megameter · HackerTrans

5 yıl öncediscuss

I think the rat-race idea got baked deep into SV largely because of the setup of the post-1970 economy, and specifically California's rules: every startup had to be "fast" and "hit the ground running" not just because of literal business pressures, but because implicitly, everyone intends to exit and move on to the next thing immediately, so a slow-moving part-time effort would be a no-go. That derived just from mundane realities about the market, legal and financial environment, and protections afforded towards workers and businesses - everyone knows that we moved in the direction of corporations squeezing the workforce because they "couldn't afford" to build them up. Therefore career mindsets filtered to accommodate only those with the gold rush viewpoint, because the only way to win that game was to strike it rich and retire.

megameter

5 yıl öncediscuss

An example I know of that resembles the bricklayer problem is synthesis of human singing vocals into MIDI sequence data. There is now a history of products around that check off the boxes - one (Vochlea Dubler) debuted just last year - and every time, it demos well but the potential audience ends up rejecting it, because it does not really add what they thought it would add to their workflow. Even if the results themselves come out usable(already a wicked problem since the DSP has to deal with a multitude of recording scenarios while achieving low latency), users discover that they need to be talented at "singing like an instrument" if they want to play instruments by singing, which is a technical barrier, not an assistance to spontaneous creation. Practically speaking, they're better served creatively by button input tools that work top-down(e.g. pick a scale, then the keyboard only plays notes within that scale) since those define down the medium and therefore perform a creatively assistive function with a legible design paradigm(different scale = different sound).

megameter

5 yıl öncediscuss

You're getting at the part that I can expound a bit on :)

It's possible to engage with nihilism and say "I'm just going to survive pragmatically". It's related to the "state of nature" many philosophers will refer to as a pre-societal world. You can't have a society that's wholly nihilistic, but you can exist within society nihilistically in degrees, with the far end of that being the "off-grid live in a cabin in the woods" sort of disengagement. But even without going that far, it's also possible to engage with philosophical concepts and critiques without being ideologically attached to them.

Ideological attachment is what happens when you start converting all life events into phenomena relative to that ideology, and that's the thing that I see being shaken away from a fully normalized state("this is how the world is, there's no discussion to be had") to a vigorous, even violent argumentation(see: all the concepts you listed). And I can pinpoint that the shift happened almost instantly after the world achieved mass connectivity with smartphones, in the 2008-2012 period. Suddenly the US had its Marxists and anarchist voices emerge; trans rights became a major issue; and the "alt-right" took shape as well. We have a lot of visible ideologues in social media culture that will blame everything on the other ideology, where before those positions were buried by the consensus and relegated to subculture.

To me that makes it a "better" world in the sense of agency, because it's easier to examine the different positions. But it's also more fragmented as a society, more prone to bubbles of extremism. If my experience tracks, we're in a transitional state where many old attachments are being discarded while others are being taken up. (Since 2008, I went from being - to retroactively label things - a vagely cishet liberal, to a nonbinary asexual meta-anarchist, all terms I would have struggled with back then.)

My ideas on this mostly derive from Heather Marsh's philosophical writing, so you could say I am attached in that direction(it's equally true that I haven't been able to critique her work, in the sense that I literally just don't want to); her view coincides with that of the meta-anarchists(itself a newly emerging project of philosophical writings) which is why I now also use that as an identity label. I don't see myself as anti-identity, but I do see myself as anti-politics(despite having some occasional political engagement), because I accept Marsh's idea of there being both healthy attachments and unhealthy ones, and kicking my political attachment is like kicking a smoking addiction; I can try to curb it, but it often roars back to life if I look at the news.

megameter

5 yıl öncediscuss

It's clear to me that it's too easy to be Panglossian about our material conditions. Just thinking about the time frame I grew up within(1980's-2000's US) there were a lot of things that I now see as definitely bad and that have, in fact, all started to change in my adult life:

* The omnipresent nature of sweetened food and drink

* Car-dependent culture

* Mass media culture

* Simpsons-style dysfunctional nuclear families

* The whole array of corrupt policies and programs, cults-in-disguise(e.g. "troubled teen" schools), and ideologically driven movements; while we're hardly free of those things, and there are plenty of new or intensified versions of them, I believe there are also more ways to find a sustainable path outside those frameworks these days.

