"I'm going to take my bo at, and I'm going to down the reeever, and I'm going to (where did my film career go?)"
Canadian power should be all hydroelectric, period.
If we stopped worrying about looking good and started worrying about actually being good, the first thing we'd do is build a bunch of ugly and boring but super effective dams in every single province and territory and make it so everyone could heat their homes in winter cheaply and without burning anything, and in the process we'd punch above our weight by selling a bunch of that carbon neutral power to the US.
If we stopped worrying about looking good and started worrying about actually being good, the first thing we'd do is build a bunch of ugly and boring but super effective dams in every single province and territory and make it so everyone could heat their homes in winter cheaply and without burning anything, and in the process we'd punch above our weight by selling a bunch of that carbon neutral power to the US.
A lot of people point out that being stupid is lazy, but what they don't talk about is it feels really good. Simple answers help the world make sense. You don't need to feel the pain of uncertainty, just follow what the orthodoxy says is true and the world makes sense. It's not fun being in an uncertain world. It doesn't feel good having to look at things you might not like to come to conclusions you might not think you'll come to initially. By contrast, a feeling that you're doing what's right is deeply fulfilling, even if it's not based on anything real or true.
When I was younger I got sucked into a couple ideologies like that for a while. Constitutional libertarianism is really nice because as an idea there's basically one question: "Is this directly supported by the constitution?" and usually the answer is "no". It efficiently sorts about 95% of questions before you even start. The problem is that beyond ideology the world is complex and dynamic. Even Ron Paul got gotcha'd for voting to recognize Rosa Parks despite the fact that the ability to do so is not enshrined in the constitution (In the grand scheme of things, that's a pretty acceptable thing to be gotcha'd on if I'm being honest).
Thing is, once you step out of the ideological realm, the world exists and does continue to exist regardless of how well or how poorly your model works. Often later on you come back out the other side and realize (like the German NPCs did) that you regret the way you acted despite it feeling like the only way to act in the moment because you were so certain of yourself and your ideology's imperviousness.
When I was younger I got sucked into a couple ideologies like that for a while. Constitutional libertarianism is really nice because as an idea there's basically one question: "Is this directly supported by the constitution?" and usually the answer is "no". It efficiently sorts about 95% of questions before you even start. The problem is that beyond ideology the world is complex and dynamic. Even Ron Paul got gotcha'd for voting to recognize Rosa Parks despite the fact that the ability to do so is not enshrined in the constitution (In the grand scheme of things, that's a pretty acceptable thing to be gotcha'd on if I'm being honest).
Thing is, once you step out of the ideological realm, the world exists and does continue to exist regardless of how well or how poorly your model works. Often later on you come back out the other side and realize (like the German NPCs did) that you regret the way you acted despite it feeling like the only way to act in the moment because you were so certain of yourself and your ideology's imperviousness.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ww47bR86wSc
This is a great video that fantastically explains one of the biggest ideas I think we need to be facing today. I've said that the sort of people who shut their brains off would be guarding the railcars to Auschwitz, here is the same idea presented by someone who was imprisoned and ultimately murdered by the people who guarded the railcars to Auschwitz.
It's funny seeing someone call out actual 1945 Nazis as NPCs.
This is a great video that fantastically explains one of the biggest ideas I think we need to be facing today. I've said that the sort of people who shut their brains off would be guarding the railcars to Auschwitz, here is the same idea presented by someone who was imprisoned and ultimately murdered by the people who guarded the railcars to Auschwitz.
It's funny seeing someone call out actual 1945 Nazis as NPCs.
Big problem no matter what with most of these attacks is you start with "Ok, so first we have to successfully attack the system."
If you've successfully attacked the system, then it's already game over. You can pass data through a number of different avenues.
If you've successfully attacked the system, then it's already game over. You can pass data through a number of different avenues.
The number one largest by volume group of people who are trying to cut people off from being able to do business would be the woke religion. There are countless examples where someone is sitting there basically minding their own business and they end up getting kicked out of the banking system, or they get kicked off a website, or they get kicked off of a sales platform, or they get kicked out of their job, because they are not following the holy precepts of that religion.
So let's do it for everyone. Tax the churches, tax the political nonprofits. You're not allowed to deny someone because your religion of God tells you that they are evil, you're not allowed to deny someone because your religion of wokeness tells you they are evil.
I think doing that would immediately calm down a lot of this culture war crap.
