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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 8th, 2023

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  • In capitalism the goal is to use the money you have now to help you get more money in the future. If you can spend a few million dollars training your workforce or spend a few million buying corrupt politicians, and the latter nets you 10x the return in 1/10 the time, the system will reward those who make the immoral choice. And if you are working for a publicly traded company, your shareholders and board of directors will probably fire you for not using all technically-legal tools at your disposal.

    I was recently thinking that the proponents of unregulated capitalism make it sound like natural selection for corporations. And it kind of does sound like that, until you think about it a little bit. It would be like an animal that grows more mouths as it finds more food, and if it eats even more food it can do magic shit like edit its own DNA and warp the laws of physics. Oh and of course it would be immortal, able to die from injury or starvation but never old age. (and if it did die from injury or starvation, it’s probably so that its owner can sell its kidneys)


  • Plus it’s good if some of them win and pull the party in a reasonable direction. And having decent people in government is always nice.

    The structural flaws in our elections that force us into a two-party system are deeply entrenched and they aren’t going to change until this place burns down and starts over. If you aren’t willing to vote for a politician with good priorities because they were nominated by the democratic party, you can still be an influential voice but come election time the system is already designed to ignore your vote.



  • 10^24 is a lot bigger than 6×10^23

    Well yeah it’s almost double, but I wrote the comment as a mental estimation of the order of magnitude, so it doesn’t change the substance of the discussion.

    I mean at the beginning I arbitrarily picked a number in that 10^40 to 10^44 range and that’s a factor of 1:10,000 rather than 1:2, lol.



  • It was far too recent for somebody with my background. I learned how the UNIX command line was different from DOS in the late 90s, but it was only last year that I switched from a VM to a native Linux install at work. Then I swapped over the home PCs during winter.

    After defaulting to Windows for so long because of games and employers favoring it, it was almost frustrating how fast, smooth, and “clean” feeling it was to install Linux natively on a system compared with the recent versions of Windows. And that’s without any special lightweight distro. I am a proud Linux Mint Cinnamon user, lol.


  • We have a few dogs. One is a yellow lab. He is absolutely the empty skull of the bunch.

    This derpy wood knot dog face reminds me of him so much. If I had this piece of wood I’d learn some new skills and buy some new tools just to perfectly preserve it!


  • You make some good points, and even though the labels man and straight work for me, I have likewise been focusing more and more on the whole “know thyself and live life the way that really works for you” thing and loving it.

    But back to my quip: You make some good points. I can foresee how much my dumb angry conservative relatives would hate it! No labels? No categories? Next you’re going to tell me that humans don’t naturally need strict hierarchy in their society to survive!


  • This was a fun one to look up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon_number

    It looks like the number of valid chess positions is in the neighborhood of 10^40 to 10^44, and the number of atoms in the Earth is around 10^50. Yeah the latter is bigger, but the former is still absolutely huge.

    Let’s assume we have a magically amazing diamond-based solid state storage system that can represent the state of a chess square by storing it in a single carbon atom. The entire board is stored in a lattice of just 64 atoms. To estimate, let’s say the total number of carbon atoms to store everything is 10^42.

    Using Avogadro’s number, we know that 6.022x10^23 atoms of carbon will weigh about 12 grams. For round numbers again, let’s say it’s just 10^24 atoms gives you 10 grams.

    That gives 10^42 / 10^24 = 10^18 quantities of 10 grams. So 10^19 grams or 10^16 kg. That is like the mass of 100 Mount Everests just in the storage medium that can store multiple bits per atom! That SSD would be the size of a small large moon!




  • We as a society did not forget how to build good houses, write good software, design good vehicles, or anything like that.

    We just stopped caring about it because the core purpose for any business is to increase revenue, decrease costs, grow, and absorb market share (exceptions being niche and boutique places that price accordingly). And may of us as individuals think we should run our own finances in a similar way.

    For instance, let’s say I can build 100 shitty crooked houses with the cheapest and non-background-checked workers, with the same time and money invested that it takes you to build 50 beautifully crafted and solid homes with your team of experienced carpenters. I can sell my shitty homes for 20% less than you since the home buyers are also mostly shopping on price and stats, then I am going to win and once you’re out of business I will be building 150 shitty crooked houses at a time.


  • this is indicative of a much larger problem(distrust amongst coworkers)

    The scope of the problem is much much larger: the entire fucking culture IMO, assuming you are in the USA because I am and it sure sounds like you’re talking about this place.

    I think it goes beyond distrust though. It is a lack of respect for human dignity (which leads to lack of respect for oneself) and for just being decent to one another so we can all enjoy our time on Earth a little bit more.

    I have made a couple trips to Sweden of all places, and it’s wild seeing things like real glasses and silverware being available for any schmuck to use in a restaurant/airport/workplace. And then people put them in the dishwasher or return them to the kitchen when done! Little things like that seem so minor until you think about the deep seated issues it is revealing.




  • They don’t care how they’re remembered, as long as people keep saying their names.

    This is the only thing that could explain Musk’s actions of the last several months as a believable rational choice. He realized he is not going to be around to see immortality or brain downloads or whatever, so he has to make his name and image immortal instead.

    Of course, there are numerous other reasons that could explain it, many of them personality flaws.