3,796 karma · joined December 15, 2012
Also, good tools and supplies- kester solder and liquid flux.
It took me quite a while to figure out that my preferences are for desoldering braid that's been soaked with liquid flux- if I use a manual pump it's going to be rough. I am hoping to get a hot air station at some point but I haven't been doing enough work to justify it over my ancient hakko.
He is a tech guy, though.
But he keeps having to go to oil production facilities on site in Wyoming to maintain IT infra. It pays okay but it's not the kind of stuff I would do now that I'm mostly able to retire into audio/music work and the minimal amount of festival EMT/ free clinic volunteer stuff I do.
He's a genuine and kind person and has spent a lot of time doing nice things for folks because he likes doing those things. For instance, he was running the makerlab here in the sticks for a couple of years. He got the American legion hall setup so there is now a space for local artists to play.
That's how I know him, at least.
There are a lot of folks in this world who've gotten to some degree of comfortability some way or other, usually some combination of "the old fashioned way" (my parents passed on and left me their IRA) or the more usual way of working for several decades at some tedious skill that pays well in some circumstances.
Folks like my buddy have made a rational decision to just "kind of do whatever"; he has what he needs, he's not super old, and if you've managed to secure a spot out in the middle of nowhere and figure out not-too-annoying-but-inexpensive ways of maintaining that lifestyle, then a lot of options open up.
According to him, he brings a lot of generator equipment and tools (including a welder) and spends his time out there fixing stuff for folks or maintaining stuff like the poorly-configured mesh network equipment other, similarly minded nerds bring out. He troubleshoots folks' generators or vehicles.
Does that sound fun?
It sounds fun to me, to just go somewhere and help folks when I can.
Even if a lot of those folks are spun, or dumb, or party people trying to social climb or whatever. I am certain that given the fame and the proxemity to SF-style wealth there are plenty of well off folks trying to party with folks while networking, but I am equally certain that there are a whole rainbow of other ways that folks are being out there.
I don't like being at events that large, so that rules it out for me, in the same way that I have spent a lot of time at Kerrville Folk Fest but have avoided the Rainbow Gathering.
And to be clear, he's going to a party and it's an easy place to find "unique" substances or people to have fun with.
But I do see how there has to be some amount of community there, given how many folks are going to be with people and not just be tourists.
I am likely projecting to a small degree, but my impression is that largely that's the vibe out there, folks enjoying doing things because they find them satisfying rather than because they can monetize the behavior somehow.
Maybe that satisfaction is dressing up fancy and doing many days worth of drugs. Maybe that is running a bar for strangers, maybe that's making art for other folks to enjoy, maybe it's fixing busted bicycles, maybe it's getting a generator running again.
Having been "involved" with a certain amount of off grid raves and other kinds of gatherings, that's my general understanding of that culture. I'd assume it is in play out there as well.
Look, I get that folks in the US and other colonial projects feel a-okay in genociding the folks who were living there previously. I also get that you can't understand the different connection to specific pieces of land that folks such as the Ute, Navajo, and Hopi folks I live around have compared to my own connections to place and people.
But you'd be way less annoying if you'd just state your (almost-certainly-inhuman-if-plainly-stated) argument instead of trying to "hah gottem"ing yourself.
The idea that they can find the folks organizing and funding these "cells" is a big part of the US gov's premise on how it is going to "fight" these "cells".
It's not stated as explicitly as that, so it's not surprising that folks don't pick up on that distinction between "distributed groups who agree on principle but don't have any material connections" and "top down, hierarchical structures funded by singlular sources".
But the folks running the US gov don't even see the folks who disagree with them as human, much less as having a legible and understandable grievance. So it's not surprising to me that they just project their own authoritarian and top-down organizational preferences onto other groups of humans doing stuff.
So sure, "antifa" exists. But it's categorically different than how the US government is trying to say it exists, and that's an important distinction.
The obvious problem is that when the same group is committing vicious crimes and horrors, it's very hard to look at about anything they do and be like... well, at least folks were getting laid during Midnight Climax.
"Oh, hey, that's cute: the vicious monsters who torture people to death in a global network of black sites are manipulating us again by exporting pleasant videos of puppets teaching children".
It took about 20 years for my philosophy and literature degrees pay off.
I know more now, but I had to start -somewhere- even if it was hard to get the whole context.
