daniel-cussen

Sourceress on the flip side. And they use the long responses to their long emails to train more. Eh.

Recruiters have been doing this for years, stringing along applicants--ideally into turning down real offers from real people writing for real--with emotionally touching, thought-out...shit at random. To get to the point the applicant prematurely rejects all other offers and then--20 percentile salary offer, non-negotiable, "and then we'll see," and you know and I know you're homeless if you don't take it, but that never gets spoken out loud. Dude they look at all your financials, they build the equivalent of fraud detection to see how much they can lowball you, check your credit history (you knew that, they asked you for it), then they wanted all this endless information from other previous employers (but you never talk to their former employees, no boss's resume of references that worked for him to see how they really felt about it). So in response, first, declare you forfeit all stock options, unconditionally. Then, ask to talk to the people you'll be working with. Then, ultimatum offer, and if you end up on the street because of procedurally generated emotional commitment (which turns out is a liability in court, coming soon), hey, Daniel Cussen will still talk to you, I'll still listen to you, I'll give you when you beg, I'll vouch for you as a witness, I'll remember your name, I'm doing all those things where I live every day with all the awesome beggars--they have so many stories--that took the bait in some capacity.

I'll treat you just like if it were the flip side, as good as I wish you treated me if I got evicted.

And after that, accept that it's a job and subordination. And then do the job, it'll suck it's work, come on, most of the money still goes to people's salaries (this is in a transition and is shifting dramatically, money spent on training is absolutely exploding at the expense of salaries, to my and therefore your monetary benefit if you end up on the street, https://www.fgemm.com coming soon).

I've never heard of or met a circumstance that actually warranted Haskell. Not even in finance, those guys are totally wasting their time.

It's an attractive (I'm going to say "it seems" though you ought to take that for granted) intellectual rathole. Like some forms of philosophy, like many things. Thank GOD (despite being unbelieving at the time) I went with Lisp instead. And I got real speedups.

Yeah like 35 dollars per transaction right?

Maursault, you're probably right. I was probably programmed. All the literal brainwashing memories were themselves brainwashed.

I think you're a pretty cool user, Maursault.

I know it sucks. But I'm taking the first step and saying they're oppressed, which they are.

I don't know why things in Chile work the way they do. I wasn't born here. I'm a guest, basically. An immigrant, got naturalized.

Echo-reflective surfaces.

Plus I agree bats have worth, but these guys carry crazy amounts of diseases like cough cough Covid-19 cough.

Yeah but they're pushing it to do this. The plot is human-generated. And in any case it passes the buck onto the inside universe to come up with the excursion that escapes endlessly outward.

It's a little like Rick and Morty. I think they have an episode about this with energy, infinite recursion then something happens then you get excursion.

Yeah there's a highly restrictive quota, your affording medicine comes at other Americans's expense. Cornered market.

Now if you were to travel to South America or in particular to Cuba that would not restrict health care access to other Americans. On the contrary. They basically all speak English in Chile, accent yeah just deal with it, better than a 50-minute wait for a 6-minute appointment meant to last 20 minutes.

Snake oil per se is an analogue of fish oil, effective. It's use as a pejorative term dates to false advertising of petroleum as actual snake oil in the 19th century. The biggest problem was it wasn't well processed at the time, and was not really edible like petroleum derivatives can now be made to be.

And I generally don't take it at face value, I accept it as a glitch in English.

Hahahaha, yeah that's...that's a good one. Hehe. Thanks.

I love it.

> That said, the general point of 'this is crazy bullshit, why do I have to cut back when they're sitting here wasting water on Almonds for nothing?!' is totally true. There is a LOT of bullshit about water in California.

OK let's start with that. In fact many Californian consumers now prefer oat milk to almond milk because they know they're basically drinking 10000 gallons of pure fresh delicious non-F-ed-up water per quart of milk they drink. They hate it because it sucks. It's just shit and they hate it. Almonds are rightly and widely hated. Hatred. Good because that hatred gets rid of them, gets rid of almond desertification.

So you're basically right in everything you say, but there is a distinction to be made presently. The water table. If it were a mineral, like copper, if its under your land hey, go for it. But with water, like oil, and lithium, sucking it out of one place drains everybody else (on the same aquifer, oil field, salt flat). It's regulated with oil, not with water or lithium. So if a neighbor farmer's sucking out water sucks out not only water under his land but water under my land, that's impinging on my rights. He doesn't get to suck out the water from under my land. Any more than he gets to steal my bed from under me (Proverbs).

California specializes in evictions and water theft, though. Landlords steal from you faster than you can take them to court, they end up covering for each other, I am a Roman Law hero and I can vouch.

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And moreover, there is due to be accorded to being a citizen in California independently of being a property owner in California. Like these farmers can totally split with 1000 gallons for a "city slicker" as they call them. Monthly water bill, or a pack of almonds? Same price really.

