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Being Raised by the Internet

jimmyhmiller.github.io

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Re: Being Raised by the Internet

#311

Post by throwanem »

dllthomas wrote: post #299
throwanem wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would need someone who understands Morse to notice and interpret. The same dexterity can also operate a pen, and this is the option I have more often seen used. Neither is likely to be a much richer channel than the other, I think.

I think you probably need more dexterity (and grip strength) for minimal successful communication with a pen than with Morse code, especially if you wind up trying to do both without visual feedback. The odds of those around you noticing is something you have some power over, if you're thinking about it ahead of time.

All true, but a pen still can be legibly used in at least some such situations. I've seen it done.

I'm not saying not to plan around Morse, just that it's a little early to assume there must be no other hope - and always too early to place much faith in being able to exert control over circumstances where, more or less definitionally, this is not a reasonable thing to expect.

That probably sounds scary. I can't help that. Dying is a scary topic, I imagine likely much more so for actually doing it, which I as yet have not. But I do know some things about how to handle fear, and one is that it helps a lot when that doesn't come by surprise - when you don't have to start totally from scratch to build what equanimity is available.

Less so than any one specific response, what I'd focus on trying to prepare for is that. You can't really know what tools you will have available in such a moment. You can't really know you will have any. Whatever there is, though, you'll have an easier time to recognize and use for being able to better see past that fear.

Re: Being Raised by the Internet

#312

Post by throwanem »

jcgrillo wrote: post #310
throwanem wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is my understanding that about 50% of the cultural values companies prescribe to their teams are values they don't want to see adopted. Sure, same here. What I don't understand is the idea that such pervasive mendacity and self-delusion should acceptably characterize a kind of culture that anyone is expected to regard as worthy of respect. I realize it has a lot to do with the difference between organizational d…

I think it's thematically consistent with the lack of rigor in this field. I've been told countless times to deliver provably broken, bug-ridden shit on the premise that "it's better to deliver quickly and iterate". Similarly, I've gotten the management stink-eye from discovering (and proving by fixing it) something that was running totally broken in production for years. When nothing matters, that is when companies…

Because that's what it's come to be about. We aren't here to serve our users, our bosses or each other. We are here to serve money and personal ambition, with "meritocracy" inhering solely in whether one serves one's own ambition or another's.

Finance is a cancer in the body of the industry. This is why we say so; this is what it does.

Re: Being Raised by the Internet

#313

Post by olyjohn »

fermigier wrote: post #88

I wasn't raised (as a technologist) by the internet, but by cassettes, floppies, magazines and books. But we share at least one experience: the horrors of ndiswrapper. 20 years later, I recently tried to install Ubuntu on an old Intel MacBook Pro that I got somehow, and I realized that in 2024 you still can't install Linux on a laptop (at least, on laptop of a certain popular make) without jumping through hoops, due…

There are so many laptops that Linux works great on right out of the box. I've used it on brand new models straight from Dell/Lenovo/HP etc and it's worked out of the box. It's weird to me that you call out Linux for not running on one proprietary machine and expanding that and saying you can't install Linux on any laptops. It's simply not true.

Re: Being Raised by the Internet

#314

Post by throwanem »

082349872349872 wrote: post #238
Loughla wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Historically, in the United States, the barbershop was a meeting place. It was a place you went to talk and relax. It's weird in the modern society of fast cuts and what not. But barbers tend to go into that business because they like talking to people. And you're right, every barber I've ever had has pried into my life. But I've also been more willing to share life experiences with barbers, and listen to their exper…

After a tip from hispanophone colleagues in California, I started going to their hairdresser: it was Monday only, $5 or $10 instead of $30, and that was because the girls only took 5 or 10 minutes instead of 45. That was when I learned that the traditional barbershop package consisted of, say $10 worth of haircutting and $20 worth of rag chewing. > barbers tend to go into that business because they like talking to pe…

If your grocery store has a union, best do that always, if you have the time. Makes it harder for management to lie down how many people they need.

Re: Being Raised by the Internet

#315

Post by immibis »

TZubiri wrote: post #136
doubled112 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Red flags galore. You should divorce immediately. Not the asshole. I do fear, in the long term, what happens to those chat logs? Surely they will be used for training later on, and being anonymous doesn't always work out. Will the viewer be more AI bots? Human employees? Law enforcement? A dump on 4chan?

One of the things that bit me is one of those anti-system videos where they tell you not to speak to police or whatever. Turns out it's better just to say "hi officer, yes officer, no officer" than spending the night in jail for absolutely no reason other than "the internet taught me how to react to police answering questions." A more harmless example is when I read that the best way to clean cooking oil spills was t…

Conversely, it's better to spend a night in jail because you exercised your right to remain silent, than five years in prison because you accidentally confessed to something.

Re: Being Raised by the Internet

#316

Post by immibis »

psychlops wrote: post #281
immibis wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, you have really raised the quality bar for discussion by combing through another user's comments and cherry-picking ones you don't like. Especially complaining about comments on political posts being political. And complaining about the same thread multiple times is chef's kiss . The rest of your comment was only added an hour after the comment was originally posted, presumably because you realised in hindsig…

No, we cryptocurrency people don't agree. It's actually hard to get them to agree on anything. Even whether it should be under state control or not. Labelling the ethereum fork (I assume you are speaking of the DAO) as criminal is interesting. They simply executed the contract according to the terms of code which isn't necessarily illegal. At the time, ETH was a hundredth of its current size (losing 1/3rd its value o…

Similar excuses, of course, would justify the government taking your fiat money away.

