bm3719

> When you finance a car, the vehicle becomes collateral for a loan, but it belongs to you

Is it not correct that the lending entity you use to purchase a vehicle is the party that legally owns it? The borrower has possession and right to use the vehicle, but the lender holds the title. That's why you get the title transferred over to your name once the balance of the load is repaid.

Currently using a Kyocera DuraXE. It's great and still has a very inconvenient to use subset of the functionality you might miss from a smart phone. I bought it because I needed hotspot tethering for work. However, I've recently read that the Light Phone II has that feature and is even dumber of a phone, so might switch over to that.

Previously I was getting by fine with a pre-paid LG flip phone and buying around $100/yr of minutes/service from TracFone.

Keep as much local as possible. Do anything involving money or your personal info inside a dedicated VM running a secure OS, or use QubesOS. Use a dumb phone instead of a smart phone. Keep your passwords in a local encrypted text file. If you need a password or other data on the road, SSH into your home machine from your laptop (which has an encrypted disk). Go back to using fake nick names instead of your real name whenever you post online. If some service requires a phone number, other personal info, or an app install, don't use it unless you have absolutely no choice. Use FLOSS and don't pay for software with your money or by viewing ads.

Reject the notion that you NEED these BigTech services and don't let them hold your life, well-being, or friends hostage.

Self-hosted GitLab with a <project-name>.com domain.

Any plausible (and not expensive) recourse in such situations?

I've had a game server emulator project DMCA-ed previously, and my team's casual research couldn't come up with any solutions. Despite the takedown's text being factually incorrect (it was all rewritten code, not proprietary), there seemed to be no one to appeal to. Instead, we just moved it off GitHub with no further negative consequences. This resulted in some lost visibility and broken links though.

Lived in several of the DC metro area cities (mainly on the Northern VA side) for 12 yrs. Was a good area compared to many other cities I've visited, but I'm glad to not be there anymore and wouldn't have been able to retire early given COL there.

Assuming these conspiracy theorists actually exist, there's an easy way to prove them wrong without pejorative-laden propaganda pieces like this: make one of these cities that people will actually want to live in.

I worked hard to move out of the city and have some space. I took the tradeoff in accessibility in exchange for the financial and personal freedom that allows. Build a higher density city where housing prices don't make me work another 10 years, and is free from crime, high taxes, noise, and overbearing laws, and I'll be happy to move back.

Being able to walk to a restaurant is great and all, but isn't worth the tradeoff currently. It's not even close, I'd say.

Been using Clojure professionally for 9+ years now and while I'm thankful that I can make a living writing the language and using Emacs all day, I've found these points to be spot on.

These issues have added noise/confusion to what used to be a much simpler ramp-up for new developers. For those who've been around for awhile, the overall experience definitely felt cleaner previously, with more obvious best paths. While it's hard to argue against more options, the effect on the ground is that it's also needlessly divided the already small community a bit too.

Prison guard. With AI good enough to put programmers out of work, there's not much that is safe from its reach. So, until prison reform happens such that human guards are no longer needed, the market for prison guards will be healthy enough to make it until I decide to retire (or join the Butlerian Jihad myself).

The BlockTube extension can make shorts disappear. In the options, check "Block Youtube Shorts videos". I also block all videos under 59 seconds, since they're effectively shorts. You can also block channels and never see them again.

Combine this with normal adblock, SponsorBlock (to skip the mid-video junk), and Unhook (to hide junk features of the platform), and the site becomes much more useful.

This doesn't solve: the fact that YT will still dip from an endless supply of dreck to keep your recommendations annoying, search results being full of click bait and repeated results, and the fact that watching hours of video on YT is at best marginally better than being a TV addict.

View counts (and similar metrics) are a trap precisely because they are correlated with the things you do want. Say you want to educate others. That's hard to measure, so instead you measure updoots and retweets. They're prominently displayed, so of course you're going to look at and consciously optimize for them.

But now you're in the trap, because you've accepted these numbers as the true proxy for influencing the world, and doing anything orthogonal to the algorithm will make number go down. In reality, you're doing what Twitter wants, not necessarily what you originally wanted.

We have to break out of this view count trap if we want to be free of the ills of centralized social media.

Maybe instead of views, consider the effect of your words on the outside world. How often does a tweet change your thinking or deeply enlighten you? The rare times something like this sorta happens is in the awkward form of a tweet thread, where it would've been much better as a proper article. Speaking personally, there's blog articles that have vastly changed my view of some part of reality and improved my life.

IRC + email + VCS system works fine for FLOSS projects.

tmux can also be used for screen sharing, if anyone needs support or wants to pair on something.

One nice thing about using this comms stack is it doesn't exclude people who are on slow internet connections. Video/audio is grossly inefficient for transfer of some bytes of raw information versus text.