Instead of trying to sell them one quart of almond milk. That's the endgame, dry them out, salt their water, negreate their sustenance and then sell them back some terrible shit in terrible plastic at 100000000% the price.

Extortion.

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Realistically it's because the county is loyal to the land, so whomever owns the land gets crazy benefits, blind eyes, et cetera. Obviously has to pay for them, lobbying papering over direct bribes. Obviously there's bribes, nobody with power would allow such blatant shit without a payout, it just doesn't make Historical sense. Nobody does that. I think the police doesn't take direct bribes (I took a risk on the math that there was a 2% chance SFPD was corrupt, couldn't afford that risk so didn't call them up), but small county? Knows the mayor? Invites him to his land? Phone call away from anybody? Yeah bribes. Nobody does it differently, like ever. I don't know, Californians are very square, for sure some counties are square, but really...no. There's bribes. In addition to the lobbying, that's to paper them over. The lobbying gives plausible deniability, to say the favor was done for campaign contributions. But nobody cares that fucking much about their campaign contributions if they can't touch them even diagonally. And there's career paths formally known to lead to that campaign contribution money entering the pocket, I think a Republican lobbyist talks about retiring and becoming "a top lobbyist". If it's indirect enough, like fines or taxes, that's fine, but uh...no dude there have to be bribes. I can't keep denying it in any way, I just divine it, there's crazy bribes and payers and recipients tell each other there's no way for them to be tracked.

Goes back to the water table, or voltages, there's a current flowing out, that doesn't go anywhere. Then there's an equal current flowing over here, that doesn't come from anywhere. They're next to each other. You can't look at what is in between.

Must have some hell of a capacitor in between to not be connected.

Yeah scrapers and in any case if it changes the black and white text to both being the same cool gray. No joke.

This forum gets hacked into that, you can't see points a comment gets unless you measure it by the gray of the comment, in which case you can tell exactly when it has 0 points, or -1, or -2, or -3, or -4. Scrapable, and illegible. Opens itself to voting rings. Not even legible if highlighted, you need to copy-paste to another application.

I brought this up formally.

Well farmers love to put civilians at the back of the line to the well and hold them hostage. Farmers use something like...hard to measure they really really don't want measurement, but 80-90% of water. In this paper it says roughly that percentage of water is used for agriculture, it's in the charts.

Farmers get water gifts and city slickers get droughts. Basically a farmer is a water thief, surely not in 5000mm rainfall a year but in Mediterranean weather? Water thief all the way. Chinatown was about this. Just stealing water nonstop, bribes murder conspiracy you name it. It's the limiting factor in these climates and it's so so easy to steal.

Take one more drop. What's the consequence? Nothing happens. Classic tragedy of the commons.

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I don't see why a farmer should pay any less for a liter of water than anybody else. Free market for water, you pay for the quantity and the distribution raw every time. People object and insist on price discrimination to protect poor people, when really price discrimination discriminates against poor people. They end up having to buy bottled soda (blacks do this) because the water is too salty to drink, while a farmer with a square mile just pays for the power to his new wells.

Now it's true that salting the water has a huge cost and that turning water into brine to make dentists happy (or they start this crazy squealing screams about children getting cavities at rates they are purely making up) is expensive. Then stop doing it. Cold turkey. And then, don't insist everyone have perfect teeth. Feature people with bad teeth in posters, tell people to see dentists once a year at most, pull teeth now and then, look at artists like Robyn https://music.apple.com/us/artist/robyn/535211 who don't have stereotypical American dentist dream-teeth. It costs $100 a year to salt the water, then you go to your doctor she says you need to eat less sodium meaning shake the salt shaker less. What about instead colluded degreed professionals stop putting that sodium in the water table? Plus that salt in the brine--cannot be called water if it's intentionally salted--tap brine--alters brain chemistry to crave sugar, so it's not even as good at what it's supposed to do as it claims. Causes chemical imbalance, literally. F atoms effing up your sodium-chloride channels into sodium-fluoride channels. They're called sodium-chloride for historical reasons, from an era before F'ing up the water.

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Changing subjects back, price discrimination generally backfires against the poor in favor of the rich. Ever seen people digging a well in a ghetto? That's pretty much what they do in fact do, walk to the eg gas station and buy some big bottles of juice so they don't die of thirst. Ghetto water is so salty they can't even drink it (for political reasons, it's formal oppression, F'ing up the water impedes ghettoes from eg taking people to small claims courts or filing for welfare, or protesting, joining unions, complaining properly, getting an education, competing for slots in colleges, everything everything everything). The people in those ghettoes are the doing what they're doing and are doing as poorly as they're doing because they're smart and coping with poisoning. Same as the rehab I went to, 100% of patients were forced to take clozapine, and almost 100% of them rapidly fattened like fast, doubled their weight. One exception. The paranoid guy, yours truly, recognized the pharmaceutical, Abbott, from a previous round of poison (Valproic acid) with similar shoot-the-moon marketing and dodged the pill. Only skinny guy in the rehab.

