elago

That talk was inspirational, as was the follow up ~10 years in progress video that came up next. I'm going to give FreedomBox a try. It is sad that I've never heard of this until now.

More clarification on the topic would be nice. When I open the Signal app right now, I am nagged to "Create a PIN. PINs keep information that's stored with Signal encrypted. Remind Me Later / Create PIN".

Would be interesting to know if an app specific PIN resists cellebrite analysis. Screen unlocked, Signal PIN enabled.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. has 434,164,946 acres of “cropland”—land that is able to be worked in an industrial fashion (monoculture). This is the prime, level, and generally deep agricultural soil. In addition to cropland, the U.S. has 939,279,056 acres of “farmland.” This land is also good for agriculture, but it’s not as level and the soil not as deep. Additionally, there is a vast amount of acreage—swamps, arid or sloped land, even rivers, oceans, and ponds—that the USDA doesn’t count as cropland or farmland, but which is still suitable for growing specialized energy crops.

Of its nearly half a billion acres of prime cropland, the U.S. uses only 72.1 million acres for corn in an average year. The land used for corn takes up only 16.6% of our prime cropland, and only 7.45% of our total agricultural land.

Even if, for alcohol production, we used only what the USDA considers prime flat cropland, we would still have to produce only 368.5 gallons of alcohol per acre to meet 100% of the demand for transportation fuel at today’s levels. Corn could easily produce this level—and a wide variety of standard crops yield up to triple this.

What's wrong with that site? I've been listening to the podcast hosted there, Econtalk, for the last year+.

Do they have some bias in the grander scheme of economics? The guests and topics always seem extremely varied, and the host actually asks challenging and interactive questions to the guests.

I wouldn't say that's the problem. You do not need to register a new account to see an instance's timeline.

For example this page shows the instance's timeline without logging in: https://mastodon.sdf.org/about

If you like someone's toots there, you can follow and message any user on SDF's instance from your account on any other instance.

As mentioned elsewhere, the only thing you would gain by creating an account on sdf.org is to have your toots appear by default in the local timeline of other sdf.org users.

On the android app I use, switching between accounts is as simple UI wise as switching to different instances (or spaces or whatever the top level division is called) in Slack. In two taps I can switch between tech themed and social themed for example.

I agree some platforms make multiple accounts hard to the point where you're registering multiple free email accounts, installing multiple browsers and using incognito mode, etc.

That is not inherently the case, and can be quite the opposite when allowing users to control multiple accounts is part of the software's design.

I've seen electric companies bill like that to reflect the realities of power generation and usage, but it's applied equally to all consumers of electricity at the time of day.

Using 1000w of electricity with a 1950's toaster cost the same as using 1000w of electricity with a 2018 microwave.

And hopefully it would cost the same to use 1000w of electricity to power your home server hosting a website that criticizes the local electricity company.

This is absurdly myopic. The only way it's 100% along party lines is if you ignore EVERYTHING else that happens in politics except the issue of Russian influence in the 2016.

I could go on and on citing examples of both parties doing absurd things, but you've already indicated you're done with this thread so I won't cut into your Rush Limbaugh listening time and won't mention anything about birth certificates.

I give a lot of page views to those ad-heavy online unit conversion calculators that are quite simple. While the page itself really just implements basic arithmetic, I have no idea how hard it is to get the 1st result from the search engine when you google "Convert 130 inch ounce to newton meters"

True for me. Using spacemacs which uses vi style keybindings, so most shortcuts are key sequences instead of chords. I think its faster for me to press two or three characters on the keyboard my fingers are already on before I move them into place on another keyboard.

Adding a second keyboard and using the Russian layout is a cool method to use a 2nd keyboard that doesn't just duplicate the keys of the first, and likely has more fun applications than just adding more shortcuts to your text editor.

To be cynical regarding that link, there are 2 separate facts presented but not a good explanation of why the two are related.

1) A chinese electricity company began collecting wireless sensor data in 2014

2) In April 2018 their profits were up $315M

Did they begin doing more business? Did their competition remain the same? Are they subsidized by the government somehow?

So many reasons why a utility company could be more profitable, they should explain the connection between the monitoring and profitability, otherwise someone can probably show you evidence that switching brands of office coffee increase profitability 200%.

