Everything would be exactly the same except for like 3 posts where I made “hooting” puns.
So-called “Rationowlists” claim to be tolerant of all ideas, but in practice they are actively hostile to feminism and socowl justice and their much-vaunted “Principowl of Charity” is just an excuse not to engage with the racism and fascism of their friends the Neowlreactionaries. They insist that their critics must be lying or deluded if they haven’t slogged through the hundreds of thousands of words of the Seqowlces and then turn around and refuse even the slightest engagement with critical theory and postmodernism unless everything is spelled out for them. These fucking cultowls hide behind “free speech” when called out on their misogyny, yet their leader actively suppresses discussion of Rokowl’s Basowlisk.
lmao lesswrongowls are such hypocrites. neowlfascist blogger owlsley nowldwracu severnowlazemlya blocked me so i can’t reblog them, but here’s a screenshot of him criticizing them:
[ i m a g e ]
they’d be so pissed at this coming from a leftist like they pretend to be, but from their owlt-right buddies it’s totally cool. they constantly deride leftists but ignore the awful things done by the actual nowlzis they hang out with. they’re not actually opposed to bullying, they just hate the owlft. oh, and look at the notes if you ever wanted proof that they’re lying about not hanging out with fascists.
#fascism// #nazis//
amazingly this actually makes more sense than the original discourse
By observing programmers in their natural habitat.
Okay, not really, observing programmers in their natural habitat was simply the thing that made me intensely invested in learning it because the natural habitat was extremely appealing to my sensibilities.
I had tried it a couple of times in uni, but it was always something ridiculous like java or C#, with the semicolons, curlybrackets and public static cargocult copypastes before anything could be done. When I visited SF I had the opportunity to interact with people who do it for a living and got two recommendations for actually getting stuff done: python or ruby. I chose ruby because it was completely new to me and seemed a bit less common and I tend to optimize for the unlikely (a strategy which has brought brilliant success so far).
I got started with codecademy, just running the elementary things in the browser for quick familiarity (and because I didn’t have a machine to do it properly on anyway), then after exhausting the elementary stuff began opportunistically exploiting other sources, mostly rubymonk and learnrubythehardway; if one didn’t explain something in a satisfactory way, some other place did. In codeanywhere, because I was still intimidated by the prospect of installing Arch on my chromebook and wanted to gather confidence before trying it.
Then I discovered that I had been scared of it for absolutely no reason because stuff worked very well (or at least stuff that isn’t xorg-related) and fell in love with not only the language, but also the command line. In a certain kind of way I’d like not having a window manager at all because screw desktops, code is where the interesting stuff happens, but not having to reboot to chromeos for accessing websites is kind of relevant so I’m now just trying to figure out a minimalistic i3 that can get out of the way and be basically cli with tabs, tiling and a browser. And zsh now that fish has given me a hunger for shell awesomeness because zsh can actually satisfy it.
But anyway, back to programming; while going through hardway (some people un-recommended it because it was just a port of the original book for python, but for me the “monkey.see.do.extrapolate” approach was very compatible) I was also running through ideas of stuff I wanted to use it for, and took detours to build those things whenever I learned something that could be used in one of them. Now I’m doing the odin project/preparatory work for the viking code school to learn the rest of the infrastructure for building more impressive and bigger things that would feel worth spending time on.
My brain approaches this stuff like a mathematician and loses interest in trivial but burdensome tasks once it has proven that they are provable and can be like “okay I can certainly see how it would be done, just can’t be bothered to implement it because I could spend the time learning new stuff instead”. For example, I built a universal input validator that can also handle dictionaries of synonyms and even optimize and prioritize if the same word has two different meanings, so that it can take in anything and convert it to terms the program itself understands, and handle all the possible cases as gracefully as possible. It emerged as a method for replacing successive prompts in my budgeting program (“to”, “from”, “date”, “amount” etc.) with a simple string input of natural language that wouldn’t be so constrained.
Then it just grew more and more capable because I didn’t want to be bound to a specific formatting of the input, so if one were to be like “anon paid promethea 50 yesterday” it would be just as understood as “$50 from anon to promethea on nn.nn.nn”.