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But let's not change the subject. We're talking about poison sure enough, but let us be specific.

That water tastes more like toothpaste than toothpaste itself, which is what sodium fluoride tastes like. That's sodium fluoride's signature flavor. Your body knows what that shit is, every kid hates it and struggles to avoid it, because they're smart. That's how you take mountain water and make it taste like city water, mix in some toothpaste. And in Chile which is more heavily geopolitically oppressed the fluoridation in toothpaste is insane, 250 ppm in USA, 1650 ppm in Chile. Regulation. You have to go to like a Native Chilean (Mapuche) store for non-F-ed-up toothpaste. And F-ing is the specific reason you're told not to swallow toothpaste, that's an acknowledgement that NaF is bad for you, but it's irrelevant you absorb it through your gums and mouth. Much more than with teeth, the least chemically reactive organ.

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Back to the farmer, farmer is out of luck with no water rights, nothing, oh, what? Farmers go out of business? Go, go out of business, business of theft, your subsidized thieving farm going out of business is pure benefit to the economy. Everybody wins. Just leave land as shrubland, come on. Dry, some native grasses, some bald spots, looks beautiful that way, like the land on Highway 280 South of Stanford, or around Apple Campus for that matter. Beautiful, nobody waters it, not exploited for grazing, native grasses outcompete invaders, no maintenance, leave it like that. It's not a waste. That's California. Not a golf course, that would be England. There yeah. East Coast too. Go back to England if you want to have green lawns at a price that rips everyone else off, go and don't come back, if you think the East is better than the West, go to the East from the West.

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That's one of the industries startups (including tons of YC startups, this is the right forum to bring this up) have a really hard time in, looks tempting but no, medicine and agriculture. And music, "don't do a music startup" as pg put it. No particular reason they should be so aggressive against outsiders, right? Look like good sectors? All are heavily subsidized stealing from everybody around them. No sympathy for farmers. At all. Dude just sell the land get a job selling shoes like shrinks propose rehabilitation patients do. Same goes for doctors: forget your degree, if you're a doctor you can get a job selling shoes like you propose your rehabilitation patients do. Sink or swim. No chinitas [as they're called in Chile, like the ladybug insects which do this to each other (no relation to Chinese, it's a coincidence), meaning climbing on someone else's back and drowning them to stay afloat, like both those industries currently are to everything else].

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So gross to see rich people begging.

They also insisted nobody gift food to the Irish in excess of what the queen of England was giving them. Censored I think...Ottoman Empire's gifts this way. They had to maroon ships full of grain by accident, and tons of people sent food, like even Kenyans and Native Americans.

Ireland still hasn't repopulated. Still half its 19th century peak population roughly.

Messages just like it are evenly diffused with death threats. That's why.

I've gotten death threats, no joke. Hitman showed up at my house one time. No joke.

No joke.

What I don't get is when it decrements and checks if we're at the base case?

Oh you know what the OP could do? Two-for-one: install solar panels while simultaneously operating bouncy castles around the perimeter of the roof. So the kids beg for their parents to install solar so they get their bouncy castles for a day, birthday maybe, the synergy being that solar panel installers can fall off safely because there's a bouncy castle right there breaking their fall (I've fallen off 3 meters onto school gymnastics mattresses, it's amazing), so then you get first off no deaths from installing solar panels, meaning you get the best ratings for human death for any electricity source (it's mostly people falling off roofs, hence the bouncy castles), you don't have to transport that much weight (bouncy castles unlike bulky mattresses are just plastic balloons you can fold), it's an event and a sales thing that should work, gets people thinking. Gets the littlest people thinking. And plus it's a line item, you don't need as much liability insurance and harness shit, which is crazy expensive and often impedes the job completely, or compromises it, everything takes a lot longer and you need more experience, can't get unemployed guys off the street like the Alphabet Soup agencies in the Depression, just telling broke guys under 25 hey pick up a shovel and come along, dig holes because you're a man and you can get work done with your hands and legs and arms and feet and back.

So get on a roof and put solar panels on, you can do it! Fall off? Relax! Fall on the bouncy castle, sprained ankle at worst.

And you align solar with the future, which is to say the children.

OP please steal this idea. Please. Never give me credit, I just would love seeing a pamphlet saying "bouncy castle solar" on it, ideally handed to me in an inconvenient time and demanding my attention rudely. That level of success.

You know what I sunk in on recently? The whole thing about "efficiency" is really "use less copper" which is really "negreate Chile out of its rightful money". And in fact the main uses of copper during the 19th century were telegraphs and copper hulls, and then in the 20th century power lines and telephone lines, electrification and communication. But always, always, these guys wanted to use less and less copper. Like nothing. Substitute for aluminum! Yeah.

