I came up with an idea this morning about "cultural Lysenkoism".
Lysenkoism was an alternative to genetics and natural selection that was developed in the Soviet Union because genetics and natural selection ideologically cannot fit within socialism because it implies that certain people are naturally better or naturally worse. As an example of the pseudoscience and how it contrasts with science, the proposal was that rather than the children of two organisms carrying attributes that are related to their genetic code and therefore bounded within that, that instead their attributes are set exclusively by the conditions of the two parents at conception, so for example if somebody was naturally overweight and short but they worked out very hard and became skinny for a short period of time, and maybe we're surgically altered so that they were taller, then their offspring would be tall and skinny rather than short and fat.
Here I am taking that concept of Lysenkoism and I'm transposing it into contemporary media culture.
A lot of things have been true isn't for a very long time in the in the media industry, and for good reason: they are true. Things like "sex sells and attractive actors and actresses can sell a movie", or "it is important to make a good movie because otherwise the audience's will stop showing up", or "ultimately it is the customer who makes decisions about what to watch", or "the customer is always right in matters of taste"
A lot of postmodernists have made it into Hollywood, and many of these longstanding truisms are not politically acceptable for their ideology. Attractive actors and actresses don't draw people to movies, they are problematic and dangerous. Having control of a property is more important than what you do with the property because if you have the property then you have the power over the audience because you have the thing that has power. If you are in a position of power then you have the capacity to bully audiences into watching what you want them to watch rather than what they want to watch. And the customer is not always right in matters of taste, and if they want something that doesn't align with your personal ideology and you are in a position of power then it is just and effective to try to change the audience by giving them something that they don't want because you know better than them.
That's not the only precepts of it, I suspect that you could write books on the topic. However, once I start laying it out like this I think that it becomes intuitive for anyone who has followed Hollywood in the last few years, or video games for that matter, and we could quibble about the micro definitions of a certain elements, but generally speaking many people would immediately identify that there was something to this.
Lysenkoism ultimately ended up killing a lot of people because when you were growing grain, it is important to understand the reality of growing grain rather than what ideologically would be convenient. Likewise, cultural Lysenkoism is killing entire industries because the model's being used to produce new video games or movies or music don't align with the reality of creating those things and actually making them operable. It didn't happen right away, because the real world isn't digital, it is analog and it has time constants and sometimes you can make a mistake and it takes 10 years to truly see how badly you've messed up, but people will claim that the video game industry is making more money than ever before, but the reality is that companies that existed for decades are closing up shop because they can't produce successful products under the tenants of cultural Lysenkoism. They end up chasing a false idol of modern audiences which don't exist outside of very limited conclaves, and produce things that cost more and more money, but ultimately struggle to be profitable at all because audiences don't actually want any of this.
Another interesting parallel is that this is in fact enforced. Whether it is through ESG and DEI initiatives which limit what is acceptable, or it is through companies like SBI which are now known to be funded by nation states presumably in pursuit of ideological outcomes, the powers that be have a certain direction that they want things to go in. The problem is that eventually these industries need customers. Even if the government ends up subsidizing 100% of the media industry and video game industry, it will employ a lot of people but there will be no power in those industries because nobody will consume the content any longer. We are in fact seeing that, where audiences are moving on.
Lysenkoism was an alternative to genetics and natural selection that was developed in the Soviet Union because genetics and natural selection ideologically cannot fit within socialism because it implies that certain people are naturally better or naturally worse. As an example of the pseudoscience and how it contrasts with science, the proposal was that rather than the children of two organisms carrying attributes that are related to their genetic code and therefore bounded within that, that instead their attributes are set exclusively by the conditions of the two parents at conception, so for example if somebody was naturally overweight and short but they worked out very hard and became skinny for a short period of time, and maybe we're surgically altered so that they were taller, then their offspring would be tall and skinny rather than short and fat.
Here I am taking that concept of Lysenkoism and I'm transposing it into contemporary media culture.