Much of that time between putting in all that work and feeling like it was worth it was spent reading a lot of other things and amassing life experience, raising my kids, and working in unrelated professions.
However, having that context for the experiences I was getting is probably why it feels useful in retrospect.
Even though I didn't really understand Sartre or Kirkegaard or whoever (and I suspect that they don't have the best ideas all the time), having them available to me was helpful.
To me, even if I didn't totally get the context of "Pride and Prejudice" or "The Mayor of Casterbridge" or "Ulysses" or "Pamela" or "Borderlands/La Frontera" or "The Sun Also Rises":
a) knowing that these were things people do deeply explore was helpful and
b) the little bits that did resonate have stayed with me.
Further, it's been very useful to re-visit these texts as I've gotten older has been supremely interesting.
So yeah, education is wasted on the young and all but it set me up well.
As a not-super-old 48-year-old with adult children, I'm quite pleased that I can review the texts from my 20s and will be able to do the same if I get to be in my 70s or 80s.
I know them pretty well. It actually has been quite difficult to extricate my thinking from that culture which raised me and I still struggle to do that work.
I know they are incredibly violent.
Hoping that you could take their firearms manufacturing and get them to shoot flowers isn't just dumb, it's a dangerous misreading of the structure.
F35s aren't going to start dropping aid packages. Thinking they might is dangerously naive because it misses the structural forces that create them in the first place. And further, that kind of "the miliitary could be used for good if we just use the power of our minds to levitate the pentagon" style thinking is what leads folks to develop vicious technology without worrying how it may be used.
The folks with the guns and the empire often hold a belief that the technology that they produce has not underlying system or ethical structure that produced it, so it could be use for "good" just as easily as the violence to which it will enviably be put.
The US liberals and conservatives who hold these views generally think that if we just have more [trans/well-trained] bomber pilots or [black/class-transitioning] billionaires, all the violence in the world could be put in the bottle and chucked into the sea.
When I write that the person who is creating all this text is a fucking nut, this is the kind of thing that I am talking about:
"de-weaponization means, disconnecting the user from using technology in destructive ways".
You can't.
Thinking that you can is dangerous and just hides the problems.
Thinking that somehow the teleology of the technology can be reduced to a single person's motivations for using it is the exact same structure that the folks who are using it for violence think.
It destroys any hope of understanding the social structures that lead to folks using technology for violence.
It's what has led to the IMF, World Bank, and WTO doing so many crimes. It's lynch pin that allows folks in the US to think somehow their thoughts and prayers for how all the tech they produce just needs to be tweaked a bit and somehow that will stop the ecocide of the planet. "Sorry we destroyed your economy and caused massive instability, but you were holding it wrong".
I mean, I have in the past "expanded my mind" to understand that none of the terrible violence inflicted by this empire is necessary- you're right that it is not, but the problem is that anything I do after that is "all in my head".
The material reality, though, is that either we're not doing anything material at that point (which is certainly a kind of narcissism in its own right) or more typically we don't fully understand the deep violence maintained by something such as the US capitalist world order, which is (as far as I can tell) even more narcissistic and violent.
Just pure, unadulterated bat-shit craziness.
There is no world where the globe-spanning, petroleum based colonialist empire that produces F35 is going to somehow, out of the goodness of it's oil-pumping heart go swords to plowshares.
I mean, of all the many folks displaying cluster-b disorders on this site, you're quite expressive of certain trends. You're unable to look past your own identity within the hegemonic order to understand how absolutely out of touch with the material world your positions are.
Congratulations or outdoing so many other folks here in expressing the most radically contradictory and simultaneously un-self-aware positions.
Historically the way white folks have squared that circle has been to say that those folks aren't really people and simply don't know the joys of Christian city dwelling.
I can't make the math work, though.
I understand that the unspoken assumption is that (unlike internet randos such as myself) LEOs and your local government and every other jerk to whom they decide to grant access are universally "good and well intentioned".
But I am always astonished that folks really believe that assumption when stated as such.
If you give up on that assumption, though, the actual reality is that there isn't a difference between only letting literally everyone who has or knows someone with a .gov address access who comes and goes from your house and letting every random dumbass such as myself access that information.
The amount of assumptions about what it might mean to "think" coupled with a seeming obliviousness to those assumptions is quire masterful.
The dumbest people making the most confident statements about thinking...
I love it.
