Solidity is the JavaScript-like programming language designed for developing smart contracts that run on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).
My intuitions are saying that the language should be functional, simple, high-level and damn well tested. Ideally it should also be close enough to natural language that it would be partially self-documenting and difficult to hide nasty tricks in. And it should have a strict syntax so that there’s only one correct way to do anything ever, and deviating from it would produce an obvious error instead of unexpected behavior and it would be noticed at “compile-time” so that the only programs that ever get to run are Correct.
I’m not an expert yet but these features sound like inspiration should be taken from the likes of Ada, Haskell, Python etc.
…so they chose javascript instead
what has the world done to deserve this
And it should have a strict syntax so that there’s only one correct way to do anything ever, and deviating from it would produce an obvious error instead of unexpected behavior and it would be noticed at “compile-time” so that the only programs that ever get to run are Correct.
Python
Wat
That was more about the “natural language-resembling” part; to my knowledge none of those languages would satisfy all of the requirements, but Python programs are actually readable while javascript is…javascript.
Solidity is the JavaScript-like programming language designed for developing smart contracts that run on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).
My intuitions are saying that the language should be functional, simple, high-level and damn well tested. Ideally it should also be close enough to natural language that it would be partially self-documenting and difficult to hide nasty tricks in. And it should have a strict syntax so that there’s only one correct way to do anything ever, and deviating from it would produce an obvious error instead of unexpected behavior and it would be noticed at “compile-time” so that the only programs that ever get to run are Correct.
I’m not an expert yet but these features sound like inspiration should be taken from the likes of Ada, Haskell, Python etc.
Here is a survey about queers in STEM which I feel is probably relevant to the interests of half my followers
(Note: cishets also supposed to take the survey! be a control group! for science!)
Grrrrrr
Gave up halfway. Tons of questions where my answer is n/a, but they force you to answer to proceed.
Like, I guess no one enters a STEM job without any degree. So what do I put, since I don’t exist or something?
Evidently they’ve never imagined a software engineer who doesn’t write grants or publish research, but who instead writes software. Like seriously, what rock do they live under?
Do they even try these surveys on anyone who isn’t exactly like them?
Garbage in/garbage out.
If you know who these researchers are, trust nothing they conclude. They cannot design a survey for shit.
What annoys me is these jerks will probably publish their erase-people-like-veronica non-data. Which, as an actual fan of data, this offends me.
Yeah it was pretty terrible.
I picked the bottom slider, wrote “Industry work” in the text field and slid it alllllll the way to the right. Grants? What grants? I’m a productive member of society, my clients pay me to work. I have a sales department to ask them for money.
The “Biological gender” field was also something special. “Determined on the basis of child bearing capability, genitalia, chromosomes and/or hormones.”
OK, brilliant, what if I have Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome? Then I check (no, male)/(vulva, female)/(XY, male)/(estrogen, female) on that list.
Yes. I’m trying to slog through (”high school”, “actually doing the git gud thing: 100%”, “amab female”) and it’s very bad.
But I had a few laughs at “are you aware of anyone in your STEM field sharing your gender identity”. Sure, that’s one of the more legit questions but it was nonetheless somewhat funny. The people with the exact same gender I know are all in my field, and a bit more broadly interpreted I’m vaguely aware that trans women are not actually a majority in my field (the same way people in downtown SF are vaguely aware that black people exist).
A lot of people go all “Youth rights is all about stupid white kids who wish they were oppressed” but I don’t think anyone could honestly deny that minors have a lot of serious limitations to their freedoms and their parents are often allowed and encouraged to treat them as property and even hit them, as long as they don’t do it too much.
But they don’t even try to deny that minors are legally and socially treated worse than adults. They just say that it’s a good thing for them to be treated that way, or at least that parents have a right to do it because they take care of the bills (imagine if someone tried that excuse for abusing their wife or something instead).
This is the same pattern I see with fatphobia. People’s objection isn’t that fat people aren’t oppressed, they just think that they deserve it or that it’s for their own good.
Actual Misandry seems to have this too. “Yes, men deserve to have violent emotionally repressed lives and be treaten as disposable.”
