“Seeing like a state”. It could be half the length without losing anything, but it’s a very interesting perspective on states and central planning that I haven’t thought about before and am enjoying.

The solution proposed in “After Capitalism” is (with democratically worker managed companies):

A flat-rate tax on the capital assets of all productive enterprises is collected by the central government, all of which is plowed back into the economy, assisting those firms needing funds for purposes of productive investment. These funds are dispersed throughout society, first to regions and communities on a per capita basis, then to public banks in accordance with past performance, then to those firms with profitable project proposals. Profitable projects that promise increased employment and/or further other democratically decided goals are favored over those that do not. At each level—national, regional, and local—legislatures decide what portion of the investment fund coming to them is to be set aside for public capital expenditures, then send down the remainder, no strings attached, to the next lower level. Associated with most banks are entrepreneurial divisions, which promote firm expansion and new firm creation. Large enterprises that operate regionally or nationally might need access to additional capital, in which case it would be appropriate for the network of local investment banks to be supplemented by regional and national investment banks.

That’s for taking care of the investment part that stocks/shares fulfill for a large part right now.

And for getting there:

Legislation giving workers the right to buy their company if they so choose. If workers so desire, a referendum is held to determine if the majority of workers want to democratize the company. If the referendum succeeds, a labor trust is formed, its directors selected democratically by the work-force, which, using funds derived from payroll deductions, purchase shares of the company on the stock market. In due time, the labor trust will come to own the majority of shares, at which time it takes full control via a leveraged buyout, that is, by borrowing the money to buy up the remaining shares.

Along with legislation that if a company is bailed out by the government, it gets nationalized and turned into a worker self managed company. If companies get sold, they can only be sold to the state (according to the value of current assets, not stock market cap or similar). And if a firm is not sold, it’s turned over to the workers if the founders death. If there’s multiple founders, each can sell their share to the state or workers separately.

For stocks specifically, there’s the Meidner plan, where every company with more than 50 employees is required to issue new shares each year equivalent to 20% of its profits, these shares will be held in a trust owned by the government, and in an estimated 35 years, most firms would become nationalized (of course along side all newly founded firms having to be worker owned).

Not saying I fully agree with all of Schweickharts proposals, but at least the book is a relatively concrete proposal for an alternative that can be discussed, and how to possibly get there, so I thought it merits sharing.

In general, anything that hijacks search shortcuts.

Oh you wanted to search for text on this one page? Let me show you a search bar for the whole website instead, with a search that’s strictly worse than the search engine that you came from in the first place.

Maybe a third of a used or import lathe or mill.

Machining is super expensive as a hobby to get started.

Which is why I’m slowly upgrading my cheap CNC router to be more rigid and capable, bit by bit. Machined stainles for the first time last week. though i’ll never get close to a ‘real’ machine, in hobby machining, everything is a finishing pass…

This can work, but with cryptography instead of the porn site connecting to a government service.

The swiss government wanted to introduce electronic id a few years back which was a complete clusterfuck, every party would get all your private data even if they just needed ‘older than 18’, it was supposed to be implemented by various private companies that then sell it to the individual states, not really with gov oversight, so you have like 20 companies all with all the data, each of which could be hacked at any point etc.

we forced a public vote on it in 2021 and rejected it with 65%.

the use cases are pretty valid, like online pharmacies, ordering booze online, though of course you never know what they would require it for in the future.

so now it’s 2025 and a new proposal, this time much more privacy focused, developed by the government, open source, seems like they did listen to a lot of the criticism.

this blogpost goes into a bit of details on why unlinkability matters and that one-time-pads are one potential solution. And the whitepaper with more detail.

i saw a presentation from the digital society on it earlier this year and from what i remember, you get a set of keys (and can create new ones if you run out) from which you can create derived keys that only contain relevant information. The other party can verify this directly, without a gov service. And since you use a new key each time, the porn site also cant crossreference with your booze site that you’re the same person, that kind of stuff. It all sounded pretty reasonable and like it would adress your points.

Selling fewer explosive vehicles seems like a good idea tbh.

I mean, they helpfully provide ranking lists. Start at #1 and work your way down

sort of. Having a system that allows multiple parties, like in many European countries, certainly helps with representation and discourse. But looking at Europe, it certainly doesn’t prevent a right-wing drift towards authoritarianism. There’s sooo many other things needed for a healthy democracy, like education/literacy, strong independent institutions, unions etc.

You can just end up with two right wing parties, an extreme and a moderate one, but the moderate one catering to the extreme positions of the extreme party (and being mostly moderate in name only), and both of them forming a majority government and drifting to authoritarianism, even if there are many parties.

A proper (CNC) milling machine and lathe, like ones you can work hardened steel with. Lots of better things you could buy for that money, but with a mill and lathe i could make those things for even more money!

