bobson381

A guy on the sysadmin subreddit managed to 8x the global GDP https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1uz2fv2/aws_says_...

Sounds good, thanks for your response. I didn't mean to denigrate your word choice at all, it's mostly that I'm hypersensitive to that kind of phrasing now because there's so much auto-written stuff on e.g. Substack, LinkedIn, etc. Sam Kriss has a nice article about it all.

Language is already a lossy map, but it is not really an expression of another person's thought or mind if they translate it through an LLM. Or at least it's a much harder to decipher representation of it. Form is void, void is form, and the two are not separate.

Fascinatingly, I'm now so allergic to certain LLM-phrases that I immediately noticed your use of Not X but Y in this comment. Maybe that was intentional, maybe not, but it's a funny illustration of how odd this language rabbit hole has been!

Because of access to a giant store of energy. Our advancement has also created a future need to consume more and more energy to fuel increased complexity.

One of my favorite pieces of writing on this topic

https://books.worksinprogress.co/book/maintenance-of-everyth...

if you allowed for some slippage in precision, how many images could you fit in that are recognizable from various angles, with ~acceptable~ resolution? Sounds fun.

Hmm. Mainly that access to much larger quantities of energy than before in the form of oil/coal/gas enabled the creation of a much more complex system than before, with a higher metabolic need.

Ongoing servicing of that metabolic need requires continuous access to the same or greater amount of energy year after year. The world burns through its annual resource budget in July this year.

As we continue to extract more and more, the energy return on energy invested goes down, so net energy availability drops, making it harder and more expensive to continue the current basal metabolic rate, let alone fueling continuous growth. Because so much is built atop the energy mechanism, instability happens when it's threatened or changed.x

So maybe a better turn of phrase would have been that it's the first time we've harnessed so much energy at once and effectively put a lot of energy slaves to use per each person. Like starting to use fossil fuel to create fertilizer that enables more people to survive famines, you create a scenario where you need ongoing access to the same or greater amount of energy just to keep up. Not saying it was the wrong choice, just that we tend to fix issues by making more complex solutions that introduce future resource need.

it is the first time we have harnessed all of the energy on the planet at once to power a single interconnected advanced system across continents. Mostly I'm drawing from a thermodynamics outlook[0]. previous collapses had unused high quality energy in other areas to fall back on. I'd love to read more about the growth towards China being sustainable in that sense.

[0] https://youtu.be/5WPB2u8EzL8?si=doERoIYuYZYHLAAZ

This is largely escapism because the current paradigm of growth is ending, rather messily. The definition of living well is going through a forced change, and adjusting is hard.

Okay, question because someone here might know. I have a faint recollection of reading a few years ago that prior to the current train automation system in Japan, they used to have to keep a staff of graduate students or other temp workers on standby to handle the busy periods. Am I hallucinating this fact? Does anyone know? I've tried to find the article where I read it to no avail.

Huh, interesting. I retract my previous statement! I'd love to read about this if you have a source.

also interrobang is rendered as bang-interro (!?) when it should be interro (?) then bang (!) -> (?!)

I dunno, my Mom in the midwest thinks it's the funniest thing ever, having grown up in an area where all the houses looked like this. There's some element of satisfaction knowing that you can't buy good taste

We are also limited - the backstock that's made our extraordinary 200-year party possible is the reserve of oil. Future civilizations will start lower on the energy gradient.

I'm with Alan Watts. It's consciousness all the way down, in a unified, Spinozan, sense. A rock feels rock like you feel you, just in rock ways. Tat Tvam Asi, in a way.

It's useful for us to have the concept of separateness, like it's useful for us to have the concept of names, or a foot, or dollars, etc. But it doesn't mean things really are separate.

in that case, hello, bat!

You know what it would be like for you to imagine being a bat, but you don't know how it feels for a bat to be a bat, as "you" aren't.

I have always liked the way that this paper frames the distinction and tension between the feeling of subjective experience and the "detached" rational scientific descriptive perspective that purports to be outside of that experience.

What is Real by Adam Becker was a fun foray into why this is so in (some) modern science philosophy as well - there's some desire to say that there isn't a "there" there when we talk about the world, just stuff. I'm probably with Alan Watts on the whole thing, that we are in some sense local aspects of a larger consciousness pretending it isn't so, and the hard work done by detached, disembodied perspectives like the scientific descriptive one are more and more steps to an unfolding game.

We are going to find out. See Limits to Growth.

That is frustrating. Sounds like no way forward w/o basically forcing a crash via hard shutdown from a PDU.

Could you get a kvm connected to a networked PDU with per-outlet control? Then a power cycle on the plug for the mac would accomplish the same thing. Or just use the network port on the PDU directly w/o kvm.

a la https://xkcd.com/505/

It's essentially the TVtropes Fascist but Inefficient, but it takes out the grunt work.[1]

The other thing that comes to mind here is Brazil, the movie directed by Terry Gilliam - the inefficiency of the state is part of what makes it evil because it mostly doesn't care if it gets stuff wrong - I wonder how machine intelligence may change that.

[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FascistButIneffi...

Advaita Vedanta or Alan Watts style looking - essentially the idea that there are no separate things or events, sort of like Whitehead's process philosophy. Trippy stuff and a little bit out there, but consistent with some other ways of looking at things. What is real by Adam Becker goes into some underpinnings here too.

I read and enjoyed the book " what is real" by Adam Becker that talks about this intersection between the philosophy of the day and its impact on what more considered valid interpretations of QM at the time and into the future. The logical positivists had a lot of impact on popular conception of quantum stuff, even to this day. Great read

Hence the title and its hearkening back to seeing like a state - I would guess one of the author's related views is that a rigid, high-modern codification scheme will always miss the magic stuff that fills in the cracks. And you can't go without that without eventual unforeseeable consequences. It's a techne versus metis distinction I think

well we can stick planes in the upper atmosphere and sprinkle sulfur around to get some cooling, but it'll get worse before then. gonna be interesting.

So I've been on a journey of discovering basically this - limits to growth - for the last few years. It's been .... an emotional roller coaster as someone living in the developed world. I'm following the work of Nate Hagens and others in the space, but The Dread still ebbs and flows.

How do you hold this dispassionately? How do you get to a point of wanting to reproduce, or even wanting to continue, as an act of radical hope? Absurdism? Pure interest in watching it all unfold? I'm pretty aware that we are going to have constraints forced on us as like, a thermodynamic function, but ... how to cope? Go back to the tragedy?

-confused, interested, fascinatedly dreading

This is like the functional ugly tier of buildings from "how buildings learn". Excellent stuff