So what happened in the late 60's early 70's when OPEC, the copper predecessor of petroleum OPEP, in English called OPEC, was successfully cornering the market on copper. And people went apeshit! Like USG said no more pennies because people were melting down pennies. Melt value it's called in currencies. So that's when they substituted with zinc for the inside of the penny--still a bad deal these days because you still need a layer of copper on the shell of the penny, that's a money loser for USG. Speaking neutrally in this case, USG is a neutral term even the US Embassy to Russia uses on its website. United States Government. Anyway. Like USG can lose some money but they can't blow money especially not in the direction of an antagonistic Marxist democratic winner president. So...the pennies got hollowed out--and again those pennies are worth 5¢ still, bad deal, just not a terrible deal like it was before. Could have been worth a quarter, fucks up the whole system.

There is a system. System doesn't want to talk about there being a system, but there's a system. And it needs integrity, which I like to give it, because when there is no integrity all Hell breaks loose.

So that's one way you could win. Do away with all that flamboyant high-voltage shit and do voltages humans can tolerate, like household voltages, just using a lot more copper. Lots more. Take the USG out of your equation, buy copper, hey it's a precious metal, it's an exotic metal, you're clearly not politically aligned with negreating Chile, Peru, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Arizona, and Mexico right? And copper in your wires is a great investment. Copper hasn't had a bull run in ages. Again, very niggardly buyers who through golps of state (coups d'etat), highly negreated commodity. Very political. In fact for copper wire thickness it's not an optimum to use the thin wires they use out there, it's calculated based on interest rates and metal prices, and then there's the political layer. Get wires as thick as whale-hunting rope, six inches diameter, go for it. More efficient at every voltage, can use lower voltage, less liability insurance, go for it. Electricity can't leak onto more copper.

There's caveats. Although you should also do your own experiments to verify, don't get everything from a single pipe because then you're destined to suck it. That goes for electricity generation as well, you can give people options, maybe jump in during a disaster, when too-efficient (not effective) power generators go offline.

And study up. Be an autodidact if you wish, but be solid. Work through like three books, working out all the exercises, with only minor gaps.

OK so you get one of those books from an Elmer, which is a common baby name in the 1890's I think, meaning an old-timer who's seen all kinds of shit. All kinds. And in addition to all that shit of all kinds, seen a lot of the same shit over and over. In Japan people respect this level of repetition, in America no you gotta be a movie star and always do radically different stuff in a single respectable line of business perpertually...forget the American. So in Japan a sushi apprentice must cook rice for ten years before he gets promoted to a chef. That has worth! You end up knowing the rice so perfectly...every detail, the times, the temps, the water, the purity of the water, tap water or non-effed-up water (F'ing as in F the letter for Fluorine). Like I just tried cooking rice and fucked up hardcore, it burned into the pot, because I didn't know the bottom of the rice had charred while the top was soggy.

So get that Elmer.

And then, read those books. And then you know what why don't you verify experiments, read about Tesla's experiments verify them, there's shit going on there, there's political stuff reaching into the physics, it's not flat physics. Know that a friend whose judgment is ground truth said Newton's physics formulae didn't check out. Like at all.

Maybe we're in a Riemann geometry insofar as the laws of spacetime physics.

But in the meantime, be very very independent, find beauty is simply and solely how little resistance there is to verification.

And start strong, get worn out, struggle to death. Then you'll get a second chance.

Dude I have just the recipe for you. Come on down to Chile and ask for puré de castañas. The really oppressed Chilean women make it the best, it's highly unique, I actually thought I could eat a chestnut because I used to eat this dish, kept biting into absolute bitterness. But bitter isn't bad, now that I'm addicted to something bitter (an undisclosed stimulant) I prefer bitterness to sweetness, but not everyone can be an addict, the addiction doesn't always take. Too bitter. Just like the American Chestnut didn't always take. Too bitter.

Love the bitterness. And in the dish there's a trace bitterness natural to the chestnut left in the puré, which involves sweetening chestnuts and also some I think crema Chantillí or leche condensada not sure which.

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Let me add that in my unique Chileanized upbringing, as an American, a Chilean woman, in this unique case not oppressed, explained to me why I couldn't eat a cactus fruit, what's it called, tuna (no relation to fish in absolutely any way). So typically, she explained, gringos bite it wrong. They think you gotta bite it till your jaw closes, your teeth meet up again after that long goodbye when you put the fruit in your mouth. No, you gotta close your teeth less, not chew, no no, and she explained it to me in plain Spanish in a way I, a Chileanized American, a gringo, a gringuito (and in fact there was a movie about a Chileanized American called El Gringuito in the late 90's in Chile, huge hit), how to eat the native fruit. But I was a kid. This partial chewing made it good to eat, I can vouch. They would never tell you to only chew partially of politeness. But I can. I'm passing that on, to eat tuna fruit, work on your bite, don't bite all the way, like almost. Because it has a lot of seeds, very hard seeds, you see, so biting it all the way hurts, so you hate it.