A lot of things have been true isn't for a very long time in the in the media industry, and for good reason: they are true. Things like "sex sells and attractive actors and actresses can sell a movie", or "it is important to make a good movie because otherwise the audience's will stop showing up", or "ultimately it is the customer who makes decisions about what to watch", or "the customer is always right in matters of taste"
A lot of postmodernists have made it into Hollywood, and many of these longstanding truisms are not politically acceptable for their ideology. Attractive actors and actresses don't draw people to movies, they are problematic and dangerous. Having control of a property is more important than what you do with the property because if you have the property then you have the power over the audience because you have the thing that has power. If you are in a position of power then you have the capacity to bully audiences into watching what you want them to watch rather than what they want to watch. And the customer is not always right in matters of taste, and if they want something that doesn't align with your personal ideology and you are in a position of power then it is just and effective to try to change the audience by giving them something that they don't want because you know better than them.
That's not the only precepts of it, I suspect that you could write books on the topic. However, once I start laying it out like this I think that it becomes intuitive for anyone who has followed Hollywood in the last few years, or video games for that matter, and we could quibble about the micro definitions of a certain elements, but generally speaking many people would immediately identify that there was something to this.
Lysenkoism ultimately ended up killing a lot of people because when you were growing grain, it is important to understand the reality of growing grain rather than what ideologically would be convenient. Likewise, cultural Lysenkoism is killing entire industries because the model's being used to produce new video games or movies or music don't align with the reality of creating those things and actually making them operable. It didn't happen right away, because the real world isn't digital, it is analog and it has time constants and sometimes you can make a mistake and it takes 10 years to truly see how badly you've messed up, but people will claim that the video game industry is making more money than ever before, but the reality is that companies that existed for decades are closing up shop because they can't produce successful products under the tenants of cultural Lysenkoism. They end up chasing a false idol of modern audiences which don't exist outside of very limited conclaves, and produce things that cost more and more money, but ultimately struggle to be profitable at all because audiences don't actually want any of this.
Another interesting parallel is that this is in fact enforced. Whether it is through ESG and DEI initiatives which limit what is acceptable, or it is through companies like SBI which are now known to be funded by nation states presumably in pursuit of ideological outcomes, the powers that be have a certain direction that they want things to go in. The problem is that eventually these industries need customers. Even if the government ends up subsidizing 100% of the media industry and video game industry, it will employ a lot of people but there will be no power in those industries because nobody will consume the content any longer. We are in fact seeing that, where audiences are moving on.
The things that exist in your shadow may very well be filled with death and decay. But they exist whether you look at them or not. That's why if you want to pay close attention to them for a time, so that you can deal with them.
If you have a misbehaving child, if you just ignore what they're doing because it makes you uncomfortable, then eventually they're going to go off and do something completely reprehensible carrying your family name. You have to look fully at that child, and with a full understanding of exactly what they are doing, administer the corrective actions.
If you're trying to purify something in chemistry, often the first step is to integrate that which is your product and that which is your byproduct, and then you can do different filtering or freezing or pH modifying or solvent steps, then you separate what is wanted from what is unwanted and you recrystallize the final product at the highest purity.
If you have a misbehaving child, if you just ignore what they're doing because it makes you uncomfortable, then eventually they're going to go off and do something completely reprehensible carrying your family name. You have to look fully at that child, and with a full understanding of exactly what they are doing, administer the corrective actions.
If you're trying to purify something in chemistry, often the first step is to integrate that which is your product and that which is your byproduct, and then you can do different filtering or freezing or pH modifying or solvent steps, then you separate what is wanted from what is unwanted and you recrystallize the final product at the highest purity.
Have you guys been hammering Canada for their awful attempts to lock down the internet?
I got a real pet peeve in contemporary media about the term GPU.
For context, I grew up using computers right from the commodore 64 and I had an 8088 IBM PC I eventually got a 5 MB hard drive for, and I've been here for the whole ride.
