PhilosAccnting

I like to think that most of the valuable information is generally unnoticed. Most of the things I make are very valuable to the people who want it, but any one of those things are pretty useless to the majority of people who would find it.

A huge part of the phenomenon comes through how fashions form. Hype collects around emotionally-charged things. By their very nature, their spectacle is compromising some of the sincerity and value to maximize reach. The spotlight is power, and power corrupts.

HN is a perfect example of this: looks like a chat forum from 1998, but is very much current and edgy with the cool kids.

Whenever I hear "algorithm" anymore, I see it as the "statistics" of the past. This entire thing is a product of math washing[1].

[1]https://www.mathwashing.com/

I'm still trying to differentiate the difference between Western and American culture. As a general rule, the content that floats here about the rest of the world is either extremely stereotyped or with a severe agenda attached.

To the end of that, I believe almost everything in your last paragraph, with some clarifications as an American:

- Americans are highly ethnocentric relative to the rest of the world. It's because this country is the size of Europe, and its relative newness has made very little variance between, say, Kansas and Wyoming as opposed to, say, France and Germany. Thousands of years of horse-drawn travel have crafted your country's culture, while most of this country has had steam power, especially when you head westward. - The actual meaning of "Western Society", at least as I defaulted to using it, is to draw a political dichotomy to "Other Societies". Frankly, I think elements of all cultures are useful, but this two-party system over here removes any sense of subtlety to the dialogue. - I believe that protecting innocence is a losing bet, so I personally give my kids all the information as much as possible. To most Americans, that's offensive because they believe I'm somehow scarring them.

[1]https://gainedin.site/culture

I'm absolutely convinced that censorship takes one of two forms:

1. Cut out things, overstepping and taking some of the best that humanity has to offer. 2. Avoid cutting out things, leaving many people offended for a wide variety of possible reasons.

The reason I believe Lolita is being questioned is because the pendulum has swung too far toward Type 1. The entire idea of a free society, though, is predicated on lots more Type 2.

Thus, I believe Western society is unsustainable as it stands. We'll either see much more censorship in the coming years, or a company/government will face such a huge public backlash on their censoring that the trend reverses course.

I'm comforted by history. Shopped photos don't mean we distrust photos entirely, but we're now generally "herd immune" to silly things in a photo because we all know that it came from somebody's edits.

This will hold true for deepfakes. It means that we might start judging the character of a person, their surrounding information (e.g., who they know who vouches for them) instead of the core information itself. It'll be a bit like how cybersecurity involves trusting the trust of trustworthy sources: not perfect, but doable.

As a trend-resistant individual, this entire discussion is ridiculous. While I'm white as the plowed snow, my wife is distinctly black.

Whatever injustices that happened have, for the most part, been committed by long-dead people. The concept of "ancestral guilt" is mostly a social fashion for people to maintain their lifestyles without their status quo being disrupted.

I believe this is a fashion that's moving to pivot back again, based on my metamodel of trends[1]. This may take months or years, depending on the culture, but at some point the practical use cases of judging others by what's in their minds will outpace even bothering what skin color someone is.

Though, I must concede, this fashion of demanding reparation-driven political action has gone on for decades in many black communities, so it'll probably only change when their community leaders start forgiving stuff and moving on[2] without getting ostracized by their community[3].

[1]https://gainedin.site/trends/

[2]https://adequate.life/happiness-2/

[3]https://gainedin.site/taboos/

Why so much fatalism? From what I understand, this seems like a one-off situation, and could swing back into full restoration once the urchins die off from starvation.

If nature is anything, it's most certainly resilient! Mt. Saint Helens erupting caused more pollution than the entire industrial revolution combined, and a year of worldwide lockdown cleared up metric shedloads of air pollution.

Why trust what so-called experts say about 20 years out when their models suck for the next few years?

A huge part of this depends on your philosophical axioms about the inherent morality of individuals. Are people default-good or default-bad?

Frankly, this view is the major divide between conservative and liberal. And, it'll directly affect all practical implementations such as giving everyone free money. It's also profoundly philosophical in questioning the essence of the soul, so most people like to get unphilosophically political (which is like trying to make software without knowing a language).

Totally okay, though I added the PDFs/videos to gitignore. I'm mildly paranoid about IPs[1]!

[1]https://gainedin.site/ip/

I love this! It really embodies the concept of "emergent order". From our birth onward, we perceive the environment around us, observe patterns, then build them, and the entire thing is absolutely stunning even with the most ridiculous constraints imaginable.

I have a massive learning project[1], and I think 2/3 of my "to get through as soon as sensible" content is news.ycombinator links.

Needless to say, this site is my own personal StackOverflow, and I think there's something about ingratitude bouncing around in my mind somewhere.

[1]https://github.com/PhilosAccounting/ts-learning

I entirely agree, but HN is filled with ASD savants, so what would you expect? It's not precisely correct, and affirmations about known facts are largely a neurotypical thing.

NOTE: I'm ASD, so please don't call it my "NT privilege"!

A joke I like to say is that a true geek will hear about the President caught in a sex scandal and will obsess about the fact that it was because the password was easy to guess.

One thing that tends to offend most tech people I come across:

Data is not the basis of existence. Math itself is nothing but a derived value construct our minds play tricks with. 3 apples is a value system in the mind as we see it, not innately as it sits there.

Thus, when people say "I want data", they are saying to me, "I want a majority thought based on an abstraction of information (math)." You certainly didn't when you (and me and everyone else) were foraging for a nipple/bottle!

I'm still hashing out the details, but essentially cybersecurity has one major flaw: nothing is immaculate.

At least the way I see it, good CySec is creating a chain of dependent constraints (e.g., password-protect a file, which uses a password stored in another file, encrypted with a password, etc.). Wherever that chain comes out is the "entry-point". A password you forgot is as bad as deleting one of the links in the chain.