Like bitterness. Great flavor, in fact.

Dude I shelled out like $50 bucks when Beorg only charged $10, just shoving money into their pocket to breathe life into them. I put my money where my mouth is, I get great value too, am a model patient and put psychiatry first with the first 20% of my income, that includes your type of apps.

Like is it good? Do the students love it? NEED IT?

Cause if it sucks it sucks. There's a lot of products that suck. I can't buy something that sucks. Flawed I can work with, sucks, like contempt for me, I can't.

Dude all the way. That's where I fucked up, like I aced I think every single algorithm interview, the coding part, all of it, one time sort of, like an answer that didn't fit into their view. Or one time that same day same company did stump me, told me the answer, and immediately replied with a better answer that used less energy.

So I approached the whole thing as a computer scientist, like hey if we have a problem we soon will solve it by designing an algorithm or data structure[1] that speeds things up dramatically. Shockingly even. I think I've gotten career speedups...I don't even know...quintillion-x on one problem? Not expressible as a multiple. And another thing about me which I found to depart from the norm is I produce tangible research results every time, every single time, total reliability on producing results in research.

And we split the benefits, between computer scientist and manager.

So yeah, so a friend who is a great programmer, which I am not, said yeh it depends some days it can be 5 lines of code some days 500, and they're both good days. A lot of variation, but the 500 lines are unimpressive and the 5 lines are unintelligible, so if you mix them you get the boss happy...sort of. If such a thing existed.

In general bosses are designed--just viewing the org chart as a data structure to extract useful work out of a disorganized mass of people who need sustenance. This is generally done by making a hierarchy ie a tree, similar to society in a closed system (pecking order or popularity in high school) and also similar to the organization of the human brain, all trees--so bosses are by design not tolerant to variation. Bosses want bricklayers. They pay the minimum of effort and value.

In particular shitty bosses of shitty companies, that's the only people open to talking to me after torture ruined my résumé. Which is also apparently most companies most of the time in most economies in most of the business cycle, just not that profitable. Not like they pretend with their gold-plated (contains gold yes but like one gold atom per square inch like any ordinary) dogshit. Just not profitable. You gotta bring them the money to get a cut, they're deep in debt, and it's personal like it's not company debt the boss himself "loses the house" as if it were his when it has a mortgage, but at any rate personalized debt, and personalized liability. Not Options SpA who is in debt. Companies don't exist really. The boss, call him Fernando to give him a name like lets pretend he was my boss because he denied this in court, is in debt. 20% annual interest. Standard for Chile. The banks let them get enough to look rich to a sufficiently accomplished, sufficiently "gullible" computer scientist. As if it were wrong to believe capitalism had merit, born during the fall of the Soviet Union. Stupid to be a cappie, guess I should have been a commie.

There's so many companies that don't add up to dogshit. Like you gotta show up to work the first day with an ingot of gold worth double your salary for the boss to do the great honor of cutting it in half to give you half back.[2]

And they don't let you choose which half.

Being literal here.

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[1] Commie : communism :: cappie : capitalism. But I suppose I can be both. Why not? Be a cappie and a commie? Honestly my life as a computer scientist would be pretty much the same on either side of the Iron Curtain if I lived in the fifties. 99% taxes as a Soviet inventor, with all kinds of privileges like backstage passes and RELATIVE freedom of speech which is huge for someone who wants to be heroic especially during transitions of leadership, and like free travel in a closed country which according to Edward Snowden is so beautiful, plus like a solid budget with an actual pounds (later dollar) amount for a lab to do whatever I dream of, plus access to all the absolute most locked-down information from the whole world for my own enlightenment (unlike the Americans who didn't know dick of Soviet developments in the fifties), it's true liberty. All I have to do is find some merit in some mostly but not completely defective parts--those are always the best.

And on the cappie side of the Iron Curtain, much the same thing. 99% taxes because as an Intellectual Property expert told me there's like thirsty parasites on the way to the Patent Office, corrupt but navigable (every place is corrupt just not every place is navigable), you still pay taxes just not to the orphanages, more like the sugar daddy orphanage of the daddy who isn't even there, paying for golps of state of Iran and Chile same shit different day, unlivable conditions all over the world, and yeah the system doesn't need as many watchmen and trust but secretly it does there are brutal asswhoopings just exported to eg Iran and Chile, and the inventor in the fifties didn't really get his get. The inventor, I repeat, doesn't get his get. Like the guy who perfected FM (frequency modulated) radio committed suicide because the large corporation, in this case RCA (Radio Corporation of America under that Belorussian expatriate called "the General" informally) which had to pay a million dollar fortune to the true inventor's widow, that guy got fucked.

