Notices by em (em@babka.social)

@kolev that sounds really healthy IMO. Some sort of algorithm that enables you to minimally engage with the disagreeable things such that you get your needs out of them, and are still not capitulating to them.

@kolev @serge I saw you write elsewhere that you were at the point to just, e.g. eat ham. In case you're doing some black and white thinking, I'd like to remind you of the "not yet" approach. You don't have to choose between being perfect and giving up altogether. And if you choose one way and it stops serving you, you can change again! We all need kindness and togetherness, it doesn't help bring about Olam Haba for you to destroy yourself e.g. boycotting unfree software.

@kolev @serge I used to really suffer over things like how horrible most food was for the world: for the human laborers, the animals, the soil, and the atmosphere. I stopped buying food altogether at one point, and planned my life around the trash pickup schedules in my town, so I'd eat the garbage before the trucks took it away.

I got out of that by focusing on pikuach nefesh. It's not my responsibility to singlehandedly fight every injustice at the cost of my life, I had to figure out something that would enable me to live. And that way of thinking would have ended me up in an early grave, I'm very sure. I had no regard for myself, and that is not really aligned with the Jewish perspective that we are each immensely valuable, e.g. bc we are made in the image of hashem.

You are not obligated to finish the work of the world!

I hope you find some comfort soon.

@kolev that's why I think we should get rid of the capitalists before getting rid of legal institutions. But truth be told, most people writing laws (not to mention enforcing them!) are also capitalists, literal owning class people, so...

@kolev @ashdod to further make my point about how different of a framework libertarianism is (and not trying to convince you of any my position 😃 ), my libertarianism involves the abolition of prices and money altogether.

but definitely does not involve abolishing holding people accountable.

if you're ever interested in it, peter kropotkin's "the conquest of bread" would be a good place to start
(here it is in digital form: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-the-conquest-of-bread)

@kolev @ashdod the libertarian position (both right and left) comes from an entirely different way of approaching the problem. But the fundamental point of the position is that the state isn't a legitimate arbiter of justice.

Trusting people who hold the power to kill with relative impunity (presidents, police, or people acting on their behalf) could also be said to be naive.

On the other hand, people do tend to regular themselves in most situations - it's generally only when we are pit against each other and need to act selfish in order to survive the conditions of capitalism that we tend to act in non-cooperstive ways.

Finally have some time to make it to the ship yard. Wish me luck

While I take a break from the destruction, I wana talk about something I've been learning from this boat experience. First, that everything in the world has an entire Talmud worth of lore beside it. Like you think you know about paint if you painted some walls in a house once? Wrong! Paint is incomprehensibly complex. If you want it to stick to various materials? even more so! I'm not even talking color theory, just getting the stuff to survive its environment and stick to the thing you're painting it onto.

But then, at the same time, when it comes to hardware, almost everything is just a remix of the same few principles. I guess how music is just a couple notes put in the right sequence, well there aren't too many new things you can do in hardware. You can basically just wedge and roll and clamp and crap like that. Modern machine theory has moved past the Six Simple Machines, but its still a pretty damn good description of the world.

Well I wana talk about gaskets! Did you know the whole world is basically held together by gaskets? It's extremely simple technology but so ubiquitous!

Any time you want a liquid to be one place and not the other, you probably have a gasket or two of some kind. This is a thing I just took off a sink I'm destroying, and it looks exactly like the type of thing I'd use if I wanted to get water from inside/outside of my boat on to the outside/inside of my boat. (of course right now I can just pass water through the various rust holes in the hull).

This thing works like: ocean - big nubby thing - gasket - hull of the boat - gasket - screw to clamp down the gasket - any hose with a valve to decide when water goes through the hole.

So you go out to the middle of the ocean with at least like 4 of these preventing the ocean from coming into your home. Or for this particular case it just prevents the sink from leaking into your cabinet. But the principle and even form factor is basically identical.

Your water bottle and coffee mug? They have gaskets to keep them from leaking. Your hose connection to your house, or your shower head. Gasket. I duno why, it just feels nice to see them everywhere. Like, I knew my water bottle had a rubbery thing, but it didn't occur to me that it's basically the same principle as how my sink plumbing works until I built or destroyed a few sink fixtures and learned about boat building.

Note, I don't think you wana use that setup as a thru-hull bc I'm pretty sure the brass and the stainless steel and the salt water will make the world's stupidest battery, and as one of the metals runs out of electrons the system will eventually fail and your boat will sink.

I don't have much faith in electoral politics and usually think the presidential election is just choosing the hue you shine the turd to... but I'm really fucking pissed off and sad that it legit might be trump again. People on either dumping biden either bc he's too anti-israel, or not anti-israel enough.

Meanwhile, if we as society and individuals really understood and internalized the impending climate catastrophe, we'd be in a full-on offensive against climate change. But instead we're just gona drive off this cliff feeling self righteous and indignant.

while $PARTNER's mom is in town, $PARTNER and I are working in the same room. and $PARTNER's work has named their computers things like "shirley", which makes me laugh almost all the time when they debug things.

What is Shirley doing? Why is Shirley behaving so weird?

and I all I think is,
"...and stop calling me Shirley"

@GreenSkyOverMe i think you're right!

we just got back from a 3 week vacation and don't have anything edible in the house, so i'm currently eating peanut butter from the jar with a spoon. it was brand new when i opened it, how much you think will be left when i'm done snacking?

My therapist asked me today, "do you have a stick with you today?", and I said, "uhhh, I might!" and I got pretty far taking inventory of my stuff before she clarified that she meant a USB stick.

@wurzelmann fairphone?

whenever we fuck up something in the kitchen, my goyische partner refers to the final product as the of our affliction, and i just find it so funny. i love imagining that's also how the guy who invented matzot felt. and 💜 feeling connected to an ancient tradition of occasional but epic cooking disasters

the codebase i'm working in has the following files in the root directory. each one is a configuration for a different tool? maybe? how would i know by looking at them?

• package.json
• project.json
• workspace.json

😞

Doomsday cults can never admit when they are wrong. Instead, they double down. We failed to make artificial intelligence so we pivoted to artificial life. We failed to make artificial life so now we’re trying to program the messiah.

If the news in the so called #AI world have you a little confused (or weirded out) lately, let the ever brilliant @emilygorcenski put it a little bit into context with their utterly epic blog post, https://emilygorcenski.com/post/making-god/