Daniel Lakeland

https://mastodon.sdf.org/@dlakelan

Applied Mathematician, Julia programmer, father of two amazing boys, official coonhound mix mutt-walker.

PhD in Civil Engineering. Debian Linux user since ca. 1994.

Bayesian data analysis iconoclast

Github: https://github.com/dlakelan
OpenWrt: https://forum.openwrt.org/u/dlakelan/preferences/profile

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npub1fnejmanw24sxweer9t5ncla5v5ekdf6mvtwnjmkm7em6vxjnxf6swp87ll

NIP-05 Address

[email protected]

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsyeued7eh92cr8vu3j46fu076x2vmx5adk9hfedmdlvaaxrffnyagpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dsvm7emt

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npub1fnejmanw24sxweer9t5ncla5v5ekdf6mvtwnjmkm7em6vxjnxf6swp87ll

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Last Notes

2026-01-20 20:01:56 GMT

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Mastodon is limited in bandwidth so I focus on the simplest examples. Its not vigilante justice to stop a person chasing another person down the street with a machete. it is vigilante justice to find out that someone got cut up, assume who did it, hunt them down and do them harm. one is immediate defense the other is vengeance etc. they are different.
Deterrence effect of cops is extremely sketchy evidence wise like... takes all kinds of statistical assumptions to try to detect

2026-01-20 18:58:49 GMT

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Capitalism isn't "markets and money" capitalism is states creating laws that say people may own the land and the radio spectrum and certain numbers (copyright) and the products you produce with machines they own... Capitalism is legally enforced in-group vs out-group privilege with respect to access to the bounty of economic production. Its ownership over things thousands of miles away because papers say so and cops bust your heads if you dont comply.

2026-01-15 06:29:46 GMT

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The Nazis Miller and whoever else puppet Trump dont need a massacre of ICE agents to give them permission to do Gestapo shit, but it'll help to recruit the military who will be able to tell themselves they're suppressing lawlessness. We all understand what the real lawlessness is here, but the 19 year old light infantry troops with the buzzcuts who just finished indoctrination will see it differently and will convince themselves they're doing the right thing when they invade cities with tanks

2026-01-15 06:19:53 GMT

Everyone in the country whose paying attention understands that ICE is literal Gestapo, that they've been hired to ramp up terrorist tactics and smash any sense that anyone has any constitutional rights that mean anything, plus they are bait for eventually some citizens to protect their community with countervailing violence which will trigger a mobilization of the military at large scale to do all the shit the generals were told at that fucking Hegseth meeting.

2026-01-15 04:56:34 GMT

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not calling out Artemis... this was meant for anyone who might want to do Anarchist mysteries, she just occurred to me as a possible candidate.

2026-01-15 02:18:13 GMT

If you ever wanted to become a mystery writer I think there could be a market for Anarchist mysteries... in my view this genre already kind of exists, often the PI is a symbol for an extra-systemic source of justice. But it could be a lot more explicit and propagandize for cop abolition and horizontal mutual aid networks and such. create a fictional world people would want to inhabit
@npub1hpk…88gd ??

2026-01-14 22:09:23 GMT

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No cap!

2026-01-13 01:39:37 GMT

well if I gotta be sick in bed I might as well watch murder she wrote, plenty of episodes, they're free, and from an era when people respected writing instead of just action.

2026-01-07 22:00:32 GMT

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A classic VW bus in light blue, it is a survivor of the Palisades fire. Theres a wall display of a photo of it in the midst of devastation.
https://mastodon.sdf.org/system/media_attachments/files/115/856/062/842/500/239/original/ba715edb167c53c5.jpg
https://mastodon.sdf.org/system/media_attachments/files/115/856/063/318/558/236/original/efaed27cadc9ed35.jpg

2026-01-07 21:58:06 GMT

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A white 1980s Lamborghini Countach
https://mastodon.sdf.org/system/media_attachments/files/115/856/053/675/674/639/original/4abcc5ae8c79e519.jpg

2026-01-07 21:55:00 GMT

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The Mirth Mobile from Waynes World
'chya right *tosses hair*
https://mastodon.sdf.org/system/media_attachments/files/115/856/041/340/331/556/original/2df4e2d975d8a948.jpg
https://mastodon.sdf.org/system/media_attachments/files/115/856/041/595/785/764/original/fb2cb1407385e1af.jpg

