crispinb

"People" and their "wants" or "enjoyments" are manufactured by culture (which is in turn now dominated by corporate propaganda). They are not fixed by nature. Any examination of the range of 'wants' in human history will inevitably conclude that, beyond a few corporeal basics, they are endlessly plastic. This is hard to see from the centres of Empire (especially highly mediated ones) where local and highly propagandised 'desires' are seen as 'natural'.

Agricultural societies are machines for creating large numbers of humans. In any democracy (or sufficiently responsive government) the kinds of persons that are created is a powerful determinant of what subsequently happens. Corporations choose to make consumer-humans. Many other types have existed, so ipso facto are possible.

maybe they don't make great decorations

Some of ours are decorative enough, eg this orb weaver I exchange greetings with most mornings: https://www.pasteboard.co/07o5TWpFLUY8.png

They're saying all the right things here ..

No. "Commitment" in corporate speak is a synonym for "absolute lack of intention". That's why corps 'commit' to reducing emissions, treating employees fairly, etc, ie. to all the things they will not do. But no suit 'commits' to making money. They just make money. It's just a superficial linguistic gesture. Shakespeare got it.

Kobo + Koreader (https://koreader.rocks/) works pretty sweetly with Calibre.

What change was the person who shot him hoping to elicit?

This would be a relevant question in many nations, but it's a bit beside the point in the US. Violence is a deeply respected and loved core of the culture for its own sake. It's an end, not means. Nearly all the US's entertainment, culture and myths are built around a reverence for violence. Even political violence has been pretty much the norm through most of the US's history. Celebrated cases aside, there's been something of a lull since the mid 1970s, but if as now likely it increases again, this will be a boring old reversion to the US's norm.

Or to put it another way: a Pebble would cover more uses with a GPS. They're clearly not expensive nor necessarily profligate with battery. My now 5 year old Amazfit bip, which was cheap as chips, still gets 3 weeks of battery life with a daily gps-mapped run.

Quite. Phones & watches are mutually exclusive from my pov. The whole point of the watch (especially when running) is not to have to carry a phone.

We agree on the empirical fact that many people generate suffering for themselves by encouraging an inner narrative of complaint about others' behavour.

If there's disagreement, it seems to be about whether or not this is necessary. I contend (along with thousands of wise narrators from just about every culture throughout human history) that it is not. This is just spiritual/ideological/psychological pragmatism (depending on your metaphysical orientation), and is intrinsically unrelated to altruism or perhaps ethics. Indeed someone holding a view that judgement of others is ethically or morally 'bad' merely shifts the target of the wasted mental judging-activity to their own putative ego.

What purpose is served by being judgemental ..

It reinforces ego. It's a common malady. An optional one (which isn't to say it's always easy to ditch given constant and insistent if irrational social reinforcement).

Do you think those who optionally exercise the mental activity of making judgements of those behaviours are likely to suffer more or less burnout than those who choose not to? How useful an activity do you think making judgements of people you interact with is? Who is it useful to? The judge? The judged?

But a lot of it is showing up to help yet another person ..

It must be an distressing burden to carry that weight of judgement, regardless of what job you do.

Ycombinator has one legitimate function: dissipating excess looted wealth.

It's the barstool economist argument style, on long-expired loan from medieval theology. Responding to clear empirical evidence that X occurs: "X can't happen because [insert 'rational' theory recapitulation]"

You're quite capable of seeing that a serious of ludicrously generalised ideological statements, entirely abstracted from reality, are as close to meaningless as human statements get (which is exactly why social media affords them). You are just blinkered by acculturation, and prefer it that why. Drama is so much more fun than reality.

Someone once said something to the effect: "I'm not concerned that computers will become more like people, I am that people will learn to 'think' like computers".

A fortiori humans vs social media. You are faux-thinking in a series of tweets.

Your malevolent childs-ego-inflated-to-national 'winners vs losers' notion will inevitably, if not expunged, make losers of us all. My 'us' is of course unimaginable to your minuscule 'me'.

Turns out that the person who originally created the language doesn't like them either.

But it also turns out the very same isn't as neurotically attached to his 'likes' as most of us are:

The Rust I Wanted probably had no future, or at least not one anywhere near as good as The Rust We Got. The fact that there was any path that achieved the level of success the language has seen so far is frankly miraculous. Don't jinx it by imagining I would have done any better!

He understands that his likes are just contingent facts about a single mammal, not truths. This is a hard-won understanding. Most people never reach it.

I think what you have to bear in mind is, with all sorts of caveats and exceptions, the HN crowd is at the centre of the current ecocidal empire, with most participants personally gaining from biosphere destruction. Participating here is much like being around public debate forums in 18thC Britain, where, yes, the slave traders inevitably dominated because they were at the centre of power, but abolitionists kept heads high and voices loud and eventually won. Of course we don't yet know whether or not we're going to win.

Being here can be interesting, but don't expect it to be sympatico. There can be no solidarity while exploitation dominates.

Unmet needs are legion.

Does anyone other than Fastmail use it?

how techbros ruin the perception of legitimately useful technology

Well said - that really is key. Fortunately or not (depending on your values), it's just a given that if there's a means out of the crisis (who knows?), tech just is going to be a major part of the plan.

