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I can't believe that we've managed to escalate past seeing parents as negligent for letting their kids walk home from school or play outside. Is this the new normal? You are negligent if you let your kids ... talk to people online? I uh, am outraged. What if kids start having thoughts their parents don't approve of?

Further, facebook users could chose to use platforms that don't exploit their users. By allowing facebook to benefit from the network effect, they are responsible for kids wanting to be on the platform. They give facebook power, and then facebook uses that power to exploit children. Yet facebook's adult users don't even see the need to defend themselves. To take responsibility.

Some of these laws affect mastodon, so these laws are not a regulation of facebook. What exploitive features of mastodon deserve such a ban? Are children addicted to mastodon's default chronological feed? It seems like it would benefit facebook to establish a regulatory moat that smaller non-ad-driven competitors don't have the resources to comply with. It certainty doesn't seem to have affected their stock.

Also there is reasonable suspicion that meta lobbied for similar laws: https://tboteproject.com/git/hekate/attestation-findings

So much for holding facebook accountable.

Oh, also: https://xkcd.com/743/

assume intent is malicious, ignorant, or amoral

do not grant grace to those who make mistakes, especially those that you have never met or otherwise spoken to

do not seek to understand those you do not already understand

Are these not reflected in your comment?

For unrelated reasons (looking up the author of a quote in the bsd fortune file) I was looking at François de La Rochefoucauld's wikipedia page and learned that he wrote this in the intro for his book of maxims on human behavior:

"... the best approach for the reader to take would be to put in his mind right from the start that none of these maxims apply to himself in particular, and that he is the sole exception, even though they appear to be generalities. After that I guarantee that he will be the first to endorse them and he will believe that they do credit to the human spirit."

Responsibility is to those that give status. Duty of the pro-social sort is what you buy status (regard) with.

Neither subjective or consensus accounts of truth (neither of which correspond with postmodernism or utilitarianism in the way you imply) are obviously inconsistent. Philosophers would not bother talking about them if that were the case.

Funnily enough, I can't tell which of Stalin and Mother Theresa you are worried will be confused with the other, given that many people have opposite ideas of which was moral and which was immoral.

Modern religions define objective morality, not objective truth (excluding metaphysical assertions, which are not what one usually means by truth).

Of course you don't get it: you're not autistic. Did you expect to get it?

There's what's that quote about good art disturbing the comfortable and comforting the disturbed.

Eating is very stressful for many autistic people because of trauma and lack of (non-enmeshing) support in childhood. They don't learn how to make a comfortable environment for themselves or that it is even possible. Every meal becomes stressful. Force feeding or depending completely on others.

Masking goes so deep, it's just not possible to easily convey with words, because after a lifetime of masking you don't even notice all the things that you do that count.

"Presenting behavior in a socialized way when necessary" has a hidden part. Presenting what behavior? To whom? Presenting autism-coded behavior around autistic people is stress-free.

Yup, these people are perfectly fine. They don't need to identify each other and band together. No one is targeting them[0]. They need to stop making mountains out of molehills[1]. It's not like anything bad has ever happened to these 'high functioning' whiners[2]. I mean who cares if they are 'treated' by withholding food to force them to pretend to not be traumatized[3]. They should understand that if they stop identifying with the label or as oppressed victims it will be better for them[4]. Just like all those people with drapetomania[5] who don't realize what's best is a tough hand to guide them. Don't you miss how things used to be?[6] Back when there was more tough love[7].

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0: lol

1: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-truth-about-h...

2: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9087551/

3: https://autisticadvocacy.org/policy/briefs/intervention-ethi...

4: citing a source for this one would be an insult to the reader's intelligence

5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drapetomania

6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chamber_pot

7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Dully

Pricing in externalities (such as national defense impact) is a basic function of economic policy.

I searched 'economics 101 strategic industries' and found this[1] within 30s which includes an overview of 'national self-sufficiency'. It presents the standard argument, including the parts you claim the standard argument ignores.

I personally favor decentralized planning over markets, but I find it unnecessary to slander economics.

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1: https://www.adamsmith.org/economics-101

I was making the deontological argument because I assumed that was the meta-ethical framework you were using, which can be extended by just saying "abiding by moral commitments and oaths is a matter of moral necessity". I think all the arguments you levied can be addressed by that extension.

Trump didn't run on project 2025 precisely because he knew it wasn't the will of the public.

My personal view is that much evil in the world occurs because people who make decisions and those that do them are not the same set. That any one, or any small group, can inflict so much unnecessary suffering seems surely to be a sign of pathology in the structure of our civilization. The fix, in my view, is to reassert direct personal responsibility, and to deny the legitimacy of looking to systems of rules to launder responsibility.

