patryn20

Language is a tool for manipulation. Sure it is used for communication with people considered “equals”. But primarily people use it to get what they want from people they can outmaneuver and/or manipulate verbally and legally (both are an extension of language).

Language’s roots are in trade and survival. Therefore manipulation of others for the speakers benefit has ALWAYS been the primary purpose.

You are of course welcome to administer this site as you wish. However: This site hasn’t represented balanced discourse or intellectual debate in at least a decade.

I’ve watched it become just yet another Ivy League and big tech echo chamber as YC has pursued its existing investments over its stated goals and creative ideals.

Money ruins everything. And I’m tired of it.

I was so fortunate to get in at a startup paying $90k/y usd in 2004.

Now I’m poorly paid compared to the people I “mentor” at $160k + bonuses with no RSU. But at least I’m working on stuff I care about.

I hear these fresh college grads getting $300k offer that have the right university on their meaningless tech degree they drank 24/7 to achieve, and I just want to scream. In three years I’ll be rejecting them for positions writing the software that makes their current employer run.

I’ve nixed so many Amazon and Facebook employees in the interview process that couldn’t answer anything about basic programming skills. Their answers were just “I’d use this off the shelf solution”. Well sorry, but we create that off the shelf solution or an alternative. So you actually have to know how to use binary arithmetic. Bye bye brat.

Reading through papers on cholangiocarcinoma: most of them ARE falsified. And I want to harm people for it. Only three new drugs in 29 years. And I can’t help but think it’s partially due to this.

Mother has stage 4 intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma.

Not downvoting personally. But the charging situation on the ground in Texas is hit or miss. If you’re along major interstates and major metropolitan areas you’re fine. You might have to wait for an hour for an open spot but you’ll get charged eventually.

But once you start going to many of the smaller cities you have to start taking longer routes to get to chargers and make weird detours and backtrack from chargers to get to your route.

Same with many tourist destinations outside the major cities.

Friends that tried to go pure EV and didn’t live their lives entirely in one city have inevitably had to buy a second gas car or truck. Because those “occasional” issues show up a lot in Texas.

My personal main concern is the emergency situations where the grid is down or there are mass evacuations. After hurricanes entire highly populated of the state can be without power for weeks. The area I live in now to be near my ailing parents regularly has power issues. I can bring in gas from outside the area to last a while but I can’t bring in a high voltage source.

Yeah. But I can still fill an ICE car manually with a can or hand pump.

Also hurricane evacuation with mass electric adoption is going to be an interesting situation to observe. It may be better than with an ICE. We’ll see.

Now imagine that distance being the distance to the next major city. And your family is 2 hours east of there. Welcome to Texas.

Seriously. Just give me a NORMAL car with a modern electric drivetrain and I’ll be happy. I have my 4Runner for longer trips and “electric grid down because Texas is a 3rd world island in a 1st world country” situations.

These electric cars are going for full gimmickry and just look like a giant long term ownership nightmare. Built to be disposable status symbols for your average American trying to appear wealthier than they are instead of practical vehicles for the mass market.

Yes! It literally pointed at the horizon. Awesome find.

Not sure if it’s still this way, but Kotzebue AK was the perfect place to test low bandwidth internet. The over the horizon satellite uplink the entire town shared could only allocate 56k speeds to each client and had horrific packet loss.

I had to rearchitect an entire file synchronization and uplink system for resilience while sitting in a hotel room in the middle of a blizzard during the shortest days of the year so I could deploy software for clients up there.

Thanks for continuing to write as you can.

Both of my parents are simultaneously dying from different forms of cancer. My father the same as yours (it started in his upper gum line). My mother a rare form of bile duct cancer. They’re not the sort to engage in psychedelics, but I suppose in some way their deep religious beliefs and experiences served the same purpose.

Your story and others I’ve read have really helped me understand the turmoil they’re facing internally and externally, and to analyze what I’ve been feeling to this point.

Perhaps a brief trip into the unknown is in my future.

All these new hardware level physics exploits in software fascinate me. At the same time they make me wonder if the hardware will ever truly be able to be secure and perhaps we need to just move on to new methods and concepts in hardware design and maybe trade size for security.

It also brings to mind that Simpsons scene: "Stop stop! He's already dead!"

And to be very clear: I don’t think the developer in this case is overhyping anything. I think the community is.

His writing is super entertaining and he has made a great product.

Oh I’m not disputing it’s good for a single developer along with the freedom.

It’s just that these projects always get talked up as huge successful life changing products (like Bingo Card Creator and appointment reminders etc) and then have really small revenue numbers attached to them.

Don’t get me wrong, kudos to the developers for building something people love and that give them the lifestyle they want.

I just think these projects are often overhyped to seem more than what they actually are: lifestyle projects.

Man it’s so great to see sites like this continue to thrive.

At the same time, I am once again amazed at how little revenue a publicly touted successful project makes.

