So I quickly gave myself diabetes…

I don’t want to die, but if I could un-exist like Marty McFly disappearing from a photograph I would choose it in an instant. I have a pretty privileged life but, even for me, if I try to honestly inventory my experience there appears to be more suffering than pleasure. I don’t think this is unfair or unnatural, I believe suffering is integral to being alive because it’s how organisms respond and adapt to a world that is constantly trying to dis-organize them. Basically you can’t have life without it, given the laws of physics.

I don’t think “humans are a virus” is correct because it’s a pejorative and I don’t think viruses or humans are inherently bad. If I was going to classify anything as bad it would be the capacity to suffer, which is so foundational it actually informs the concept of “bad” rather than they other way around. I think suffering also becomes more acute the more processing power you have. Unfortunately for Agent Smith, the “virus” is intelligence and the machines already caught it.

I admit my ideas are probably half-baked on this because I just don’t feel articulate or intelligent enough to describe it. All I have is my own experience. As far as I can see, it appears that more complex animals have a greater capacity for suffering than less complex ones. It seems that the mechanisms of suffering are “body stuff”, mainly nerves, and more complex organisms simply have more of those in more robust configurations. This might just be cope, because the alternative is horrific. As a kid I looked through a microscope and saw an entire world of rotifers and paramecia ripping each other apart, struggling for energy, and realized that if all organisms can experience the same “level” of suffering than we are truly in Hell. It was literally inconceivable.

I don’t care for the “antinatalist” label. I admit that suffering is hard to quantify and may be totally subjective. This is why I don’t mind what other people choose to believe. It’s none of my business. Based on my subjective experience I will not be doing so. Sometimes people pry into why I don’t have kids and I am forced to expose my beliefs. Suddenly, in their eyes, I become an evangelist. I’m not. They won’t engage with the notion of 'the non-existent mind". They constantly argue from the position of a hypothetical mind that chooses stuff. Eventually they think I’m suicidal because in their mind dying and non-existence are the same. They also get angry and insulted even though I’m leaving more resources for their own children by not having my own which, by their logic, should be good. So I just don’t bother. Do what you want. Maybe they are right.

I really like this website for exploring all the options. Not sure how up to date it is with this latest ffmpeg.

https://ffmpeg.lav.io/

I still think about the dude who repeatedly put massive amounts of paraquat on his balls, and died, instead of just getting some antibiotics.

In my experience people didn’t trust each other more, but it did feel like you had more autonomy. Cell phones are what really changed everything, for better and worse. I think the dumb phone era was the best because you were no longer in a position to need to walk miles in the countryside due to a breakdown, but also they weren’t ubiquitous enough that everyone demanded constant contact (old rules of phone etiquette were still in force). Also no algorithms. Brain rot was confined to TV, magazines, and radio.

Python is actually pretty baller with string operations too since so much of the C has been heavily optimized.

This is just some library too, not their main application. I know “lines of code” is bullshit but just for reference I looked it up and apparently curl is ~180k lines of code. I can’t imagine how crufty this fucking code must be, assuming this is even real because it seems too ludicrous.

The Naked Lunch. I was probably 10 years old? I didn’t understand any of the plot, I was weirded the fuck out and the giant bugs made me sick to my stomach.

Yeah, it’s impossible to develop a greenfield site without scraping everything off. You have to create and get approval on water runoff management plan for any new development. That means grading everything and often these days it also means managing and impounding water on-site without dumping it all into the (overloaded) storm drain system. When there’s no grass you have to install silt fences to keep silt out of nearby streams while building. You can’t get final approval, and remove the silt fence, until there is some kind of ground cover and that basically means grass since it grows fast and is easy to apply. Even if you somehow left the trees there’s no way they’d survive the process.

Fuck McMansion developers, and fuck lawns, don’t get me wrong. But it’s a reflection of an entire system of land-use policy and not just stupidity, or whatever.

The collection sounds like “The Dark Descent” but I’m not familiar with the waif story.