If I was a fed right now I'd probably already have been arrested for breaking people's legs. There are way more feds than there are people telling them what to do.

Federal employees swear a constitutional oath that supersedes presidential order and they have civil service protections beyond what most workers have available. Many are in unions.

As executive workers, they have a legal obligation to execute the law irrespective of what is decreed. Even then, they have their own - private - moral principles. The Nuremberg trials were clear: following orders is not a defense.

The technique might have 'merely' prevented deep sleep due to interruptions; similar to why uberman[1] doesn't work.

When I was younger I stayed up to see what happens. The worst experience of my life was when I lied down to sleep and felt 'too tired to go to sleep' and then started hallucinating sirens. I have no idea how long I was up; after a few days I lost track. I had to paced to stay awake, which I did the entire time. I got pronounced disassociative symptoms - which I'm prone to anyway - ("it's not me in control of my body; there is a mutiny", "my reflection is weird/scary/different; that is not me", "the lines that make up the walls and reality don't seem to lay correctly"), gaps in memory, broken pattern matching (everything looks like a spider, chasing down mundane sounds to figure out what they are), and mixing up memories and imagined thoughts (e.g., fill up a cup, go to drink from it, it is empty and I'm not sure if I filled it up and then drank from it or imagined filling it up or if my memories are out of order).

Given the loss of contact with reality, I could see it being easy to manipulate people if you are in the room with them. I was alone, but if someone told me another me talked to them and then drank from the cup, the mix up could easily seem like evidence that it had actually happened that way, especially if I was trusting, vulnerable and open-minded. And once someone has a model that suggests that, they would probably make up stories on their own to support it.

So, yeah, definitely agree on the importance of sleep.

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1: https://polysleep.org/wiki/Uberman

Wow what a blast from the past. Sounds like /r/Tulpas. I've always thought it was a purely rhetorical trick + disassociation, and obvious what is happening and why. Sleep deprecation has always been part of it since that makes it harder to notice the errors at the edge of your perception. It goes back to at least the 2010s I think.

There is some precedent; the Twin Flame cult coerced transition in some members if I remember correctly. My guess is it was emotional manipulation used to make them do something that makes them more vulnerable to control. If you transition and you are not trans, you are going to have a hell of a lot of dysphoria, and shaming people and telling them it's because they are not trying hard enough/a good enough person/etc. would absolutely make it hard to break away.

Making excuses for abuse is just as unhealthy as seeing it everywhere.

I have been diagnosed both autistic and adhd and I experienced food insecurity despite living in a house with several balconies and a detached garage bigger than my friends' families' houses because my parents thought I would get over it and start going out to eat with them if they didn't bring me any food. I don't think they intended deliberately to harm me - or realize that me not going out to eat with them didn't mean there was enough food - but their authoritarian way of thinking did the harm nonetheless and it's a completely predictable outcome of such a way of thinking; so it's not "I didn't mean it" so much as "I don't want to think differently because I value my attachment to this mode of thinking more than the wellbeing of others; and when I harm them I'll say 'nothing could be done' because changing how I approach the problem isn't on the table".

The healthiest thing most autistic/adhd people ever do is moving from 'I am sick' to 'the society I inhabit has an autoimmune disorder'.

Fascism's power is situated on lying to a 'chosen majority' and telling them they are special, unique, destined for greatness, etc. (often by simultaneously giving them insecurity - that if they don't take up the mantle of chosen majority they are losers, worthless, no one will love them, they deserve to suffer, etc.) so that you can use them to get rid of opposition, and then split off small groups repeatedly, until finally screwing the chosen majority too over because they no longer have enough power to resist.

A critical part of this is controlling information; people need to be convinced not to unite, because if they notice what is happening early on, they can brute force victory through sheer numbers.

Another element of that is maintaining/gaining control of institutions with 'true believers' who are willing to commit cruelty to satisfy the party's ambition is a critical part of progressively removing minorities without the chosen majority realizing that they might be next.

Additionally, making the situation uncomfortable and scary to get people to voluntary leave whittles down the population of people who might be capable and motivated to resist. And making it seem like they have more power than they do and making it unclear what will cause harm to them can cause people to 'obey in advance', giving up power to the party which they do not have.

I call it a kink because I attract women with the kink.

I'm referring to pragmatics not semantics; the use of dictionary definitions is a category error.