The thing is, the term GPU basically came about specifically because 3D accelerator cards gained an important new feature: previously, 3D accelerator cards solely accelerated the rasterization of 3D triangles, usually with textures and some texture filtering. Upon the release of the geforce 256, a new important feature was released and that was hardware texture and lighting. Now you can argue that this is just a marketing term gpu, but it's a meaningful one. There was a distinct fault line between cards that did have GPU features, specifically texture and lighting at that point, and those that did not. After a few years, there were video games that you could not play with a 3D accelerator card. You required a GPU with hardware texturing lighting.
I saw one person claiming that a GPU is a device that has 3D and 2D at once. That's absurd and totally breaks immediately. Early 3D accelerator cards such as the S3 Virge or the matrix millennium both did both 2D and 3d, and anyone who knows what they're talking about would never call these cards a GPU. They just aren't.
Hypothetically, you can split the features into three separate buckets: 2D cards which exclusively do 2D, 3D accelerator cards which accelerate 3D rendering, and gpus which hardware accelerate parts of the mathematics in the pipeline before the 3D rendering. You could have an architecture with three separate chips doing three separate functions: one card handling 2D, a second card handling 3D acceleration, and a third card handling GPU functions like hardware t&l or later pixel in vertex shader functions or today completely wide open pipelines that can be used for general computing. It is simply because of the way that the devices evolved that today every 3D accelerator card has 2d, and every GPU has 3d and 2d.
There are certain chips that are 3D accelerators today but are not gpus. As an example, matrox licenses out their g200 graphics core which was when it was released a low end 3D accelerator card with exceptional 2D performance. However, it does not accelerate any part of the mathematics prior to the 3D rasterization, and therefore is not a GPU. In fact, the fight to attempt to build a GPU effectively took matrox and many 3D accelerator card manufacturers out of the race. That was the moment many previously marginally competitive 3D accelerator companies effectively left the business because they were able to make 3D accelerators, but they were not able to make gpus. It was a mass extinction event for 3d accelerator companies.
As a point of comparison, memory controllers used to be a discreet component, and after a certain point all contemporary CPUs came to contain the memory controller because it just made more sense to do it that way, but that doesn't mean that you go back and say that earlier CPUs were memory controllers because they weren't. That was a capacity that was added later for technical reasons.
Anyway, it's just a pet peeve, and a little bit of it is because I did make the mistake of buying a 3D accelerator card and not a GPU in the era that it mattered, and that was really frustrating at the time.
For context, I grew up using computers right from the commodore 64 and I had an 8088 IBM PC I eventually got a 5 MB hard drive for, and I've been here for the whole ride.
The thing is, the term GPU basically came about specifically because 3D accelerator cards gained an important new feature: previously, 3D accelerator cards solely accelerated the rasterization of 3D triangles, usually with textures and some texture filtering. Upon the release of the geforce 256, a new important feature was released and that was hardware texture and lighting. Now you can argue that this is just a marketing term gpu, but it's a meaningful one. There was a distinct fault line between cards that did have GPU features, specifically texture and lighting at that point, and those that did not. After a few years, there were video games that you could not play with a 3D accelerator card. You required a GPU with hardware texturing lighting.
I saw one person claiming that a GPU is a device that has 3D and 2D at once. That's absurd and totally breaks immediately. Early 3D accelerator cards such as the S3 Virge or the matrix millennium both did both 2D and 3d, and anyone who knows what they're talking about would never call these cards a GPU. They just aren't.
Hypothetically, you can split the features into three separate buckets: 2D cards which exclusively do 2D, 3D accelerator cards which accelerate 3D rendering, and gpus which hardware accelerate parts of the mathematics in the pipeline before the 3D rendering. You could have an architecture with three separate chips doing three separate functions: one card handling 2D, a second card handling 3D acceleration, and a third card handling GPU functions like hardware t&l or later pixel in vertex shader functions or today completely wide open pipelines that can be used for general computing. It is simply because of the way that the devices evolved that today every 3D accelerator card has 2d, and every GPU has 3d and 2d.