I am going to print it out so that when my great-great-grand kids are hunting angus beef on the plains of what used to be the US they will have some understanding of how the late 21st C version of a Butlerian Jihad came to be.
This is beautiful and I hope that all you folks actually do stop thinking even harder than you already have, because it might liberate the rest of the humans from the Torment Nexus v3.0 you folks seem so dead set on rolling out post haste.
To be fair, US political culture (and capitalism in general) contain deep, deep contradictions so it's going to require a whole lot of glue and squinting to say that there is any coherence to any US political party...
The person you're responding to has it correct, though, that there was an important cultural shift around Johnson and Nixon and the Southern Strategy and all that... not that these cultural politics could ever touch the materialist facts of capital.
If you're not familiar with the concept... https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=lmgtfy
Well, I did write out a couple of paragraphs about what I thought I learned.
I did indeed "learn how to play fallout". Which is pleasant. Like learning to play Rock Band or Sing Star or Guitar Hero was also pleasant.
And although I initially thought that maybe all those "ethically good" decisions I found gratifying might improve my ability to make ethically good choices in the larger world, I believe I was incorrect.
And further, because of the highly contrived nature of the game and it's uncanny closeness to the material world, it might be actually harmful: it encouraged me to pretend I am ethical when in fact it has brought me to do literally nothing with other people.
My point is probably getting hung up on the mechanics of drumming, which I have struggled with off and on for the last 30 years now.
So instead, I'll say what I have to say about writing and general LLM usage and be done:
The real difficulties of writing are a positive adjunct to my thinking, and I believe that almost all of the intellectual things I have struggled with (from learning to read the log files in Linux to predicting what is wrong with the engine in my car) all benefit from the same struggle.
Removing that effort by crapping half-formed thought in and out of an LLM might not be a big deal or even improve the work of folks who have already learned how to think through these complex systems.
However, that flailing certainly doesn't help people get better at thinking in the way that writing or troubleshooting complex systems might.
Further, unlike Guitar Hero an LLM might encourage folks to just "play the game" instead of actually breaking out of the bounds of that game. Because it produces tangible output (from poetry to PLC code), the folks using these "ways of thinking" often feel that they are "doing the same thing" in the same way that I can "bench press" 2-tons-of-steel with a front end loader.
And that intentional confusion between "getting better at doing stuff" and "a lot more crap got done" isn't a good thing to me.
That is the point: a lot of folks do in fact think that creating with an LLM is the same as the process of learning to create.
My point isn't to say that if your motivations for drawing or drumming or whatever come from XYZ, then they aren't valid. I'm also not claiming that picture books about airplanes are bad because they encourage children to become bomber pilots.
People have all kinds of strange and complex motivations, some better than others.
I'd trade your "enjoyment of video games" for "my parents' failures as 'professional' musicians" any day of the week.
My own reasons for going out tonight and playing double bass with my jazz band are way more sus, weird, dumb, illegitimate, whatever and have way less to do with my (very real) love of playing music with my people than anything I think some rando on the internet is going to divulge.
Rather, the point is that struggling and sucking at drawing until you figure out how to do it in a way that feels good can easily get short-circuited by midjourney or whatever.
The hidden midpoint that you think I am hesitant about might be all the pedagogical materials in-between: the scales, drum rudiments, gesture drawings, forum postings, low-rent bar gigs, half-assed bug ridden toy PHP scripts, bizarre sophomore manifestos, bad poetry, broken song lyrics, iffy recitals, lessons with bored teachers, incorrect tableture. Those things are all "pretensions" in your sense: those are all on spectra where folks flail as they approach "doing the thing". And they are all a-okay.
The limit on that spectrum, though is the LLM and the Guitar Hero, where folks are barely even "flailing". Like all parts of a spectrum are on the spectrum, but which is to be avoided if the other end of the spectrum is "good". And I probably wouldn't bother writing that out if there weren't LLMs didn't have literal cults forming around them...
I'm sorry you had folks rolling their eyes at you when you got your instrument. That's an exceedingly common thing to happen. Especially with singing. But it doesn't make it okay or correct or nice.
But the lessons and the practicing aren't the same thing as playing a video game.
In the same way that no matter how good I get in Fallout it will never have anything to do with how I am able to deal with folks in my real life.
For instance, I enjoy Fallout and it's very validating to play it and be the "good" guy. For a quite a while I considered that maybe there was something ethically useful in that kind of "education".