Failure of an ecosystem is very severe. What does the base rate fallacy test have to say about playing russian roulette? No one talks about the 5/6 times it doesn't cause any problems.

I've got to visit something similar at Sandia National Labs. https://energy.sandia.gov/energy/renewable-energy/solar-ener...

(The video at about 6 minutes shows cool footage of spaceship material being tested)

I got to see it just as a tour, I don't work in that field and don't know how it compares to the Odeillo solar furnace.

Yea, you probably can if you want and don't give up.

It's not apparent to me if you want to be a quant, or you want a job that earns a lot of money and is considered prestigious by a certain group of people.

If you had the passion for being a quant regardless of the money, you could be learning and programming in your free time.

If you want the job title more than you enjoy the activity, then I'm sure you could keep studying and practicing and get the job, but I don't think you'll find it satisfying.

If you merely want money for quality of life, stability, security, having F-U money, or anything along those lines, then I'd really want to stress that there are two areas you can work on to achieve that goal. One is earning more money and you seem very focused on that. The other is becoming more efficient with your life. At any point you can make the realization that you've hit a point of diminishing returns in either area, and focus on something else.

I'm not in your shoes, but w/ a salary of 145k at 22 years old, I think you can make the pieces fit to retire in about ~10 years, while spending plenty of money on recreation along the way. Alternatively, I'm sure you can rent/buy/subscribe enough that you spend the next 10 years living paycheck to paycheck. Lifestyle is yours to choose.

You ever hear of "early retirement extreme" (don't be scared by the cheesy misleading name, it's probably the lowest quality part of the blog/book). I discovered it in my mid 20's and wish I did earlier.

I could go on and on about it, and I won't even drop numbers because you won't believe them. The author is a physics PhD and discusses topics very logically and steps back critically analyzes many common cultural behaviors and preconceived notions (what IS retirement, for example) that can help you think about what you really want and the best way to get there.

Judge for yourself but I think his life is a lot more interesting than rich tech kids buying exclusive turnkey vacation packages w/guaranteed great instagram backdrops. Example, walking the docks and joining a sailboat racing team, training for 100 mile bike races, etc.

There's really too much to write here to describe the full philosophy lifestyle, but I encourage you to at least check it out with an open mind. I guarantee you it's not "frugal living", the guy probably has nicer stuff than most people when it comes to clothes, bikes, tools, etc.

Honestly reading your posts in this thread I can tell we're so wildly different when it comes to values that I don't really know if this will resonate with you or not, but again I at least encourage you to check it out, just to see other options for whats out there.

I will go ahead and spoil the "end" of the guy's personal journey, since I think you might be especially interested: Despite having investments that generate over 100% of living expenses, and not having to do anything for anyone, getting to do whatever you want all day, the ends up taking a job as "quant trader/researcher" for the opportunity to solve challenging problems.

http://earlyretirementextreme.com/so-long-and-thanks-for-all...

At the risk of being judgemental without knowing you:

1) Are there really that many things you can't do in the world with that salary?

2) Are you choosing a fair group of people to compare yourself with? Yes, you may be at the ABSOLUTE BOTTOM of the top 5%, if you only look at the top 5%. Do you have any non software engineer peers?

Thank you for the response and engaging with me. I'm sorry you were insulted, I should have written a longer reply and left less room for reading between the lines.

I'd really enjoy diving a little deeper into this, and really hope I'm not coming across as combative.

Take the "blackhat" away from SEO, take the "scam" away from ICO, replace "spam" with "effective viral marketers". All of those are technically challenging but not necessarily changing the world. By your reply's 2nd paragraph, I'm assuming you will withhold judgement on these individuals/professions?

Otherwise, would you mind explaining the distinction? The only difference I see is Jane St et al are established with massive amounts of capital, vs being the little guy. I don't wish to offend you again but it seems by calling them criminal/detriment to society you are passing the same judgement that I am on large financial firms?

Aren't high frequency traders and big funds always toeing the line between legitimate behavior market manipulation?

Finally, call me narcissistic if you wish but I am a human not a Vulcan. I can't help pass judgement and say those who willingly pass up easy money to selflessly do poorly compensated hard work to help those less fortunate and make society a more harmonious place DO deserve my praise more than some interns on the way to potentially being the next Martin Shrekli. I think the world needs more of these people and they're certainly not being compensated with money so I want to do what I can to compensate them with social capital.

