Not to mention, Reddit’s assault was followed by seemingly every tech company looking on and saying “hold my beer”
I’ve always been wary of the ability of tech companies to pull the plug of services on a whim, but holy shit did 2023 bring that way up the priority list
I’m running nix on my PC turned server, and there’s definitely a lot of advantages…I highly recommend it for people who can pick up languages easily and prefer fixing a problem once by brute force trial and error.
Doing easy things is much harder, but doing hard things can be laughably easy
I probably wouldn’t pick it as-is for my primary PC, but for a server? Amazing.
It ends when you write an AI better at configuring Linux than you are, but is also very good at soothing your pride… The latter is the infamous “alignment problem”
Nah, you take your shot (without being inappropriate) then you accept the answer gracefully.
This guy did a three in one - she clearly went way, way beyond acceptable responses, but forcing out a straight “no” makes women uncomfortable.
When she says “I have a boyfriend” or “I’m gay” or whatever, it may be the reason she’s saying no or she might just be lying to spare your pride and avoid a bad reaction. An excuse is definitely a “no” though
You get one shot. If you’re the type who needs a clear answer, ask a clear question the first time
I remember an acquaintance was complaining about their computer turning off when they closed the lid, so I told her to hand it over and I’d see if I could fix it.
She said she’d buy me dinner to thank me, but my fix didn’t really fix the problem, I just made the computer not sleep when you closed it, and so I didn’t feel like it was worth a reward
She even asked a second time, it took me years to realize I unknowing (firmly) shot her down
Creative constraints is the term you’re looking for
It’s absolutely a thing - they do it for creative writing and game jams, and it’s very effective.
Programming is inherently creative, even if we don’t think of it that way. You start learning the basic use, then you get into very rudimentary designs - at that stage, you transition from problem solving to creating a design that solves a problem.
Constraints help - if you pick what we call an opinionated framework, it limits and guides you. It tells you how pieces fit together, and ideally it doesn’t limit you, but it does make some things much easier and others harder.
Nintendo had an extremely opinionated engine in that time - they were still drawing the maps out on paper in a grid, then scanning it with custom hardware.
These days, you open up godot, and you get a blank screen. You could make anything, 2d or 3d, a game or a tool, and it just gives you the tools. You could build a tile map for a 2d game, or a terrain for 3d, you can set the camera wherever you want. You can have multiple cameras, multiple maps - you can do anything
I don’t think we need to make this literally true - we can put in a lot of wiggle room, because we just need to restrict doing this at scale
Say, no more than 2 homes per household, 1 extra for each additional adult. You want a vacation house, or a place near work? Fine. You want to buy another house and take your time moving? Fine. You want both? Make some compromises.
Or we could make the limit 5 per household - that would be excessive, but if they couldn’t rent them out it would still decomodify housing, because it’s people buying homes at scale that really is killing us
From there, you’d crack down locally - if you want to live in the boonies, I don’t care if you have 5 acres. If you live in a city with a housing shortage, maybe you only get a certain square footage per person, maybe certain areas are primary residence only, or however you want to slice it
Because at the core of every religion is a tiny grain of truth. It’s 50% intentionally fabricated nonsense, 45% poetic license and the personal interpretation of someone long dead, and maybe 5% of it is truly profound and universal
If you look at religions, they have a lot of commonalities. There is an inhuman, unknowable creator, or source. Then there’s some number of superhuman beings who serve or reject the creator, and may interact with humans. They don’t interact with the creator directly though - they’re also not human, but have some exaggerated human qualities
The abyss, the primal chaos, Ginnungagap for the Norse… It’s the nothing that spawned and makes up everything. It’s ever present, but you know it by acting in harmony with it, and destroy yourself by acting against it.
Then there’s the pantheons, servants, great spirits, naga or what have you - they’re assertions for how to live in harmony with it, some kind of greater being that is partially right and partially wrong. They’re value systems, and they make mistakes in most myths, showing the flaws. Sometimes they created the world from the abyss/chaos, sometimes they created humans, sometimes they just stumbled upon us. Or sometimes aliens that created us as a slave race, depending on how you want to see it.
And then there’s the reason for it - in one way or another, it’s to become something greater through our time alive. Often to become strong or pure enough to be able to join the deities, or to be able to exist in the void without burning to nothing.
You do it through engaging in life - mindfully doing anything will teach you truths about the universe, and through various forms of introspective meditation (or prayer) to bring yourself more in harmony with your version of the truth.
