411 karma · joined October 19, 2022
Killing the drive to learn and explore is not empowering; it is fundamentally disempowering.
… so long as they have the money, and the power grid survives the overtaxation.
After all, why bother encouraging a culture where people are genuinely empowered to tweak and create their tools? Why encourage a culture of exploration, of playful cleverness? What use is there to being a hacker, of sharing knowledge?
It’s definitely much easier, more sustainable, and more fulfilling to have server farms adjacent nuclear reactors make your calculator app for you.
Exploration for exploration’s sake, knowledge for knowledge’s sake. Not everything learned by the human race needs to be immediately useful; it all contributes to a vast tapestry.
Not to mention that if we focus solely on profitability and utility, we do bad science: Why do you think we have a reproduction crisis? Because reproducing experiments isn’t sexy nor profitable, so no one is incentivized to do it.
We need more arrows, full-stop.
> Any modified versions, derivative works, or software that incorporates any portion of this Software must be released under this same license (HOPL) or a compatible license that maintains equivalent or stronger human-only restrictions.
That’s not what copyleft means, that’s just a share-alike provision. A copyleft provision would require you to share the source-code, which would be beautiful, but it looks like the author misunderstood…
> Clueless software developers should not be messing with kernel settings like irq bindings. Software that does that is not worth my time.
Come on, man. If you don’t want to help, just don’t respond. If you want to warn someone against something, just be bare-minimum polite. It’s easy.
It’s true that mentally ill folk (including yours truly) fall prey to these dopamine sinks more easily as an escape or coping mechanism — and they’re even more vulnerable to the predation of marketers and UX engineers trying to maximize ad-views. It is important to have these talks about society and social structures. But ultimately, on an individual level, it very literally is about just “getting out there and doing stuff.” That isn’t dismissive or discounting hardships, that’s just how it is.
Getting out there and doing things is the answer, for those with mental illnesses and those without. Upping your willpower and your ability to cope is paramount. How you do it differs from person to person: It might be tweaks to routine, taking medication, or getting therapy. But this is a universal human thing. The goal is the same, the steps is the same — but some of us have more intermediate steps than others.
In specific cases, they make sense purely practically; but generally? It feels like a huge error for the whole world to leave copyleft and the GPL behind. The reason we can run Linux on everything is because Torvalds chose the GPL, and so vendors are forced to share their drivers if they use the kernel. And that is a truly magnificent achievement.
> AnkiMobile is the official iOS app and all purchases help fund Anki's development.[1]
You could always use the web UI in your phone browser, Ankiweb[2], which is very kindly hosted for free by the developers.
You could also write your cards as CSV, HTML, or really any format you want and import them, if the interface isn’t to your liking. Shoot, you can even use an Emacs package[3] if you want to.
[1] https://apps.ankiweb.net/ [2] https://ankiweb.net/ [3] https://github.com/eyeinsky/org-anki
We are nowhere near that point; you could perhaps make this argument for Japan (though I’d be skeptical), but for the US? No, I’m sorry. That is very, very, far off. Our age distribution is healthy enough that every older person can be taken care of just fine — and we don’t need to seize all the assets of the top 10%. I really don’t understand how you can come to the conclusion that we are in such a resource and labor crisis based solely on slight funding shortfall for Social Security (which can be remedied by raising the cap a bit). It’s just narrative, that’s all you have.
Let’s talk about letting grandma starve when it’s a real problem, alright? Stop the dehumanization of old folk. We don’t like ageism around here.
> I do hope that I have the fortitude to take myself out though once I become too much of a resource sink for my descendants.
Seriously. It’s sad to see someone preemptively throw their life away over an imaginary crisis.
It is. But you are talking about a very specific policy: How much money goes into Social Security. The cap is arbitrary – not a calculated reflection of physical reality. It is an artificial restraint! Whether the cap is $160 000 or $500 000, you can’t just say “this is a reflection of resource-scarcity” when it is very much a policy decision made to allow the wealthy to pay less taxes.
> For sure there is lots more room to take wealth from workers and give it to non workers, but expect more and more political headwinds and long term consequences.
The goal is, in my eyes, to reduce wealth taken from workers by non-workers – the owners that increasingly make more and more money proportionally to workers. The young always got less than they put in – that’s how companies profit – but now they get even less than they used to. This is because we’ve allowed wages and salaries to stagnate, letting wealth inequality become incomprehensibly massive compared to just two generations ago. The results of this is what makes the young poorer and despondent.
Raising a tax marginally on these owners, like raising the Social Security cap such that the ultra-wealthy pay more into it, doesn’t break physical reality nor does it take money from workers. It takes money from non-workers.
We are not nearly in such a resource-counting phase: We produce more than enough food to feed every single person in the US several times over: we have enough empty homes to ensure every person is housed; we have enough of much everything. Thanks to innovations that have happened under Capitalism, we are less resource-constrained in this regard than ever in human history. We have great excesses that are wasted, sometimes to our detriment, and sometimes comedically (ex., the practice of burning tonnes of corn by farmers in attempt to keep prices higher).
That Social Security is unsustainable is not due to a lack of physical resources nor manpower, but capital. Money.
There is currently a cap on taxable income, for Social Security. For the first $168 000, you pay the Social Security tax; for income beyond that point, you do not.
If we lifted or even abolished the cap, Social Security would be more than above water, and no cuts whatsoever would be necessary.
In modern society, if you are a “sink,” it is solely because the system is designed to make you that way – perhaps the wealthiest among us are able to pay a bit less on taxes, in exchange for your caretaker not getting monetary support. For example. I reckon gutting social security would be very profitable to some.
The government’s job is to be useful, and supporting those who can’t support themselves – like the elderly and disabled – is very literally the most noble and useful thing it can do.
People wanted this because news and social media have told them to want – both which are functionally mouth-pieces of the ultra-wealthy. News has been consolidating into fewer hands for decades; it’s only getting worse, and their owners more emboldened. The popular social media sites, when not owned and manipulated directly by their owning oligarchs, are subject to a massive amount of astroturfing bankrolled by other ultra-wealthy folks. The wealthy chose Trump, and so it is.
We aren’t completely bystanders, but the cards are unimaginably stacked against us. We need to break up massive media companies, get rid of manipulative algorithms, and fight tooth and nail to get money out of politics – as much as we can.
Not a fan of the AI slop images, and I’d prefer if it were federated, but it’s libre and small enough in scope that it’s fine by me. Good idea you’ve got here! ^ ^
You could also make the argument that the second is more feminine, as it is non-committal and low-risk, something indicative of “hedging” that women often do.
Arguing against that principle is arguing for pseudo-science: “Acupuncture works, I tried it!,” “Crystal-healing works, I tried it! Don’t trust a paper over your own body!”
I feel this isn’t the right point to take pause about “them”.