bm3719

In the 60s and 70s, there was a thread of Western academic thought in Marxist circles that mapped connections between traditional leftist narratives like the exploitation of labor to things like race and gender. Of course, socialist feminism has a longer history, and can be traced back to the early 20th century. It's debatable how much influence the academics had, beyond their simple existence adding some weight to the previously only political movement.

Within those circles, it seems they like to think of it as extending Marxism to include feminist (and race-related) thought. Having read (only) a bit of it, I'd probably say the connection is a little forced and fraught with motivated reasoning. Though Marx criticized colonialism, I read him as more focused on its relationship with the capitalist system, exploitative by his measure at home as well as overseas. Furthermore, on race, Marx (and Engels) wrote some things that would be hard to utter in polite company today.

For those in favor of censoring the internet, here's a notion that helped me:

Probably all of us would be against censoring the verbal communications between individuals in our society. Such communication is full of untruths and agenda-driven lies. Right now parents and teachers the world over are propagating untruths to children. Workplace discussions are happening around watercoolers where unscientific nonsense is spreading. We just accept that this space of human interaction is the noise floor of our civilization, and maybe even appreciate the agency that this gives us.

With the spread of the internet, that same communication is happening online. It being online is literally the only difference. Let the noise flow, I say, and from it can both objective and social truths arise. To do anything else doesn't give us truth anymore than did restricting interpersonal speech in certain unpleasant regimes throughout history.

I suppose we all reserve our greatest ire for the apostate.

If Rand were alive today, I'd probably respond by saying that as she identifies as a philosopher, she's (part of) the logos to libertarians' praxis. So, naturally there's going to be some sloppiness introduced into her conceptual ideal. That's there to account for the real world issues she didn't have to deal with alone at her typewriter, like how to get enough bodies to have a viable a political movement.

Furthermore, what she's describing in the latter half are anarcho-capitalists, which are a small subset of libertarians. In fact, many (perhaps most) of them would be very uninterested in being labeled as such, thinking of libertarians at best as minarchists.

I might go the standard box method at some point, but right now I just dig a hole in a bare part of a garden and throw stuff in it till full. Then I cover it up and dig another hole. Seems to work okay.

I try my best to carefully manage it. All compostable biomatter goes into compost, with the only exception being anything salty. I also shovel up all the animal plop and mix that into the soil twice a year. I haven't done any scientific soil tests, but my plants seem to be more productive as the years have gone by, so I guess it's doing the trick. I have a lot of forested land, and my additional plan starting this year is to collect leaves, run them over with the lawn mower a bunch, use it as mulch during the growing season, and then till that into the soil in the Fall.

I have a long-term goal of doing similar. Specifically, I'd like to produce as much food as 2 people need, even though we won't actually try to survive off of it. If/when I do reach that point, I'll probably trade/sell/give away any excess, or send it back into the ground as compost.

I'll share my setup in case anyone wants a real life data point: I have about 2400 square feet of garden (in 4 plots), 19 fruit/nut trees, a small vineyard, blueberry/blackberry bushes, and various animals like chickens. I also grow indoors during the winter and have an herb garden. I think we'll accomplish this goal once the trees I've planted in the last 5 years start producing full loads, but we're probably at around 40% of needs currently. Technically, I could probably get much closer now if I hunted deer, since there's huge herds in the area and I'd qualify for a DNR crop damage permit (allowing me to take many additional deer over the limit and out of season), along with other animals. I have plenty of space for additional garden plots too, but don't really have any more bandwidth for it due to working full time as a software engineer.

Worth noting that while I have this goal, I'm not really min/maxing it either. I "waste" space/energy on flowers, gourds, luffas, and other nonedible things. Also, this is just a fun hobby, not really something too serious.

Since you're a founder, maybe you can shift some of your focus-heavy work to night time. A lot of your noise sources shouldn't be an issue then.

If moving is ever an option, you might consider a house with a furnished basement. You can setup your main office there, or just have a second work area for when you need the extra quiet. It's also possible to add some treatments to a room to sound-proof it to some degree, up to the extent you might find in a recording or studio booth, say in a radio station.

It's already possible to do this, though with numerous, onerous restrictions (that I'd advocate against, obviously). For example, if you wanted to own a functional RPG launcher, that would be an NFA-registered DD, and each explosive projectile would be a separate additional NFA tax stamp. You'd also need an active FEL (Federal Explosives License). There's numerous other conditionals that apply, e.g., you wouldn't need the latter for inert projectiles for your RPG, or if the explosive charge was less than 0.25oz.

> I think it is equally ignorant to be universally against gun control measures

Someone "universally against gun control measures" here. I'd be interested in knowing how I'm as ignorant as people who want to regulate things based on scary buzzwords, vaguely describing items that they generally lack any knowledge of.