There are certain chips that are 3D accelerators today but are not gpus. As an example, matrox licenses out their g200 graphics core which was when it was released a low end 3D accelerator card with exceptional 2D performance. However, it does not accelerate any part of the mathematics prior to the 3D rasterization, and therefore is not a GPU. In fact, the fight to attempt to build a GPU effectively took matrox and many 3D accelerator card manufacturers out of the race. That was the moment many previously marginally competitive 3D accelerator companies effectively left the business because they were able to make 3D accelerators, but they were not able to make gpus. It was a mass extinction event for 3d accelerator companies.
As a point of comparison, memory controllers used to be a discreet component, and after a certain point all contemporary CPUs came to contain the memory controller because it just made more sense to do it that way, but that doesn't mean that you go back and say that earlier CPUs were memory controllers because they weren't. That was a capacity that was added later for technical reasons.
Anyway, it's just a pet peeve, and a little bit of it is because I did make the mistake of buying a 3D accelerator card and not a GPU in the era that it mattered, and that was really frustrating at the time.
I like "ill mind of hopsin 5".
But probably for the same reasons you're saying what you're saying.
But probably for the same reasons you're saying what you're saying.
I was sitting through a video where they were reading various reviews, and many of the reviews seemed to be very upset that the Super Mario Galaxy movie wasn't citizen Kane.
Now citizen Kane is a great movie, I own it myself; but the things that make a good soup and the things that make a good cheese aren't the same, and the things that make citizen Kane good and the things that would make super Mario Galaxy good are not the same.
Now citizen Kane is a great movie, I own it myself; but the things that make a good soup and the things that make a good cheese aren't the same, and the things that make citizen Kane good and the things that would make super Mario Galaxy good are not the same.
I've got that former chinesium android set top box I converted to linux earning its keep today -- It thought it was going to maybe do some light streaming, and I've got it running an entire platform's compile farm. Thing barely has a heat sink.
And?
Do we stop enforcing just this law against spouses of government employees, or should we stop enforcing all laws against them, up to and including things like laws against murder?
Just so we have an understanding of what is implied by this story.
Do we stop enforcing just this law against spouses of government employees, or should we stop enforcing all laws against them, up to and including things like laws against murder?
Just so we have an understanding of what is implied by this story.
I always find information like this very strange.
If she thought that Khomeini was so good, why is she in public without a male relative?
If she thought that Khomeini was so good, why is she in public without a male relative?
I've got a hypothesis that the enshittification era of AI is imminent.
Now I hear ya going "it's already slop, it can't be made more shit", which in mind is real is a real lack of imagination.
In order to produce anything using this stuff requires massive amounts of energy and hardware that have so far been fully subsidized by investor dollars, but I don't know how much longer that's going to last. Everyone's starting to get wise the fact that productivity doesn't increase as much as you would think, and so the actual ways to make money with this are going to be very limited, and so prices are going to have to rise and services are going to have to get worse in order to help these companies but you never made money get on after breaking even.
Drink em if you got em, but I think last call is imminent.
Now I hear ya going "it's already slop, it can't be made more shit", which in mind is real is a real lack of imagination.
In order to produce anything using this stuff requires massive amounts of energy and hardware that have so far been fully subsidized by investor dollars, but I don't know how much longer that's going to last. Everyone's starting to get wise the fact that productivity doesn't increase as much as you would think, and so the actual ways to make money with this are going to be very limited, and so prices are going to have to rise and services are going to have to get worse in order to help these companies but you never made money get on after breaking even.
Drink em if you got em, but I think last call is imminent.
No, I'm just a retard from the sticks. Whenever I announce completion of the project I'm working on, you'll see just how retarded I am.
You'll be like "Wait, you just spent all this time and effort to do *THIS*?
You'll be like "Wait, you just spent all this time and effort to do *THIS*?
To understand why I found openBSD annoying, you have to understand what I was using immediately beforehand.
I started on ubuntu, which is something that's familiar to me. All the tools are gnu tools I'm familar with, and it took a few tries to build a package with dependencies but it was ultimately completely doable. Not only can you chroot into a base distro install easily, with linux you're basically able to chroot into different distros which is quite useful. The qemu/binfmt method is amazing -- it lets you chroot into a different CPU architecture's distribution and operate as if you're running natively. It's possible to build an entire matrix of linux distributions and platforms without what is typically considered cross-compilation, and all from one command line.