As I have gotten older I have come to feel that it's actually closer to some kind of ethics porn: none of the choices have material consequences for me or my community and I can go back and do things from a save game. I have total control over the situation in ways I never have in real life.
And further, I have come to think that this way of thinking ethics might actually be harmful to my practical ethics: because I'm not forced to make choices that actually impact me or anyone else, that game might start to erode the parts of that process that deal with the often-negative outcomes of those decisions.
So, like, sure: Fallout made me more interested in how my ethics function. But it's so far removed in how we actually move through the world that it might actually mess up how I do things.
I used to have an octapad back in the oughts, and if that was the only way I was interacting with the drum kit it would have done a lot of harm to my playing. If I played the video game drum set like I played my real kit, it would get destroyed in short order.
I am certain that you know what I mean when I say that the specific techniques around stick/beater control have virtually nothing to do with the mechanics of that kit, and further I am equally certain that you understand that the timing involved in these games has little or nothing to do with the strictness (and often looseness/feel/dragging/etc) of the timing when we play drums with other humans.
My point isn't even about the specifics of these games, but about how folks seem to abuse AI so easily these days.
I -don't- think there is anything pretentious about buying an instrument you don't play and then doing whatever you do. That's not pretense, that is the process of learning to play music- that's what it is in itself.
But I also don't think that is the same thing as playing a video game, and I think the distinction is important to make because there is much in our world that asks us to pretend we are doing things we aren't doing.
In the same way that I have to think about how to respond and think about why you have a negative reaction to what I wrote, I also have to struggle with a reasonable way of communicating why I think you don't understand what I wrote.
I have to come to terms with the limitations of my ideas and how I can state them-- if I crapped "fuck your strawman and the fleshlight version of music and thought that is generated by an LLM" into an LLM, then I wouldn't really be getting anything at all out of these kinds of interactions.
So when I read and write, I often struggle. But I think that having those difficulites and sitting with them is what is different than dropping half-baked reactions into an LLM or playing Guitar Hero.
I actually do sight read for a couple of instruments- nothing in any of those games has literally anything to do with that.
Hell, my (very good) reading for clarinet and double bass has nothing to do with my (very poor) ability to sight read on piano.
Whatever gets folks interested in stuff is great, but to me it's like saying "I watched 10K hours of MTV in the 80s and that was very helpful in my career playing jazz"...
The same thing is true with writing and other skills replacements- much of my ability and desire to write comes from the experience of using it as an adjunct to thinking.
Having to figure out how I should connect ideas and state them in a way others will understand clarifies my own thoughts, so the idea that I am somehow gaining idunnowhat by adding a bunch of verbal noise to my writing misses a lot of the reasons why I like to write.
I'm happy to use LLMs to draft things like the contracts I need for the mechanical royalty payments I make when I record other folks material, but that's only because I am not trying to learn how to think legalistically.
And further, creating documents via might spark an interest in legal language and how it get used, but it's not going to help me understand the underlying reasons for what's going on any more than watching a whole lot of porn is going to help me be a better lover...
I did the same process as the "author", namely Joshua Bardwell's videos and tutorials Liftoff using a remote, and now I have a tinywhoop and analog goggles.
But it was mostly just normal practice and learning in the sim (I have maybe 25-35h of time in that) which has translated pretty well to the actual drone. I was able to fly around my yard pretty well. I don't think I'd have had as much luck if I'd not crashed many hundreds of times in a simulator.
For me, the amount of thought outsourced to LLMs has been a bit strange lately. Like, I just puzzled this stuff out and followed a couple of videos other folks had made on Youtube. It's just not that complex these days and there are plenty of (human intelligence) resources already.
I do first aid at music festivals and volunteer at a free clinic that serves a homeless population. I see a lot of spun folks and folks in varying stages of "burned out" (to use the term from the stereotype). I'm still in EMT school, but I've had to work with a lot of folks having adverse reactions to these substances.
Meth and alcohol, simply being poor, childhood trauma, getting into a bad medical situation, losing a job and not finding one; all of those things will put folks into some bad places.
But most substance abuse, in my limited experience, comes down to various traumas folks get into and maybe some chemical predispositions.
That's not how most of the folks I know who have had very adverse psychedelic experiences have gotten into those states. And it is generally a very transitory state.
