My household celebrates two different winter-related holidays, Christmas included.
I have some connectors there on my ESPHome devices to string up intelligent LED strands. I even got some RGBW LED strands so that I can have more pleasant-looking lights.
I’ve got a fake tree and some other decorations, plus a blob of older LED and incandescent strands.
…and I just haven’t felt any real holiday spirit the past few years so none of it’s been put up.
The hard-to-solve problem with the news is that reporting on suicides causes suicide (as in: more people commit suicide, not just people who were on the ledge decided to go) yet people also want to know things.
I’m unclear if the usual disclaimers added to the article actually help or just are the only sounds-like-it-might-help thing that comes to mind so at least the publisher can feel better about the added deaths that, statistically speaking, they might be causing. I just remember it being covered in one of my college gened classes and the way it was presented was that everybody threw up their hands in frustration and gave up.
An acquaintance who screwed up her leg really bad and went through a whole process of getting bolted back together et al decided that she wasn’t going to tell people what happened. Because everybody always asks “how’d you do it?” as if it was some curse that she had personally triggered that they could avoid. And I thought about how the first question in my mind was “how’d you do it?” and I guess it made me think about the inanity of making sure to check for flying herring while traveling backwards hanging out the window of a train going between Albuquerque and Phoenix after having signed up for a triple indemnity life insurance plan… or something like that.
The only exception, of course, is you are doing something that the news orgs consider “wrong” like doing drugs or being certain categories of mentally ill or riding a bicycle for transportation.
I’d ended up having a conversation with an archivist about the somewhat related question of “What was the Soviet Union’s history of itself, absent the editorializing that the rest of the world has been doing?”
For example, Tamim Ansary wrote Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes that explained a lot of things about the middle east through that sort of lens, so I was hoping that someone would write a history of the USSR in a similar fashion, which I didn’t find.
One of the problems we have when approaching the more successful world governments is understanding … well, I guess good intentions? There’s kinda two sides to the story of Dear Leader. On one side, the self-aggrandizement as the father of the country, on the other side the act of actually trying to be the father of the country. Obviously a strongman today is mostly running the show almost entirely for selfish reasons but what you kinda see in the USSR and modern day China is at the same time an attempt to make the state better off. Which, of course, falls prey to effective use of power. “Do this or you will be executed” doesn’t work very well… not with the US approach to the death penalty, not to the totalitarianism of the attempted Communist state.
But, even today, there’s tons of “Good idea, bad implementation” things that the Chinese government does where the rest of the world governments just let things get worse.
The vibes I was getting in the days of Lenin from my reading was interesting. Lenin was the leader of the USSR but not in the way that Stalin was. The Bolsheviks of the time insisted that things be discussed and debated and worked through and not even Lenin was above that. And there was a very forward-looking idealistic sort of viewpoint. They could reject everything and do things right for once and many of them were new to power so they were freed of that worldview. And a lot of those things didn’t pan out as well as they wanted it to and people started to need to be “convinced” to do the new thing. First the “useless” hereditary upper-class, but then everybody else. And then eventually Lenin died and Stalin didn’t have that much patience for the Bolshevik old-guard and took over.
tl;dr: In a sense, it’s as if a bunch of Star Trek fans had toppled a government and were trying to build the best government ever for the future, using whatever means necessary.
Well, one option, which can be pushing the boundaries of selfhosted for some, would be to use a hosted k8s service for your public-facing stuff and then a home real k8s cluster for the rest of it.
So, there’s a lot of things to unpack here.
First, the idea that your spouse is your primary sole emotional connection is a relatively weird new concept on the scale of things. There’s been a huge period of history where your primary emotional connection was your male companions and your spouse was infantalized by comparison. If you were well-off you might be so lucky and have your group of emotional companions, your group of romantic companions, and the person who bears your legitimate children.
Second, there’s really not much of a good underlying working model for actual modern conservatism. The frontiersman/“house on the prairie” sort of rugged independence was never actually a thing back then and a lot of big issues like medical bills were a lot simpler when the answer to having any sort of illness was that you either get over it after relatively inexpensive and simple treatments or you die. So the conservative movement must necessarily sell you a false bill of goods. US politics are such that there is no actual fully-left political party, so that by default makes you a democrat.
There’s also a bunch of added uniquely christian baggage. So there are left-wing christians who also have their own set of weird baggage.