So let's do it for everyone. Tax the churches, tax the political nonprofits. You're not allowed to deny someone because your religion of God tells you that they are evil, you're not allowed to deny someone because your religion of wokeness tells you they are evil.
I think doing that would immediately calm down a lot of this culture war crap.
Pretty much par for the course with these stupid political cases.
It cuts both ways. Was there really no other cake shop the gay couple could have gone to?
Thinking about this post is actually brought me to a completely different idea. When the US Constitution was first created, morality did swing largely around the church. So freedom of religion and freedom from religion was to an extent a right to your own morality, and a right to act or not act based on your own sincerely held morality.
Today, we live in a much more secular world. There are much fewer religious people than they used to be. So we end up in this really weird situation where if you have a sincerely held moral belief and you have that because you think God told you to, then you can be protected from having to act another way. And you have that because you think it's the right thing to do, you have no similar protections.
I think there's a good argument we made for amending the Constitution of the world to change the freedom of religion into a freedom of conscience. And similarly, a freedom from someone else's conscience.
It cuts both ways. Was there really no other cake shop the gay couple could have gone to?
Thinking about this post is actually brought me to a completely different idea. When the US Constitution was first created, morality did swing largely around the church. So freedom of religion and freedom from religion was to an extent a right to your own morality, and a right to act or not act based on your own sincerely held morality.
Today, we live in a much more secular world. There are much fewer religious people than they used to be. So we end up in this really weird situation where if you have a sincerely held moral belief and you have that because you think God told you to, then you can be protected from having to act another way. And you have that because you think it's the right thing to do, you have no similar protections.
I think there's a good argument we made for amending the Constitution of the world to change the freedom of religion into a freedom of conscience. And similarly, a freedom from someone else's conscience.
Imagine if he actually won on those stupid arguments. He'd have to sleep with a vest and helmet on for the rest of his life.
[admin mode] Downtime just now was due to a database upgrade that was overdue. Started to notice this week a lot of things were starting to fray because we were applying hotfixes but deferring some major upgrades. We should be good for a long while now on that front. At some point we'll be upgrading our back end and front-end, but not tonight.
The FBXL invidious instance was also starting to fall apart, it's set up to automatically upgrade on a schedule like most of our stuff. It's working perfectly again.
I'll probably be fiddling a bit more with invidious and lotide, but the social and video instances are back to normal now.
The FBXL invidious instance was also starting to fall apart, it's set up to automatically upgrade on a schedule like most of our stuff. It's working perfectly again.
I'll probably be fiddling a bit more with invidious and lotide, but the social and video instances are back to normal now.
Did you know that when I made this it was a stupid edgy joke and half the planet wouldn't pretend I was actually advocating we vote for Hitler?
A lot of folks following me since I posted this last: Privacy redirect is available for chromium and firefox based browsers and lets you redirect links automatically from big tech to privacy respecting sites.
Every single person on fediblock instances is a neurodivergent quadrapelegic fat hideously ugly Jewish black gay trans who migrated from India where he was part of the untouchables caste who lives under the poverty line and attended residential schools and speaks English as a second language! The dei machine just says "tilt"
If I went with that list rather than adding myself to it, I'd be cut off from some of the best people on the fediverse.
The establishment has discovered they can shut down legitimate debate by accusing it of being related to so-called "unacceptable speech" even where it clearly isn't. The moment you can shut down something legal by routing it through something illegal, they will.
We are seeing a whole bunch of speech that has absolutely nothing to do with race, sex, gender ideology, or nationality getting reframed by The Establishment as racist sexist homophobic transphobic Russian propaganda because that way they don't need to deal with any legitimate questions.
We are seeing a whole bunch of speech that has absolutely nothing to do with race, sex, gender ideology, or nationality getting reframed by The Establishment as racist sexist homophobic transphobic Russian propaganda because that way they don't need to deal with any legitimate questions.
One of the keys to building models is coming out with actionable predictions. Human beings are mastery rationalizers, so it's very easy to come up with a model to justify any course of action, but the important question is: when you take that course of action you've justified, did things play out the way that your model predicts?
Of course, there are Black swan events that no one could predict. There is no model that would have predicted that in 2020 the entire world economy would be shut down due to a pandemic. On the other hand, a model should account for some level of unexpected events, because the world isn't static.