Next I moved to Haiku. It also used standard gnu utils, gcc and gnu make, and the shell was bash. Package installation and creation with dependencies were both really straightforward. Honestly, working on Haiku even fully through the shell was enough to convince me it's a solid OS worth looking at. I didn't try chrooting. The options for APIs were nice, havng extensive bsd and linux shims for cross-compatibility, as well as native APIs such as the window APIs.
After that I was on FreeBSD. That particular BSD has a lot in common with linux, and it's quite forgiving to compile on, to install on, and FreeBSD really wants you to be building in chroot jails. There are 3 major versions active at any one time and you really want to build and package for each with integrated dependencies, I did exactly that and it went very smoothly. There were few to no surpises.
Next I was on OpenBSD, and I got pretty annoyed. It really doesn't want you using gnu utils, but I need them for what I'm doing so I felt like a second class citizen. The make you call is totally incompatible with gmake. The shell is a bsd shell incompatible with bash. You can chroot, but you can't really spin up an isolated OS for compilation and testing because of limits on the local commands. A lot of files are in unusual spots. Everything else I used so far was able to use non pie/pic libraries without problems but you couldn't even build them on openbsd. The packaging tool has command line options documented for adding dependencies but it doesn't look like you can actually do that without going through their ports system which relies heavily on bsd/make. Then when I finally decided to pull the pin and generate a package without deps, I couldn't open a file dialog box in firefox because it was locked down too much, so I had to install a file manager to drag and drop my updated file onto my nextcloud to get the file off the system.
So yeah, it's just really annoying trying to do what I was trying to do on OpenBSD. I moved to netBSD afterwards and it shares some quirks with OpenBSD I've thankfully already resolved, but even then it isn't nearly as locked down so for example I checked and at least in firefox I was able to open a dialog box with no drama.
But, as I said before, it's all for a reason. OpenBSD didn't make those choices to mess with some dummy from the sticks. They made them as part of their security minded design. For that reason I can find it super annoying, but I can also understand it. If I wanted a thing that would happily just do as it was told, I've got lots of options. But if I wanted something that would not have a root exploit in its base install for years and years, obviously I'm going to pick OpenBSD.
I started on ubuntu, which is something that's familiar to me. All the tools are gnu tools I'm familar with, and it took a few tries to build a package with dependencies but it was ultimately completely doable. Not only can you chroot into a base distro install easily, with linux you're basically able to chroot into different distros which is quite useful. The qemu/binfmt method is amazing -- it lets you chroot into a different CPU architecture's distribution and operate as if you're running natively. It's possible to build an entire matrix of linux distributions and platforms without what is typically considered cross-compilation, and all from one command line.
Next I moved to Haiku. It also used standard gnu utils, gcc and gnu make, and the shell was bash. Package installation and creation with dependencies were both really straightforward. Honestly, working on Haiku even fully through the shell was enough to convince me it's a solid OS worth looking at. I didn't try chrooting. The options for APIs were nice, havng extensive bsd and linux shims for cross-compatibility, as well as native APIs such as the window APIs.
After that I was on FreeBSD. That particular BSD has a lot in common with linux, and it's quite forgiving to compile on, to install on, and FreeBSD really wants you to be building in chroot jails. There are 3 major versions active at any one time and you really want to build and package for each with integrated dependencies, I did exactly that and it went very smoothly. There were few to no surpises.
Next I was on OpenBSD, and I got pretty annoyed. It really doesn't want you using gnu utils, but I need them for what I'm doing so I felt like a second class citizen. The make you call is totally incompatible with gmake. The shell is a bsd shell incompatible with bash. You can chroot, but you can't really spin up an isolated OS for compilation and testing because of limits on the local commands. A lot of files are in unusual spots. Everything else I used so far was able to use non pie/pic libraries without problems but you couldn't even build them on openbsd. The packaging tool has command line options documented for adding dependencies but it doesn't look like you can actually do that without going through their ports system which relies heavily on bsd/make. Then when I finally decided to pull the pin and generate a package without deps, I couldn't open a file dialog box in firefox because it was locked down too much, so I had to install a file manager to drag and drop my updated file onto my nextcloud to get the file off the system.
