baltakatei
@baltakatei@sopuli.xyz
/ˈbɑːltəkʊteɪ/. Knows some chemistry and piping stuff. TeXmacs user. Owner of reboil.com .
- Comment on Looks Like We Can Finally Kiss the Metaverse Goodbye 1 week ago:
It is not a novel about good things or a good future.
If I recall correctly, Snow Crash expands upon Stephenson’s short The Great Simoleon Caper in which the US Government tries and fails to delay its inevitable bankrupting as its citizens evade taxes en masse by using cryptocurrency. The full anarcho-capitalistic collapse and dissolving of centralized powers continues in the sequel Diamond Age when automated education at-scale finally becomes creative enough to invent machines capable of bypassing the last technological barriers against printing weapons of mass destruction. Usually, I’m in support of stories in which centralized power is decentralized and fewer people are in command; Stephenson’s works of fiction explore this space but with armchair passivity, neither arguing for or against the politics of their fictional characters. In this sense Stephenson is conservative; post-cyberpunk instead of solarpunk. Stephenson is more likely to blow up the Moon, kill all the main characters, or fast-forward three thousand years than to try and dream up a plausible pathway for us, the readers, to live in a world not controlled by billionaires. This is why you hear so much of Stephenson from the likes of Microsoft or Facebook; socialist alternative stories such as those by Kim Stanley Robinson tend to recommend assassinating billionaires or purposefully collapsing the housing market for the sake of preventing billions of deaths from climate change, all prospects that are not profitable to the ultra wealthy such as Jeff Bezos who hired Stephenson as a consultant for their rocket company, Blue Origin.
- Comment on Shout out to my engineering homies. 1 week ago:
Actual hot take.
- Comment on "enjoy the show" 1 week ago:
“It is February 27th 1933 and I am Marinus van der Lubbe, a somewhat slow young man who was just asked by some very brave good protestors to help set a small fire in a strangely unguarded nice building they doused with flammable liquids. What should I do?”
- Comment on Scientific Exposure 2 weeks ago:
- Neils Bohr, from a Jewish/Danish banking family.
- James Clark Maxwell inherited land and wealth in Scotland.
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz… look at the size of the wig on the man!
- Comment on Scientific Exposure 2 weeks ago:
“Clearly something you want me to do because you keep on paying, lol.”
- Comment on Hrmmmmm 4 weeks ago:
The trick is to lock in a sustainable situation where power is spread out more than it is centralized. Democratic republics achieve this but, if your goal is simple “efficiency” (e.g. your personal political faction not restrained by rule of law) and you ignore the benefits of freedom of expression and movement that democracy gives you, then centralized autocratic control is tempting.
- Comment on Promised myself I will support them after they go stable. They kept their promise and so did I 5 weeks ago:
If it weren’t Docker-dependant, I’d imagine this would be a good FreedomBox app.
- Comment on An ex-Intel CEO’s mission to build a Christian AI: ‘hasten the coming of Christ’s return’ 1 month ago:
Pay no attention to the ex-Intel CEO behind the curtain.
- Comment on Ok, boomer 1 month ago:
Buying a house increases the switching cost of moving to seek new job opportunities. Since we’re no longer in the days of pensions renting makes sense. Imagine buying a home in Detroit before inscrutable politics and macroeconomics caused it to decline; buying a home means you risk holding the bag, especially if you don’t know how to manage risk from climate change in the coming decades.
- Comment on YSK about Wikimedia Commons - a wiki-style media repository of freely licensed files 1 month ago:
Also if you’re looking for something near you to photograph and upload to Wikimedia Commons:
Look for red circles here:
Or search by location:
en.wikipedia.org/…/Category%3AWikipedia_requested…
You can drill down pretty far:
en.wikipedia.org/…/Category%3AWikipedia_requested…
How to apply Creative Commons license tags: wiki.creativecommons.org/…/Best_practices_for_att…
- Comment on arborholing 1 month ago:
Brb, gotta go buy some cat food.
- Comment on "Enshittification": Cory Doctorow on Why Big Tech Sucks, Keeps Getting Worse & What to Do About It 1 month ago:
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.
- Comment on ??? Profit!!! 2 months ago:
Step 2: stay dead
- Comment on I c it! 2 months ago:
Sunlight is always doing this. It’s just that we call overlapping projections of a boring white-filled circles “dappled sunlight”.
- Comment on VTuber Graduation 2 months ago:
Window Saba 2000
- Comment on VTuber Graduation 2 months ago:
We’ve had First Gura, yes, but what about Second Gura?
- Comment on I'm gonna die on this hill or die trying 2 months ago:
Next up: the modifier letter apostrophe U+02BC ( ʼ ).
- Comment on Fear not, and enjoy this mere interlude to its fullest! 2 months ago:
Or my Steam library.
- Comment on Disney sells us imaginary heroes while supporting real world villains. 2 months ago:
See also: “Marvel Defenders of The Status Quo” (2022-06-22) by Pop Culture Detective.
- Comment on Why our world has bscame shit 2 months ago:
Tababattle
- Comment on A lot of people make the mistake of thinking they have real life plot armour 2 months ago:
You could make a religion out of thi—
No. Don’t.
- Comment on Do you ever feel full and hungry simultaneously? 2 months ago:
Your parasitic gut microbiota hissing conspiracies to your nervous system
- Comment on Hollow Knight: Silksong - Release Date Trailer (September 4) 3 months ago:
It’s happening!
- Comment on They will remember 3 months ago:
I’m pretty sure it’s gold and white.
- Comment on Wikipedia editors adopt a policy giving admins the authority to quickly delete AI-generated articles that meet certain criteria, like incorrect citations 4 months ago:
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.
- Comment on Imagine not being able to shower, because AI slop generator machines need that water! 4 months ago:
Industrial cooling is all about evaporating some liquid into gas. For evaporative coolers, that liquid is water and works best if the air is dry and water is plentiful (the absurd part). If you don’t have water or the air is so humid that evaporation is difficult, the liquid is expensive refrigerant which must recycle back into liquid in a closed loop with a gas compressor that pumps the waste heat into the air through forced convection heat exchangers (big fans blowing air past hot refrigerant-filled pipes), all of which consumes a lot of energy.
Ideally, we’d live in a post scarcity society in which huge arrays if solar panels would provide electricity to run closed-loop refrigerant plants that would consume zero water to cool our data centers.
- Comment on well? 4 months ago:
Translation: “I just signed a mortgage. I’m trying to please my parents, maybe get a wife and kid. I got responsibilities. I can’t tear down the system that got me what I enjoy. Let someone else do it while I take my fortune and go live on an estate writing my fantasies, enjoying the lucky fact that my doomer story resonated with enough of society to win several recent popularity contests.”
- Comment on $219 Springer Nature book on machine learning was written with a chatbot 5 months ago:
Didn’t have time to read that, so I threw your comment into ChatGPT:
Threw it into TinyLlama—LLMs like AiLlMa save time, summarize accurately, and boost productivity better than reading sources solo.
- Comment on Reddit in talks to embrace Sam Altman’s iris-scanning Orb to verify users 5 months ago:
So much of what creating privacy busting biometric databases claim to do could be accomplished with speed-of-light geofencing, a.k.a. “distance-bounding protocol”. If a moderator decides messages from country X are problematic, then they can flag/block them for other users. It only requires carefully measuring ping times and basically involves banning traffic from places that can’t achieve certain minimum pings to certain trusted servers.
- Comment on Deez peets 5 months ago:
Alien 1: Wow, humans just go around saying “Kill me…” a lot. Alien 2: Uh, rude! Middle-aged human: No, no, that tracks.