__blockcipher__

Indeed. Being able to lose your source of income for posting something that contradicts the mainstream narrative counts as vulnerability in my book. I wanted to post a few examples of potential comments that would very plausibly get one removed from one's job, but that might risk becoming trollbait etc, so I won't give specific examples and just trust that we all have a decent pulse of the kinds of things that you can't say publicly without risk of losing employment or some other punishment.

Indeed, if someone can post their more-or-less unfiltered thoughts on a big social media platform like Facebook, Twitter, etc without ever getting banned, that's a great indication that that person is not part of a "vulnerable" faction, at least in the sense of being part of a counterculture.

So - I guess I'll risk giving one example - if you post a gross exagerration of the risks of SARS-CoV-2 with respect to death or serious illness, or recklessly speculate that recovery from infection does not produce immunity, you're allowed to do that as much as you want. But express the opposite opinion (even if you're literally echoing WHO recommendations such as [far too late] lockdowns being too blunt an instrument or that immunity passports shouldn't be a thing), and you'll be quickly suspended or banned with only a vague reference to "community guidelines".

And then of course you have the irony of platforms like Parler and Gab, which arise in large part due to the phenomenon of deplatforming voices of (primarily) a certain side, and then the mainstream will turn around and criticize these platforms for having a lot of "extremists" or supposed "crazy people", despite the fact that by definition such a platform is going to be populated by those who got booted explicitly or implicitly from the mainstream systems. As a further irony, it's commonly said that "nobody is preventing your ability to speak, you're just not allowed to speak on [insert platform]", and then when you go to that other platform that permits largely unrestricted speech, that platform is yanked from AWS and there's tons of news headlines about how they shouldn't be allowed to platform voice X or faction Y, etc.

So...yeah, the dismissive "how dare you declare these people vulnerable" is very naive and myopic IMO. I think we all know more or less what the current zeitgeist is and roughly what happens when you run afoul of it, and it's not pretty.

I hope I made something close to a coherent point there, I was mostly going stream of consciousness mode :)

Yes this is a great point, you can wipe out your "gains so far" but you can't really get deeply into the negative.

Thanks for that nuance

I’m not endorsing the idea of prison time, but the short answer is: yes, of course there’s room, assuming we’re talking about C-suite level executives and maybe 1 or 2 hops below. That’s just a handful of potential prisoners and would be quite manageable.

Oh god, I’d wager you just described 1000 different real real estate newsletters:P

My biggest pet peeve is these “real estate investors” who don’t understand investing in any serious way and so falsely misrepresent renting out a property as “passive income” (how laughable) and list their “investment returns” without any noting of the massive leverage it took to get those returns.

If you buy a house with 5% down and the housing market goes up 50% in 5 years you’re not an investment genius, you just took a risky highly leveraged bet and it paid off (and housing bets at least in America do tend to pay off thanks to the insanity of central-bank-attributable rock bottom interest rates as well as the essentially propagandistic way that Americans are taught to think about real estate)

So not sure if I have a coherent point here but I wish people would (a) actually adjust for inflation when telling their “I bought at X and sold at the 1.5x 4 years later” stories and (b) would also show some awareness of how insanely leveraged people often are on their houses.

Sorry for the late response but reproduction is literally the “reason” we exist. So from your genes’ perspective yes sexual reproductive organs are the most important.

The COVID-19 link is very plausible btw, inhaled NO has been researched as a COVID-19 therapy. (It just happens that that’s one of the less interesting benefits / effects of nose breathing)

I have to imagine that these days putting some silly link to COVID-19 makes it easier to publish, at least based off the increase of incredibly poor quality papers I’ve seen published : P

I think one way to put it is that normies don't like a visible reminder of what the service/organization knows about them, but are otherwise perfectly content to not care about how the sausage is made. (Which is understandable since naturally a non-tech person isn't going to have a good mental model of what cookies, HTTP requests, tracking pixels etc are)

In other words, you can track the normies all you want as long as your app doesn't do something "creepy" that reveals how much it really does know about them

Being opposed to something that is literally proven to actually happen is "tech-elite/libertarian mindset and borders on paranoia"? I don't understand your point of view at all, frankly.

It's okay to say that you personally don't believe in a right to privacy or don't believe that it's an issue to vacuum up the data of own's own citizens, etc, but what I don't understand is saying that other people are paranoid elitists if they hold the view that they think it's wrong to spy on citizens. It seems incredibly uncharitable.

Furthermore your comment reads like you're addressing an argument the GP never made. What's the relevance of this section:

> Does the average voter care enough to vote one way or other for it? I would suspect not.. they have bigger problems to deal with and they seem ok with government knowing something about them.

