shadowgovt

But to do so would leave you alone and a lunatic.

Here's the thing though, I know quite a few people who have done this. It's not particularly easy (after all, most of the complexity of the modern world is a fabric that enables a level of sheer convenience unseen by previous generations). It requires a lot of planning day to day, a willingness to accept setbacks the likes of which you just don't see in a comfortable apartment in an urban environment very often, and the resilience to pick up and keep going.

But if one wants to live that way there are places to do so and you can learn how. I had a colleague who grew up in a yurt and as soon as they had saved up a comfortable nest egg in tech they moved right back into that life. I know someone who lives off the grid in the outer Banks, maintains his own boat and makes his living doing transportation for his neighbors and repair jobs.

I don't disagree with the author and I have felt the stress they have felt, but if they're feeling the need to snap their laptop in half it may just be time to transition to a way of living for them that doesn't require being on the laptop all the time. I suspect they will find it to be much preferable. Or they won't, but if they don't at least the adventure was worth it.

Oof. There are two pieces to this story. One is great and one his heartbreaking.

The fact that modern tech has disintermediated people with problems to solve from the need for a "priest class" to commune with the machine to solve the problem is a great thing. It's the goal. The more we do it the better we are making the world for humans.

... the fact that people need to work to eat or provide anything above a subsistence quality of life is not only tragic, it's increasingly abhorrent in a world where automation and simplification via machines has freed up this much raw resource and free time.

If we're pitting LLMs against people's ability to provide for their families, we have lost the thread on why we're doing any of this.

Places that aren't the United States aren't obliged to treat their history of speech the way the US does.

The US's protections are rooted in observations of local authority (and Crown-backed authority) trying to disrupt what the revolutionaries self-observed to be peaceful demonstrations, peaceful entry of thought into the public discourse, and public discourse itself. It's grounded in Enlightenment-era belief that unsuppressed discourse is the best path to real truths, and respect for real truths via the distributed, democratic comprehension of them are the foundation of good governance and good society.

Germany watched a significantly post-Enlightenment, free, democratic people talk its way from democracy straight into fascism, and concluded that some kinds of discourse are so toxic to the actual practice of discovery of the aforementioned truths that they are to be excluded from the public sphere.

Both cultures came by their conclusions honestly and there's some merit to both points of view.

You are both correct, but rayiner's comment goes to the up-thread rhetorical question:

Has anything changed since the sacred texts were written or we just going to keep acting as though we can never adjust the laws

... the answer is "Oh boy, Chatrie sure does hope nothing has changed, and the Founders would have hated geofencing had they had any way to know what it was! Otherwise, the laws passed in the past 50 years say it's legal and fine."

There's a rhetorical dodge in this argument where it transitioned from talking about property destruction to talking about harming people.

One can cause the other, but the burden of proof is on the claimant that wrecking a mass-produced special purpose autonomous vehicle did more tangible harm to a human being than make some engineer sad before they rolled up their sleeves and built a replacement.

The Waymo emphatically did not care it was destroyed.

It is a (possibly flawed) feature of the US Constitutional form of government that there is a proper channel for adjusting the enumerated rights in it, and that process is via amendment.

I'd like it to be otherwise, but this Court has demonstrated in its overturning of Roe v. Wade that the risk of leaving it up to SCOTUS to synthesize "prenumbrae" and rights to privacy (which would have not been a thing anyone would have written in the 1700s) is that reasonable people can disagree on what those things are, unless you write them down explicitly in the document that requires a lot of effort to change.

The problem is, unfortunately, those data lakes are in the category "safe until they aren't." Germany has some of the most restrictive data collection laws in the European sphere, for example, because they know that the courts (and executive) don't pose a risk to most Germans... Until suddenly they do, and the only defense is not having aggregated the data in the first place.

To be clear, no disagreement with your self-risk-assessment, and reasonable people can disagree on where their paranoia threshold is.

The only silver lining I can see in this is that if they replace their existing tooling with AI integration, we might actually get search and confluence that works.

I've lost count of how many times I search for a keyword and get no relevant results, but the document I'm looking for, which contains the keyword, is in my automatic pop-up of recent documents visited.

I soft of feel like every five years someone comes along and tries to re-invent cancellable threads and immediately arrives back at the same conclusion: the problem of what it means to "cancel" a thread is so domain-specific that you never save anything trying to "support" it in your threading framework; you try and save people the effort of doing something ad-hoc to simulate cancellation and build something at least as complicated as what they would build ad-hoc, because thread cancellation is too intimately tied to the problem domain the threads are operating on to generalize it.

Between Brexit and the aging population, I don't think joining the rest of the world in poisoning the atmosphere for the future faster is going to improve the UK's situation. There are much, much bigger fish to fry than energy policy for improvement-per-unit-effort.

The UK relies heavily on tourism. Tourism is disrupted by global instability. Climate change and fossil-fuel-catalyzed wars cultivate global instability. And the UK doesn't have the land or people to compete on the global stage in manufacturing exports (not that they do bad work, just that the scale doesn't exactly pan out. Not unless people are really keen on telling the tale of two cities again).

Best policy is likely to focus on domestic affairs (how to keep the country stable and solvent as the population shifts towards more and more retirees) and maybe look into rejoining that massive free-trade sector right down the block that the country so short-sightedly left a short time ago, since it'd really open up the tourism and trade markets.

Or be a lot uglier. See: Microsoft replacing its own API surfaces with binary-compatible representations to workaround companies like Adobe adding perf improvements like bypassing the kernel-provided kernel object constructors because it saved them a few cycles to just hard-code the objects they wanted and memcpy them into existence.