Then I realized the applicability and because I’m extremely DRY (if I have to do even the tiniest thing repeatedly I tend to write it into a method, and thus my code looks like half a million “def something"s with other custom somethings nested inside them like recursive lego, and the final product is just something trivial like "thing = CustomClass.new; thing.run” because the methods do everything. Not sure if it’s smart programming, but it feels really natural to do it that way; I don’t know what exactly I end up doing so I just implement a lot of building blocks that can be re-used and re-configured as easily as possible.) I made it universal so instead of taking a hash with strings as keys and arrays of strings as values, I made it validate strings against anything with even a bit of stringiness in it and return the matches in an easily-digestible form.
Then I realized that I had built basically half of a pretty neat parser for a text adventure game (the other half being the code that tests the relationships of the words to each other, and the dictionary containing the valid words), but the rest would be drudgery because I’d have to come up with content instead of just tools; implementing the validator was interesting because it was a constant puzzle, but the rest shall be left as an exercise for the reader because I’m not getting paid for it. (However, if someone were to want me to code a tool that can generate a text adventure game for whatever content they want to have in it, it would feel like worth doing, because I’d just need to figure out the metaprogramming, and let someone else do the boring repetitive work. And this probably generalizes pretty well; I gladly welcome any ideas for building something interesting.)
And back to the original level from all the meta; now I’m setting up my modded chromebook (my Troll side finds tablet mode with only a CLI interface absolutely hilarious) for proper fullstack dev work and enviosly eyeing the terms of bootcamps that are like “four months of madness, no need to give cash just pay us a fraction of what you earn in your first year, green card holders or citizens only”.
Some lovely kind and trusted people, including @socialjusticemunchkin, are in the process of rescuing me! There is every hope that they’ll get me to safety within several months!
Now I will need money for various expenses! (see link for details)
I appreciate all your support and kindly assistance enormously. I know many of you feel for me, and I promise I’ll do my best to survive and thrive. Thank you!
(please feel free to share)
Multi’s a friend of mine. I’d appreciate any help you can give her.
In which promethea is Getting Shit Done. Okay, my contribution has mostly been about getting the right people in contact with each other and writing a thingy for them because for some reason people like it when I write thingies, but I prefer to call it “efficiency”. This is legit, support it, it will make many people very happy and one of them very safe as well.
I had broken bash in my arch installation and managed to make it dump core like Chernobyl (baby leet’s first segfault!) so one quick reinstall later I’m exploring the joys of alternate shells, my feelings sufficiently summed up by this image:
I would be unimaginably glad if someone knew a CLI editor that was the same thing to nano as fish is to out-of-the-box bash. This is such good, perfection, sense-makingness, convenience and most importantly teh pretty.
How…
How did you manage to break bash?.
Isn’t that thing older than and more widely used than Linux? Like, the last significant bug it had was counter-intuitive handling of environment variables, no? How do you manage to break it?
For CLI editors – absolutely no idea, I’ll be honest (I just use emacs), but I’ve heard `jed`… mentioned once or twice? And not in a way that is “it has many good extensions” I don’t think? So it might be worth a look?
I think sourcing .bash_profile in .bashrc according to some customization instructions for OSX bash was the cause, because on my second try undoing that part unbroke it. First time I broke my account promethea with it, just got locked out and had no clue why (because it happened substantially after editing the files) and mucked around on root trying to make i3 and sddm work and managed to lock myself out of root as well. So I got back to ChromeOS (doing this on a c100pa chromebook because baby leet’s first arch must be as non-standard as possible because I always play life on hard mode), reinstalled (it was easy this time because I knew what I was doing) and broke bash again, but this time I was su’d to promethea from root, so it dumped me back to root instead of login, showed an error message and made debugging easy.
