It’s fun when my government decides which administration officials to shitcan via press leak vibe check.

It looks like a dog ate bird poop and threw up on a biscuit. It’s really good though.

When I was younger there was a hot new book called The Artist’s Way. I never finished it, I don’t even know if I would recommend it, but one of the practices it recommends is morning pages, and morning pages helped me.

What you do is you get a pen and a notebook, and write three pages every morning. If you miss a morning, wait til next morning and write three pages. It doesn’t have to be good or even sensical. A lot of my early morning pages were line after line of “I don’t want to do this, this is bullshit, I’m just kiiiiiiiilllllllling trees and wasting space this is dumb”. Eventually I got bored of writing that stuff and started writing other things, but it took a long time.

The trick is you gotta do it every day, even on days you don’t want to. No one but you can make you write so if you don’t do it, you won’t do it.

Oh it’s pandemonium. My nipples can launch a thousand ships per minute. Each.

You’re getting near a description of Merkle’s Puzzles, one of the earlier versions of public key cryptography. If you like thinking about this stuff I think it’s a fun read.

This is my reflection on my own experience with meditation, I have no other expertise on the subject.

It’s not not that. It doesn’t completely prevent processes from starting up randomly, but it does make it easier and faster to shut them down gracefully. It’s also helpful for understanding and adjusting system calls that keep restarting processes I no longer need running all the time.

Meditation is essentially a software patch that reduces the brain’s tendency to DDoS itself.

My alt-text isn’t showing up and I spent too long on it to give it up so I’m putting it in a comment:

yep that works a lot better. Mine did spit out a wall message, but only after the script hangs and has to be ctrl-D’ed. I figured I had tested enough for the internet joke and I shipped it to prod.

Nah, it’s nothing that complicated, it’s just a bash script

while [ 0 -eq 0 ]
do
        wall | head -c 16 /dev/random
        sleep 1
done

It’s such a defeated attitude. Back in my day the internet Nazis at least pretended to give a shit about their ideology, now it’s just “we can’t let them take away our wallowing drivel, otherwise we would have nothing left to wallow in” like, Really? the best defense you can come up with is “it’s better than nothing?” When was nothing an option?

Oh right, when nazi ideology dictated that the only legitimate culture is its own. God damn, nazis, it must be bleak to live in a world where you’re not allowed to enjoy any good art. No wonder you’re such cranky assholes all the time.

LMAO “not rehosting nazi content” -> “we’d have no content” is a wild statement.

Even better, it’s a new way of not saying it.

Let’s say I’m a tech worker who got mega laid-off. Depending on how long I have been in tech I may or may not have some small savings to fall back on, but it won’t last long and it doesn’t seem like there are likely to be any tech jobs in the near future that aren’t criminally negligent to outright actively evil. I want to write open source code and I want to help make the internet and the world a better place, but I also really need money for food and medicine and shelter and stuff. What could I do?

seriously what do I do

We could be the great scourge of this part of the universe. Expanding recklessly through galaxies in the local group, leaving only the dead husks of stars that have been stripped of all usable energy. The exponential nature of scientific discovery means that not only do we have a head start, our head start compounds as time progresses. We become a horrific but very efficient war machine for the sole purpose of controlling and exploiting all available forms of energy for profit. We seem like we’re on that path.

That thing you use to poke at stuff on the grill is called a toque. A spear is a onek (pronounced “wunk”)

I’d throw The Dick Van Dyke Show in as well. Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore are both dynamos on their own and they play off each other beautifully, the supporting cast is solid, the writing is timeless. All around fantastic classic show.

I’ll regard it, but I’m not sure what useful conclusions can be drawn from it. This seems like polarization bait that lets left-of-center types feel smug about how much smarter they are than conservatives, and right-of-center types can indulge in a good pity party about how biased those socialist Europeans are against conservatives. Something for everybody, accomplishing nothing. Who gives a fuck about who has the higher IQ? What has it to do with whether a persons actions are just or unjust? Even if we take for granted that IQ is a reasonable measure of intelligence, intelligent people are just as capable of doing terrible, selfish things.

Imagine a scenario where this same study was conducted but it found that conservative men had higher IQs. Same study, same methodological rigor, different result. How would your opinions or beliefs about the world change? Would you be inclined to think that maybe conservatives are perhaps going about things the right way, by virtue of this study? I would hope not. Even if we could measure intelligence, hell, if we could even define intelligence cogently and comprehensively, what impact should that have on our decision making? Are “smarter” people considered more right? Or should statements be evaluated on their individual merits, regardless of the quantified “smartness” of the person who said them?

I think it should be the latter. IQ is at best a curiosity and it should have no place in the evaluation of government or social policy. Thank you for coming to my soapbox harangue.

Caring about IQ is stupid even when it validates your preconceptions.

Specifically for writing textbooks, you might enjoy looking at https://www.americanyawp.com/ for inspiration. Their documentation is light on technical details but you could email the contacts at the bottom of https://www.americanyawp.com/text/about/ with questions about how to structure your specific project.