wallacoloo's comments

yeah but classes like geometry? i remember our section on conical slices. like, cool, you can make an ellipse by intersecting a plane with a cone, but (for someone with limited mental imagery: ) isn't that just a really tortured way to go about the task?

i'm sure perception is cool when reading, but arguably it's cool mostly because the imagery leads you to _feel_ certain ways? when an author describes a moonlit scene with the protagonist alone at the edge of a lake watching the patterns of ripples on the water... that instills some meaningful emotion in me. perhaps a feeling of solitude, or that of a calm evening where i feel in-touch with the world. so... to what extent does limited imagery decrease the emotional potency of a scene?

a few people have told me "yes, i still feel something when i read that scene. it's more that i can't imagine any of the character's faces". i haven't met anyone who says they feel literally no emotions when reading any scene, but that doesn't mean they don't exist, nor does it mean the emotional response isn't attenuated.

> The there is definitely a question whether, now that they have moved so solidly into content production, Netflix is actually a scalable / viable company any more. When they were just sending other people's content around and doing it much cheaper and better that was innovative and different.

to borrow cliched terms, big companies protect their position by either building a monopoly (Bell, your traditional telco) or building a moat (Apple). Netflix started with an effective monopoly on film distribution/streaming. at some point Disney & friends extended their moat vertically (Disney+), eating into the distribution layer that Netflix previously monopolized. perhaps leadership understood the monopoly would only ever be temporary and decided to build out their internal production house as such. whatever the case, Netflix still has the possibility of transforming this into a moat that stands alongside the other players in this space. maybe it can exist as this, but it will surely be less profitable than its monopoly days.

consumers don’t everywhere react instantly to price changes. the number of lost subscribers is likely to be greater than what you see today as consumers explore alternatives over time and change. though by how much i don’t know. (for example, it pushed me past the edge to install Jellyfin & friends, but i’m keeping Netflix as backup until i’m comfortable/confident with my new setup).

the myopic view: of or focusing on only the present. never did i say the antidote is to take a hyperopic view. obviously the appropriate view will lie somewhere in between. i even went out of my way to clarify that the extreme hyperopic view is not what i advocate (my second sentence). it's only my point that we leaned (continue to lean) further to the myopic direction because we don't really understand (or appreciate) the extent to which this impacts things over any other timescale.

and in its wake would be left space for more resilient structures to emerge.

i’m not saying “let it collapse”: a government has a duty to protect its own citizens of course. but i do think the myopic view which subsidizes a system once it becomes too big to fail runs counter to long-term prosperity by making the local optima more trapping than they would otherwise be.

> But a collective action at this scale is pretty difficult to orchestrate.

maybe, maybe not. Mastodon & the Fediverse has been around long enough to establish itself as a Twitter-like "alternative". it's crossed the scope at which it's hard to get concrete numbers about how many people actively use it, but lower bound's around 500k MAUs across 10k instances. we get waves of new users _every_ time something controversial happens around Twitter. the largest instance (which accounts for about 15% of all users) gained 12k new users in the past week [1], so figure 50-80k across the board; some of which leave after a week, some of which properly embed themselves.

no, these aren't big-tech-co numbers, but it's a large enough base to be accommodating to certain types of today's Twitter users. not _every_ Twitter user cares about having 300M peers v.s. 500k peers, and bridging between Twitter and ActivityPub works ok enough to ease that a bit, especially if you were primarily using Twitter as a glorified RSS feed.

[1] https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/108132679274083591

i feel like i'm out of touch. the premise is that most Americans don't like/agree with the political aspects of their social media: to which i wonder, why don't they disengage? even in 2022, it's not hard to find people who don't talk partisan politics. it's not hard to find people who value epistemics. the web-like portions of the internet make this easy. Google "rationalist community" and the first result is LessWrong. Google "neutral political news" and you get allsides.com. moreover, find just one person associated with a single thing you value and you can connect with them, chat with or browse who they're following, and recurse connections until you've embedded yourself in an environment of people you enjoy associating with.

this stuff is in easier reach than it's ever been. if you expect to consume the firehose and enjoy it, you're disillusioned: never has a single source appealed to every individual on the planet. you have to select your peers. curate your connections. if a friend repeatedly blasts you with bad political takes, cut or reduce the connection. the digital web isn't that different from the irl web in this aspect. it's your responsibility to craft connections that benefit your life. FB/Twitter/etc are tools to use in that (and far from the only ones), but you cannot abdicate your responsibility and expect good results.

