two people out of one. What am I?’

‘A Mirror.’

‘Oh, I think Harvey might disagree with you on that one,’

Edward let out a smug laugh,

‘Oh, Batman, it’s too easy with you sometimes.’

As they reached the elevator that lead to the cells the guard standing there stepped forward,

‘I’ll take him from here Batman,’

Edward laughed,

‘Oh, why, is it because you want be to escape your arms this time, as opposed to just slipping away from your so-called watchful eye, hmm, Bolton.’

‘You’re not getting to me today Ngyma,’

Edward gave a sly grin.

‘Oh, no, would not dream of it, but you have it backwards, you can’t get me, that’s why you got pushed to elevator duty,’

‘You will not be leaving here again Nygma, you hear me, not happening, not one more god damn time. I can promise you that Batman.’

Bolton’s face turned to hard stone and The Bat said nothing as he passed Edward over to him.

‘Well, this is where we part ways Batman, its been fun, until next time, c'est la vie.’

The dark figure moved back down the hall as Bolton pulled Edward into the elevator.

‘Hey, Bolton, Hey, Bolton, Hey, Bolton, Hey,’

‘What, Now, Ngyma,’

‘I have no feet, no hands, no wings, but I climb to the sky. What am I?’

‘Not, playing, your games.’

‘Come on its an easy one, even you could get it.’

Silence.

‘No? well, I’ll just tell you, shall I, its Smoke, similar to the kind coming out of your ass, when you told Batman you can stop me getting out of here.’

Bolton then hit a button on the elevator making it come to a complete halt.

‘I don’t think I made myself clear,’

Bolton then grabbed Edward by the collar of his shirt.

‘You are not getting out of here again.’

‘What are you doing? Stop.’

Bolton then punched the other man in the face, Edward’s head hit the wall of the elevator as he slid to the ground. Bolton then winds back his leg and begin to kick the man on the ground, harder and faster with each one. Edward yelled out but no one could hear him and even if they did there was no guarantee anyone would come. Bolton’s foot began to stomp all over Edward body, Edward was not a stranger to a beating by his father, by his classmates and The Bat, but this was different. This time was the first time that Edward was not sure if he was going to walk away. As he knew his father was too much of a coward to murder him, that his classmates where all just children looking for an easy target and The Bat had his one rule, and if he were ever to break it, he would not waste it on him. But Bolton had a point to make and Edward was not sure how far he was willing to go to prove it, as Edward is also very familiar with the great length’s men are willing go to prove themselves. Bolton then grabbed the man by the collar and slammed him hard against the wall, so they were face to bloody face.

‘You aren’t leaving here again Nygma, but since you have trouble understanding that let me spell it out. If you think you can just walk out of here, I’ll break your legs. If you think you can crawl out of here, I’ll break your arms. If you think you can talk your way out of here, I’ll smash your skull. Do you get it now, you’re not leaving, as of right now you’re on lock-up, you and all the other freaks. You’ve all have had run of this place for too long, but not anymore, not anymore.’

Bolton then let go of Edward’s collar and restarted the elevator, Bolton then Grabbed Edward’s arm and held him upright. As the elevator opened again Bolton then guided Edward into the hall where a man was sitting at a desk.

‘Oh, Nygma’s back, guess I won the pool, huh.’

‘Yeah you sure did Dan,’

‘Batman really did a number on him today, hey Bolt’

Dan then looked Edward up and down with mild concern.

‘Actually, he might have overdone it this time, well, for Nygma anyway.’

‘I’ll throw him in his cell, you can send up a doctor later.’

Bolton then pulled Edward along. Edward was in a daze, fresh blood running down his face. His thoughts were not straight enough for him to voice them, he could only go along to whatever his new fate may be. Bolton dragged him along the cells. The cell block in Arkham was a maze and that’s not a colourful metaphor, after one of the many escapes and explosions it took all of Gotham’s wisdom to make this new cell block in Arkham to be designed as a maze so that anyone trying to get out would have one hell of a time trying to getting away. How effective that was remained to be seen but the doctors certainly had a hard time finding their patients.