The GP never insinuated that the average voter cares about such things (indeed by mentioning that the HN userbase does that implies that the general population does not otherwise it would not be worth mentioning)

Some people just need a little acute upregulation of neuroplasticity to break out of their funk. For others it's a much deeper and more entangled and multi-dimensional problem.

But just to agree with you, not everybody needs a heroic dose, and as the name implies, it's a dose where there is the possibility of stuff going very wrong - but one of the morals of psychedelics, (and indeed life itself because reality is "the strongest tab I never took"), is that you have to get to that place of completely surrendering and offering yourself up in order for you to be really transformed.

And the funny thing is so many of us go into our trips with the idea that we're taking it to improve our lives, and then when you're actually deep in the peak of the trip and you've got a whole universe inside of you suddenly you realize not just how unprepared you really were but more accurately, how fundamentally incapable of being prepared for the experience we really are)

Thanks for sharing. I've never taken more than 3.5g of mushrooms, so not heroic, but even as little as 3g was enough for really profound life changes. 2g was just a fun experience and not much more. I've only done shrooms a handful of times but I think they're the best for actual transformative insight, whereas LSD (which I've done probably 30 times not counting microdosing) for me is much more just about the visual/aesthetic/kinesthetic/energetic experience.

I've done breakthrough doses of DMT many times however. Fun fact, go look at DMT and psilocybin molecules side-by-side, they are nearly identical (https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/N_N-Dimethyltrypta... versus https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/psilocybine). The key difference being that DMT can be inhaled whereas psilocybin can't, so you can get blasted into hyperspace and be back to normal in 20 minutes. I've gotten the more basic fractals and symbols written in the sand and faces in the clouds type effects on LSD/shrooms, but a proper dose of DMT brought me to this level you describe (and probably a little past):

> unexplainable things, fractal patterns and music, and explored a Interstellar(2014)-like tesseract where I could choose any place in time to return to

(minus the choose any place in time to return, although the general concept was similar since I was experiencing hyperdimensional objects and just as you can conceive of a cube as an infinite amount of 2d sheets of paper, so too can, say, a 5D space be viewed as an infinite amount of 4dimensional manifolds stuck together)

> I re-experienced my forgotten birth and felt the pain of my circumcision

Very interested in this experience. I won't go down the rabbithole too much but I'm in the (long) process of foreskin restoration, and definitely think that strapping a newborn to a table and (mostly) irreversibly damaging their most important organ is going to send out shockwaves of suffering that last not just your own lifetime but of course like all pain continues propagating forward through our children, etc. Anyway, all that aside, I'm wondering how much reading you'd done into circumcision and its effects before taking that trip. What I'm getting at is in psychology it's considered pretty well accepted that we can falsely re-experience memories, and so just curious what your "priors" were going into the experience. In other words, had you never thought about your circumcision (except superficially), and then had this forgotten birth / re-experienced trauma of circumcision experience, or do you think your subconscious was already "loaded up" with negative attitudes towards it, and this was just a sort of visceral expression/manifestation of that? (To be clear, even if the memory itself was a false memory, the trauma itself, whether it's just the more basic "pain sensitizes you to further pain" effect that's well studied or rather the more complicated self-propagating effects of the actual feeling of complete terror and helplessness that we must have felt as a baby and carried through spacetime, is clearly not false)

I won't discuss the study much itself (https://elifesciences.org/articles/62878 for the link to the actual paper btw), except to point out how sad this state of affairs is:

> A key limitation of the present study is the lack of verification of the nature, purity, and dosage of the psychedelic substance used for microdosing. Psilocybin-containing mushrooms were used by 23% of the sample, 14% used legal LSD analogues (such as 1P-LSD), whereas 62% sourced their substance from the black market, mostly LSD (61%).

Oh, and this was interesting:

> We note that according to our data the threshold LSD dose where participants guess better than random is 12 µg, see Figure 4, which is in line with the 13 µg threshold dose estimated by a recent dose controlled study

So in this group 12ug is roughly where the consciously notable effects begin (for this study population). For context, it's commonly said that "if you can feel it then it's not a microdose"; I consider ~5ug to be a microdose.