I'd assert it's possible to hold this position, yet also be quite well informed about the history, mechanics, laws, and social consequences surrounding firearms and their accessories. For example, one could simply consider retaining the individual agency that this part of the Bill of Rights has preserved for us as being of higher utility than any of the downsides that additional (or existing) legislation purports to address. My personal view is a bit more nuanced than that (in fact, I agree with most of your post), but wanted to point out that one could start with different base axioms/heuristics, examine the same data, and end up with a different end perspective via perfectly rational (i.e., non-ignorant) reasoning.

People with IQs below 91 walk among us. Not sure why Project 100000 gets so much criticism of the moralizing type. Sure, it turned out to be a bad idea in retrospect and should have been a smaller trial run first, but the idea isn't crazy if you put yourself into McNamara's time and place. I could easily see myself thinking that systems were autopilot enough that the IQ of the body component of modern warfare to be of lesser importance. And if that were in fact true, we'd have found a way for such individuals to contribute. Is it more moral for the inevitable sacrifices of warfare to be solely among a society's higher IQ individuals?

In the end, it turned out that those of lower IQ would continue having less of a productive role in society--something that was already accelerating at the time. Perhaps that's the real tragedy here. We have an oversupply of those only capable of simple labor. Maybe trying more "x's Morons" ideas isn't such a bad idea?

I explicitly set aside time for it, and track video games along with other things on my todo list.

This may seem counter-productive and like it might ruin the fun, but the opposite turned out to be true. Since free time is finite now (and arguably always was), it helps to get the most out of a game, prioritize which games I really want to play, and what I expect to get out of the experience.

Certain points in Kaczynski's manifesto greatly influenced how I view the world, and I feel they have positively influenced my life in many ways (e.g., trying to live life less wastefully, using nature to ground oneself in reality, evaluating the true total cost of ownership of products of industry).

RIP.

I think of ambient silence as the most valuable sound of all. Think about what it'd cost you to get freedom from your neighbor's lawnmower, traffic, sirens, construction, dogs barking, and the rest of the mindless noise that involuntarily assaults the average person's brain all day. You might think you can move out to the country, but most of the homes you might buy still have plenty of it. Neighbors will have bigger lawns that require even louder diesel tractors to mow, large dog ownership is at a higher ratio, recreational gunfire is more common, or you might hear a chainsaw running all day. In fact, it might be even more noticeable due to its irregularity.

I hope the future is a quieter place. Electric motors replacing internal combustion engines is a step in the right direction. I suspect we'll need a full cultural shift and actual noise ordinance enforcement to get there though. Otherwise, it only takes one guy with $100 buying a leaf blower to ruin everyone's day.

> What exactly do you want? A service that will spend their money to deliver arbitrary HD video on demand and lose money?

I'd probably want options instead of a singular proprietary garden, antithetical to the open web, where all content is hosted.

Just one example: I'd be fine with a service that respected my time and just had a list of sponsored links associated with the content of the video, but everything was in 480p-720p. Maybe that wouldn't be ideal for everyone, but that's how the web was supposed to work: lots of approaches, only unified by consensus-derived protocols.

Love Tutanota and been using it for some time. I do wish I could access it using mutt though, like if they supported some kind of bridge. I know they have security concerns with this, but it would actually be more secure for me, since I'd not have to access it directly on every device, leaving active email tabs open. I'd just keep all email use on my home server, leaving mutt up in the tmux session which I'm already in all day, and it'd be as secure as anything else I can only get to via SSH. It's also annoying needing a web browser open when I otherwise don't have use of one, especially on low end hardware like a Raspberry Pi.

Just checked and there's at least several on Craigslist at that price right now in his area. He could also move to a different area for even greater savings.

Don't know much about your project, but it seems a long way off from producing income, if ever.

I see others have tried to help in the past with little luck, but I'll take a stab at it too, just in case: I'd focus on getting some income of any sort coming in, even of the informal employment variety. Also, go to your local social services office and apply for things like EBT. Once you have a few 100 dollars (which you might even be able to get by panhandling for a few days), go find a room for rent. If you're not picky, you can get one for $100/wk or probably even lower if you look around. Then look for more sustainable income sources. Once that's all sorted out, only then start thinking about your side project.

My only source of internet in undergrad was dialing into my university's modem pool and getting a shell on the main server (a DEC Alpha running OSF/1). Browsing the web was done through lynx.

That worked fine but every now and then, a site would have some inline image that I'd want to see, so I'd view source to get the img URL and then download that to /tmp and transfer the file to my local machine via zmodem. Usually, it wouldn't be worth the effort. I'd also download mp3s off IRC via DCC and queue up a bunch of data for zmodem to transfer overnight or when I was in class. I really appreciated those bytes back then. Now, not so much.

> I even tried playing the 'I have another offer elsewhere' lie card, with nothing to show for it.

You probably should've actually gotten an offer elsewhere, maybe even had it in hand and quoted the number for them to meet/exceed. Not actually having one can backfire. It's really an ultimatum, and one you should probably follow through on if called. Maybe it's not a factor in your case, but this can result in souring a relationship with your employer.

