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What a delight to see Barzun's name here. I read From Dawn to Decadence in 2000 when I was young. It was one of the first books of its kind that I read, and it stuck with me all these years because its style was so bizarre to me - unstructured, meandering, erudite, conversational. It connected references of the obscure to the well-known. The wikipedia page notes a review that described his judgments of historical figures as "at best otiose and...[at times] ludicrously banal." And, that makes me laugh. I wish there were more books written that tweaked literary editors. If the 20th century is described as decadent ("Boredom and fatigue are great historical forces"), I describe the 21st century as a climax to platitudinous, bromidic, jejeune.

I think we're using different definitions of patriotism. I looked it up, and it said "homeland" not "nation". Homeland generally means region. I think what the parent meant was nationalism.

Either way, I don't care about the 'nation' all that much (although constitutional free speech rights are very important - arguably a major factor of what's holding the world together at this point). But, I definitely care about where I grew up, the region, the homeland.

Patriotism is the attachment one feels toward one’s homeland.

Personally, the place where I grew up: the geography, people, and culture are permanently etched into my identity. So, yes in a sense it is brainwashing - but driven by biology.

Unfortunately, the rulers always want to deconstruct individuals and groups into fungible mechanical parts that can be used by the machine that continues their reign and authority.

Yes, I can separate myself from my past, but it sure doesn’t feel good. Why do we continue to sacrifice the life satisfaction of the small and weak to only give greater satisfaction to the powerful? Have so many become a product of this corrupted system, that their homelands no longer matter to them?

I often wonder where these artifacts end up. There are probably a couple hundreds thousand artifacts that have been looted. If you search for information, you'll find reports that they were sold on the black market.

One surprising thing is that immediately after the first two US-gulf wars began, professionals came in a dug down 10 meters at archeological sites, and reportedly over 100k artifacts were looted. However, I just checked Google's AI and it initially refuses to agree with this even though those numbers were reported by the scholars in their reports. If you challenge Google's AI (I haven't tried the others), it will eventually agree but will still be really vague about it.

The recovery of the dead sea scrolls is also interesting. They 'appeared' in caves in Qumran, but many early reports suspected they were placed there. Also interesting is the character "Kando" who ended up trading them.

Given recent current events (I won't mention names to avoid my comment being downvoted out of the search history), we know there are a lot of powerful people who are into the occult and ancient rituals. So, I suspect a lot of the artifacts end up with them. Who knows.

The thing is, they aren't creative. When I ask an LLM to go beyond the mean, it has no idea what to do and returns incoherance. Its responses seem to have N latent dimensions of information. But, the value of each of those dimensions is always the midpoint. With creative prompting, I can push it to respond in ways that go beyond the mean, but it can't tie them together cohesively. It doesn't have anything in its training data to fill the hole in space. No ability to extrapolate.

Does this help explain why the circuits that control emotional crying, which rely on connections that span the anterior, posterior and midbrain, develop?

Our congress is taken over, in case you haven’t been paying attention to the complete lack of justice on Epstein. It’s not all that difficult to see who is in charge.

but the pigeon doesn't have the benefit of using bayesian priors nor collaboration

Some people are just better pattern matchers

The innovation was what Jeff Han demoed at the TED talk in 2006

The mac tahoe weather system daemon is also sus

Bare minimum means I want it to boot have have input and display

No, really you can't disable all of the services with SIP disabled, at least not the latest Tahoe. Maybe there's a better tool than launchctl, but I don't know what that is. Plus, you disable one, and it crashes and you have to debug it for an hour.

Yes, I'm exaggerating about the networking. Yes, you can lock it down by turning off all of the devices, but honestly, I'm still not 100% on that. It was a surprise to me after I disabled ethernet and wifi and turned off everything in system settings, and someone passed by with an ios device.

However, if you're an expert - please save me a year of trial and error and point me to the minimal list of services and daemons.

If you’ve ever tried to lock down a mac and dealt with the 100s of system services, you’d know why. I like the hardware and base os, but I have no idea what those services are doing.

Many are undocumented. A lot can’t be disabled, even with SIP disabled. And, they’re chatty and persistent in trying to communicate out. You can kind of disable communication of TCP/IP but they’ll find alternatives - like low power bluetooth or even lower in the network stack.

I only use my mac for development. I’m a simple man and don’t need all the bloat and hidden behavior. Plus, I always feel like I’m one automatic update away from it becoming unusable.

I understand. Different people have different thresholds for trust. Unfortunately, I have lived in DC for a long time. Long enough to know the basics of how espionage works. And, appealing to authority is very effective. Humans love authorities. Write a few papers. Give a few conference talks. Get a few magazines to report on your expertise. That's pretty much all it takes to get entry. Otto and Olaf are probably great guys. I'm just extra cautious.

No source code? No thanks but no thanks.

There also seems to be a lot of ‘privacy’ tools popping up on github lately. It’s a good time to be wary of any if you don’t trust the author 100%.

It’s like when HIV emerged in the 80s - the disco days of free love are over. Be wary of who you’re sleeping with, and always wear a condom.

Tangential question: how do you actually find and hire people?

I have a decent amount of disposable income [1], and I often want to pay people to help with things I’m not particularly skilled at. The problem is that I have no idea how to reliably find the right person or even how to structure the arrangement once I do.