2026-01-07 21:49:55 GMT

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Another fun car was the Delorean Time Machine from Back To The Future, several pics here
https://mastodon.sdf.org/system/media_attachments/files/115/856/020/931/056/693/original/311610b63539871a.jpg
https://mastodon.sdf.org/system/media_attachments/files/115/856/021/329/134/966/original/c2dbb913449fb254.jpg
https://mastodon.sdf.org/system/media_attachments/files/115/856/021/567/810/248/original/216fec2383d8f38d.jpg

2026-01-07 21:46:01 GMT

Hard to pick a favorite car from the auto museum, but honestly the thing I was most chuffed to see was the "Ferrari" from Ferris Buellers Day Off (1986)
https://mastodon.sdf.org/system/media_attachments/files/115/856/006/270/108/455/original/ee97945d87a084ce.jpg

2026-01-07 15:49:36 GMT

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Who's the white Swedish Archeologists that's a gardening machine with all the Biologists?

2026-01-07 15:46:05 GMT

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Talking 'bout Rundkvist...
Then he can dig it!

2026-01-07 15:07:11 GMT

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the whole "autistics dont have a fully functional theory of mind" often said by textbooks etc probably should be rephrased as "autistic people think allistic people are baffling but get along with and understand each other just fine thank you"

2026-01-06 06:34:19 GMT

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Today you are one of the lucky 10000 😅

2026-01-06 06:02:24 GMT

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OK so see, I can't help but wonder if the joke didnt land because Lety is too young for the slang "spend a penny" or if she just didnt think it was worth acknowledging... we may never know.

2026-01-06 01:50:37 GMT

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I tend to prefer GPG, GNU Pretty Girls

2026-01-05 16:22:59 GMT

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I dunno, my dog is gonna be upset. she enjoys spending a penny.

2026-01-01 06:32:48 GMT

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Ron said the listing freaks are also all over herping as well. and he even mentioned one particular town where if you go to the one cafe for breakfast theres practically a dividing line with the rare birders on one side and the rare herpers on the other... Like the Lister brothers hes not a fan of the competitive or list oriented subculture, but finding salamanders, newts, frogs, lizards, snakes, etc just for the beauty of experiencing wetlands and nature is a great thing.

2026-01-01 06:29:09 GMT

My cousin is here we have been planning some herpetology hunts for tomorrow. this evening we watched Listers on YouTube. i watched it back in Thanksgiving, thanks to @npub1prs…eh8y noone believed me it was gonna be worth it but they all were thoroughly delighted by the end. About halfway through the movie theres a story about a guy who cheats on his bird sighting, and then gets bitten by his pet king cobra. My cousin immediately said he knew that guy personally, they live in the same town...

2025-12-29 07:28:09 GMT

Watched The City Of Lost Children (1995) with my sister. I'm pretty sure I saw it back in the day but I didnt remember much about it. Truly a bizarre film with that 90s creativity that I dont think has been much available in the post 9/11 world.

2025-12-24 23:33:04 GMT

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admittedly the longer jumps are harder, and thats where the blue tape comes in for me... on this chromatic stringed piano posted on Reddit they colored C,E red... similar idea
https://www.reddit.com/r/piano/comments/aftoou/anyone_know_whats_going_on_here_no_separation/

2025-12-24 23:24:26 GMT

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because just like in C on the regular keyboard, the "in" keys are always in one relation to the root, and the out are another. In C its white vs black, on chromatic theres this 3 of one row 4 of the other row pattern. so a note in the "wrong row" is out of key. the entire structure of music is a easy and consistent physical property of the geometry thats key independent.
anyway it helps me enormously because if I play a note and want to go to another note, its immediate

2025-12-24 23:24:25 GMT

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imagine how Ray Charles interacted with the keyboard though. he could neither see its structure, nor probably imagine it as visual images (he was blinded early in life, we could substitute some other born blind musicians if needed for the example).
The amazing thing to me about the chromatic keyboard is that if I want to do an interval X that is always precisely the same distance in any key. theres a "feel" to that interval. and I immediately know if the note is in or out

2025-12-24 21:30:00 GMT

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power is there to cause harm to some in order to benefit others, that literally why it exists. if your idea was so good that everyone agreed with it you wouldn't need power, people would just do the thing.
So its not just that power attracts assholes, its also that if you aren't an asshole and are put in a position of power you will be asked to use that power to protect the powerful and harm the weak. thats what the structure is FOR

2025-12-24 19:34:44 GMT

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Interestingly, I'm aphantasic (I can't "picture things" in my head) so I don't "picture" notes on the keyboard when I play the way you say you do. On the chromatic keyboard intervals have particular shapes/geometry that's consistent everywhere. So I kind of play by "feel".