That’s all more like spirituality, but then you spend generations adding in some cautionary tales - we do live in a society after all, these are like bedtime stories that mix our history with the values our society prizes.
Often heroes grow spiritually they make distilled rules to guide the society to improve… Generally they’re pretty reasonable (in the context of the original period)
But then sometimes a more temporary spiritual leader decides they don’t like something - clearly it’s unnatural and unaligned with the truth of existence because they really hate it… So obviously it’s the will of the creator, and it gets tacked on to the guiding code.
And several hundred years later, once the religion has gained institutional power in a much larger and more hierarchical society, assholes just add in whatever is convenient. The core message is forgotten, there’s endless stuff tacked on teaching morals or history that can be reinterpreted… Or maybe society just changed, and you have to drop some rules or lose the flock
Tldr: there’s a core message of how to grow spiritually as a person, and a glimpse of something true about the nature of reality (in a very metaphorical, poetic kind of way). The promise of a reason and a goal speaks to everyone… But then they keep going, and bury the original message by teaching all sorts of other junk, often misinterpreted for an agenda centuries ago, in the same tone. Often misinterpreted today for an agenda.
(Side note, all ancient stories are super poetic and metaphorical, even historical ones… They’re probably just more fun and more easily remembered when they’re repeated around the fire for the next generation)
This is one of those complex topics that we don’t truly understand well yet
We’ve called them a distributed intelligence, because they do basically have a core brain and auxillary brains - but is there really any other kind?
It seems to be to be something like their core brain is in control, and the auxiliary brains are a combination motor cortex/occipital lobe (vision is our primary sense, but even though their eyes are better they have taste+smell+touch+em sense? All over their tentacles).
Conversely, we also have a brain worth of neurons in our gut and a lot of capacity to learn reactions at the spinal cord. Our brains could also be described as several brains clumped together… Personally, my fingers know a ton of things I don’t know consciously.
We also have the capacity to “run” two human level intelligences - server the link between the hemispheres and you can get an auxiliary person who can have different opinions, understand language independently, and even communicate separately through writing
We really don’t know how brains work, they’re black boxes to us. We know that “if I destroy this region, it will impact that capability”, but in a more fundamental sense? We’ve barely scratched the surface
So I learned all this almost 2 decades ago so the details may be off…
There’s crossover cables, which are a-b and used if you want to connect one computer to another-the tx and rx are flipped from one side to the other, so two “client” devices (like 2 computers) don’t speak and listen on the same line
There’s rollover cables, which are flipped on one side, that were used to connect to the console port of a router
Aside from that, nothing about the configuration really matters except being standard. The reason they’re not just in stripe-color color order is to separate the tx and rx to minimize interference
I’m pretty sure all of this became moot after hundred gigabit Ethernet became a common thing anyways - they multiplex electrical signals across each of the wires, so they have to negotiate the method or fall back to a simpler protocol from the start. I’m not sure how robust it is to randomly shuffling the order on each side individually (I wouldn’t try it on hardware I wasn’t willing to risk)
So really, all that matters is that it matches. And since we’ve been doing it a certain way for so long, doing it differently is a bad idea. A vs b makes no difference, but you could make green the split pair and it’d be identical. You could use the same arbitrary order on each side and you’d probably not notice much difference, although you might get a lot more errors from minute interference
And FWIW, I think b is the more common standard across the world… But any advantage or disadvantage probably died back when we stopped using those trunk lines with dozens of pairs split out on a punch down block that goes to a bunch of different homes
I genuinely respect when people own up to their mistakes.
I’d greatly prefer a boss who says “look, this isn’t your fault, I wish I could do better by you, but it was my job to protect your job and this is where we are. Absolutely use me as a reference, reach out to me if I can do anything to help you land on your feet”
People really hate when something unfair happens and you try to pin it on them… But when you put down the titles, explain why it’s come to this, and offer to help them find a new job? That’s how you don’t burn the bridge from the other side… It doesn’t even require you to actually take responsibility, you just have to acknowledge it’s not their fault and make them feel you’re not taking it lightly
I still call Meta Facebook and alphabet Google… No one is confused, it’s only ambiguous if you start getting into logistics about business units
Twitter didn’t even reorganize, they just changed their name to something it feels dumb to say. It’s actually less ambiguous to call it Twitter, because X is a confusing trademark
There’s degrees to be sure though - ticktock is the absolute worst, because it has a lot of content and a good algorithm… Plus, short form video is the easiest to get lost in