I have lots of examples, but here’s a recent one. A device failed, and replacing it would have cost about $1,000. I watched some videos to see whether I could repair it myself, then spent probably ten hours researching and tinkering with it. I even bought some equipment. It was fun, but after I came close to bricking the thing, I eventually shelved it. Since I rarely use it anyway, it joined my ever-growing list of projects I’ll get back to someday.

The first problem was discovery: how do you find someone with a niche skill who is actually interested in doing a relatively small job?

The second problem was trust. I’ve been burned before by hiring companies based on Internet reviews. A lot of businesses seem to optimize for low-cost labor and throughput. The person who actually shows up has little incentive to care about quality, craftsmanship, or attention to detail.

The third problem was knowledge transfer. Even if I found the right person, explaining the problem and exactly what I wanted might take half as much effort as just doing the work myself.

And this isn’t really a new problem. Funny enough, in the 1990s I built supply chain sourcing systems. Essentially the same problem existed at a macro level: how do you efficiently match specialized demand with capable, trustworthy supply? I recently talked to someone doing similar work today, and apparently it's not close to being solved.

So what do people actually do?

[1] There’s an odd irony here: I’m also one of those people who would like to work but effectively can’t, at least under the current hiring system. I reached my financial goals in 2020. I was between jobs during the pandemic. I assumed I’d find another job fairly easily because my record was fairly impressive. What I wasn’t prepared for was how time-intensive and test-driven interviewing had become. I was over 40 (apparently a red flag), and I had little interest in competing in hustle-culture interview processes. After 5 failed interviews, it was just easier to live off my investments. Yet, I have way too much idle time.

Also true at the macro level. Human civilization and infrastructure resembles slime mold from space. Also, apparently the cosmic web: https://news.ucsc.edu/2020/03/cosmic-web/

This acquisition and the Stripe acquisition of OpenRouter are puzzling. Both HF and OR, from a technological standpoint, don't appear to have much IP that cannot be easily replicated.

I wonder how much it's worth to Nvidia just to obtain a list of who's downloading which models and for what purpose. Similarly with the Stripe acquisition of OpenRouter. In the past, it would have been valuable to obtain an audience or market share or even a productive team. However, in this new age of the surveillance state ...

telemetry, orchestration, and financial

Yes!

Too easy to destroy if they're outside of population centers - soon they'll be building them under hospitals and orphanages

Wait til you find out what the GIA[1] did with other forms of cultural expression and education - like motion pictures, music, television, and academia

[1]: Global Intelligence Agency - because we know that they have deep reach into every nation at this point and are only accountable to themselves.

Wait, you mean there's a place in the world where people with merit, effort, and capability thrive?

Yeah, that doesn't fly with most Americans. Sounds a lot like the Sacklers - welp, can't ban pain meds, so might as well just addict as many as we can to opiods and take as much money as we can before they die

I wouldn't be surprised if Zuckerburg and Sackler were 4th or 5th cousins, they act so similar

I'm sure everyone here understands that. But, there's a difference between a company that puts morality and ethics first vs. one that abandons it altogether or even encourages its opposition. I've worked for all three types, and after unwittingly working for scum, I recommend to always check who one's bosses are. In my understanding, I believe Zuckerburg has always operated in opposition to morality.

I'm just stating that not everyone is reading the most popular million books. And, there are many, many millions of books in the long tail.

A few years ago, after running into this issue several times, I looked into the economics of it to see if there was a opportunity to republish digitally. I found the sales data for some, the ones that had value were selling on average for around $50-150 dollars. Because the typefaces weren't modern, OCR wasn't scalable. Because only 20-40 were transacted each year, it wasn't worth the time.

What kind of books are they? In my case mostly historical documents by some relatively unimportant person who was highly important for a very, very niche subject. They still contain valuable, irreplacable information.

An analogy: imagine you discover a really cool video game from 20 years ago. You love it and want to find the developer's previous work. But, you find out that the company was purchase by another company which was purchase by another, etc, etc. Sure, maybe the game still exists in some digital vault. But, more than likely it's gone because old things only seem have value these days if some influencer broadcasts it.

It's interesting that libraries are purging them. Several times, I've found that the only available copies were at some random university rare book collection in middle of no where, and basically impossible to access unless one fly in - which isn't worth it. They are often donated by a benefactor and stuck there - which is why they're never read. It's not that the content isn't valuable.

archive.org is an incredible blessing that I never really respected enough until the last few years. I have bookmarks going back to the 90s, and for some reason, starting in 2015 or so, sites just started disappearing. I estimate at least 20% of my bookmarks are 404 now.

I think you may be greatly underestimating the long tail. Several times a year I read sources that reference older books that I can't find online. When I am able to locate them, they often cost at least several hundred dollars, sometimes into the 10s of thousands.

Why should the fruits of our labor be taken to pay for some rando’s job training? If they actually had any potential, they wouldn’t need job training and certainly wouldn’t need average people to pay for it.

I’ll think of the poor researchers once we get the homeless in my hometown of Pittsburgh down to zero. Currently, real people matter more to me.

There are too may bad scientists, and I don't want to fund them. When the sciences became status-oriented, group-think and profit-seeking became the norm.

This administration is trash, but I'm still tired of paying taxes to fund jokers.

If your 'science' is so important, then any other country in the world will be happy to scoop you up. gtfo

Just one example out of many: Today, I looked up research on EMDR treatments. Major problems in replication for things outside of PTSD. Yet, therapists are told by their boards to push the treatment for all sorts of things.

Have many of you actually looked at a lot of the garbage funded by NIH?