somatic

People have reasonable expectations of privacy.

They expect their phone calls not to be recorded. They expect that their emails are treated with the same inviolability as their letters were. They expect their letters to be as they were before the advent of technologies that governments are now using to mass record the contents of letters without opening them, of which technologies and practices they have no knowledge.

All of these expectations, and many more, are now ritually violated in the most outrageous manner.

It isn’t the responsibility of the individual to combat every violation of his person. Not only is it an unreasonable expectation for society’s “default setting” to be the casual violation of its citizens, but it’s also literally impossible for even the richest, smartest, and most diligent among us to avoid getting screwed... in some way... when there are so, so, SO many ways to get screwed.

Because, in 2019, if your highest priority is NOT getting screwed, you might literally have to live alone in a cabin in the mountains.

Which is why you can take your atomic-individual libertarian “oh you “just” need to somehow avoid every omnipresent feature of contemporary life” and take a fucking hike.

I demand the right to walk to the grocery, buy a sandwich, walk to the park, eat the sandwich, and walk home, without having my minute-by-minute location invisibly and undetectably recorded and sent to ANY corp/gov, my purchase recorded and sent to ANY corp/gov, my face/gait/person scanned and analyzed by ANY corp/gov, etc. and so forth.

And I should have to take no special action for any of this, because this is the default setting.

> When the spacecraft is about 2,000 ft (610 m) from target, it switches to the landing phase. This is when the computer hands over manual control to the Commander, who guides it in for final touchdown. Slowed to a hover, the module can be steered by tilting it like a helicopter to make any necessary corrections.

A rocket landing on (top of) a column of thrust and a helicopter suspended below a disc of thrust are not even remotely the same thing. Classic failure to reason from first principles.

Here’s a suitable analogy: it’s like the difference between having a center of mass behind the center of pressure, and a center of mass in front of the center of pressure.

For the interested layman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitudinal_static_stability

So hang on, let me rephrase this: Lockheed has basically fired most of its most highly experienced engineering talent? Is that right?

What did Lockheed hope to accomplish by this move?

Do you know what the total realized effect was?

If our military-industrial complex is so concerned with protecting operational capabilities, then why have they facilitated the offshoring of industries to China, especially industries concerned with the manufacture of some of the world’s highest technology? Shenzhen literally has skyscrapers of high electronics logistical heaven; in America we spend billions of dollars on fuck-all software and can’t repair broken consumer electronics circuitboards.

> I worked at a large tech company that had

How big is their finance department now?

NYT, WaPo, and the rest are just aliases for particular groups of people. It all starts with those people, at an individual level. What sort of person is going into “journalism” these days, and why? Would you? Do you know anyone who would? Why or why not? Would you turn down a job at Google to become a “journalist”, any “journalist”? Would you recommend that course of action to a bright teen?

APT is written in C++ and YUM is written in Python.

Besides the Python2->3 thing, are there actually any practical advantages to using a lower-level language for managing packages?

> and now every site out there takes 20 seconds to load with 10 little spinner icons while all the HTTP requests go out to their microservices on docker clusters, and everything requires a hundred-library-deep build stack

That’s just the cost of progress. Gotta break a few eggs to make an omelet. No pain, no gain. There are always casualties in war. Get with the times, grandpa.

If there were no JS, how would anyone make billions of dollars of ad revenue?

What is old is new again.

Brutalism for President 2020.

Yeah, I see what you mean.

You know, it’s pretty interesting that IBM was painted as the devil, but that they made this standard, interoperable computer system that you could touch at such a low level. Now it’s all Windows 10 and MacBooks and Linux userland, and even if it were possible, good luck finding documentation for any of that.

—Sent from my iPad.

My observation is fundamentally that if open source can be cannibalized by profit-seeking entities, it will be so cannibalized.

It’s true that I haven’t comprehensively studied the GPL.

Mostly I’ve observed companies using hundreds, thousands, or millions of hours (depending) of the very hard work of many very smart open source devs in building their own proprietary systems on top and making fucktons of money, none of which is ever seen by the people who made 90 or 95% of their business possible.

It’s true that I haven’t comprehensively studied the license.

Like, because there are so many more unknowable levels of abstraction now? Hyper-specialization?

The flat-Earther 9/11-truther astrologer probably really is primarily motivated by "intellectual curiosity", he probably just has poor priors. Which is to say, he's seeing that world as he's seeing it, it's just that something in his lower intellectual foundation is rotten.

The interesting question is whether that specific bit of rotten reasoning is still accessible to alteration after one has passed through that specific phase of neuroplasticity.

never relax

Here's the text of #6: "The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research."

My thought is not to restrict anyone from doing anything. Rather that, for example, any profit-seeking entity can use any code, but that that profit-seeking entity must pay a standard and proportional fee to the license-holder of that code, generally its author(s) and/or maintainer(s).

Does that qualify as "restricting anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor"? Going by the wording, I would lean toward "no".

Furthermore, while on that page I glanced at the other paragraphs, and I couldn't help but notice that according to #9: "License Must Not Restrict Other Software" and its text: "The license must not place restrictions on other software that is distributed along with the licensed software. For example, the license must not insist that all other programs distributed on the same medium must be open-source software.", the GNU/GPL don't qualify as "open source" software.

It is to laugh.

What if there were a license that made all hobbyist and educational use free and open source, and all commercial use propriety with kickbacks to devs?

Would that resolve your hemispheric conflict?

Will do, thanks.

I’m all for good governance, and I’m glad that most people in government are trying to do the best that they can with what they have available.

But I think that it’s pretty clear that they’re not running the show, where it really matters.

If I had to guess, I’d say that most of these people are aligned in factions, most of which probably have roughly similar interests and so are working fully or partially independently towards roughly the same things, probably with no little amount of internicene jostling for position.

And in the process they’re probably producing technological horrors simply because it’s convenient and effective to do so. No hard feelings.

Conspiracies happen all the time, and I would imagine that few ever come to light.

Yeah, but what if the marketing isn’t for consumers?

What if someone at Apple was smart enough to figure out that the rampant abuses perpetrated by privacy-monetizing Silicon Valley et al. were ultimately time-limited and would blow up eventually?

What if Apple’s privacy-focused marketing was aimed at regulators?

>As a software engineer, I'm just an entertainer for rich people.

What do you mean by this?

All freedom is a relative proposition.

Sure they are: they’re all things which normal people wouldn’t do to other people, and in which the perpetrators weren’t punished.

And by “normal people wouldn’t do to other people”, I mean “stark raving mad”.

I don’t know about you, but the Snowden Revelations dramatically shifted my baseline of “paranoid schizo”. Before, I thought the prospect utterly bananas that “the government” was tapping every phone call, strong-arming ISPs, and intercepting mail en route to its destination.

Then I found myself in a rabbit hole of Tuskegee experiments, Operation Northwoodses, MKULTRAs, human-animal hybrids, and so on.

Now, the question I ask is, “is this technologically possible?”

By that standard you could say that every decision made by everyone is made in pursuit of a better life. Which is true, sure, but it obfuscates certain arguably important points.

By that standard, existence is something forced on you in a way, not a matter of actual choice.

Newsflash: you are your biology. Your biology demands its continuation. Defy nature at your own peril.

If you want plants to die, starve them of carbon dioxide.

You have cash, good health, and free time.

Take up an “extreme” sport. Skiing, SCUBA diving, mountaineering, surfing, windsurfing, paragliding. Become a de facto member of your chosen activity’s local scene.

Or just find a girl, ???, propagate your bloodline into the future.

Like, whatever, man. It’s over when they’re packing the dirt in your grave.