And I got fucked. And you got fucked. We all got fucked. That single inventor's betrayal is the reason FM radio, which is typically the only radio anybody uses calling it radio, is an odd frequency. It's megahertz, "a hundred and one point one" refers to megahertz, and the true inventor originally had "radio one hundred" which saves air time and listener time, lines of code right there, but RCA in response fucked him by broadcasting really loud .1 MHz away from his stations. And they fucked him, fucked you, fucked me, fucked everyone, and that was what the court found and told them to pay the fuck up, give his widow a million dollars for being culpable of the inventor's suicide. That is to say, they suicided him. It actually is a transitive verb, it was in Rome, were suiciding was common at the beginning of the empire. But the inventor got fucked and everyone except that Belorussian defector with him.

In the 1910's America rewarded inventors, in the fifties I don't know man. Like you'd get a job in Bell Labs, attaboy for inventing the transistor. And even then Bob Noyce and those guys had to come up with crazy multipliers over and over. I could almost do that if I didn't get tortured, but I can't survive by multiplying zero by any speedup no matter how astronomical. Zero by a thousand is zero. Zero by a million is zero. Zero by a billion is zero. Realistically you eat half your food to get a 2x multiplier, Zeno's Paradox. That's the most literalist shit there is, Zeno's Paradox.

And of course the big companies paid a lot in taxes, CEO's generally made at most half a million a year, very tiered, 90% taxes at the top, and they were my old time best friends these capitalists, the old timers. Not about snubbing people at the country club as a form of entertainment, more like rewarding hard work. That's it. That's selfish enough for them, compared to that taxation. Lines of code, in a lot of cases.

Hey, no lines of code, no work right?

[2] They prefer exotic metals because gold is obviously money. Apparently time is an exotic metal.

Well bricklayers pay by the brick. In construction time goes pretty linearly into completion.

In computer science, no. No because first off how much of the code did you copy paste from one part to the other? But it is a measure of effort. For instance, secretaries do in fact get paid basically for their character count. And for myself, since I am measuring myself and am not trying to cheat myself, line count is actually not a terrible measure of how much went into a project. But instead of lines, count characters. That actually corresponds to the difficulty of typing, and to the size of the codebase. Yeah it's terrible but come on. Most bosses are impressed by line count. One YC company asked how many lines of code I had written over the course of my entire life...what were they called...hey it's a discrete number. Tells you something. And most code in my opinion, outside Common Lisp, Scheme, Clojure as another poster talked about, code size measures something. Like you're doing it right now, you looked at my comment, said "oh look a wall of text", meaning it doesn't even matter what I pull out of my ass at this point because you won't even read this far. Lines of code.

Dude talk to Beorg, I was a very bright college student with ADHD (diagnosed as a freshman, first quarter at Stanford, Adult ADD, absolute textbook case ie every symptom and no symptoms of anything else, open about it like one of my doctors), I basically flunked when Beorg broke down. It was a combo. It's a one man show, but you could be stronger together.

Tell me what your app is called!

It's an analog approximation of a sphere against the error induced by air motion, and gravity.

So a bubble is unary in that it represents pi with single molecules in a circle. Then, forces tug at it--like gravity a tiny bit, but moreso wind and especially the hyperlocal flow of air driven by eg temperature (and particle concentration) that want it to not be spherical. But the bubble membrane wants to be spherical because that's its most stable shape. Here we're thinking of big huge bubbles, those exemplify this more, bubbles like 20 cm in diameter. So it's a tug of war between the air and the bubble, with the air tending to infinitely deformed and therefore inescapably burst bubble and the bubble tending to pi.

The von Neumann machines are a process. It has many different organs. von Neumann worked on the brain in particular, that was a big bottleneck and still is, others eg Henry Ford specialized in an analog of the muscle. The Industrial revolution at one point specialized in textiles, one of the many many things performed by the fingers of the only real unique organ humans possess, the human hand. But it took a huge amount of fingers finging, like people would spend so so so much time weaving, slaving away at the loom, replacing that function with machines to give everyone good clothes (everybody has good clothes), was worth I think...two fingers per person. It was also a finger-intensive process, the machine could remove fingers, machines still do, that's why that one industrialist specialized in hiring child labor for the machines and visited orphanage after orphanage, saying hey children have small fingers that's perfect for these machines.

