somatic

An economy is driven by free money.

The standard defenses of the ability to be rich are persuasive arguments promulgated by those who are rich.

If we assume that the rich are, as other advertisers, rational and self-interested, the we should expect their messaging (i.e., the “standard defenses”) to be that which is most effective.

Something akin to if it works, it ships.

Consider that from the perspective of the accountants, every job created is a huge and ongoing liability and cost, and that from the perspective of the shareholders, every job created is stolen profit, money that is not returned in the form of equity appreciation + dividends.

Then you will begin to see the reality of the situation.

You say that capitalism is broken, but the capitalists are all doing very well, even as everyone else feels the pain.

If the capitalists are doing very well, then how can you say that capitalism is not doing very well?

To answer this question may require you to undergo a paradigm shift.

Think about it.

The term “modern JS” should be used only as a pejorative.

I mean... is there really?

How much do these people get paid?

Dude, nobody cares. What ridiculous moralizing. "Fiddling with stuff on a computer?" Crabs-in-a-bucket comparisons to doctors? Whatevah. Get outta town.

No one pays you because they like your face. They pay you because you make them money.

No one works when they have rivers of cash flowing in their direction. You trade your time for their money: a slice of your life, in the most literal sense.

What is the value of your life?

Know your worth. Take every dollar. You will get precisely what you can negotiate, nothing more, nothing less.

Scheme is properly tail-recursive and has been around since 1975. Most (all?) Common Lisp implementations have proper tail recursion. Clojure has tail call optimization for simple cases and only if you explicitly ask for it, but it gets you most of the way there most of the time.

So there are reasons to prefer more imperative languages and their systems, but stack-smashing isn't one of them.

Yes, you're absolutely right: React itself is great. But React is part of the NPM ecosystem; try using one without the other.

And then if you're still feeling cocky try finding someone else who uses one without the other.

Free markets hate good software. "Good" meaning secure, stable, and boring.

On both ends.

Software developers hate boring software for pragmatic HR-driven career reasons and because devs are apes and apes are faddish and like the shiny new thing.

And commercial hegemony tends to go to the companies that slap something together with duct tape and bubble gum and rush it out the door.

So you get clusterfucks like Unix winning out against elegantly designed Lisp systems, and clusterfucks like Linux winning out against elegantly designed Unix systems, and clusterfucks like Docker and microservices and whatever other "innovations" "winning out" over elegantly design Linux package management and normal webservers and whatnot.

At some point someone important will figure out that no software should ever need to be updated for any reason ever, and a software update should carry the same stigma as...I don't know...adultery once carried. Or an oil spill. Or cooking the books. Whatever.

But then also it's important to be realistic. If anyone ever goes back and fixes any of this, well, a whole lot of very smart people are going to go unemployed.

Speaking of which...

https://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/joke/cpp.htm

jQuery: 88KB, standard everywhere, one entity responsible for all of it, people know what it is and what it does, if it breaks you know what went wrong and who to blame.

Literally anything built with NPM: megabytes? tens of megabytes? in size, totally inscrutable, code being pulled in from hundreds of megabytes of code in tens of thousands of packages from hundreds or thousands of people of unknown (and unknowable) competence and trustworthiness, if it breaks not only do you not know who to blame but you probably have literally no idea what wrong.

Yeah, jQuery was probably better.

LOL at the GPG swarm down below. I hate the Internet, I regret posting my own GPG message, and I'd delete it if I could.

Valid point. To clarify, it was hyperbole, as I got (rightly or wrongly) a more "military" vibe. And in my highly uninformed opinion, I'd feel much less comfortable in close quarters with actual spook-dom than I would around high-end military establishment people. Maybe I'm wrong. I'd probably take upper six figures to warm a seat for either, though. Shake the hand of the devil, sell your soul on the dotted line.

Get in touch?

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I'll be on the lookout, but quite frankly I despair. I've always wanted to be in a spooky line of work. Oh well.

The good companies for 9 to 5 casual evil are small >50 man shops which require security clearance to work at.

Where do I sign up?

(Edit: this is a serious question.)

(Second edit: Mencius.)

It wasn't so much "gave up on" as it was "deliberately destroyed".

Since the late 1800's, the banks and the governments have pursued a continuous policy of economic centralization and integration, and key to that policy has been the gradual ratchet of making farms unprofitable and uneconomical.

We could have a thriving agricultural economy — just change the policymakers.

You have erected a hilarious false choice.

The supermarket is recording your image as you browse through the store, and within five years will assuredly be plugging you into facial recognition software.

It is not necessary for you to have a toll transponder in order for your car to be tracked. You have a license plate which can be trivially collected and indexed with off-the-shelf hardware and software. If you have a car made within the last few years, it probably has a permanent tether to the Internet.

