I mean, you theoretically still could have that, USB decks send MIDI signals (even though I found it a bit obtuse trying to get my FLX4 to control anything except VirtualDJ - I was trying to map it to grandMA lighting controls). The TUI here could be primarily a presentation layer. I think the main benefits would be a) more hackable than VirtualDJ and b) it looks cool.
I've been thinking about this story a lot lately. When giving away your agency gives strictly better results, should you? And if you shouldn't, do you really think you're strong enough to resist it?
Would you give away your agency to another human or human organization if they gave strictly better results? My guess is you value your own agency over your life more than that. It's your life to make mistakes and hopefully learn from (but that's up to you), not somebody else's to live for you.
I'm super excited about the Index. All the time, I feel like I go "oh, I need to buy this thing" or "I should message that person about this" but I'm in the middle of a task and then I forget. (Or I have to get out my phone or a notepad to write it down - the phone is distracting and the notepad needs to be synced manually later, which I won't do.) I think my main use case is probably going to be adding stuff to my grocery list while I'm cooking, but I'm also excited about the webhooks integrations - I can pipe my idle while-driving questions to an agent and read the report later, for example. Or maybe I'll connect it to home assistant - "It's cold, turn down the AC please" or "hey can you play some music" without having to break focus. If this all works alright, I'm thinking about figuring out audio-out, so I can ask "what's on my calendar for tomorrow" and get a verbal answer. (Or maybe, putting this+todo lists on e-ink displays in physical space.)
I think the reason this is so exciting to me is that it's a way to interact with technology that's a lot less "evil" feeling. I am at my best when I'm not looking at screens all day, and the index provides an off-ramp that can potentially move several common workflows off those screens. I think even on my technology-off days, using the ring would still be fine. It also looks cool, and speaking into a ring to make things happen is much more aesthetically pleasing to me than "ok google." I really think you can't discount the cool factor here.
they want to isolate gay and trans children from other gay and trans people. don't you know, there's social contagion afoot, but if we protect y^Wour children from this inherently sexual (and thus adult) content, we can prevent it. this is enough to make me oppose age verification wholesale. I don't care if there's fancy ZKPs, it's still going to be used to isolate and harm hundreds of thousands of vulnerable trans kids, who are already experiencing astronomically elevated suicide rates over the past few years. they don't need more of this.
In Denver, they'll be expanding once they have budget. Also as soon as Axon finishes developing their integrations with civilian cameras into their Fusus product. They've also got natural-language queries in the pipeline ("find red trucks near here"), and they already have integration with the hundreds of existing non-ALPR LEO cameras. It's not better.
It's different. The primary harms of flock come from their horizontal integration into a nationwide surveillance network, working with ICE etc. Axon (formerly Taser) has strong vertical integration, which is new and we haven't thought through as much yet. (This is the position of city councilmember Sarah Parady, who's been part of a working group to research+draft ordinances about surveillance technology, and whose speech at the meeting voting on the contract I really respected. I think it's available online.)
The Axon contract is smaller than the Flock one, 50 cameras instead of >100, but that's because it's all they could get budget for, and they want to expand. DPD owns the data and is theoretically not supposed to share it with federal agencies, but there are lots of legal ways to make them comply. They're setting a 21-day retention period for data that's not part of an ongoing investigation, but I think that's missing the point, and it's not codified into law. The Axon cameras can be switched into a mode where DPD can view live feeds. Most of the contract provisions that the mayor's office added because of significant public outcry I would call "token." They're not addressing the real issues, and it's still contributing heavily to the development of the surveillance state.
Overall, it's an improvement, in the sense that breaking your leg is better than breaking both your legs. But don't get me wrong, they're coming for the other one as soon as they can.
Hi, I'm in Denver. They're already doing this over on Colfax. It's a significant change vs the existing halo cameras, because they use the drones to follow people.
We have ceded too much ground in this debate. When I say "trans women are women" I mean that, ontologically, it is really true that trans women are a subcategory of the general class "women."
Like you say, we are searching for outliers. We don't cut women that are too strong or too tall. We shouldn't cut out women that happen to be trans. If all the top levels of women's sport end up dominated by trans athletes (something I don't see occurring, and that isn't supported by the data), then good, outliers found. We love to see women succeed.
(To avoid perverse incentives, though, the HRT requirement is critical. Otherwise you have trans women having to choose between being more competitive and receiving necessary medical care.)
>(To avoid perverse incentives, though, the HRT requirement is critical. Otherwise you have trans women having to choose between being more competitive and receiving necessary medical care.)
This is incoherent as an argument. It conditions the category on checking off boxes on a medical treatment list. I hope it's not necessary to explain why this is absurd.
> There is a category called woman, it’s defined by something that’s identify related.
But that’s not how it’s defined. People have been using that word in every language humans ever invented for thousands of years to mean biological female. If you want to argue that there is something else that isn’t biological sex and you want to invent a word for it, go nuts, but “woman” is already defined. Words can and do change definitions over time, of course. If it’s your contention that the definition by consensus has already changed, say so, but there are billions of people on this earth who haven’t got the message, which seems odd for something determined by consensus of the people who use language.