I don't think this was necessarily true, say, 40 years or so ago. It might have been possible then to put economies on slower burns (pun intended), and concentrate on social/political/ethical adjustments, wealth redistribution, urban redesign etc.

But there's isn't time for long-term solutions now. Short/medium-term emergency survival is going to require massive tech deployments. But if they're going to work, the direction needs to be determined by rational considerations, not neurotic and childish billionaire egos.

Having said that, I don't think it's going to happen. A crash is more likely at this late stage.

Unfortunately your satire is mainstream thinking amongst much of the SV/HN set. Business/economic/tech "hardheadedness" is just millennial Protestantism in another guise. So many of our secular disguises are religious in origin - "progress", "sovereignty", etc. Unthinking inheritances of a prescientific age.

In some ways the physical-reality-averse 'realists' are even less solidaristic than your satire suggests. "Humans", you would think, rationally includes the vast numbers of climate refugees (millions now, hundreds of millions in decades to come) - yet somehow I suspect they will not be welcomed with open arms by techno-'realists' when their islands and lowlands go permanently under. When one-third of Pakistan was recently underwater I didn't hear loud assertions of human solidarity from them.

"But Malthus!" might be persuasive to people unfamiliar with science and/or history, but (being neither), it just makes me sigh. Another pointless repeated diversionary trope. And as for Gore - your weird obsession with celebrities illuminates nothing.

Not a single person (I mean that quite literally) familiar with the actual, hands-on, empirical work going on in the field by tens of thousands of real scientists in thousands of research institutions private and public alike in a couple of hundred nations covering every ecosystem on the planet is in doubt that the living world is in deep peril.

Neither is anyone who has ever lived for any period outside of a well-protected urban area. My region has been swept with an unprecedented sequence of floods and fires over the last few years. Two almost total destructions by flood in 2022 alone. We will never again have permanent road & telecoms infrastructure (it is routinely destroyed). And that's just the most obvious surface. Anyone familiar with the flora, fauna, and water systems here knows that the ecosystems are in an advanced state of collapse. That's repeated over almost the entirety of the globe.

Forget historical culture wars. Just survey contemporary, real-world, empirical science. I'm not going to cherry-pick a few irrelevant links from a google scurry like you have done. You need to do a bit of homework. You just look daft without it. Get over your fear and have a good, clear-sighted look at reality. You'll probably feel better.

I've followed the literature on this at a layperson's level (science feeds, etc). I haven't been seeing any work that disputes the fact that limits are being breached right now. Ecosystems all over the planet are dying, and many planetary systems (notably the climate) are shifting into unstable patterns.

As far as I've seen, there absolutely is broad agreement among scientists about the physical reality at play. But (as usual) soft-headed business and political people ignore what they can't face.

Economic growth is a euphemism for biosphere destruction. Borrowing your phrase. More truthfully 'economic growth' and biosphere destruction are literally two terms for the exact same physical process. Circular economy stories excluded for the sci-fi fantasies they are, of course.

Nice (not to mention surprising) to see a mention of them here (of all places). Both channels are great sources of distraction. Flying foxes are splendid little creatures, and the carers are admirable.

I'm blessed to live somewhere with a healthy flying fox population, and always look forward to the Moreton Bay fig and guava trees around my place fruiting - flying fox squeaks and squeals all night.

I had been hoping to do a mountain marathon in August as a fundraiser for the Tolga Bat hospital in QLD, but I think a calf injury might have put me out of commission for that.

I suppose flying foxes, not being echo-locators, are a little off topic. Though having had them around for some years, I'm very sure it is like something to be one.

Not at all. I phrased the comment clumsily in a quick fly-by way, so it was very easily misunderstood ;)

How will you get access to a real night sky, if there's no democratic control over billionaire's actions?

You just assume (without argument) that the internet has to be absolutely everywhere (and all high-bandwidth). You can argue it, and then figure those arguments into pros/cons. If you see none of the cons, you are not even part of the debate (you're just an ideologist). To assume one side, without interrogation or thought, is to be a decerebrate plaything of the billionaire's momentary whim.

I don't even particularly like the notion of a 'take'. As if it's just an opinion about one minor supermarket choice. It's not. I see it more as a fundamental attack on my planet and species, by a self-appointed colonising elite.

I've played guitar for many years, but for the last couple of decades it's only been casual noodling, often improvising with music I have on in the background. I read music, but slowly and reluctantly so have only a weak association between note names and sound.

But I have a strong fretboard/sound association that is some sort of pitch memory. I can jump straight to a note, or if not to it, I'll be off by a fret (semitone). It's more accurate wiht a quick intuitive attempt - if I pause to think I'll often be further off. Jumping straight into playing with/over something I hear I'll nearly always start on the right note.

What pitch memory I have is very clearly learned, and I suspect it could be developed it were a priority.

If it's "mature" to disregard basic values, then we're stuffed. Attitudes and values cluster. People who care about night skies also care about ecosystems. Denatured, psychologically-damaged people who value neither, destroy both. There is no distinction between "nature" and anything else. There is only the real physical world.