What would an apolitical "permacomputing" look like? The premise is to reduce consumption and conserve resources. It's about recognizing the externalities associated with technology. You can't just do that in a vacuum.
If you just want "MacBook with socketed RAM" there's already other people doing that. You don't need this to be that.
Neither leaded gas nor CFCs were eliminated because of capitalism. They were eliminated in spite of it. Companies got dragged kicking and screaming into compliance because of regulatory oversight, which is anathema to pure capitalism.
Neither leaded gas nor CFCs were eliminated by communism, nor did communist governments do a particularly good job at eleiminating their use in an extraordinarily expedient way or anything.
In fact, leaded gas and CFC elimination in communist regimes happened exactly the same way (via regulation/treaties).
Regulations are universally needed to account for negative externalities-- just look at soviet superfund site equivalents (like lake Karachay) and tell me with a straight face that communist administration solves those problems by itself "without dragging anyone kicking and screaming".
Thanks for your comment. I’m not very familiar with permacomputing so am trying to understand it more. I wouldn’t say im advocating for an apolitical movement necessarily, as much as it being open to incremental (instead of revolutionary) change. If permacomputing is fundamentally an anti-capitalist movement then obviously it doesn’t make sense to include capitalists in it, but I’m not sure it needs to be. I guess I disagree with the idea that capitalist systems are unable to reduce consumption/conserve resources.
It seems like this site had a “neoliberal” wiki entry but it got removed, or I at least I can’t access it, I would be interested to see it
I just want to say, I appreciate you directly getting to the actual ideological disagreement here. If you want to conceive of and fight for a neoliberal permaculture.. well that's something different than what this site is about for sure but I personally would be ready to find some common ground here.
It's actually very helpful! Even just to keep track of what you did and how you were feeling on a given day.
I didn't keep one for a long time because I grew up in a household where I didn't feel secure - if I had a journal my parents would have snooped for sure. As I've gotten older I (a) see the value in remembering the past (b) feel more trust in the people around me.
Highly recommend trying a journalling habit for a month. It's also very satisfying to do it in a little notebook with a pen instead of typing. It feels more tangible.
It's an impressive build of "putting a Mustang shell on a Model 3", but for God's sake why didnt they swap the seats and steering wheel at least. Got to be the worst-looking interior I've ever seen.
It's the leveraged buyout playbook. You buy a company and use its own assets to secure a loan. Then you "find efficiencies" (strip it for parts to pay yourself and the creditors).
In this case, if the deal goes through at the price given, eBay's liquid assets are untouched. The cash portion is paid out entirely through the loan and Gamestop's cash.
This debt will carried by company resulting from merge. It might be not classic leveraged buyout but if they have any trouble with repaying it, it will end in asset liquidation all the same.
Yes, the loan is the leverage. It's secured against the assets of eBay. If the acquisition fails to produce efficiencies the resulting company has a bunch of extra, arguably unnecessary debt from the acquisition that a free-standing eBay wouldn't have.
In theory eBay should be one of those bubbly dot-com companies that kind of settled into a lifestyle business by virtue of longevity. It's no longer commanding insane multiples but it has revenue and a dedicated fanbase. They sold off Paypal which was (afaik) the only stable/growing part of the company.
So you're taking a big, but slow-changing auction website and stapling it to a dying brick-and-mortar retail business which survives on meme stock issuance and their die-hard fanbase gambling.
I'm sure someone is going to miss the point and say "this is political correctness gone too far!"
It seems impossible to produce a safe LLM-based model, except by withholding training data on "forbidden" materials. I don't think it's going to come up with carfentanyl synthesis from first principles, but obviously they haven't cleaned or prepared the data sets coming in.
The field feels fundamentally unserious begging the LLM not to talk about goblins and to be nice to gay people.
> I don't think it's going to come up with carfentanyl synthesis from first principles, but obviously they haven't cleaned or prepared the data sets coming in.