As Edward carried his heavy footsteps and his heavy thoughts, Arkham began to sing to him with its chorus of bellowing screams and high pitch cry’s, along with the percussion of the bashing and clawing limbs desperately hitting and scraping at the walls. The symphony of the insane, the melody of monsters or the affirmation of animals whichever way you look at it Arkham held them tight in its embrace, cold and suffocating.

Bolton made it to the right cell, he then uncuffed the man he was holding and then held him by the scruff of his neck before throwing him into the cell. Edward landed face first on the ground, he laid there unmoving, hands by the side of his face, blood pooling at his top lip. Bolton stared down at him and mocked.

‘You’ll be fine, for now. As long you stay in lock-up.’

He then made his way down the hall whistling cheerfully as he did and smiled at his good work. For Arkham is a madhouse filled with monsters but not all the monsters here are behind cells.

to be continued

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villainessbian · 3 years ago

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"Look, I didn't mean to do it," I protested, emptying a fire extinguisher on the nearest, quickly suffocating, fire-themed hero. "Just how many guys who can fly, shoot ion beams, and punch through walls are actually vulnerable to bullets? I was mostly shooting to distract him but the guy had to catch it on an artery and bleed out."

My boss was not happy about the deal. Of course, he was in far greater danger than I. He designed himself a supervillain, and the kayfabe that the "Large Scale" community adheres to makes it clear that anyone who deals in supervillainy is expected to survive. Supervillains and superheroes, with or without magic bullshit superpowers - it's all a matter of scale, see - need a steady ecosystem of wrongdoers who don't fear for their lives and do-gooders who win more often than not.

In a word, situations don't escalate. Wrongdoers get a slap on the wrist and put in minimal security, heroes get fame and loads of money off of merchandising. If you start killing the villains then the heroes start getting called "supermurderers" or "übercops", and their job becomes that much harder. And since the villains are now terrified of being splattered by some space warper across half the continent if they step out of line, they all go work in construction or something. Good job clearing the heroes' reputation if the one thing that defines them - taking out "large scale" threats, if no one is going to make them.

No, the only times things have ever escalated in the current "metahuman meta", as I liked to view these political shows of playing cat-and-mouse on a society-wide level, was when someone on the villain side stepped over the line themself. And then it's pandemonium. A hero-killer villain is dead meat.

That said, I was never a villain. I was a henchwoman. I staffed the evil lair, did some data analysis, helped with planning some types of heists and provided the pragmatic unaugmented human approach that the typical megalomaniacal "I'm more of an ideas guy" villain will lack. Such as, we know you can phase through walls, but if you blow the wall up then no one can know it was you and we can be seven people bringing the cash in and/or fighting the guards. With guns, rather than showy energy rays. People flee from gunfight, energy rays attract the eye because you're making a light show. That kind of thing. What I'm getting at is that villains are paradigm-locked into maximising profit and stroking their own ego. Heroes are paradigm-locked into protecting their image and winning fights and stroking their own ego. Humans? We're focused on surviving the super brawls, explosions, and all, and thinking ahead so that we don't, you know, kick it. We need to adapt. Think fast. Plan. If you survive three months, you're likely to survive a year. If you survive two years, you're likely to survive four. I made six without a single scratch, because I was known for being able to think. And then I shot my gun at my boss' fucking arch-nemesis and this moron just leaned into it.

So now, the lair was being targeted by the fear, hate, and pent-up aggression of the entire hero community that knew this Algiz fellow, and my boss had never planned on needing to survive a caped goodie-two-shoes, much less to kill any number necessary for survival.