2025-12-24 18:50:28 GMT

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It wouldn't surprise me if the guitar transition took maybe a hundred years or more and might have started in the 1600's or 1700's. Unlike keyboards, changing spacing between frets on a guitar wouldn't feel very "weird" and guitars are a common microtonal instrument today:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQgybkGPETU
That video suggests microtonal guitars were first made in 1840's or so

2025-12-24 18:36:26 GMT

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1584-1585 for the invention of the system and calculation of the intervals... But I think the tuning system became widely adopted because of fretted stringed instruments (lutes and guitars) and I'm not clear on when that really got going. The article doesn't make it super clear either, though I think it's earlier than the mid 1850s? Guitars have been around since like forever (lutes for well over 3000 years) but equal tempered frets must have been post 1585

2025-12-24 17:02:45 GMT

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What's the relevance of 1850 here? I know the equal division of the octave was invented in the 1500's but of course wasn't adopted immediately. did something happen in 1850 that really "killed" other tuning systems? Hoping you have some interesting history reference there.

2025-12-24 16:05:13 GMT

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Professional musicians sometimes practice playing things "in all 12 keys" this just isn't a thing on the chromatic keyboard. In many ways its more similar to a fretted Bass (the other instrument I play) where by shifting the start location and keeping the geometric pattern the same, you get the same tune in a different key.
anyway Im looking forward to the rest of the thread because tuning systems are quite interesting.

2025-12-24 16:04:50 GMT

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As a guy who went out of his way to create a Chromatic keyboard, I can tell you definitively, its easier to play improvised music, and with landmarks provided by blue tape in my case, but could be colors or textures, I dont think it'd be harder to play written.
On the chromatic keyboard, a major key always looks the same, its 3 successive notes from one row followed by 4 from the opposite row. This symmetry makes everything incredibly easier.
https://mastodon.sdf.org/system/media_attachments/files/115/775/392/251/796/833/original/55780904af183582.jpg

2025-12-20 13:51:52 GMT

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Well, if you got it into your head to do a very careful video on Bells Inequalities and non locality in QM I would watch the heck out of it. Maybe a little later in your video career as you probably want to edit that one really carefully. i dont blame you at all for your general policy on avoiding the topic in a crowd.

2025-12-20 00:33:04 GMT

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Despite this agreement on outcomes, there's a lot of disagreement about what it means about the world... Strange.

2025-12-20 00:31:43 GMT

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No worries. The conversations wound up somewhat interesting anyway. The weird thing about QM is how controversial it manages to be without anyone disagreeing about what the outcome of key experiments will be.
Like, everyone agrees about the EPR correlations, everyone agrees about the existence of entangled particles. Everyone agrees that the Einstein Box experiment will show the particle in exactly one of the boxes...

2025-12-19 22:45:59 GMT

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Also Bricmont's book Quantum Sense and Nonsense, chapter 7, describes a logical argument that "standard" QM **must** be incomplete (Einstein's Boxes) and in Chapter 8 describes why DeBroglie Bohm solves these issues. Here's from that book, him quoting Bell:
https://mastodon.sdf.org/system/media_attachments/files/115/748/649/646/306/817/original/1deaf3fd23781c98.png

2025-12-19 22:27:06 GMT

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Well, I appreciate that Bell himself specifically said repeatedly that Bohmian mechanics explicitly is a hidden variable theory and is NOT ruled out by his inequalities. The hidden variables are the positions. The reason it's not ruled out is that Bohmian mechanics is nonlocal. Only a local hidden variable theory is ruled out. Bell's paper "On the impossible pilot wave" is explicit about this.

2025-12-19 15:00:46 GMT

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It makes perfect sense to say that we propagate our uncertainty through our calculations and then turn out to observe one of the possibilities than it does to say theres a mysterious godlike centralized RNG in the sky actually deciding everything at every moment of existence... which is the vibe of other QM descriptions to my educated nonspecialist ears.

