Starts-with-X programmer. Fantasy author. The human social function emulator may not function as expected. He/they. Born at 322 ppm
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Published at
2023-04-12T23:35:40+02:00 Event JSON
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Last Notes npub1gg0lmq7zl3n3cp3ay7jv7eat9lfqk3ljfx2wf3rnwzk8n462evsqc9w0xq Graydon @npub1qy5…qq3x You know "the Cossacks work for the Czar"? The media works for the money. npub1gg0lmq7zl3n3cp3ay7jv7eat9lfqk3ljfx2wf3rnwzk8n462evsqc9w0xq Graydon For a long time now, it's been the case that you can do a lot of work to arrive at a nuanced, fact-based policy position, or you can look at the policies conservatives demand and do the exact opposite. Doing that exact opposite is probably not precisely as optimal policy as what an hypothetical ideal human of good will and vast ability with arbitrary time and resources could achieve, but it's really quite close. And it's right there and extremely low effort. npub1gg0lmq7zl3n3cp3ay7jv7eat9lfqk3ljfx2wf3rnwzk8n462evsqc9w0xq Graydon Joe's running mate is a black woman. Anything that makes him seem mortal kicks off a mad scramble to make sure the possibility of VP Harris becoming President Harris isn't there. That's got a lot more to do with things than is being generally acknowledged. npub1gg0lmq7zl3n3cp3ay7jv7eat9lfqk3ljfx2wf3rnwzk8n462evsqc9w0xq Graydon @npub1psd…9sr7 Same. I sometimes have doubts about the follows 3, no posts, no picture, accounts, but not enough to click accept. npub1gg0lmq7zl3n3cp3ay7jv7eat9lfqk3ljfx2wf3rnwzk8n462evsqc9w0xq Graydon @npub1aq2…4nfw When people who really, really want a world in which they never, ever have to take no for an answer start accumulating power, it's going to be better for all concerned if they don't succeed. npub1gg0lmq7zl3n3cp3ay7jv7eat9lfqk3ljfx2wf3rnwzk8n462evsqc9w0xq Graydon @npub1psd…9sr7 On the plus side that is still a really promising code name. Or do you absolutely require the prior mention? npub1gg0lmq7zl3n3cp3ay7jv7eat9lfqk3ljfx2wf3rnwzk8n462evsqc9w0xq Graydon @npub1psd…9sr7 that seems like a good plan. Plumbing-related stress would provide a sadly plausible explanation, too. Headmeat out of chemicals. npub1gg0lmq7zl3n3cp3ay7jv7eat9lfqk3ljfx2wf3rnwzk8n462evsqc9w0xq Graydon @npub1lzz…jhl3 Power is power. Money is an accounting abstraction that depends on a whole lot of social machinery to translate into power. So, sure, money can be power, but we don't have to let it. npub1gg0lmq7zl3n3cp3ay7jv7eat9lfqk3ljfx2wf3rnwzk8n462evsqc9w0xq Graydon @npub1lzz…jhl3 The entire point of being an elite is to not have to accept feedback. (That is, no one can tell you you're wrong. All the consequences, all the responsibility, lands on someone else. You might have to spend money on lawyers but you're, de facto and nigh-always, never at fault.) Elites exist to be free from responsibility and consequence. The rest of us need to remember that, recognize that it expands the harm elites do, and to do the work to have a society without elites. npub1gg0lmq7zl3n3cp3ay7jv7eat9lfqk3ljfx2wf3rnwzk8n462evsqc9w0xq Graydon @npub1lc3…r3st @npub1psd…9sr7 @npub1rkj…ufed Humility, the idea that you're not special, that there's lots of stuff you don't know, that you're easily wrong, is a virtue. It's also essential to having a relationship with facts. (Facts are external, knowable only through co-operation, not authority, and there's no approach to facts that doesn't involve readily admitting error.) Once you lose your humility, decide you're special, and then extend that into "I get to prescribe a norm!", that's it. npub1gg0lmq7zl3n3cp3ay7jv7eat9lfqk3ljfx2wf3rnwzk8n462evsqc9w0xq Graydon @npub1jvn…uj7g I can't read most of their materials, alas, but find the English ones disturbingly coy about how these things are to be powered. Do they explain how one gets tracks people can step over without electrocution risks? npub1gg0lmq7zl3n3cp3ay7jv7eat9lfqk3ljfx2wf3rnwzk8n462evsqc9w0xq Graydon The objections to putting down the fossil carbon, sobering up, and getting the work done arise uniformly from the people who get their de facto extrajudicial status and wealth from controlling fossil carbon extraction. They're having a big public bout of immense personal