Edit: oh and a proper garage/hobby room to put them in

Actually, as to your edit, the it sounds like you’re fine-tuning the model for your data, not training it from scratch. So the llm has seen english and chinese before during the initial training. Also, they represent words as vectors and what usually happens is that similiar words’ vectors are close together. So subtituting e.g. Dad for Papa looks almost the same to an llm. Same across languages. But that’s not understanding, that’s behavior that way simpler models also have.

Though half the time it’s

deleted

thanks that really solved my problem, you’re amazing!

I still have mixed feelings about deleting one’s whole comment history, though i also did that when I left reddit. it’s the right thing to do, but the amount of information lost because of greedy leadership is super sad.

I mean, yes, i takes some practice. I was more commenting in terms of time+effort, which imo is not that much actual time spent doing stuff compared to e.g. just making regular sourdough bread. which also takes practice if you want nice big bubbles. In my experience, getting a pretty sourdough bread with high hydradation dough actually took more practice (in terms of handling the sticky dough) than getting good croissants.

And even the first couple of croissants turned out pretty good when i started. Not on par with bakery ones but still tasty. So it’s not like practice results need to go in the bin

You fold and flatten it like 3-4 times, each takes like 5 minutes and then it goes back in the fridge for 45 minutes.so while it takes like 4-6 hours of time to make croissants from scratch (including proofing the dough etc.), it’s more like 1 hour of work. Really not as bad as people make it out to be.

effort wise I find it on par to making sourdough bread, what with all the stretching and folding of the dough dgring proofing.

and you can prepare them the day before and proof in the fridge, then bake the next morning. Actual fresh baked croissants in the morning are fucking amazing and well worth the work

Buddy Guy. the concert was pretty posh (think bankers in suits), with everyone having arranged seating, audience sitting still and quiet like at a classical music concert.

he was like ‘fuck this, this isn’t a proper concert, my guitar is wireless, let’s stand up, go to the entry hall and jam’. so he’s just standing in the middle of the crowd and going nuts, at like 83 years of age. That was amazing.

Apple TV the devices or the streaming service? Because the streaming service has pretty good content, especially compared to the other streaming services. Pretty stupid to have named those two the same, though, so many people dont know that it’s just a regular streaming service that works on every device.

everything else Apple sucks though

i have a venta lw45. same principle, but instead of a wick, it has these rotating disks that the water sticks to (with a little soap in the water). Works incredibly well, still uses next to no energy (<8W) and the disks are super easy to clean. It’s a beast, goes through 9 liters of water in a bit over a day. All the parts are easily accessible for maintenance and there’s replacement parts if anything ever were to break (though i havent needed those yet).

the disks are especially nice when you have hard water, the calcium can be a pain to remove from a wick, but you can put the venta plastic disks (and lower housing, if you can fit it) in the dishwasher to get them good as new. And calcium does not stick to them weld, so a quick rinse under a strong showerhead is usually enough to clean the disks. Definitely one of the best appliance purchases i ever made.

Looking through hugo/nebula nominations.

friends

i used to use goodreads but since it’s owned by Amazon, i don’t trust it an switched to thestorygraph.com which has really nice recommendations. of course it recommends based on my usual tastes but often also has some books i would never have checked otherwise, which i quite appreciate.

Kobo.com DRM is also very easy to bypass and turn into epub using knock

It’s not economical to grow. It has very specific requirements in terms of wet soil and not too much sun, it has pretty low yields in terms of weight/area, compared to other crops. and since it isn’t grown commercially, you also dont have optimized farming techniques and breeds etc.

and since it’s quite common in the wild, well, if the price is too high, you’d just go and collect some yourself. Wild garlic products in supermarkets are already too expensive for me and i’d rather spend half an hour filling a bag with 2kg than buying 50g for 5 bucks.

The newest generation of xps i shit anyways, good riddance.

i was really happy with my 2019ish xps. But the 2024 one is hot garbage. not just that it arrived with the keyboard not working and Dell taking 3 months to replace it. There’s a total of 2 usb-c ports on it. That’s all the connectors, yes. No, no headphone jack either. And one of those two is taken up with charging, so i’m left with one port if i dont use a dockingstation.

the whole function bar is touch now. you need to hit it 3 times for it to react, who needs Esc anyways. Unless you want to type in the number row, then the function row will pick up random key presses sometimes.

Copilot key no one asked for. Power button is just an unlabelled piece of plastic that looks like filler, not a button. Keyboard sucks in general, too little space between keys, you’re bound to mistype.

linux support is ok, though webcam doesn’t work in firefox, hibernate doesn’t work, every few weeks it’ll just freeze. But otherwise acceptable.

definitely my last dell, i really hate it.

[Edit] Oh and I forgot the best part, when the dell repairman finally repaired it after 3 months, he said “oh a new XPS? Yeah, those suck, every customer hates them especially for software development”