mrobot

This is great, thank you. I was gonna start on something like this myself, glad i did not duplicate effort with it yet.

Video mentions India. There's a really old article [1] by Mark Ames and Yasha Levine about some of the negative parts of social media-based lending for poor people in India. It is called "micro-lending", Pierre Omidyar is big into it. I guess there were a bunch of suicides from a company he was funding. It is basically having more desperate people opt in to giving up privacy in exchange for loans. You opt in and it sucks in your data, system crunches on it and decides what to do.

But, I do think this is kind of where the whole surveillance capitalism thing is headed. It is interesting to me everyone always points at China as this dystopian nightmare, but even major media outlets are now admitting all their articles on China's evil "social credit score" were kinda BS [2]. Seems to me the real nightmare is with our own oligarchs.

[1]: https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/extraordinary-pierre-omidy... [2]: https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/09/15/china-social-credit-sys...

I view political articles on Wikimedia's Wikipedia similar to how i view media sources such as Radio Free Asia. There is really nothing democratic or open about the political content you will find there. There are even seemingly obsessive accounts with thousands of edits a day that may just be government or think-tank managed accounts, reinforcing content favorable to US foreign policy goals. I see Wikipedia as kind of a good jump off point to see what the US State Dept and CIA position is on some issue, and then continue my investigation from there.

If everyone googled about what is going on some part of the world, almost all would read the Wikipedia article. If the Wikipedia article differed in any major way from what the Pentagon's goals were, well... you can see how that would be a problem for the Pentagon. If you allow yourself to believe that the goals and movements of the Pentagon are not always grand, you can see how the political content there can more or less act as a weapon of war. Not really an exaggeration to say that, i really don't think...

I feel like a lot of people just aren't catching on to how tightly managed US media is when it comes to "hostile" or "aggressive" actions of others, "democracy", "brutal dictators", etc. in other parts of the world. People are really still ingesting these corporate news sources with anything other than the utmost suspicion.

Lots of chauvinism and nationalism here, pretty offputting really.

Some more history here https://alyssa.is/leaving-freeagent/

This article starts off with meeting between Graham/Goss and Mahmoud Ahmed, or 'Mehmood Ahmed' as it is spelled some other places. Also, what is the reason spellings always differ so much?

https://archive.is/ttTRs

Good. I ruined my damned brain playing stupid first person shooters for disgusting amounts of hours from like age 12-22. Aside from the social life i lost out on, I really think my brain is permanently deprived of chemicals.

You might be interested in this post from today on the racket-users list:

https://groups.google.com/g/racket-users/c/hP1hZDWnj7Y

It is about "social contracts" and seems to kind of address some of what you are saying here. Basically, the community comes to an agreement on what some good common contracts should be. I wonder if there are any other social problems in the lisp languages that we could think of that can be developed by consensus this way.

Organizations like Bellingcat are really just sort of less-than-professional press outlets for the intelligence agencies. The information is controlled, the interpretation is biased because of spook affiliation at the highest levels, and they can be more sloppy than official government agencies with the information that is available to inject some narrative into public opinion without it actually being fact. They can wave off any harm they do. Some of these organizations make absolutely wild conclusions based on very limited info like looking up buildings on google earth and assuming they are some type of building, making some crazy conclusion like such and such number of prisoners somewhere.

If you're worried about brutality, you might want to look up what US sanctions on Syria are actually doing to the people there. They can't eat. They have no heat. No gas. We are stealing their oil. Do you think the Syrian people might see us as an authoritarian government? Because they are suffering, we are causing it, there's nothing they can do, and the situation is enforced by violence.

Yes, i don't think people realize just how ruthlessly enforced alignment with US foreign policy goals is on Wikipedia. In matters of foreign governments and current events related to war, Wikipedia is essentially a propaganda page of the CIA. Very few editors control exercise real control over the foreign policy information on Wikipedia. It is not the democratic neutral source that people see it as, and that's part of why it's a good propaganda tool. It is kind of a Trojan horse into your trust boundaries.

If you watch some of the edit wars when a big event happens in the news, you can often see very useful information (with sources) being thrown away. It's not really possible to get information on there that conflicts with the current military goals, because that would upset the mission.

I don't think anyone with actual power over the issues wants shorter prison sentences. The public loses money on prisons, but there is an industry of basically sucking profits off all the different things that prisoners do throughout the day, and in also taking a cut for other things like how they broker relationships like which healthcare providers get paid, etc. They take orders-of-magnitude too high profits on moving money, making phone calls, video calls, ordering books and stuff, mailing packages, buying some ramen noodles, privileging someone with an ankle bracelet, or charging rent at a halfway house (they own those too), or just the slave or near-slave labor wages for doing a job, etc. And the states get stuff like free firefighters, as we all know. A privileged minority is gaining all the real estate for the new prisons, offices, halfway houses, too. They want to keep doing what they are doing. And it's not just the private prison industry or anything it's just the whole thing is this bloodsucking.

It is corrupt extraction of human ability and based on suffering, it is just not tracked closely. People do time for the worst things. Using drugs is not a real crime worthy of punishment, for example, but people just sit and sit and work and work for really dumb stuff like that. Justice system seems clearly not some rehabilitative thing where people involved are helping in good faith. That is maybe what they imply on tv crime shows or something.

