Udo

If we're talking about basic tech such as networking, the time for foundational work has probably passed, or it has at least become exponentially more unlikely that you'll contribute another bedrock protocol or mechanism. It's also worth noting that you never hear from the many thousands of technologies that either failed to reach critical mass or became obsolete a long time ago. Just like founding a startup, this will be the most likely outcome.

If you're looking to be the first to do something, my advice is: try to do it in space. Seriously. Finally things are happening again there, and you can probably make your mark inventing basic necessities and/or being one of the first people to colonize a new place.

If you're looking for something in software, opinions on what's needed differ a lot. As an old person, my perspective is that we're going to need a way to deal with complexity and brittleness. Our software stacks have become bloated, unreliable, and a nightmare to debug. Things are getting slower and more buggy year by year, because we have not yet hit the right balance between using low-level primitives and high-level abstractions. We're now using huge frameworks regularly for very simple things, both because it's what we're used to and because these frameworks help paper over design defects lower down the stack. This needs to be solved, we can't keep stacking things on top forever. There is a real, concrete danger to our society here.

Overall, I like the idea of making an effort to form social connections and to learn more about your colleagues and their work. Especially in an environment where most people are not completely consumed with deep work (which to be honest applies to most work places including mine right now) this could be one of the little things that keeps a company together as far as motivation and mood go.

> That is all true even if there were nobody listening because they believe it to be true.

I absolutely agree, whatever contributes to the patient's positive attitude helps. As does the involvement of friends and family. This is why I felt that I shouldn't criticize the perception of the overall effect so much, because I do agree that there is a positive mechanism at work here.

It is with the metaphysical aspects themselves where I have trouble, and in a sense that's how this whole thread got started because it seems a stark contradiction.

But coming back to your explanation, I agree, if your god wants to see signs of compliance from you and your social circle, it does stand to reason that people would believe this would cause him to intercede in the universe's processes in order to spare your life when he would not have seen the necessity to do so before.

SuoDuanDao's point then was that the idea that your god would change his mind on account of prayers is not theologically bankrupt (in hindsight this was a very poor choice of words by me) because it works. My thesis however, was that even if prayer works that doesn't mean the specific reasoning behind it is automatically valid.

But again, whether you believe that it works or not, I wanted to move the discussion to address the claims of why it supposedly works. What I mean by "bankrupt" is the idea that people believe there is an omniscient superintelligence who actively controls the universe on a micro level and takes a direct interest in your personal life choices, who at the same time can be made to change its mind whenever enough people get together to praise it in a transparent attempt to beg for someone's life.

Even putting aside the obvious scientific problems with this concept, I call it also theologically bankrupt because - while it's not completely inconceivable that the universe works like that - it still flies in the face of what most religions portray their deities as.

> Why did I live and the rest not live?

There are many factors at play. Among those not listed by the author are: age, genetics and biochemical happenstances, and pure random luck. Yet, the question seems to angle for a deeper meaning, as if to evoke the intent of a higher power who lets people live or die for personal or moral reasons.

> Was it the amount of toxin? Was it that I knew what had happened to me and sought care and help quickly?

Yes.

> Was it my meditation/visualization and somatic self care/self help practice?

It's been shown that a patient's determination and outlooks do have a noticeable effect on their outcome, so your mental framework may very well have helped here for reasons that are not related to specific practices themselves, but because they have a positive effect on your attitude.

> Was it the prayers of my friends and family and my faith?

No. And I would object to this even if I was a religious person. The idea that an all-powerful and infinetely wise entity, who decided on the fate of the entire universe well in advance, would change their mind and let someone live on account of the amount of fawning being performed on behalf of that person - that idea is both intellectually and theologically bankrupt.

> Was it the doctors’ care? One of them said it was a miracle!

Yes, it was the doctors' care, which was most likely necessary to save you. Using a throwaway utterance like this as evidence in support of a miracle-based world view seems self-deceiving.

If we're going to assign miracle status to improbable events, it should probably not be those that fall within the 20-50% range. The most disconcerting thing is that we would expect someone whose work involves particle physics to have a better grasp of probabilities, but I think once a person subscribes to the idea of a personalized universe that cares about the conduct of individual humans, a whole different set of rules suddenly comes into play.

PHP makes use of the <? ?> notation which lends itself to good integration with text editors, since this is the canonical XML syntax specifically reserved for processing instructions.

In this context, because it's not PHP-specific, there would be nothing wrong with using <? ?> for your own language or preprocessor, and I'd rather prefer it for the additional reason that it's easier to find and type a question mark on many kayboard layouts. If I ever attempt to make a web language again, that's what I'd probably stick with.

That being said, whatever works for you. It's certainly better than what I came up with in the late nineties when I made my first CGI-based HTML preprocessor... I used to encase everything in $ signs, which looked extremely messy and entertained our web designers to no end because they assumed I was thinking about money a lot. However, at the time, that notation did have some advantages because web layout editors had a lesser chance of destroying it as compared to anything weird with angle brackets :D

I don't think this is a helpful characterization, because this invokes post-apocalyptic associations of a world where there are somehow only text terminals left. In the article itself, the author goes on to describe a scenario where he used generic text/command line tools to achieve functionality that had not been explicitly granted to him by a restrictive software policy at work.

