simple-thoughts

I’m reading it a bit differently. Yes the censorship of political speech related to political figures is bad but we’re coming out of a period where much more fundamental rights were violated due to a slightly stronger than usual respiratory virus. The seriousness of the covid reaction is an order of magnitude greater than any alleged biden corruption. Until people are ready to reevaluate what happened, we’re still in danger of a return of extreme restrictions - since there are plenty of other things that have high death rates such as cars, drugs, and obesity.

Human rights are really important to me, and it was quite shocking to see what are supposed to be inalienable rights violated for something that’s much less than catastrophic.

A warrantless search that’s a cronjob? Seems that for some people, if the tech is simple then that’s ok! To me, that’s still a rights violation whether it’s a cronjob or not.

A lot of countries did not have much restrictions and seemed to get through without a catastrophic population decline. Are there any countries that saw more than 10% of their country perish? Keeping in mind that the policies included human rights violations such as the right to travel, the right to food, the right to work, and the right to speech.

It’s great to see not only this ruling but balanced reporting on it from NYT. I’m optimistic that the turn towards accepting tyranny is finally ending.

A place to start would be the 1807 Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves. Of course this didn’t prevent slaves from being born in the USA nor did it prevent internal slave trade. But there was a non violent movement to end slavery through gradual means, which had already worked in northern states. A good book on Gradualism is “The Scorpions Sting”[1]. To be clear I’m not arguing for an innocent south as that’s not supported by historical documents. I am going to maintain my position that the US population has been bloodthirsty from its founding to the modern day (albeit thankfully less so now than in the past).

[1]https://books.google.co.kr/books/about/The_Scorpion_s_Sting_...

The confederacy could easily have prevented the war by not attacking union forts. And as you say the war did not end slavery. So all we’re left with is a thirst for blood.

Most settler colonial states under British rule gained independence without death and murder, unlike the USA. It’s unlikely the USA would have been different if it’s population had been less bloodthirsty.

US Slavery as an institution was gradually on the way out before the civil war. Again a bloodthirsty mass movement was not willing to let time take its course. Slavery is wrong but murder is worse.

I know several blockchain projects that would love you but none that can afford you. Market is terrible especially in web3 gaming. I myself have taken a 97.5% pay cut with my most recent position compared to 2020.

Edit for the haters: it’s completely expected. In 2020 solidity engineers were being offered $1m+ annual base pay packages with no takers, since anyone could earn more building something on there own. Like it or not more actual utility that people enjoy is getting built now that the hype boys are gone.

Thanks for the invitation to join your club, I appreciate it.

I’m quite familiar with security clearances from close contacts. It’s also inevitable to run into controlled information in the types of work people like me do.

The real secret is that there is no secret worth keeping. Secrets are a way to cover for incompetence - it’s the same mindset as “security by obscurity.” Even the most secret information regarding nuclear weapons has mostly been leaked. The main thing that prevents nuclear proliferation isn’t secrets; it’s international pressure plus tight controls and monitoring of materials.

The only way to fix the FBI is to dissolve the institution- and even that would be an extraordinary challenge because the criminal networks the agency possesses would still operate, just as the networks built by secret police in other countries persisted post dissolution.

Me to, twice. Which is where my opinion of jurors was formed.

Jurors by definition aren’t the brightest, since they don’t know how to get out of jury duty.

Something about this smells like a bad attorney. Especially the part where he didn’t know that he was free until his card stopped working. But who knows, and it doesn’t matter anyway since the legitimacy of the court system is supposed to rely on common ideas of justice rather than process. If all we have from courts is process, it’s no longer justice, only bureaucratic oppression.

If the FBI actually operated in the open and stopped keeping secrets, the mystery would be removed and they would no longer have any power. Once the mystique is broken, the mundane reality of the FBIs daily ineffectiveness would be revealed. Power requires secrets. What you are suggesting would destroy the FBI.

The idea that people who are close to power are “in on the secret” and thus are more correct that people who aren’t doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. It’s a religious idea that extends back to the earliest gnostic cults.

I’m sure it feels good to you to feel close to power, but those feelings are because you feel powerful by association. It does not mean what you are doing is right or just.

Make officers personally liable for civil and criminal penalties when they break laws or violate rights, even if acting on orders or in accordance with their departmental policies. Simple fix.

Or, just enforce laws and follow the proven “broken windows theory” of policing. Which worked in cities such as NYC.

Advanced Asian cities which combine rapid zero tolerance policing with the resulting social conformity don’t have these issues. There has been a rise in drug abuse but it tends to stay out of the public view, again due to policing.

I remember visiting nyc and seeing people shooting up in the street while the police were watching. Obviously the problem is lack of enforcement- and if petty crimes aren’t enforced even with just small punishments, then more serious crimes accelerate.

You’ve hit it on the head. A well written react app will have a lot of code that isn’t in hooks or components and is instead imported by those. That said anything to do with the presentation of the app should be within react, with important exceptions.

