I will never reveal the Wu-Tang secret

i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3

unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it

i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map

i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs

this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.

crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.

by glass_museum on tiktok

Everbody wants third spaces until a homeless guy shows up. Now theres a lot of talk about third spaces for a reason. We need places to form community beyond just home and work, but that begs the question of who gets to be a part of our communities? You want more parks, more libraries but then you complain when these public infrastructures are, well public.

For the unhoused the importance of public spaces isn't just a matter of wanting somewhere to chill with friends it's a matter of existence and freedom. In his landmark essay "homelessness and the issue of freedom," Jeremy Waldron argues that the freedoms of the poor are dispraportionately restricted under the law since their material conditions coerce them into a state in which they must choose between survival and the violation of the law. He writes that freedom exists for the homeless "only to the extent that our society is communist."

Now before your redscare ass starts to hemmorage over the C-word let me explain, but first let's define our terms. Specifically let's distinguish between postive freedoms and negative freedoms. While postive freedom is the capacity to act according to ones free will, negative freedom is the capacity to act free from the coercion of others.

So things like loitering laws [and] public indecency violations though they apply to the rich and poor alike, they apply disproportionatly to those who posses no private property of their own and thus who exist solely in the collective space, and so while a homeless person may posses the positive freedom to, say, physically lay down in a park, they have their negative freedom restricted since they'll be forcebly removed for doing so, because of the regulations placed on public spaces that prohibit certain actions that are typically relegated to the private, like sleeping, pissing, showering.

All these actions are natural and necessary, and yet theyre prohibited in the public space. And this limitation is no problem for owners of private property, since the public is conceived of as being complementary to the private.

However, as Waldron notes, "This complementarity works only for those who have the benefit of both sorts of places" so if youre homeless you're stuck in a situation where you're forced to violate the law in order to survive, because in order to exist, one needs somewhere they can exist.

There's oftentimes a contradiction with how people consider the homeless if they even consider them at all, people don't want them pissing in the streets, but they also don't want them pissing in the Mcdonald's bathroom. People don't want encampments, but they also oppose the construction of affordable public housing.

There seems to be a desire for increased public life, but only a certain kind of public.