cyberdrunk

A fine read indeed. This quote in particular resonated:

"Many who have ''plied their book diligently," and know all about some one branch or another of accepted lore, come out of the study with an ancient and owl-like demeanour, and prove dry, stockish, and dyspeptic in all the better and brighter parts of life. Many make a large fortune, who remain underbred and pathetically stupid to the last."

Successful people are very often full of shit - since perception is hugely important in any human endeavor, the people who have attained success must have mastered bullshitting (incl. faking confidence) along the way. Then, like any other life skill, they pass it onto their children. I see this mechanism in my father and in myself.

> This is what happened with the United States hundreds of years ago.

United States started with a bloody revolution in order to secede from Britain.

To get some territory for your country, you'd either need a revolution in an existing country or perhaps create an artificial island somewhere in international waters (or a base in space). I don't see any other options.

> Others would take the USPS as proof that a strongman president can switch such services on and off at a whim, for political reasons.

When was it done?

The State owns USPS and it's not so bad. Before phones were introduced, it was the main channel of communication.

> There's not much knowledge about "what it was like to work for Sun 15 years ago."

Based on these stories, the tech companies from 1990s and before seemed much more fun than career-focused environments of FAANGs today...

> Staying for years around an area that gets "only a month" of excessive PM2.5 particles and smoke is unwise and you will soon become someone with an existing respiratory condition.

I live in a city which has a serious smog problem in the winter and colder autumn and spring months. Yet most people don't have respiratory conditions.

In general, all environmental problems that people create stem from using technology - i.e. without technology (starting with the most basic ones, e.g. mastering fire), we are harmless enough to not be able to do any damage. So far, the more technologies we've developed, the more damage we've done to the environment. I can't see this trend reversing.

> I can do as a CS engineer to help solve the big problems of our time, such as climate change

So far, technology has only created environmental problems. I don't think environmental problems created by technology can be solved with technology without creating another problems.

In Poland, the rule is that basically if you and sibilings can afford to pay for the nursing home of your parent, there is no state assistance. The state only kicks in if the family is too poor to cover the costs. The rationale behind it being probably that caring for parents is the responsibility of family, not state.

Propaganda is just old-school name for PR. All large organizations do PR (or propaganda).

It's just someone's prediction. Could be true, could be false. Maybe the singularity will happen in 10 years, maybe in 10000 years, or maybe it's actually impossible for us humans to accomplish.

> We happened to be born 99% of the way from the beginning of humankind to the end of death, but we just barely missed it.

Ekhm, citation needed?

Presumably you could also do a lot of embedded software work that solves similar problems as controls?

I wonder if it's possible to take a cheap Android phone and turn it into a desktop? I.e. connect keyboard, mouse, external monitor, install Linux with X?

Please don't do this. We don't need Twitter any worse than it is already.

Being seen as pariah/weirdo in an environment you spend 40+ hours per week in does not like the best working arrangement...

> What I have done is transition to an area in which my skills can be used to make money for me and others.

Money is both good and bad. Thee bad part is that it attracts a ton of unsavory personalities, who will do anything to get ahead. In coding, it results in endless self-promoting, pushing unnecessary (or downright harmful) new tech and project ideas in order to gain a promotion, one-upmanship in code reviews etc. All that bullshit gets old fairly quickly.

The reality is that, in a complex environment, it's much easier to make money by doing some work and heavily manipulating people rather than doing good work and no manipulation. Hence, I want to exit complex environments as quickly as possible, which means distancing myself from society and modern economy as much as possible. It will probably mean living on $500-$700 a month, but hopefully the peace gained will be worth it. (Currently, it's still all in a fantasy stage, as I need to accumulate some more money via coding job to make the jump).

> I legit font get where most of the purported US wealth is concentrated, most US cities are dilapidated

Isn't this because US cities (esp. the dilapidated ones) are in big part storage for the poor, and the middle class lives in suburbs?