No, I was not bullied. People like I describe would posture, I would raise my eyebrow and wait, and then they would treat me nice and pretend it didn't happen. Dominance as form outside the bedroom is remarkably ineffective. That's why I call it dominance as form.

"When a diplomat says yes, he means ‘perhaps’; When he says perhaps, he means ‘no’; When he says no, he is not a diplomat. —Voltaire (Quoted, in Spanish, in Escandell 1993.)

These lines — also attributed to H. L. Mencken and Carl Jung — may or may not be fair to diplomats, but are surely correct in reminding us that more is involved in what one communicates than what one literally says; more is involved in what one means than the standard, conventional meaning of the words one uses. The words ‘yes,’ ‘perhaps,’ and ‘no’ each has a perfectly identifiable meaning, known by every speaker of English (including not very competent ones). However, as those lines illustrate, it is possible for different speakers in different circumstances to mean different things using those words. How is this possible? What’s the relationship among the meaning of words, what speakers mean when uttering those words, the particular circumstances of their utterance, their intentions, their actions, and what they manage to communicate? These are some of the questions that pragmatics tries to answer; the sort of questions that, roughly speaking, serve to characterize the field of pragmatics."[1]

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1: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatics/

(Dominance-related) insecurity is being pathologically averse to being seen as weak, which leads to preferring dominance as form over dominance as function. If the meek hippie gets everything he wants from his wife, his neighbors, his peers, etc., and the physically impressive traditional man is ignored and rejected, then the hippie is more dominant (i.e., leading and getting what he wants) than the traditional man (even if he is abusing his wife the whole time she laughs at him).

The actually effective strategies are available to the insecure but shunned and rejected because they cannot be tolerated, creating a self-imposed impotence.

The word alpha, in almost every context I've observed, is used exclusively to refer to such dominance as form, especially in substitution for dominance as function. i.e., it is applied almost exclusively to people who are definitionally not dominant.

The only exception I have encountered is women-focused kink literature which, being fantasy, maintains that dominance as form is dominance as function so as to make sexual fantasies seem more real.

In short: you are describing a kink, not real life. Though I consider that you might be joking too; I really can't tell.

Out of Your Head 2 years ago

Suppose a model of reality M (which makes predictions) and doesn't admit a higher metaphysical plane as part of the model. Now assume Mp does admit a higher metaphysical plane and makes the same predictions as M for all observable phenomena (or for all reality in the sense of 'this reality').

In such a case, the existence of a higher metaphysical plane is purely aesthetic. In terms of predictions, both models are equally correct, being identical. The correctness of the internal representation is beyond epistemological limits, and arguably a meaningless or ill-formed proposition. For a significant difference, the models must make different predictions. But the conventional understanding (say the standard model) is carefully constructed and deviations by laypeople are invariably simplifications or are due to impaired reality testing.

This situation is the same as religion, because it is one. Either the religion doesn't make predictions about reality, in which case it's difference is purely aesthetic (as a model of reality), or it does and in practice is either trivially falsifiable or copying what is already known (note that the old well known religions have long since had their predictions tested).

Psychedelic experiences could, in theory, produce interesting hypotheses about reality; just like Scientology and the "Twin flame" people could. But in practice it almost always seems to produce crackpot stuff like "you can make a perceptual motion machine with time crystals and fractals; also Einstein, Aristotle, and Tupac already knew this but no one was paying attention; luckily drug-induced divine revelation has bequeathed this information via direct transmission; if only everyone else experienced ego death, then maybe they could be as great as I".

This is the hubris I perceive in the idea that scientists, philosophers, etc. that have dedicated their life to the study of particular tiny pieces of reality and honed a disciplined sense of intellectual rigor are going to be outdone by random people tripping. It is uniquely offensive and arrogant.

That said, in so far as 'reality' is 'my model of reality', individuals may gain psychological insight by partaking in 'spiritual' activity, including psychedelics, and it follows that they may gain a 'special understanding of (their) reality' in that way. The problems are the magical thinking implicated in universalizing personal insight, the pitfall of assuming independence of realities beyond subjective experience, the belief subjective perception is unlimited by physical reality, and in some a tendency to insist that such insight cannot be gained in other (more mundane) ways.

The crux is the word 'I'. When I say 'I' think, do I mean the conscious part of me which has direct experience of that thinking? If so, then I am denying all the of the thinking that 'I' don't do, but my brain/body does.

From that perspective, the experience of thinking in words or pictures is distinct from actually thinking in words or pictures. Saying one thinks in one of these ways seems to be saying what they identify thinking with.