While there are long-term psychological effects from stuff like acid (and IME, MDMA, Ket, and Nitrous are worse physiologically than things like LSD, C2B, DMT, psilocybin, mescaline, etc), generally psychedelic substances lead people to doing less of those drugs over time and that has a very different effect than, say, alcohol and chronic poverty.
Propaganda about these things has a hard time taking hold in the face of most folks lived reality.
I'd literally rather live in the back of a pickup than have to keep getting woken up at 1am to reboot a server in Iowa because that's cheaper for my boss than getting a second instance.
At some point I inherited some money and bought a shack in the desert, and now I am studying to be an EMT and I volunteer at a free clinic... today got to help a doc sew up a hobo who got into a fight, which was beyond interesting for sure. I get enough money from some investments, an audio production business, and doing festival stuff (either first aid or audio).
Fuck the US, and fuck its working culture. It's sick. When I had to play along with it cause I had kids to raise and needed some stability, I put on a happy face and did the thing.
But there is no reason to do that if you don't have too.
For context, I am 48.
Then get all righteous and start talking about democracy and then no-true-scotsman all the actual things folks do to curtail the actions of the state.
It's wild, but the flip side is that since I am on that side of things I have a much better picture of what it might actually be possible when folks understand that the ethical choices aren't available via a ballot line.
I wish I believed voting worked even a little.
A lot of folks might take that sentiment to believe that since the only 'real and adult' politics comes about from voting we simply abstain out of apathy. For me, the sentiment is a lot closer to "I wish I thought I could just vote instead of all the other weird political things that I end up doing".
My position is that the US has been on this road for about 250 years. Blood quantum and similar policy choices forced on people, individually and in groups, have been very damaging.
But as a person who reads (and I assume you have some care for what you're reading) why would that have anything to do with you as an audience? Like, I get why folks would want a curated set of Readers Digests, but why would you care to make -more- of that output?
Producing a bunch of filler content to pad things out is the opposite direction from most of the reading that I have found helpful. In fact, shortening works seems to be the main part of good writing. I don't generally want to watch a 4-hour film that could have been a tight 50 minutes. I don't want to read 800 pages that could have been a solid 200.
I'm not reading for distraction, and if I were Zane Gray and Robotech and Harliquin romance novels already have that filled- heck, I could just re-read Cujo (which probably wasn't edited very much at all, admittedly).
Generating a ton of crap, as you note, has never been a problem.
Getting rid of the 4-8 paras of thoughtlessness has always been the real work in my experience.
Like a lot of things in the US, the resources are "there" for this stuff, because it's a lot of individual labor instead of something that can be turned into a massive payoff for a couple of "investors" there's no "market incentive" so nothing will be done.
For context, I live on 40 unimproved acres in CO, and much of my spring and late fall is spent moving downed wood and cutting down thickets of gamble oak.
That is a lot of work, and I hope (over the next decade) to eventually get it somewhat under control. The idea is to not have, for instance, a dead tree leaning up against a living tree and to try and tamp down or increase the space between the floor and the first couple of branches in the trees. I also collect up wood for heating in the winter (better to burn it to stay warm than to lt it go in an eventual wild fire.
This is a lot of strenuous work, and not just because I have some love and respect for the situation of all the individual flora and fauna that populate this chunk of land. I've know several wildland firefighters here and they are doing similar things in a hurry out in the hills with hand tools. Because you can't get large equipment around to do the work- there aren't roads in a lot of these places.
It'll all probably burn at some point, anyhow.
But I try because at least in the couple of acres where I actually live I might be able to get the underbrush cleared so a fire could be fought.
But the idea of setting it on fire is prepostrous- I might as well set the shack where I live on fire while i am at it.
That more or less scales up.
The process of mitigating wildire (usually done on a line near an active fire) is largely a bunch of 25 year olds with shovels and chainsaws.
I am all for that work- I'd much rather have them doing that than geraing up to go to Iran or Cuba or wherever.
But hey, the ecology of this place is fucked. My ancestors destroyed the megagfauna to prevent folks from subsisting off of the concentration camps/ reservations. The folks who are still "into" that racist, genocidal, ecocidal project aren't going to do anything to fix it; they'd rather burn their own houses down first.
Because of that work, I have very little trust in the thinking of folks who don't care enough to engage deeply with the process of formulating their thoughts in a way other folks can understand.
"Do what thou wilt" and all, but you might consider that the process of writing is a helpful adjunct for thinking.