This is interesting, because I’m picking a pattern which suggests that “group X is treated badly” receives either “yes, so what” if people consider it okay and deserved, and “not true” if people consider it not okay (dat just world bias); for example, the “lol male tears” kind of feminists usually try to establish constructs explaining it away (”dat privilege tho” or “that’s a men-on-men problem”) instead of outright saying “yes that’s how it should be”, or how really few people are willing to go on record saying that the traditional targets of anti-discrimination efforts should be discriminated against while a lot of people are really invested in arguing that the discrimination doesn’t exist.
Extrapolating from that, if youth rights and anti-fatphobia got more popular people would start thinking they already are treated equally. There’s probably a slight connection mechanism to reality in the sense that popularizing youth rights wouldn’t work so well because of laws explicitly making the oppression obvious as it would be nigh-impossible to claim minors are equal with a straight face (although people totally would try anyway).
And this might also explain why nominal legal equality is so popular while trying to do anything about the substantial problems (non-violently; even when leaving state action out of this it still applies very strongly) gets a pushback. People who don’t want things to be improved can gather around de jure equality and claim it fixes everything while leaving de facto oppression and biases untouched. (Once again, even the male tears feminists tend to oppose conscription.)
Question that I haven’t really seen explored or answered (though I could just be searching the wrong thing): we’ve seen a bunch of studies arguing that a society with less guns is or isn’t safer than, for instance, contemporary US.
However, given that you are in a society where a bunch of people do have guns, is it better for you to have one too?
Seems like a good question for the rationalist(-adjacent) out there, since I feel like most normal people will own or not own pretty much in tandem with their beliefs about guns. But it seems to be at least possible to be anti-gun but still want one so long as everyone else is going to have one, or be pro-gun but choose not to have one.
?
There was quite a while when I was pro-gun but had no interest in owning one.
I am now mildly against gun-legality (mostly to make overly impulsive suicide harder). But also vaguely interested in maybe getting into target shooting.
This depends a lot on the spread of gun ownership in society.
I’d probably prefer not to own a gun (in the sense of having one in my home or carrying it) everything else being equal.
But I’d want a gun to defend myself from dangerous people if I considered it necessary.
Necessary meaning in this context “how likely is any given adversary to actually be armed and assume absence of armament”
So my preferences would go:
bad guys think I have a gun, but don’t > bad guys know I have a gun > bad guys think I don’t have a gun, but do > bad guys know I don’t have a gun
If I apply intuitive game theory to this set of preferences, it suggests that attacking anyone isn’t safe because if guns are considered rare, they would have one, while if guns are considered common, they might not have one but the chance is too high to risk; simultaneously it would balance the amount of guns into an equilibrium where enough people have them to outweigh the number of bad guys with guns but not everyone has so the risks of impulsive people having guns and hurting themselves aren’t as big as with universal gun ownership.
welfare is impossible without taxation and centralized coordination… welfare is impossible without taxation and centralized coordination…
don’t worry, “cap” as we know it is impossible with an “an” because there wouldn’t be a way to coerce people into living under a system they don’t want and thus the ancoms and ancaps would actually have to compete for whose system serves people’s needs the best instead of just looting the commons and handing oppressed easily-exploitable labor to cronies the way statcaps and statcoms alike operate
and if property rights were defined according to what organically arises from spontaneous order (it’s not like there would be alternatives), one would expect to see people having things like anarcho-syndicalist communes delivering effectively-welfare from the basic concepts of “our shit, no takey, go away looters” and “it’s actually nice to live in a community where people share things and take care of each other” and thus setting a floor for the possible misery of people
and i’m back to protesting anarchism for the sake of preventing feudalism’s natural rise from anarchy (the exact same mechanisms that incentivize aggregation of market power, but with more explicit force).
my promethea-model is saying the response to this is the minarchistic exogov that acts as a form of meta-state. problem is i haven’t read those posts because ow my head.
what prevents the use of force but consolidated force, what prevents the use of consolidated force but greater-consolidated force, what prevents that greater-consolidated force from being the centralized state itself? how can force be consolidated save through use of force? where did the articles of confederation fail where this mechanism wouldn’t?
