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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • OK here’s my Anarchist “Hot take”. It’s not correct, but I’m building an oversimplified model to make what’s happening somewhat visible. Let’s divide people up into two groups: One group has “experts”, who are pretty alone / introverted, but doesn’t really do the work of meeting up with others. The other group has people who know how to gather a party together, through a bbq or cookout or family meals or an actual party, but aren’t too bright.

    In the past, both groups were kind of homogenised together, to the extent that neither group really knew the existence of the other, but they knew how to make things “work”. Like the experts didn’t know how the cookouts happened, but they just needed to turn up, and enjoy the party. The rest was more or less magic. The other group knew the effort to bring people together, but didn’t realise that some of those people were more valuable than the others. The actual dissemination of expertise was more or less magic.

    Today, we have social media. The cookouts happen in social-media spaces, but what’s happened is that the experts and the non-experts have split (sort of like the milk we’re talking about here). The experts can “meet” without the party people, and the party people “meet” with the other party people. In the past, the experts would naturally become the trusted members of society because people would know them over the years being right over and over. Today, however, the experts are effectively in a different world to the party people, who are all vying for a “trusted position”. This is valuable, because the party people are “gullible” – I don’t mean this in a negative sense, just that they must trust the expertise around them, the social proof, or the consensus. Repeating that this used to work because actual experts used to be among them.

    So you have people like Alex Jones, who is a snake oil salesman. In the past, a niece or nephew might have been able to tell their family not to listen to Alex Jones, and that would have worked. However, that’s no longer effective because Jones has unadulterated, prime position straight to the party people’s brain sockets through talking for hours at end about this crazy stuff. The nephew is also not at enough of the cookouts to counteract that. This pushes the family apart (we’ve seen this narrative now, people who are so far in the alt-right pipeline they can’t back out) and allows Jones and co to completely wreck these people’s lives.

    So in short, I don’t think this is a consensus reality thing. I think it’s a filter bubble thing. We’ve managed to make it easy enough to filter things we don’t want to hear, and to not work with people who don’t agree with us. Oh and don’t think the “experts” are in a better position here. They fundamentally can’t organise a party. They don’t know how.








  • My guess is this is the underlying reason. Basically these companies set up the infrastructure for when governments would start to mandate this stuff, and they’d get a bit of nice press out of it. However, the fossil companies have found that you can basically confound all progress by the private sector just via the threat of rolling back climate legislation. This happened when the LNP government even just mentioned a nuclear plan which is just plain stupid.

    I’m guessing by even stating it, Air NZ has gone one better than a lot of companies, which have conveniently “forgotten” about their goals. They’ll get 20% of the way and declare that a success, but basically one company can’t move until all of them move. We need to get the crazies out of government and out of opposition too.










  • I think it’s worth thinking about this in a technical sense, not just in a political or capitalist sense: Yes, car companies want self driving cars, but self driving cars are immensely dangerous, and there’s no evidence that self driving cars will make roads safer. As such, legislation should be pushing very hard to stop self driving cars.

    Also, the same technology used for self driving is used for AEB. This actually makes self-driving more likely, in that the car companies have to pay for all that equipment anyway, they may as well try and shoehorn in self driving. On top of this, I have no confidence that the odds of an error in the system (eg: a dirty sensor, software getting confused) is not higher than the odds of a system correctly braking when it needs to.

    This means someone can get into a situation where they are:

    • in a car, on a road, nothing of interest in front of them
    • the software determines that there is an imminent crash
    • Car brakes hard (even at 90mph), perhaps losing traction depending on road conditions
    • may be hit from behind or may hit an object
    • Driver is liable even though they never actually pressed the brakes.

    This is unacceptable on its face. Yes, cars are dangerous, yes we need to make them safer, but we should use better policies like slower speeds, safer roads, and transitioning to smaller lighter weight cars, not this AI automation bullshit.




  • So I have been asking myself why I held some of my beliefs, and the answer is that I “learnt” them at a really young age, maybe 4-10 years old. It was an age where I basically knew “nothing” and I guess I filed it away for clarification later and that “later” never came. All of a sudden I’m much, much older and asking myself why I even believe this strange thing and the answer is “they got me when I was young”. If I wasn’t exposed to other thinkers who asked me to re-evaluate my ideas, I might never have questioned them.


  • I’m just using it as a space heater for my study, which is also where I work from. While using the computer in Winter I just switch on f@h for both CPU and GPU (AMD 5700x and 6700xt), and this heats up the room. It’s a good 300-400W. I have home assistant telling me the temperature in the room and it bugs me to turn it off if it’s too hot. That’s my “temperature control”. I didn’t build anything, the computer is just under my desk and it heats up my room.

    Originally my plan was to have F@H automatically turn on and off based on temperature, but it turns out the power is low enough and the lag is high enough that you switch it on in the morning, and then once the room is upto temperature you can just switch it off and the room will stay warm the rest of the day.