As opposed to survivalism, I think it's more fitting to describe it as user empowerment. I'd argue that the premier usage scenario for these tools is not as a fallback in hard times, instead it's an important type of toolset integral to the craft.

I think the proper word is "authoritarian", which is a classification they would likely agree with.

As an aside, I think traditionally political labels like "the Left" are becoming very problematic and are part of the problem. It's generally no longer enough to ask someone whether they're left or right and then correctly assume their stance on things. Instead - and I argue that we should have started doing that before this current upheaval - instead, you have to query a person specifically about their positions on specific things.

For example, that way some confusion about the so-called Social Justice Warriors could have been avoided on all sides. They are a heterogenous group, but do tend to represent leftist values (inclusiveness, equality, a belief that society should take care of disadvantaged individuals disproportionately), at the same time they are not liberals in most regards. They tend to believe in progress through force, and they do generally favor strict rules and harsh/permanent punishment. They're authoritarians.

One might argue that the SJW movement has more in common with conservatives and reactionaries than traditional leftist liberals, if you disregard their disparate political goals for a moment. Leftist liberals and SJWs often cannot successfully communicate and as a result are often in conflict, despite overlapping goals.

This may also be the reason why, as the article describes in one instance, an openly anti-trans moderator was mostly seen as A-OK, whereas the leftist liberal author was fired.

This does not fit in with FB's goals and strategy. Zuckerberg may not grasp it, but even if he does, it's unclear how this could be implemented inside a framework that is 100% centered on a user's profile and real-life persona.

GP asked whether it was in the cards to have a world where no territory is forcefully occupied. No forceful occupation means that the people who live in a region get a say in choosing their government. Nobody is really arguing we cede Kashmir to a competing species.

> If Homo Sapiens were to reach this "mental maturity" it would most likely stagnate and, eventually, make space for another species to rise in its place.

Are you arguing that science and other problem solving strategies at peace are dooming the species to extinction, and that only war and suffering can ensure our continued existence and progress?

One of the middle class problems I do see is that owning your daily stuff (like a house and a car) - and hence gaining some measure of independence - is increasingly difficult, even for relatively high earners. I think another poster here got it right when they said that being upper class ultimately means being a rentier instead of a rentee.

I have no idea what percent of the population is actually upper class, but they usually outright own multiple houses and luxury cars, and most importantly, a significant stack of wealth that is not necessarily bound in everyday living.

On average, society has pretty serious attitudes/biases regarding both sexes. Men are seen as innately value-less, disposable, dangerous, free, and powerful, all at the same time. If you're a man, society does not care whether you live or die. Women are seen as having massive inherent value, in need of protection, harmless, unfree, weak, and limited, also all at the same time. If you're a woman, every decision about your life is seen as significant, sometimes to the degree that they don't trust you to make those decisions yourself.

All of these suck.

  "Many ‘normal’ people suffer from not being hypersane: 
   they have a restricted worldview, confused priorities,
   and are wracked by stress, anxiety and self-deception. 
   [...] In contrast, hypersane people are calm, contained 
   and constructive. It is not just that the ‘sane’ are 
   irrational but that they lack scope and range, [...]"

It seems to me these kinds of characterizations are really the product of people trying to build a framework that appreciates their (subjectively underappreciated) positive traits. It's obviously not wrong to celebrate those traits, especially when confronted with their opposites so publicly on a daily basis, but the problem arises when we're trying to bundle those traits up under a buzzword package name. People are very diverse, and their traits and behaviors develop over time.

I allege that it is more helpful to look at the positively connotated traits mentioned here in isolation, and work on improving aspects of ourselves in a targeted manner, as opposed to subscribing to a blanket identity (in this case hypersanity, which is ultimately meaningless). There needs to be less emphasis on "what identity am I innately" and more emphasis on "what properties do I like about myself and which ones do I want to improve". The difference here is not only one of nuance and constructiveness, but also one of fundamental outlook.

I get the desire for a single unified initiative that drags us out of this mess, even against our wills. But no entity capable of doing that exists. And the bigger ethical question is indeed whether it should exist to begin with. If we can't solve these relatively simple problems of ensuring our survival and provide a reasonably fulfilling existence for our fellow humans, why does our species deserve to exist?

It's a serious allegation that deserves more than a casual brush-off and some condescending statements about publicly available debug symbols. If MS is really full of shit, as I hope they are, they should be held accountable with more than a shrug and a smile. If ReactOS does contain copied code (and yes, that does include data structures as well as instructions), well then that should have consequences as well.

Brushing this off as a free "PR campaign" only works if those NT programmers simply made everything up. That's possible, because we as the general public have no way of knowing. But it's hard to ignore that there are just two possible scenarios here, nothing in between.

Could you please clarify: If MS people say they do recognize verbatim code from NT in your source, are they lying? If they're not lying, what happened?

