baltakatei

I really enjoyed Chokepoint Capitalism (2022), the book he co-authored (read: had someone else back up his frequently repeated anecdotes with reputable citations in a proper Bibliography) with Rebecca Giblin. 90% of the interview can be found in that book already with 10% being new slogans and anecdotes that can’t be found in that book.

Step 2: stay dead

Sunlight is always doing this. It’s just that we call overlapping projections of a boring white-filled circles “dappled sunlight”.

Next up: the modifier letter apostrophe U+02BC ( ʼ ).

Or my Steam library.

couldn’t they have put people in personal heavens

From Agent Smith’s monologue to Morpheus in the first movie:

Agent Smith: Have you ever stood and stared at it, marveled at its beauty, its genius? Billions of people just living out their lives, oblivious. Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world. Where none suffered. Where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed that we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that as a species, human beings define their reality through misery and suffering. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this, the peak of your civilization.

From The Animatrix, Neal Gaiman’s Goliath, and across the three movies, I recall that the machines did try putting humans in paradise. Their goal was to use human flesh minds to perform calculations they could not, so, to an extent, if the human could be tricked into thinking they were in paradise with a small fraction of their mind, the machines could occupy the rest (presumably to control fusion reactors, but mostly to augment the machines’ cognitive abilities). The narrative implied that human minds consistently rejected utopias and paradises, spawning rogue entities like Neo and Trinity who possessed destructive abilities the machines couldn’t comprehend but could empirically measure.

Basically, human cognitive abilities most valued by the machines also were inextricably tied to chaotic destruction of whatever medium the humans occupied. Like how uranium is useful for generating electricity but turns its container radioactive, melts down if unmoderated, and can create thermonuclear weapons.

I long for mixed used housing without an automobile parking requirement in an area with ubiquitous mass transit.

Never let a crisis go to waste. — Machiavellian leaders

It’s better to compare yourself to a version that is successful together with your neighbors. At that point, you realize the stereotypical understanding of “success” is equivalent to “beating down your competitors until you alone stand above them”. Shared success is indistinguishable from being ordinary.

This reminds me of the campsite rule but applied globally: “Leave the world a better place than you found it.”

If your ethos is to own and manage as many housing units as possible, you’re not going to improve them since, paradoxically, leaving the world a better place doesn’t help grow your enterprise. On the other hand, if every housing unit is managed exclusively and only by a single local person who doesn’t split their attention, then that person has a personal incentive to improve their home since they suffer the direct consequences of neglecting their possessions.

“Hey, I’m kinda lost [and you look a bit lost too]. Do you mind if we band together until we figure things out?”

Looked up which were the highest paying jobs for people not inheriting wealth or social connections. Realized the field was oil & gas and the highest job was Petroleum Engineer, took Chemical Engineering because of its wide applicability, accepted I’d be working in the boonies for at least a decade of my life, made it work.

5/10. Wouldn’t recommend for the loneliness.

Indomie comes with its own cute little oil packet suspending oil-soluble spices. =D

That’s oral history in my book. I wonder what the first equivalent of the Odyssey will be translated.

“She probably committed some grave sin in her previous life.” — religious leaders of my childhood

How else do you expect to fit two morbidly obese American parents and their morbidly obese children?

It’s happening!

I’m pretty sure it’s gold and white.

Sounds like military recruitment which is one ethical step away from conscription.

How frequently are images generated/modified by diffusion models uploaded to Wikimedia Commons? I can wrap my head around evaluating cited sources for notability, but I don’t know where to start determining the repute of photographs. So many images Wikipedia articles use are taken by seemingly random people not associated with any organization.