So why the fuck was I using OSX instructions for Arch? The bootcamp preparation didn’t include linux instructions, presumably assuming that anyone using linux either doesn’t need handholding (because they know how to do stuff) or doesn’t deserve it (because they’re running linux without knowing how to do stuff or bothering to figure it out themselves), which is IMO perfectly justified. I assumed they’d be similar enough because bash is bash, it wasn’t, and I learned. Fucking up and unfucking it taught me a lot more about bash than just following instructions successfully.
People on Facebook are now declaring their willingness to transition and then sleep with Eliezer in exchange for more HPMOR.
Okay, @sinesalvatorem existing might only be the _second_ most efficient way of equalizing the gender ratio in the community. More data is needed.
best tactic for avoiding ridicule is to blast through it and go waybeyond ridicule
you have no idea…
It’s my purpose in life. Nothing is more satisfying than taking ridicule, owning it, and going above and beyond it with full sincerity. The (implied) looks on people’s faces are priceless.
official opinion on “Chariot for Women”, the new Uber competitor that only hires women drivers and only picks up women:
women in Ubers are not at an elevated risk of sexual assault. most people who are sexually assaulted know their attackers. our societal obsession with the scary stranger as the prototypical case of sexual assault to protect ourselves from is deeply unhelpful.
women also commit sexual assault. saying “we’ll only hire female drivers, to keep our women safe” is buying into a narrative about female harmlessness and male predatoriness that helps female abusers and rapists get away with it.
In general, the fact that women are scared to be out at night and scared to call a cab is a problem. That fear is not remotely warranted by the evidence, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t affect and limit peoples’ lives. it is part of the same patriarchal “women can’t go out alone; they need protection” mindset that motivates some countries to require women have male chaperones. It is not feminist and feeding the unwarranted flames of this fear in the name of feminism is disgusting.
There’s this thing that keeps happening where people say “let’s unquestioningly accept the patriarchal narrative that women are pure, virtuous, and need protection. Let’s also unquestioningly accept the narrative that women are safe around other women, and that danger comes from men. Then, let’s come up with a plan for ‘empowering women’ that buys into both of those assumptions completely and in fact reinforces them! Why aren’t women empowered yet?”
On the bright side good on them for having an unequivocal “duh we take trans women, they’re women” policy. I guess if we’re going to all be subject to stupid empowerment-flavored pedestalization it may as well serve a population with a legit non-negligible risk of random strangers assaulting them.
Also, regular Uber is already able to be a lot safer for women than traditional cabs because both the driver and the passenger are identifiable from the app databases, while traditional cabs can easily be like “good luck trying to remember the license plate when you were totally wasted”.
Sexual assaults happen in ubers, and their numbers seem large because Uber carries so many people, and there has been some possibly-valid criticism about Uber not responding to them as well as they could/should (although taking it to the cops isn’t always that useful either, and if an abusive driver “only” loses their job it might be quite a bit more serious of a consequence than most assaulters get), but this is a relatively insignificant problem as far as the actual per capita numbers are concerned; and IMO only shows that Uber is evil, not dangerous.
I had broken bash in my arch installation and managed to make it dump core like Chernobyl (baby leet’s first segfault!) so one quick reinstall later I’m exploring the joys of alternate shells, my feelings sufficiently summed up by this image:
I would be unimaginably glad if someone knew a CLI editor that was the same thing to nano as fish is to out-of-the-box bash. This is such good, perfection, sense-makingness, convenience and most importantly teh pretty.
"I wanted to … make [Rorschach] as like, ‘this is what Batman would be in the real world’. But I have forgotten that actually to a lot of comic fans, ‘smelling’, ‘not having a girlfriend’, these are actually kind of heroic! So Rorschach became the most popular character in Watchmen. I made him to be a bad example. But I have people come up to me in the street and saying: ‘I AM Rorschach. That is MY story’. And I’d be thinking: ‘Yeah, great. Could you just, like, keep away from me, never come anywhere near me again as long as I live?’"
“I wanted to use the typical cliches to signal that this character is disgusting, but people sharing some characteristics saw a reflection of themselves, no matter how twisted (it’s not like trans women never recognized themselves in “evil” characters), and I just want to make it absolutely clear that I consider smelly people without girlfriends disgusting and worthless.”
