Notices by sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net), page 4
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Saturday, 05-Oct-2024 04:42:05 JST 
sj_zero
Hugs with German UX and English engineering. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Friday, 04-Oct-2024 21:50:55 JST
sj_zero
Whoever you have kids with will have a place in the future.
So it should be that people fall in love, have sex, have kids, and those kids will be The future, and that's the future of the human race.
I hope you love your wife, because you're making another one of her! -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Friday, 04-Oct-2024 19:19:17 JST
sj_zero
He'd probably be a lot happier with his life if he just became a pipefitter at that point... -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Friday, 04-Oct-2024 02:57:21 JST
sj_zero
50% increase in job cut announcements, but no increase in jobless claims.
I suspect this means The jobs being cut are good ones with severance that prevents you from filing a jobless claim. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Thursday, 03-Oct-2024 23:50:50 JST
sj_zero
The brains we have can be considered to have 3 different sections: the reptilian brain which is largely reactive and instinctual, the mammalian brain which works with emotions and memories, and the human brain that has higher thinking centers. Within the human brain is a powerful ability to model others minds, which in a sense is a form of telepathy, because we try to build models of those around us to understand them and see them. That isn't a rational process, it's subconscious and autonomous. It's paired with the broader function of our prefrontal cortex, which has the similarly amazing function of predicting the future, allowing us to predict and plan for future events.
To "fire on all cylinders" as a human with a big wrinkly brain then, you need to accept all modes of thinking. The rational brain is important because it can be used to reach places that are unintuitive through logic and reason, but the irrational brain or the subconscious brain is also equally or even more important because it can be used to places that are intuitively understandable but not necessarily rational or logical. That's why the paradox of understanding logically that the universe is meaningless, valueless, and senseless coexists with the understanding that there is nevertheless an intuitive meaning, value, and sense to the universe, and doesn't need to be rationalized. Both are true, but both are false. But depending on the situation, certain things are more true in that they are more useful to go with.
So while I agree in some ways, I'd suggest that you shouldn't make it an either/or situation.
If my view is correct, then your intuition does still need to be trained like your rational mind, and that's the benefit of society's ancient wisdom -- to help your intuition "kick in" and be able to use telepathy requires a base of intuitive knowledge about other people you don't automatically get, and that would be why some people are better "telepaths" than others. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Thursday, 03-Oct-2024 20:09:51 JST
sj_zero
I also go with my gut, but I've also got a highly developed moral sense I can rely on. That's a key thing. But where did that sense of awe in the face of deep virtue come from?
Unlike most people at most times, for whom a discussion like this is abstract, right now the discussion of moral development is extremely embodied, immediate, and relevant, since I'm raising a son who will have to navigate his own way through the world, and I have a limited amount of time to guide him. Maybe 10 years where he'll listen to me, then another 10 years where he won't be listening to me nearly as much, then he'll be on his own, assuming I'm even still alive by the end of that second 20 years.
If I assume that this little life in front of me will magically become moral because the universe has a clear objective morality that will be obvious, then I'm going to fail because that's untrue, and I'll raise a child who lacks virtue. Many people in my generation are doing just that. Immoral, illiterate kids who go on to fail at life. I could be long dead by the time this little boy reaches 40, he can't live in my basement until he's 40.
So you have to have a mental model for the idea that a new mind will need to build a model of virtue. Part of that is being a role model of virtuous behavior. Part of that is going out into the world and teaching virtue by doing things together and informing him how to behave in real-world circumstances and correcting him when he behaves in a manner that isn't virtuous. And part of that is telling the stories of our civilization which help the mind understand virtue by seeing it in different circumstances. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Thursday, 03-Oct-2024 11:48:21 JST
sj_zero
There's a big problem with this train of thought, and that's the ought-is problem. You can't get to morality from objectivity. There is no such thing as moral truth written into the objective universe. Thus, the phrase "The epistemological foundation of moral law" isn't really something that fits together with reality. There is no epistemological basis for moral law in a rational sense. You might counter that there are commonalities between humans, and to an extent you would be correct, but no particular human is objective, and the human race among all the known races isn't particularly special necessarily. A thing that is not human will have different values, and even different humans may have different values.