it’s the distribution of violence
feudalism arises from a situation where a single trained knight in armor can pwn whatever number of peasants
non-centralized power arises from a situation where people can pwn each other and refrain from doing so because they don’t want to get pwned in turn
anarchy could well be like the “horrible coordination” thought experiment in a stable non-centralized order: anyone who tries to consolidate force gets force consolidated against them only for the purpose of stopping them and afterwards the force gets immediately deconsolidated to avoid others consolidating against it
of course, this necessitates that the tools of such order be distributed widely so small groups of people can’t hoard them and enforce their order on everyone else
the minarchistic exogov (or ‘mvg’ for suckless-style naming that doesn’t get mixed up with authoritarianism) is just a “if there is a state, this would be a quite non-terrible one”, I haven’t managed to hack it to output effectively-anarchism (YGM, cut me some slack it’s only a day old) as an inevitable outcome of nicely-engineered incentive gradients; Elon Musk has said that there should be direct democracy on Mars and mvg could be a tolerable implementation of it as it could provide a very libertarian society at least in places where people want to have libertarianism (and it could be implemented as a very hands-off “the only rule of the pseudo-anarchist state is that all other attempts to start a state are banned”)
Firewall is the actual attempt to solve the issue of “okay there’s some stuff we really need to centrally coordinate even in an anarchist system”
nice state you’ve got there; it’d be a shame if anyone… SMASHED IT
police is not the best example of socialization…
it’s kind of literally the worst example of socialization it is possible to have. clearly this lime-green Tyrannosaurus rex hasn’t been keeping up with race relations, the “drug war”, the “terrorism war”, surveillance, and the constant erosion of civil liberties.
that’s just the US.
The entire point of PoliceMob is to enforce harmful stuff and pass the costs to others; non-harmful stuff that people Actually Want to enforce could get done anyway (eg. I don’t want people to get murdered, and thus I will support the enforcement of “nobody gets murdered”, but I wouldn’t pay shit to the enforcement of “nobody smokes weed” if I wasn’t forced to do it at gunpoint)
@socialjusticemunchkin, I haven’t engaged with your OpenGov posts because holy hell is that a lot of text and I am a very lazy person.
but a more defensible reason is that the framing of government as software is fundamentally misguided I feel. it drags the debate in a direction that feels more comfortable to geeks (upgrade your government! open source it! hack it!) while obscuring the actual problems that need to be solved and replacing them with the vague idea that existing players are just too dumb to spot obvious wins.
like, if your proposal takes from granted axioms that aren’t even accepted by a majority of the population then it’s going to be a rocky road to acceptance, is part of what I’m saying.
What I’m saying is that the immediate actions of USG are very much defined by the people in it (Obama has been less horrible than Bush, for example), but the fundamental character of the system and the incentives shaping the big trends are influenced by the procedures and operations which in turn are an outgrowth of the constitution and history.
Thus, focusing on people can win 4-year terms of desirable policy, but focusing on systems can win decades to centuries of subtly more desirable policy by making the government be more inherently likely to output certain things over others.
And on the other hand if I try to come up with some kind of a “source code” for a government that would inherently be less harmful, focusing on specifics is like asking the drafters of the constitution about what the requirements for drivers’ licenses would be. I’m not trying to come up with specific solutions but instead with a system of delivering certain types of specific solutions. It’s not my place to describe the daycare policy of Caracas, all I’m trying to come up with is something people in Caracas could use to determine whether they want to have a daycare policy and if they do, what would it be. Traditional democracy is shitty for solving this question anywhere resembling well, and if a better solution could be implemented it would be v v good for people.
And many of the better object-level solutions could be basically described as “hands off motherfuckers”. Eg. building codes in Finland have evolved over 50 years to never actually save any energy, and just create novel problems which the next iteration will try to patch up while causing its own. The entire country would’ve been better off with a policy of “just don’t fuck with it” because at least then well-proven construction techniques that don’t end up creating health problems for people wouldn’t be outright illegal. I want government to receive legitimacy by delivering the core goods at the expense of random populist whims, not by satisfying random populist whims and sacrificing the core goods.