And finally, I'll repeat that I don't mean to troll or cause offense to you. I'm gracious for the opportunity to engage with you and learn different opinions rather than stay in my echo chamber/filter bubble.

This reasoning leads to praising blackhat SEO, spammers, ICO scammers, etc. I'm sure they do plenty of technically clever things. And they also make plenty of money, therefore via economic theory they're a valuable asset to our community, unlike those marginally useless teachers and social workers.

My life's fine and more importantly I sleep great at night and am proud to tell anyone what I do for work.

I've completely plateaued on the happiness vs money graph and you couldn't pay me enough at this point to take a job in the finance or defense industry.

No, because the shares actually represent ownership in a company that's engineering and building rockets.

I believe a Ponzi scheme is when you pay "interest" to early investors, via investments from new members. There is never any income generating activity other than recruiting new members.

I don't think Ponzi applies to Spacex.

As a human, social, user of Mastodon, yes that's totally fine with me. 50k followers is absurd, I have maybe in the 100's of social connections, and realistically only maintain in the dozens of meaningful conversations with people. I just want a means to have those connections that's not feeding some omnipotent beast.

I'm assuming your values are something else. Do you monetize your social media followers/follower count in some way? For some professions it's smart and necessary, but for my career it's not relevant in any way at this point.

It is social media, why does this need to be handled at the protocol level? Post a final message on the "You@ServerA" account saying "This is my last post here, keep talking to me with my new account: You@ServerB"

Anyone who visits your old account will see the last message. Anyone who sees that message and can't muster the effort to make 2 mouse clicks probably isn't a follower except from a numbers perspective.

Mastodon is like email.

Then why did you write this sentence and not "ActivityPub is like email"?

Mastodon would be like Hotmail, right?

How many centralized social networks have failed too? Most of them.

A lot of successful things have had similarities to previous failures. The first step is to actually try something new instead of sitting around nay-saying everything.

Personally my opinion Youtube can keep the the drama rage videos, or they can fall off the face of the internet. I just want educational videos and music without constant ads, and I don't want to create some entity with absolute power to censor content for the rest of the internet.

I'm curious how are you coming up with these economic projections? Are you running simulations? Reading reports? Are you an economist?

What if China just sells to other customers? What is China subsidizes it's manufacturers, so they get paid and keep their production capacity whether or not they're actually producing? Exactly like soybean and corn farmers in the US are btw.

The whole thing seems incredibly complex, and most of the economic opinions I read about don't say "markets are better when the goverment skims 25% off of all transactions".

So I'm curious how you immediately come to the conclusion "USA Wins, China has no leverage, game over".

They're a Russian company and semi-recently Trump banned their software from government agencies.

People theorize they're controlled by the Russian government but I've never come across any evidence that they're anything other than a top tier security company though.

They have done some fairly bold moves in the past though, like cleverly calling out other AV companies that were copying their detections [0] and kind of embarrassing the NSA [1] when a NSA employee took their malware/cyber weapons home to their PC running Kaspersky AV, which detected the malware and sent it back to Kaspersky server for analysis.

[0]https://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/10/kaspersky_malware_d...

[1] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/nsa-employee-...

"the whole IoT thing" was ever Stallman's responsibility to stop in the first place?

he wants to champion free software, not every just cause under the sun.

IoT devices shipping with insecure configurations is a "failure" of an infosec champion/thought-leader to step up and save us.

On the free software front, RMS contribution are mind blowing to me. I'd be proud if I can ever contribute a fraction of what he did.

Why would they do that rather than just not submit anything and let the already broken next-best competitor win?

Well I hope we meet again on a thread that's a more appropriate platform to spread my lunatic gardener beliefs.

I enjoyed the discussion and learned something new about the honey bee.

I don't have one. The pesticide issue and species collapse is one of many entry points to get people to entertain (or better participate) in restructuring all of modern agriculture.

There are other reasons too (resilience, independence, better economics for small communities) and the common response of "bigger must be better because thats what the free market has produced" is invalid when there has been so much government intervention that has given and continues to give much advantage to the existing system.

So basically I implore you to entertain the idea of restructuring agriculture even though you implied you aren't inclined to :)