The A. americanum (lonestar) tick larvae are insane this year. I blame the wet summer. At least it’s hot and dry now, and I can imagine them dying by the truckload!

I don’t want to die, but if I could un-exist like Marty McFly disappearing from a photograph I would choose it in an instant. I have a pretty privileged life but, even for me, if I try to honestly inventory my experience there appears to be more suffering than pleasure. I don’t think this is unfair or unnatural, I believe suffering is integral to being alive because it’s how organisms respond and adapt to a world that is constantly trying to dis-organize them. Basically you can’t have life without it, given the laws of physics.

I don’t think “humans are a virus” is correct because it’s a pejorative and I don’t think viruses or humans are inherently bad. If I was going to classify anything as bad it would be the capacity to suffer, which is so foundational it actually informs the concept of “bad” rather than they other way around. I think suffering also becomes more acute the more processing power you have. Unfortunately for Agent Smith, the “virus” is intelligence and the machines already caught it.

I admit my ideas are probably half-baked on this because I just don’t feel articulate or intelligent enough to describe it. All I have is my own experience. As far as I can see, it appears that more complex animals have a greater capacity for suffering than less complex ones. It seems that the mechanisms of suffering are “body stuff”, mainly nerves, and more complex organisms simply have more of those in more robust configurations. This might just be cope, because the alternative is horrific. As a kid I looked through a microscope and saw an entire world of rotifers and paramecia ripping each other apart, struggling for energy, and realized that if all organisms can experience the same “level” of suffering than we are truly in Hell. It was literally inconceivable.

I don’t care for the “antinatalist” label. I admit that suffering is hard to quantify and may be totally subjective. This is why I don’t mind what other people choose to believe. It’s none of my business. Based on my subjective experience I will not be doing so. Sometimes people pry into why I don’t have kids and I am forced to expose my beliefs. Suddenly, in their eyes, I become an evangelist. I’m not. They won’t engage with the notion of 'the non-existent mind". They constantly argue from the position of a hypothetical mind that chooses stuff. Eventually they think I’m suicidal because in their mind dying and non-existence are the same. They also get angry and insulted even though I’m leaving more resources for their own children by not having my own which, by their logic, should be good. So I just don’t bother. Do what you want. Maybe they are right.

I think some of the Reddit refuges honestly think Reddit sucks because Spez Man Bad. There’s no analysis of what creates Reddits and Spezes, and therefore they don’t recognize who made this platform and why.

I have to believe ultimately some of these people will come around, so that’s good at least.

I really like this website for exploring all the options. Not sure how up to date it is with this latest ffmpeg.

https://ffmpeg.lav.io/

In my experience people didn’t trust each other more, but it did feel like you had more autonomy. Cell phones are what really changed everything, for better and worse. I think the dumb phone era was the best because you were no longer in a position to need to walk miles in the countryside due to a breakdown, but also they weren’t ubiquitous enough that everyone demanded constant contact (old rules of phone etiquette were still in force). Also no algorithms. Brain rot was confined to TV, magazines, and radio.

At first I thought she meant ‘fantastic’ in its literal sense and I was optimistic. No, of course the former CFO of Morgan Stanley is a ghoul.

“Burgum, a Republican, used his speech to criticize Silicon Valley for having supported ‘the climate extremist agenda,’ which he defined as the idea that ‘a degree of temperature change in the year 2100 is the thing that we should drive every policy in America.’ Burgum added: ‘I’ve always been a little offended by that.’”

Well it’s like 3 or 4 degrees at this point, which is civilization-ending. Real, “we’re all going to die anyway” energy here. Glad we’re doing this to hallucinate the next Amazon show and not slow down the approaching catastophe or at least give poor people food or some shit. Is that a little offensive?

Python is actually pretty baller with string operations too since so much of the C has been heavily optimized.

This is just some library too, not their main application. I know “lines of code” is bullshit but just for reference I looked it up and apparently curl is ~180k lines of code. I can’t imagine how crufty this fucking code must be, assuming this is even real because it seems too ludicrous.

