metadope

> a foundation I made for myself

Creative thinking requires an intent to be creative. Yes, it may be a delusion to imagine oneself as creative, one's thoughts to be original, but you have to begin with that idea if you're going to have any chance of actually advancing human knowledge. And the stronger wider higher you build your foundation-- your knowledge and familiarity with the works of humans before your time-- the better your chance of successful creativity, true originality, immortality.

Einstein thinks nothing of import without first consuming Newton and Galileo. While standing on their shoulders, he could begin to imagine another perspective, a creative reimaging of our physical universe. I'm fairly sure that for him, like for so many others, it began as a playful, creative thought stream, a What If juxtoposition between what was known and the mystery of unexplored ideas.

Your intent to create will make you creative. Entertain yourself and your thoughts, and share when you dare, and maybe we'll know if you're regurgitating or creating. But remember that you're the first judge and gatekeeper, and the first question is always, are you creative?

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Predicting the future, I can tell you with certainty that This Too Shall Pass.

Just don't ask me what 'This' is: A fad, or a sea-change?

My main Luddite objection to the current passion for LLM coding assistance is the new dependencies created/fostered within the software engineering diaspora. Not only are we dependent now on cloud access for so much of our SE now, but we'll also depend on the ongoing build-out, as LLM infrastructure bulldozes our real-world landscape, and we experience change from DRAM shortages to unwanted (NIMBY) construction of data centers. All based on the idea (yet again) that this is it.

The question becomes, is it (or will it be) worth it?

My personal prism of past experience does not lend itself to an easy answer. The move from assembly language to C was a no-brainer, but I remember resisting a transition from C to C++ ("I can do that in C with structs and function pointers") and the surge in OOP and COM and... the list goes on.

I remember objecting to Rational Rose and UML because I just didn't trust code generated algorithmically. Boilerplate with artifacts. I don't think I was wrong to hesitate there.

But I might be wrong now, to let others push the leading bleeding edge. Maybe it's time to get into it.

Can I just download a trained LLM and host it myself, without a dependency on internet/cloud corporate/overlord/rented-infrastructure?

I am willing to try, but I must declare that-- where I am, the Personal Computing revolution is not over. We still haven't won. And the rebellion: against auto-updates, telemetry, subscription models, any usage or dependency of/on your internet against your will. The fight for freedom goes on.

Can I get a Claude Code to live in my home with me, air-gapped and all mine?

Will I spend all my time spanking the agent?

I am sad. I can't think of a single good thing that has been accomplished by the current administration. Not in its first year here and now, or in the previous four years (with training wheels and pandemic).

I would welcome a generous reassessment by a fair reporter: Is there a list of accomplishments somewhere? Some solid map of milestones?

Not the blathering superlatives of self-aggrandizement as displayed in the recent subhumane Rob Reiner TDS takedown, but a real list of genuine positive accomplishment that we can all agree on and comfort ourselves with when the night gets long and the darkness grows.

I find it hard to believe that we've accomplished nothing but the chaos in those five years.

> you’re essentially facilitating censorship.

Yes, please.

I want the facility to censor. I want and need to exercise it all the time.

I start with the headline, taking one full second of my time and attention. Not interested? Skip it (censored). I'll never know what lied (lay) within. So be it.

Content? I might load one or two of the first 30 pages pointed to by /active, but I'll rollover first, and my personal censor will often reject loading of certain sites, based solely on their URLs.

Comments, finally... active pages get the most comments, and there's a lot to learn here, so it's often worth the effort and the time to segregate the wheat from the chaff, the signal from the noise. This requires the usual selective reading: the first sentence of the first paragraph determines whether the rest of the graph will be consumed, parsed into a gist, or skip the rest. Only slow down for recognized experts (or inherent/exhibited expertise). Build a quick TL;DR as you scan, backtrack if you find a nugget. Panning for gold!

Not censorship based on 'a tribal mentality' but a pure self-interest in not wasting the limited time I have at my disposal. Wanting knowledge and insight and perspective, not willing to slog through regurgitated shittalking.

> We’ve reached a point where people cannot tolerate

Exactly.

Topics from the video:

  01, Super Grub2 Disk
  02, Rescatux.org
  03, commandlinefu.com
  04, LDP (Linux Documentation Project)
  05, wiki.Arch (Gentoo too)
  06, wttr.in (TUI weather)
  07, pure sh bible (pure bash bible)
  08, ShellCheck
  09, RodsBooks
  10, Brendan Gregg
  11, man pages
  12, tldr
  13, cheat.sh
  14, 
  15, OverTheWire (ssh in to play a game or two)
  16, Awesome (via Github repos)
  17, Patience+Practice (general closing encouragement to noobs)

That ship has sailed.

The only correct answer is... both answers (1 and -11).

