SoylentNews

A quick and dirty voting script has been developed for use in Soylent IRC.

Voting syntax for users identified with NickServ is:
~vote <poll_id> <option>

More info on how to use it can be found here:
http://sylnt.us/vote

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http://sylnt.us/exec

Wow, moderated troll for some honest comments. I was really hoping to see a smaller community like SN somehow work a better more honest moderation system, but what I am are seeing and being subject to is the same old game in a smaller pond, can we not better control ourselves ? It hardly seems worth the effort needed to develop 'another' so-called community if it going to end up the in the same place and straits as the one we left. I always browse at raw -1 because every so often I find good stuff posted by AC's who can't or won't login but I've become disillusioned and am questioning my desire to wade through the muck at "another" site to arrive in the same place still covered in FSCK'n crap...

  http://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=4521&cid=109411

It was a dark and stormy night.

There was a sexual harasser on the loose.

Somebody who had been learning programming well told her mentor that she was a feminist.

A few hundred miles away there was a great guy who had dated over 20 different women that year alone and was rejected every time and was still a virgin. His married sister had sex on his couch with a man who was not her husband.

In the nearby city of Pine Rapids, Iowa, a frustrated trans woman reached her limit of reading about the drivel womyn-born-womyn publish about fields they don't understand. Maybe it was gamergate that made her crack, or maybe it was systemd.

In Derry, Maine, her estranged sister, who had begun living as a man, Maxfield Stanton, three years ago, was accused the day before yesterday of sexually assaulting a mutual friend of a man he had started to develop feelings for.

-=-

Don't worry. I'll tie this all together in scene 24.

I've scrambled my password and email on the green site. I had to use Chrome under Windows! Midori on BodhiLinux wouldn't work! Good riddance to that site.

I've made an account on the blue site just to reserve this username, but I can't figure out how to scramble it quite yet. Maybe I'm just too confused at life at the moment.

I'm now scrambling my password and email here.

It's not you; it's me.

This has been the year from hell, and it's not over yet.

Clearly my knowledge about feminism, or at least those who call themselves feminists, is about 15 years old. Some of it may still be true to a certain degree, but I feel I no longer know what the movement is and my comments earlier today were probably putting blame on the wrong people. Thus, I'm as guilty as the feminists of 15 years ago for what they did to me.

Given enough time, everything changes.

I may be returning, but not with this UID. You won't need to hear any more trans-this cis-that from me, hopefully. I understand that may no longer be an issue for the feminists, so it's no longer an issue for me.

Yet, I'm clearly triggered on a level that indicates PTSD just by the word feminism. I'll be seeking treatment. Things will change, one way or another. Either I end up in a gutter or I get well and go on to die when I'm 90. Either way, the cycle of death and rebirth continues, and afterwards I'll be somebody even more strange who won't even remember being here as gamers and male programmers come under increasing fire for all that we can guess are ulterior motives.

There's a new-age movement of the future for you: mediums who help people trawl through old message boards from the first quarter of the 21st century to attempt to find their previous life.

It's been great.

Goodbye

There is now a feed set up in the #github channel on SoylentNews IRC for reporting push, pull and issue events for SoylentNews/slashcode, and push events for some other SN user and staff repos.

The feed works by querying GitHub API URLs every 15 minutes.

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http://sylnt.us/exec

moved nick tracking inside bot process cos i was having all sorts of grief trying to make it work the way i wanted in a separate script. seems to work pretty smoothly now, and i don't need to worry about pausing/unpausing the socket reader.

starting fidgeting with irciv again now that i got some reliable generic authentication features. trying to consolidate all actions into a single alias and get player authentication back up.

event response is a bit more readily available to scripts with event handler registration. the bot keeps track of command/handler pairs in an encoded bucket, and on various events the register is queried and any handlers that exist are executed. this opens up possibility to have the bot trigger a script on an event without using the exec.txt file, and as the register is a bucket it can also be edited from within irc. will have to think about what sort of security risks this might pose, but ability to manually edit buckets is limited to privileged users so not overly worried. irciv will register event handlers on startup to manage player tracking, which was formerly done in cmd.php (eventually want to remove cmd.php, to be replaced with registered event handlers in startup.php). some templates are supported in event handlers; %%nick%%, %%trailing%%, %command%% and %%params%%, which are replaced with actual values when the handled event occurs

a little SN funding feed has been enabled. polls home page slashbox every 15 mins. message appears in #soylent if funding amount increases

comment feed has been changed to use simpler xml feed and only top 20 articles are scraped, as i found the latter 30 articles never got that many comments (assuming probably cos they fall off the SN front page). /join #comments

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http://sylnt.us/exec
https://github.com/crutchy-/exec-irc-bot

•Build a more uniformed sense of community throughout the site - Can you actually build a community, it will either form or not based on the quality of those attracted to the place. I would have purchased a sub by now but I refuse to use Pay-Pal, when some other viable option becomes a available I will likely do so, but the intent to build sounds far to structured to hold my interest.

•If possible, try and reach out to other not-for-profit journalist organizations for advice and guidance - Why if possible ? you seem to be over complicating things, just ask for suggestions in an article and send an email to the sites or organizations that seem to be in a place you want to be.