Once you know what you're looking for, though, it's pretty obvious how to take down most heroes. Elemental heroes depend on their elements, so you just need the rock to their scissors. Case in point: our good friends flameo, firesomething, and burnstuff, or whatever their names had been, extinguished and very much extinct. The plantmaster whose roots had dug into the lair, which proved to be an effective shield after we just poisoned her with Agent Orange and left the dead plant matter in place as an extra line of defence. Oh, and the water and lightning guys we just smashed together. That was kind of gruesome, but effective.

The powerhouses that can give and take a punch got the fire treatment. And bullets. Overkill is just the right amount of kill when you don't know what physiology you will face.

And all our clothes were now fully reflective mirrors. They could try to laser this, the self-righteous and overall righteous arseholes.

"Daphne, your methods certainly bring results, but I would very much prefer us all not to die," the boss complained. Of course he would. That's all he'd done ever since. Sigh.

"Well, I'm doing exactly what I need to do for that," I replied. "Every fucking hero that pops in here one way or another is either here to kill or get killed."

That third fire dude had really gotten close. I could actually smell the acrid scent of burnt hair.

Useful data: even with killer powers, some heroes are more powerful than others. this translates to them being harder to kill with the same tools.

More useful data: despite that, few heroes are really a huge risk if all their combat instincts were honed on non-lethal takedowns. that makes them all easier to defeat.

Even more useful data: almost every hero with a face snuffs it if that head is gone. whether it's a shotgun to the face or an anomalous fire that's snuffed doesn't matter.

"What the fuck are we going to do from now on? They all know I'm the villain who swore to destroy Algiz! They all know where my lair is! Either we leave, and we're vulnerable on the move, or we stay here until they kill us or get tired!"

He... made a surprisingly good point. For the past three days, I'd been focused only on repelling the invading forces in the short term. I hadn't been thinking about something much more important. I turned to him.

"You know, you're right. We need a change of plans, or they'll just keep coming until one side is dead, and the more we kill the bigger the target on us is. I need data."

"What data! Big shot heroes from the A-league are going to make time to get here and then we're toast!"

Important and useful data: so-called A-league heroes are nigh-undefeatable, let alone killable. You simply know when you face one, because the sheer pressure they can put on you is beyond all else. There was no one in our group who could survive such an encounter.

"Yes. We need to focus on evasion and survival at some point. That's why I need data, right now. I know more about the heroes' social dynamics and personal powers than anyone on-site. I need specs on you. Can you teleport?"I started quick-firing. "If so, how far? How fast? How powerful are your beams? How good are you at phasing? Can you keep it up indefinitely? Can you-"

"Hold on, hold on. Yes, I can teleport, but not far. It's just phasing in a direction. What was the rest?" he answered.

I went again, more slowly: "How far exactly? And how fast?"

"I can do maybe 4 metres. Takes me about two, three seconds to focus it. Useless."

"Damn. Phasing with no movement and energy beams are your main things then. If you can't do it quick, the power means nothing. How fast can you fire?"

"Half a second to fire, but the power is great. Why, once I even-"

"Not important right now. Powerful, that'll come in handy. How good are you at phasing?"

"I daresay I'm great at it. I can permeate through anything except the ground if I want to!"

"That'll make killing you hard. Can you bring someone else in phase mode? Leave them inside a wall?"

"No can do. Only small objects close to me."

"Fine. Can you cast it as a reflex? Phase through a bullet?"

Most useful data: all the data about heroes also applies pretty well to villains.

"No, it still takes a while to set in. About a second or so. Good for covert ops, not fighting."

"Good," I smiled. And shot him between the eyes.

And this is how I went from basic henchwoman to a supervillain nobody, to one of the most researched persons for belonging to a group of hero-killers, to one of the most famous heel-face turns into heroism, glory, and wealth of history, all within a week.

As I said, humans need to think fast and adapt.

As a villain henchman, the number 1 rule you’re always taught is to never outshine the boss. However, during a small bank heist, you accidentally kill your boss’ arch nemesis, and the legion of superheroes now see YOU as their ultimate threat.