Putting that aside, since sports are about physicality and accomplishing things in the real world, it makes no sense to base them on “identity” - something that cannot be detected or defined by anyone but the self identifier - rather they should be based on physical aspects of reality.
I’m not defending this definition, but I will point out that gender has never been about the chromosomes you were born with. It has been about how people around you perceived you and people often have overly simplistic ideas about exactly what that meant.
Plus it’s totally normal for words to have more technical detail than they first appeared. The idea of a sex binary doesn’t fully exist so we’d need something to deal with that anyway.
I personally support segregation based on hormones as the fairest option available. Otherwise if you use purely a genetic test there are plenty of women with high t levels without an sry gene and no one disputes that high t levels confer a biological advantage in many sports
Going even further back, gender denoted, originally, a linguistical construct associated with sex but not strictly dependent on it, as seen on romance languages like Spanish, Portuguese, etc. [1] There, words have their own gender and, sometimes, the gender of the word and the sex/social gender of the subject may disagree. Ex.: "ant" in Spanish is "hormiga", but this noun is exclusively feminine with no masculine form.
> It has been about how people around you perceived you and people often have overly simplistic ideas about exactly what that meant.
I don't know any culture which defined gender by how you dress and how long your hair is rather than what is between your legs. You would be called a girly boy or a boyish girl.
So girly and boyish is how you are perceived, girl and boy is your sex, that is how almost every culture defined it through all time.
>except that to remove perverse incentives it’s reasonable to require hrt
"I took a drug, therefore I am now a woman" is not a reasonable position to hold. The debate starts out with one based on an identity, and then in the very next formulation reduces that identity to which medicines you take.
No, but that’s not what the statement is saying. It’s arguing that we should add the minimum restrictions we can to the women’s sports category and that hormones might be a reasonable one
This started out with a claim that “trans women are women full stop”, which implies that there’s no difference in the categories, and has since retreated to “in order for trans women to compete as women, they have to take these medicines”.
This implies that males who identify as women but do not undergo HRT are not women in the context of sports (and their gender in other contexts remains ill defined, especially in the absence of perverse incentive). This is a form of misgendering, which is what we were trying to avoid in the first place.
This is a position that one could take up, but it comes
at a steep cost. It holds the societal acceptance of
transgenderism hostage to a biological account of
sex-gender. This is problematic for several reasons.
Moreover, it is worth highlighting the problems with
suggesting that sex, as biologically based, determines
the gender with which one psychologically identifies
[...] Second, whatever criterion is offered to ground
this similarity would inevitably disqualify many women,
for not all women share the same hormone levels,
reproductive capacity, gonadal structure, genital
makeup, and so on. (Tuvel 2017)
Again I don’t take it be saying that. It’s saying that encouraging women to be forced to be in emotional distress to succeed at sport is problematic so we should require hrt so that elite sport doesn’t require trans women to skip hrt
Such a common pattern, I'm tired of seeing it. "That's not what it's saying, those words actually mean..." again and again, ad infinitum. A perverse form of moving the goalposts. Your reply has no relation whatsoever to what was previously stated, it is a new argument entirely.
> It’s saying that encouraging women to be forced to be in emotional distress to succeed at sport is problematic
This was never said by anyone until you came along with that comment, which is a totally different idea (effectively a non sequitur). Can you quote who echoed the same argument?
I said "Sports should only be segregated by this <gender identity> category, except that to remove perverse incentives it’s reasonable to require hrt"
That was trying to elaborate on citruscomputing's argument where they said "Otherwise you have trans women having to choose between being more competitive and receiving necessary medical care."
I'm rephrasing those two points. Apologies if I initially described that badly, but I'm just restating the perverse incentive they were talking about
> When I say "trans women are women" I mean that, ontologically, it is really true that trans women are a subcategory of the general class "women."
I must now insist on pinning you to a particular philosophical position and indeed a citation, to avoid motte-and-bailey fallacies where, once your current stance is found nonviable, the definitions of words are, or the entire argument structure itself is, swapped around and re-defined post-hoc, such that "tails I win, heads you lose."
Axioms must be seen through to their conclusions, not accepted halfway and then abandoned for some other set of assumptions the instant you start running into paradoxes. You cannot simultaneously use ZFC and the New Foundations (without Choice); the system must remain internally consistent and coherent, there is no mixing and matching.
Ontology is found to be a subdiscipline of metaphysics (Wikipedia). Quoting Talia Mae Bettcher, a feminist gender theory professor:
“transsexual claims to belong to a sex do not appear to be metaphysically
justified: they are claims that self-identities ought to be definitive in
terms of the question of sex membership and gendered treatment. They are
therefore political in nature” (Bettcher 2014, 387).
I am not sure, since this article uses sex and gender in senses that are entirely inverse to the common ones in 2026. How do you define those terms?
In particular, the 2026 senses are that sex is an immutable biological characteristic based on karyotype and gametes; gender is a social construct, and this is why it can be "transitioned."
The cited article nonetheless uses the archaic terminology "transsexual" to refer to what we today know as "transgender."
Now you see the linguistic ambiguity we are mired in? Can you clarify?
If we’re going to take an ontological approach, is there a stable non-tautological definition of “woman” that admits your definition of the subcategory?
