Any time there’s a ready meal from the supermarket and for some reason the adhesive is way stronger than the plastic film. You end up with loads of bits of film just sort of stuck to the rim of it. Super annoying.

We’re just smelly sacks of biology like a rat or a lizard who happen to have developed higher reasoning capacity for whatever reason.

As an exercise, try to be conscious about your thought process, write stuff down. When your thought process leads to an action with a consequence or verifiable prediction, consider: did it pan out? Was that because of your thought process or a fluke? If something went wrong then what about your thought process didn’t help you?

This can help you to narrow down stuff like: did a possibility not arise to you, were you biased/overly dogmatic in some way, did you just not know some relevant information or a particular technique that could have helped you? Have you gotten out of practice with something? Was the situation even in your control?

And like wise if it’s good, what can you repeat? Did you apply some good critical thinking rule or something you learned? Are there situations where this wouldn’t have happened this way?

I find it’s impractical to do this for everything but worthwhile doing every so often and sometimes this can call out patterns in your cognitive processes.

Another one on mental clarity: do the apple test. Try to visualise an apple. At some point I struggled with this and got mediocre results but I was able to improve it by doing some visualisation based “meditation”/exercises and employing some techniques like verbally saying or thinking the word “apple” or a description of one and/or focusing on parts of it before attempting to call the whole apple into view. This had some carry over benefits like being able to visualise things in blender in my head better.

It’s still March… 2020

Too real. Not just holidays, weeks and months go by and it’s like “shit when did it get to 2025??”

I no longer feel a sense of unrealised potential for myself I guess. That’s it, I’ve got what I’ve got.

If going from scratch, trying to get support from an acquiring bank to verify authorisation and settlement integration as a community project would be “interesting”. Things like PCI compliance, 3DS accreditation etc. also. Pretty much need to piggyback off an existing solution.

Yeah definitely. I’m sure some people in co-tech in the UK were working on something like this in a more generalised way a while back. They were running sessions for people on this for a while. Working with experienced orgs on this would be key.

Ideally each country would have a system which generates all the basic legal paperwork and a sound (if basic and intended for extension) constitution which encodes essential compliance requirements. Getting such a system verified may be easier said than done, however, especially depending on how co-op friendly the local regulatory environment happens to be.

I’d say if anything it’s hard to stop people from doing so. It’d be trivial to set up an ad-hoc exchange (e.g. I’ll PayPal you money for tokens) for instance or simply resell items purchased with the tokens in a fiat market.

Thinking more strategically, I think the aim would ultimately to get things like this provided through our co-opy marketplace.

The question then becomes when does exchange into national fiat currencies become an issue: legally of course there’s money laundering concerns. I’m hoping that the continual regular and cheap issuing of the tokens would generate a somewhat inflationary environment (which is compensated merely through dealing with everything instantly and electronically with an exchange mechanism) which would head off speculation at least.

Then maybe there is some idea that there should be an exchange to fiat currencies which is also organised as a co-op, which could allow some governance to be put in place around it and then defederate from instances which allow ad-hoc fiat exchange (again to put in a speed bump for money laundering and criminal liability).

Ok here’s the pitch: instances generate currency for each of their users on a time registered basis or some other easily verifiable metric. Each instance’s currency is different and they automatically generate exchange rates with each other instance’s currency. People buy and sell items through it using only currencies generated by the federated platform.

Also all instances have to be co-ops or they get de-federated. Maybe the license even specifies this.

???

Socialism

Would-be regex compiler writers wince as they realise they can’t just implement a FSA 😢

Died eating sea urchins… Yeah that kind of tracks actually.

Not a hamster but when I had gerbils, one had eaten half of the other. Not long afterwards the cannibal developed a severe middle ear infection which killed her even during treatment.

Given they’ve already floated ethnically cleaning the area it seems like things are about to get worse before they get better for sure.

If there’s one foreign influence we don’t need, it’s Elon Musk’s apartheid nostalgic nonsense. The sooner he blows himself up the better.

An opinion brought to you by somebody who’s never done a real day’s work in her life.

the guy who thinks detonating masses of nuclear warheads on a planet is likely to make it more habitable rather than less

There should be a “saving thirty minutes in reading documentation by spending two days debugging a GPT generated method”

Yeah I used to use Ubuntu as a Linux desktop a few years ago. I just came back to install Fedora on my desktop and the whole process was super easy. Even for gaming, Nvidia drivers, Steam with proton, etc. all set up with zero command line interaction, troubleshooting or even looking up guides or anything. It was intuitive and works.

Literally the hardest part was I couldn’t find my USB stick and ended up improvising with an old SD card as installation media.

The compatibility for gaming on Linux today is generally really good. The whole experience is really polished.

In historical context (especially without technological verification of where goods are ending up, counterrevolutionary presence and so on) I totally see why Lenin felt all this was necessary, extraordinarily strict criteria and all.

I hope when we see a socialist revival in Europe, we are able to leverage less personally invested measures such as those proposed in Stafford Beer’s work. Hopefully we can efficiently measure inputs and outputs to the economic and state machinery and use that as cause for inspection rather than making it a day to day business, and in general make things robust to differences in ideology. Use technology to enhance the efficiency of bureaucracy rather than introducing potential conflicts of interest by combining worker organisations with the state/party.

But these things may be easier said than done.