No official reason given, so all the tech press is basically speculating (if someone finds a source that does a teardown, please share; I can't seem to locate one). I think my favorite piece of speculation is that it reflects an anticipated modern workload of using the OS as a vector to launch a web browser and open multiple tabs in it, which is just going to be a memory hog as experienced by most Ubuntu users.

General question because I'm ignorant of UK internal politics: are the Isles' energy prices just generally higher? There aren't any large sources of fossil fuels or natural gas that aren't offshore, right? And the coal got significantly used up by hundreds upon hundreds of years of mining.

I'm wondering if really, the causality is reversed: it's not that the renewables make energy expensive in the UK, it's that energy is expensive in the UK, which incentivized construction of a lot of renewables, because they're an overall cheaper source of energy long-term since you don't have to either pay your neighbors to import them or build rigs in the saltwater ocean?

The terrorists that struck the World Trade Center targeted a building too.

If we aren't going to have a military doctrine that cares about who's in the building, we will be treated the same by our enemies. I don't think we want that.

And fundamentally, this is aUS doctrine issue. The US is willing to strike targets in foreign soul with no boots-on-the-ground confirmation of target nature.

It's how the Obama administration drone-struck a wedding before this and how a missile got dropped on a Chinese embassy before that. The doctrine itself is flawed.

It's always seemed fundamentally flawed to me that the exchange laws are designed to prevent people benefitting from insider information but then the entire purpose of the stock exchange is to make money by leveraging information asymmetry to make choices other rational actors wouldn't make because you have more knowledge or data than they do.

It's a very "leverage your info to make money no wait not like that" scheme. I think I just don't understand what the difference is between an insider who sits on a board (illegal) or has a nephew who's an SVP at the company (illegal) and a politician setting the laws that shape the whole industry (legal apparently?) or gets tips from same (legal apparently?).

Is it silly? Yes.

But still... I am in love with the people who are obsessed with minutae. The world ultimately runs on prime who care. Thise obsessed with patterns are first to notice when they break. Sometimes, that matters. The first ones to understand the US military was disappearing people in the War on Terror to other countries were plane-spotters, because you could disappear people but planes are too big to disappear.

For what it's worth, the wall of text is extremely helpful. I, for one, learn mostly by text and whether or not an LLM generated this, the output is true it is well written and easy to follow. So long as it's also true I'm satisfied.

Using xcode does require paying Apple, unless you've gotten your hands on a free copy of the OS and/or free Apple hardware somehow.

Google still doesn't make you pay s dollar to write an app on their architecture (only to have it hosted in their store).

No because those cost more to maintain than the digital ones. Nobody is restoring the budget that got cut because the meters got cheaper.

Ruining Android for everyone to try to maybe help some rather technologically-hopeless groups of people is the wrong solution.

Those groups of people are Google's paying customers. Google will, of course, defer to the ones who need more help to be safe online over the ones who don't. That's how you create a safe ecosystem.

So can it be breached by turning off networking and setting the date forward a couple days?

Perhaps interesting here is that some of the things he said were definitely not defensible via "truth is an affirmative defense." But it's ultimately up to the jury, and they can also find him innocent because a reasonable person wouldn't be offended by outlandish accusations.

(Ultimately, though, they can find him innocent for any reason. If they decided he should walk because you can't legally offend cops, that's fine too.)

We are, of course, not privy to the jury's reasoning unless they choose to divulge it.

Which is unfortunate, because we may never know if they concluded "Given who you've demonstrated yourself to be, your wife is justified in seeking other lovers whether or not this allegation is true" or if there were other factors involved.

This is a key insight.

Most "rational actor" theories of human behavior actually only work in the large (where the average can dominate outlier behavior) and in systems where rational action is a positive feedback loop ("a fool and his money are soon parted").

If those assumptions break down (especially the second, i.e. if foolish use of money results in more money accruing, not less), what we perceive as rational behavior should not be expected.

They are, but unlike fossil fuels, those dependencies go down over time (modulo the utility growth that makes demand for everything go up, of course).

If you buy fossil fuel from a country that may not be an ally forever, your demand remains constant (or goes up over time) because you are changing that fuel into a state that cannot be used again.

If you buy, say, lithium, you put that in a battery and in the future, you can get more lithium from the ground but you can also grind up batteries and re-extract it when they fail. Battery ingredients are, generally, not consumable over even medium and long-term scale if you build out the recycling infrastructure to recapture those ingredients.

One of the more interesting parts of the whole ordeal was officers getting on the witness stand and declaring that the lyrics that insinuated he had had sex with their wife were deeply traumatizing.

People keep throwing around 'cuck' as an insult, but if trained officers of the law familiar with application of deadly force when necessary can be severely traumatized by the notion of another man sleeping with their wife... Maybe the cucks have been the brave ones all along?

What more do you want?

A solution that works, honestly. Because phone scams are so abundant now that people are ceasing to use phones.

We do, in practice, impose all manner of limitation on free speech while still maintaining the sanctity of that right. Lying in a professional capacity is fraud and punishable even though it's "just words." Being wrong as an engineer or lawyer can cost you your license to practice (as an engineer, even if you never turned a wrench but your directions to build the thing were flawed beyond the reason of the standards of the profession). "Wire fraud" is an aggravation atop regular fraud.

These protections could go further, but they haven't. Why is it just "okay" that someone can call you up on the phone and convince you that your loved one is in mortal peril and you have to wire money to them right now? Why is the party transiting that fraud or providing the wires connecting entire fraud offices to the global telephonic network not responsible for enabling that attack?