licebmi__at__

Everything Trump does also makes total sense if you take in account American exceptionalism; which also explains why half the population and half the political apparatus supports him; even beyond that, that also explains how the other half is adamant on blaming a country with a GDP less than even some US states on this problem rather than self reflect on the internal causes.

I usually read it the other way around. People denouncing it has always been like this felt like the line had already been crossed; and I'm conflicted with the fact that it took a foul mouthed celebrity for so many people to realize that.

Trump can pretty much reduce Sam Altman's talent pool, his voter base seems to have an appetite for that. Also let's not pretend like private sector R&D has not been built over public sector research since forever. Seems like Trump wants to make public science more "efficient". Results still to be seen, but the perspective is not encouraging given the common wisdom on how basic science grows.

I don't think you are including the discouraging effect on buying a new Tesla, and being prone to vandalism might also be considered by insurance companies on their calculations.

Attacking a rescuer who absolutely was right as a "pedo guy" was 5-10 years ago, man.

It's been longer since there were rumors about Elon's "personality". I always disregarded them as rumors without deep value, which I still believe it's the right thing to do, but I won't deny they were there all along.

They had the chance to boot him the last impeachment trial, and they decided they wanted to keep being his lackeys.

Do you mean neoliberals? I mean, leftists have been skeptics of USAID as soft power arm of the CIA for ages. Also, you would be crazy to believe this is "Democrat" as this has been a bipartisan effort since it was funded.

Anyway, I'm reminded of this joke:

---

A KGB spy and a CIA agent meet up in a bar for a friendly drink

"I have to admit, I'm always so impressed by Soviet propaganda. You really know how to get people worked up," the CIA agent says.

"Thank you," the KGB says. "We do our best but truly, it's nothing compared to American propaganda. Your people believe everything your state media tells them."

The CIA agent drops his drink in shock and disgust. "Thank you friend, but you must be confused... There's no propaganda in America."

-----

I guess to some, since Musk and Trump dismantled USAID, there's no more propaganda in America.

I guess we could agree that the goal of the "Red Hats" was not cheap eggs, right?

Let's not forget that ok sign was used by the Christchurch mosque shooter. The fact that nazis have lost the sense of aesthetic doesn't mean those that ring an alarm about these symbols are wrong.

I bet a German judge will buy your Roman salute explanation after vouching for a far right party and tweeting some great replacement theories. I mean, why are certain people always finding themselves in situations where it could be implied they are nazis? Why can't they one day stumble getting out of bed and tweet by accident something supporting the Black Panthers? Why is it always the same side?

Certainly is an explanation on how we got here. Yarvin has ties to Thiel and his ilk.

I feel like Youtube Shorts follows the same logic as youtube where whales skew recommendations. So yeah, you get feed the same shit over and over as the rest of users.

OTOH, with tiktok I got surprised of how much "viral content" is tailored to me. I mean in the sense that I get a huge amount of videos from different trends from different creators, that indicates should be a big thing but then I realize that people around me, heavy tiktok users, barely get recommended or even not aware of.

And yet here you are discussing a thread where Elon is at least joking about using a weird Stanning account as a sock puppet, or even worse, admitting actually using this sock puppet account to weirdly Stan for himself. This behavior definitely screams honesty and maturity.

This was said just 2 years ago:

> When Elon Musk came to the White House asking me for help on all of his many subsidized projects, whether it's electric cars that don't drive long enough, driverless cars that crash, or rocketships to nowhere, without which subsidies he'd be worthless, and telling me how he was a big Trump fan and Republican, I could have said, "drop to your knees and beg," and he would have done it...

I doubt either of them forgot about it. Smarter men than Musk were dropped by Trump before.

It’s a good thing Iraqis never faced a false accusation about WMD, painting them as the enemy and fair target for defense. Otherwise you might look really silly.

I can totally relate. In my case I feel deeply connected to Poincare writings about unconscious processing. It’s not that I have sudden eureka moments, but I observed that if I try to consciously search for an answer, I just won’t find it, like I need to soak on information and do something else to actually get the result after a while.

Genuinely curious, what are the advantages of a CO2 monitor?

I mean, I get you can “track air quality” but what exactly does that mean on day to day basis?

Because the buckets were always there and the main difference is their visibility.

I kinda agree with your position, but I don’t share your optimistic outlook regarding Israel fate if it loses US support. I think the Arab world is mostly at peace with Israel because of US support, and Russia/China are only thinly supporting other nations because US has such a large stronghold via Israel that make really little sense economically. If Israel loses US support, this calculation changes wildly, and I’m kinda skeptic that Israel could pivot that quickly to other patron, the chaos on the power struggle between factions would create enough delay.

My impression yet is that unless something radically changes, I don’t think Israel would lose US, the power vacuum in the region would be filled by somebody else, something US is unlikely to allow. Despite the show, I don’t believe Biden/Netanyahu’s fallout; it’s simply the only way Biden can do at least the tiny amount of damage control that allows him to keep the most of Jewish/leftist voting blocks.

I’m really skeptic of the over simplistic approach of “supply and demand”, as if a wildly inelastic market such as housing has much similarities as a different more elastic one. To use the point on GP, if suddenly a huge landlord decided to jack prices to 1mm a month, I would expect prices to reach a more adequate equilibrium, but not because market mechanisms, but because a lot of things are going to burn, at least politically speaking.