If transportation accessibility has recently peaked and will invert, with fuel and vehicle prices continuing along current trends, the lower classes become increasingly less mobile. The better off can drive their $100k SUV to fine dining and museums, which may be as close as the nearby town/city center. They might accept that trade-off in exchange for space and separation from urban blight.

My long-term prediction: Rural areas and exurbs will up-class, housing the higher-paid remote workers. The remaining non-farming rural poor will be priced out of these properties and will have to live in cities, in ever smaller apartments and eventually pods. The nice services that often are only available in cities currently will distribute more evenly geographically, negating a lot of the benefits of city life.

This will have some positive effects, like having the countryside and its adjoining natural environments better curated, along with the large underclass masses living more resource-efficiently. The main downside will be that cities will be even more of a concentration of crime and other social ills, combined with worse public infrastructure due to reduced city tax revenue.

Can confirm that SWE salary + no kids + modest needs/desires can make for an easy mode life. Myself and some others I'm familiar with in a similar situation use the free the bandwidth to load up on complexity in other areas, like work. Others just enjoy an easy life. Either can be quite rewarding, just as I'm sure procreating sometimes is.

In that situation, I would just pay for it (and have in the past). If it was one of those nightmare bills you hear about sometimes, I would simply extend my working years by +1 or whatever to even things out. Or, maybe I'd just pretend I lost it in a market downturn and move on with life.

I have health insurance provided by my employer, but when not employed, I skip it and just pay for anything out of pocket. Hasn't been a problem so far, but I can see how people more attached to health care services might find that hard to make work. Their numbers (and perhaps mine later in life) will be different, of course.

I live in WV. Per capita income in my county is $14k, so most here are living on much less. My only fixed costs are power, property tax (which is pretty low here), internet service, some firewood to supplement what I cut myself, some food to round out the garden diet, and a twice a year run to the dump. But, that's only about $5k/yr. The rest are non-essentials, like buying a new car instead of used, trips, hobby supplies, and the occasional video game.

Despite being well off income-wise, my expenses are under $20k/yr on average. This is with owning a home, buying a car every 5 yrs, and basically buying anything else I might want. I could go as low as $5k/yr in fixed expenses if I had to.

I could spend more, but can't think of any additional products I'd want to clutter up my house with.

Not doing anything too special/weird here (I grow some of my own food and try to repair things myself, but that's about it), so seems strange you'd need so much in retirement.

This has been the SEC's stance since at least 2020 when they went after Ripple (XRP) for selling "unregistered securities" in their ICO.

It's the SEC's position that you can issue tokens, but they have to be "registered," specifically with them.

https://www.sec.gov/ICO

Anecdata based on the men in this situation I'm familiar with: They do have mental health issues, but I'm not sure they're more than what the average employed man is afflicted by. I detect a general life fulfillment malaise, but in exchange they avoid all of the stress the rest of us deal with every day.

For this reason, I'm reluctant to call their lifestyle choice irrational since by their own measure, they seem to think they're taking the best path. They take stock of their options in various areas (relationships with women, career prospects, engaging in social activity, and so on) and say, "No thanks, I'll just play video games all day." There are virtual world substitutes for a lot of what they'd get out there in the real world now too, and though they'd probably agree it's not as good as the real thing, they can get a 50% solution for 0% of the effort. That might sound like a good deal to some, and apparently it is.

I own a 6.5 Carcano and can confirm that the this chambering does exhibit non-standard terminal ballistics when using the old bottle-nosed, flat-base surplus bullets. Also, a lot of these late-19th century surplus rifles (including my 1891 Truppe Speciali) have less than stellar bores, having seen hard use in two world wars. Mine was shot out pretty bad when in service and often keyholes rounds, for example. All kinds of weird things could be possible at impact in that case. That said, it's still a remarkably well-designed cartridge with many features considered modern now, so can be flat-shooting and very accurate. Some detailed analysis of Oswald's Carcano could lend some insight into whether this is relevant.

> Finished the exam in LUA for a openresty opensource project (didn't even know lua). Everything worked nicely. I was told he didn't like how i laid out the lua.

I like take-home tests too, but am reluctant to do them in languages I don't have a lot of recent experience in. Not that I can't ramp up enough to get them working, but when someone who writes that language every day looks at the code of a guy who just read a few tutorials, he's going to be irked by lots of little things. Not the impression you want to give going forward. Only exception is if I can solve the problem in a more academic language, e.g. Scheme, or something else they don't use there.

That's probably a deal-breaker at places that want to hire a developer with X years of experience in some specific language. So if I found that was the case, I'd probably just pass on it, as it's obviously not me they're looking for. Whether they realize/intend it or not, they're filtering for someone who has said language and tooling pre-loaded into their brain.