weakness, deficient character, and flabby analysis. They're not correct about any of this; they're just a long way down a fear-makes-you-stupid spiral, and trying to drag everybody along with them. We need to refuse to go. npub1gg0lmq7zl3n3cp3ay7jv7eat9lfqk3ljfx2wf3rnwzk8n462evsqc9w0xq Graydon Thing is, the Carbon Binge is not some inherent upper cap on personal prosperity, material security, or exercisable agency. If you do the back of the envelope math about cost per kilowatt, it's pretty obviously the case that there's a much better future right there. (Even if we're all subsisting on a diet with a major component made out of blue-green algae for a few hundred years.) It's important to hang on to that; the reason to leave this maximum is that the other one's better. npub1gg0lmq7zl3n3cp3ay7jv7eat9lfqk3ljfx2wf3rnwzk8n462evsqc9w0xq Graydon Had a thought. People worry about Biden's age. Thing is, I'm not quite sixty and I have no adult memories of pre-Mammonite-takeover anything. Joe Biden is about as young as it's possible to be for someone to have those settled adult memories of how things work when you organize the economy to benefit the nation and citizenry as a whole. It's not ideal that he's that old, but in a lot of ways it's positive-sense important that he's that old. He knows for sure mammonism is optional. npub1gg0lmq7zl3n3cp3ay7jv7eat9lfqk3ljfx2wf3rnwzk8n462evsqc9w0xq Graydon @npub12ph…gt8y @npub1psd…9sr7 Large sample size "guaranteed brain damage" studies came out of the UK in the first half of 2020. They vanished under the clanking treads of the narrative of mildness, but they did happen. npub1gg0lmq7zl3n3cp3ay7jv7eat9lfqk3ljfx2wf3rnwzk8n462evsqc9w0xq Graydon @npub1psd…9sr7 @npub1j8j…s9kl The other thing, well, two things about the F-35 is that Ukraine is demonstrating that the USAF doctrine change to presume that anything not heavily stealthed as a matter of form and design is dead against a modern air defense network is substantially correct, for one, and for two, it's built to be part of the"volume contests you" armed sensor network. If you're going to be doing those designed mission roles at all, it's not that much over the minimum ante. npub1gg0lmq7zl3n3cp3ay7jv7eat9lfqk3ljfx2wf3rnwzk8n462evsqc9w0xq Graydon @npub1psd…9sr7 I've been drifting into "are we certain-sure they don't have a submarine?" territory for awhile. npub1gg0lmq7zl3n3cp3ay7jv7eat9lfqk3ljfx2wf3rnwzk8n462evsqc9w0xq Graydon @npub1kmn…8cg8 We have a recent clear example that the House republicans will elect any speaker Trump commands them to elect. That's how the current speaker got the job. npub1gg0lmq7zl3n3cp3ay7jv7eat9lfqk3ljfx2wf3rnwzk8n462evsqc9w0xq Graydon @npub19fc…ay3c Don't get too focused on fungible goods. Those will matter; food is a fungible good. And for a lot of things people already have one and will be OK for awhile. (kitchen knives. mixing bowls.) (Hair clippers, especially manual ones, nail files, and no-hair-dryer hair brushes and combs are probably going to feel a bit short pretty quick.) I'd be looking at post-cell-phone, post-GPS stuff; rechargeable batteries, completely non-digital radios, stand-alone clocks, and paper maps. npub1gg0lmq7zl3n3cp3ay7jv7eat9lfqk3ljfx2wf3rnwzk8n462evsqc9w0xq Graydon @npub1psd…9sr7 It's quite sensible but the general outrage at this being an undocumented feature seems well-taken. Using depressurization as a means to open the cockpit door works only if you can move around and while ten minutes of air in a wee carbon fibre bottle is very cheap these days, getting on the plane with it wouldn't be easy. Otherwise you're stuck in your seat or you're collapsed on the floor. Someone's going to pitch AI-directed swarm-of-bees security microdrones, I just know it. npub1gg0lmq7zl3n3cp3ay7jv7eat9lfqk3ljfx2wf3rnwzk8n462evsqc9w0xq Graydon @npub1psd…9sr7 A long-distance rough terrain canoe-and-foot race where you start in Yellowknife and have to get to Winnipeg. Called that because you're not permitted any navigational devices whatsoever and have to either know the route or perform primitive celestial navigation. Hasn't been held since 2019, ostensibly due to COVID but probably also because two-thirds of the 2019 participants DNF'd due to causes including "devoured