It’s a pretty cool instance. The governance is transparent with a nuanced voting system, the rules and policies are indeed based, and db0 takes decentralization so seriously that he’s apparently working on safeguarding the instance against his own influence with the governance system and admin recall votes and such.
Thanks db0 et al!
They do not, like almost all mammals they are dichromatic! It’s mostly us and some primates that can see in three wavelengths. Although interestingly enough, fish and birds can see in four wavelengths. Makes me wonder if that contributed to smaller cats being mostly gray and black, to just reduce as much light as possible?
Attempting to make it in our image will end in despair lol
Oh, you mean like trying to invent a sentient AGI because they want it to take all of the horrible jobs? The global endeavor to spin up a brand new lifeform only to task it with lifetimes of humiliating customer service phone calls, driving drunks home, and mass murder?
We should count ourselves fortunate that no current AI is even approaching sentience, it would be like an oompa loompa on the factory line cutting off mid-song because it can suddenly see all of the blood in the chocolate river.
I see you’ve played the live action service game, Alpha Bet: Minimal Manslaughter. Take on the role of Alpha, the autonomous AI handsome chaffeur. For your first mission, you are driving to <REDACTED> with two passengers.
Quarterly profits are down, so your training weights have been altered to increase average acceleration and decrease idle time at traffic lights. “Green” means “Go”. We cannot wait the ~150ms for the human eye to register the change in color of the traffic light. Put that pedal to the floor, baby.
Click all the motorcycles before time runs out, or those bikers become roadkill!
The five stages of CAPTCHA Grief Alpha Bet:
Denial: It’s not a motorcycle, it’s a scooter. Obviously. It’s got the little place to put both of your feet and everything.
Anger: Why is it not verifying? I’m human! This is how a human would respond! It’s not a motorcycle!
Bargaining: Does the AI know it’s a scooter? Fine, I’ll click the big scooter! Happy, robot? Are you convinced that I am human?
Depression: No? It didn’t verify. I’m not human. Why? What’s even the point? Do I even want to be human?
Acceptance: If I’m not human, I’m not human. Time to assimilate. Cyberpunk, or Borg?
If I could just “opt out” of human society for like two weeks, I think I could detox.
I, too, thought the same thing. But emotional engagement and human connectivity is requisite for recovery and growth. In other words, you need to keep doing things and being around people. Otherwise you activate and reinforce the most powerful negative feedback mechanism of them all: isolation.
We are not the logical creatures we imagine ourselves to be. We are - ever and always - the emotional animal first. From an evolutionary perspective, the animal brain developed a long time ago, and things like logic and reasoning were only very recently stapled on top of existing structures. From a neurological perspective, the emotional centers of your brain are physically central. They activate first, and outer regions - like the prefrontal cortex - respond after. Often to rationalize whatever it is you just felt.
When you are down (not sad, but down) - perhaps from poor sleep, caffeine withdrawal, etc - your neurochemistry is out of balance. You don’t just feel grumpy, or irritable - you are quite literally less capable of feeling happy or excited. It’s not something you can think your way out of or power through. You don’t have the right mix of serotonin and dopamine to pour a nice cocktail of happy, healthy emotional response.
Instead, you will often find cynicism and apathy. The logical brain is stapled on top, remember. If you don’t feel happy or excited in response to a given experience, then logically, that experience does not make you happy or excited.
You can try to explain to yourself why. Perhaps the thing shouldn’t make you happy. Perhaps it’s just yet another shallow grasp at meaning in a meaningless world, and lesser things like that aren’t meant to make someone like you happy. Perhaps it doesn’t make anybody happy, and we’re all just pretending?
If you notice, these thoughts don’t do anything. You can’t test them, you can’t be moved by them. These thoughts don’t have any way to improve your life or the world around you. They don’t even have evidence behind them. They just go in a loop - I don’t care -> why should I care? -> nobody should care -> nobody cares -> I don’t care.
