flopunctro

This comment reminded me, with a smile, of Scott Alexander's Unsong: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/unsong-available-in-paperba...

> you'd have to decide when to stop binge-watching, because the show would always go on.

I would argue that this is already the case. I'd hazard a guess that almost any concept one is interested in, that can be synthesized in a few words (e.g. "deep-ocean human habitats", or "ethics and techniques for this niche psychological framework"), has an infinite rabbithole available online: usually, starting from Wikipedia, there are countless pages and videos about and around the topic.

So the ability to stop binging, i.e. sufficient self-awareness, is already a pretty useful skill, and it will be increasingly necessary.

No. Please don't do that. It's called Pick-Up Artistry, and it is toxic.

You will benefit more if you try to be a considerate human being, and not treat women like prizes, or prey to be captured. This way, you actually have a chance to healthy relationships.

> your standard of living largely comes from people who step out of that comfort zone, work hard and take economic risk

Citation needed for the above.

Maybe their standard of living largely comes from the high taxes imposed on the rich. Or maybe it comes from decades of free education, or maybe from the oil reserves of some scandinavian states.

Or maybe we just don't know; and that's ok too. I'm just saying that we shouldn't be so sure that the protestant work ethic is the necessary and sufficient thing for a good standard of living.

I haven't done any research, but my set of anecdata (3 Internet providers from Romania, 2 national and one regional) says that providers do have ways of bypassing their router at Layer3. These ways are not advertised, sometimes not even documented. But they should be just a phone-call away.

If the router is also used as a media-convertor (upstream is Fiber or DSL or coax), they should be able to set it to "bridging mode", where it will function as a Layer2 device (switch), thus allowing the customer to use their own Layer3 device (router).

IMAP is not an email provider, it's just another protocol for reading your mail. It is the successor of POP3, having several key improvements. Somewhat like HTTP2 is to HTTP.

If both your email provider and your client (aka mail reading software) support it, there really is no reason to use POP instead of IMAP.

Ah, I see. Thanks for explaining :)

Gary's response was obviously tongue-in-cheek, even somewhat flippant. My comment wasn't trying to be ironic, though I now see that it could be interpreted so.

Okay, I admit my comment was a bit rushed, and I apologize for that. It's not tongue-in-cheek, and I don't feel that I'm rationalizing things (but then, I guess I wouldn't feel it even if I were).

I was trying to view things in a bigger picture. Ofcourse we are using too much fossil fuels at this time. Ofcourse our functioning is pretty unsustainable.

What I am trying to say, is that sometimes high energy usage is acceptable. Should we stop launching things in orbit? Should we stop the LHC?

I think that for _some_ people, having a thing such as bitcoin is worth the energy expenditure. It is perfectly okay that for you, it _isn't_ acceptable. I am not trying to convince you of anything. Just affirming that there exists a subset of humans that find value in it, and therefore are willing to allocate resources -- be that electrical energy, fiat money, or mindshare.

No idea who's Gary Johnson. I'm just a guy from Eastern Europe, watching too much Isaac Arthur.

> effectively closed system of Earth.

All the plants, algae, and everything with chlorophyll would beg to differ. I really think we cannot consider Earth a closed system, because we're not a rogue planet in the insterstellar void.

Our solar _system_ would be a better approximation of a "closed system".

In the grand scheme, the "tons" (or rather, gigajoules) of energy wasted by the Proof-of-Work are nothing. The Sun radiation that hits Earth every second dwarfs this consumption.

Also, one of the definitions of life is "a local decrease in entropy, at the cost of a global, larger, increase in entropy". By this criteria, every living being is a bad thing for the universe, because it accelerates the global heat death ever so slightly.

I guess my point is, some uses of energy are acceptable, even desirable. And every use of energy accelerates the heat death of the universe, but we humans are insignificant on this scale; there is really nothing that we can do to even accelerate our Sun's death. We're not even Kardashev-1 :)

> I wish I was happy.

IMHO, this is a mistake, if not _the_ mistake.

I feel like i've been in your shoes, in a past life. I've come to believe that happiness is like the horizon, or the sunset. It's a fuzzy concept, which disappears if you go too close to it.

The horizon is not a place, and the sunset is not a moment. They are aggregate phenomena. You can't set them as targets, because they don't exist physically. You can observe them as composite entities, emerging in the right context.

Such is happiness. You can't set it as an objective, because it doesn't exist. And chasing it directly will only cause you suffering. Instead, try to set smaller goals, and let it emerge on its own.

Take care of your physical health. Take care of your relationships. Allocate time, not much, but regularly, for activities that you like (hobbies). Widen your intellectual horizons, e.g. by reading or listening to diverse people. Get better at what you do professionally. Try to find some form of meditation that works for you. Occasionally, try writing long, thoughtful comments on forums :)

Try to do these without looking too far into it; just trust the process. And at some point, you'll have the revelation "man, it's been quite some time since i felt unhappy!"