Your cell phone is triangulated and your location is approximated to a handful of feet by your carrier.

In some not-too-distant future, it’s easy to imagine the death of cash, the outmoded way to pay: cryptocurrency is just so much sexier.

Newsflash: every man is not his own island.

In excusing those responsible for polluting my life, you are culpable also.

In calling these people entrepreneurs you are really contorting the language. The entrepreneurs in this system are the creators and owners of the system. The other people are something else entirely.

I recommend Hegel with Neuralink: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ppGlEiQXrRI

Unless the computer is itself capable of anticipating and satisfying your desires — which, I grant, is possible, but, I would argue, incredibly, incredibly dystopian — you will need to consciously articulate your thoughts in such a way that the computer serves your will. That conscious articulation is the bottleneck. Not the keyboard, not the mouse, and certainly not the typing speed.

This is, of course, assuming that the computer remains the servant rather than becoming the master.

Adtech. Hence Facebook/Oculus.

Does your website have a public repo?

There’s no question that Rogan’s style is to make every interview as “warm” as possible, rarely challenging any guest on any extraordinary claim.

There’s also an argument to be made about his “platforming” of arguable kooks and so on, though it’s clearly preferable to entertain unconventional ideas than to dismiss them out of hand, the cumulative payoff of an unconventional idea being so very great.

Flying saucers are always good entertainment, though not good enough to paper over the fact that half of that Bob Lazar “documentary” was footage of a tattooed guy shouting into his smartphone for the benefit of like three different GoPros.

The open secret of physics is that nobody really knows WTF is going on. Particle theory is obviously a rough approximation, and string theory and quantum theory have been effectively stalled for long enough that it’s increasingly apparent that the complexity of the Universe has more moving parts than the working memory of the human brain. Humility is called for. “We know” ... yeah, okay.

There are studies showing that e-texts are significantly less “assimilable” than paper texts. I think the consensus speculation is that the physicality of the paper gives the brain a better understanding of the text, where you are in the text, and so on. Text on a screen, on the other hand, has an effectively infinite “depth”, among other things.

If you model the capabilities of a software/hardware package as intelligence, then it's easy to see that a handheld device is a "node" of intelligence. And then, between (non-airgapped) nodes, there are "pipes" carrying intelligence between the "personal" nodes (e.g., computers, smartphones, etc.) and the "corporate" nodes (e.g., servers, cloud services, etc.).

The question is this: if the bandwidth of the pipe is expanded to infinity, does the intelligence inhered in the personal owned device remain, or does it wither away... into a rented, datamined, and preternaturally infrastructurally fragile "the cloud"?

Thus far the evidence seems to suggest that "another wave of smartphone and IoT innovation" will fully and finally turn personal devices into dumb terminals administered according to the whim of the Great IBM in the Sky.

If the fake is "pixel-perfect", then how would there be any way to tell? Your fundamental assumption is that the resolution inherent to the transmitted medium is greater than the "resolution" of the faker.

lol!

please go on I want to hear more

please

Who cares what Enron was in the business of? Who cares what Musk is in the business of?

I admire Musk’s obvious engineering prowess (chiefly his ability to find and motivate top talent), and his showmanship, but let’s not pretend that by virtue of being on some holy crusade he’ll never need turn a profit.

It would be great if some sizable fraction of the government budget were used for fabulous projects. Personally, I would like to see our entire economy made fully sustainable, and upon transitioning to the only practical sustainable energy source, nuclear, we will be able to wind down much of our military operations, excepting, of course, Afghanistan.

But that isn’t the world we live in. Instead, we live in the world of two-thirds-of-every-tax-dollar-goes-to-the-healthcare-industry, and much-of-the-rest-to-defense-contractors, and hey-look-kiddies-don’t-you-want-a-literal-chip-in-your-brain (the disheveled homeless guy weeping softly in the corner; he tried to warn people but no one listened).

A truly brilliant insight, this. I’m glad I clicked this link and read this article. My life is immeasurably improved for having done so. Thank you, Andrenth, for bringing this to my attention. For not hiding your lamp under a bushel. For brightening my day. Wonderful. I’m going to go and read it again, and again, and again. Like the Bible, like the Art of War, like Lovecraft, this is the wisdom that just never stops giving.

Want to hire me? I’m a reasonably competent programmer already, pretty good designer. Most recently I wanted to familiarize myself with the basics of C++ so I wrote my own big integer library.

The average person does not understand the implications of their actions vis-à-vis IT companies and their personal information.

Moreover, their actions do not affect only themselves, but also all of the people with whom they regularly interact, regardless of whether or not those people themselves have “chosen” to “opt in”.

There is only one solution to this problem, and it is political in nature.