2025-12-19 15:00:45 GMT

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You are WAY more of an expert on physics than I am of course, but I'm an expert in Bayesian probability and its applications. To me Bohmian mechanics has a clear story about the unknown outcomes being a direct consequence of our lack of knowledge. Non Bohmian descriptions all seem to rely on a giant hidden RNG in the sky such that whenever an outcome might be several different ways, the RNG "decides for us". Many worlds makes that nearly explicit.

2025-12-19 14:37:03 GMT

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if Physicists say "we calculate as if the world were nondeterministic because we observe unpredictable outcomes and its convenient for calculation" I'd be much happier. But instead people promote weird ideas like Many Worlds, and "wave function collapse" and "the moon doesn't exist until someone observes it" and such.

2025-12-19 14:25:21 GMT

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this is a pretty well presented part of the video. My outsider perspective suggests that only a tiny fraction of physicists understand that logic. Bell certainly seems to have had a hard time getting physicists to come along with his logic.

2025-12-19 14:25:20 GMT

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Yes, I'm aware that quantum field theory doesn't have a Bohmian style formulation. Eventually i think it will.
i dont see "embracing the new quantum outlook" as a good description of what we've done. it seems more like burying our head in the sand and saying lalalala about the most glaring and interesting aspect of QM, which is that its fundamentally nonlocal. Aspect showed Bells inequalities are experimentally verified. the logic behind that says QM is nonlocal.

2025-12-19 07:29:38 GMT

https://tube.blueben.net/w/cgUJdHuRTmPRHXa9Bek83Q
This Veritasium video on a PeerTube site is pretty much the best video ive seen on JS Bell's inequalities and quantum mechanics. right up until they start talking about Many Worlds at the end. Many Worlds is to me a complete cop out. The description that makes sense is Bohmian mechanics. Many worlds requires not just that there are many worlds, but that the number of worlds is something like 2^kt where if t is measured in seconds then k is like 10^100 or something.

2025-12-19 07:29:38 GMT

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Bohmian mechanics is compatible with fairly normal logic. Particles are real, they move through space according to deterministic laws, their "random" behavior is a consequence of our fundamental inability to know their initial position as they enter our experimental apparatus, and that uncertainty propagates normally through the experiment. because of that, I believe something like Bohm's mechanics must be right.

2025-12-16 18:17:54 GMT

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My big weak spot has always been tools and equipment to make things or accomplish stuff... whether its pens and paper, radio tech, computers, hard drives, cameras, machine tools, sewing things whatever.
Now I need to give myself space/time to use them. So I'm not buying stuff anymore unless its maintenance and replacement of old things.

2025-12-16 01:30:24 GMT

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Hmm, I usually just keep them wrapped in the butcher paper in the meat drawer of the fridge, but you do you.
@npub1san…jgxu @npub1ucv…5a8g @npub1jt2…s5v4 @npub1emq…xekg

2025-12-14 01:41:45 GMT

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It's my dream to one day run into you somewhere in some grassy triangle next to a random street in LA County, carrying some mastodon plush and looking for a spot to shoot a video and say "Oooh look, it's Lety from Mastodon" and win some kind of hipness contest with my teen kids.

2025-12-14 01:38:16 GMT

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You are hilarious, keep on doing stuff Lety.

2025-12-13 22:50:04 GMT

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/average-american-net-worth-620-121500111.html
Median net worth in the US is $124k 15th in the world, behind for example Australia, Canada, NZ, and Italy.
By average though its $620k and second in the world... because of the billionaires and 100 millionaires skewing the avg.

2025-12-11 23:08:26 GMT

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I'm thinking of ordering a zoot suit any day now
@npub1mzu…yccg @npub18x7…p6e7

2025-12-11 23:07:58 GMT

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hipster started out a hundred years ago as a variation on hepster, or hepcat which was either Jazz musicians or their most ardent fans, in Harlem. so they can't have it, fuck that. us hepcats gotta stick together.
@npub1mzu…yccg @npub18x7…p6e7

2025-12-11 17:50:23 GMT

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As @npub1s02…zz9t pointed out repeatedly, we know the answer to this already. If you can't dominate someone, then, you have to incentivize them. In other words, we get people to work by making it worth their while rather than threatening them with destruction if they don't.

2025-12-10 23:04:02 GMT

Went to check on @npub1nf4…nqe4 YouTube channel and typed in "john Carlos b" in the search box and it suggested "john Carlos brawl stars" so now I cant stop thinking about some kind of theoretical physics Battle Royal game ...