And that ties into why we have ten fingers, like we have thirty-two teeth at adulthood and need some removed, that is after losing the first round of teeth in childhood. There's replacements. Some monkeys used for experiments need to be kept in cages, watching cartoons (meant for human children, same ones, they don't make special cartoons for the monkeys), and the monkeys (I wish I remembered what species this was) stop and stare at the screen, paralized. Keeps them pretty happy while they're isolated from each other in cages. Normally they're not kept in cages, except for this experiment, you know why? This experiment required them having all ten fingers, like humans, but if left hanging around as a group they bite each others's fingers off like in the first three minutes. Just to figure out who gets to fuck, basic pecking order, right off the bat. Ten fingers is like ten shirts. In Utopia Thomas More...well one of his characters, he specifically wrote that book within a book to defray responsibility...said if you have ten shirts you are a clotheshorse. Too many clothes. Because they had such a huge cost. A cost of drudgery, then performed by the mechanical loom. That's one organ.

von Neumann machine. Organ by organ.

Like can you imagine a whale telling another whale e=mc^2? Who gives a shit! Want a Nobel Prize you blowhole? Gotta keep hunting squid every day, that's the bottom line, philosophy (don't know the whale word for this) is for when both us whales are full. The human hand is what gives that the power it has, humans are busting open a bottleneck of life with our hands. I'm typing this with all my fingers. I couldn't do this by voice. It would come out different, not as spinal. In fact my hands are writing faster than my inner monologue. They absolutely have a life of their own.

Yeah shipwrecks. For sure there were people crossing the Atlantic via shipwreck, they could flat-out never make it back. Even then people could be disbelieving and say, "eh old Mariner's tale.". Nobody buys those stories, nobody buys the stories about sea monsters (whales intelligently ramming ships crossing their territory), everybody thinks sailors are full of shit. That's what happened with the Vikings, who did cross the Atlantic, but couldn't exploit it nicely (from the explorer's point of view) like the Hispanics. It's also because Vikings crossed before the Black Death, so they weren't infected with smallpox. Bioweapon. Back to the shipwrecks: this fact, that you can't make it back, was critical to the Atlantic Slave Trade: Africans had no hope of returning to Africa, once an African sold an enemy off to the Europeans headed for America, he had no worries of seeing that enemy return to Africa. That was key. A Colonial historian told me this.

A bubble factors pi as it moves and deforms and reforms. Not in decimal, not in a numerical base...in unary.

People think about space travel exactly in the same terms as the History of European Colonialism. Like exactly. Every first contact movie "take me to your leader" is right out of the letters to the king written by Hernán Cortez and Francisco Pizarro, looting the Aztec and by far the most gigantic, the Kechwa fortune after taking the Inca hostage. That's like 200 years of Chile's current gold production, and this is a mining country with modern technology to the point it exports eg explosives for mining. Just an insane amount of gold whose accounting was not possible to do correctly. Like doing the accounting of a casino from the movie Casino. Gold like it was iron ingots. Fucking stupid stupid amounts of wealth, all for going overseas.

So people think, OK, who plays the Europeans? Some movies say Earthlings do, other movies say aliens do. Either way, plunder and pillage. Like one movie, very enlightened, said the aliens just wanted our gold. That's wantable. But like think of it in terms of apes, like a primatologist. Aliens would be going somewhere with shit technology right? Well the real reason would be to get our nice biosphere, before we wreck it long-term ourselves. That they could want. So, for a rough handle for alien's interest in humans, look at primatology or study of cetaceans. Yeah we spend trillions on space travels, rockets, telescopes. I doubt we've even spent a billion on primatology. Cetaceans I think has cost more than a billion. There's just way more money and brains in whales than apes.

I think space colonization will be similar to European Colonialism but only for the Solar System. After that, it sucks. And it doesn't stop sucking for at least 700 light-years.

Well there's different market segments. Me on one market segment, I'm the guy (nice to meet you) basically the way a sow has a runt, on the off chance she can feed it, that's the same basis companies hire me. And only very fucked companies.

The basic reason is because I got tortured with an amnestic lobotomy. I had a very marketable curriculum until that point, and after that if for instance I was asked where I worked during April 2009, I would ask "are we talking about the Gregorian Calendar, that shit?"

So for me you have to provide amazing shit for me to subscribe to anything. And it can be done. Not often. I can't have 7000 apps draining me $5 a month. That is why I identified a natural limit to the number of web-app subscription-model startups there could be, the first limit was remembering all the credentials to use them, which 1Password and similar surpassed. One user here talked about having 800 web app username-password credentials on his 1Password, obviously doesn't pay any scratch for most of them. Veteran of the freemium model, like I became a veteran of the psych ward in my remarkably successful struggle under torture, including not caving to the torture.

I talk about this at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32620302

So my segment of the market, I'm gone. Neither feature you mentioned seems...wantable. And that goes for most web apps, like I predict their business model and then operate on that basis. So for instance most VPN's are, as a business, honeypots. Like yeah you can steal from the labels who steal music from the artists, that you can do, but for tricky nitty gritty, nah. It's just too obvious, it's just too instantaneous an erection the founder gets thinking of cutting deals with Kuwaiti Intelligence during the commercial of them going on TV saying "We never have and never will cut a deal with Kuwaiti Intelligence."