EU membership is more fluid than US membership. and i’m not an expert on it, but my understanding of its origins is as an economic partnership first (promote a unified currency and compatible border regulations between member states). AFAIK the EU can’t declare war and has more limited funding/taxation options (e.g. rather than an individual income tax, the closest it can accomplish is a tax applied at the level of the member nation, and limited to 1.4% of GNP). that said, the US as a federal institution also started small and gained greater powers over time, so maybe this won’t be as significant as i assumed.

as for litigation, i thought it was the individual member states that were suing Big Tech. i thought the only role the EU itself played here was that of explicitly stating the conditions under which members can do such things.

a federal government is a single body of policy which states opt into (more or less permanently). one read on GP is that we don’t need something this rigid for every coordination problem. time-limited and domain-limited agreements to which only some (large) subset of states agree could, possibly, accomplish the same things — perhaps with less political backlash in the process.

for example, state AGs band together in such a process pretty frequently.

> What are going doing holding so much $ and costs for nothing? Everyone who realizes this also cant rush out to sell. There's already loads of empty buildings and who is buying? Nobody, you'll get wrecked.

1) how many companies actually own their buildings? i think generally it’s only the already successful companies which own instead of lease — i.e. the ones who can recover from such a hit.

2) IF the office had negative utility, then the company is harming themselves by using it. whether they’re willing to sell it or not, that fact remains.

> What do you mean? Did you interrupt the reboot process (eg. repetitive ^C)? Otherwise the OS should flush everything properly.

here’s my best guess: in my setup i have a host running a qemu vm and most of the interesting stuff happens inside the vm. originally that vm image was just 8 GB, but then i got a HDD to dedicate to it. with VM powered off, i partitioned the HDD and then dd’d the VM image onto it. then i booted the VM via KVM passthrough of /dev/sdb…

it booted fine; i ran ‘df’ and noticed that i forgot to resize the fs to the HDD, so i ran resize2fs. 3 days later, i `shutdown` the VM and then `reboot`d the host. the host didn’t actually come back: the power light and activity lights were off. after 5 minutes of this i power-cycled at the wall socket.

host came back up. vm wouldn’t boot. ran fsck from the rescue shell. now it booted, but no services were operational. since i couldn’t login to the vm (ssh broken + password logins had long been deactivated), i shutdown the vm and mounted its fs on the host. ‘df’ showed that the host thought the fs was only 8 GB in capacity.

i don’t think it was outright disk corruption, because the poweroff wasn’t that messy (but i come from btrfs, which has handled like 20 power faults on me w/ zero issue: idk how solid EXT4 is to these things). my best guess is that somewhere along the way, the changes from resize2fs didn’t actually make it to disk, or were overrided with stale in-memory values. maybe when i updated the guest’s kernel some post-upgrade script did something to push the old fs size to disk somewhere. or maybe the host had the old 8 GB fs size cached and flushed that during shutdown/start. unfortunately i’m not sure i’ll ever know.

use VMs. qemu/kvm. the Tor-based Whonix OS takes the approach of one VM running a Tor proxy and another VM running your application software. the latter VM only has access to that proxy, and no other network interface. it’s effectively the same approach as i understand a slug to be, but with the hardware virtualized instead of physical (or course you don’t have to use Tor — you can define whatever interface you want: a VPN, a firewall, etc).

i started self-hosting a bunch of stuff last month: Pleroma (like Mastodon/Twitter), Matrix (chat), Gitea (like Github) and Jellyfin (like Plex, a media server). AFTER i set up the hardware/OS, these each took about 1-2 hours to setup, and it gets faster each time as i get more accustomed to the common parts (nginx, systemd, Lets Encrypt, and whatever containerization you use).

today i accidentally nuked everything by not flushing the disk before rebooting and then naively letting fsck try to ‘fix’ it (which just makes things worse since it unlinks every inode it thinks is wrong instead of helping you recover data). now i’m manually dumping blocks and re-linking them in, supplementing whatever’s not recoverable with a 3-day old backup. that’s probably gonna take an entire day to fix up.

after this i have to figure out a better backup solution, because it costs me $5 of API requests every time i rclone the system to Backblaze, making frequent backups too expensive.

after that, i have to figure out the email part of things. AFAICT it’s pretty much impossible to 100% self-host email because of blacklisting. you have to at least proxy it through a VPS, or something.

and in between that i may spin up a DNS server to overcome the part where it takes 60min for any new service to be accessible because of the negative caching common in DNS.

no, this stuff is just way too involved for anyone who hasn’t already spent a decade in the CLI. i’m only doing this because i’m a nerd with time on his hands between jobs. self-hosting isn’t gonna catch on this decade. but maybe we can federate, so that you just need to have one friend who cares about this stuff manage the infra and provide it to their peers as a social good.

also, i don’t think privacy is the right angle for promoting self-hosting. a good deal of the things that people self-host have a public-facing component (websites; public chatrooms; etc). if privacy is what you seek, then you should strive to live life offline. the larger differentiator for self-housing is control.