Wait, what? I get the sadistic-vigilante aspect being meant to be offputting, but I assumed his lack of ability to have a relationship was meant as an unfortunate side effect rather than an actual disease. When the heck did Alan Moore attribute Rorschach’s popularity to THAT?
That said, does the “Marginalized people see themselves in a villain” phenomenon seriously apply to Rorschach? The whole point of Rorschach is that he’s a reactionary wingnut who enjoys inflicting violence on pretty much every category of people who ever had to settle for a villain for representation.
Relatability. That seems to be what Moore is actually talking about; not heroic but protagonist-y.
I can’t interpret this as anything else than “oh btw neckbeards suck, scorn dem” because he’s not talking about Rorschach’s reactionaryness, but his neckbeardness. Reactionary wingnuttiness is bad, but if reactionary wingnuts are the only protagonist-y neckbeards is media, one shouldn’t be surprised if neckbeards latch onto reactionary wingnuts. I’d be far more sympathetic to the idea if it was like “but I forgot that a lot of fans are closet reactionaries who just want to inflict violence on pretty much every such category of people” (which, unfortunately, also seems to be true for a certain value of “a lot” that is nowhere near the majority but seems significant enough to cause problems) because that is a characteristic of bad people, while neckbeardness is not.
Nick Land has conveniently put everything truly interesting and scary about NRx in one short post - whether it’s plausible is a separate question, of course, and deserves further consideration. All the stuff about race and sex or whatever is, as they (the specific they) say, just signalling interestingness or scariness, and not very well.
Serious question - assuming this is plausible, it seems to be neutral with respect to the distribution of property. Can we develop an alternative architecture that auto-enforces a collective or egalitarian distribution of property? That would be one way to make a run around revisionism and other political degenerations. A mutualist version of this appears to be what the Democratic Catallaxy people are after, though I can’t say I’m super-impressed so far by their concrete proposals. (Likewise Urbit thankfully doesn’t seem especially impressive to people in the know either, but as always, the ideas of the things are bigger than the first attempt at them.)
Okay so this is very much the æsthetic. Achieve voluntary redistribution of capital to reduce the problems of inequality without fucking up the markets. It matches intuitions about the modern economy: if I buy a Toyota I buy a car, if I buy a Tesla I buy a movement. Some parts of it are ones I’ve been looking into myself. It sounds suspiciously great superficially, as an abstract idea.
So the long game is obvious. But what’s the short one? What is the advantage of switching to a system with higher transaction fees and decaying money, if one isn’t in it for the ideology. What are the immediate incentives. Making early adopters filthy rich seems kind of assumed these days, so those who contribute to “catallaxy” early would seem to get a lot of rewards from it later on if it becomes big, but what else distinguishes this from the standard ponzi scheme. Bitcoin had 1) cheap 2) fast 3) unstoppable transactions in addition to the ponzi, but what does this one give in addition to a vague promise of a future revolution? I could see something like this being at least very experiment-worthy but there needs to be some other substance to it than “if everyone did this it would be awesome”, and I don’t see what is the thing that does it. A huge player in the field adopting it would give it momentum but why would it happen. That’s the part I’m not seeing.
because cupcakes and mountain goats cause heroin addiction
or possibly the other way around? I forget!
how remarkably helpful
i thank you for your wisdom great owl sage
Dashboard osmosis to the rescue!
AFAICT, it’s because a lot of rightists and edgelords who refuse to censor their self-expression just because someone finds it offensive were very offended by people being cute and cuddly where other people could see them.
They think it is not Serious Person Attitude because only manly stoics who never show emotions other than shedding a single tear over the tragic necessity of having to oppress all the not-white-man-people are Serious People.
This made them conclude that the people who aren’t interested in keeping up a facade of Serious Person are n e o t e n i c degenerates; the men are either cucks or women, the women are sluts, and the rest don’t real.
Everyone else laughed because the Serious Persons are the ones missing out on all the cuddling and polyamory and hotness pills and being able to show vulnerability and sincerity and still being able to be an impressive achiever if that’s what one is into (example: me).
