riverlong

It's much worse than that. You will be on the hook for garnished wages for years to pay off your creditors. And you will have plenty of creditors because the GP's advice says "go lose a civil case". You know what a civil case has? Damages. You know how large the damages are if your strategy is to lose? Big. They have a trademark case so they could get attorney's fees. We're talking about a seven figure bill in fees alone if the case goes to trial. Following this advice could have the OP getting his wages garnished as long as he lives to pay off a multimillion dollar debt. Good luck with that.

This is not legal advice, but here's what I would do:

1. Recognize that they have requested exactly four specific actions from you (bullet points, second page)

2. Do not follow the 4th bullet point, affirming in writing any future conduct only opens you up to liability. (By affirming, you'd create some agreement that they could later make hay about you breaching if they're not happy with your future conduct.)

3. Follow the 3rd bullet point rigorously. They do have a claim on Trademark infringement, and that will hold up well enough. Clean it up ASAP.

4. Take a legal position on where you stand vis-a-vis the LinkedIn User Agreement.

- BrowserFlow (or Road to Ramen LLC) is not a party to that agreement, so you can argue that you're not bound by it. The individual person who is using BrowserFlow is, since they have a LinkedIn account.

- If you want to play it safe, remove the LinkedIn examples from your website. (Bullet two.)

- I would not change the existing functionality of BrowserFlow -- my view here is that this is general-purpose tech and BrowserFlow doesn't have an agreement with LinkedIn. Any consequence of misuse of BrowserFlow is on the end-user, not you. (As spelled out by the terms at https://browserflow.app/terms, which contain a limitation of liability section.)

Do prepare for your LinkedIn account to be banned though.

This is absolutely terrible and irresponsible advice. "Declare bankruptcy immediately and protect your assets" is the worst possible way to handle the situation, since: 1. Losing the court case does exactly what you don't want to happen here; 2. On top of that, you get to go bankrupt! Ruin!

> I increased my account by 5x since the lows of covid to present with simple large cap tech and etf strategies (...)

You managed to make money on a levered high-beta strategy in a zero interest rate environment? If you don't know who the rube is in a market, it's you. Add a bit of volatility and the smart kids at Jane Street will eat your portfolio. They are on both sides of every trade, taking your money no matter what you do.

The days of the "good track record" traders in the public markets have been over for 15 years. Forget your strategies, park your money in SPX and thank me later.

That's not the right frame of reference to use. Yes, they're a little more pollutive than cycling or walking. However, they're also much faster. Scooters compete with cars, not with walking. And it is obvious that scooters are much more environmentally friendly than people driving or purchasing cars.

Thanks for this, you're one of the very few in this thread who get the point.

Sure, food is a way of sharing cultures and connecting to some common history -- I agree with you that these are all means of self-expression and connection -- but I'm not really interested in this mode of expression.

And for most other parts of life, that's a legitimate position and you're allowed to opt out. Don't like musicals? Don't watch them. There are lots of things from which people derive emotional, cultural, community and individual value -- and where other people choose not to participate, and that's broadly seen as fine.

But food is in a different, much more oppressive position: I'm not allowed to opt out. I am forced to participate, to some extent by cultural forces, and more broadly by the primitive cravings of my body. And the fact that I don't have much choice about participation is a fact that I do not like.

Been there, to some extent already: https://jayriverlong.github.io/2021/11/25/pornography.html

Sorry, that was a typo on my end. I'll push a fix momentarily. (Do note that the math for $630k over 9y was right.)

Sorry, I wasn't aware of that. I was under the impression that palliative care is (at least generally) end-of-life comfort for the dying. I wish I had chosen a more appropriate term.

I wouldn't count strcmp, etc. It returns < 0 if str1 is shorter and > 0 if str1 is longer. Returning 0 means there is 0 difference. That's not a True/False.

"0" is not a "truthy" exit code for a system call, it rather denotes the absence of an error.

In my view, a value X being "truthy" means that `bool(X)` evaluates to TRUE, or `if(X)` gets executed.

Yeah, exit codes aren't what I'm talking about here.

In Hoon/Nock, `if(0)` literally gets interpreted as True. That's insane.

Sure, all data is on other people's servers, but the point is that you have tamper-proof, globally distributed, redundant copies of that data. Storing a piece of data on Ethereum is way different from hosting it on a single cloud machine.

Where in C is 0 truthy (or 1 falsy)?

Author here. I've watched a lot of international films, probably between 250 and 300. These are pretty much the only films I watch nowadays -- you're right that the American lens on film gets tiresome. Nonetheless, I still have many of the same issues with international film, given by constraints of the medium.

Author here -- No, I have never been a particular fan of action movies. I find them pretty boring; they're perhaps the worst offenders in the "all movies are the same" category.