2025-12-10 03:28:40 GMT

The #Altadena library foundation president thought my idea of having the foundation buy eBay lots of older computers and I set them up as Linux machines and they resell them to the community members was a good one, and said he'd talk to the board and has asked me to check in with him over the next few weeks as reminder to get back to me.

2025-12-09 15:35:16 GMT

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Thanks. Because I was sick for a while I didn't really send it for your feedback and I know it would have been better if I had. It was well received anyway last week. Today I plan to have a paper handout with the "take home" ideas you can use in your everyday online usage.
Maybe I'll post a PDF of the slides as well on here? Not sure if PDFs can be posted.

2025-12-09 15:31:06 GMT

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The plan is to do two of these in January about how Linux based Operating systems can work for everyday users, help keep you safe online, and get a hands on play with a laptop running a linux system.
I'm going to be talking with the library foundation president about buying refurb older machines on EBay and installing Linux systems and selling them at very reasonable prices to community members later in the year.

2025-12-09 15:28:23 GMT

This afternoon at 4PM at the Loma Alta branch of the #Altadena library I'll be presenting the same presentation from last week to whoever may have missed it previously. Its about understanding and avoiding scams, spyware, tech surveillance and government surveillance. There are real world take home ideas you can use to protect yourself online. #infosec for everyday people.

2025-12-09 15:15:22 GMT

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Also as an aside, this goes into exactly how Enron worked...
Rolling blackouts in CA had a big effect on me. Its probably responsible for me going into Civil Engineering. They were entirely an engineered problem created by Enron.
Whenever you look carefully at major problems in society its never because we dont know how to solve them. Its always because someone is getting fucking megalomaniacally rich off that shit and the people who could solve them are politically powerless.

2025-12-09 14:08:12 GMT

Well after reading this long sarcastic newsletter on the whole NVIDIA and AI grift, I gotta assume we are all screwed. Seems extremely likely that the vast majority of GPUs sold that justify NVIDIA being the biggest company by market cap in the world are not even powered up. Which is a good thing because if they were we'd be destroying resources at an even faster rate.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/nvidia-isnt-enron-so-what-is-it/

2025-12-08 16:07:27 GMT

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Who is caught, there are thousands who didnt quite go so far as to be catchable, but still basically bunk on a stick producing articles and conference talks and whole fields of research built on foundations of quicksand.
Its the same shit in AI. Y'all hate it because you know better. But your avg 4th grade teacher or plumber or auto mechanic or photographer or whatever doesn't...

2025-12-08 16:07:27 GMT

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They didn't spend 20 years studying computer science and math the way you did.. So fedi folks are on the outside looking in at the train crash.
The market for lemons. Read the paper, and then just watch for it in society. Here's the paper
https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/84/3/488/1896241?login=false

2025-12-08 16:07:26 GMT

I feel like a good explanation for much of the modern world is the concept from George Akerlof... The market for lemons.
When consumers know that sellers are cheating them through superior information, they become unwilling to pay for quality (because they assume they can't discern it). Then, the providers of quality can't compete, and remove themselves from the broad market. Finally, everything is just broken used cars and tech surveillance phones/TVs/internet services.

2025-12-08 16:07:26 GMT

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The same is true for academia, its just a process that hasn't completed yet. But youre competing with the guys like Brian Wansink, and Francesca Gino, Diederik Stapel, and the Stap cell people and whoever. People willing to cut corners and get ahead by exploiting the fact they know they're fraud or bad research but most people dont and esp most people doing funding. They look GOOD on paper... All the high profile signals of many papers in prestigious journals etc. For every one of them...

2025-12-04 21:41:42 GMT

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Here's what my position is... Tech people are actually pretty good at teaching for the most part. And actually a lot of tech support winds up solving the problem in the end... Where it really goes wrong is when the person on the other end of the call steadfastly refuses to help and expects magic. This can be caused by extreme anxiety, entitlement or extreme levels of ignorance, or very low intelligence.

2025-12-04 21:33:42 GMT

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Thanks a lot you induced about an hour of discussion with my sister in which she assured me that whenever people don't understand tech things it's because the tech people know too much and just don't know how to explain it to the nontech people and the tech people don't even have a clue where the disconnect is, and that tech people should learn to teach things... in other words, it's always the tech people's fault 😂

2025-12-02 14:53:35 GMT

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Like, if it exists as a product, or if you have some in your house?