You have a morality imparted upon you by the civilization you live in and all the baggage attached to it. You think your morality is self-evident and self-proving to any rational person, but that's because you're a product of your civilization and have been built by those influences. In another society, the idea that an important man can't cut down an unimportant man where he stands would be ludicrous and offensive. In yet another society, the idea that a conqueror can't cut down the conquered would be ludicrous and offensive. There's an island in the pacific islands near India that has a neolithic tribe living there, and any human being who steps foot on their island is immediately murdered, and to do otherwise is considered ludicrous and offensive. In their own ways, they're all right, but they're also all incompatible with the idea that we're all equal in the eyes of God and thus it is wrong for one man to murder another.
The context here is a discussion where people suggest rejecting religion or fairy tales and other stories because they're "delusion". In that sense, if you reject those things then you're rejecting culture and history on a large scale, which is effectively assuming you can take facts and logic and magic yourself into a value system. The most famous attempt at this still ended up inheriting the values of the culture of the time, and still ended up the most murderous ideology in history. In another post in this thread, I talked about some examples of objective facts we learned from the crazy stories of the past, you can't just assume we know everything there is to know if we wipe all that out.
Objectively speaking, life on earth isn't meaningful. We all live on a tiny speck of dust surrounding an inconsequential star, and we're likely to be extinct within a mere million years or so, but even if we survive that we're going to eventually have to deal with our yellow dwarf star entering the red giant cycle and our planet and everything about it will be swallowed by billions of years of atomic fire until the sun uses up its fuel entirely and becomes an ultradense chunk of matter slowly cooling over millions more years. And we're unlikely to figure out any way out of the inevitable. All traces of the human race will be wiped out, anything you considered good, anything you considered evil, not that anyone or anything will ever even know we existed anyway, on a timeline that is possibly going to see the universe become a slowly dying and dwindling place over timespans we can't even begin to imagine.
Given that fact, and the fact that we'd all die out of despair if we think too hard about that sort of cosmic existential horror, we humans cluster around meaning or value we can find subjectively the same way our ancestors huddled around the primitive fires they learned to create out of nothing but sticks. Pretty it up with fancy words, but we're just trying to figure out the ways to live, and there's no mathematical equation for doing so. But those who came before us had ideas they thought worked, and so they'd pass those messages on through stories. And they also pass messages to us through genetics, where many subtle parts of our genome whisper in our ears about lessons those who came before us learned.
We have the capacity for both violence and peace, both prosocial and antisocial practices, because regardless of our personal desire for a peaceful and prosocial world, the world is an ever-changing place and individuals constantly will be tested with the reality that you can't always make friends, you can't always make peace, and people who are good sometimes or even often die. So we can't assume that one path or the other is written in the atoms of the universe, and we also can't assume that one path or the other has any moral value in the face of a truly nihilistic universe. We realize that, and that's one interpretation for why we stepped out of the garden of Eden when we ate the fruit of knowledge of good and evil -- once we understand its nature, we can never go back to the dumb primate bravado that we're definitely dong the right thing no matter what we do.
Postmodern man is an idiot. If we were as smart as we thought we were, we wouldn't be committing suicide. If we were as smart as we thought we were, we wouldn't be so depressed or otherwise mentally ill so widely. We're better off materially than many of our ancestors but they would say they're better off in ways that matter than we are. We think we're the most moral humans to have ever lived, but we tried to wipe our slates clean to get there, and that's not how human beings work. We lose our ancient wisdom, we lose the epistemological basis for the few things we think can actually work. Eventually we lose our morality because it's just loose sheets of paper sitting on a table.
I want to make it clear that I'm not necessarily saying that all morality is subjective in the sense of cultural relativism. What I'm saying is that there's a lot more going into a successful value system than we think, and we are arrogant to throw out the basis of our current values to think we'll somehow be able to do better without ancient wisdom trying to just wipe the slate clean and keep writing. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Wednesday, 02-Oct-2024 18:45:36 JST
sj_zero
I find it odd that in some ways we live in the least symbolic era of all time, where people will pick apart organized religion or fairy tales as if they're scientific fact told with the full intent of expressing the results of a lab test, but in other ways we live in the most symbolic era of all time where everyone chooses their words so carefully because everyone is expected to look at words and actions through more lenses than an optometrist.