Looking at a clock from Earth through a telescope isn't as straightforward as you'd think. The image you see of that clock is actually light (photons) emitted from Earth, which will take a while to reach you - like, 1 year, if you're 1 lightyear away. During that year, Earth has moved on, maybe blew itself apart. But you can't even tell, because information can't reach you faster than light :) So you can only see Earth's past, not Earth's "now". The further you are, the more "now" loses meaning.

AFAIK, there is no canonical time in relativity. There is the "local time", which is what your wristwatch shows, and the "time in place X", where X can be Earth, Mars, or some spaceship. These times might not be in sync, and they might even be distorted. Because, if place X is moving relative to you at a significant percentage of lightspeed, their seconds will be longer. Also, the further X is, the blurrier the concept of simultaneity becomes. Which makes the question "what time is it _now_ in place X" moot :)

> a slight push in the direction of the sun

That's not how orbital dynamics work; a slight push in any direction won't change the orbit enough for that thing to not be a problem anymore.

To make something fall into the sun, one needs quite a bit of delta-vee, which means energy. However, if the thing isn't in any hurry (and I imagine waste isn't), one can simply attach a solar sail with a tiny computer for steering it, and let it brake for the next few thousand years.

(Kerbal Space Program should be part of school curricula)

Heads up, the winamp 2.95 download from www.oldversion.com triggers a malware alert from Windows Defender. Another red flag is that the download is via regular HTTP, not HTTPS.

So I'd recommend avoiding oldversion.com.

I don't think it helped him (Tim of WbW) either. I don't think it was even supposed to help; reading his writings, I never had the feeling he was offering a solution -- rather, he was fascinated by the phenomenon, and was doing a kind of nerdy, technical analysis of his state. One that I (and others) could resonate with.

What actually helped me was framing the issue in a somewhat buddhist manner. I purchased his Panic Monster and the Monkey, sat them on my desk, and tried to look at them (and thus at my procrastination) with kindness and acceptance.

FWIW, my procrastination hasn't gone away (here I am, on HN); but it shrunk, and it stopped being such a big problem for me.

Unless it's something that was mined there, like Helium-3 or some other mineral resource that we may find it's cheaper to extract from the moon.

The less-obvious difference between Mars and "anywhere on Earth" is that no amount of environmental (even tectonic) damage done on Earth is going to affect Mars. I'm not arguing that Mars is orders of magnitude harder than Nevada, but it covers the risk of "we fucked Earth".

Surprised nobody mentioned Dennis Taylor's Bobiverse. While it's a bit on the light side / vacation read (novels aren't very long, the storyline isn't complex), the author is a programmer, the series' universe is refreshingly plausible and consistent, and the humor is suprisingly good.

Though i wouldn't call it "hard scifi", the Culture series is indeed a classic and i second the recommendation.

Some enterprise-grade server platforms already have this functionality, it's called a "watchdog". Linux supports this since (at least) 2.4.

I've been using this with HP ProLiant servers and (for me, at least) it has always worked as intended.

For more info, search "linux watchdog timer".

> Companies that offer this service

You can't possibly trust any company with this kind of service. This is something you need to [learn how to] build yourself.

The concept of "deadman's switch" has an implicit component of "trust no one", IMHO.

Power over who? If you as an elite kill your subjects, who will provide for your needs? Who will work the fields that provide your food, who will repair your cars and house automations, who will mow your lawn? We're still far from a sustainable fully-automated food cycle.

So I believe the superclass don't want their subjects dead; they want them submissive, healthy enough to work without dying, and happy enough to not be motivated to try to change the system.

P.S. from a certain POV, money itself is a consolidation of power. The superclass uses money as an enslavement method -- see how most of middle-class are constrained to wage-work for paying back their debts.

You can't "turn off" that bunker, it has multiple diesel generators and lots of fuel reserves. It also has clean water reserves and air filtering capabilities, so you can't gas the people inside.

Physically cutting its uplink lines would be IMHO the most efficient way to neutralize that datacenter.

I believe there is at least one case of compromise where a trusted liveCD will not help: a hardware keylogger connected on the keyboard circuit. (I think i saw this in some movie, and I liked the idea very much).

So even if your kernel is trusted, your network stack is trusted at all layers, your communications are cryptographically secure, the words you are writing can be seen by an attacker through this device. Perhaps in or near realtime.

The "spam" and "ham" IMAP folders correspond to a certain file or folder(1) on the server. Email users have the learning commands in crontab. These are as simple as "sa-learn --spam /path/to/spam_folder; sa-learn --ham /path/to/ham_folder".

(1) file if the backend is mbox, folder if the backend is Maildir.

A private switchboard sounds complex, but it can be a single Asterisk server with 2 phone lines connected to it.

Dial in, optionally identify with PIN, type the number you want to call, Asterisk calls it for you, then connects your line with it.