So yeah, it's just really annoying trying to do what I was trying to do on OpenBSD. I moved to netBSD afterwards and it shares some quirks with OpenBSD I've thankfully already resolved, but even then it isn't nearly as locked down so for example I checked and at least in firefox I was able to open a dialog box with no drama.
But, as I said before, it's all for a reason. OpenBSD didn't make those choices to mess with some dummy from the sticks. They made them as part of their security minded design. For that reason I can find it super annoying, but I can also understand it. If I wanted a thing that would happily just do as it was told, I've got lots of options. But if I wanted something that would not have a root exploit in its base install for years and years, obviously I'm going to pick OpenBSD.
It is my growing opinion that OpenBSD is really annoying.
It's supposed to be annoying, mind you. that's what makes it secure. That's why its logo is a puffer fish, but being annoying for a reason doesn't mean it's not annoying.
It's like, we all have that friend, right? They're super annoying, but you understand why so you tolerate it.
It's supposed to be annoying, mind you. that's what makes it secure. That's why its logo is a puffer fish, but being annoying for a reason doesn't mean it's not annoying.
It's like, we all have that friend, right? They're super annoying, but you understand why so you tolerate it.
Neither is correct.
440m underground is deep enough that you're well under the cold temperatures immediately underground, but not so deep it's painfully hot. It's probably a super stable temperature year round, and you could probably spend all day every day at 440m and the worst you'd have is it's pretty stuffy being surrounded by rock. Ventilation is key in something like that, because it'd be humid and without getting fresh air it gets stale and eventually could get quite dangerous as well.
440m underground is deep enough that you're well under the cold temperatures immediately underground, but not so deep it's painfully hot. It's probably a super stable temperature year round, and you could probably spend all day every day at 440m and the worst you'd have is it's pretty stuffy being surrounded by rock. Ventilation is key in something like that, because it'd be humid and without getting fresh air it gets stale and eventually could get quite dangerous as well.
Pretty impressive for a guy who had one joke one time and has stretched it into an entire career.
As part of an ongoing project I have been setting up various flavors of BSD.
Freebsd, openbsd, netbsd, and dragonfly bsd. Nothing particularly fancy, they are all just living in virtual machines.
Unix is Unix, but it's surprising how different each one is. Freebsd was The most straightforward so far, feeling the most familiar and straightforward. OpenBSD so far has been the most difficult to develop on because it has a lot of security features as mandatory that other OSes recommend set as default. Dragonfly has a lot of similarities with freebsd, but in trying to set it up feel like I was back in 1996, fumbling with manual config files only to have no keyboard or no mouse for reasons known only to God.
Another big difference between them is how they manage current versions of things. Freebsd maintains 3 different version lines going back several years, but openbsd is standardized on whatever the current version is.
Something that is constant between Linux distributions is the Linux kernel, so you can chroot between distributions which is convenient for compiling between distros, whereas BSDs are basically their own thing and each kernel is unique with a long individual genetic line.
Freebsd, openbsd, netbsd, and dragonfly bsd. Nothing particularly fancy, they are all just living in virtual machines.
Unix is Unix, but it's surprising how different each one is. Freebsd was The most straightforward so far, feeling the most familiar and straightforward. OpenBSD so far has been the most difficult to develop on because it has a lot of security features as mandatory that other OSes recommend set as default. Dragonfly has a lot of similarities with freebsd, but in trying to set it up feel like I was back in 1996, fumbling with manual config files only to have no keyboard or no mouse for reasons known only to God.
Another big difference between them is how they manage current versions of things. Freebsd maintains 3 different version lines going back several years, but openbsd is standardized on whatever the current version is.
Something that is constant between Linux distributions is the Linux kernel, so you can chroot between distributions which is convenient for compiling between distros, whereas BSDs are basically their own thing and each kernel is unique with a long individual genetic line.