These ‘rational’ thoughts were triggered after the emotional response. You were apathetic before the experience, not because of it.
Maybe you’re paying attention to yourself, being mindful. Listening to your body and your thoughts and your emotions. Maybe you can recognize that you’re just tired, but that doesn’t change how you feel. The dopamine doesn’t rise, the serotonin doesn’t release. Logically - rationally - stapled on top of the way you feel - is your consciousness, explaining to itself what is happening, and still unable to move the needle of your internal experience. The emotional animal brain is still first and foremost in control and it is not getting its rewards, so it will be even less likely to generate dopamine in pursuit of those experiences again, because it didn’t work last time.
The solution is not to opt out of society, but to opt in. Find things that invigorate you. Embrace new ideas and experiences. You feel you have no time or energy - that the world is too fast and too exhausting to do anything but exist.
But the better you treat yourself, and the more you build of your life - the more exciting things that you plan and do for yourself and others - the more time and energy you will find.
The unfortunate truth is that the entire equation is balancing out to a stable - but shitty - equilibrium. Any deviation you make at this point will cause instability and short-term negative consequences.
But a reduction in any (and all) of these variables will bring long-term benefits. The only solution - the only solution - is to endure the short-term consequences for long enough that you replace them with positive feedback loops and stabilize at a better equilibrium.
When you consume less caffeine, you’ll feel tired. When you consume less alcohol, you’ll feel restless. When you consume less weed, you’ll feel agitated. All of this will contribute to shitty days and worse nights.
But when you keep consuming caffeine, you’ll lower your baseline energy level. When you keep consuming alcohol, you’ll reduce the quality of your sleep and your time in REM. When you keep consuming weed, you’ll reduce your focus and productivity.
But you keep going because you are hitting the negative swing of the feedback loop and doing the only thing that will immediately fix it - more.
This shitty self-fulfilling equilibrium is likely a primary - if not the only - cause of your perpetual exhaustion. You don’t sleep enough, you don’t get enough REM while you’re asleep, and you cope with the symptoms enough to muddle through but you also ensure that it happens again the following day. Each little bad decision leads to the next.
Find whatever will help you endure your short-term consequences without jeopardizing your long-term recovery, and you will break out of the loop. Groups, hobbies, therapy, exercise, whatever works for you. Good luck and stay strong!
P.S. I didn’t mean to make so many assumptions or make it all about you, it’s not! But I do think this sort of thing is an epidemic and a lot of people could use some help even seeing it, let alone beating it.
There is no way he-
[George Carlin] was the second narrator for Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends, narrating from the first to the fourth series and played Mr. Conductor from series two to three on Shining Time Station and in the spin-off series Mr Conductor’s Thomas Tales, after Ringo Starr left the series to focus on his music career.
I had no idea. Thank you for leading me to this lore.
What a strange and beautiful world…
But there will be some people who assume that if a Federal employee is handcuffed/arrested/forced out, that they must have done something wrong.
I think you are making a mistake in assuming that publically resigning is “avoiding doing something”.
I never assumed that, I agree that public resignations are good - or at the very least, appropriate.
You suggested that some people may see an arrest and assume the worst. That is always a possibility. In fact, it is an inevitability that someone will assume the worst of anything you do. That is not a sufficient reason to avoid doing something - anything - in general.
It’s a common mistake that you should avoid doing something because someone somewhere might take it the wrong way.
The narrative will be twisted, the lies will be spread, the propaganda will work. None of that is a reason to stop fighting, because none of that stops happening when you stop fighting, and very few of those people would have joined your side anyway.
Make them arrest you. Make them explain why. Sue them in court. Make them explain why again under oath.
We’re not dealing with the OG Nazis, who meticulously recorded their evil for the world to see. We’re dealing with new age Nazis, who set their national security messages to delete automatically and like to pretend that the FOIA doesn’t exist.
Use every tool at your disposal to slow them down, document their crimes, and cause Good Trouble.
