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> So yes, your rights are given to you by the state and you don't really have any without the state enforcing them.

This ignores the Constitution and the acknowledgement of 'inalienable rights'.

   We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, [...]

In essence, the government of the United States derives its power from the governed, and otherwise wields no true power. The Constitution of this nation is written specifically limiting powers of the government, and not enumerating the rights of the people.

> If you could naively own your property then you could just tell the tax collectors to fuck off, what are they going to do with your property if it had been truly yours?

Yes. This is where the second and fourth amendments to the constitution are important. True sovereignty (not in the sense of that 'sovereign citizen' nonsense) comes with martial ability; that is, the right to take another life. Sovereignty is necessarily paired with 'power', as without it, there isn't any true ability to protect one's rights.

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All that said, I'm appealing to an ideal when I say 'property tax is theft'.

I've been calling sports physios "body mechanics" for quite awhile now. A much more appealing term, IMO, and it cuts to the heart of what the job is about.

I'm getting WH40k or Helldivers 2 vibes from this.

"Purge the xenos!"

This makes me think of John Williams, an artist of great renown known for things like the Raiders of the Lost Ark OST and the Star Wars OSTs.

All of his stuff (or most of it) is repurposed and refitted chunks of other classical works. The beautiful part is, he does it so well.

It's the same mindset some artists have when considering raw stone for a statue: there's a Greek god in there somewhere, you just have to find him.

It's a way of thinking, not some deep metaphysical mystery. Unless it is actually a deep metaphysical mystery, but I'd rather not go there.

I'm not saying taxes are bad. I'm saying specifically that taxing property itself is bad. If someone 'owns' a thing, why would they pay rent to some landlord (the state)?

I acknowledge that I'm indulging in equivocation by saying 'assessing taxes from property is essentially paying rent to the state'. I assert that the equivocation is valid because the outcomes of not paying rent and not paying property taxes is the same: you get evicted.

Property tax is theft.

By applying a tax to a _thing_ that someone owns, you are saying 'actually, this thing you have is mine, and if you don't pay me for the privilege of having it, I will take it away from you'.

This is quite fun. Did you write the prose?

I'm essentially of the mindset of JohnFen (adjacent comment). If I have a health issue that crops up, I'm financially done anyway. Given this, I might as well control the money rather than throw it into a pit and hope something useful pops out in an emergency.

I've seriously considered opting out of health insurance altogether and stuffing away the obscenely priced monthly expense into an interest yielding account. Insurance is nightmarish, and I don't really want to deal with it much anymore.

I know this might appear foolish, but fighting with a corporation whose incentives are adverse to my own (both on the medical side and the insurance side) makes me a little sick to my stomach.

The mouth speaks what is in the heart. What is inside eventually leaks out. In anonymized spaces, this is especially true, and has been acknowledged from the beginnings of the internet (and perhaps long before). When you don a mask, your heart speaks freely.

But the knife cuts both ways. As you speak, so will your heart be. I think modern psychology supports this. Actions drive attitude, and attitude drives actions. If you assert your will in either place, the other is disrupted and will adjust.

You can literally change yourself into whoever you want to be. But a passive participant in this process will simply show the world what kind of person they are without ever realizing it.

My current laptop is a 15 year old freebie from work. It does everything I need it to. Except for run all the boosted agent frameworks. It chokes on open code, Claude Code, I don't dare try codex.

It would definitely be useful to save that off and upload it to archive.org.

For several export controlled industries in the United States, even self-hosting a Chinese model is a non-starter.

There a lot of ways this could work.

1) the hardest, custom silicon + MCU to manage the USB interface

2) not as hard, shared memory, NPU + MCU to manage inference and USB interface

Theoretically you could do 2 with the right MCU, NPU, and memory combo. You'd stream/DMA the weights from memory into the NPU and then read the results with the MCU. From a user's perspective, it might take the form of an openAI API compatible endpoint that enumerates when they plug the USB device in. There would likely be some host-side software to ease the pain of trying to use a USB device as an HTTP API.

It's also very educational. Having used mostly frameworks or raw html5 with HTMX I stood not know most of the things that page talked about.

I would take a camera with AR integration. I'm imagining some mashup of scrap book note keeping in digital space and technical work like car repairs or utility work. Imagine seeing where the studs are in the walls, or finding a now you left yourself in the engine bay of your car...

One of the ideas I had (and I'm still tinkering with) is 'agent as a linux user'. All of the perms/groups/access rights are already built in, so it would make sense to leverage these for agents running on the same host. Heck, there's even mail built in for async comms between agents.

What you are describing is precisely my goal with my agent framework.

One of the meta-processes designed in is pushing automated processes, both defined and discovered, down as far as possible. "Down" here means as far towards the metal as reasonable. So automate the automatable stuff, and leave the LLMs to do stuff LLMs are actually good at.

A trivial example is 'handle this bugfix ticket'. Many actions in a bugfix are pre-defined, for example a git commit at the end of the ticket. So Maelstrom will, at the end of a bugfix workflow, will force a git commit from the LLM that did the implementation. The LLM never even sees the git command, it just fills in a JSON field with a commit summary, and the workflow handles the commit.

Tried this on an old 4 core i5 and got about 1tps.

OS: WSL2 on Windows 10

Pain is a powerful teacher. I have grown the most when I hurt.

Several projects.

1. an extension to my shop (I have a shop! I never thought I would have one of these) for water treatment and food storage.

2. an agentic framework that I started on in January - maelstrom. You can find the current code here: https://github.com/zerohumancompany2/maelstrom-code/tree/ske...

The whole point of this framework is to increase the robustness of agents so that small models (30b class) can function over long time horizons reliably. Other goals include auditability (full agent sessions are stored durably and can be branched/rolled back/restarted from any point, all over-the-wire comms are also durably stored) and reliability (sane fallbacks for common failure cases).

The current iteration (sketch 7 or draft 7 or 8) is specifically a coding agent framework. In the future I'd like to expand the core to handle a variety of tasks.

> Makes me doubt he has the public interest in mind at all

But why?

He's doing what he loves. He's able to support himself doing that. What he chooses to do with the internal product of his labors is his choice. Committing to open source software is a big lift for a lot of people. Maybe he didn't want that.

That's like saying 'getting attached to locked dependencies for your app is a smell'.

But this could be framed as 'getting attached to an API revision when a new one is available'...

I can see it both ways, tbh.

@AngeTheGreat on youtube is worth mentioning here, I think.

He has a whole series on building out engine simulators of various types, and even published a Steam game for steam engine simulation.

His work is notable because he leans heavily into generating sound directly from the simulations.

In some of the scifi books I've read there's local time and there is 'sol' or 'earth' time, where 'sol' or 'earth' time is the absolute time, and the local time slides by the absolute time.

So... not time 'zones', per se, but time 'frames'.

When I was doing rote memorization and flashcards frequently (some years ago now) I observed that remembering things became a lot easier for me.

I also find my verbal fluency is directly affected by how much pure social time I have in my schedule. It makes me think its one of those 'use it or lose it' things and that I need to schedule more time with people.

To OP, you should look into Barbara Arrowsmith-Young's clock exercises. They start with a single hand, and add more and more hands until the units get out into centuries or millennia.

I use lazyvim for all my neovim config. Does it fly in the face of the configurability or minimalism of vim? I'd argue no, but rather it is an expected outcome of a highly configurable system. Some people don't want to think about this kind of thing, they just want something that works.

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