2025-12-01 20:48:19 GMT

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If youre covering for right wing people who really just want to have violent fantasies... Yeah. But if youre a leftist who takes "we keep us safe" seriously... Then not so much. Its really the context as to whether youre covering for asshats.
Carrying a weapon everywhere is probably not a great idea, but having weapons so that they can be available for appropriate contexts is kind of like having fire extinguishers, backup generators, or flotation devices on your boat.

2025-12-01 15:24:21 GMT

A techbro can never be held accountable, therefore a techbro must never make a management decision.

2025-11-27 03:36:09 GMT

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@npub1ucv…5a8g ?? Aren't you a geo-champ?

2025-11-26 21:21:44 GMT

Have you ever noticed that if you actually know some electronics principles, that HVAC wiring guides are really annoying and unhelpful because they just tell you what labels to connect what wires to, not HOW the circuits work? Well be confused no more. here's an actual electrical engineering worthy wiring guide (PDF available at the site too for offline reference)
https://www.qwik.com/education/knowledgebase/thermostatic-wiring/

2025-11-21 14:40:46 GMT

As a society America is absolutely obsessed with companies like OpenAI, and Oracle and Facebook. But as a society our actually productive companies are like Lodge cast iron, Levis, and Kitchenaid. That is, companies that produce a reliable quality product that most people can afford. We fetishize money, when we should be reveling in the fact you can buy a cast iron pan for like $30 that will cook for you for the rest of your life.

2025-11-20 22:35:03 GMT

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It is wild to me that you got out and became who you are. Its inspiring.

2025-11-20 19:45:37 GMT

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agreed I think of the Epstein stuff as at least partly similar to drug gangs in the 90's making drive by shootings an initiation rite as a kind of commitment pledge. anyway, it's disgusting and I'd like to see someone fly a C130 full of perpetrators out 20 miles to sea, and return empty.

2025-11-19 19:44:11 GMT

Hey #homeassistant peeps. I have a google free #grapheneos phone, and the F-Droid version of the homeassistant app which doesn't do location reporting because the app relies on google play services for location. Is there an alternative way to get my location reported to my homeassistant server that works under these conditions?

2025-11-14 22:05:13 GMT

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If you had a cheap mini PC running proxmox I'd send you a preconfigured VM (I can just clone mine after I set it up).

2025-11-14 21:20:21 GMT

OK off I go to get gutter downspout extenders because it's gonna rain a lot. Check that off in my ticket management app for me. 😂 @npub1prs…eh8y

2025-11-14 19:37:31 GMT

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Anyone have any suggestions? Something I can self-host that isn't particularly complicated to set up and keep running.

2025-11-14 18:46:13 GMT

I need to set up a trouble ticket system. For my life. Don't laugh, I'm being 100% serious.

2025-11-14 03:37:58 GMT

My wife has an expensive research microscope for her lab, and a camera from Leica, and a mini pc to run the camera. A few days ago the computer just stopped booting... I had her bring it home, diagnosed no power on the power supply using my cheap multimeter. Sent her a link to a $15 replacement, and now her lab can take pictures again. Internet points will be accepted.

2025-11-13 14:14:47 GMT

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It was great, and my neighbor Tina who lost her house and is working on rebuild was able to come along. Shes a classical cellist and she had a great time.
Man when I look up ragtag it has so many different definitions. In any case the sense I'm using here is that they aren't an official band, its a different group every week with the drummer as the organizing principle.

2025-11-13 08:05:11 GMT

Another amazing set with Jimmy Branly and 3 musicians he booked at 1881 in #pasadena (will look up names tomorrow)
They started out rough and smoothed out in the first 40 mins. Then just cruised the rest of the night. I recognized every tune but once ive even had a half a drink the names of things are completely inaccessible for some reason. Anyway great show guys. Hope he returns with the ragtag jazz cats after a break for touring etc.

2025-11-12 17:12:21 GMT

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Totally! That was indeed my point, that both the tradition, and the living reinterpreted and extended ideas are important.

2025-11-12 17:02:28 GMT

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What I think though, is that Anarchism is a living idea, like Jazz, it's built by both respect for tradition, and new contributions, with a strong oral and informal communications tradition.

2025-11-12 15:23:52 GMT

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Someone will be along shortly to provide you with your lanyard and a copy of Kropotkin's conquest of bread.