But if you asked me if life was good in 2000, I would be mostly in agreement, because my life seemed pretty good - I was told it was! But then I look back on it and it's like, nooo, actually, there were all these pieces that traumatized me, removed my agency, were bad for my health or made me settle for less. And I believe the same would be true if I had been experiencing life in 1970's.

Like, sure, in 1621 I'd probably have died at a young age. But I am on the hedonic treadmill with respect to life quality too. It doesn't matter to my feelings that now is the best time, if better is still possible.

megameter

5 yıl öncediscuss

Currently I use TextAdept which is kind of the inversion of "scripting" the editor - the core is basically a SciTE wrapper and the editor is Lua. It boasts a tiny source code footprint. There aren't many features or integrations, but I am aiming not to need those.

(Becoming IDE-dependent is definitely a thing, but when it goes in that direction, I look for a full-fat IDE experience for that specific language and then use either my text editor or IDE situationally. It's just not worth it to try to configure your way into Nirvana when the language you're using is probably going to change again.)

megameter

5 yıl öncediscuss

I believe the most troubling thing about Crawford's path is simply in the inability to develop self-critique of his own philosophy. His thoughts on a subject seem to terminate in the thing of having a mathematical model of a topic, not what we get out of that model. It does not seem to matter if the model is inscrutable when presented within a system, or if the system degenerates into a single strategy. (I have a memory of playing "Balance of the Planet" and after struggling for some time, discovering that the model did not restrict my taxation of dirty energy. Therefore I could gain a nearly infinite budget to clean up the planet on turn 1 with no negative consequences beyond "people falling off roofs while installing solar panels." I'm not even kidding - for some reason roofing accidents are ranked up there with deforestation and carbon release as very important things to model about our impact on the planet.)

Plus, last I heard, he's still stuck on an evo-psychological model of society that is quite out of fashion these days, which doesn't exactly help matters.

Crawford's story is a good warning for anyone who embraces simulation as an "end in itself", rather than a medium, though. This was an idea in vogue with wargaming's golden era and is now carried forward by VR enthusiasts, among others.

megameter

6 yıl öncediscuss

It's a combination of patents, features, target devices, and marketing proposition. There are many devices with hardware decoders that work great for watching a TV show, but if you're using video for interactive assets as games do, you probably have latency targets to hit, you might want seek-through performance, you may want transparencies, and so on. And RAD has long had a lock on really supporting the platforms game devs are using, so if you use their stack instead of bodging together a video solution, you're saving time overall.

megameter

6 yıl öncediscuss

While the codecs have been central to RAD nearly from the start(Miles was the first product, closely followed by Smacker), the talent pool they have is exceptional across many other categories relevant to Epic - so there is an element of aquihire here, even considering the IP. It's probably a good time to exit since the alternative would mean coming up with a sufficiently awesome next-gen thing again, and even with experienced hands, that can be a moonshot.

megameter

6 yıl öncediscuss

Try floor sitting. It's not perfect in the summer months since you get less airflow around the legs, but it lets you move a little and stretch as you think which is very healthy. Dozens of postures possible. It can be done cheaply, cheaper than a "normal" desk setup:

1. Folding floor desk(ideally taller and wider than a breakfast tray so there is leg room)

2. Lap desk for peripherals. This makes computer interactions ergonomic, no more hunching or reaching.

3. Floor chair/backrest so you can recline and get some back support in long sessions.

Plus all of it can fold compactly so it works well in a limited footprint.

megameter

6 yıl öncediscuss

There's a definite normalization of coded socialization throughout the business world and most any occupation. It emerges from the same quality that makes founders see their business as a "child" - they are going to protect it, and usher you towards similarly protecting it, because that is the thing parents do above all else. That isn't wrong - lots of folks fall in love with ideas.

If a person should come in that room, though, and make the case that they are the child, you start to get this sort of dysfunction. And when you wield a lot of authority, it's easy to fall into a child's mindset and never get called on it, and there is nothing innocent about what happens in those scenarios. You can pathologize it with various terms of the psyche, call them predatory or whatnot, but the underpinning of it is that these people are good at turning people into doting chaperones, and they will seek out such wherever they go and twist the rules as needed so that their own mistakes are "oopsies" while those of others are "unforgivable".

The only counterbalance I know of is to be so committed to an idea of your own that you immediately drive away anyone looking to engage you in this way. Then you will be bad at "socializing", but good at finding others similarly committed to ideas.

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