Got tickets to see Cannons, Meg Meyers, and Nimesh Patel

Wed Jun 21, 2023 12:01 AM

I remember that was my experience in the schools that I went to. I fought back.

Thu Jun 22, 2023 04:33 PM

Don’t shop through Temu nor Shein. They do little to nothing to weed out products made from slavery (forced labor). A congressional investigation into Temu and Shein offered new insight into services that are delivering a deluge of cheap and little-regulated products. Also, if they say that are in compliance with regulations, don’t believe them. In China, the general business rule is to fake compliance with regulations, fool the environmental testing measurements, or bribe officials to get a pass. #Temu #Shein #China #slavery

Thu Jun 22, 2023 09:51 PM

Establish a code word with your family members in case you get a suspicious call that looks like it comes from their telephone number and sounds like them.

Sat Jun 24, 2023 07:01 PM

Just in case I lose my mind and think it would be a good idea to be that far out in the woods from a trail. Yeah, I get tired of seeing other hikers on the trail too and want to be alone with nature too, but I’m not that desperate.

Sat Jun 24, 2023 07:34 PM

It’s taking a lot of willpower not to adopt one of these cuties. Right now, gotta be patient.

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Sat Jun 24, 2023 10:57 PM

from the source of “emotional damage!” meme

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This is what I’ve been saying for weeks. https://venturebeat.com/ai/the-ai-feedback-loop-researchers-warn-of-model-collapse-as-ai-trains-on-ai-generated-content/

Mon Jun 12, 2023 11:47 PM

Is Amazon getting a tax break (or a backroom promise about no new taxes) from the Seattle City Council for bringing workers back into the office for 3 days a week? (as part of its downtown revitalization efforts) #seattle #Amazon #seattlecity

Tue Jun 13, 2023 10:18 AM

It occurred to me out of the blue this morning that people get hung up over the theory or idea of communism that they can’t see what happened in practice. In the abstract, all communist countries settled on a one party system or group think. Think of it like a theocracy, or a large scale brutal tribe or clan.

Communists become paranoid of dissent and see it as a threat to their ideas and goals. They wipe out dissenters with mass atrocities and/or re-education camps. Their goal is to unify the country under their control because they believe their ideas and values are the best, and they are the only ones who can be trusted to govern the right way. They are very much like religious nationalists who have established a theocracy.

Years after they have established control and there is no one else to blame for their systemic failures, desperation makes them more open to reform. It also helps reform when the older generation of idealistic revolutionaries cede control to a newer generation of party loyalists. The party trusts the loyalists, even though they bring about reforms that are different from the original ideas. They trust them because they see these reformists as part of their group who have the best interests of the group in mind. They are not seen as dissenters to the ideas. The reforms are gradually presented to the party in order to assuage paranoia of an overhaul of the ideas that united the party in the beginning.

My point here is that communists should be seen in a more abstract view rather than their stated goals. They are anti-democratic, anti-pluralistic, controlling, share a group think, and want their own group cultural values to be the nation’s cultural values. They are not that different from theocratic-authoritarian regimes. They are also like clans that go to war with each other and wipe the others out. What defines that clans? Is it race, family, familial ties, cultural practices, religion, or language? It could be anything that they see important enough that unites them in the face of adversity and the “others”. If there is a large enough distrust and fear others so much, they’ll unite on anything that they see as a common shared identity.

I wrote this with the thought of Christian nationalists in the back of my mind. They aren’t that different from the communists that they use as insults.

#communism #communists #ChristianNationalism

Tue Jun 13, 2023 10:35 PM

Some people want fast cars, but not me.

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If you know about astronomy, there does not seem to be an end to the universe, it keeps expanding, and galaxies are moving apart from each other because of some dark (unknown) energy.

In quantum physics, virtual twin particles pop into existence and annihilate each other (matter-antimatter) almost instantaneously.

