big-green-man

Simple desktop that works and isn't crazy: Linux mint with cinnamon desktop. Just use it, I promise you won't regret it.

I don't use that, because I don't need the simplest thing, I'm a more complicated person. But my wife does, and it's amazing. I set it up for her. I tried out a handful of desktop environments the other day to see which one is the easiest to use, cinnamon is the only one I tried that I'd recommend, which surprised me. KDE just gets in your way every chance it gets, others just deviate too much from the windows concept of a desktop for someone who isn't into Linux to start using, and the rest have quirky behaviors and bugs that just make life harder.

As far as the distro, you'll hear mint a lot, it's what Ubuntu used to be back when it was the easiest to use distro. I'll always recommend it to people that just need a desktop that works. Linux Mint with Cinnamon Desktop, your parents won't even notice except that they don't have forced updates and login to outlook and all the terrible cruft, they'll just have a computer that works for them again.

If he could get the small kinks out of the design and modify it for a manufacturing process these things would sell like hot cakes. They'd be expensive but worth it to a lot of peoe.

It's not the christian right. It's everybody.

I don't know a single american who thinks our public school system is functioning adequately. Not a student, not a teacher, not a congressman, not a parent, nobody. We all have different ideas of how we need to change it, but we all agree it is an abysmal failure.

Someone's trying something. That someone was duly elected, partly on the promise to do this. And elected with a Democratic mandate by a popular majority. Do you want a better school system? Let your opponents try something, if they fail, try something else. Public school in america is in shambles, maybe the problem is architectural.

I'm curious how you get an AI to give you the code you want rather than the code it thinks you want.

The fact that he campaigned on it, brought Musk along and put him on stage to make speeches about it, and even named the "department" before the election and then won seems pretty compelling to me. Open and shut case I'd say.

Don't listen and keep losing and pontificating as to why seems to be the chosen path for many people right now.

> the liberals were ruining our country

I think their grievances are more detailed than that.

They didn't pretend not to listen. They genuinely want what is currently happening and are very happy about it.

I read this here a few weeks ago https://aeon.co/essays/a-new-field-theory-reveals-the-hidden...

It seems to imply that living systems (and possibly not simply limited to living systems, potentially including all systems with positive and negative feedback loops) can have an "intention" of sorts. Convergent evolution could be an example of this, and perhaps, given enough time, technological advancement is something that is converged on.

Not much substance in the interview, I'd like to actually understand his reasoning. He's right about the simple concept, if nobody buys the bonds, the government eventually defaults. And if the borrower of last resort, the central bank, buys them up, inflation.

And hes right about the concept that a trader bets on their own worldview. They learn quickly if they're right or wrong about their understanding of the world, they learn it in a very personal way, they don't eat if they don't understand the world pretty well.

I don't dismiss what hes saying, I just want the meat and potatoes.

It's obviously exactly that. Of course, it's not well thought out, its 100% legal from the language in the bill to jerk off with a condom, or pull out. Wouldn't want to tempt your opponents to actually make it the law to empregnate your wife every time you have sex. Also, it makes periods illegal.

The US government is modeled after Cromwell's parliament, almost exactly. The prominent difference is that instead of lords there are senators elected by states. The design has existed for a very, very long time, and evolved organically in England during and after the civil war. It might not seem like it is a good idea, but the US has been wildly successful. The design works.

There are a lot of powers the president has now that the office didn't have a long time ago, and the power of the executive has steadily creeped into everything and grown significantly. If the president were limited only to his powers articulated in the constitution it would be less consequential who the president was. Really, what makes it such a big change is all the executive departments that have regulatory and therefore de facto legislative authority.

Don't forget the power accumulated by Franklin Roosevelt, which probably did more to make the president a king than any single president since.

Well that's good to know, I was unaware.

> Google’s search results are telling us to eat rocks

I can ignore the summary chat bot. What makes google impossible to use for finding information is that all results are "official" sources, such as CNN. I wonder if CNN wants to comment on that part of the enshittification of the internet.

This is a paid propaganda article.

There are people that are "anti science." These are people that say the earth is flat, that say the earth is 6000 years old or whatever else. Trying to paint all the rest of people with the same brush, use guilt by association, the CIA came up with the term "conspiracy theorist" to discredit people saying things we all take for granted as true today. Of course, this is the old game and it's effectiveness is waning. Fail to see this at your peril.

The truth is, people asking you to accept the word of others because they have a credential are anti science. The rest of us just want to understand rather than just be told. I'll leave with a quote from the father of modern optics, Ibn al-Hathayam:

> The seeker after truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them," the first scientist wrote, "but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration and not the sayings of human beings whose nature is fraught with all kinds of imperfection and deficiency. Thus the duty of the man who investigates the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, is to make himself an enemy of all that he reads, and, applying his mind to the core and margins of of its content, attack it from every side. He should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency.

The government doesn't get to dictate what the word "engineer" means. An engineer does engineering. Some software developers carefully design very complex systems. That's engineering.

That said, I am with you, the word is overused. Most developers aren't engineering, they're slapping frameworks together, meeting product deadlines and creating mostly godawful programs. Some of them, very few, do their work with enough rigor and care that they could call what they do engineering.