I suspect that all sufficiently complex fields are extremely susceptible to fads, egos and cliques. It's the worst in humanities, since they deal with hopelessly complex subjects (i.e. humans), but even science can commonly become like this. Heck, even coding is like this, as we've probably all experienced in our jobs. With this in mind, my plan to retain my integrity is to leave fields with an intellectual component and live simply on much less.

What about the stories of tenured professors being essentially managers and grant-chasers for their unit? Doesn't sound low-stress to me.

Even if it isn't, old games eventually just stop running as Microsoft releases newer versions of Windows. So, even "owning" the install files is not a long-term solution. I think we should accept the fact that video games are just ephemeral goods that disintegrate within 5-20 years timespan.

> What is fragile? We have had specialized roles for the entire history of society and it hasn't caused anything to crumble.

I'm not a historian but I can imagine that a medieval specialist, such as for example blacksmith, could very much fix his own house (or maybe even build a new one), grow food, take care of animals, make wooden tools, make some simple herbal medicine etc. I'm guessing a lot of he was consuming was produced by himself and his family. Today, for engineers it's the total opposite - we only consume things produced by others, and essentially by strangers whom we've never met.

Regarding fragility specifically, if a major crisis comes (say a war), the desk jockeys, esp. ones didn't have the wisdom to accumulate resources, will fare much worse than someone who's say running a homestead. If they did accumulate resources (provided they don't become worthless by hiperinflation etc.), they will be able to buy the essentials and hope their stash lasts until the end of the crisis.

It's missing the bit where he explains that doing good work is in many fields (in precisely the ones that people are attracted to) is not enough to sustain yourself. You need to be super good or be lucky, have connections or some other form advantage.

Even 386 was absolutely crushing A1200 in some respects. In Amigas, you had to set every bit of a pixel separately, which didn't hurt for 2D games with static art assets (which you just copied from memory onto the screen), but it was a killer for anything 3D based. In result, you could have a 386 run Doom IIRC, whereas 3d shooters on Amiga 1200 were much worse than even Wolfenstein 3D.

My impression of FOSS is that it's very heavy on total rewrites, as that is what attracts engineers. So, you end up with a lot of underbaked variants of the same thing.

> I would love to see analysis under which Stalin was intellectual

The Wikipedia article conflates intelligentsia with intellectuals, which I don't agree with (I'm Polish, so I have some long-ingrained intuitions regarding those terms). Stalin, as an educated non-wealthy person (he studied to become a priest), can easily be seen as someone who is a member of inteligentsia.

> Which literally means every person participating in Russian politics is intelligentsia by this definition.

Tzar family or many of the old aristocratic families were not a member of intelligentsia and would probably be offended by the association. The key factor of being in inteligentsia was (from Wiki): "people engaged in the complex mental labours". The higher classes didn't do any labor.

Intelligentsia does not mean "educated people". For example, capitalists or the tzar's family were not part of Inteligentsia. A lof of the military officers weren't either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligentsia

It really depends on what you compare with. Before the spread of public education, people were commonly believing in magic, witches and, based on that, could be sold on all sorts of non-sequiturs. Now, they're more or less aware of the scientific process, understand most basic concepts of natural sciences, know a bit of history, can write semi-coherently, have a bit more rigour in forming arguments etc. Of course, they aren't all Oxford-educated intellectuals but, to elevate a big fraction of population to that level, I'm guessing we would need a ton of 1-on-1 tutorships, which would be extremely costly.

> The revolution did came from people who were able to read and write, obviously, it is kinda hard to coordinate without that.

The did much more than coordination. The intelligentsia was basically 100% responsible for the revolution in every aspect, starting from conceptualization (peasants would never come up with the idea of trying to apply Marxism to the real world and wouldn't even be able to imagine world other than the one in which tzar rules over them) through managing implementation to the post-revolution power capture. Peasants were merely ants, necessary for revolutionaries' plans to install themselves as new rulers of Russia (obviously, some of them had more lofty goals, but as usual the worst scoundrels quickly took over and the idealists were disposed of).