That is, if you're really interested in pursuing the position.

Not only are you willing to take their tests, but you go beyond what is required, for your own benefit and edification.

That's why, when presented with the URL during the interview, you immediately load it, and right-click View Source into another tab, while simultaneously making small talk with the former CTO interviewer.

Even though you're a backender, you know enough frontend to navigate the interspersed style and html and javascript and so, you solve both puzzles, and weave into the conversation the two answers, while also deciding that this is probably not the gig for you, but who knows, let's see how they answer your questions now...

This string of words made me shudder, gave me a chill.

Too true.

>> If you think otherwise, you're ... [elided]

Yellow card.

I am sorry and saddened to see your comment dimmed and dissed by our brethren.

Everyone is in a mood, after entertaining the terror that comes with deploying unsupervised super-potent Agents, the year of living dangerously.

I for one appreciate having my consciousness raised in the middle of all this, reminding me of the importance of other humans' experiences.

Or, were you tongue-in-cheek, just yanking chains, rattling cages?

In either case: Keep up the good work.

> Pizlix requires you to set up your machine thusly:

  > You must have a /mnt/lfs partition mounted at /dev/sda4.

should say

  > You must have a /dev/sda4 partition mounted at /mnt/lfs.

Pedantic Sunday: Happy Hanukkah!

I don't see (C) the joke.

  inline bool isEven(int32_t x) { return (0 == (x & 1) ); }

> No one is likely to be looking up my license plate and looking at my movements, because I don't do anything that would warrant that kind of attention.

Want to spend an hour on the side of the highway while the police search your vehicle?

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/investigations/article... + https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46196209

> the kinds of people who oppose this kind of tracking _on principal alone_, I'm immediately suspicious of all of them.

The principle is Don't Tread On Me.

Stars on Github mean nothing to me.

Github has been the best example of a brilliant UI, presenting a large database of code for easy browsing and consumption, without requiring javascript.

That was/is its killer feature. This is what locks me in.

Github has deteriorated since the takeover, to be sure. I would estimate its noscript usability to have regressed from 95% to maybe 80% today. The Ruby-on-Rails backend services have faltered a bit. Markdown files in the repo tree are no longer auto-converted by the server into html, but the main readme still works.

Have you ever visited a Gitlab project with javascript turned off? Worthless!

Tangents are a sine of the times.

The timing of this article's publication is provocative, don't you think?

Isn't there a pending Executive Order in the works that would move marijuana from the federal Schedule I list, making it a Schedule III (less restrictions)?

As near to a federal legalization as you can get without rousing rabble to react with a Just Say No!

I would love a peek at the NYT editorial calendar to see when this piece got, um, scheduled. And I wonder what it says about their editiorial intentions.

(As my old buddy Jethro used to sing, I'm just Wondering Aloud.)

Why does the HN headline here drop the original's important word: 'why'?

Original (emphasis mine): >> Stanford Medicine study shows why mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines can cause myocarditis

Transcribed to an HN headline here: >> Stanford Medicine study shows mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines can cause myocarditis

A significant difference, no?

Why?

----

After reading the article at Stanford, the word I'd choose is 'how' as in 'how vaccines can cause myocarditis'.

There were indeed early warning signs that Facebook was shady.

I remember being delighted with FB initially. It was a wonderful way to keep in touch with extended family and wayward friends.

But then I discovered how difficult it was to control my 'timeline/newsfeed' or whatever they called it. There was a small menu attached that allowed you to Sort By Latest or some such... but it wasn't sticky, and so you always had to select it, and it eventually disappeared completely and... you saw what they wanted you to see.

Originally FB would send you an email whenever someone sent you a message on Messenger, and the email contained the contents of the message, so you didn't even need to login to FB, and I enjoyed having that... But that too didn't last long. When they turned that feature off I realized they were all about themselves and their goal of user engagement, and the value-added (for me) dropped to zero.

Sometime after '15 I disengaged. I left the account alive but haven't been on but thrice in 10 years.

I campaigned for a while, within my family and circle of friends, trying to get them to rally around an alternative (I started by offering Slack, feebly) but I was unconvincing and unsuccessful.

I remember the horror of Thanksgiving 2016, as I stood in the living room of my niece's apartment, and pondered the array of five family members before me. Easy chair, couch x 3, easy chair... each of them engrossed by their phones. Nobody was talking, everybody was comfortable, there but also somewhere else.

I'm elderly now, but in my distant youth I had many encounters with police officers. Every single one of them was a blessing to me. Of course, I am a white male, and my encounters with police were probably affected by my (traditionally) privileged status.

I do not blame LEOs for the growing encrouchments on my (our) personal liberties. I view them as bona fide public servants, motivated mostly by genuine generosity of spirit, wanting to help people.