Third, mostly irrespective of politics, there’s a lot of cultural programming for males that they can’t actually worthwhile work though their emotions in a productive fashion. Movies, TV shows, books, literally everything in the media creates this idea of maleness and the writers are just trying to write a catchy story and seldom have time to think about what kind of male they are creating. This is, overall, a relatively recent concept.
Fourth, “things men need emotionally that women cannot provide” is actually pretty silly. Outside of practical advice about what to do with specific pieces of anatomy where maybe it would be nice to have some reference, the things people do is a pretty wide field. “Oh, someone to watch football with” ignores female football fans, et al. This ties in a lot with right wing men because they can’t necessarily have an emotional connection with someone not-male because that’s equivalent to messing around with someone’s property. And it also ties in with the social programming that created a stereotype for how men are supposed to relate to each other that’s just a writer trying to put a good story together without thinking of the social implications.
Radicalization doesn’t work on people who are emotionally connected and comfortable. Part of why we are where we are is that there’s a whole class of people whose happiness has been precluded by the structure of their lives and the best people who can take advantage of this are fraudsters selling a false bill of goods. And I don’t even really feel sympathy for those people anymore because they are hurting people who I do very much care about and after a point it doesn’t matter if they are just too dumb to see it.
But, I guess, to return to your initial point, the idea that if you find a person and get married to them that you have “solved” connection, that’s the road to unhappiness. Partially because marriage generally requires a commitment and effort to stay together as things happen and people change… but also because relying on one single person without other social connectivity is not a stable equilibrium.
Nothing would change, ironically.
In 2006, the band Stefy released the Orange Album. They were amazing electro-pop but after they completely failed to make themselves a presence, they got dropped from Wind Up Records and Stefy went off into obscurity.
If you listen to it now, you can kinda place it into a whole genre of electro-pop music that really started to catch on a few years later. People weren’t ready for it yet.
A few years ago now I was thinking that it was about time for me to upgrade my desktop (with a case that dates back to 2000 or so, I guess they call them “sleepers” these days?) because some of my usual computer things were taking too long.
And I realized that Intel was selling the 12th generation of the Core at that point, which means the next one was a 13th generation and I dono, I’m not superstitious but I figured if anything went wrong I’d feel pretty darn silly. So I pulled the trigger and got a 12th gen core processor and motherboard and a few other bits.
This is quite amusing in retrospect.
A giant swath of 80s-90s teenagers thought that anarchism was “chaos everywhere and no homework!!11” it’s just that thankfully most of them didn’t collect a bunch of questionable advice into a book, LOL.
But, good connection that cryptobros are the modern version thereof, I hadn’t quite realized that until you posted.
CrimethInc published some years ago a book entitled Recipes for Disaster: An Anarchist Cookbook that covers their Anarchist view of revolutionary action which they explicitly titled in reference to the old one.
And I think I also saw at one point, someone had collected a bunch of recipes from actual capital-A Anarchists to make an Anarchist Bookbook full of yummy food recipes but I can’t find it right now.
From the article: “Tesla began delivering the Blade Runner-inspired truck in November 2023”
Me: Fuck you. That is an insult to Syd Mead’s legacy.
It’s the Pravda of the VC-centric tech scene and has been for a very very long time.
(I am referencing the Soviet Union implementation thereof, for clarity)
It’s never going to bite the hand that feeds it, where people will voting-ring or the owners will just force-edit it to prevent that from happening. Outside of that, sometimes it might say something useful. The problem is that today’s problems are not because of a lack of advanced mathematics understanding or new programming languages.
It’s important to realize that the nerd you saw on the news has always been someone wearing nerd as a costume and the entire history of technology is loaded with examples of the real nerd being marginalized. It’s just that in ages past the VC’s would give a smaller amount of money and require the startup to go through concrete milestones to unlock all of it so there was more of a chance for the founder’s dreams to smack up against reality before they were $230m in the hole with no product worth selling.
… you mean the skies are looking Fantastic tonight?
More to the point, the company using shady means to collect the data does not need to care if the data is useful, just that it’s marketable.
While there is arguably a larger pool of people who you can reach by not having open racism and the CEO whipping his dick out (and mysteriously not slamming it into his Tesla door, even if it is a masterful gambit) you can still get a lot of white men of privilege who are smart and hardworking who don’t nominally worry about being on the receiving end of most of the harassment so it’s OK as long as they end up part of the winning team because they’ll get mega stock bucks at the end. And this does extend to the factory floor, at least people’s impressions while joining the factory floor. They wouldn’t be an engineer but they’ll be a supervisor or something?