#short fiction #writing prompts #villainess #epic win #girl power #something like that #I didn't make it lesbian this time #but I will next time I promise #writing prompt

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potterkane3-blog · 6 years ago

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Tron Wallet

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Consequently, we can certainly assume that no even more bridal party will be getting into the market right until on least January first 2020 when the Foundation�s lock-in period of time expires. Sun also introduced on Twitter that TRON have a or maybe burn off planned during Q1 connected with 2018, this will of course cure the going around supply and a rise in expression price should be believed as a result. TronWatch Wallet has passed this particular check. 5. THE TRON CREW & ROADMAP Often the TRON Team TRON have what exactly looks to be a very strong and well-rounded staff. As a project overview, i will giving each of our opinions in a good number of key online players and all of us recommend that readers check out the TRON website for more information on the team. First up will be Founder in addition to CEO Mr. bieber Sun; recently involved with Ripple while chief representative with regard to their Greater China Region, Sunlight seemed to be also the founder associated with Peiwo (A Chinese web 2 . 0 platform with over 10m users). They has also double already been listed because one of Forbes 25 under 30 (2015 plus 2017), showing the particular solid reputation he has inside of the business enterprise world. Chief Technology Officer Lucien Chen possesses a new large total of experience with a amount of first-tier internet firms while Product Supervisor Deuce Yu has extensive experience in the gaming industry, something which could be extremely beneficial to often the TRON project when they accomplish the latter stages regarding their map. A closing member we would want to highlight is Procedure Manager Charles Zhang; he is definitely the former co-founder in addition to COO regarding Beauty Place and also dished up seeing that Secretary-General of their Chicago , il branch. Charles offers a good burial container of business information away from crypto and provides been increased to provide lectures more than one particular 100 times by Peking University or college, highlighting how effectively recognized he or she is inside the company world. This TRON Plan Another standout aspect of often the TRON project is his or her extensive roadmap; a new detailed six-stage, ten 12 months plan. We all will highlight each step and their focus beneath. Exodus � August 2017 to be able to 12 , 2018 � Written content distribution platform Odyssey : Jan 2019 to July 2020 � Focus on monetary incentives in addition to content personal strength to stimulate growth. Superior Voyage : July 2020 to September 2021 ~ �Personal ICO� implementation : content designers will be able in order to produce their own tokens and sponsor their a ICO to be able to allow these people to produce more articles Apollo � August 2021 to March 2023 : Building the full decentralised forex trading platform for tokens Celebrity Travel � The spring 2023 to September 2025 ~ Building a decentralised gaming software to get end users to produce their own video games Everlasting � Sept. 2010 2025 to September 2027 � Customers will be able to help build their own gaming websites 6. PROVIDING POINTS Close ties Operating in an industry that will was worth $1. eight trillion in 2016, TRON are also able to boast a number regarding amazing partnerships already. By these kind of partnerships with businesses for example Baofeng, Peiwo together with Obie, TRON are able to provide their selves together with over 200 mil probable users already. Any time this specific is combined with typically the recently introduced project having game. junto de (TRON Dogs- Similar to Crypto Kitties), then the potential customer numbers are presently amazing for the system. A new part note surrounding this TRON Dogs project is usually that 2018 is the Chinese year with the puppy; this is rather insignificant but may well help to be able to drive uptake and is an extra point to think of. Chinese Endorsement Lately, the parent company connected with Peiwo APP (The first software package to host for the TRON platform) was seen as one of Beijing�s high-tech businesses of 2017. The National High-tech Enterprise is some sort of policy set by this Far east government to encourage the quick advancement of high-tech companies. There are usually strict standards to get inclusion. �After being integrated, firms will enjoy a new series of concessions in technology researching and development, tax reduction and employees policies so as to help enterprises devote more energy and ability to be able to separate research and progress and also to enhance their primary competitiveness. � � Tron Foundation�s Medium Page. Considering TronWatch Wallet Download in direction of cryptocurrency, this particular news is certainly somewhat surprising and is usually a good sign to the long-term potential of often the project. 