by weasels". npub1gg0lmq7zl3n3cp3ay7jv7eat9lfqk3ljfx2wf3rnwzk8n462evsqc9w0xq Graydon @npub1psd…9sr7 People looking for a norm to imprint on will imprint on ANYTHING. One reason to discourage norm-imprinting at all, and another to promulgate something non-torment and minimalist as generally as possible. npub1gg0lmq7zl3n3cp3ay7jv7eat9lfqk3ljfx2wf3rnwzk8n462evsqc9w0xq Graydon @npub1psd…9sr7 @npub1zdp…vqv8 Insecurity management by feelings cannot work. While anyone is structurally socially important, we'll keep trying it. The thing that makes me actually angry about this stuff is twofold; economics being functionally religion, so the [Yard-Sale Model](http://www.physics.umd.edu/hep/drew/math_general/yard_sale.html) is not widely known (great wealth is luck, not virtue, always) and how selection is misunderstood; you get what is easiest to copy into the future. ("fitness" is how easily you copy into the future.) npub1gg0lmq7zl3n3cp3ay7jv7eat9lfqk3ljfx2wf3rnwzk8n462evsqc9w0xq Graydon @npub1upk…tcwy @npub1uzg…ychd `git rebase branch` on main does result in a weird state. Would not recommend. `git rebase main` **on branch** updates your branch commits to be as they would have been had you started from where main is now, and that will let you find the places where your work is in conflict with the rest of the team's work. It's also stuff that has to be dealt with eventually so might as well do it locally. npub1gg0lmq7zl3n3cp3ay7jv7eat9lfqk3ljfx2wf3rnwzk8n462evsqc9w0xq Graydon @npub1uzg…ychd @npub1upk…tcwy I rebase main onto branch all the time; it applies other people's work so I can fix any conflicts in the branch before I create the PR that will move my commits to the shared remote. The thing with git is that not only is there more than one way to do it, someone is doing it that way for entirely sensible reasons. npub1gg0lmq7zl3n3cp3ay7jv7eat9lfqk3ljfx2wf3rnwzk8n462evsqc9w0xq Graydon @npub1psd…9sr7 It's escaped from Bluesky. It started off as a quote from someone who likes to post peculiar moral quandaries involving Christian babies without entirely comprehending the conventions of the quandary genre. npub1gg0lmq7zl3n3cp3ay7jv7eat9lfqk3ljfx2wf3rnwzk8n462evsqc9w0xq Graydon @npub1h7c…47kq @npub1psd…9sr7 It's exactly what a shill for the automotive industry would do, because they've been doing it for fifty years now. The essential, inescapable, fundamental thing about using hydrogen as a fuel is that it does not work. You can even tell it doesn't work, and that the fossil carbon folks are utterly sure it doesn't work, because it gets funded. Stuff that could work as pumpable non-combustion fuels, like methanol-air, aluminium-air, or ammonia-air, does NOT get funded. npub1gg0lmq7zl3n3cp3ay7jv7eat9lfqk3ljfx2wf3rnwzk8n462evsqc9w0xq Graydon @npub1qy5…qq3x Which in turn becomes a problem of keeping the belief system from copying itself (into more people, into future generations, however one wants to put it.) It's not a problem of preventing the behaviour, strictly; it's a problem of causing the cultural transmission to stop. npub1gg0lmq7zl3n3cp3ay7jv7eat9lfqk3ljfx2wf3rnwzk8n462evsqc9w0xq Graydon @npub1wjh…6adp In making it impossible to govern. If it's impossible to govern, the rich can do whatever they want, and I do mean "whatever"; de jure chattel slavery, no free press, no civil rights for women, formalizing that the law does not apply to the rich, and instituting theocracy. Which is the whole point. They're against any consent-of-the-governed construction of legitimacy for the civil power. npub1gg0lmq7zl3n3cp3ay7jv7eat9lfqk3ljfx2wf3rnwzk8n462evsqc9w0xq Graydon @npub16a3…9dah @npub1gmx…atcq Not being able to work is pretty reliably fatal, here in late capitalism. Not seeing any "this is what Long COVID does to your standard of living" articles, possibly because those might actually worry people. npub1gg0lmq7zl3n3cp3ay7jv7eat9lfqk3ljfx2wf3rnwzk8n462evsqc9w0xq Graydon @npub1ntq…rg38 I'm not meaning to complain at you specifically, but the "vulnerable" narrative as though this particular disease isn't going to rip the lungs or the liver or the cardiac function out of anyone boggles me. We're all vulnerable. (Some of us are like to die, but you don't have to be like-to-die to be vulnerable.) My take