So with the paying users it's like ice on land, they need the ice on the sea in order to hold them back from falling into the sea. Non-paying users provide a lot of value to Slack, in that for instance you can do a trial release on them to debug your product for the paying users. For example.

"Slack just really sucks at b2b marketing" well compared to Microsoft yes. Slack sucks at marketing compared to Microsoft, for B2B. I buy that. The guy Butterfield (Stuart? Something) was busy getting on magazine covers like it is still the previous millennium, which for businesses loses credibility.

So I went to slack.com and tried finding what they charged, they wanted me to see all their flair first. So I went to the URL which said https://slack.com/features and replaced "features" with "pricing" and there it was, the chart with the numbers they want. So they want $8.00 USD a month for their product, and assumptively propose you buy it for the year at a pro rata price of $6.67 as the default. I looked for their asterisk at the bottom of the page, but it wasn't there. No this was a javascript asterkisk, no relation to asterisks in eg legal document. So $8.00 a month, per user.

So that right there is a turn-off to an informed buyer, which B2B is. There's typically a designated person in the office for this sort of purchase and she herds the company's users through the spam, the spear-fishing, the shitty deals like this one, every everything. Apparently Teams is in fact the better product, and that might be because the terms of service aren't demonic (though I vaguely recall them yes being demonic which is why I couldn't use it, but then from the dodginess in revealing the price I divine Slack's terms are demonic too).

But whatever. In for a penny, in for a pound, sell your soul, no reason to pray. Microsoft already has telemetry on like blood type in the first 18 minutes so it's not an additional leak to work with them.

And that's saying as someone conflicted about the company, I like the way they didn't fuck up github for instance. Didn't nix it. Like they never even bought it. It works better now, in fact, I can tell it has more integrity and reliability. Backend stuff.

Yeah grounds for a suit. Unless of course they don't fuck up, that's a different story, then no suit and payment will be forthcoming. Like a bank. Password managers are banks.

Subscriptions are highly fetishized by the current accounting system, because they seem more predictable basically, and plus there's a lag between no longer using a service and discountinuing the subscription, that's like four free months at the end with no support calls no use no opening the app, nothing. Not even electricity costs. For that user in those months you might as well have 0% uptime. It's cheap. Except billing because you keep getting paid! And when they leave it's generally not a chargeback, plus you can be a bitch to unsubscribe from to the narrowest extent permitted by the law, ask Google not to lead people to the answer to how to unsubscribe on the first try or SEO it, in some way, hey that's solid business plusses and minusses. Especially the plusses for the first-person, the business owner, the first-person in economics too, for whom the price and quantity axes on economics charts are switched. There's also the idea that for a business to be a business it has to be repeatable. It's a sound idea.

And there's tons of businesses that make sense as a subscription. If you want to reward a business for doing a great job, try to subscribe to it under some pretense because that revenue will go much farther in business terms to strengthen it. I've done that, I did that for Beorg. I already bought all their unlockables. Even the ones I didn't want. Tipped them (him? I think it's a one-man show) a bunch of times. Then I subscribed thinking of all the good that subscription would do for the startup, instead of eg tipping.

Then it broke and I couldn't use it, like the calendars got out of whack. Plus, it's a todo app, ie I nag myself with it. It's like an alarm clock. There's the alarm clock effect.

Alarm clock effect: no matter what song you choose for your alarm clock, Beethoven's 9th the Beatle's biggest hit ("Yesterday" I think it is), any song any any song: in a week you will hate it. If it's your alarm song you will hate it. Hatred. Somethings are beloved, this is behated. I think it takes one year of not hearing it in any context to recover from it for every single time it wakes you up early. It's all in the interest of not getting fired for 8 more hours or not getting denied from an institution. Protects against existential threat of sleeping in.

Agendas are similar. And password protectors are similar. Existential threats. But in the case of password protection, I don't want a subscription, then what happens when I can't pay? Basically lock me out of everything, either explicitly or with hexes or nags or giving me a longer and longer runaround every time, slowbanning me, that kinda shit. For password protection, it needs to be one-and-done or work for some long event horizon, like ten or twenty years.

Especially because of the intricate relationship between cryptography and torture, in the endgame. If your crypto is strong and the bad guys are still determined to get your information the only option is to torture you. Elite cryptographers talk about this all the time.

So any half-assed password manager has to be really strong in that scenario. And it was, I bought 1Password in 2008 I think and it worked great, I felt very secure despite getting hacked by amnestic interrogation, which I had no idea of for like a decade. 1Password of 2009 failed only under torture. That is the exact unique kind of next-level shit that is a legitimate situation for a password manager to fail.

1password is basically a bank. A password bank. They should act like a bank instead of acting like I don't know patreon dancer.