It was actually a postmodern instinct I had to shut off because it's a poisonous way of looking at your own life. I mean, try to be a good parent or a good husband or a good brother, and the postmodern mind starts setting off alarm bells that through a literary lens you may be setting yourself up to be killed off-screen or something.
Human beings have always had an instinct for metaphor, but I think the inauthentic deconstruction and critical lensing of the current day is a unique artefact of pop-postmodernism. In that sense, the millennial generation craves authenticity but they've been trained by their media from birth to tear down anything authentic and replace it with 15 layer deep false symbolism. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Tuesday, 01-Oct-2024 21:44:15 JST
sj_zero
Furthering the metaphor, I bet there is a sort of ideological immune system that will eventually tap the brakes most of the time, but for something that doesn't have that immune system by design and just keep on getting eaten up. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Tuesday, 01-Oct-2024 19:06:52 JST
sj_zero
https://youtu.be/I5g_7AtUzQg
These two have some interesting things to say, and this episode is about the "pod people" effect of wokeness.
Given what happens every time, inauthentic people injecting themselves into hobbies so they can eat them from inside, you can see the pod people actions, and also why we might have an instinct against such people -- like a brachnoid wasp, they lay their eggs inside your favorite properties, and when they think they can get away with it those eggs hatch and they start to devour those properties from the inside out.
You can see from there why normalish people get the heebie jeebies from such people, because you can sense their inauthenticity. "As a little girl I always loved Warhammer 40k!" No you didn't.
But here's a further take: thinking about it this way, I'm not sure progressive ideology is itself inherently pod peopleish or even inherently woke the way we think about it. I kind of think that default liberal ideology was super powerful (a famous study around 2007 showed 75% of millennials agreed with it), and so the pod people were drawn to it. It looks like the cause of the disease, but it's just the current carrier, like a zombie beetle carrying around wasp larvae. I'm not even sure it's "patient zero", I think those pod people ate up organized religion before they caused it to collapse, and now they're eating stuff like opposing racism and the like, but they'll jump to a new host once this one is dead (and make no mistake, it's dying). The pod people also force others to conform or be expelled, so that explains why some people who used to be cool seem to have stopped and started acting like pod people full-time.
I can't predict what the next host will be, but it'll be something super popular. It may even be "anti-wokeness" seeing how badly progressive ideology has been destroyed, where they'll inject themselves into it, take power for themselves, make it totally insufferable with pod people, and people will start to hate this thing too. I can imagine something wholesome like anti-pedophilia being taken over, because then you get the power to accuse individuals of horrific crimes due to your movement, and they'll even eat that host so badly people just won't care anymore. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Tuesday, 01-Oct-2024 03:26:41 JST
sj_zero
apt purge cups* foomatic-filters lpr -y && apt autoremove -y -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Monday, 30-Sep-2024 09:43:13 JST
sj_zero
Rome is decadent, all we can do is find a hermitage and start rebuilding quietly so we can emerge once the city is empty. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Monday, 30-Sep-2024 09:43:11 JST
sj_zero
It's a good video that suggests that in the context of what we're talking about, we need to go small again, and have the people owning their own plot of land. Metaphorically, that suggests to me something I've been talking a lot about lately, having your own little slice of the world. Once game development is mechanized and made into a billion dollar industry of virtual serfs tilling someone else's land it was always ripe for perversion.
So it's like other things in life right now -- we need to make our own things, own them, not give them up in the face of rewards from empire. In so doing we'll be free, and likely happier. But a small farm will only ever produce a small amount and we need to refocus our visions to account for that. Instead of coveting the corrupt cities, we should be looking instead at what our own lands can produce. It won't be bright and shiny, it won't field giant armies to conquer the entire continent, but it'll be honest and it can be good... -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Monday, 30-Sep-2024 06:12:18 JST
sj_zero
I always feel like if you're a game developer you're sort of selling the family farm if you don't want to have the competence internally to build a game engine. I might just be really old school in this regard, but it seems like most of the best game developers of all time had an engine in house, got really good at it, and were able to turn over great games pretty quickly that did exactly what they wanted them to do. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Sunday, 29-Sep-2024 21:35:23 JST
sj_zero
One thing that I've always gotten a kick out of on Asus products is they always have inspirational phrases on the box that are just way overselling what you've got.