Author here. I've dug reasonably far into international cinema -- at a glance, about 250 - 300 outside US Cinema, across various time periods: French New Wave, Korean, Iranian, etc.

On David Lynch -- I like stuff that is weird and unusual. I LOVED the first three or four episodes of Twin Peaks. But after that, it was an unbelievable disappointment. You cannot seriously tell me that the latter half of Season Two was good. It was clear that Lynch had drafted the body of a Blue Velvet-style movie that lent itself well to a few hours of material, but once you got past the first three or four episodes, there was no material left. From there on, the attempts to keep the plot together became more and more abstruse.

With a guy like Lynch, these movies do not showcase the "raw power of the human imagination" -- what they showcase is a man who is deeply disorganized.

To the extent that his films are flawed, they are always flawed in the same way: execution of the latter half. Premise and first half is always fine. That pattern speaks volumes.

Thanks! I've been watching more foreign films, but my problems persist. I'll check out some of these. (I've seen some, like Parasite, The Salesman, Tehran -- they were fine movies.)

This is FUD. If the electricity consumption becomes prohibitive, Bitcoin will just switch to Proof-of-Stake. Ethereum's already doing it. Zero electrical waste.

Orwell's less well-known works are some of his very best. Homage to Catalonia is superb, as are some of his essays -- Politics and the English Language I remember as an essential piece. He's a wonderful writer, especially at his more thoughtful or subtle (as compared to 1984 and Animal Farm, which are good but ultimately very on-the-nose).

Thank you for sharing the Postman talk. It's a superb set of insights.

I'm 29 now, and will soon turn 30. While I did my very first few deals when I was 24, I became much more active as I got older. There are many small checkwriters like me.

I'll assure you I am trying to do my best on that front.

I spend a lot of time listening to people who are being screwed. Trying to move the needle on polarization and climate change. On one hand, those are important movements. On the other hand, this is fixing problems we've brought upon ourselves -- it's maintenance. Plugging leaks in a moving ship.

It's probably more important/responsible to plug leaks than to day-dream about Mars, but part of me is wondering at what point we'll ever be done plugging leaks and have the time for big, groundbreaking innovations. Certainly the last few years have felt more like we've been running in neutral (both in terms of society/tech) than anything else.

That being said, I'm not sure that we're actually leaving our bull run. We keep getting more efficient. Sure, we don't have flying cars, but for example, we've connected the entire world via the internet, and it's only getting better. The milestones of obvious tangible technological progress -- supersonic travel, life extension, etc. are different. We've had real progress, but in more abstract ways, along a different axis.

Perhaps because we've been progressing mostly along that less visible axis, we've forgotten how to dream big in the tangible, physical world.

I think there's a solution in pseudonymity: it has the liberating effects of anonymity, while providing some accountability that there's a real human behind the digital face.

For example, suppose there's some repository of hashes of Personal IDs. If you want to sign up somewhere, you have to submit a Personal ID that corresponds to such a hash -- the Personal ID doesn't get stored anywhere, but it authenticates that you're a real human. (Obviously this is a naive solution and something more clever would be necessary, but it's just an example.)

I'm worried that this situation is going to get a great deal worse. A flurry of disinformation and online noise is somewhat manageable so long as it is coming from humans, who may be paid by a state or an enterprise to drive engagement with controversial topics.

It's going to get a million times worse when this gets automated.

Right now the quantity of disinformation is practically limited by the human capacity to post stuff online, but GPT-3 style automation will remove this limitation, and we will live in a world of all noise, no signal. Our knee-jerk adherence to "free speech" is opening up a dangerous scenario where we are more vulnerable than anyone else to what is effectively a DDOS on our minds.

I explored this topic in more detail in an essay of mine, where I lay out that a world of Anonymity + GPT-3 can undermine free speech by drowning out real human views and opinions with machine-generated, human-looking propaganda. https://jayriverlong.github.io/2020/07/24/gpt3.html

In the rest of the world, you see whole families living in one room together because they are poor. Virtually no-one chooses to live like this. Case in point, as soon as such people get money, they upgrade to larger houses.

Definitely. The "premium mediocre" stuff has been on my mind a lot, and I'm sure it's conceptually related. "Downward mobility" is a good term here.

Thank you! The problem is huge in scope, and there are many potential solutions (with lots of smart people debating them). Land scarcity and cost is a core part of the intergenerational wealth divide. There, variants of Georgism[0] are becoming more popular, but the debate is far from settled. In some places, legislators are setting up incentives (taxation, benefits to owner-occupiers rather than landlords, etc.) to correct these market issues. Effects of such recent legislation in Germany and Vancouver, for example, appear to be productive.

Regardless, I'm just trying to draw attention to the fact that a lot of current lifestyle trends are coping mechanisms to deal with poverty, no matter how good the Instagram pictures look.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism

Very well put. I wish I had included that phrase in my essay.