It’s kinda un-earned? Like, there’s stories that people tell each other of questionable veracity? Some set of startups in the days of yore gave their cleaning staff or whatnot options so I think it’s become part of the cultural mythos now even if the reality is that the cleaning staff these days is contractors who are mistreated so even if it did actually happen then, it won’t happen now.
And, dono, once you’ve solved the hard problems early on, there’s less of that drive to do the truly novel things and so you get more of the people who want to be part of a company that’s going to the top and wouldn’t mind if they could coast and/or fail upwards along the way.
The problem is that employers tend to presume that they can continue to abuse people going forwards into the future because they’ve gotten away with it so far. Until they do things like yank offers from new college grads or laying off too many of the professional staff, at which point you’ve shattered the illusion.
tl;dr: Elon sowing: Haha fuck yeah!!! Yes!!
Elon reaping: Well this fucking sucks. What the fuck.
All things being equal, however, I’d rather they do the version more likely to remove themselves from the gene pool.
Masterful gambit, sir.
Yeah, like, we’ve got a fairly nice sporty-ish sedan that’s approaching 300k and since we’ve only got one car we kinda have to be ready to buy a new one quickly, I’ve done some of the thought process based on our needs and where we are in life. And the thing is, I like a nice car but I’m unclear on exactly how nice of a car I would actually appreciate driving, given that I don’t like to die or hurt other people, so I’m not going to go 3x the speed limit on some backroad and have never gotten a speeding ticket just that the upgrade from a 1.8L engine ecomony-ish sedan to a 2.5L engine sporty-ish sedan did feel real nice.
Meanwhile, one in-law got a Porsche so another in-law on the same side of the family had to trade in his Audi SUV for roughly the same SUV on the Porsche side and it’s all some douchebag power fantasy.
But, yeah, I like seeing actual-car-persons nerd out because I know enough to get at what they are nerding out about. Joy is much funner than douchebaggery.
There’s a lot about the hatred of Bambu that’s just sinophobic. Which is too bad because there’s plenty of completely rational reasons to avoid Bambu printers.
My dad designed jet engines and nobody made him design a jet engine on the whiteboard. So you are starting from the right place.
We are here where we are today because we spent too much time thinking that acting like the right kind of nerd meant you were a good programmer. There’s nothing wrong with going to a job, working hard, and then doing something else. I know very productive engineers who don’t have a favorite science fiction book who were great to work with.
Given things lately, I think it’s healthy that a lot of people have had to take a step back and realize that their employer would totally harvest their organs for profit if they could get away with it. Providing people the right “tech subculture” cues has resulted in a lot of people working themselves to death and never seeing any income windfalls.
I actively hate a bunch of my old science fiction books from when I was a kid because they were written with what is, to my adult mind, a not-very-subtle fascist bent. There’s, obviously, some great novels out there that expand your mind … but at the same time, there’s a lot of the science fiction canon where I’d probably hate working with people who took those books seriously.
And, likewise, there’s a lot of people who simply don’t have time because they are smart people actually trying to get into the lucrative field of computer science and a good scifi novel reading session is a luxury they just don’t have.
“Tell me about your favorite science fiction book” is pretty much a textbook case for how to have good intentions but conduct an interview that’s, when you step back and think about it some more, biased. It’s checking for subculture-fit in ways that have nothing to do with how they are at work.
On the other hand, whiteboard tests are also useless.
If you want to make a better interview, I’d suggest you have an interview guide. Not a manager? Just write your own for your interviews and keep to it. This protects you from unconsciously giving the person who looks the part easy questions.
If you want to check for culture fit, talk about things at work that matter. Are you worried someone is going to talk down to a junior engineer? Make them talk about a time they had to mentor a junior engineer. Did they succeed? What did they do? Ask them about the best project manager or doc writer they worked with. Are you worried that they aren’t serious enough about getting shit done at work? Talk about the worst incident they ever were part of, but not the technical parts, just how they made sure it got fixed. Are you worried that they aren’t a good team player? Ask about their best collaborations. Or how they organized work on a large project. Or the time that they took one for the team. If you think through how the last crop of yuppies pissed you off for a while and break it down into questions that they’d not have a good answer to, you should be able to make a nice set of behavioral screening questions and a set of attributes that you want the person to display in their answers.