But police culture is another matter, and it is the culture than corrupts. Because it is such a boring job (for the most part), management is always seeking new ways to keep their officers engaged, enthused, gratified.

That job, sitting alongside the highway, is less boring if there's an ongoing story that you're part of, a team that you serve, that's counting on you. So you're going to do your part, hold up your end, carry your weight, even if that means you need to do something that makes your conscience go squiggly, it's okay, it's just the compromise expected of a player, taking a little one for the team. That corruption is something that management enables, and wink nod encourages. And management does it, and gets away with continuing to do it, because a large portion of the public are okay with it too.

What are the chances that the next mistaken AI-assisted surveillance conclusion is going to capture you in its crosshairs? It's a small probabilty, right? Just don't drive near the border, don't drop any women off at motels, don't drive I35 in Texas: you'll be okay.

Law enforcement is mostly mundane repetitive boring work.

It can't be easy sitting alongside a highway for hours on end, waiting for someone to do something that requires your intervention.

Police engage in shared fantasies. Which can lead them to hallucinate. They often end up wanting a crime to be committed just so they can intervene and exercise and validate their skill set.

Civilian behaviors will be observed, recorded, and matched: against a theory of a crime which may or may not have been committed. Depending how bored and unfulfilled the coordinated LEOs are, a dark fantasy of ongoing crime can be enabled, and confirmation bias follows immediately, with every civilian action (or inaction) being re-interpreted through the lens of an understandable rampant LEO desire -- They want so much to catch the bad guys that they will actually manufacture probable cause from stretched whole cloth, so they can believe a crime is in their purview and they're righteously on the case.

Otherwise it can become a really boring gig.

Advances in surveillance technologies and predeterminations of crime probabilities via automated software will only serve to add fuel to the fire of the aggregate LEO imagination.

What we witness here in Texas is the result of a shared fantasy. Remember that shared fantasies become more real the longer they are shared and sustained... even the "trace" amounts of imaginary drugs on which Max the dog alerted become a part of the now-permanent interdiction team's backstory.

This kind of thing is happening all over America, all the time. We face a crisis of fantasy addiction. So many are unhappy with reality that they are constantly fantasizing something better for themselves.

Not to pick on the LEOs, but they are supposed to be the best of us, holding the line, and not compromising their integrity for the transient satisfaction of an imagined felony stop.

> scared to wait for a cab

I contend that American Unhappiness is manufactured and sustained by the constant onslaught of misinformation, broadcast by special interest groups, all of whom have it in their general plan to make you feel an unmet need, a base emotional response, a tickle in your amygdla.

Likely, your life is not that bad.

Likely, the fear you feel, waiting for a cab outside your favorite bistro, is a response to programming you ingested from the culture that tries to nurse you into a permanent state of semi-consciousness.

Fear is sensational, a proven sales tool, a political football, click-bait 'journalism'. There are whole armies of professional and amateur fear-mongers out there, who make it their life's mission to plant the seeds of fear into your imagination, to sell you a product, a candidate, a policy.

>> fulfillment requires more than material wealth,

Agreed, but...

>> which in our quest for more stuff, we have forgotten.

Reject the programming. Whether it is fear or desire that the advertisers/liars attempt to trigger in you, recognize the effort aimed at making you feel wants/needs that do not actually do you or our society any good at all, and reject the unhappiness they are trying to program into you.

It is an individual responsibility. An individual has authority over their own emotional states. Defend yourself from the onslaught of lies and liars.

> Society needs to feel safe for people to truly feel happy.

I don't disagree with this. But whose is responsible for 'feelings'?

I don't think of myself as anonymous. I am a glittering grain of sand on a beach. I am anonymous only as long as nobody cares to pay attention. If somebody (or some three-letter-agency) decided to focus on me, I'm fairly certain they could decipher my identity and 'de-anonymize' ('demonize') me. But as long as I don't glitter too brightly, don't call too much attention to myself, I can remain safely pseudo-anonymous, just another caw in the cacaphony of the crowded beach.

> It’s objectively an unnatural form of communication

I agree. Short bits quick hits and spunk spits lead to epileptic fits from social halfwits and, that's what we produce and consume. More so, when we imagine we are anonymous. The random emotional inpulse spikes that flit across so many of our untrained anonymized minds leads to a noise floor that threatens to completely obliterate any signal.

There is value in anonymity. But I would love to participate in a smaller subset of the internet, where every participant is known, identified and associated with their real-world self. Such that no one feels so obscured and anonymously free to grafitti; where everyone is careful and concerned with their affect on the environment; where publication is a precise responsibility; where effort must be made or authority is lost.

((Kinda sorta like HN, but with blue checkmarks)/s)

I will tell you the truth, and you will be safe, believe me, because I know what is true, from my personal experience.