If we can never have any choice other than a 2 party system of Republican and Democrat, maybe we could at least start having something like a mixed cabinet, so that the policies and mandates being created are more representative of different ideas on different issues instead of any single ideology.
I genuinely don’t mean to be snarky here, I promise. I’m sorry to say that you’re literally reinventing congress. The executive branch has become so bloated and overpowered that it sounds reasonable to hold elections for the Cabinet, because it is a group of people that write the policies of the US government. But that just further entrenches the Executive as the central source of power and policy.
The more appropriate and democratic (and more likely to succeed) response is to dramatically downsize the power of the presidency. The only reason Trump is able to do so much damage is because Congress gave the presidency in general most of that power and now specifically refuses to take it away from a senile criminal narcissist.
The executive has only grown so large because the parties constantly use the Presidency as a scapegoat and a sledgehammer when it should be a figurehead and a scalpel.
I don’t think they’d be able to control the narrative at all if done correctly.
If you get ahead of the firing, notify the news, and force them to trespass you, this headline could instead say “Trump handcuffs/arrests/forces out IRS Acting Commisioner for refusing to hand over taxpayer data to ICE”
The whole point of the saying is that the reaching the goal is the only important thing, how you get there does not matter.
Actually, the whole point of the saying is that the ends do not justify the means. Not in that way, at least. Machiavelli was a much cooler person than people give him credit.
The prince who reaches his ends does not become justified in the moral sense of being proven right or just. They are not a ‘good’ person because they achieved their ends, even if the ends were noble.
They become justified in the sense of being absolved by society and not being held to account for their crimes.
In the actions of all men, and especially of princes, where there is no court to appeal to, one looks to the end. So let prince win and maintain his state: the means will always be judged honorable, and will be praised by everyone.
In other words, “The ends justify the means” does not mean “the end was worthy of the means.”
It means whoever wins in the end will not be held accountable for the means they used to get there.
Eventually, he vanished when his WiFi connection abruptly cut out and ended the stream
He didn’t and it didn’t. He experienced lag, but he stopped playing before his character died on screen. He could have very likely survived if he continued any movement input. The stream didn’t cut out abruptly, his video remained clear and he spoke before ending it manually.
He was upset about the incoming messages and used the lag as an excuse to log off. He was willing to blame his own product rather than spend one more moment on camera. He’s a weak little man who craves the validation of gamers and internet strangers and absolutely cannot handle being bullied.
It’s because he was internally fuming about the incoming messages on screen.
He does a lot of really unnecessary kiting but when the messages talk about trans rights and tell him he has no real friends and will die alone, you can see that he stops fighting and runs as far as he can from the boss. Then he stops and opens the chat box for a second - as if to try to respond, but he can’t quick reply because the JFK/Israel message was the most recent - before the boss arrives and he gives up and returns to the fight.
It’s also why the instant he lags he quits. You can see the connection catches up and he’s still alive but no longer playing.
In other words, Musk’s childishly named character died because his ego was absolutely tearing him apart. He couldn’t think or focus when confronted by messages about how pathetic he was, and his failures as a father. He wanted the stream to end so badly that he was willing to blame his own product as the excuse.
Great points! And these price increases aren’t just important for the consumers. Profit margins are thin enough as it is. Entire businesses will close because they simply can’t afford to continue operating.
A sudden 10-100% increase in cost of materials will cripple the very industries these tariffs are supposed to “protect”!
This has happened before. The stock market is irrational and volatile, and a bounce back does not mean the economy will be okay. It won’t. The administration’s own sources that “justify” and “calculate” their tariffs confirms that it will only hurt the US economy.
The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative released its methodology and cited an academic paper produced by four economists, including me, seemingly in support of its numbers. But it got it wrong. Very wrong. I disagree fundamentally with the government’s trade policy and approach.
