Photuris

I cancelled my Audible subscription and stopped using Amazon entirely.

Eat shit Bezos.

Rednote 小红书 is much better than TikTok anyway, obvious propaganda and all.

Productivity will go up, wages will remain the same, and no additional time off will be given to employees. They’ll merely be required to produce 4x as much and compensation will not increase to match.

It seems the point of all these machines and automation isn’t to make our individual lives easier and more prosperous, but instead to increase and maximize shareholder value.

You think they guy who writes code to make Xbox games work, or the woman who does data analytics in R and Excel to optimize cloud hosting traffic shaping rules (or whatever), is the same as ICE and the SS?!

Jesus Christ. Climb out from under your rock and go meet some real people doing real things, and do some real things of value yourself. Maybe learn how to make something with tech. Maybe learn a little bit of code, I don’t know.

I work in tech. I am not rounding up my Hispanic neighbors for ICE, nor am I building spyware infrastructure for Palantir. I write code to help doctors and nurses do their jobs more effectively and efficiently. But fuck me I guess for trying to earn a living by providing some value. And fuck Microsoft employees for writing code to allow people to play video games or whatever.

Oh, fuck you.

People need an income, and they work hard to provide for their families.

Tech employees are people, too. And many of them spent years perfecting a very difficult set of skills that the market is quickly deciding isn’t as valuable as it once was, because their corporate employers regard them merely as resources to be exploited and then discarded at the first opportunity. That sucks.

It sucks whomever it happens to, be it warehouse workers, truck drivers, call center employees, retail and customer service employees, or office knowledge workers. Just because a person had made a pretty good salary doesn’t mean they haven’t still be exchanging their precious time for dollars like the rest of us, grinding away their life at a job rather than spending quality time with their loved ones and persuing their own hobbies and interests.

Seriously, fuck you dude.

These control freaks keep popping up, and so we’ll have to do it again.

I relate to this so much!

Righteous!

A long time ago, I use to call myself “Libertarian.” Before you cringe too hard at this, this was long before MAGA, the Tea Party Republicans, all that. I just wanted weed to be legal (even though I don’t partake myself), no more foreign wars, and basically people to mind their own goddamned business most of the time and for the laws to be less convoluted but apply to everyone equally. Basic stuff for a younger mind. I don’t like busybodies and control-freakery.

My primary concern was in maximizing Freedom for the greatest number of people.

What changed my perspective, was learning and understanding the difference between Negative Liberty (freedom from) and Positive Liberty (freedom to).

And I then understood how a healthy Left and a healthy Right might in theory disagree when Positive Liberty and Negative Liberty are in conflict, even if they both actually really value Freedom (e.g., the freedom to own firearms responsibly vs. the freedom from fear of having one’s children murdered in middle school; Or, the freedom to drive anywhere on public, toll-free roads vs. the freedom from excessively high wheel taxes, or emissions standards that are burdensome on the working poor, or from imminent domain laws that take bits of your land to build roads on).

That understandjng had me, over time, shifting from Libertarian to Liberal. I became a normie Democrat.

Another shift has been happening lately, from Liberal to Progressive/Democratic Socialist, for largely the same reasons: my understanding of what Freedom (and by contrast, cooersion) means in practice is deepening (also, the rise of MAGA and the fecklessness and corruption of the Democratic Party has me a bit radicalized).

I still value Freedom, and I want it maximized for the greatest number of people as possible. I have changed my mind on what that means exactly and how we might get there.

1. Find something you really want to study and learn, that requires retaining a lot of facts

2. Download Anki

3. Download or build a flashcard deck for what you want to learn

4. Do your flashcards every day, and trust Anki to know what cards to show you, and when, and how often. It’s just a few minutes per day.

5. Spaced repetition just made you much smarter!

6. Repeat, forever, learning all the things.

Dude, non-MAGA have kids, too.

That’s one (of many) reasons I don’t want to give up remote work.

Bosses say that remote work misses “the human element” and “face to face” time.

Yes, and I couldn’t be more happy about it.

100% we need to switch back to entirely paper ballots, even if it takes months to determine a winner.

Well, they’re certainly not “conservatives.” I see no conserving going on.

So, what do we do?

There are also external AI tools that do this just fine.

But imagine these tools generating summaries of summaries.

When someone tells you who they are, believe them.

They will be, when it affects them personally.

In other words, typical Republican thinking.

Protestors are adults who understand and accept the risks.

People are going to die defending democracy. And the jackboots will most likely shoot first. We all know this.

War is coming, let’s stop pretending it’s not gonna happen.

But the general public (myself included) doesn’t really understand how our own reasoning happens.

Does anyone, really? i.e., am I merely a meat computer that takes in massive amounts of input over a lifetime, builds internal models of the world, tests said models through trial-and-error, and outputs novel combinations of data when said combinations are useful for me in a given context in said world?

Is what I do when I “reason” really all that different from what an LLM does, fundamentally? Do I do more than language prediction when I “think”? And if so, what is it?