Existing players being too dumb to spot obvious wins is basically the entire justification for governments; if you assume they could, then I guess you might as well go full anarchist because nobody would be required to enforce the obvious wins on people. (sry for the snark; it tru tho)
And public choice theory has pretty definite explanations for certain entire classes of failures governments consistently deliver and hardening the state against them would not prevent the previous crisis as usual; instead it could render it altogether more resistant to the next crisis, and the one after that, and the one after that…
I know it’s a programmer brains thing to describe the functionings of USG as “source code” but those functionings create an incentive landscape which people will travel and the best way to push a boulder somewhere is not to exert effort on making it go uphill, it’s making that somewhere be downhill to begin with. And understanding and controlling those systems to generate less harmful outcomes is theoretically massive leverage. And what else is leverage? Software. You can campaign for a certain candidate, or you can run google or facebook and be basically in a fuck you we make the real choice position. I know which one I would work towards. So there are certain obvious analogies. And a few shock doctrine economists had a much more massive impact than millions of voters, so this isn’t without historical precedent either.
Furthermore, focusing on the meta level lets me take the focus away from my popularly objectionable object-level positions to my equally objectionable meta-level positions… okay yeah I just want to spacestead okay. Then I’ll be out of the way and not complaining when people follow democratic incentives off a cliff again and again and again.
#we need a suckless government
*heart palpitates*
do you consider the market to be naturally empirical? it’s pretty clear that if states are, it is in the span of centuries. markets are quite obviously a genetic algorithm imo.
i also consider the market to be naturally wealth-aggregating, by necessity of the inefficiency inherent in the people that compose the market. risk-aversity, leveraging small differences in power into big differences, and merging into a union/consuming and being consumed are my only immediately-available ideas as to why and how.
the intersection of those two properties gives you google, and since google is going to eat the world i think they’re pretty good guesses.
if by “naturally empirical” you mean “finds out what works, for the meaning of ‘works’ it is operating within” then obviously, because otherwise someone else would find out what works and overtake them
and actually there are reasons to believe properly freed markets would have centrifugal effects as massive profits couldn’t be sustained, piracy would be rampant and google’s code would get “stolen” because fuck why not it’s not like there’s anyone to stop it as information wants to be free, and the inherent inefficiencies in large-scale organizations would set limits (strictly speaking, corporations operate under the same information constraints as states; just because the constitution says “optimize shareholder profit” doesn’t mean they’ll actually be any good at it when burdened by office politics and shit while a startup where people actually know what the fuck they’re doing and why can have massively higher productivity) for how big they can remain
and then there’s the fact that for wealth to be meaningful, it needs to be controlled somehow and without the state to pass the costs of that control to others, massive amounts of wealth can only be held where holding them actually works; one can have an extillion cryptodollars but it’s numbers on a screen if one can’t exchange it for other forms of value, while maintaining control over vast quantities of physical property is expensive and thus will only happen if it’s “worth it”
welfare is impossible without taxation and centralized coordination… welfare is impossible without taxation and centralized coordination…
don’t worry, “cap” as we know it is impossible with an “an” because there wouldn’t be a way to coerce people into living under a system they don’t want and thus the ancoms and ancaps would actually have to compete for whose system serves people’s needs the best instead of just looting the commons and handing oppressed easily-exploitable labor to cronies the way statcaps and statcoms alike operate
and if property rights were defined according to what organically arises from spontaneous order (it’s not like there would be alternatives), one would expect to see people having things like anarcho-syndicalist communes delivering effectively-welfare from the basic concepts of “our shit, no takey, go away looters” and “it’s actually nice to live in a community where people share things and take care of each other” and thus setting a floor for the possible misery of people
speakertoyesterday asked: Suckless? :D :D :D (yes, this is not a question so much as excitement on finding another lover of the old ways)
yes
st is objectively Best Terminal although I have patched in a bit of extra to deliver scrollback (I’m using window manager instead of tmux because I can’t get a normal people browser to be a tmux pane and w3m one can’t exactly do webdev on); my desktop is running xmonad because I like functional programming for ideological reasons (ghc is fukhueg but otherwise haskell seems nice); my nvim is more “full-featured” than “minimalistic” which is kind of in violation with the ideas I guess but it’s my most important tool and everything else needs to get out of the way while nvim can save time by almost reading my mind; I read about systemd and am scared and astonished simultaneously; the suckless “rocks” list rightfully contains a lot of stuff I use…