For example, I don't usually think of fantasy as thinking. If I day dream, I wouldn't say I am thinking, but that is fairly visual. To what degree am I saying something about myself vs my identity if I say I do or don't think in words given that context?

Relatedly, I've noticed that when it comes to remembering something, it is not 'I' that remember. Rather 'I' set up mental cues and direct focus, which then hopefully causes the memory to be placed within my awareness. This happens below the level of direct experience. But I might say I failed to remember, taking responsibility for something that 'I' - the part separated from the automatic functions of the body - did not do.

So I'm suggesting statements about words vs pictures are about ego, metaphor and meaning-building, and not about actual mechanisms or communicating actual differences in the experience of thinking.

It can be difficult to talk about these things because such conversations implicitly occur between our identities, not between who we actually are - something beyond our grasp - and the noise this introduces is something I don't know how to surmount, or if it can be surmounted.

Whether it matters if attackers control filenames depends on the threat model. I can think of a few where it doesn't matter. One example: you provide managed web application hosting and have some scripts that check something about the files so they get handled properly.

If you have a good reason to create a file, and the value you want to identify it by contains a newline, then that is a good reason to create a filename containing new lines. Filenames are arbitrary bytes excluding null. Regardless at scale, eventually such a file will end up being created. Encoding bugs, libraries, user creation, messed up copy/paste, etc. File names may not even be utf8.

`ls | cmd` is also just an sh code smell. Bash is big on discipline and suffering and not so much on correctness (like C and forth) so code smells matter more. When I worked with/maintained large bash/sh scripts, one `ls | cmd` and I would reread everything the person wrote because it was very likely it was horribly broken. Another one is 'set -euo pipefail`, which people love to set but often don't understand.

A lot of sh/bash, maybe most of it, is written by people that don't take it seriously as a language, and it shows. Also basically everything on stack overflow about it is wrong, and probably everything chatgpt says. I remember it being uniquely bad in that regard. To the point that whenever someone says a neat bash fact, it is better to assume they are part of an elaborate conspiracy to get you to write catastrophic bugs until verified independently. Anything short of that level of paranoia and you eventually do the steam thing and delete everyone's files.

The article could have been titled "why you shouldn't use sh".

People with obsessive tendencies may believe (less than consciously) that avoiding mistakes is the only way they can be loved but that it is okay because they can become perfect 'eventually' with enough work. Finishing a project induces anxiety because it means admitting (to themselves) that it is the best they can do. On team projects this may manifest as hostility towards declaring anything done, criticism of acceptable work of teammates as shoddy, excessive work hours, not finishing things they work on, constantly blowing past deadlines, preoccupation with organizational tools and techniques, etc.

It seems like it is about logic, rationality, being optimal, etc., at the surface, but it is fundamentally an emotional reaction (fear) accentuated by a blindspot as to how their emotions affect them. People with these tendencies frequently declare that they are completely rational and not at all driven by emotion, which is due to the blindspot (often denial to maintain the fantasy of becoming perfect so that they can be loved).

In short, if children are only loved in highly conditional ways they may learn that they have to be good enough to be loved, and as adults not get anything done because the terror of not being good enough means they cannot accept their own work as good enough.

The problem is that while they have most of the good learning resources locked away, they are frequently aligned towards other goals, and they are structured in ways that make that clear.

I didn't go to college because I was rebuffed by the sharp edges. And honestly it is difficult to not resent at times my peers that both did and failed to use the resources available to them.

I wish it was just accepted that ability comes in different forms from different sources, and should be cultivated wherever it is at, without social gatekeeping, status games, etc. The banality and simultaneously seriousness of these rituals repulses me.

Because the principle you suggest applies in reverse as well. If an autodidact knows more than someone with those resources available - then they are so much better equipped to learn the material that they should be an automatic hire and you should ignore anyone else unless they are significantly more capable/learned.

Ignorance is the natural human state, and no one should feel ashamed of it. Everyone is ignorant of more things than they are not ignorant of.

Often feeling dumb/not understanding is just a product of not having the prerequisites for something. Basically all ideas and fields are accessible to people of modest intelligence with sufficient effort (and ability to pick one thing and stick with it). The ones that are not fill with charlatans. It can be boring to pay attention to technical details. There is no moral superiority in doing so.

When I've taught people who thought themselves to be dumb, I found that the negative self talk about being dumb was often rooted in either a feeling of guilt/badness or obligation, and the label of dumb solved the unhealthy feeling: "I'm just dumb, nothing I can do". This is even more pronounced in cases where there is some resource the person needs that they don't have, where trying harder causes worse performance, or where they feel obligated to because they think like their preferred activity is less valuable/lower status.