Thus, there's no perfect solution, and cybersecurity professionals make a lot of money on the ensuing fear from that.

I would love for someone more well-versed to correct me on this, but I remember reading a decade ago about how the Roman priesthood (the calendar-keepers) would fudge with the dates to conform to their political desires, ranging from 200-500 days at the most extreme.

The fact that we can consolidate this down to only disagreeing on how to set our hours is what I'd call progress![1]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_calendars

I'm probably speaking _way_ out of my league here, but I imagine it's somehow spoofable, kinda like how you can generate fake MACs or IPs, so why not? One terrifying/beautiful element of tech is that where there's a will there's a way!

Even if this was shopped, the illusion was correct, meaning the sailors' tall tales from a few hundred years ago weren't quite so tall.

I mean, mermaids ≡ dolphins, so ghost ship ≡ floating ship.

It doesn't help that game dev (IMO) is literally the most difficult software development possible:

- massive front-end visual dev, both static and animation, that often require logistics and endless fiddling to get it just right - hefty back-end dev, especially when dealing with massive latency questions (e.g., MMOs) and calculations (e.g., 4X strat) - audio design that must sync with graphical elements - on top of all that, higher standards for input syncing to video output than almost any other type of app

...and then overworked and crunch-time to top it all. I'm amazed that we're even getting finished games these days now that devs can sell a near-playable v0.6 as "Early Access"!

I'm sure I'm not the only one who noticed the trend from that graph. We seem to be floating steady at ~50% now.

I don't mean to be cynical, but what do you think would bump the current trend into overdrive? My only estimation would be to make gamers actually want Linux over Win10, and my limited experience tells me that the word still scares normal gamers.

Yes, but self-made NAS is always an option, and in this case I'd almost say an ideal for when the balance of trust leans away from unnamed organizations holding your information.

While that's true, I tend to imagine it like a horde of mosquitoes, a bit like Paul Graham's idea[1], but applicable to social trends. I wrote a whole essay on trend movement that leads me to believe the pendulum is close to swinging.[2]

[1] https://observer.com/2011/06/paul-graham-outlines-the-mosqui... (and he also has an essay that I was too lazy to find about startups) [2]https://gainedin.site/trends

Thank you. It's probably a stupid question. I've been hearing about it a bit, and if it's fashionable it must be good, right? ;)

I'm sure most of you have observed this, but there's a game theory answer to the question of trust: https://ncase.me/trust/

In practice, distrusting is a matter of worrying about the minority. If you lock anything, you're worried about 1% or 0.1%, maybe less, who will legitimately do something bad. But, the consequences are so heavy that people apply that distrust to everyone.

I built a map that tried capturing all the programming languages. It's about 700-1000 of them.

https://github.com/PhilosAccounting/langmap

My reasoning is that there's plenty of looking forward, but lots of rework from not observing history. The map is an ambitious attempt to capture everything. It's amazing how arcane some stuff gets in 40 short years!

I'm also rather discouraged about how much work it's taking given my present technical acumen, so anyone is free to hijack all my data and make something better than I can.

The issue, I sincerely believe, is a form of justice that goes beyond "eye for an eye". I call it "face for an eye": a beatdown in response to a sucker punch.

The cause, frankly, comes from severe psychological trauma that breaks sensible thinking [1]. But, it's no excuse.

The solution? I believe it requires making people more moral, thus making them more just. How to do that is, effectively, something I believe is beyond the scope of my understanding.

[1] http://gainedin.site/ptsd/

As a former suicide-considering person (never attempted), I sincerely believe it's worth separating the action from the desire.

We get all sorts of desires. The mind is full of inactive, dormant code. But, when we get one of them, then entertain it long enough, and the environment is just right, people most certainly will do horrible things, including killing themselves and others.

I'm not implying that it's all programmable, but more that decisions are the consequence of many variables after the initial temptation.

That question could be rephrased as "how much entropy should a system have?"

Specifically, I refer to "chaos/evil" as a type of entropy. It's a perversion of virtue. We live in a world system that always seems to have self-interest in there somewhere, but self-interest taken to extremes becomes evil.

So, "Freedom v2.2" is a system that allows for some entropy to motivate independent decisions that affect the public good (e.g., an entrepreneur), but are also punitive toward the public bad (e.g., child porn).

The real battle here that becomes political is the quantity and scope of controls. Generally, in the USA, the Republicans are presently leaning away from more controls and the Democrats toward it. The voter decides based on whether they think the system is self-correcting.

Or, to put another way, the entire essence of free information is either a self-correcting negative feedback loop (like the stock market) or a holy-crap-let's-stop-this-train-before-we-all-die positive feedback loop (like a horrifically dysfunctional family).

How do you go about decentralizing it? I'm fairly new to the industry and have career aspirations in this direction, so please fix what I'm missing:

1. Build out a good FOSS alternative.

2. Market the snot out of it until the unteched masses use it.

3. ??? open a foundation with that niche's leaders, or something?

4. FOSS is the new normal for that niche.

(edited for line breaks)

I don't think anyone's debating your claim. It's a fascinating point of view, and reflects closely to the conveyed image of the matter.

What people are disputing, though, is more closely tied to the story. Right now, many people see NYT and WaPo as NYPost-likes regarding their journalistic rigor.

If it feels like Windows and runs like Windows, but has a different-ish UI, people will treat it like it's Windows-esque even if it's Linux.

AXIOM: Inherent bias will always prevail, proportional to self-interest.

CONCLUSION: In this case, we know there's self-interest involved. Who, what, where, and why is relatively unknown to us, the pseudo-washed masses, so we must resort to our preconceived views.

And, naturally, FB/Twitter make good money on all these preconceived views, so there's something recursive here.