I’ve been getting annoying amdgpu crashes every now an then. I’ve tried all the various BIOS and kernel params but so far nothing has worked. Next step is rolling back a kernel version, at least that’s what I’ve gathered from all the threads about it. It’s bothersome but not frequent enough to be a real pain.

(This is an amd framework 13 with fedora 42 / wayland)

A “carriage house”, in the backyard of some rich couple who were the landlords. I split it with a buddy. Open holes to the outside that we patched with duct tape. The entire thing listed to one side. It smelled like mold. Zero insulation or climate control of any kind. Landlord still stole food from our fridge when we were away.

Try to get a really early start so you aren’t spending the last few hours driving in darkness. If you haven’t listened to the “Shit town” podcast, it got me through a long drive once. This was on a 2012 car with no smartphone features besides basic bluetooth, but there was a pairing procedure that got audio to at least play (it was really wonky to setup, I had to look it up).

Edit: Big Caveat to my advice on the starting early, be careful if your trip ends inside a huge metro area on a weekday, as bad timing can land you straight into some horrendous rush-hour traffic.

There’s no sleep like class sleep. Five minutes feels like an eight hour rest.

Maya and Motionbuilder run on Linux, but that happened before they were hoovered up by the monster. Autodesk just ignores that part of their portfolio. I know a few people who work/have worked on the Maya team and they’re talented, passionate devs, but management just doesn’t give a fuck about Media & Entertainment when Autocad and Revit are making so much money.

This is probably just because it’s DC. The rules get really muddy there. For a long time the highest elected position in DC was head of the school board, and even though ostensibly there’s “home rule” now, Congress still loves to punish the local populace by overriding anything they think scores points with their base back in Idaho. If you get convicted of a felony in DC you actually get transferred to federal prison.

If you can find it, I keep a small bag of straight-up wheat gluten and I add a spoonful or two when I want to make stronger flour. A small bag lasts forever and a little goes a long way.

It’s not just tech. Gardening, DIY, cooking, and similar popular subjects have been completely destroyed by this crap. If I see an AI generated header image or thumbnail I immediately backpedal now because I assume that means the text is bullshit too.

The example stuck in my memory now is when I was trying to read about watermelon growing times and the article said they flower a week after germination.There’s now frequently this, “oh GOD DAMN IT *close tab*” moment when you realize it’s actually total slop. Like, “oh so this article is BULLSHIT bullshit.”

I see it as the continuation of a very old problem. Old school engineering didn’t have any standards until a bunch of people died over and over and the public demanded change. The railroads, construction tycoons, factory owners, mine operators etc all bitterly fought, and still fight, engineering safety requirements. Computer industries have continued this. They all oppose public action, hide negative information, and try to pin blame for conspicuous failures on individuals rather than systemic rot.

I think also because of the relatively less visceral nature of software catastrophes we don’t have a culture of safety. That’s not to say software errors can’t cause horrific accidents but the power grid going down and causing a dozen people in the service area to die is less traumatic than a bridge collapsing and sending a dozen people into an icy river. That’s an extreme example but my point is that humans undervalue harms that are seen as less acutely, physically brutal and software just seems more abstract.

Most of us aren’t working on power grid either, so when you start trying to quantify our software’s risks you have to speak to “harms” rather than just crimes like negligence, and then you expose this huge contradiction about how responsibility is allocated socially. Like, not only should engineers, pilots, and doctors have higher responsibility to prevent harm, but so should cops, journalists, politicians, billionaires, etc.

So the risks are undervalued and both intentionally and unconsciously minimized. The result is most of us who’ve seen the inside are quietly horrified and that’s the end of it.

I don’t know what the answer is except unignorable tragedies because that seems to be the only thing powerful enough to build regulations which are constantly being eroded.

I found the original blog post more educational.

Looks like these may be typosquats, or at least “namespace obfuscation”, imitating more popular packages. So hopefully not too widespread. I think it’s easy to just search for a package name and copy/paste the first .git files, but it’s important to look at forks/stars/issue numbers too. Maybe I’m just paranoid but I always creep on the owners of git repos a little before I include their stuff, but I can’t say I do that for their includes and those includes etc. Like if this was included in hugo or something huge I would just be fucked.