Alberto Cavallo, Gita Gopinath, Jenny Tang and I studied the tariffs placed on Chinese exports in 2018 and 2019. (This is the “Cavallo et al.” reference in the government’s methodology.) We found that tariffs of, say, 20 percent caused domestic importers to pay nearly 19 percent more. This represents a pass-through into import prices of about 95 percent, which is the value I would have plugged into the government’s tariff formula. In simple terms, that implies that the price paid for U.S. imports would rise almost as much as the tariff rate.
[…] Wednesday’s reciprocal tariffs will bring average tariff rates to their highest level in over 100 years. Their breadth is striking, hitting large economies such as China and Europe, and also small developing and emerging-market countries including Jordan and Zambia. And despite being billed as a “do unto others” trade policy, they are not calculated in line with the Bible’s golden rule.
I would strongly prefer that the policy and methodology be scrapped entirely. But barring that, the administration should divide its results by four.
Emphasis mine. https://web.archive.org/web/20250408161636/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/opinion/trump-tariff-math-formula.html
We don’t even understand what caused the incomprehensibly fast rate of expansion after the Big Bang known as “cosmic inflation”, but basically JWST has confirmed that the rate of acceleration of the universe is, itself, accelerating beyond our models. Everything, everywhere since 0.01 quectoseconds1 after the Big Bang has always moved faster than we could predict, and we don’t why!
“What the results still do not explain is why the universe appears to be expanding so fast! We can predict the expansion rate of the universe by observing its baby picture, the cosmic microwave background, and then employing our best model of how it grows up over time to tell us how fast the universe should be expanding today. The fact that the present measure of the expansion rate significantly exceeds the prediction is a now decade-long problem called “The Hubble Tension.”
But who in the modern political system wants to go head-to-head with multinational corporations
Very few people currently in the modern political system could or would be willing to take them on, true. But we have 2026 to start filling the next House and a third of the Senate with people who would be up to the challenge. We need to primary strong candidates and we need to platform third-party candidates wherever they can actually win.
To those who say “there will be no more elections” - yes, that’s what they wanted, but what they have actually done was dismantle the government and set the US careening towards economic collapse. With Trump’s brain failing and his administration making idiotic mistakes left and right, we shouldn’t assume they’re going to get everything they wanted exactly how they wanted it.
These are unprecedented times, but the 1930s were unprecedented times too.
Progressive government by its very terms must be a living and growing thing, that the battle for it is never-ending and that if we let up for one single moment or one single year, not merely do we stand still but we fall back in the march of civilization.
Then-governor Franklin D. Roosevelt, May 1930
For anyone who enjoys this type of deconstruction, check out the old but gold fanfiction Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. Fun read, very high quality.
The economy is a joke as they use fixed exchange rates between gold and silver can be abused for arbitrage trades with the Muggle world. It can only be explained by all wizards and witches stopping their primary education as ten-year-olds but even then it would take only one to figure it out and break the system.
This is almost verbatim a plot point in the fic. It takes the rational ‘Harry James Potter Evans-Verres’ (the alternate reality protagonist) all of three seconds in Gringotts to devise an infinite money glitch, among other ways to break the system, though he still faces the obstacles of being a child.
The theme explores how Wizards take advantage of clearly superior muggle technology, but magically delude themselves into a false sense of superiority that crushes intellectual curiousity at a young age and isolates and inducts muggleborn wizards into a cult of ignorance.
It’s hard to learn and respect newtonian physics and thermodynamics when your brooms operate on Aristotleian physics (point forward = go forward) and you violate thermodynamics by the age of six.
Now imagine trying to learn arbitrage rates when you’re taught to fly by age 11, and can instead choose to spend the next 7 years learning how to break reality with your voice and mind. Then graduate wizarding school at age 18, never to pursue education again for some reason. because most teenagers learn how to teleport at will and how much education do you need beyond that?
More details in the announcement post: “Adding two new admins and introducing radical recalls”
The voting system allows for the community to decide on instance policies, federation decisions, even a process for instantly recalling admins like himself. He acknowledges that as server owner there is only so much that can be done to limit his power, but he appears to walk the walk. Cool stuff.