Hacking the DAO was objectively criminal activity, since it was illegal.

Ethereum agreed to fork to within a margin of error. I know this because the post-fork version of Ethereum is much bigger.

Re: Being Raised by the Internet

#317

Post by immibis »

jcgrillo wrote: post #264
RajT88 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Continuous learning and development are also values that employees are often invited to practice, though not when there's work to do! These are the things you're supposed to do on the evenings and weekends. Honestly, I'd love it if companies took the tack of giving employees projects based on the skills they want them to develop, instead of the skills they already have.

> These are the things you're supposed to do on the evenings and weekends. Along with "giving back" to "the community" in the form of unpaid labor. There is a class system at play where the owners and financiers--not the builders--benefit the most. And they make sure of it. They've effectively co-opted everything that made the early (mid-late 90s) Internet many of us grew up on good and turned it into a money printin…

This is why it's important to license software as AGPL instead of MIT. Corporations won when they convinced everyone GPL licenses were oppressive.

Re: Being Raised by the Internet

#318

Post by xorcist »

kragen wrote: post #309
xorcist wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatever assets you keep with custodians abroad while invading a neighboring country might not be safe, irrespective if that asset is paper cash, gold, bitcoins, luxury yachts or anything else. That tells us nothing about the assets themselves, and only a little bit about how international law is practiced.

well, the specific reason bitcoin is better than gold for this purpose is that you don't have to keep it with custodians abroad in order to sell it easily. right now a more important reason that it's worse—unusably bad, in fact—is that its so-called market capitalization is too small, and the markets backing it too thinly traded, for the reserves of any country but a fairly small or poor one that might change, but fo…

How is that different from gold? I believe central banks keeps that around for precisely that reason. Or, for that matter, the difference from paper cash or luxury yachts? All you need is to find a buyer.

Which might not be easy for yachts, and maybe not for bitcoins for the reasons you mention, but shouldn't be too hard for gold or cash. For central banks, bitcoins should be pretty similar to other assets.

(This made me curious, but I couldn't find any reference to whether any central banks are known to own it.)

Re: Being Raised by the Internet

#319

Post by throwanem »

nuancebydefault wrote: post #307
throwanem wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On further reflection, I'm sure I did. It was unjust and I'm sorry. It never occurred to me until a moment ago to wonder whether your question read to me like it did because it came from someone who maybe has never had to doubt that everyone can always know who to call to get out of a spot like that, on a number that will always be answered. Even now I can't bring myself to call that a conclusion rather than a surmis…

You don't have to feel sorry. I feel sorry that the situation in the US is what it is. That said, there's a lot for me to learn so I think asking questions and getting (sometimes harsh) answers is a way of learning that _sticks_ so to say.

Grossmütterlichgefälligkeit, I believe the word to be. I've learned some of my own best lessons that way. Here I think has been the opportunity of another.

Re: Being Raised by the Internet

#320

Post by kragen »

xorcist wrote: post #318
kragen wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well, the specific reason bitcoin is better than gold for this purpose is that you don't have to keep it with custodians abroad in order to sell it easily. right now a more important reason that it's worse—unusably bad, in fact—is that its so-called market capitalization is too small, and the markets backing it too thinly traded, for the reserves of any country but a fairly small or poor one that might change, but fo…

How is that different from gold? I believe central banks keeps that around for precisely that reason. Or, for that matter, the difference from paper cash or luxury yachts? All you need is to find a buyer. Which might not be easy for yachts, and maybe not for bitcoins for the reasons you mention, but shouldn't be too hard for gold or cash. For central banks, bitcoins should be pretty similar to other assets. (This mad…

generally to sell gold you either need to ship it to somebody, which poses the risk of it being stolen, lost in transit, or interdicted when crossing a border, or you need to have previously deposited it in a warehouse approved by the commodities exchange that you are trading it on, which involved shipping it to the warehouse. lme has 465 of them https://www.lme.com/Sustainability-and-Physical-Markets/Ware...

commodity metals like gold can change hands many times before ever leaving the warehouse, and so some fraction of the metals purportedly in those warehouses don't actually exist, having been stolen years earlier—an eventuality normally handled by insurance

consequently a very large fraction of the world's non-british central bank gold reserves are actually physically located in london

what's not covered by insurance is having your assets frozen by a foreign court that has jurisdiction over the warehouse 'your' metals happen to be in; historically this was not considered a plausible scenario in reliable countries, but then it happened, and now, as i understand it, nobody knows what to do. keeping your reserves in warehouses under your own jurisdiction doesn't solve the problem; it just transfers the risk to whoever you're trading with

with bitcoin, no shipping or warehousing is needed, so these risks are replaced with subtler risks related to information security

in this imf note from january https://www.imf.org/-/media/Files/Publications/IMF-Notes/202... the possibility of adopting cryptocurrencies as a new class of international reserve assets is discussed, though that's not really the main point of the note. in general central bankers are extremely skeptical of cryptocurrencies, especially decentralized ones. the world bank helpfully issued a communiqué on its blog last week, entitled, 'crypto-assets: unfit for central bank reserves today' https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/allaboutfinance/crypto-assets... which mostly echoes what i've said earlier in this thread

so i would be surprised if there was any adoption of cryptocurencies as international reserve assets yet

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