domain:alakasa.substack.com
Forgotpassword
3hr ago
Unless you're going to take a decade-dated one at which point you get annihilated on fees, the whipsaw effect of a meme stock run by somebody with a history of overpromising random in-vogue ideas makes it hard to leverage against.
OliveTapenade
3hr ago
That's another sign to me that it's not a particularly earnest gesture of inclusion - they are obviously male and female, with nothing changed but the names. No additional work has been done, so no additional expense has been incurred. From a development perspective, changing the names of the genders is a trivial task, and defaulting to singular they in all dialogue is slightly cheaper and easier than having distinct male and female variations.
The banner is inclusion, arguably, but the actual itself is profoundly lazy, and insofar as what it does is ignore or misgender everybody who identifies as anything other than they/them (which at last count was approximately everyone), it's actually less welcoming and inclusive.
But it's easy, it looks trendy and/or fits the cultural moment, and if it continues, by reducing the diversity and variability of humans - making everyone a bland, standardised they - it suits the interests of systems designers. A perfect symbol for the time, really.
(Yes, they're distinct male and female types now, but they don't need to be. For instance, in Splatoon 3 there are no gendered body types or identifications - everyone is just an androgynous little squid-kid. I guess the justification there would be that the characters are prepubescent and shouldn't have visibly different physical characteristics, but still, that is a long way from the time when the Pokémon manuals explicitly recommended that the children playing choose the character of their own gender.)
(Alternatively, consider the character creation in a game like BattleTech - there are no gender-locked features. It's been a little while since I played, but I believe that instead you just pick body characteristics from a big chart, so beards, breasts, etc., are perfectly interchangeable. Then at the end you pick pronouns from a drop-down menu. What's gone is any sense that these characteristics form two natural clusters. Instead of men and women, what we have are a bunch of isolated, chopped up body parts that can be reassembled in any combination. It's hard not to feel a bit dehumanised.)
Shrike
3hr ago
It seems to me like SpaceX is the stand-out success (reusable rockets are a big deal!) so there's a sort of natural gravitation towards it, perhaps particularly on here. But I think you raise a good point! In the spirit of answering your questions, here's my somewhat reflexive thoughts on the other stuff:
- Tesla: OP criticizes them for hype (which seems fair) but from what I can tell on a two-second Google they do seem to make money, billions of dollars worth. And my recollection is that they beat the rest of the US automakers in electric cars and still outperform them in other areas. I'd consider leading a company to that sort of success (or really any success!) a W under about any circumstances (even though I think it's perfectly fair to point out how it is rewarded by subsidies.) However, I'm...skeptical about some of the issues with the cars (which may not be unique to Teslas) and I am not sure if the engineering is particularly good – China's got a huge EV market, perhaps in the future they eat his lunch. I'm not especially optimistic about self-driving, at least in the medium term, but that's partially because I think there's strong inertial force against it, and fixing the engineering problems doesn't entail fixing the regulatory and repetitional problems.
- The Boring Company: seems really cool, but also like they missed their moment. Just doesn't seem to be enough demand. Maybe their time will come, but it doesn't seem like it has yet.
- Twitter: renaming it was a bad idea (imho). Firing most of the staff and generally decreasing the draconian attitude was a good idea. I'm very interested to see if he can make the finances work. (In his defense, my understanding was that "getting the finances to work" was something Twitter struggled with before Elon took over.) I actually think the basic plan (strip down the staffing costs, print money on the world's most high-velocity social media platform) was good – obviously some of the advertising income streams hit snafus. I will say that although I'm a fan of the ad-revenue-sharing deal in theory, in practice it does seem somewhat scammy to me. I'm not saying that rises to the level of an actual scam but I can definitely imagine a lot of people misunderstanding which end of the distribution they are on.
So, overall, based on my assessment, I'd say SpaceX is a huge W, Tesla a solid W so far, Boring company hasn't had it moment yet and may never, and Twitter probably a good thing on balance but the jury's still out on the end results for Musk.
jkf
3hr ago
I have a TODO for exploring backblaze, AWS, and other places for offsite storage of large unchanging data sets since I want to keep my data in the event of a house fire.
If any of these datasets contain photos, Amazon's photo storage associated with a Prime subscription is truly and completely 'all you can eat'. (well all I can eat anyways, but I'll bet I have more photos than you)
If they ever decide to wrap this service up (Hi Google!), that backup would be fucked and it would be a hassle of course -- but no worse than if I'd never put the photos there.
4doorsmorewhores
4hr ago
How can we be certain that they didn't give those instructions? If you're resolute in that claim then I'd like to see some evidence or a strong intuition. All we know is that they tried to hire Mrs. Johansson, were unable to, made public references to the film 'Her' with respect to the AI voice, and then hired someone who subjectively the majority of people conflate the voice of with Mrs. Johansson.
