notabee · HackerTrans

12 dni temudiscuss

I am really starting to think that the Very Smart People (pejorative) holding power think that they can just copy the Chinese mass surveillance and social control model without changing anything else about the economic or cultural models of the U.S. and Europe, and that's going to somehow allow us to compete with them. I'm sure there will be massive exceptions for anyone wealthy and connected, so the panopticon is just a way to whip and threaten the common folk. That's also why it probably won't work. In a way it just reeks of desperation and reaching straight for the most authoritarian approach.

notabee

w zeszłym miesiącudiscuss

I think that fasting-mimicking diets are a way to potentially get some of these benefits through occasionally engaging these "slower speed" repair mechanisms without permanently living with bare minimum protein intake. But I also think that at this point so far we've seen fat, sugar, and then all carbohydrates villainized. I don't think that excessive protein is going to turn out to be a good idea either and it will likely also have its turn as villain, especially after all of these new high protein fad foods that are still highly processed junk run their course. People just need to balance their damn nutrients and eat whole foods. There aren't many real shortcuts to health, but we're just desperate to find them due to time poor societies obsessed with hyper-optimization.

notabee

2 miesiące temudiscuss

For a deeper dive on just how that funding is meant to circumvent constitutional protections that normally exist around law enforcement, I recommend watching this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkgNnbTrsgw

notabee

2 miesiące temudiscuss

Conway's Law still holds true. Software applications will resemble the communication structure of the companies that build them. If the companies are comprised of 90% overly verbose bullshit, so too will be the fragile slop monstrosities that they build.

notabee

2 miesiące temudiscuss

Any system is going to have a free rider problem. I genuinely believe that if we stopped trying to force a large chunk of the population to look like they're busy when they have zero intrinsic desire to do anything well and will continually cut corners wherever they can, we'd reach a productivity golden age where there would be enough surplus for them to fuck off and be lazy out of the critical path. The stumbling block here is always the perception of unfairness, and it's a big one, but for anyone that really cares about their work or its quality, do you really want to always have to work with people who will only do the bare minimum to survive? Hopefully you aren't cold enough to want them to starve, but should they be forced to participate and drag everyone else down just to prove some kind of innate moral ethic? I wish that we as a society could approach this pragmatically instead of moralizing under a veneer of pragmatism.

notabee

2 miesiące temudiscuss

I really hope that more people become aware of how much of our society is turning into kayfabe. Just think of the rise of all the new types of ____ theatre like this that have been coined over the last decade or more. It's not an accident or fad, it reflects something true that's happening to society at large. Everything authentic and valuable is being turned into something inauthentic, based only on conjured up perceived value and competition to fulfill the perception, and not real or useful purposes. It's all in the service of propping up systems that no longer function for the majority of people, or even for basic needs. And until a lot more people are willing to point out that the emperor is quite naked, even at their own social or financial risk, this will continue to rot everything down to the foundation.

notabee

4 miesiące temudiscuss

The U.S. has done that kind of thing before, and that's probably why it's so paranoid about having the same kind of thing done to it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/national-...

notabee

4 miesiące temudiscuss

The problem with this becoming the only reasonable tactic writ large is that it creates social bubbles just like social media. You wind up with very insular cultures and I think at least some of the hype addiction problems seen in tech can be attributed to these echo chambers. It's a hard problem to solve, especially now with LLMs being force amplifiers to low effort hiring and job seeking attempts. But to not solve this problem will, I think, continue to make increasingly unwell companies and unwell industries as the "meme pool" gets very shallow.

notabee

5 miesięcy temudiscuss

It's baked into the foundations of the U.S. While perhaps not a cult as we describe it today, even the first puritans that settled here were considered extremists not welcome in their home countries. For such a young country, we have always had a burgeoning industry in upstart cults, grifts, and religions (but I repeat myself).

notabee

5 miesięcy temudiscuss

I had a situation like that with an undocumented behavior and systemd-tmpfiles. I wanted it to clean up a directory in /var/tmp/ occasionally. The automation using that directory kept breaking, however, because instead of either finding a whole intact git repo to update or a deleted repo, it instead found only a scattering of files that were root-owned with read-only permissions. There was yet another undocumented feature in systemd-tmpfiles where it would ignore root-owned, read-only files regardless of explicit configuration telling it to clean up the contents of those directories. Eventually this feature was quietly removed:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1780979

https://github.com/systemd/systemd/commit/a083b4875e8dec5ce5...

That was far from the only time that the systemd developers decided to just break norms or do weird things because they felt like it, and then poorly communicate that change. Change itself is fine, it's how we progress. But part of that arrogance that you mentioned was always framing people who didn't like capricious or poorly communicated changes as being against progress, and that's always been the most annoying part of the whole thing.

notabee

7 miesięcy temudiscuss

Billionaires are buying up and consolidating all of the media outlets just as a hobby, I'm sure.

notabee

7 miesięcy temudiscuss

I'm pretty much always disappointed these days reading online discussions, and I sometimes think about how intentionally devolving most online conversations into petty slapfights is one of the very effective astroturfing techniques. It's basically signal jamming anything substantive or cooperative because people get tired sifting through all the noise and get mad reading all the bad takes. Though I have no doubt that many of them are still 100% genuine foolish humans.

