corbin @ corbin @awful.systems

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Joined

2 yr. ago

Exactly! Quoting myself from the conversation I linked above:

With [HN] in mind, I don't really want to give Dan G. any benefit of the doubt. He's had years to decide whether to open-source the forum, add features like a moderation log, switch the forum to invite-only mode, add reputation tracking, etc. It's his website, and he chooses to leave these comments up.

At this point, reporting bad posts only serves to let Dan G. and his buddies sweep the fascists under the rug.

I'm reminded of this conversation from last autumn, where HN moderators deleted posts only after they were used as receipts. It is a maddening sort of gaslighting to be told that HN isn't that bad while the moderators only take action in order to make HN look good.

I scrolled too far up and motherfucking Lemmy ate my fucking comment. Fuck this Web 2.0 garbage. You get a shorter reply, yay. Also I'm not re-linking everything; search Wikipedia for anything confusing, like "futures market" or "spot market" or "basket of goods."

A commodity futures ETF is a way to improve the arbitrage that an individual investor experiences, while also reducing their exposure to spot markets. In particular, an investor only holds shares in a fund, and the fund does the actual trading; also, the fund only trades futures, although they do typically have a "basket" which holds physical commodities at a secure location.

For example, I hold shares of precious-metals ETFs. This means that, unlike e.g. somebody who has gold coins in their safe at home, I have to trust that the ETF managers will still exist tomorrow and that the financial system will still honor their contracts; this is technically increased risk. But in exchange, I don't have to physically receive and store any precious metals, and also I get theoretically better returns due to the implicit arbitrage in futures markets.

Fun fact: BTC is overpriced, mostly from grifters and miners pumping and hyping the market. However, arbitrage sees overpriced commodities as an opportunity, and a futures ETF can produce value for its investors merely by insisting that the commodity should be valued less. This is also why the spot ETFs were not approved by SEC; the spot market for BTC is quite volatile and it's not clear that a BTC spot trader would produce value for investors.

My "I am not a prophet, do not follow me, this is not a religion" shirt sure does get a lot of questions.

Their mistake is not grokking contrition. An apology ought either to be contrite or to justify why contrition is impossible.

To be explicit, contrition is the part of an apology where the apologizing party promises to change something. Without contrition, apologies are worthless, since they do not amend any social contract.

What the author proposes instead is indeed "Machiavellian" and "hacking social APIs;" we should recognize it as a form of deceit or lie. They are clearly more interested in appearing to be decent than in improving society, and should be marked as confidence scammers.

BJ vague-tweeted about having his heart broken by a girl in a way that, unfortunately for him, is subject to peer review. The particular peer here is the girl in question.

On one hand, this would be mortifying; on the other hand, BJ should be mortified.

Your position is also inconsistent. For example, coyotes have meat-based diets and are not capitalist; I think that coyotes also don't use cryptocurrency, although I have no evidence either way. Naturalistic appeals are usually fallacies since they involve special pleading for humans in an otherwise-natural holistic existence.

That said, I upvoted you for approaching the concept of obligate capitalism, the idea that the only choices presented to humans within a capitalist society are to own capital, labor, or starve. We should be less keen to criticize each other merely for choosing to live.

I'll be one of the resident communists.

I think it's important to not forget the positive facts (pardon the pun!) in the GameStop situation. The event really did contain a short squeeze, and one Manhattan hedge fund really did take it in the shorts (pardon me again!), nearly becoming insolvent in front of their friends and eventually closing up shop. (One London hedge fund also was taken to the cleaners. Robinhood was embarrassed in front of Congress, and worse, in front of their clearinghouse.) Additionally, GameStop has continued to restructure its management and operations, and the local GameStop (in the local dying mall) is doing about as well as the Claire's next door in terms of customers.

This was a victory, but only in a specific sense: Wall Street was wrong about GameStop's failure, and collective action forced specific firms to admit their wrongness and even fail as ongoing concerns. The meme-stock cult can't understand this, because they imagine that there must be more. More wrongness, more collective action, more FAFO. They can't be proud enough to have destroyed two hedge funds and caused a Congressional inquiry; it's gotta involve literally melting the bull and throwing traders out of skyscrapers. (Not that I'll stop anybody from melting the bull!)

Yes, although the veracity of the quote is uncertain; see here for discussion. This is the commonly-cited form that you'll find all over the Internet:

Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man wants to make a million dollars, then the best way would be to start his own religion.~ Lafayette Ron Hubbard

I guess not everybody's strong enough to resist the urge to form a cult.

I'm a little surprised that people feel like Discord does a good job of (4) and (5). On (4), Discord's ToS used to permit Discord to resell your personal data in bulk (and still might allow it; haven't read the ToS in a while), all guilds are co-located in a single database, and rumor is that three-letter agencies are allowed to make relatively complex queries against that database. On (5), Discord is well-known to ban alternative clients, hacked clients, API clients, extensions, addons, and even chatbots, without any due process or recourse.

Like, yes, it's a nice service, but is it really that much nicer than Mumble or IRC?

The paragraph about gullibility resonates strongly with me. One of the first things in organic chemistry (a course I repeatedly failed) is that carbon doesn't behave like the ions which we normally manipulate in undergraduate chemistry laboratories. Instead, carbon is like a Lego brick or K'Nex connector, with four ports which clip together in a variety of configurations. This is used to explain many quirks of biology, like why diamond or nanotubes can't be easily produced by enzymatic processes; as you explain, carbon's bonding process makes it very difficult to put into place atomically, and instead we need some sort of external force like immense pressure or heat to reconfigure large masses of carbon into carbon-only structures.

Money is power and the powerful already get enough influence over us through other means. We shouldn't directly listen to them, and in fact we should be skeptical of their claims.

Deeply complicating matters, 0 and 1 can be excluded from theories of probability, and there is a good informal reason to do it, known as Cromwell's rule. The issue is that there no longer are units in such a system; 0 is the disjunctive unit and 1 is the conjunctive unit. This is part of a bigger theme in maths where units are increasingly seen as optional, but Yud is completely unaware of this bigger theme.

Ask a search engine about "math pet", perhaps including "miri" or "lesswrong". Unlucky 10000, I'm afraid.

Even if there were Glaze/Nightshade for computer programs, it could be reverse-engineered just like any other code obfuscation. This is the difference between code and most other outputs of labor: code is syntactic and formal, allowing for decidable objective analyses.

It's not a nightmare, but I've yet to succeed. npm2nix and node2nix struggle. napalm puts up a good effort, but doesn't quite work either. The biggest sticking point right now is that cjb used a custom DHT implementation with some patches, and I've gotta integrate that somehow.

I will be overjoyed if somebody else writes a working Nix flake. I've tried three times so far, and I bet it'll take five total.

Nobody tell him that Social Security can easily pay out $1600/mo to people today. His head might pop right off!

Last time I ran the numbers, I concluded that the USA can afford to pay $2000/mo to each taxpayer, even if considering marriages as two taxpayers. The economic benefits would easily compensate the small amount of self-borrowing required to jumpstart UBI. Similarly, the USA can easily afford to auto-enroll everybody in Medicare, although the government would have to eat several HMOs and ACOs to ensure coverage and prevent profiteering.

I've been on-and-off trying to get gittorrent packaged for Nix. I don't really care about Web-oriented forge workflows; I fully acknowledge that I'm something of a curmudgeon in that respect.

He's too young to grok why operating systems exist. (So am I...) To be fair, we're outgrowing the concept in several areas; folks say that Web browsers, unikernels, blockchains, and now apparently LLMs are all replacements for the operating system, because they resemble each other in functionality sometimes.