squishington

If you have any disagreements I'm keen to hear them. These are just my own observations so I want inputs from others outside my own echo chamber. If you CBF that's fine too though.

The mainstream media plays into this for sure. But I think there is a lot more to it. I think most of us on this platform have cosmopolitan leanings. We're educated and have some job mobility. I've worked overseas because I got an engineering education and did well in it. But wage stagnation, job insecurity, housing costs, low rental vacancy all play into this dynamic. There are a lot of people who don't like seeing their country change in its demographics. That is partly racism, but its also fear of change. I don't like it but I can understand it. When material conditions devolve, there will be a lot of people who blame the "other", even if its misidentifying the cause. I think Australia is lagging behind the right wing populist movement of the UK and US but we are on the same trajectory, and the major party policitians still don't understand how to address it. And most left wing people won't attempt to understand it because they at stuck using rationality and ethics as their rhetoric, and don't understand that emotion and grievance are going to trump that in politics.

There are social forces that are shifting the collective mindset to be more sympathetic to anti immigration sentiments. We see it in Australia recently, but the political analysis of this phenomenon is still lagging from my perspective (I am not endorsing these sentiments).

I use a VPN because I still seed 10s of thousands of torrents and have a static IP address. I don't want the swarm to see that. Most of them are from private sites I trust, but some from private sites that have a huge membership I'm not sure about. I have a lot of movies and music that isn't available anywhere else and archiving that is important to me. Kept my music collection from what.cd and a lot of that you can't even buy on discogs.

On the topic of shopping at the wrong place, in Australia we have a supermarket duopoly. Depending on where you live, you may only have the choice of Coles or Woolworths. They both suck. I'm lucky to live in the inner city and can shop at aldi or the local markets. People living in regional towns have less choice and are getting screwed over.

I feel this in my engineering work. My software goes into cars that are mostly bought by rich people. Not very satisfying. I'm somewhat lucky my work goes into real products rather than shelved research projects. But I get my kicks out of helping friends and family with IT tasks. Set up a pi hole for someone. Give them an openwrt router with a wireguard VPN to my jellyfin server. Set up a cheap thinkpad with Debian. It's basic but it makes a visible difference.

It also had a sense of community that was never quite replicated on RED. The freeleech events were fun. I remember there was a release request for Kirk Van Houten's "Can I Borrow a Feeling?".

Burroughs came from an upper middle class background. People with money are sometimes able to avoid some of the health dangers that come with heroin use. It's the heroin users who are poor that end up with the worst health outcomes. Malnutrition and risk of infection for example. Not being able to look after yourself because you have no money left.

Relevant article from the latest Arena quarterly in Australia:

https://arena.org.au/private-equity-public-pain/

I use attended sys upgrade. I've been using OpenWrt for the last 7 years, but I've noticed that attended sys upgrade often fails at release time. And there are often point releases shortly after. I'm just skeptical that their infrastructure would handle mass auto updates at release time. I usually wait a few weeks after release until the masses have reported various device specific bugs before I upgrade.

You also need to rebuild the firmware with the installed packages. Otherwise you end up without your packages installed. That requires a server to build the firmware for your device. Doing this automatically for everyone is resource intensive.

This is a lovely notion that most well adjusted people can get behind, but if you've ever had a person with narcissistic personality disorder in your life, you'll understand that they need to create conflict to emotionally regulate themselves. Unfortunately these people tend to acquire wealth and power, and are never satisfied. Then the rest of us have to deal with it.

Howard era policies have strongly contributed to the housing problems in Australia today. His policies were short sighted.

Openwrt with the policy based routing package can do this, and is simple to set up.

Could you expand on your comment a bit please? I've not heard of Lem before now. How does it compare to Emacs? Also your comment about cultural leadership. I'm not sure what you're referring to specifically. (Asking in good faith out of curiosity).

My understanding is that the optimal scenario is taking an SSRI in combination with therapy. The SSRI adds flexibility for the brain to respond to therapy and envisage new possibilities. If you don't include therapy, you've just established a new baseline to habituate to.

I was drawn to engineering by the joy of learning and problem solving. The pain of puzzling over a difficult problem, then the ecstatic release when you figure it out and get it working. I don't understand why someone would want to give that up. It gives meaning to the work.

Competition at the $500 per week range is intense, because there are many people who can't afford more than that.

I think language does us a disservice here. I'm reminded of Korzybski's work in Science and Sanity. The interpretation of "truth" depends on which level of abstraction you are operating on. "Every statement is true in some sense, false in some sense, and meaningless in some sense". The term "reality" implies a perceiver, and that perceiver is generating "reality" based on their neurological instrument, which has its own biases based on its prior experience and genetics.

Thanks for your input. I have a similar feeling about general economic matters. I like Gary Stevenson's perspective on this. When the numbers say the economy is doing well, but you talk to "ordinary people" and they say they feel their living standard is declining, which source do you believe? All inputs should be considered to try to get an accurate picture.

For what it's worth, one of my uni lecturers in my final uni year told me that over half the cohort for that year would never work in engineering because there weren't enough jobs. He said the uni didn't want him imparting that information but he thought it was unethical. I'm sure he had a historical perspective that informed that advice. I've worked with older guys who got engineering jobs without degrees and taught themselves FPGA design on the job in the 80s and 90s. There's no chance of that happening now.

My feeling is there are often factors which are not captured in job market statistics, which is why it's important to listen to the experience of grads seeking jobs. When I graduated in 2018, it took me a whole year to land a job (graduated with first class honours in electronics engineering in Australia, with 7 months overseas experience working for a chip design company in germany and a research scholarship at university). I came across job interviewers who had very irrational approaches to hiring, which I suspect was partly because they had too many applicants and were overworked processing them. One medical hardware company turned me down because they said I was overqualified and would get bored and quit. Overqualified as a grad. What a joke. I just needed a job before the next round of grads came out and left me forever shut out of my future field. It was a massive shock to my system as I had done nothing but work hard for years to get top marks and industry experience, and it still wasn't satisfactory (also building projects to showcase in interviews). I feel for new grads.

The left and right have more in common with each other than they realise. Many of the distinctions become irrelevant when you realise it's really workers against the power of massive capital.

Sorry, it wasn't my intention to demean the project. I can just see a humorous aspect to it. The human element reminded me of Mancierge https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4WrPkKc2Wg

I enjoyed reading fiction until I studied electrical engineering. After that I felt that fiction was a waste of time. On a cognitive level I don't think it is, but I think the feeling comes from having been instilled with a sense that reading has to involve some degree of learning. As though everything I do has to involve some self betterment. It's frustrating and I feel a sense of loss about it.

This sounds a bit like a Tim and Eric Cinco product.

The official jellyfin android app also provides 'remote' functionality (skip episodes, browse library, change volume etc.). It works well for me most of the time, but occasionally it can't find the remote session until I restart the jellyfin instance.

Korzybski claimed that the most significant difference was the human ability of time-binding.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Cbqr9NcFDtjvM6zC4/time-bindi...

Cool project. I've been using this IMDB interface and really like its simplicity: https://github.com/zyachel/libremdb

Please don't spread misinformation like this. It can stop people from seeking professional help. When people seek therapy, they are taking ownership over their emotions and actions, because they want to change their internal state in a healthy way (as opposed to escaping negative feelings with substance abuse, for example). Earlier this year I would suffer flight responses in public due to the effects of PTSD. I was able to significantly mitigate this (nearly gone) by seeing a therapist who practises EMDR. And sometimes people do need their feelings validated, which is an important part of healing from abuse. It's about rebuilding trust.