I mean, why not? If it has learned fundamental chemistry principles and has ingested all the NIH studies on pain management, connecting the dots to fentanyl isn't out of the realm of possibility. Reading romance novels shows it how to produce sexualized writing. Ingesting history teaches the LLM how to make war. Learning anatomy teaches it how to kill.
Which I think also undercuts your first point that withholding "forbidden" materials is the only way to produce a safe LLM. Most questionable outputs can be derived from perfectly unobjectionable training material. So there is no way to produce a pure LLM that is safe, the problem necessarily requires bolting on a separate classifier to filter out objectionable content.
Making it trivial to generate software is making people turn their brains off. They don't think through the details and accept the "default" from an LLM which has no concern for the user experience.
It's May Day, which is a labour holiday everywhere except North America commemorating the Haymarket Affair when American police brutally repressed striking workers .
In North America we have Labor Day in September to distance it from the historical associations with actual organizing and police brutality.
We do get ice and snow in Portland, along with flooding and landslides. No, it's not the same as Midwest, but we do get a few days every other year or so that you just don't drive out in. The black ice around a couple curvy sections of i-5 are notoriously bad at night in winters. (Terwilliger)
I have lived in the midwest, as well as Portland. It is good that Portland only occasionally gets ice, because in like-for-like conditions it is way more dangerous than the midwest. Primarily because of hills. I found driving in snow & ice in the midwest to be mostly a non-event, even on inadequate tires.
I really hope we're able to get them without the city council messing things up. The way they reacted to the news at first, you'd think Minneapolis was the first city to ever have autonomous vehicles. That, mixed with a heavy dose of "What about the buggy whip makers??"
It's funny to me that the average American is Islamophobic, but the US government sharply divides middle eastern countries based on alliances (and how rich they are). Qatari Emir? You're a friend of the US government. Poor Pakistani? Enemy. Lebanese farmer? We'll think about it.
It makes sense given a few things, although it's not as bad as you're saying:
1. The median American lives in a city and has exposure to Muslims and is most likely not Islamophobic.
2. Due to the voting structure of the U.S., people who don't live in cities and don't get exposure to Muslims get outsized voting rights.
3. Most American electeds are much more well travelled than Americans who don't live in cities.
So basically, elites have to necessarily balance (and exploit) the biases of over-represented minorities with their own largely metropolitan beliefs.
All of this is made more ironic in that the moral structures of the Abrahamic religions, including Islam, are all influences on and in line with, traditional American values, which American elites don't follow (see Epstein) but Americans who don't live in cities largely do.
> The median American lives in a city and has exposure to Muslims and is most likely not Islamophobic
Most Islamophobic people I know live in cities. Is there really that much of a change related to urbanism for Islamophobia, one you adjust for political alignment and religiousness?
For reference, this is the America I see every day:
Over the past 17 years I've lived in three houses (in the suburbs of two different cities in two different states- one East Coast, one land-locked) and an apartment in NYC (obviously also East Coast). In all of the East Coast spots (urban and suburban) there was a mosque closer than the nearest McDonald's. For the land-locked state suburb the mosque was 2 miles away and the nearest McDonald's was 0.75 miles away.
I'm not selecting these houses to be convenient to the Mosque- I've never been in any of those Mosques. It's just an artifact of living in the sort of neighborhoods that I like. I tend to agree that it isn't urban/rural per se, as much as it's Openness of the Big Five personality traits. Which, at least in the US, tends to be correlated with a lot of other things (college education, density of living, etc.).
IRT the "college education", Collin County is statistically higher educated than most of the country demographically-speaking. >56% achieved bachelors or higher compared to NYC at ~42%. For reference, Santa Clara County in California is also at 56%, so about as educated as the area with Apple, Google, and Facebook at least as far as that statistic analyzes.
If you just want "MacBook with socketed RAM" there's already other people doing that. You don't need this to be that.
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