markjgsmith

2024/08/27 #

• The world is doing it’s yes yes yes yes yes yes no thing again today. It’s very disorientating for your body, and quite annoying, and occasionally dangerous. But what can you do? Not much apart from wait till it blows over and turns into the new new thing. Yesterday the world was so on the warpath all day it was uterly ridiculus. I managed to ignore it all, which seemed to make it worse. The world just pretended even more to not be on the warpath while being even more on the warpath.

  Anyway, today maybe I’ll be able to rebuild the reusable deploy workflow so as to fix the mystery syntax error.

  Nough said. #

• Are people constantly escalating everywhere because we are living in an actual exponentially escalating technology fractal?

  We humans are all so dumb sometimes. We think we’re like really smart but we’re just not that far from our monkey see, monkey do past. All the instances of being dumb get conveniently forgotten about. But we always find another, possibly even dumber, way to be dumb. It just so happens that we are also getting smarter so it all sort of cancels out. But we are so dumb.

  I bet the furries think we are fucking hilarious.

  There will of course be a contingent that righteously believe the escallations are causing the exponentially escalating technology fractal in the first place, and are thus a good thing.

  The escallationists think they themselves are both hilarious and indispensibly important, but they hate pandas for some unknown reason.

  Oh noes.

  I’m not even smart enough to make this note all perfect and lovely. #

• Wouldn’t it be strange if now, or some time in the future, it turned out that racism doesn’t actually exist, that it’s a ghost in the machine so to speak, a misunderstanding. That the people accused of being racist were actually reacting to being trapped in some way, and the perhaps unwitting trappers interpreted this as racism. And I wonder if, bizarrely, should such a situation occur, whether it could lead to actual racism since the person being trapped sees it happen so often that they just front run these events and ‘act like a racist’ even before such an event occurs. Yeah I know it’s weirdly circular, very chicken and egg, but sometimes the world gets into a right old twist. #

• Just going through old notes from the past couple of weeks to catchup with things. Thought this was worth publishing. Even if it’s not a completely finished perfect thought, I think it highlights some frustration with the levels of hypocracy in politics at the minute. I had titled it Fuck politics.

  Democrats will literally tell you that they want you to have control over your body when it comes to abortion, while simultaneously trying to control every other aspect of your life including your body!

  Republicans will literally tell you they want you to have freedom while simultaneously infiniti belittling you so you can never get ahead in life!

  It’s bullcrap infiniti on both sides.

  FuCk PiLitacS indeed. #

• Another one from my notes cleanup. This one stems from all the weird pedo pervert apocalypse that happened last week. At one of the locations, right in the middle of all that stuff, one of the regular locals shouted at a mechanic up the road just before leaving on a motorbike:

  "They go bear"

  That was accompanied by some rather evil sounding laughter. The context around this is that at another location I go to nearby, some gang stalkers have grafiti’d the words 'Beor Loose' just were I sit. So often that’s thrown at me as part of the harrassment, often during starvation periods they put me through.

  The individual in question in this case is always around young children, and I think the double meaning here is quite obvious. I don’t know why it happened, it feels like some form of intimidation, that’s why I write about it now.

  Another thing that happened, either right before, or shortly afterwards, I forget exactly the sequence of events as there was so many things happening, was this individual clearly saying 'you learn' to me while they were buying something from a nearby vendor.

  I have nothing else to say about it apart from it’s very f-ing weird. #

• cat << EOF > Liberalism should be about liberty not beer

  I’m trying to catchup with things, going through notes I’ve written over the past couple of weeks.

  This one feels like it was worthy of a blog post. It’s not a fully formed idea, and no doubt highlights more about my misunderstanding of political concepts than being some valuable critique. But if I’m finding some of these concepts confusing then I bet others are too, so maybe some knowledgeable politicos out there might jump in to clarify.

  Btw the title references the very well known at this stage, pillar of the free software movement, that tries to explain that when we talk about free software, we mean free as in liberty not free as in free beer. Though the two concepts are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

  I hope I’ve remembered that right, I don’t currently have internet access to verify I’ve well worded that. This is the sort of thing where wording actually matters quite a lot, so perhaps look it up on Wikipedia or the FSF website.

  Whether the use of the not free as in beer analogy is appropriate here, I don’t entirely know, but it should give you, dear reader, an idea of where I’m coming from on this topic.

  Anyway, here were the notes I jotted down:

  • Conservatives should be able to be liberals too, because you can be conservative in your approach to life but also want liberty
  • Maybe the opposite of conservatives is progressives
  • Liberals will tend to spend more, they want more space for the individual
  • Perhaps there should be an ism for the opposite of liberalism, something like slaveism, or supremacism. Perhaps the reason there isn’t such a thing is to ensure it can’t happen?
  • But it still happens whether there’s a name for it or not. The downside of not having a name for it is it’s very difficult to talk about, and that’s very bad for liberals that find themselves in a dangerous slavism situation, how do you even think about something that doesn’t officially exist?

  EOF

• cat << EOF > The game in a game problem

  Another one from my big daily notes cleanup. Again this feels like something that has undoubtably been thought about to death in philosophy circles, and there’s probably loads of famous sheet wearing ancient greeks that have been there done that got the tshirt so to speak. But anyway perhaps it’s interesting to consider in a modern AI + crypto + the world wide web context.

  • Surely eventually AI tools will be so powerful that people will use them to control societies, taking people’s entire lives and turning them into a sort of game.
  • And they will get very annoyed if said person decides to become a developer because in their eyes, they will think they have to create whatever the developer wants to build before the developer tries to build it.
  • And as soon as the developer decides to build in a way that the super developer didn’t anticipate they will blame the regular developer.
  • And isn’t society a sort of game, so what does that tell us about how we should design our societies?

  Perhaps some philo geeks can jump in to set me straight, even though my reasoning is clearly flawless.

  EOF

Today’s links:

• London’s Luxury-Home Market Looks to Rich Americans to Save It - Make London great again ’init. www.bloomberg.com #

• French officials question Telegram CEO about child sexual abuse images and drugs - I wonder if these days it’s the case that just being a tech business CEO opens you up to being arrested abroad. Makes travel a lot more worrisome, because the rules are different everywhere. We should all probably just be mindless dumb henchmen drones, and put the humanoids in charge. www.npr.org #

• What's new in ECMAScript 2024 - Some of these seem kind of fun, e.g. emojis in regexes, but the rest just feel overly complex to me. GroupBy looks useful but it’s annoyingly not on the Array object where one would expect it. Have we reached ECMAScript peak usefullness? I dunno I’m just a boring web programmer, all this fancy juggling just seems a bit over the top to me. pawelgrzybek.com #

• New Post: Liberalism should be about liberty not beer markjgsmith.com #

• New Post: The Game in a game problem markjgsmith.com #