For-profit US tech boycott club!

It’s more like, a blog is a personal thing. Using some off the shelf solutions removes that sense of personality to me I guess. It kind of makes the act of publishing the post feel like I’ve cheated somehow, when, all I’m really doing is putting text on the internet and I’m perfectly capable of doing that myself from a technical POV.

I get this with game dev as well, I’m much happier with games where I feel like I’ve worked with lower level tooling than a pre made engine. Sort of a personal not made here syndrome thing I suppose.

I’ve had a few hosted ones but I kind of hate them. I think I’ll build and self host a solution at some point because I just like things that I’ve made myself better.

I bought a collection of Dreamcast bits, Sonic Adventure and Powerstone (yes I know they’re easy to pirate, but the ✨vibes✨) a while back on a whim without owning the console and now I’ve got a whole setup with a CRT. Living the retro dream(cast).

All well and good until you turn up to see Farage posing with a pint.

They were pretty well optimised, frequently sharpened and they had an angled blade with a decent amount of weight behind it. This means that there’s reduced surface area at the point of contact so higher penetration. Guillotines don’t miss as they’ve got a guide, unlike axes which were known for occasionally gouging the victim’s back, because executioners did miss!

Potentially with experienced staff members they might try to call its bluff but then it seems like they’ve also been uprooting experienced personnel, making everyone unstable, replacing them with Trumper patsies etc. which probably minimises this kind of pushback.

I guess it depends too much on the nature of the crawler. Does it actually extract links from robots.txt or is it merely ignoring them? If the crawlers are distributed, do page hits come from the same IP that the robots.txt was hit from?

It gets harder and harder to get away from CDNs and captchas, which are not exactly good things from an open source POV for the most part.

I think there’s another issue in that the agencies who receive the executive order are essentially obliged to act as if they are legally binding until they’re shot down in court. This means there’s a sort of time gap where an executive order can enact an essentially permanent change (e.g. delete a bunch of info, bomb something, etc.) and the court has no way to get it reversed by the time they rule on it.

I hear this kind of thing a lot and I’ve been tempted to think it myself. But ultimately I have come to the conclusion that twice is too often to be a coincidence and this kind of thinking has been too complacent.

There’s this whole alignment of the billionaire class taking long term, unveiled and direct ownership of the government sphere, in the most powerful, militarised country in the world, in a way that was even unprecedented under neoliberalism. And it really depends on how little backstabbing goes on between them which determines how long this show will go on for. It might be 5 years, it might be 500.

Think of it this way: the first term was reconnaissance. He and his team were probing all the weak points and creating the conditions for the second term, doing things like getting the right supreme court judges in place that now he’s personally almost untouchable from a legal standpoint.

This second term is the main event so to speak, and I don’t think the US should expect the pace of change to slow down any time soon.

How many articles do we need about Tesla cars being destroyed or vandalized?

Well we need something to break up all the bad news

“Lights out” factories have been an industry goal for a while. It does seem like it’s finally within reach. Honestly what I don’t understand is why western nations with relatively high labour costs and an increasing desire for autonomy and skilled job creation haven’t been pursuing this.

Definitely just poking a stick inside a printer

I guess fundamentally I see the mind as arising out of physicality and emergent constructs within that physical system rather than being fundamental. The reason the Gaia hypothesis appeals to me then is because it is just an extension of that emergence idea but across the whole world

Maybe like a limited Gaia hypothesis. The whole planet is a conscious thing, we are its braincells and its hands.

if there’s any medical conspiracy going on, it’s that the effort to destroy trust in the medical establishment is a ploy to promote eugenics and survival of the fittest by modern day Nazis.

Any time there’s a ready meal from the supermarket and for some reason the adhesive is way stronger than the plastic film. You end up with loads of bits of film just sort of stuck to the rim of it. Super annoying.

We’re just smelly sacks of biology like a rat or a lizard who happen to have developed higher reasoning capacity for whatever reason.

As an exercise, try to be conscious about your thought process, write stuff down. When your thought process leads to an action with a consequence or verifiable prediction, consider: did it pan out? Was that because of your thought process or a fluke? If something went wrong then what about your thought process didn’t help you?

This can help you to narrow down stuff like: did a possibility not arise to you, were you biased/overly dogmatic in some way, did you just not know some relevant information or a particular technique that could have helped you? Have you gotten out of practice with something? Was the situation even in your control?

And like wise if it’s good, what can you repeat? Did you apply some good critical thinking rule or something you learned? Are there situations where this wouldn’t have happened this way?

I find it’s impractical to do this for everything but worthwhile doing every so often and sometimes this can call out patterns in your cognitive processes.

Another one on mental clarity: do the apple test. Try to visualise an apple. At some point I struggled with this and got mediocre results but I was able to improve it by doing some visualisation based “meditation”/exercises and employing some techniques like verbally saying or thinking the word “apple” or a description of one and/or focusing on parts of it before attempting to call the whole apple into view. This had some carry over benefits like being able to visualise things in blender in my head better.