Does anyone know what year and date this started happening?

I think i would restrict it to "X narrative, where X is chosen from spectrum of acceptable opinion dictated by appointed board of directors, USA, inc.".

Just my reaction take on the Marc Polymeropoulos guy, i watched some videos and i don't trust him. Feels like they made up a story and he is the designated person to tell it. Also maybe unrelated how come he doesn't have a Wikipedia entry?

Why would anyone trust someone who worked for or works for the CIA exactly? Their job is to lie to people and be good at it.

I guess there is also the possibility that they just changed their mind and didn't want it to be usable consumer technology at this time? Maybe i am being overly suspicious, but i guess it seems to be at least a little strange that DARPA would put someone on the task who says "it's closer than you realize" and then do a complete 180.

Also, i don't really follow the tech, but i thought i remembered seeing (on HN maybe?) positive reports of actually useful BCI prototypes. Maybe those were overblown or limited, though.

Definitely not a fan of this new wave of whatever you might call it... even-more-direct opinion management than the media already gives us, i guess. Whether it be Facebook partnering with the Atlantic Council, sites like Snopes, Google ranking down independent news or demonetizing peoples stuff, or this... seems like i'm only supposed to have CIA-approved opinions.

I will have to read this. My hope is when i do read there is some stuff in about exploitation. I tend to see exploitative systems kind of like cancer. Many exploitative systems can exist in cities. I wonder if they have made space in the study for studying exploitative practices and reconcentration over time of the products of public effort and how much the networks produced and reproduced end up actually benefiting society, or how much more society could benefit (with different amounts of exploitation) if the system was reorganized in different ways.

I found the nix pills to be a good starting point for learning about how to use nixpkgs/nixos https://nixos.org/guides/nix-pills/index.html

Thank you for the brain dump. I liked that this came up. I used tree style tabs for a few years starting way back in maybe 2012, but eventually just abandoned it because of the same performance problems you mentioned. I didn't replace it with anything good, and was just recently getting annoyed at the state of things as i suddenly find myself context switching a lot on mini projects. I was just setting myself up in Emacs org mode and felt i needed better integration with the browser. I have a little extra time to put into making it right. I think at the very least i am going to write some small amount of integration for the currently clocked Emacs org task, the main OS views, and Firefox, just Mac OS X to start, all open source.

Anyway, i was exploring options and i was glad to find your experience. I think i am ultimately looking for something similar to what you want and maybe will email you at some point to ask about this if i do indeed get a little deeper into it if you don't mind.

I am glad this came up. I had just started work on synchronizing my Emacs org-mode clock tasks with tree style tabs and i see there are some other good things to check out in this thread. Also signed up for Skeema waiting list.

I found an article which points out some negative things Feynman's did that i was not aware of. It is an interesting take by a woman who was essentially driven away from her natural direction in science by bad behavior of men in academia, and i sympathize with it. I really liked the original article posted here, though, and respect the way Feynman looked at the world.

https://caltechletters.org/viewpoints/feynman-harassment-sci...

I think you are kind of overlooking that the situation is a bit more complicated than just some of the defectors telling conservative pundits what they want to hear. It seems to me from a little digging that detainment of former citizens of the North by the NIS is indeed a coercive process that happens long before the defector even has opportunity to speak to the pundits. How can this be simplified so much?

Here is a video that contains some accusations of bribery of defectors and other shady business by NIS (Korean CIA) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktE_3PrJZO0

Thanks for the tool, i just used it to increase my grade.

Does this apply to individuals or people hosting their own services or services for their friends?

Also, can someone come to me with a subpoena and a gag order for hosting email for my friends?

Why was the US Department of War renamed to Department of Defense?

Important to note that the US Agency for Global Media was funding and supporting the Hong Kong protests [1]. China could never get away with doing the same thing in the US.

The fact is that media bubbles are a powerful tool. There is a reason the US / CIA spend so much time/money on projects like Radio Free Asia. If you are on the same side as the CIA and US imperialism, you might want to think about why that is and what kind of harm you are causing with your jingoistic posts. The US media is carefully controlled and an opinion-making bubble of its own. Yes, many Chinese people support their government and it's not because they are duped, actually.

[1] https://www.scmp.com/comment/opinion/article/3091438/us-has-...

Just a couple gripes, they seem like non-problems today:

Training -- Schools should be covering the training problem in this PDF, and i think that would help a lot.

Availability -- GHC is no longer an 'adventure' to install

Packagability -- Can't you just build standalone programs with most FLs?

Popularity -- Aren't they getting more popular?

"They don't get it" -- I don't think the example given of "i need some documentation and stability" applies anymore.

My feeling right now is i disagree with this. I think there is a certain amount of clarity in functional languages that more imperative languages are striving for as they develop maybe. You seem to be able to express more for less in most functional languages. Out of curiosity, do you yourself work well and quickly in functional languages?

CI/CD is also separable from this issue, i think. But the thing that you can do well with it which is write and regularly run tests is not.

My thinking is the main problem is people just aren't exposed to functional languages enough and get stuck working to line theirs and other peoples' pockets before they have had enough exposure.

I also have some gripes with the actual document which i will post in a top-level reply.

Proof that China is an Empire? I mean outside of Hong Kong and Taiwan, which are already a part of China.