It's not a well-defined scale anyway, since you could probably build a K3-equivalent civilization with only a few star systems using miniature black holes as reactors; conversely, you could easily be a galaxy-spanning civilization but only use a fraction of the total stellar output.

The concept of translating into another universe does seem like an appropriate achievement and next step after K3. Since another universe might have wildly different basic parameters, classical sci-fi portals and such are probably out of the question. You'd have to translate the information stored in the brain into something appropriate that could continue to perform roughly the same functions on the other side.

Personally I think Youtube is a likely candidate for this. They may very well just remove all "legacy" content one day. They have absolutely no idea what to do with the platform, except offer it to music companies to feast on. They're at war with the majority of their content creators, I'd be very surprised if they didn't go for the nuclear option at some point - maybe after a large legal scandal...

I would not be entirely suprised if Youtube one day just requires actual browser DRM to work at all. That would likely break every single smart TV out there, which is probably the only reason why they haven't yet done it. However, as they progress further on their path away from amateur content towards corporate-only content, I'd say there is a decent chance they'll pull that switch eventually. And die shortly after, of course.

There are a couple of neat effects that fall out of the (mem)brane hypothesis. For example, it offers a model for why gravity is seemingly so weak compared to the other forces: because a large part of it leaks out into neighboring universes. In that case, we'd have a handy explanation for dark matter as well: it's gravity that leaks in from neighboring universes. This would mean that stuff clumps together across universes. It could also be an auxiliary model for black hole formation in certain cases where we have yet to find out how some black holes could grow very quickly.

If we ever become a K3 civilization we could attempt to send a message across universes with gravity, or possibly even paint a symbol into the sky using large masses. Not we know how likely the other universes are to support life (probably not very).

For me the point of the software is not to leave a printer unattended for long periods of time. To be honest, I don't see how OctoPrint is fundamentally different from the printers' physical panels in this regard: my printers did not come with deadman switches either! If I wanted to start a 2 week unattended megaprint, I could do that from the standard printer panel as well.

The draw of OctoPrint comes from the fact that it's a standardized and networked UI. It allows you to upload files to your printer, manage its settings, take a video of the print. It's a deluxe firmware.

Audio: I'm also using one RPi2 with an attached hard disk as a music player for pen&paper roleplaying sessions, and I have 3 Pis distributed around the house acting as Wifi-enabled Airplay receivers attached to off-the-shelf powered speakers.

Retro gaming: I built one RPi2 into an empty Amiga 500 case, it runs an Amiga emulator with many emulated game floppy disks onboard. Fun fact, the Amiga 500 keyboard sends its key strokes over a serial interface, so it's relatively easy to attach it to modern devices.

3D printing / IP cameras: I have drifted towards the Orange Pi hardware recently, mainly because they have a dirt-cheap headless module that costs about 10€. These are extremely useful for all kinds of automation tasks. For example, I'm using them with the Octoprint open source project to control 3D printers. Those headless Orange Pi Zeros are also fantastic as IP cameras, which has become necessary recently because consumer IP cameras that do not send all your data to China have become rare and expensive.

Attendance and access control: I'm currently considering throwing out our shitty proprietary attendance and access management system at work, in favor of some simple custom-built Raspberry Pi or Orange Pi-powered panels. I have a prototype ready but haven't had time yet to make more.

Lab control: I have an RPi3 attached via serial interface to a chemical analytics device at work, which required reverse engineering the proprietary protocol between the device and its shitty Win32 software. This allowed us to throw out a legacy Windows PC that needed to phone home all the time.

The issue I see for the future of the entire industrialized world is that this particular brand of consumerized dictatorship is based on the lessons of hundreds of years of failed regimes, and in an evolutionary effect it seems "we" have now come up with a system that is both stable and totalitarian. It's an emerging system for the whole world, and the fact that no human on the entire planet can escape it without losing access to everything they care about, only enhances its stability.

This system is precisely tuned to offer us just enough so we do not mind what's being taken away. I'm personally no exception to this: I want a high standard of life and security as well. I want the luxuries afforded by consumer electronics and high technology. Through technology and international connectivity, I have more options for meaningful social interactions than ever before. The prospect of losing access to any of that if I ever act up against the system is a powerful mechanism that keeps me in line. Not that I ever brush up against the boundaries, mind you, because the system is well designed to appeal to my need for perceived autonomy: as long as I keep my head down, I'll be left alone.

Right now, in the West, the price of reasonable dissent is not very high. Yet. But you can already feel the thousands of little mechanisms working to discourage it. When I became active in protesting against the EU copyright reform, my first attempt at being political in decades, the game was so thoroughly rigged that I'll probably refrain from attempting to change the official narrative in the foreseeable future. Had protesting been actively discouraged by the government, I'm a bit ashamed to admit, I would probably not have shown up at all.

I'm struck by our collective inability to come up with a good alternative to this system. It seems to me this system is evolving on its own, and that development is synchronous world-wide. Sure, it's appealing to the powerful, who actively push it. But that's not what's driving it. I suspect it's the collective human spirit.