Is the mobile app required? If I'm already at home, why would I want to try to awkwardly navigate some 3D space with gestures on a tiny phone screen instead of using my desktop computer?

Required app installs make the world less accessible for us non-smartphone owners. At the very least, I'd want a IoT device to be optionally controllable via some kind of network API. That way I can unify its scheduling, programming, or whatever with the rest of my network computing resources, instead of having each device require a specific UI (or worse, its own app).

I use IELM regularly, so thanks for writing it!

Looking at ielm.el, it appears it now defaults to hexl, which is part of the Emacs distribution, as cat might not exist on non-Unix platforms. That's wrapped in a condition-case call though, and will still call cat if that fails.

Most spies in American intel history are motivated by either money, ideology, or to make their otherwise mundane life more interesting. For the money-motivated, many of those were deeply in debt or addicted to an expensive lifestyle. I wouldn't rule out an ideologue though. Polling shows support for Russia is in the single digits, but that means there's probably still plenty of people with TS clearances who at least disagree with how the US is handling things currently to some degree.

Sounds like these docs were high-level summaries or status updates though, which would probably be widely distributed. No doubt many analyst teams would be on a daily summary distro list.

> I've read through your website and documentation and are truly inspired by your vision

It's probably more practices like this, where the prospective employee has to enthusiastically profess subservient, slavish devotion to a company in order to be considered a viable candidate. You're writing GraphQL API glue. Everyone knows you're doing it to pay the mortgage. It's not a transcendental experience.

By contrary, the direction we were headed until recently made more sense. A company wanted some service provided. They'd look around and reach out to someone that likely was the best fit and contact them.

For example, if I was hiring a plumber, and some guy told me he was "inspired by my vision" and sought me out by reading everything on my website about my family, I would assume he had mental health issues and certainly not hire him.

Google is utterly massive, and companies that get that big tend to never fully die. Like large countries and other entrenched institutions, they can decline, but it's a long way down to zero. As such, Google will likely exist in some form for the rest of our lives, just like IBM and GE will.

Also keep in mind that ChatGPT in its current form hasn't been fully productized. Just like Google search was excellent when what it provided was in line with user needs and now only provides the absolute minimum value to get as much ad money as it can, so too are LLMs in that phase. There's nothing stopping LLM-driven services from returning the same kind of results based on whatever topic is being queried about. In fact, that's exactly what companies like MS want to do with it. None of the large companies pouring billions into this space have a goal of making society at large better informed. They want LLMs integrated into their services so they can deliver a new level of targeting for ads, reduce customer support costs, shape narratives, automate PR, and attract users to platforms that can then be marketed to their real customers (other businesses and governments mainly). Those of us envisioning idyllic futures that this tech will unlock need only look at every other technical advancement in recent history to see how it will end up.

Make a list of everything you want to improve in life and decompose it into atomic facts. Order them by easiest to fix to hardest, then plan and execute actionable steps to rectify one thing at a time. Put everything else on hold and accept that the other things might stay bad or even get worse in the meantime. If one of those things isn't working out after a couple weeks, put it at the end of the queue and keep going. Start racking up a few wins, and before you know it life will look different and your problems will seem less intractable.

For example: Instead of "losing weight", add items to your to-do list like "quit snacking", "stop drinking soda", and "eat one fruit/veggie with every meal". The point is to reduce those big problems into small ones that anyone can fix then start churning through them.

I also think of the games market this way. It's bifurcated between single purchase and on-going, and I'm not interested in constantly paying for stuff or needlessly complicating transactions, so the latter doesn't exist to me.

I find the acceptance of in-game stores rather unfathomable, but apparently the market has spoken as it represents the majority of industry revenue. So, it's unfortunately not going anywhere. What's wrong with players willing to drop $1000+ on a single game and/or have their game mechanics and other activities tainted by constantly pulling out their wallet? I know people in RL that do this, some to great personal financial harm, and haven't really gotten a good answer yet.

I clicked flag to help the site stay focused on actual tech over Twitter drama.

Maybe it's a personal failing on my part, but I used to live in blissful ignorance of what Musk was up to today. Would like to go back to that at some point. If I did care, it's easy enough to follow him on Twitter.

Social security recipients got a +8.7% increase this year. It was +5.9% in 2022.

Pretty sure employee wages aren't tracking anywhere near that.

Can't help but notice that we keep wanting to make content that should be flat more 3D (e.g., animated 3D backgrounds, scroll filler on corporate pages, the entire metaverse), and content that could benefit from being 3D more flat (like UI buttons losing their pseudo-3D bevels and not looking like interactive widgets at all).

Even if someone wanted all those things, it would still be rational to weigh them against the negatives. That would include both realized downsides, like incompatibilities and conflicting life goals, and potential ones, like all of the negatives involved in divorce.

Doing such an analysis and coming up with a different conclusion than the (current) norm shouldn't be grounds for him needing mental health services.