sinedpick

even technical communities use discord now. It's SO fucking over.

The first footnote makes me want to give myself a lobotomy with a no. 2 pencil:

I wish to note here that Richard took this “as evidence that John would fail an intellectual turing test for people who have different views than he does about how valuable incremental empiricism is”. Of course I couldn’t just ignore an outright challenge to my honor like that, so I wrote a brief reply which Richard himself called “a pretty good ITT”.

If this guy doesn't masturbate his successful polemicizing every 1.5 paragraphs, he'll go into septic shock.

More like "People want things and hurt if they don't get them. Also, look at me saying things like utility function! Function is math! Math is smart. I am smart! Isn't that so cool?"

It would do you a lot of good to actually read about communism and political theory in general instead of acting as a conduit of brain rot.

Absent from this analysis: reduction in QALYs resulting from perfectly good men being denied a child bride by some evil meddling NGO. Will someone please think of the poor men?

I'm actually somewhat surprised that the rationalists didn't bring this up.

I'm a nixos fanatic, thank you very much! I even installed nixos on my (non-technical) SO's computer. Was this a mistake? Yes. Do I care? no.

Random musings but I feel like posting: I almost got sucked into the urbit hole. I thought it was such a cool idea and implementation, and all the fun names and technical purity was so attractive to me at age 18 (this was before the crypto circus and urbit barely did anything except talk to a terminal).

It took me a while to realize that there is, actually, zero reason to give nonsensical names to literally every aspect of software, and also pretty dumb to try to shoehorn everything through a tiny functional core ("Nock") while slowly re-learning all the lessons of 50 years of compiler development. So why use it at all?

Using urbit over a normal Linux stack comes purely with downsides. Slow, buggy, obscurantist, and so on. This means whoever actually dedicates their precious time to developing this unconditionally buys into the ideology. I never thought an ideology could be so powerful that it could corrupt the minds of my people (software monkeys).

Urbit is a truly fascist^H^Hnating phenomenon.

The problem is far worse than what any single billionaire can fix. Billions of dollars are being poured into renewable energy infrastructure. It's just that while this is happening, we're also emitting the same amount of CO2 as always. The only long-term resolution of this is de-growth.

Can't use that to explain Cs in math and physics.