It is no great miracle producing a set of predictions that tomorrow will be largely the same as today. Most of the time such a model will be absolutely correct. The value comes in trying to predict what might change, in figuring out what the next Black swan event could be, or in trying to see with unbiased eyes the White swan event that is sitting right in front of you.
Human beings have the tremendously huge brains we do in part so that we can try to predict the future. That is our superpower as a species. That's why our tool use is on a completely different level than any other species, because we can imagine how we might use some incredibly complicated tool that has no present use. It also allows us to behave in ways that are insanely social. For example, one person building a piece of software that allows different social media websites to connect together. They did that imagining a future that could have thousands of different websites existing and communicating. And today we have the fediverse. It also allows us to plan ahead at a level that no other creature even comes close to. How many other species do you think have 5-year plans? How many other species do you think have 10-year plans? How many species do you think have any conception of 15 or 20 years from now? That's incredible, and it's a superpower that we have as humans.
The thing is, we need to use that superpower. Just listening to other people and letting them tell us what to do means that we're going to be doing the exact same thing as everyone else and we're never going to get ahead. Just sitting and dogmatically reciting orthodoxy in the face of new information means we're never going to get ahead. We as individuals needed to take in information as much as we can, try to build models for ourselves, and most importantly take in additional new information from the outside world to test our previous predictions, honestly and lies whether our predictions were correct, and modify our models based on that feedback from The real world so that we can make better decisions based on better predictions tomorrow.
It sure sounds like a lot of work, having to go around and put all this effort into building models, and learning more information, and testing our models, and modifying your models, but the thing is if we don't do that then we're not going to be able to make predictions ahead of the pack, and we're not going to be able to get any sort of comparative advantage. Moreover when everyone else is hurting, you could be ok because you successfully predicted the bad thing others who were relying on others to do it for you.
Once you start putting in the work, many things become much more obvious. Then you start to see the establishment saying "nobody could have predicted this!" And you sort of have to shake your head because once you're out of the echo chamber, it's just not true anymore.
Of course, there are Black swan events that no one could predict. There is no model that would have predicted that in 2020 the entire world economy would be shut down due to a pandemic. On the other hand, a model should account for some level of unexpected events, because the world isn't static.
It is no great miracle producing a set of predictions that tomorrow will be largely the same as today. Most of the time such a model will be absolutely correct. The value comes in trying to predict what might change, in figuring out what the next Black swan event could be, or in trying to see with unbiased eyes the White swan event that is sitting right in front of you.
Human beings have the tremendously huge brains we do in part so that we can try to predict the future. That is our superpower as a species. That's why our tool use is on a completely different level than any other species, because we can imagine how we might use some incredibly complicated tool that has no present use. It also allows us to behave in ways that are insanely social. For example, one person building a piece of software that allows different social media websites to connect together. They did that imagining a future that could have thousands of different websites existing and communicating. And today we have the fediverse. It also allows us to plan ahead at a level that no other creature even comes close to. How many other species do you think have 5-year plans? How many other species do you think have 10-year plans? How many species do you think have any conception of 15 or 20 years from now? That's incredible, and it's a superpower that we have as humans.
The thing is, we need to use that superpower. Just listening to other people and letting them tell us what to do means that we're going to be doing the exact same thing as everyone else and we're never going to get ahead. Just sitting and dogmatically reciting orthodoxy in the face of new information means we're never going to get ahead. We as individuals needed to take in information as much as we can, try to build models for ourselves, and most importantly take in additional new information from the outside world to test our previous predictions, honestly and lies whether our predictions were correct, and modify our models based on that feedback from The real world so that we can make better decisions based on better predictions tomorrow.
It sure sounds like a lot of work, having to go around and put all this effort into building models, and learning more information, and testing our models, and modifying your models, but the thing is if we don't do that then we're not going to be able to make predictions ahead of the pack, and we're not going to be able to get any sort of comparative advantage. Moreover when everyone else is hurting, you could be ok because you successfully predicted the bad thing others who were relying on others to do it for you.
Once you start putting in the work, many things become much more obvious. Then you start to see the establishment saying "nobody could have predicted this!" And you sort of have to shake your head because once you're out of the echo chamber, it's just not true anymore.
Why do people rob banks? Because that's where all the money is.
Why do people use ActivityPub for posting content? Because that's where all the users are.
Why do people use ActivityPub for posting content? Because that's where all the users are.