The F-91W has 18mm lugs, but it uses a friction-held (non-spring) bar, which limits your options. Further limiting it is that it doesn't quite look right without the flare out and taper. Some people don't mind this and swap it with a 18mm NATO strap and just wear it like that indefinitely.

I solved this problem by going on Aliexpress and ordering replacement metal band that fits the F-91w, A-158, and similar models. It costed $4.98. Been using it ever since and it works great. Being metal, now it's the least fragile part of the watch. You can also just upgrade to the ~$20 A-158, or one of the other metal band Casios, and get that out of the box. Timex also makes the T80 with a metal band as well.

I slightly prefer the light weight of the plastic band, but if you're okay with a metal band and your arm isn't too hairy (these low end metal bands like these can be painful if you are), then that's an option. The only tool you'll need to replace this is a spring bar tool that has the straight poker end or something similar.

If you're a cash buyer and considering upgrading, it might be your chance soon. It's hard to make this work perfectly within life circumstances of course, but the ideal timing is to upgrade when the sticker price drops, and downgrade when it's high. Mortgage buyers are usually doing the opposite, since they're the reason the prices are moving in whichever direction in the first place.

We've still got a way to go to shave off the bloat of the past several years (my home value has gone up 50% since I bought it 4 years ago), but I planned on giving the market a good look in a year or so. A casual glance at Zillow in my area already shows several times the listings count from this time last year. So, it's definitely happening right now.

> Capitalism is the private ownership of productive capacity and the use of it for private profit. That's a peculiar and recent invention.

As someone who's been using the property-based definition, I do think this one is more accurate. However, that would imply cavemen agreeing to scratch each others back would be practicing Capitalism (which I think they are).

More generally, that suggests that once two agents have the capacity for peaceful exchange of productive capacity, then Capitalism can occur. Capitalism is impossible in the world of reptiles, since they can't communicate or even internally model an exchange. Any service they provide to others, like defending their eggs, has to be hard-coded (i.e., forced upon them by nature).

The pure capitalists will argue that the alternatives to it are varying degrees of the use of force, to compel agents to either provide or not provide productive capacity beyond their internal desire. Whether that's necessary for a stable system is a different topic, but may be a function of the capacity we have to act as rational agents and how much we're still dominated by hard-coded instructions.

I recognized this as a career-limiting factor too, and took some steps to rectify the situation. My solution was to study the largely unwritten rules of social interaction as I would any other topic, then fake it. That can be draining, as the article alludes to, especially when you don't have time to recover. However, I did notice that I had been really rubbing others the wrong way with the regular faux pas and general awkwardness, so fixing that made others not actively dislike being in my presence.

Later on, I shifted my strategy to closing the gap even more by mutating my personality to a degree I wouldn't have previously thought possible (upping openness and agreeableness in the OCEAN model). That really changed things a lot, though probably isn't possible for some people (it was only a partial success in my case). That solved part of the energy-draining aspect of social interaction, since I now had wiring that made social interaction more natural.

Thankfully, the bar is lower in tech. You can have what would be a disastrous personality for a lawyer or CEO, but still find yourself as the most socially capable guy in the room on a tech team.

This is an interesting tech stack, but seems heavy-handed for managing such a small amount of raw data (the l/p list itself).

My solution for the past 14 years has been a simple GPG-encrypted org-mode (text) file. I can get to a password multiple ways from any device. The main way I check one is to open the file in Emacs which prompts for the master password via pinentry. You could also use a keyfile. Usually I just ssh and connect to a tmux session with emacs -nw already running, but I can also decrypt and grep it from the CLI, or clone the private repo its on to do the same locally. I only do anything involving PII or money in a dedicated PureOS VM though, so I generally don't jump through any hoops and it's relatively transparent.

Since they have formulae to quantize this, they would probably weigh the marginal utility of, say, a billion less hungry people now against a -1% chance reduction of annihilation of the human race, and say the latter is a clear winner.

Maybe you can count a cultural shift as just another parameter. They seem to weigh survivability super high, above anything else even. The argument there is likely that nothing matters if we aren't alive to ask these questions. I doubt they're considering "societal upheaval" as a species threat, but if it got bad enough to be on their radar, perhaps they would support (normally unpalatable) solutions to that too.

It's all about us reweighting our parameters such that our heuristic functions evaluate towards branches that ensure long-term species survival, and the argument that we're doing the opposite of that now in many areas due to short-term, emotional reasoning.

Caveat: Not a longtermist here, just projecting based on what I've read of them so far.

In addition to the other good reasons listed here: Inflation.

Most of us are now paid less in real terms for our efforts than we were 1-2 years ago. If you convert your labor to something invariant, like carrots, you just aren't given as many for a day of hard work. So, to the degree that we are rational beings and have agency on the matter, we scale our output accordingly.