While I'm aware anecdote is not the same as data, I really feel that the smart home experience vis-a-vis Alexa is getting worse. It no longer recognizes simple voice commands. Third party integrations constantly need to be reset ("I'm sorry, I can't find that." or "If you want to use SiriusXM, please open Alexa on your phone."). Randomly swaps responses between devices across the house whereas it would always respond with the nearest device in the past. Etc. Etc. Etc.

It's the same sort of things that keeps happening with maps programs, smartphones, and basically any modern tech with software updates. No one can leave well enough alone. They have to put their fingerprints on it in order to advance their careers, so everyone mucks around and breaks things and calls it an improvement.

Frankly I'm just tired of expensive devices getting worse with every single software update.

Here’s where I come off as ass, but what do you expect? These are complex systems with millions of moving parts and millions of lines of code. The chances of anyone ever being able to fully secure all systems (physical and virtual) is literally zero.

Combined with truly awe inspiring lifespans (how many coders truly have systems running mostly unmodified thirty years later?) this means that many many defects and vulnerabilities will be discovered over the lifespan of an aircraft.

Add in avionics and flight control upgrades designed to interface with legacy controls, and I consider it a miracle these amazing machines are as secure as they are.

It’s a testament to the engineering that goes into these machines that more stuff isn’t found or (god forbid) actively exploited.

Anecdata, a lot of the popular conservative user-generated content on YouTube I've come across tends to trend negatively towards "black people are causing all this crime and police drama", "I don't hate LGBT people, I just think their sexual preferences should be criminal again", etc.

I don't think YouTube is purposefully demonitizing videos on conservative fiscal theories.

That is extremely troubling. I wonder if it's because the algorithm is taking into account previous negative uses of the word in comments/commentary and flagging it as possible hate speech?

Unless Bitcoin has a fundamental evolution, it cannot be a replacement for fiat currency.

I'm super excited about the crypto currency space but I firmly believe we're in the "Diamond Rio" phase of a new technology and not yet to the "iPhone" and "Android" phases.

This is based on the assumption that bitcoin will stabilize.

I think bitcoin is a flawed first mover. The winner (and future stable cryptocurrency) likely hasn't been invented yet.

But I imagine it's mathematic properties will allows for a sustainable transaction rate (i.e.: thousands per second), short (as in sub 2-3 second) final confirmation times, and the ability to execute Ethereum like smart contracts without major security flaws and naive language implementation choices.

Bitcoin is basically useless for buying legal things. And especially useless for high dollar transactions without escrow agreements, since the value can fluctuate rapidly before transactions settle and can be liquidated to fiat (funny how moving it to fiat always seems to matter to people selling physical items.).

Besides maybe a very risky (as in unpredictable value on delivery) method of money transfer.

Cherry picking is fun.

Did you transfer money last week? If it had been bitcoin and had been at the wrong time, you would have received less than you asked for.

Bitcoin is a speculative security like product, not currency.

The power of the bank transfer is that you can predict what you will receive.

As I said, Ethereum is fundamentally flawed. And the implementation was...naive. It is a giant liability to all those who use it.

I'm very excited for the space. Just not for the current currencies.

Now if your goal was simply to circumvent overseas capital transfer limits and legal limitations, that fee might be "worth it."

If you had traded BTC cross border at the wrong time last week, you could have lost 5-15% in value based on the prevailing market price during the time it took the transfer to settle and the coins to move onto an exchange and sell.

BTC is in practice a speculative security. Not a currency.

This is the fundamental problem with treatment of rapidly evolving diseases. The hope is that if you get a "good enough" treatment and get it out to the population rapidly enough, the disease won't have a chance to evolve and spread further. Herd immunity will bring it under control.

I think the problem with a widespread, highly studied virus like HIV is that a "good enough" treatment isn't "good enough." Any treatment will be deployed in a limited manner to test the efficacy, which will in turn give it a chance to develop a resistance and spread.

That having been said, if the treatment CAN treat 99% of current infections, it will be a boon for at least a couple generations of gay and minority communities in the developed world.

I think the distinct holders can be classified as such: 1) Libertarian idealists who don't recognize they've already lost control. 2) Money launderers and their developing world mining networks. 3) Speculators (including VC backed firms) 4) Hype followers 5) The few, poor, misguided fools who think it's money.

The smart contract model makes it useful beyond just "purchasing things" (as the unimaginative would say. Yes that's a dig at you senatorobama). The EVM (despite it's implementation flaws) makes it's uses practically limitless.

Bitcoin...is an impractical, user-unfriendly first mover. Ethereum is the flawed second mover (ok, I'm discounting all the silly coins in between). I'm honestly not sure who the ultimate winner is. Unless the Bitcoin or Ethereum community fundamentally changes, it likely won't be them.

The truth isn't dulled by repetition. It's up to crypto enthusiasts to come up with a use case.