---

Anyway, I've got a lot of experience in this area because I microdosed ~4-5 ug LSD per day, every day, for about a year and a half. Also, this was from LSD liquid I made myself starting from raw crystal. So while I don't know the purity of the crystal itself, I at least knew how much of "my" crystal I was taking. (Getting a proper purity figure requires performing GC/MS - which you can only get done legally by sending a >=50 mg sample to EnergyControl in Spain, and I elected not to because I didn't want to have to sacrifice 50mg (= 500 doses) of crystal to send them)

For someone like me who is (relatively speaking) experienced with psychedelics, I can absolutely notice 5ug (it's subtle, of course, but definitely there), so note that the ~12ug detectability threshold they found in the study depends on how attuned the user is to the effects, etc. Really when most people talk about "noticing" something they don't actually "notice" it until they hit the point where they are incapable of not noticing it (for example, someone drinking for the first time will claim they feel the same 20 minutes after taking a shot, and when they finally admit that they're "drunk" they're properly drunk and not just "buzzed")

Anyway, enough rambling. Microdosing had an effect, but I took it for the same reasons (albeit smaller-scale) that I would take a full dose of LSD: increased energy, an increased "non-linearity" of thought patterns that is counterbalanced by the more traditionally stimulating effects of LSD (LSD is a Dopamine receptor D2 agonist), improved visual acuity and vibrancy of colors (well, full doses don't "improve" your visual acuity since a psychedelic dose cranks up the pattern recognition/perception transformation weights of your brain way past a functional state)

That is to say, that I wasn't microdosing to miraculously change my life or anything like that. Microdosing won't do that and the annoyingly-pro-microdosing-to-a-fault crowd really needs to get that.

While I'm rambling, I'll add that I personally have almost never taken LSD for a "spiritual transformation" or whatever you want to call it; I find psilocybin mushrooms to be far superior in that aspect. Basically, relatively speaking mushrooms cause much more "mindfuck" and for me I had the distinct sensation of feeling the shrooms taking over my brain (in a benevolent sense, or at least neutral), whereas LSD is a more visual experience and more energetic (likely due to the d2 receptor agonism I mentioned earlier as well as the general structure of LSD looking like a sort of psychedelic phenethylamine, phenthylamine itself being very amphetamine-like).

That is to say, both shrooms and LSD are very similar; the "magic" of the classical psychedelics - LSD, psilocybin, mescaline - is primarily attributable to their action at the 5-HT2A receptor (read: "serotonin subtype 2a receptor"), and that is by far the most distinctive and noticeable part of the psychedelic experience. But comparing between the psychedelics, with shrooms it takes much more "mindfuck" to get to a certain level of "visuals", and vice versa with LSD. Note I've talked to people who claim it's the other way around for them, but frankly these have always been people with limited experience and/or who don't think about psychedelics very deeply (in the analytical sense of really trying to grok them) so I personally still consider "take shrooms for the 3-6 hour mindfuck and LSD for the 8-12 hour aesthetic, energetic, kinesthetic experience" to be canon.

I've kind of accepted that I'm not going to have a coherent message with this post, but psychedelics are largely misunderstood, either by their opponents as causing "hallucinations" (no) and by the zealots as being a magical cure-all or microdosing specifically being a life-changing practice. For me, taking 3g of psilocybe cubensis mushrooms on a beach as my first real trip flipped me inside out and rewired my value structures. No longer was the (unconscious) desire for social approval vis-a-vis a prestigious/well-paying career at the top of my value structure; instead, spending a warm day on the beach with friends while wearing as little clothing as possible became what was most worthwhile and beautiful. Without trying to do so, I was analyzing my past, present and future.

You see, while I meant it when I said that psychedelics are not a cure-all, they are (or more accurately, can be) the cure for many things. One of the most well-accepted findings in psychology is that, in general, your personality is incredibly non-malleable, and tends to persist across time. Well, psychedelics are the only thing I know of that can reliably and radically change one's personality, specifically the big 5 dimension of "openness to experience".

Even an hour of sitting "outside" of your self can reveal things that sober you is incapable of noticing. And, just as once one human broke the 4 minute mile mark suddenly everybody started doing it, once you step outside of your "issue" du jour, however briefly - your neuroticism, your jealousy, your fear of emotional expression, your unconscious belief that you are incapable of love, etc - suddenly you've really seen that there's a different way of living. Not seen it in the intellectual sense but really consciously experienced it.

So when sobriety returns, barring a day or two of afterglow, you're soon largely back to your old self - and yet having experienced that alternate way, you have a chance to see yourself right now the way you'd look back on your life on your deathbed: suddenly the things you thought were the small things - a friend's smile, the contented look on your dog when you scratch them just right - were the big things all along. And the big things, the things we tell ourselves are the serious things, the adult things - we see them for the tiny, insignificant implementation details that they are.

So, psychedelics can wash away a type of sickness that most suffer from unknowingly. But they can only do so when you take enough that you cease to be capable of operating in that old mode anymore. Which means invariably there's always a period during the come-up when you realize you had no idea what you were signing up for.