If this was a more mundane dispute, say about a restaurant acquiring a hamburger recipe, all of these facts would probably lead us to believe there was an effort to get the goods without due permission. Adding in the prior of this particular company playing very loose with intellectual property rights and ownership pushes it to very likely that they did what everyone here is suspecting them of, and certainly if it was entirely innocuous, they did themselves no favours showing the contrary of our suspicions and made no effort to show anything dispositive in that respect.
I just finished it. I'm only an unthinking consoomer of product with no deep literary opinions, but I thought it was very enjoyable, and I can think of nothing to complain about.
If you want to air your grievances, I'm sure they would be interesting to hear. (Remember that this website does have
yofuckreddit
4hr ago
I was a single digit employee number at my current gig, now very successful by any stretch of the imagination.
Competence is critical. Like you, most failed entrepreneurs I've met are idiots. I've also seen some semi-successful ones that aren't super hard-working but compensate with some light grift and charisma.
I think if you have:
- A true runway to spend what you need on supplies/marketing/living for a whole year
- Some sort of revenue lined up to start
- A comprehensive plan and/or are doing something through a franchise
- The qualities to manage the number of people you want to have the business grow to (EX: You want to run a 7 person coffee shop, you should have the EQ to manage that many people)
You can be successful. Securing funding and taking advantage of luck are the keys, IMO.
Are you considering any business plan?
jkf
4hr ago
Stagnant is fine; decaying is bad. The Motte is decaying. My suggestion was to stop banning good quality longtime posters just because the Nazi contingent starts diligently reporting their every plausibly inflammatory statement, but the mods seem to disagree.
AhhhTheFrench
We will sell no wine before its time
4hr ago
There is no need to mine the new world when everything is much cheaper to obtain in Europe. Some have argued that most colonies actually did cost their home countries much more than they brought in, but one can't argue with the results. THE USA!
The majority of Republicans with solar seem to be off grid and not eligible for the absurd subsidies given to California Democrats.
"I have solar and get paid $.5/kwh to use the grid as my battery!" <-probably leftist.
"I installed it myself" <-probably conservative.
"I'm off grid and power my home with a salvaged Tesla battery and some microcomputers I had laying around" <-you are far-right libertarian congressman Thomas Massie.
This is probably one reason why IRA subsidies now require home inspections from "energy efficiency experts", other than "jobs for the folx" pork.
SteveKirk
4hr ago
Let me know if you want to compare notes when you finish it. Won't say anything that might spoil you now.
Maybe I was just in a bad mood for it.
MotteInTheEye
4hr ago
If that's the purpose then I would say that it is essentially a lie. When your data is stored with a major cloud provider, it is not just on some computer similar to yours somewhere, it is replicated in enterprise grade data centers across multiple geos and there is a rotation of highly paid engineers on call if anything goes wrong with it.
ares
4hr ago
How's everyone feel about OneDrive integration in Windows, or Google and Apple cloud in their phones?
Two is one, one is none, and three's a spare. I run multiple backup solutions on my data because I do not want to lose a bit if any one of them breaks.
For phones, I think you're pretty much stuck with Google or Apple owning your data. That's a large vulnerable surface of your Google or Apple account, so ensuring you set up 2FA (and not via phone number since those can be easily spoofed). I use a hardware key. I'll have to reassess if I ever decide I'd like to start committing felonies, because both of those companies share your data pretty freely when there's a legitimate request from law enforcement. That'll include GPS and location data, and "person who always brings their phone with them decided to leave it at home on the night in question" is very easy to tell from the records. Also important not to google incriminating things. The military uses cell phones a lot when targeting bad guys. Most of them had good OPSEC but their wives never did. My military career was mostly in intelligence, and being resistant to the techniques we used is just not practical for anyone who doesn't believe their life or freedom is in serious jeopardy from the US government (ala Snowden).
At home I'm using a ZFS array to protect against hard drive failure and bit rot. I have a TODO for exploring backblaze, AWS, and other places for offsite storage of large unchanging data sets since I want to keep my data in the event of a house fire. I keep my important stuff on Google Drive mirrored to my ZFS array. I have a VeraCrypt file that holds anything I want to backup but not let Google read. Examples of things that someone might not want Google to read include TOR accounts and bookmarks, "hacking" tools and scripts that have been used in violation of the CFAA, and cryptocurrency keys. Not that I have any of those.
Having seen how Google handles data privacy and security from the inside, I'm not at all worried about their cloud integration from a security perspective. I trust Apple and Microsoft similarly. The company is not going to blackmail you with your nudes or leak your social security number, and employees can't access those things on your account without getting caught. The company will cooperate with any and every government if they feel the request is legitimate, as I mentioned. I keep that in mind, but don't actually want to join up with the Proud Boys or kidnap the governor of Michigan, so I'm comfortable keeping my files with them. I am quite comfortable keeping my SSN and bank account information on my Google because I have the hardware 2FA key (and no other 2FA allowed) to protect against account takeover. The government and law enforcement can already get my SSN and bank account info if they want them. And if Google deletes my account, no biggie because I have a local copy of everything.