The Naked Lunch. I was probably 10 years old? I didn’t understand any of the plot, I was weirded the fuck out and the giant bugs made me sick to my stomach.

The collection sounds like “The Dark Descent” but I’m not familiar with the waif story.

The rampant mental illness in the USA really does make this a negative feedback loop. I’d say a quarter of the roommates I’ve had over the years had some serious mental issues. I’ve had a knife pulled on me, a friend of mine was murdered by his roommate.

After you have a few bad experiences like that the goal becomes to get a small family together and isolate as soon as possible. Any commune here is basically assumed to be a religious cult because nothing else makes sense.

It’d be amazing if they all shared the same cell. Gates and Clinton slap the shit out of Trump because he snores too loud and won’t sleep on his stomach. Trump and Gates thump Clinton because he’s afraid of the shower block and won’t wash his ass. Trump yells at Gates so much about his eye-watering gas that he farts in the toilet out of fear. They deserve nothing less than each other.

I think Americans can perceive how fucked up and corrupt their government is but they lack any theoretical analysis to determine the nature of it. So all they have is a general perception that the government doesn’t work for them and that creates an inherent distrust of any government program, no matter what it does.

So an American might believe that universal healthcare is a good policy, but they also believe that in practice if such a policy were enacted it would mean that money being siphoned off by the ultra rich, with nothing fundamentally changing. They would be paying the taxes of a universal healthcare state, but the actual system would continue as-is, and they would still need to pay ridiculous prices. Thus getting double-dicked for no benefit.

The thing is this is probable. Section 8 is a massive subsidy to landlords. The ACA is a massive subsidy to insurance companies. But if you asked Americans why this keeps happening they would just spout some nonsense about R’s and D’s, or some particular politician, or whatever.

This cynicism spans both “blue” and “red” America. I think it’s the heart of the rot in our society. It’s not really a society at all in the sense that people have lost the belief that we, collectively, can work together to achieve more than what’s possible working alone. When that breaks the only motive people still believe in is the extractive motive of corporations. They believe that only the rich can make things happen, and thus are creating a self-fulfilling prophecy by electing venal politicians who believe the same.

Obviously I’m generalizing here, but just an undercurrent I’ve observed. It’s not coherent, but it is consistent across the “spectrum” of American politics. This ultra wealthy magnify this narrative since it suits them.

I’ve been getting annoying amdgpu crashes every now an then. I’ve tried all the various BIOS and kernel params but so far nothing has worked. Next step is rolling back a kernel version, at least that’s what I’ve gathered from all the threads about it. It’s bothersome but not frequent enough to be a real pain.

(This is an amd framework 13 with fedora 42 / wayland)

I don’t know if it’s still a thing in the digital age, but having even just a few seconds of dead air back in the analogue broadcast days could mean that “silence detectors” all over the country would start going off and radio engineers everywhere would think there was some kind of problem with their station. So there had to be talking, music, something at pretty much all times.

If you wanted intentional silence you could play comfort noise in the background.

A “carriage house”, in the backyard of some rich couple who were the landlords. I split it with a buddy. Open holes to the outside that we patched with duct tape. The entire thing listed to one side. It smelled like mold. Zero insulation or climate control of any kind. Landlord still stole food from our fridge when we were away.

Try to get a really early start so you aren’t spending the last few hours driving in darkness. If you haven’t listened to the “Shit town” podcast, it got me through a long drive once. This was on a 2012 car with no smartphone features besides basic bluetooth, but there was a pairing procedure that got audio to at least play (it was really wonky to setup, I had to look it up).

Edit: Big Caveat to my advice on the starting early, be careful if your trip ends inside a huge metro area on a weekday, as bad timing can land you straight into some horrendous rush-hour traffic.

There’s no sleep like class sleep. Five minutes feels like an eight hour rest.

It looks horrific to me. Like a film prop from Cronenberg or Lynch. I think it’s the mix of mechanical motion, a material that reminds me of Jean Jacket’s stomach from Nope, and a structure like a severely prolapsed rectum. No way could I get off in this thing.