My collection of ideas go like this. Far apart from the tug of gravity of galaxies and in between galactic clusters, the universe has a negative gravity caused by a warping of space in the opposite direction. The idea is that the universe balances out this warping of space that causes gravity, and also causes anti-gravity that causes galaxies to accelerate apart from each other.

Also in these far voids of spaces, virtual particles don’t always cancel each other out. Over time, enough particles form and become space dust, gravity starts to build up in between these dust particles, and eventually new galaxies form from what was once nothing.

Update: I think that electromagnetic waves help cause virtual particles to cancel each other out. Far away from any galaxy where electromagnetic waves are sparse, virtual particles can stay in existence for a longer time and then form larger, more stable particles.

So in conclusion, the universe does not need a Big Bang. New matter and new galaxies are always forming in the universe. I don’t know how to explain Cosmic Background Radiation though. Maybe it’s just caused by the great filaments that connect galaxies.

#astronomy #cosmos #cosmology #universe #bigbangtheory

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This is what they mean by the AI alignment problem. In the simulation, they gave it a goal of killing the enemy and gave it points for doing so. What they didn’t expect was that it killed the operator because the operator was holding it back and preventing it from gaining more points. No, don’t kill the operator, that’s bad, and now you lose points for that. So it took out the communications tower so the operator couldn’t communicate to stop it.

Also, you can bet other freedom-hostile countries are integrating AI into military drones to kill more effectively. This is why AI leaders are calling for it to be regulated like nuclear science. We can’t stop them, but at least we can contain proliferation and limit ignorant people from causing AI misalignment catastrophes.

Thu Jun 1, 2023 06:45 PM

There are so many people on social media telling people they should or should not eat whatever because of bunk science or misinterpreted science. Watch the Dr Idz videos that debunk them. https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100088100361662

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Ouch. This video hit deep and it’s a difficult lesson to learn about “a sophisticated form of procrastination” of doing prep stuff that can aid work but is not real work. Though most of the video he is criticizing the chasing of the latest and greatest note-taking app, that’s not what I’m guilty of.

What I got out of it was that just doing research, collecting information (links!), and writing down ideas is just prep or an aid to doing real work. But we get the dopamine hit of feeling like we did something of value! No, until we actually start making something useful out of that prep and doing the hard work, only then can we make something valuable and worthwhile.

For me, it was more than just a dopamine hit. I feel so guilty that I think it is more like a benign addiction. I wasted so much time not just collecting links, but I even built a link saving app (Zholink) that barely anyone else wanted, except for others suffering the same addiction. Now I see others releasing similar apps and making the same mistake that I made.

I write down awesome ideas and promise to get back to them later. It feels great at the time but somehow I lose motivation and find myself doing something else instead of actually working on those ideas.

I’m putting this embarrassing admission out there just in case other people have a similar problem and maybe this will help them. Maybe putting this out there will help remind me too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baKCC2uTbRc

Mon May 29, 2023 10:53 AM

Just like with all those tech companies that outsourced jobs to China, that tech gets stolen too. They need to commit to building up the infrastructure in India instead to build cheaper tech that would be too expensive to build in the USA. Imagine an iPhone costing $10k.

I’m only calling out China and it’s secret policies, not people in general. I know Chinese to be peaceful, hardworking, smart, beautiful, and kind.

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In case you have a Twitter account, the narrator points out that this is a sign that Twitter will go bankrupt in a year. If you don’t want to lose all of your Twitter posts, you can back up all of your data from Twitter. But what will you do with those posts? I tried migrating them to a similar platform, but I got automatically banned for spamming.

What to do instead? I’m creating a WordPress plugin that will allow you to upload your Twitter data file and then publish them into WordPress posts.

What I need help with is the concern about user data and privacy. I’m not going to do anything with their personal data. I’m just going to provide a service to migrate their Twitter posts. How do you think I should handle this?

Sat May 27, 2023 06:42 PM

Why do we still have shoelaces? It’s not even aesthetic!

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