The eeepc box say something like "rock solid - heart touching" -- which is a pretty high bar to set for a computer that was one of the slowest things you could buy new when it was released. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Sunday, 29-Sep-2024 13:15:23 JST
sj_zero
One of the most important parts of the "student debt" debate is that much of that money is likely not spent on tuition, but on living expenses, and "living" isn't the same for everyone.
I lived a pretty cheap life in college and so didn't end up with many student loans, they're all paid back now. Other people bought cars, went on vacations, held parties, and overall lived like they were living in a boomer college movie.
People might argue that the student loan industry and higher education are predatory. I'd counter that the "Taxpayers should pay back my student loans" argument is predatory. After getting an elite education and a chance to join the upper class and for some people the literal 4-year vacation of a lifetime, suddenly it's everyone's responsibility to pay for that for them?
The colleges already get massive government subsidies from the taxpayer, go after the colleges to use that money to eliminate tuitions, rather than further fleecing taxpayers (or unborn generations) to pay for individual's personal consumption. If you think of the actual cost of goods, a university classroom can pay for itself with just a few students, even without government assistance. 10 students paying a tuition of 10k a year, well that's 100k right there, but in reality many classes have a lot more than 10 students to start, sometimes classes can have huge numbers of students in a year. It means there needs to be a lot less administration, but the idea of universities are already virtually self-sufficient by themselves with fairly low tuition costs, and then they get millions in funding from the government (even private institutions with huge amounts of money in the bank get hundreds of millions of dollars from the government), and then they have value added services such as dorms and food plans and the like, it all adds up to something that should be wildly sustainable with much lower costs. Most things I've read suggest the problem is an overwhelming administrative system that dwarfs the size of the actual teaching population, so there's room to cut.
But at the end of the day, tuition is almost immaterial compared to the fact that many student loans went to non-educational causes, and so if people's student loans are forgiven, what we're really saying is that people who never had a chance to become elites because they couldn't afford to go to college should pay for vacations in cancun and keggar parties, we're asking unborn children to pay for party drugs and video games. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Friday, 27-Sep-2024 02:17:58 JST
sj_zero
Hey guys, I figured it out. The Chinese are telling their investors they need to "work harder" but these American companies aren't good with accents so they hear "woke harder".
Seen it a million times, could happen to any of us. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Sunday, 22-Sep-2024 11:02:13 JST
sj_zero
Lots of people make fake posts about their 2 year old giving opinions about politics that either never happened or the kid was just parroting what they've been told by an adult.
Honestly, even if a child says something I agree with, that's unimportant. Even if *my* child says something I agree with, that's unimportant. Kids aren't particularly wise, the best they can do is imperfectly reflect what they've been raised in.
But something happened both times I took my son to the park today, and I'm proud of what I saw: He saw litter on the ground, picked it up, and put it in the garbage. He did it a bunch of times, too. It wasn't a fluke.
I think that's a good habit to be in at the age of 2. If he's reflecting service to the community, then I'm not just proud of him, I'm proud of myself for presenting an image where he mimics doing something like that. It reflects a growing virtue in him, and potentially virtue within myself that he sees.
And to be real for a minute, kids are a lot of different things. I was just about to hit "send" on this message, and I hear him giggling, and I'm like "aww hehehe....wait a minute, I know that giggle", and sure enough he was taking a mouthful of water from his bottle and spitting it all over himself making a huge mess so I had to go clean it up. He's still 2, after all! -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Friday, 20-Sep-2024 23:19:56 JST
sj_zero
As a 40 year old married dude, that guy looks like a 60 year old married dude. -
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sj_zero (sj_zero@social.fbxl.net)'s status on Monday, 16-Sep-2024 18:05:16 JST
sj_zero
The AC/DC conversion is just a bridge rectifier and some smoothing caps. They tend to be pretty minimal power draws.
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