2025-11-12 15:22:57 GMT

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Not a mistake as much as oppressively forced on people.
Welcome to the Anarchist club.

2025-11-04 15:37:02 GMT

"There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People. " -- Umberto Eco (Essay on Ur Fascism, 1995)
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fascism
Jesus Christ man, leave some predictions for the rest of us...

2025-11-04 05:10:14 GMT

You know how anarchists say ACAB and they do mean ALL COPS... Well here's internal documents stolen by activist hackers and released about the Kansas city Kansas police department
https://www.wired.com/story/hack-exposes-kansas-city-kansas-polices-secret-misconduct-list/
Basically if youre a cop in KC you either participate actively in abusive stuff... Or you know damn well who does and either do nothing or get forced out. So all the ones left are either new, or complicit. Thats what the data seems to say.

2025-10-31 18:09:22 GMT

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Oh yeah, my wife is gonna be totally excited about the new plasma physics hobby 😂

2025-10-27 01:04:12 GMT

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i'm pretty sure that without a constitutional amendment, a wealth tax is probably not doable in the US and because of that I've never really looked at it very carefully, but I'm not in principle against it.
@npub1z3l…txvc @npub1ekj…wjxt @npub14sz…ur2r

2025-10-26 21:08:32 GMT

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https://github.com/dlakelan/UBINotebook
Theres the repo
@npub1ack…kawj @npub1ekj…wjxt @npub14sz…ur2r

2025-10-26 21:07:01 GMT

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Yeah mastodon is hard to search but somewhere in my post history a year or two back I linked to a github with a UBI workbook in Jupiter I think.
Flat tax + UBI *is* a progressive tax, and though you can make it a LITTLE more progressive, its not much, youre kinda constrained mathematically unless you want to do something silly where making more money decreases your take home income...
@npub1ack…kawj @npub1ekj…wjxt @npub14sz…ur2r

2025-10-23 14:22:31 GMT

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God damn it another Graeber book I need to get? 😂

2025-10-23 14:09:41 GMT

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I raised my kids this way, and still do, and not because of any books on parenting or anything, but just because that's what seemed right. Kids get options, not an infinite list, but real options. If they don't like the options they've been taught to negotiate, to push back with good reasons why they should get something else. They're my kids, why wouldn't I want them to be happy, healthy, and have autonomy?

2025-10-20 11:42:05 GMT

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Yeah, I was kinda hoping that Claude + Maxima would turn out to be a combo that worked for you. Lots of people dont enjoy programming but maybe would use it if they could reduce the tedium of recalling specific syntax or the rules for using particular APIs or so forth. When the project is big I think LLMs will be limited, but when its well defined like this or like generating graphs or querying databases etc it seems like it does have some utility.

2025-10-20 10:38:27 GMT

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These systems have only a syntactic level understanding of language.... B comes after A often in a text corpus ive read...
Something like Maxima has a semantic understanding of mathematics. A is a matrix * means multiplication, A*A means do matrix multiplication using the entries of A... Etc
Claude can give you a syntactically probably correct expression in Maxima that maybe implements the math you want. If you can check that it does, then run it in a short time its a win

2025-10-19 22:16:11 GMT

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Seems like you're a good candidate for getting help from an LLM then! my impression is it's useful to think of LLMs as kind of approximate nondeterministic polynomial" solver. Basically you ask LLM for some solution, and then you have to take a certain amount of time to *check the answer was actually a solution*. As long as this checking time is much less than the time it would take you to write from scratch... the system is worthwhile.

2025-10-19 18:05:10 GMT

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Let us know how it goes! I dont know if Maxima is something you use regularly but its such a great tool and open source and available non all platforms, makes it particularly good for education purposes as well.

2025-10-19 17:27:31 GMT

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John, try having Claude write Maxima code to do the calculation. You should probably never trust an LLM to *do calculations* but you may be able to trust it to write computer algebra code to "prove" things. Computer algebra systems work by formal rules not probabilistic matching and generation so their calculations are way more reliable.

2025-10-14 02:10:38 GMT

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Partial Counterpoint... In the last 200 years the world has been completely transformed by fossil fuels. All of that ends soon, while ecological disasters and mass extinction very different from the previous 5000 years are ongoing. History doesn't end with us, but **modernity** certainly does. Population decline on the order of 70-90% seems likely over 200 years.