Realistically, it is necessary to pick how to spend your time, and math and programming without compensation are frankly a waste of time (if you are not enjoying it, finding fulfillment). As Satre said, we are condemned to be free - to chose what we specialize in, and what we skip, with no one to give us the correct choice.

If there are N things you could do, every time you do something, there are N-1 things you are not doing in that moment, which are way more than you will ever do.

I relate to the feeling. For me 'ex falso quod libet' - the idea mixing up truth and falsity once with collapse the foundation of everything I know is worse than any scary movie. The fear I'll forget faster than I learn, or that I'll never really understand. The yearning to understand the world, to know and not doubt.

If you are able to see some highly technical post you don't understand and then sleep soundly, you far wiser than I.

I prefer: do the thing when doing so reduces the expected cost of (time-discounted) future outcomes by more than the expected utility of the next best thing you can do now.

The problem with DRY occurs when it contravenes this principal - when deduplication is too expensive and/or unlikely to decrease the cost of future mutations enough to be worth it.

The proposed problem isn't a binary - that you should or shouldn't make the assumption yet - but rather that the assumption has a cost based on what you believe is likely to occur in the future and the value produced by making the assumption now needs to outweigh the cost.

Origins of J 3 years ago

Ah, mea culpa, it is here: https://www.jsoftware.com/books/pdf/calculus.pdf

The preface says:

The scope is broader than is usual in an introduction, embracing not only the differential and integral calculus, but also the difference calculus so useful in approximations, and the partial derivatives and the fractional calculus usually met only in advanced courses. Such breadth is achievable in small compass not only because of the adoption of informality, but also because of the executable notation employed. In particular, the array character of the notation makes possible an elementary treatment of partial derivatives in the manner used in tensor analysis. The text is paced for a reader familiar with polynomials, matrix products, linear functions, and other notions of elementary algebra; nevertheless, full definitions of such matters are also provided.

Origins of J 3 years ago

Since we are on the topic, I've thought about APLs a decent amount so here are some other resources/notes. I'm not an expert on this topic - I don't work with or research the language or anything. These probably are not good getting-started resources.

There is a VM model for APL languages[1] which can make optimizations comparable to those made by CLP(FD). If you read about CLP(FD) implementations[2], you'll see operations similar to what the "An APL Machine" paper calls beating. I'm not sure if any APL-like languages actually implement such optimizations.

There are different models of arrays (and their types) used by APL-like languages[3]. Also array frame agreement can be statically typed[4], though it usually isn't.

Some other OSS implementations of similar languages include Nial[5], ngn/k[6], and GNU APL[7]. My favorite is ngn/k. If you use a K-like language, a great source of inspiration is nsl[8].

There is an unusual and fun calculus book that uses J, by Iverson, but it moves somewhat quickly and loosely[9]. It perhaps gives a good example of what APL was intended to be(?). On that note, his original paper, "Notation as a Tool of Thought" is interesting[10]. There is also podcast interview with Robert Kowalski, one of the creators of Prolog, who says - if I remember correctly - that he was looking for a better way of thinking when he came up with SLD resolution[11]. It's interesting how these languages came out of different paths towards a similar goal.

Also beware the reverence of Arthur Whitney. His work is definitely inspired, but the community around K can seem schizoid-like[12], in a way comparable to Wolfram's projects[13].

That said, J is an exceptionally fun language to use. My favorite insight from an APL-like language that generalizes is how K encourages writing functions that converge by the easiest-to-use loop operator being one that applies a function to an argument repeatedly until the output stops changing.

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[1] https://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/apl/Papers/197...

[2] http://cri-dist.univ-paris1.fr/diaz/publications/GNU-PROLOG/... (there are probably more to the point papers, this is just the one I read when I noticed the similarities).

[3] https://aplwiki.com/wiki/Array_model

[4] https://www.khoury.northeastern.edu/home/jrslepak/typed-j.pd... (implemented in racket iirc)

[5] https://www.nial-array-language.org/

[6] https://codeberg.org/ngn/k (honestly it is a miracle this exists)

[7] https://www.gnu.org/software/apl/

[8] https://nsl.com

[10] https://www.eecg.utoronto.ca/~jzhu/csc326/readings/iverson.p...

[11] https://thesearch.space/episodes/1-the-poet-of-logic-program...

[12] https://www.ijpsy.com/volumen3/num2/63/the-schizoid-personal...

[13] http://genius.cat-v.org/richard-feynman/writtings/letters/wo...