I was pretty late to switch from jquery to react- I didn’t switch over until after react hooks were released. The reason is simply that jquery works great and the issues with scalability can be solved with proper design. Of course once react hooks came out it was clearly superior to me than jquery and was well worth the switch.

When I’m developing an application, I could not care less about what tech it’s built on. I’d much rather just pick something old and familiar that’s stable, has a huge ecosystem, and has tons of common issues answered on places like stack overflow.

These flavor of the week types of posts are always worth a read because it’s possible that something else may supersede react eventually. But proper understanding of the render cycle plus use of the react debugging profiler has been enough in the apps I’ve worked on to make them lightning fast.

Oh and typescript is a mistake.

For code I’ve found LLM mostly useless, since if I don’t understand something I need to read the docs anyway, and the generated code tends to be buggy even in react.

Where I have found LLM useful is in generating text. Where I used to use a thesaurus I now use LLM to find words to name things in themed UX. But it’s not great at function or variable names, it tends to pick names that look good but don’t precisely describe what something is. LLM is also great at generating text for role play.

No idea. Open source seems to come and go in waves. It has pros and cons as a business model. Personally I prefer working on open source because my GitHub becomes my resume, whereas in closed source interviews are needed to determine basic skills.

Most hacker news people aren’t experiencing any positive effects from inflation, since the tech industry is fundamentally about future growth rather than present income. Higher interest rates means less funding for ventures.

According to the economic stats, the average US worker is receiving raises that are slightly above cpi. Most workers aren’t professionals whether in tech or not.

The current situation is monetary deflation but price inflation. The same amount of money will buy more of the long term hard assets, but less consumer goods. That weirdness is due to government policy; large deficits on the one side drive up demand for consumer goods, and industrial policy constricts supply of consumer goods on the other side. Then in order to reduce the impact of these policies, the federal reserve constricts the money supply causing monetary deflation. So there’s less money, but prices are higher anyway.

Of course since there’s less money available for long term investments, at some point in the future the price inflation will worsen due to a reduced supply of consumer goods unless there’s countervailing effects.

It’s certainly true that branding as morally pure isn’t usual beneficial, but even businesses that brand themselves as sinful or evil have internal processes to maintain moral principles. Often to a greater extent than non profits that are selling morality. An example: casinos request regulation to enforce rules about payout odds, while unregulated casinos create mathematical proofs that their outcomes are honest. They also often run programs to provide assistance to customers suffering from gambling addiction. These actions aren’t because casinos are “pure” or making sacrifices; it’s because the expected payouts to the owners are higher by enforcing these processes.

It’s also important to remember that customers are not the only agents that matter to an entity’s survival. Public opinion, regulators, employees, shareholders, etc also matter. One instance of this in crypto is the lack of assassination markets. There’s been theoretical work on how to build anonymous assassin markets since the early 90s but no one has done it even though there’s proven customer demand. Why? Because for someone with the ability to build such a market, there exist better options that have higher payouts due to lower regulatory enforcement, easier access to capital, cheaper labour, etc. Again being “pure” has nothing to do with it since people with those skills do build dark net markets that sell other illicit services which are viewed as not really wrong by a large percentage of the population and as less severe to regulators than assassins.

Minimal state is absolutely compatible with leftist philosophy! Anarchism itself is a leftist movement. What’s incompatible isn’t ideology, its praxis. Mainstream leftist movements rely on state power to further their goals. That said there’s still a ton of great leftist movements today that attempt to sidestep statism.

Do you seriously believe everyone who use’s cryptocurrency is a fraudster? Your claim is ridiculous, in the USA alone over 34 million people own cryptocurrency and approximately zero of them have stolen billion of dollars of assets.

His level of stupidity has been shocking even to people who has a low opinion of his competence. Contrast his case with Do Kwon, and you can see why people thought he would escape imprisonment.

There’s no inherent conflict between morality and logic. Even with the vaguer definitions you seem to be using related to business processes, running a business that others (customers, regulators, outsiders) view as morally clean will always provide advantages over one that isn’t perceived that way.

A good place to start would be with this text on Rothbard’s leftism, which connects ideas you may already familiar regarding libertarianism with leftism: https://cdn.mises.org/19_1_2.pdf

However the roots go much deeper. Nozick himself was advancing the progressive tradition. One way to understand it is to start by considering how the state was the tool leftist had used through the 19th century to advance individual human rights. Once the state had become totalizing in the way all modern capitalist countries are today, the only way forward to advance human rights further must involve the dissolution of the state since oppression is no longer caused by traditional social mores but rather by the system that replaced those. That’s why you often see weird alliances between rightists and libertarians: the few remnants of reactionary resistance against the state allied with what is at core a radical progressive movement. Leftists are a more natural ally with libertarians but cannot support libertarians as leftist power flows from state authority.

There’s also a more specific history of libertarian plus leftist conference and other collaborations but I’m not knowledgeable on the details, merely that the info is there if you search for it.

How does someone get such a job? It’s not like the nyt puts out an online app, screens thousands, then picks a random individual. It’s always going to be through personal networks.