This is the truth over which I can claim authority. My personal experience, that small portion of objective and infinite reality that became mine, once I'd perceived and diced my tiny slice, stored and explored and retrieved and believed. I know what's true, just ask, I'll tell.

I would've liked to have read this, but...

Every once in a while I encounter a site that (needlessly, effectively) blocks access because I browse with javascript disabled.

I'm not sure I understand what is being reported here.

Was $6.25 billion dollars actually donated, as stated by the APNews headline?

Or is this one of those far-in-the-future revocable promises that may or may not become real?

So APNews is now a public relations flack, regurgitating press release verbatim?

Your comment wins the internet, as they say, and as far as I'm concerned. Your three examples of scientific tenacity are wonderful. We all benefited from these heroic efforts in the face of dogmatic establishment Science. And your comment reminds us of how valuable that lone "voice from the wilderness" can become.

I can add one even more pertinent example:

https://arstechnica.com/health/2023/10/after-being-demoted-a...

A lot of lives were saved during the pandemic because of the efforts of a biochemist (Katalin Karikó) and an immunologist (Drew Weissman), despite their research not being embraced or encouraged by the scientific establishment.

The Trump 1.0 CDC, NIH, and private industries did an amazing job delivering the Covid vaccines in time to save millions of lives.

The Trump 2.0 CDC/NIH is a farcical rebound romcom which I can't watch. It's not romantic. It's not tilting at windmills. It's not funny at all.

Kids playing doctor with our country.

> Localized phenomena like a neighbor starting a fire,

Summer evenings at home in my small Ohio village are often a health hazard, a polluted nightmare driven by the perverse compulsive ignition of so-called 'recreational' yard fires by pyromaniac neighbors.

If it is an Ozone Action day and/or a Heat Advisory day, it is near certain that one or more of the Don't Tread On Me jamokes who live nearby will come out of their houses at sunset, pile a bunch of garbage into a 55-gallon drum or a circle of rocks, sprinkle with accelerant, toss a match and back away. Eyes glazed, they'll watch for a minute, then go back inside, sometimes coming back out every ten minutes or so to refuel the fire, other times letting it blaze until the original pile is down to embers. In any case, there is a new plume of local smoke to add to the day's irritants.

It is a startling phenom to observe, let alone endure. The behavior is made all the more crazy, imho, by the presence of children. These are parents, asserting their rights to burn, and teaching their children to Live Free Or Die. It seems to me to be driven by a rebelliousness, part of the anti-woke wave, country-fried counter-culture, as in "I got your global warming right here, pard".

It's like, listening to country music stations and realizing how many (most!) contemporary and historical Country songs are themed around alcohol-worship.

But I digress.

I apologise. I was triggered by the mention of 'localized phenomena' and the horrified realization that so many of my fellow citizens are self-destructive cray-cray.

> The feds could raid every marijuana dispensary in the country

This is not a realistic scenario, but does seem to present the argument, that Federal law and the power to enforce it is inherently and legally superior to individual State laws?

> fix the laws and roll back the abuses of executive power

Perhaps we could start with the federal law that made marijuana a Schedule One controlled substance: so that ordinary residents of responsible and responsive states would not have to rely on "arbitrary non-enforcement of the law" in order to get their smoke on.

Think about it! Every one of those citizen-puffers are in violation of federal law! Send in the troops!

The argument seems to be that federal laws overrule states', and that underlying idea justifies sending military forces into cities, because, you know, federal laws are being violated, everywhere, like, all the time, man.

Sheesh.

Agree with each of your points, but must add some counterpoints as illustration:

Land of the free, home of the brave, there are some Americans who will rebel against the requirements and constraints of their lifelong socialization. I think this is an underappreciated factor in the study of homelessness-- people fight to be free, and as the song goes, Freedom is just another word for "nothing left to lose". There is some serious freedom that does along with having only the clothes on your back and whatever is in your pockets...

Yeah well there is definitely something going on, a coordinated effort to condemn GrapheneOS with faint praise (and outright scare-mongering). Here I have posted a video url I'd downloaded and watched a few days ago. It's TTS slop narration, but it makes an attempt to characterize GrapheneOS as a 'double-edged sword', because, you know, criminals. Just like the hatchet job from France.

'GrapheneOS Update 2025 Privacy Savior or Hacker’s Paradise'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCgi6bJy-qo

I get all my utube from the bash-prompt (and never have to deal with algorithm or see who is who and what else is there), so I don't know who posted this video to YouTube, but maybe there's more?

This could be a case study in an amateur low-grade half-ass influence operation.

On the other hand, it could simply be a grudge, a coordinated personal attack on the lead dev.

There are a slew of other videos by YouTube personalities who, at various times, seem to be disparaging the guy, including a very upset Grossman (right-to-repair guy).

Or hey, maybe it's just coincidence. C'est la vie!