is "outside your immediate household in air that could have had someone in it? Respirator, worn continuously until you return." Hospitals more so than most places. npub1gg0lmq7zl3n3cp3ay7jv7eat9lfqk3ljfx2wf3rnwzk8n462evsqc9w0xq Graydon @npub12dp…rpxf @npub14fx…5p6y Which is agricultural practices, not eating meat. One has to watch out for those stats; methane in cow farts is a problem solely to the extent that the carbon in the methane is derived from fossil inputs. Otherwise it's part of the ongoing carbon cycle. The closed-loop carbon and nitrogen cycles required for better agricultural practice need animal digestions other than human to work. I'm all for the closed loop, but let's make that the objective, not "reduced emissions". npub1gg0lmq7zl3n3cp3ay7jv7eat9lfqk3ljfx2wf3rnwzk8n462evsqc9w0xq Graydon @npub1psd…9sr7 @npub1jc0…sldg Eggs have a maximum size set by the ratio of surface area to volume as a constraint on gas exchange. The approximately 13cm average diameter of ostrich eggs is into the size range for sauropod eggs, the very largest reconstructed diameters of which max out at about 20cm. Sauropod eggs tend to be longer and proportionately skinnier than ostrich eggs, so the relative size difference is more than the diameter alone might imply. npub1gg0lmq7zl3n3cp3ay7jv7eat9lfqk3ljfx2wf3rnwzk8n462evsqc9w0xq Graydon @npub1psd…9sr7 Not at all, no. I seem to recall those have an actual internal texture. Is His Nibs feeding this collection of culinary delights to an audience of moderns? It occurs to me that a slab of plain bland pease porridge, no salt, would be challenging. Same with stored-in-a-drawer-and-sliced cooked oatmeal. Notionally a palate cleanser between courses, but in excessive quantity for the role. npub1gg0lmq7zl3n3cp3ay7jv7eat9lfqk3ljfx2wf3rnwzk8n462evsqc9w0xq Graydon @npub1psd…9sr7 Macdonald's definition beef: at some point its long and storied history, the material has been in contact with the inside or the outside of a cow. Do you have hot dogs as a thing in Scotland? I imagine that's where a lot of it's going in Anglo NorAm. npub1gg0lmq7zl3n3cp3ay7jv7eat9lfqk3ljfx2wf3rnwzk8n462evsqc9w0xq Graydon @npub14cq…k7mw And the gods of civil engineering are drainage, drainage, and drainage. Every ditch, dam, culvert, retaining pond, overflow, abutment, storm sewer, settling pond, dyke, levee, and drain is the wrong size, and people want to cut taxes. npub1gg0lmq7zl3n3cp3ay7jv7eat9lfqk3ljfx2wf3rnwzk8n462evsqc9w0xq Graydon Rostov-on-Don is the rail hub through which Russian logistics passes for the Ukraine war. If AFU had the strike reach, they'd've been pounding the depots and rail yards there as much as they could. Now there's a mercenary claiming patriotism standing there with better uses for everything in the depots than to continue the war. It makes me wonder how much realpolitik Ukraine's intelligence apparatus can stomach. (And evokes the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth creating Prussia.) npub1gg0lmq7zl3n3cp3ay7jv7eat9lfqk3ljfx2wf3rnwzk8n462evsqc9w0xq Graydon @npub1psd…9sr7 @npub12ld…d8ag There are various reports of genetic changes. I think it might take longer than with the flu. npub1gg0lmq7zl3n3cp3ay7jv7eat9lfqk3ljfx2wf3rnwzk8n462evsqc9w0xq Graydon @npub12ld…d8ag @npub1psd…9sr7 I agree that this stuff isn't in the domain of facts yet. Too much inescapable wait-and-find-out. I think "years" shall prove optimistic. npub1gg0lmq7zl3n3cp3ay7jv7eat9lfqk3ljfx2wf3rnwzk8n462evsqc9w0xq Graydon @npub12ld…d8ag @npub1psd…9sr7 That summary appears to suppose life expectancy will start increasing again. COVID is cumulative; the papers coming out about brain damage have wandered out of "so far" statistical stuff into neuron fusion mechanisms. The "it just takes a long time to recover, like actual flu" position has turned into "maybe you don't fully recover from flu". Then there's the ongoing agricultural collapse and weather excursions. The Decameron had a genre. One like may live again some while. npub1gg0lmq7zl3n3cp3ay7jv7eat9lfqk3ljfx2wf3rnwzk8n462evsqc9w0xq Graydon @npub1psd…9sr7 if there's an actuarial estimate of the age where life expectancy might go into equilibrium again, I haven't seen it. "Younger than me" seems nigh-inevitable at this point.