•Identify people who may be willing to work in a journalistic capacity with us - Simply set-up a mechanism for submission of stories and advert that you are accepting such. There are literally thousands upon thousands of people seeking a platform to publish their views, or make local newsworthy events more public. Allow them to submit and then be voted upon for further use, i.e. front-page views. Making sure to credit them for their content and posts. Already stated is the premise that everyone is responsible for their own opinions and views and that SN claims no ownership or responsibility for said items.

Maybe I am oversimplifying things but I do consider myself a rational anarchist and the more control/guidance you seek, the less appealing the place seems to me. More to follow as I have time or develop the desire...

A rigid notion of determinism turns it into a mechanical folly and inverts the importance away from higher functions and towards the lowest detectable causal events, it creates a world in which ultimately the smallest and most remote causal interactions are given disproportionate amounts of importance even though such interactions are constantly changing at speeds far faster than the results they are supposed to have deterministically forced into being. With such an outlook it wouldn't be “turtles all the way down” but instead “turtles all the way up”.

By analogy of a computer program the importance according to such determinism is given to the bits flipping between zero and one rather than the higher structures ruling their behavior.

Such determinism remains technically true but becomes devoid of meaning, comprehension, and value[¹], and thus also without importance.

Instead for any given end result determinism acts as a negative feedback loop in relation to its own importance when given enough complexity: a robot operating its algorithms on the basis of what might as well be an infinite number of ever-changing, causal, and mutually connected variables cannot remain a robot, it is forced into random output and/or the beginnings of intelligence where it chooses which output to give and later also chooses the reason why it is supposed to be the correct output or why a different output is more correct.

Hmm, googly eyes or Einstein afro? It makes sense to me…

(Also ¹ looks like a nice explanation of why “pop” determinism and nihilism so often end up as best friends.)

(And another tangential: if it was possible I wonder what an inverse square type of law would look like for each causal step in determinism, the fact that it rained yesterday has no discernible impact on me writing this journal entry (but now it has and thus two points were made rather than one: one about determinism and one about indirect Wittgensteinian word games).)

The focus of this post was really meant to be the part at the end that I made bold.

To me it makes one or two connections in a way that I haven't seen before (and I know about system complexity and emergence and such). In some way it feels a bit more direct and explanatory tying in a correct understanding/evaluation of determinism as well as (possibly the most basic) evolutionary pressure/fitness challenge. In this way it gets very hands on and mucky (conceptually, and also conceptually reducing the challenge of creating intelligence to that of triggering such a first move and then escalating it). Has anyone seen anything similar elsewhere?

P.S. Yet another tangential: a different kind of amusing folly, more entertaining than determinism but maybe not all that different after all?

exec now has a basic nick tracking script that hooks the join, nick, quit, kick, part and 353 events. this feature is similar but nowhere near as complete as xchat's (or $insert_client_here's) user list.

it has lead to the addition of internal stdout commands for retrieving a space-delimited listing of bucket indexes, and commands for pausing and unpausing the processing of irc data, to prevent corruption of bucket data that might occur due to multiple processes triggered by irc events trying to read/write to the same bucket(s) simultaneously.

http://sylnt.us/exec#Buckets

nick tracking enables scripts to find out what nicks are in a given channel or what channels a given nick are in. currently only channels shared with the bot are tracked, but with additional event hooks (such as a whois 319 numeric) additional channel info can be tracked.

with proposed addition of whois account querying (330 numeric) by the user tracking script, other scripts will be able to authenticate instructions with a simple function call.

the irciv script was originally designed with player authentication using the 330 nickserv account numeric. however it was messy, with irciv-specific code sprinkled throughout the main event handling script (cmd.php). the generalized tracking system will give all scripts access to the same user data via a small set of lib functions.

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http://sylnt.us/exec
https://github.com/crutchy-/exec-irc-bot

For a few months now, aqu4bot's Windows support has been broken. Compilation would fail because nonblocking sockets were not properly doable in Windows the way it was intended. I was using the same network core I use on the IRC protocol to download HTTP.

It worked, except when it hung. This affected mainly the $title command. So I added the nonblocking, which was necessary, but this broke all Windows support. I was reluctant in using libcurl because although I love libcurl, I only had two commands for aqu4 that used HTTP. That was $ddg and $title.

The good news is libcurl is VERY portable and works well under Windows. So needless to say aqu4bot's Net_GetHTTP() function was removed in favor of a new CurlCore_GetHTTP().

There is now a hard dependency on libcurl, but that's fine I suppose, since I now have my precious and arguably useless Windows support once more.
To celebrate, I created a new icon for aqu4bot that is used as the icon for the Windows executable: http://universe2.us/collector/aqu4bot.png

There's still a small issue with $time, as Windows does not have zoneinfo so I can't set the timezone properly, but everything else appears to work!

if you're chatting away on soylent irc (irc.sylnt.us) check out #comments for a SoylentNews comment feed

the feed is based on the last 50 articles in the atom feed, and is updated every half hour

also highlights score 5 comments

examples:

<exec> *** new comment: Anonymous Coward (Score:0) "Microsoft Defies US Court Order, Will Not Give-up Emails" - http://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=3678&cid=88065 (parent: http://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=3678&cid=87969)

<exec> *** score 5 comment: Anonymous Coward for article "Microsoft Defies US Court Order, Will Not Give-up Emails" - http://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=3678&cid=87971

proposed features include opt-in personalized feeds (to pm) with score threshold and other settings

suggestions/criticism/feedback/etc is always welcome

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https://github.com/crutchy-/exec-irc-bot/blob/master/scripts/comment_feed.php