notabee

7 miesięcy temudiscuss

I really wish people would stop fixating on one nation-state or other entity when it comes to the astroturfing problem. It's something that's going to have all sorts of hands stirring the pot since it's basically just a very pernicious new form of marketing and propaganda. Any sizeable countries or corporations are going to be utilizing this new tool of manipulation, regardless of how scummy that may be.

notabee

7 miesięcy temudiscuss

The longstanding existence of religions and the continual birth of new cults, the popularity of extremist political groups of all types, and the ubiquity of fortune-telling across cultures, seem to stand in opposition to your assertion that people hate being manipulated. At least, people enjoy belonging to something far more than they hate being manipulated. Most successful versions of fortune-telling, religious conversion, and cult recruitment do utilize confirmation bias affirmation, love-bombing, and other techniques to increase people's agreeableness before getting to the manipulation part, but they still successfully do that. It's also like saying that advertising is pointless because it's manipulating people into buying things, and while people dislike ads it's also still a very successful part of getting people to buy products or else corporations wouldn't still spend vast amounts of money on marketing.

notabee

5 lat temudiscuss

People have been chanting cattle not pets since before Ansible existed, so if people cargo cult it without using it in the way it's useful, there's not a tool out there that's going to really protect people from lack of due diligence. We don't judge a kitchen knife according to the people who try to grip it by the blade. Dependencies outside of an app's git repo will always exist for anything beyond the most trivial application.

Tooling can assist process, provide guard rails and reminders, but it's never going to replace remembering some important things. Having layers of process that mean that a single person forgetting is not going to cause disaster are necessary no matter what. Maybe when general AI exists we won't have to worry about remembering things, but then at best most of us will be out of jobs, at worst we'll be running from kill bots.

Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of design decisions in Ansible that regularly annoy me, but I've never expected it to make me less forgetful or substitute for people cooperating and communicating, and I think expecting any tool to do that is a road to disappointment.

notabee

5 lat temudiscuss

I'm still not seeing the difficulty with doing that. Basically any daemons that you're setting up using distro packages or systemd service units (which, even though I'm not strictly in love with systemd, is what you should do for any service daemons you set up), it's just a matter of telling the service/systemd module and probably the copy or template module that you used to created the config files that they should be "state: disabled" or "state: absent" respectively. It'll disable and remove config of whatever service you've set up. What I will also do some times is create an array variable of services to enable and services to disable, and all that's required to switch is moving a daemon's name from one list to another. So, unless you're doing something outside of the modules like copying a bunch of stuff with the shell module and launching these putative daemons without some supervisor like systemd, it's pretty trivial to tell Ansible to reverse whatever it did. And if you are just launching processes using a bash script or something, why? It can get more complicated if it's e.g. a dev box and people are using ssh to go in and tinker directly, but generally Ansible will still just remove/create whatever needs to be there if it needs to be changed, or do nothing. Depending on how robust you want to make Ansible against people doing unexpected things, you can use trap doors like "meta: end_host" to bail out on errors if people are causing problems with manual edits, but that's better solved as a people/process problem than trying to make Ansible handle all possible unexpected situations.

In the end it's also usually just easier to use Ansible to bake a new VM or container configuration and deploy that instead of mutating an existing one over and over again.

notabee

5 lat temudiscuss

Yes, it can get hairy but I just have a hard time seeing an adhoc mess of python and bash doing the equivalent amount of lifting without becoming an even bigger hairball. And the thing is, you can also just run those same bash and python scripts using Ansible if you really want to, just to keep them orchestrated properly.

notabee

5 lat temudiscuss

We've been using the git module to pull down the desired version of the repo and then using synchronize to copy it over. That could be used to overwrite whatever was previously being copied from the git repo. So, can you explain where that doesn't work for a git based deployment? It's a pattern we use a lot. (A slight tangent though, systemd-tmpfiles can ruin your day if it partially deletes the repo, because that makes the git module crap out.)

notabee

7 lat temudiscuss

Here's a few for depression and air pollution[1][2] Here's some studies on anti-inflammatory treatments for treatment resistant depression[3] And more relevant to the original topic, 5HT-2A receptor agonists may have anti-inflammatory effects. There's huge potential in a broad class of molecules that have been banned for moral, not medicinal, reasons.[4] Edit: picked another one [5]

1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30719959

2. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/01/brain-pollution-evid...

3.https://www.healio.com/psychiatry/depression/news/online/%7B...

4.https://www.fasebj.org/doi/abs/10.1096/fasebj.2019.33.1_supp...

5.https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3788795/

That's just some quick googling. There's tons more out there to read!

notabee

7 lat temudiscuss

Depression has plenty of evidence linking it to inflammation. If we can start seeing it not in terms of mind/body dualism, or on some outmoded moral spectrum, but on the same terms as any other illness, like the common cold, we'll make a lot of progress with it as a society. Much like the common cold, it probably has many different causes (like colds are causes by many viruses) but the same disease phenotype.

What you might be getting at with the comment that "everyone has it" is that modern society seems to cause depression just as surely as swimming in sewage will cause other illnesses. Much like society prior to germ theory, widespread depression will continue until we can learn more about the causes and mechanisms. People used to think other illnesses were moral failing or spiritual possession until we discovered that it was from drinking water that someone else crapped in. So how many things are crapping on your mental health? Are they really inevitable and necessary, or just bad cultural programming and assumptions about what society should look like? How much might be from strictly physical causes like air pollution? (There's research backing that.)

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