EFreethought

To paraphrase a line in the Bible: Are the bots here for the benefit of man, or is man here for the benefit of the bots?

A lot (if not most) bitcoiners think they are smarter than all the non-bitcoiners.

Do you object to that?

Is there a way to do that in WordPress on a shared host?

I do not like it either.

I have a blog that admittedly does not get much traffic, and I have started to add random words after each paragraph. The background is white, and these words are white, so they are invisible to most people. Maybe it is not that effective, but it makes me feel better.

I am sure there are some Emacs modes or plugins for other editors that could go back and forth between this and the more commonly-seen style.

There is a good chance that if the hostages had been released before election day that Carter would have won.

Hamilton Jordan, his chief of staff, wrote a book about Carter's last year in office. A lot of people thought Reagan was a clown. He was not as popular as his worshippers in the GOP like to think. Reagan was usually ahead of Carter in polls before the election, but usually by a few points, not the same margin as the final count.

The hostage crisis started on Nov 4, 1979; the one year anniversary of the hostages being taken was right on election day. A lot of media was running stories on the hostages in the week leading up to the election, particularly over the weekend. Jordan says there was a shift that took them all by surprise in its speed and magnitude. When you spend months only a point or two behind, it is easy to think you might win.

> reflected more what people wanted to happen rather than what was likely.

I think that is true of most predictions.

Some people say that when you leave Huntsville you enter Alabama.

Granted, it is still a red state.

There are a couple of sentences in "Dune" about this:

"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."

Granted, most of us are not choosing this.

Personally I think that buybacks should be illegal like they were before the 1980s.

Companies should focus more on their nominal products/services and spend less time playing games with money.

For a lot of companies, you cannot actually vote against a board member. You can either vote for them, or withhold your vote.

Totally OT: But thank you for using old.reddit.com. I find the new reddit interface to be terrible.

Reading some of Marshall Brain's work was always on my ever-expanding to-do list.

This is even better than that: "Libertarians" getting rich on government contracts to run surveillance for governments.

I run a couple of WP instances on a shared hosting service (not WPEngine), and honestly I have no need for the admin news feed. If I knew how to turn it off I would.

That is a weird thing to get upset about.

> Your friends deserve better.

Maybe they don't.

I am guessing you have never met someone who actually did like "Atlas Shrugged".

The fact is, some people deserve harsh judgement. Including people who lie to someone and think they are morally superior for doing so.

A lot of writing from that era strikes me as convoluted. I wonder what English teachers today think of it.

25% efficiency gain, but you have to burn the planet to do it.

Is it worth it?

Honestly, I am shocked Altman has made it as far as he has and lasted this long.

He comes across to me as very creepy and unsettling in interviews. I cannot imagine he is any better in person. How anybody can talk to someone like that for more than a minute is beyond me.

I watched some of the videos on their YouTube playlist about blockchain and crypto, and while there was some good information, there was not a lot of interaction. The hosts just seemed to read from a list of questions, and they did not seem to have any follow-up questions.

He mentions the post is from a written exchange, perhaps an email thread. Perhaps he just used the subject as the title.

PG's essays really have two topics: the nominal topic, and that PG is really really smart.

Sometimes I get the same impressions about PG as I do about Derek Sivers' essays: sometimes they are insightful, and sometimes I think they were the inspirations for the /r/IAmVerySmart subreddit.

Maybe that comment got downvoted because it has no truth.

Drinkers cling to their own delusions about non-drinkers.

And nothing about my life is "secret". It's just not your concern.

If you are going to be a zealot, at least be a zealot for something useful.

It is amazing to me how many people do not write things down. It's like everybody wants to turn every job into a contest to see who can spin the most plates in their head.

That second one is a two-column PDF file.

The only think I hate more than a PDF file on the web is a two-column PDF file. At least with one-column you can just scroll in one direction.

If accepting a job offer from Richard Nixon doesn't sink you, then nothing will.

This is surprising.

But it might not be as pro-crypto as crypto-boosters think. Crypto was supposed to replace orgs like Visa. Now Visa is co-opting crypto.

It's criminal to leave people in underdeveloped countries at the whims of criminals.

I have a lot of trouble when I use the search on archive.is, even if I use different DNS providers.

One trick that might help: I have found if I use a bookmarked page from archive.is, I can get to that. From there I can put in the original URL in the "Saved from" bar, and hit "Search", then I can usually get to an archive of the article.