> Even if that was 100% true, and it was obvious to everyone, there would still be envy and resentment to contend with.

we had open levels at the previous company i worked for (70-ish engineers). if you asked certain seniors at the company, you could trivially get the mapping from level -> annual compensation salary/ISO grant.

positive experience IMO. it forces managers to “get it right” when it comes to performance reviews more often than what i’m used to at other companies. being a not-too-large company, the easiest way to get a higher level is to take on more responsibilities (not to just output more code within your team). that might differ from your own goals or expectations, so it’s great that you can look around and see for yourself what behaviors actually correspond to level/salary raises!

> Why are you hiring a $150k candidate to work on X if a $100k candidate can work on X? That's a waste of $50k.

i think that’s the point. X takes an engineer who’s worth $100k. if an engineer worth more than that comes along, you want to let them do X for $100k, but since they’ll get it done easier/faster either you’re only letting them work part time (silly restriction to force on them), or you let them help out around the org in general for extra money. hence, you advertise the role as $100k (for doing X) - $150k (a rough judgment of how much extra capacity the company could easily absorb from a candidate that tackles X quickly).

that seems… pretty reasonable to me.

> Don't use mixers and tumblers, use Monero and/or Monero atomic swaps.

Monero doesn’t make your transactions anonymous, it makes them ambiguous. your wallet might default to using an n=6 ring signature, meaning it picks 5 random addresses with balances and creates a transaction that could have plausibly originated from any of those 5 or your own. so you get plausible deniability, but also if your threat actor can unmask the other 5 addresses (which might not be so hard if those accounts are regularly interacting with exchanges) then you’re done.

zcash gets you actual transaction-level anonymity, not just ambiguity. fewer places accept it, but in theory you can still break the link by obtaining zcash and then exchanging it for the currency of your choice on any exchange that doesn’t ask for PII (e.g. a DEX)

live offline. as long as you’re not completely socially incompetent you can be largely yourself in most situations, find people you jive with, and then be completely yourself with them. unless your threat level is “my phone’s recording everything in the room 24/7 and sending that to authorities”, you’re free to do all the illegal drugs you want with your friends, use the N-word, do all the other things which you thing you should be able to freely do but for some reason aren’t able to do comfortably in public.

if you must do things online that are best kept detached from your IRL/govt identity, setup a box running something like Tails that doesn’t accept any non-Tor traffic, and interact with it through a text-only interface (i.e. a shell, or links-like keyboard-driven web browser).

people sometimes discourage using obscure setups because they allow better fingerprinting but that’s not always as bad as it’s made out to be. primarily you want to break the link between your pseudonymous identity and your IRL identity. it doesn’t matter how fingerprintable your pseudonym is so long as the overlap between it and your IRL identity is small. and that’s the reason to prefer simpler interfaces like text-only: they prevent leaking things like cursor movements which might otherwise build a tie between those identities.

> Experts largely agree that current forms of AI are not conscious, in any sense of the word. While there have been many studies on “computational consciousness,” or how something that might be considered conscious can be realized with computers, these studies are very preliminary and do not offer anything close to a concrete plan on building “conscious” machines. The reality is that we don’t have a widely accepted definition, let alone understanding, of consciousness. Claiming that we have already replicated such a nebulous concept with computers seems improbable at best. Granted, the claim could also be reasonable, if a particular definition of consciousness was specified as well.

is the last sentence of this paragraph not a direct contradiction of the first?

and look at the third sentence. what’s wrong with saying “we don’t understand enough about consciousness to make claims in either direction when it comes to our neural networks”? really: why do so many people in this article seem uncomfortable with other people saying as much? is it just the PR angle? is this field really less about answering the interesting questions than it is about satisfying the public?

> Discussions of “Consciousness” in the context of ML or AI research always seem to devolve into navel-gazing futurist pseudointellectualism.

it’s a hard problem. it’s been the realm of philosophy for a good deal of time; neuroscience sometimes touches it; then AI came rushing out of the blue and the question became about a hundred times more relevant. if you are strictly concerned with only your own well-being, you’re fine to ignore it. if you’re concerned with your pet cat’s well-being, even after seeing first-hand how differently they navigate the world, and their much more limited goals/volition, etc, then maybe there’s something worth digging into here: why concern yourself with the well-being of one biological machine but not of the well-being of the non-biological machine, especially as they converge in complexity over time? is there a justification for that, beyond just “it’s hard”?