You create a better world by creating better people. My spawn will inherit the earth.

What a wonderful article, well worth the long read, that's an understatement.

Bitcoin has become harder to change the more people use it. This is true of all decentralized consensus systems that require consensus to modify. The only way this happens is if the majority see the impending outcome clearly, of course by then the damage will have already been done.

100%. And to hear it from you. I was just talking to someone yesterday about this and telling them about linear continuous debasement, mimblewimble and grin. Capped supply in PoW ends only in reduction of security which translates to reduction in value. Bitcoin as it exists today has a destiny, and it's not what evangelists think. Incentives are outcome.

Bitcoin will fail because of it's capped supply. Holders are free riders, spenders subsidize the security benefit hilders get, and are therefore incentivized to also free ride. Ultimately bitcoin security will collapse and with that, value of the network and coins.

Maybe not the answer you were looking for, and certainly you'll get more any crypto perspectives on this site than ones like mine. I like bitcoin. But incentives are outcome.

I'm not a high earner by any means, but I'll say that I've caught the underconsumption bug. I've always been of the mindset that I need less than I think I do, but I really took it to another level and I've got to say, my life has never been better.

I never buy new clothes (except shoes), all thrift store clothes. My rent is probably a quarter your rent. If you're in SV, more like 10%. I take care of a family of four on a 1200 a month budget. When I was single, it was $600 for just me, that's all expenses.

We have everything, clean clothes, nutritious and delicious food, a clean environment, all the facilities you need, private family space, lots of outdoor space, access to beauty and amenities. And, we have time to explore, we have time to learn, we have resources to experiment. We have time for each other. There is very little pressure to make ends meet, and we live in what we consider to be luxury, not hedonic luxury, we have things most others wish they had. I have the luxury to go camping for two weeks with my family on a whim. I have the luxury to teach them myself.

If I ever become a millionaire, I'll keep doing it. I'll probably own land instead of rent, the dwelling will probably be a little bigger, I'll probably spend more on projects. But I will never buy a new car on payments, a house in the suburbs, I'll never try to get a condo in a city, I'll never eat out every meal, I'll never buy my kids designer clothes because they demand it or out of some sense of shame. I'd probably keep doing the thrift store thing honestly, the clothes I currently have are way better than anything I've ever bought brand new.

*learned

Add that to your list.

I don't necessarily disagree with you. But the word "communism" is synonymous with state directed production, and often it is in the name of state determined living standards for the sake of improvement of those standards. That's always been the pitch, and that's always been the methodology.

This "study" is exactly that, verbatim. It's communism dressed up as science, as blatant as I think it can be done.

Now, we can talk about policies that might make something better or worse, pros and cons, whether the state should direct or influence certain industries for whatever reason, all that. But this article isn't doing that. It's recommending straight communism as a solution to all the worlds ills, that's all it is doing.

Not just that, but you can get health insurance not tied to your job in the US. It costs some money, unfortunately it is tied to income, but if you're planning on lowering your income to improve your quality of life, it should help quite a bit on the healthcare cost side of things.

I didn't make an argument. I simply made an observation. But I'll make one now: it's not possible with communism. This has been empirically tested, at the expense of millions of human lives. I'd say in light of that that there is no need for further hand wringing on this topic.

Is it possible some other way? I don't know. I do know that life expectancy worldwide has been going up since the 70s, as has quality of life and quality of nutrition. Maybe what we are already doing works?

Have you considered something less drastic, like leaving SV? There's a big big continent you live on, a ton of which you already have a right to be in, a diversity of biomes and landscapes I'm sure one of which would soothe your soul to wake up to in the morning.

In my experience, the american rat race is largely a city phenomenon. Have you considered moving somewhere less densely populated? You could work from home, do no overtime, take half the pay you currently expect and have a higher quality of life, if you lived in a low tax state with lots of outdoors and less huge cities. For the price of a condo in SF you could have a small ranch in Colorado, for example. North Carolina is majestically beautiful. Maybe the problem isn't america, but that where you think you need to be to make it isn't where you need to be because that idea of "making it" isn't your idea of making it?

I've found, if you get away from the rat race and turn off the news, america is a very pleasant place.

The USSR tried it already.

This is literal communism dressed up as science.

> Strategies for development should not pursue capitalist growth and increased aggregate production as such, but should rather increase the specific forms of production that are necessary to improve capabilities and meet human needs at a high standard, while ensuring universal access to key goods and services through public provisioning and decommodification.

Literal. Communism.

The abstract embodies, I suspect unironically, literally every gripe, criticism, fatigue and disdain people feel for both the current scientific and academic establishment and the plethora of Malthusian narratives that permeate our public discourse today. If you don't understand how people can be "anti science" when it comes to climate change and the like, just read the remainder of the abstract after my quote. The last two words of it are "global south". These issues and these terms, once viewed as legitimate with genuine concern, are now viewed as nothing more than the dog whistles and manipulative strategies of ambitious tyrants to most people. Double down if you want to lose what little credibility you have left.

That's really cool. I had never heard of this. Shame it hasn't been worked on since. It would be a really interesting thing to use.

There's also https://radicle.xyz/ for those interested in something like this.