7. BARRIERS TO SUCCESS Overambitious? There is definitely no question that is usually the incredibly focused job; TRON themselves high light eight distinct types of risks involved in the job and while some sort of twenty yr roadmap will probably be congratulated by many, you furthermore have to question chances of which reaching that objective with no few hiccups. 8. CURRENT CONTROVERSIES Copied Whitepaper? TRON recently came below fire following analysis associated with their whitepaper identified a large portion of this to get copied, almost message for word, from the IPFS and Filecoin whitepaper. The diagram below displays just simply how much was owing to have already been duplicated and even details deficiency of references. TRON Debate Sunlight responded in order to this by saying that typically the original Chinese version in their whitepaper featured a good number of references nonetheless since this choice variants (English, Korean etc) had been translated simply by volunteers, they had skipped a number of critical details as well like the references. This TRON Foundation as well published a good statement saying: �The design of TRON is based about it�s own personal system plus the realization involving unique codes, some codes of Ethreum were being used as guide, we didn�t note associated license, from now along we shall note the copyright laws ownership and promise this wil happen again. � Even though we are regarding course not throughout a good position to say everything with outright confidence, it is something that would be anxious people. TRON have considering that taken out all variants regarding the whitepaper from their website and have assured the release of a new whitepaper some moment soon. This is something we certainly look onward to browsing. Justin Sunlight Sells six Billion TRX? TRON likewise came beneath scrutiny recently if a post on Reddit so-called of which CEO Sun possessed distributed 6 billion TRX, this particular was proven not in order to become the case but would make some fear. The particular post highlighted a pocket which they believed to find yourself to Sunshine due to the high volume involving TRX, as well like the wallet also staying linked to a CryptoKitties bank account called �justinpets�. Often the budget in question experienced sold above 6 billion TRX regarding ETH over a three few days period of time. Even Litecoin founding father Steve Lee got involved, calling out Sun above this kind of on Twitter. Direct sun light would respond to the accusations on his personal Twitting profile by stating of which the budget in thought actually belongs to a private investor and market maker who buys in addition to sells TRX tokens to present liquidity. He also declared when it comes to any form of registration, he uses his China name of Yuchen, as opposed to Justin. Upon learning the reality, Charlie Lee would apologise and delete the tweets accusing Sun. While typically the job has certainly had some flaws, this show turned out to be a poorly researched accusations as opposed in order to anything untowards with TRON�s behalf. An case in point involving what many inside of crypto refer to as FUD. 9. WHERE TO BUY as well as STORE TRON BRIDAL PARTY Where you can Buy TRON Tokens In your opinion, the ideal exchange to buy TRON tokens from can be Binance; that is also on a number of smaller exchanges but also in our opinion Binance will give you the best prices and fluid. Where To Store TRON Bridal party TRON is an Ethereum-based symbol which means it can be safely kept with any ERC-20 appropriate wallets. Our favourite selection can be the Ledger Offline Finances. Our favourite option is definitely MyEtherWallet which you may obtain with the link beneath: Download Pocket HERE (MyEtherWallet) For guidelines on exactly how to download and mount MyEtherWallet, check out often the video under (not made by us). 10. TYPICALLY THE CRYPTOGURUS FINAL RESULT While there is no doubting the particular size of the TRON job, there are a new number of red flags who have arisen during the explore. We do maintain a small amount of TRON in all of our portfolio nevertheless this had been acquired in a good attempt to access the TRON platform. We anticipated this could allow us to give an possibly more comprehensive review although i was not able to access the podium eventually; potentially one more pink flag. We have been looking forward to reading the brand new whitepaper when it is usually released in the desire that it can minimize some of the worries people have round the project. If the project hits all of its targets it could become one particular of the biggest with the market but, since it stands, there usually are currently just way too a lot of questions around the job for us to think of a critical investment. On leading of this, the task is already priced really extremely in the market place � number tough luck � so the benefit possible is relatively small whenever compared to the substantial associated risk.

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