I’m beginning to think Emperors New Groove wasn’t 100% accurate

Next strategy will be hyperinflation to make sure that line keeps going up and to the right. Invest your Trump check® today!

I don’t know much about architecture, but a building is generally bespoke. It’s made to a specific physical location and has to work in its surroundings and be built to local regulations. From that viewpoint I can’t really judge how much value the blueprint actually has and therefore if it matters who “owns” the IP. The architect has done real legwork to bring that specific building to life and anyone else would need to redo much of it to copy the result.

Any human effort can be a creative artistic expression. You could mass produce a jacket or a hand-stitch an equivalent jacket and both will be warm. You could code a subtle and elegant CMS for a website or use some pre-built solution, both will deliver the same content. The difference is, people will laugh you out of the room for trying to patent your home stitching technique but nod and clap when you put a license on your code.

I do write code. Code only exists as a high level abstraction that codifies logic and allows us to talk about the function of the silicone without getting bogged down in details. The utility of code depends entirely on the context of the people looking at it (eg. different code works better for a small shop of experienced devs vs a large scale enterprise vs a FOSS project).

I can show you a for loop and talk in simple English about what it’s doing or write a formal proof showing that it meets the problem parameters. I could show you the compiled ASM and we would struggle to have the same conversation even with the exact same functionality. Same math, different syntactic sugar.

The process of building software is where humans will always be needed (identify the human meat space problems, define features, manage risk and cost, set delivery expectations, etc). The specifics of how we create the code within that process isn’t as crucial.

Unironically a AI’s biggest win. Absolutely fair criticism on art and weak imitations of human creativity, but code is just math with syntactic sugar. “Owning” algorithms and hiding implementations is such an absurd concept.

I often wonder how much better and more accessible software would be if everyone wasn’t reinventing nearly every wheel all the time. What if every phone could copy-paste an Airdrop implementation? What if printers just worked? What if you could put adblockers on any device? What if every online game could be self hosted and modded? AI is (for the moment) giving an approximation of that timeline and I’m here for it.

How do I invest in sea temperatures? $SST?

The encapsulation of Mao:

“If the worst came to the worst and half of mankind died [in nuclear war], the other half would remain while imperialism would be razed to the ground and the whole world would become socialist.”

Zapp Brannigan revolutionary with no plans beyond bravado. There was/is no universe where a nuclear holocaust ends in sunshine and roses instead of the (functionally) permanent crippling of the human race. That lack of critical thought is still infecting leftist conversation today: vastly underestimating the cost and implications of actions and relying on blind appeals to moral determinism.

And yet the USA’s production and consumption based emissions decreased over his tenure. Seems like replacing foreign fuel shipped from across the world with domestic fuel is a climate win, but that doesn’t let you own the libz…

War kills people and nobody pollutes less than a dead man 🤷

But do you actually have a source for that? Because agriculture is the largest driver of ecological collapse and I’d be shocked if a handful of aircraft carrier emissions outweighs tons and tons of foods and goods being shipped.

If anyone considers climate to be their highest priority, the choices weren’t even close to comparable. One was milquetoast green half measures that would kick the can a little further and one was nosedive everything off the cliff and irreversibly accelerate the climate catastrophe. If you stayed at home and were fine with the second choice you were flat out lying about your priorities.

Certain white guys will grow up listening to this and somehow end up cheering for fascists and complaining about their favorite bands “going woke”

If you don’t need to scrape anything out of the bowl on your last couple bites then you’re eating broth, not soup (consommé is a broth, fight me)

Or perhaps because it’s easier to scrape down the sides of a rounded container with a spoon?..

Everything is different (read: unknowable) to our experience as humans. Plants are well known to react to stimulus and damage, some are very sensitive to it and have sofisticated methods to communicate the stimulus. From a philosophical perspective, there’s no way to know that they would “feel” in those situations.

Does a lack of physical agency evolve into a tranquil fatalist acceptance or do they suffer in an agonizing silence? Similarly, does the limited insect cognition of crickets let them feel the dread of lurking predators or dull the intrinsic terror their ecological niche?

This is the problem I have with discussions on animal cruelty. There’s an assumption that we can project our human experience onto almost anything. We have the hubris to implicitly or explicitly anthropomorphize creatures to the point of personhood. Why does a tree limb have to be a human limb in order for us to ethically consider it?

In my opinion, the only useful discussion is about our human reaction to cruelty/perceived cruelty. The shades of acceptance or repulsion will vary by our personal lived experiences (a bird might be a crop stealing pest or a beloved companion), but that doesn’t mean we can’t reach a stochastic answer on which behaviors towards others beings we find ethical.

An average person in a certain country in the 21st century finds human torture morally abhorrent, mammal abuse to be disturbing and the chemical genocide of many insect species to be mundane. Another person in a different place and time might disagree. Maybe our resulting ethical framework is objectively correct or entirely inverted, but the exercise shows us more about ourselves and builds our empathetic awareness.

• one month old account
• every comment is repeating tankie talking points

Bro you’re not beating the allegations

Look ladies and gentlemen, no straw man needed! Already here in the flesh! Like a terminally online Candyman, say the name you’ll summon the keyboard praxis warrior.

Too hard to search your own comment history? I don’t blame you, 21.4k comments at an average of 668 per month is too much for me too. And of course that’s just your .ml account, lord knows what you’d have to sift through on your alts.

Having actual real life responsibilities prevents me from keeping up with your Kirk-esque pace of a reply every 43 waking minutes, so how about we compromise. You can just copy-paste the existing comments calling out your bullshit right underneath the drivel you regurgitate. It’s all the same conversation anyway, it will save us both time.

“Not a debate” is 100% accurate. They just copy paste some tangential and paper thin propaganda and tweak the verbiage. Basically LLM slop with some extra steps. If you punch a hole in that topic (after a bunch of equivocation and nit picking) they retreat to some other copy-paste talking point.

It’s easy to look “smart” at a glance when your conversation technique is the exact same playbook as Charlie Kirk:

• Pick someone random with minimal preparation (college student :: commenter)
• in a poor environment for a debate (a desk under a tent :: deep thread in a random comment section)
• and throw a nonstop stream of garbage at them (unexamined statistics on black crime :: unexamined stats on USSR beef production)
• when cornered, appeal to a genetic fallacy and change the topic (“that’s a fake woke study” :: “that’s CIA propaganda”)

There’s no way to have a conversation unless you already start in agreement with their priors. I’ve watched them get backed into a corner on basic stuff that contradicts their own talking points in the same thread. Paraphrasing it went something like “Communism is a perfect rational science” => Why don’t we discard the pseudo-religious trappings and make decisions that optimize for quantifiable quality of life indicators à la the HDi? => “Well actually communism is required for the vibes”

Someone who grows food for their neighbors I guess

I think we’ve been spoiled by an extended era where it was possible to be truly anonymous on the internet, which is public infrastructure at its core. In that perspective it’s fundamentally worse than real life for privacy. Everything goes through centralized hardware, making it trivial to log your traffic and digital fingerprint in perpetuity. Imagine if the camera at your local park didn’t just see you enter, but perfectly stored your height, weight, shoe size, eye color, gait, etc…

From that it becomes pretty clear that the only safe way to use the digital space is read-only on socially acceptable platforms with the herd protection of the pseudo-anonymous crowd. And of course, that makes the internet much less interesting and useful, so I might as well go touch grass and talk to my friends in physically private spaces.

Well it was fun while it lasted at least… 🍻