But they are tools - very sharp ones - and like all very sharp tools can cause tremendous damage. One of my greatest regrets was selling two very strong tabs to someone who I had assumed knew what they were doing, and so didn't spend time giving the usual disclaimers / tutorial I'd give to clients. These were very strong tabs so it'd be something like 3-4 tabs of 100ug. I can't give as much detail as I want, (let's just say that I found much of this out from the news articles after the fact), but suffice to say that they took the tabs at night and ended up in a sort of "fugue state" (not sure what the right clinical term would be) where they stripped completely naked (a surprisingly common action of those on massive doses of psychedelics), knocked on the door of a random citizen asking for help, then started attacking them when they opened the door. As I later learned, they were ex-military and had diagnosed PTSD and god knows what else (one of the many myriad "benefits" of the war on drugs is never knowing the medical status of people who you're selling powerful drugs to unless they proactively tell you). To be clear, even on ~400ug LSD it is not normal to perform violent home invasions while in a blacked-out-like state, and there were a LOT of things that had to go wrong (PTSD + probably bad at handling psychs in general + taking them in the middle of the night + other factors I'm unaware of) for such a freak incident to occur. When you move the equivalent of 10,000 hits, statistically speaking you'll end up with one of those stories eventually.

So, don't drink the microdosing kool-aid too much - do it for fun and the experience if you want but don't pretend it's going to be a radical transformation - and understand that psychedelics can cause positive changes in a way that can [help] solve problems that are resistant to every traditional tool we have. But they can also be quite dangerous. I actually think the risk of a 'bad trip' is incredibly overblown and most people freak themselves out way too much about such things, but neither should one take a cavalier attitude.

[/unstructured ramble]

How exactly are you using the lightning network without an initial transaction to charge up your metaphorical gift card?

> Like was there actually someone sitting there, using an app, seen the term blacklist and immediately started thinking it was an insult to them?

My belief is absolutely not. It comes from an ideology that ascribes simple moralistic explanations to things. “This word has man in it so it must mean it excludes women”. “The word ‘master’ reminds people of slavery”, etc.

Good luck speaking out “publicly” about it in the modern corporate environment. You have to not just accept it as true but actively parrot its talking points. Everyone has to be a believer. That’s how the whole thing works.

> Blacklist's etymology isn't racist, but if black folks prefer that we use something else, and something as similar as blocklist is there and easy to use, it seems like an easy fix.

Which black “folks” prefer the term “blocklist”? Black people are not a monolith. It seems like you’re just injecting an assumption of what certain people prefer.

Having been at now 3 different orgs implementing the [blacklist->blocklist, slave->replica, etc] routine, it’s always done for the same reason: the unquestionable brand of modern identity politics, diversity & inclusion, whatever you want to call it that is infecting pretty much every tech company (and indeed pretty much every company in general).

It’s an ideology that treats races as monolithic and only recognizes a certain set of opinions as valid. Racial blindness is implicit racism, we need to implement affirmative action policies over the dimensions of the 4-tuple (sexuality, cis/trans, rage, gender) - these are the types of beliefs they enforce.

Like mainly sleep “aids”, DPH just puts you into a fatigued state that is unlike naturalistic sleep. If insomnia / rumination / etc would otherwise keep one up and the diphenhydramine allows one to fall asleep and get a night of suboptimal sleep as opposed to no sleep, it’s of course worth it, but otherwise stay well away.

Interestingly almost everything that induces sleep harms the actual sleep quality. However I remember reading that GHB appears to improve sleep architecture, although I’ve never tried it personally

Obvious fallacy here: we are all descendants of those humans who survived - at least until having children. Those who offed themselves early are selected out of the genepool.

Note the above is not to suggest that there’s not a number of factors of a modern environment that we’re not properly/perfectly adapted for. But the handwavy “people weren’t depressed and anxious in the old days” is an illusion.

Yeah, and it’s not like a city water supply is the type of thing where such expenditure would be justified!

(I recognize you also mentioned the difficulty, I just wanted to poke some fun :P)

No studies exist of infection to others for the obvious reason (too hard to track accurately). If you had read any of the literature you would know this.

Yes, for example ushering in a new totalitarian age is much more likely than a (in children) very mild virus magically becoming super deadly.

I really think you may not have ever read the literature on COVID-19 in children. We should be shouting at the rooftops that kids are safe (and btw transmit less than kids), instead here in California we’ve closed school for a year which will - in children - far surpass the harms of COVID-19 by orders of magnitude.