I moved my email off gmail and don't have a plan for email backups yet. Another TODO.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
4hr ago
Also meta: if we allow really long posts, it might be nice to somehow allow folding the long post but not it's replies. You can fold the whole thread, but sometimes I just want to see the new replies.
hydroacetylene
4hr ago
What potential economic return?
Every economic use case for space relies on either 1) being near earth 2) expeditions to go get stuff and bring it back to earth(asteroid mining and the like) or 3) someone else being willing to fund the giant money pit of creating demand up there. Colonies are very firmly in the third category; somebody has to be willing to lose a lot of money to get them up and running, and in the real world there’s probably not a McGuffin to justify it.
Fundamentally there’s just not any reason to expect a return from it. There’s people that would quite like to go, sure. But a major government has to spend a significant fraction of their budget over a long time horizon setting it up. That’s the kind of resources we’re talking about here.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
5hr ago
The law has been on the books for plenty of time. I think this is a good reminder that the basic unit of the United States of America is the State, not the political party. I think the Democrats really thought the state would simply roll over and accommodate them, and that expectation is frankly cause enough to remind them of the proper place of the party.
I'd love to know the rationale for repeatedly ignoring these sorts of laws. "Because we can", sure, that works until you can't. At the very least, start lobbying the states for uniform 2-month rules or something.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
5hr ago
Maybe the neocon or Whig wings, but the minarchist and libertarian wings are quite willing to end subsidies.
hydroacetylene
5hr ago
I feel like solar/batteries, specifically, are exempt from a ‘f you, greenies’ push by republicans because government solar programs are so often about giving middle class people free money.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
5hr ago
It seems like some of the precursor missing technologies are obvious, but comparatively few are working on them. I'm thinking small-scale closed-loop habitats: Biosphere 2 was cute, but it mostly failed as an experiment and wasn't even a reasonable size for space colonies. I think we're quite short of the required technology, but it seems a fairly easy experiment to run iteratively on Earth to get there.
hydroacetylene
5hr ago
I like roundups so long as they’re organized on more or less the same topic. Eg ‘abortion on the ballot in the fall’ with examples from several states, or the country politics roundups that sometimes get posted. What are simply random topics strung together can be difficult to deal with.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
5hr ago
I think it's just the horses vs. elephants thing discussed over at ACOUP. Yeah, horses may freak out when they encounter an elephant in combat. But if you train the horses around elephants, they'll get used to the elephants, and then they can deal with elephants in combat just fine.
sweet
5hr ago
Or it could mean that only in a most desperate and ugly battle for one's very survival do we forgo our principles and make women to fight because we need every last body at any cost.
It's this, combined with the fact that women are a distraction when discipline and focus are paramount. If you've ever trained in martial arts you know the air is charged differently when a woman is in the gym and the minds of men will wander.
TitaniumButterfly
5hr ago
Officially "Big Falcon Rocket" but this is commonly known to be a euphemism for the actual meaning, "Big Fucking Rocket". Circa 2019 IIRC it got renamed to "Starship" so the term is deprecated at any rate.
TitaniumButterfly
5hr ago
The value of the roundups is hard to casually overstate. Can't tell you how many times I thought I'd read every discussion on this site only to find half a dozen or more gems in the roundup that I'd somehow missed entirely.
I appreciate the rundown on your file storage strategy, this sounds thorough and fair. I especially like your strategy of using cloud storage and your local storage pool as redundant backups of each other. That seems to me to be a judicious use of cloud storage, while maintaining personal autonomy and avoiding lock-in. I'm not anti-cloud, but I do think being smart with how you use it is the right call. This goes for autonomy as well as cost; I have hundreds of thousands of family photos stretching back decades, and it became pretty clear to me that any cloud photo provider would cost an insane amount of money to store all this uncompressed.
TheMotte, weirdly, is one place on the internet I go where people are strongly in favor of personal cloud vs. the build-your-own old-school hacker mentality. Then again, the only other places I go on the internet are open source forums, where that mentality is very strong. I'm guessing since the rationalist community drew so heavily from FAANG employees, and the motte drew so heavily from the rationalist community, we have a lot of people who place a great deal of trust in FAANG. It's not so much that I don't think they take security seriously, and more that I think their incentives are misaligned with people's data autonomy. Like when Google decided to make Google Photos not unlimited any more, with it also being somewhat difficult to do a mass-export of your original, full-quality photo data. And Google's usually not too bad with making takeout possible, so that made a lot of people pretty mad.
We put a lot of our lives on our computers, I think having control over them and the ability to make our own choices with how we use and manipulate our thoughts and memories is important. It's not the government I'm worried about -- like you say, they can get whatever they want if they really want to -- but the profit motive, and the random account deletions for inscrutable reasons. Enshittification is real. That's why I really respect your balanced approach and my guess is your strategy is that of the majority among home server enthusiasts. Keep us informed on what you decide for your ZFS backups, I've been looking for a place to store compressed file backups.
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