And I that’s also a possible answer your question, on why they are leaving money on the table. To avoid inviting political action.

Putin is also a product of the forced liberalization of Rusia. I guess somebody would also argue that since Pinochet was also a general within Allende’s government, he’s also a product of communism.

Anyway, no war in Europe, but it’s kinda curious that the countries that go around with free market capitalism in modern history, are the ones who have invaded the most countries. By just this fact alone, I would consider the modern era of prosperity in the so called “Western countries” through cheap energy as more responsible of peace between them than free market. We will see what happens with more constrained resources. As a world inhabitant, I hope you are right.

> What does that mean? > It absolutely does on NixOS, which is all I have looked at. files in /etc are still where you would expect them to be, files in /var are still where you would expect them to be, files in /boot are where you expect them to be.

You won't find stuff on /lib, /usr, or /bin but even if you did, well it defeats the inmutability if you could just manipulate them, which is pretty much the purpose of nix.

This is my problem with your article, so you can map these files with nice names; now what? want to hack something with them?, then why use a declarative system? want to manually modify them? then why use an inmutable system? It totally defeats the purpose of nix. Thus my opinion, and not trying to be dismissive, that you don't understand what nix is trying to do.

> I suggest reading the comments on the article, which it seems to me are strongly in agreement with my points.

I just did on your suggestion, and I'm not impressed. The top comment is saying that if the OS get's borked they restore from backups, so not interested in software generated paths... which hey, it's a valid workflow if it works for that person, yet the whole point of a declarative system is that you can rebuild your system in mins without any backup.

That's my whole point, I don't care about where the packages are, they could even come from a magician hat, what I want is to be able to write a configuration of the exact packages that I want and that it actually works instead of some mess like ansible/salt/whatever. I don't particularly care about isolation, even if that's kinda the reason why the system works, if I were interested only in isolation or running multiple versions of software I would just use containers.

> In other words: it gives isolation and the concurrent versions, but it does so via more complex packaging tools that need users to learn a whole new programming language, and it eliminates the familiar FHS and replaces it with a new flat programmatically-defined one that is almost unreadable to humans.

I agree that the packaging tools (nix lang and underlying scripts) are complex, that might be something to fix, but I fail to see how knowing the path of packages works to do anything but to encourage the mess that people who love nix try to avoid.

I get the point of in-mutability, I keep this kind of hybrid environment where I abuse the different include systems of software to keep mutable files that can be easily changed. I guess the different module systems could make it easier, but I still fail to see what this has to do with the nix store, or more so, with the names of the paths in the nix store, everything there is the inmutable part.

Some times, and I guess a lot of times since I use home-manager, I do want my configs to be inmutable, at least the permanent part that is shared between my devices.

Good to be proven wrong.

And yeah, as you say I fail to understand your article. I mean, most of the stuff is exactly where you expect it to be even if it’s actually a link to the store, nix store doesn’t supersedes the whole filesystem. I can accept that there’s loss of information, I guess it might matter sometimes if a binary is in “/bin” or in “/sbin” but so far I don’t see how the regular filesystem structure or even gobo’s would help, to fix your software, at least if you want to keep immutability, which is a another can of worms. And even then, if you hack something depending on these paths, IMO you are back to the “doing it wrong” part.

Am I missing something here?

The writer of the article doesn’t seem to understand how nix works, which in some way is even more convoluted that “trusting the PATH” as he portrays it, but it works so good that once you get it, it totally makes you think you were “doing it wrong” as he quotes flox’s CTO.

Thus no, aux doesn’t try to fix the nix store path, as it’s not understood to be broken.

I’m just a participant on the project as much as the rest of my life allows it, but as I understand the goal of aux is to change the governance structure, and how it maps to projects like nixpkgs with its huge state and nixos modules.

Depends on the problem to solve. If they are trying to solve the problem of improving the CTO leadership skills, then yes, they are part of the problem. If they are solving the problem of putting food on the table, like most people are; then you might argue that this is sub-optimal, but I don't think putting their heads on the chop block is a better way to solve it.

I will say that both analysis seem really repugnant. Specially the first one that first acknowledges the obvious limitation that "only a third of Gaza’s hospitals are even partially functional", to then push the idea that the MOH trying to work under that limitation is an attempt of manipulation. It's absurd to think that releasing less numbers would paint a more accurate picture; but I guess some side would appreciate if people stop counting the dead.

One would have thought that a proper stance is to be against any kind of mass killings, yet given the attitude on the topic of Namibia we do know there are first and second class victims.

I visited xochimilco a bunch of times during college, most people avoided them as they are expensive and you could bring your own music (using non smart phone during that time), but plenty of people did approach them. Is that not a thing anymore? I mean, I don't even like mariachi but I thought it was part of the experience.

>In short, this stuff is 90% magic trick.

I would say, kinda but not entirely. IME as a practitioner in my youth, I would say that breaking the mental barrier to throw a good punch is a thing that needs to be broken as part of the martial arts training. Another thing that a good training gives you and not many people understand is the preparation to receive a punch, not cower in fear and still keep a sound mind to try to recover and react.