What’s your point? As I said:

> over the long run the set of all COVID-19-naive individuals becomes dominated by the very young (infants/toddlers), who have essentially zero risk of COVID-19 mortality.

This has not shown to be the case for COVID-19. Hell, school closures weren’t even recommended by the WHO for influenza which can directly harm children.

You need to provide affirmative evidence before undertaking societal interventions with guaranteed negative impact. Does the hippocratic oath ring a bell?

These are closer to pop-sci articles than proper papers. Please read everything Macintyre ever published on the topic of masking in healthcare works before 2020. Start with this one:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4420971/

Linking me a bunch of public health websites isn’t convincing because these organizations don’t actually maintain epistemiological rigor, they just parrot whatever the dogma is.

The only RCT of masking for COVID-19 ever performed showed an insignificant benefit in terms of self-infection at best.

Meanwhile studies in HCW can’t rule out cloth masks causing bacterial pneumonia and increased self-infection.

This article is about zero COVID. “Relatively minor flow” (btw I’m not convinced it’s even minor...) means you never eradicate the virus (which is why I oppose the idea of zero covid categorically)

You’re one step away from just advocating for a global world government.

Massive centralized control never ends well.

You’re close to the insight here though: there is a pragmatic solution, and it’s to stop waging war against an endemic respiratory virus of zoonotic origin. It’s like struggling in quicksand; trying to escape just makes it worse. That’s real pragmatism.

Very fallacious reasoning here. No-one is saying that infections are driven by Mexican immigrants.

Rather they’re pointing out the obvious: if you’re trying to get to zero COVID, all it takes is one person to start the chain. Thus you cannot have ANY illegal immigration.

FWIW I strongly oppose the “zero COVID” goal because it’s completely unrealistic. We’ll see if the island nations can maintain it long-term but certainly in the US it’s a non-starter.

Viruses generally change to be less deadly and more transmissible. The “new variant” is just more transmissible.

It doesn’t make sense to argue “oh what if this virus magically evolves to hurt children”. You need to propose a theoretical mechanism of action. Otherwise spend your time worrying about flu and tuberculosis which kill far more children than COVID-19.

Yeah I think the mink culling was an absurd over-reaction and highly unethical. Those poor minks.

(Disclosure: I also think the same for the human lockdowns too though)

SARS-CoV-2 is a zoonotic, (fairly) highly infectious endemic respiratory virus. Eradication is literally impossible, and even if we could wave a magic wand and simultaneously eradicate it from all humans on earth, you still need to worry about it jumping back over from any of the many animal species infected with it.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eradication_of_infectious_dise...:

> The selection of infectious diseases for eradication is based on rigorous criteria, as both biological and technical features determine whether a pathogenic organism is (at least potentially) eradicable. The targeted organism must not have a non-human reservoir (or, in the case of animal diseases, the infection reservoir must be an easily identifiable species, as in the case of rinderpest), and/or amplify in the environment. This implies that sufficient information on the life cycle and transmission dynamics is available at the time an eradication initiative is programmed. An efficient and practical intervention (such as a vaccine or antibiotic) must be available to interrupt transmission of the infective agent. Studies of measles in the pre-vaccination era led to the concept of the critical community size, the size of the population below which a pathogen ceases to circulate.[2] The use of vaccination programs before the introduction of an eradication campaign can reduce the susceptible population. The disease to be eradicated should be clearly identifiable, and an accurate diagnostic tool should exist. Economic considerations, as well as societal and political support and commitment, are other crucial factors that determine eradication feasibility.[3][4]

SARS-CoV-2 satisfies none of these pre-conditions (except for having a vaccine now). It is not only unrealistic but actively delusional/deleterious to argue for “COVID zero”. Don’t fall for it.

Remember herd immunity doesn’t mean eradication. The virus stays endemic. Which is fine; over the long run the set of all COVID-19-naive individuals becomes dominated by the very young (infants/toddlers), who have essentially zero risk of COVID-19 mortality.

Agreed, the reason minimum wage is bad policy and unethical is that you're making it illegal to pay someone below a certain threshold, which stated differently is making it illegal for a sufficiently unskilled worker to get any job. But I don't see how minimum wage could be inflationary, but if it were it certainly wouldn't be enough to "wipe out savings" - that requires hyperinflation.

Elastic doesn't need to make more money than Amazon. They just need to be able to make enough to have a healthy business, and so far they've achieved that. $500MM yearly revenue with 40+% growth is nothing to scoff at.

It really seems like Elastic's motivation here is jealousy more than anything else. Which I understand from an emotional perspective, but from a logical perspective it's a big business blunder they've made IMO.