Consciousness is too expensive not to serve some adaptive purpose. It is probably not some epiphenomenal accident. However, that consciousness serves some purpose does not mean it is utilitarian in the sense that most people would mean. The peacock’s tale is a response to something evolutionarily (it is an example of Fisherian runaway), but it is not useful — in fact, it hampers the bird. Many times, I wonder if consciousness itself is not somewhere on this spectrum.
Month: October 2018
DA ∞
Facebook Launches a Camera for Your Home—What Could Possibly Go Wrong.
Anyone who installs a Facebook camera in their home is a level of dumbass that is beyond all comprehension, that exceeds previous dumbass parameters and is in some black hole of dumbassery so boundless and vast that it’ll take a new Einstein to comprehend.
Paydata
How much is your data worth? So much that Google just paid Apple $9 billion to be the default search engine in the iPhone.
$9 billion, to get people to use a ’FREE’ search.
— Mikko Hypponen (@mikko) September 29, 2018
I don’t know what areas this deal covers, but that’s about $105 for each of the 86 million US iPhone users. Apple claims around 700 million iPhones are in use around the world. If that is the case and the deal covers the entire world, Google paid about $13 per iPhone user.
Distrib
About 95% of those building distributed systems don’t need distributed systems. They just need — at most — a cluster. I’m all for doing things new-school when it makes sense. Most of the time, it doesn’t.
But if you want to make your app or infrastructure vastly more complex and slower, sure, Docker away. Get your Kubernetes on. And I won’t do that, and will have a better user experience and less downtime as I avoid all that complexity.
Standing Under
One way I’ve changed since I was younger is that back then if I were reading something and I didn’t understand it, I just could not go on until I made sense of it. I mean, anything. Even in fields that I knew nothing about. In some ways, this benefited me as I learned a great deal with my pure stubbornness but it also held me back. There’s finite time in life. I don’t need to know everything, even if I were capable of such a thing.
Now when I run across something complex that I don’t understand, I try to grasp it, and then if I can’t I evaluate if I actually have any real need to comprehend it or deep interest in the topic and then if the answer to these questions is “no,” I just move on. Admittedly, this is not all that common, but just not bothering trying to understand everything in the world makes more time for those things that really matter and that can actually improve my life.
CPU Speed
Little "Easter Egg" found in the EXE of an old 1992 DOS game… Looks like someone was rather unhappy with their job 🙂 pic.twitter.com/NOob0dECZo
— Michael D (@DarkStar_1337) August 26, 2018
Ha. Do not miss the days when some games were unplayable when you upgraded your machine due to CPU speed mismatch. You whippersnappers out there probably have no idea what I’m talking about, but that used to be a thing. A thing that bit monkey bum.
Feelin’ It
I am feeling those deadlifts today. I knew I would. At this soreness level, it means I won’t be able to go again till Tuesday or Wednesday, which is fine. The deadlift is very demanding. Even some world-class lifters only train it once or twice a week.
Citified
If cities are your personal Hell, then even if on some intellectual level you know that other people can tolerate them, it becomes hard to fight for subjecting more and more people to hellish conditions.
If I had to live fulltime somewhere like NYC or San Francisco, I’d honestly rather be dead. And that is not an exaggeration for effect. I’d rather be deceased, gone from this earth, in the ground. Defunct.
Many people — about half, I’d guess — find cities of any type utter Abaddons and to them the liberal fantasia of tight-packed concrete highrise boxes sounds like the worst torture imaginable. Most libs can’t seem to understand this, but it’s still true. I know my preferences because I lived in Seattle for a year and a half and it was miserable. We never did anything or went anywhere because so much was difficult to get to (with a car or without) or otherwise too inexpensive, inaccessible, or just overcrowded.
If you want to make me live somewhere like NYC, just go on ahead and put me down and save your trouble.
Fries
I feel sorry for people who will only eat chicken tenders and french fries.
Like, what went wrong with you?
Understand First
It helps when you state things like this, if you actually base them on what matters and what is factual rather than incommensurate measures. By the way I support a $15 minimum wage and I believe Amazon should be penalized for taking away stock and bonuses (somehow) because doing this does make this kind of a fake raise, though it will in fact help some people. But it bothers me when people on my side base their analyses on factually incorrect or completely misunderstood information. It makes it all that much easier to dismiss you and your valid concerns.
First, the graphic.
Market capitalization or stock wealth is not what pays wages! Nor should it, if you want the company to keep operating. That’s not how companies work, or really can (or even should) work.
What pays wages — and I’m simplifying a bit — is cash flow. What is cash flow? Cash flow (and there are several different types, but as I said, I am simplifying) is a measure of the amount of money coming into and out of the business. Simple, right? Well, it’s not really in the case of a business as large and varied as Amazon, but luckily since Amazon is a public company we can examine their cash flow in detail. Here is their cash flow statement, for the curious.
It turns out that Amazon had $6.48 billion in free cash flow in 2017. That is a lot, for any company. That does mean that Amazon could raise wages significantly without harming its core business or investment or anything else. Even though the liberal/leftist analysis of Amazon is factually incorrect, they are correct in the conclusion and their basic philosophy.
Amazon could and should raise wages without killing bonuses or stock options (the latter of which does not affect cash flow but does affect profits).
Note that cash flow is different than profits — profits are more philosophical in nature. Cash flow, for the most part, is not. Bet you didn’t know that you had to consider philosophy when calculating profits, did you? Well you do, especially with a company as large and distributed as Amazon.
Businesses live or die, however, by cash flow and Amazon has plenty enough to raise wages. And that’s a real analysis rather than a fantasy-based one.
I’m not dead
I haven’t deadlifted in about 20 years. This morning, I did my first deadlifts with the new weight set. I worked into it, but I did 185 pounds. That’s well above my body weight (155 pounds). Not a bad start!
It helps that I have the muscle memory from doing it all those years ago. I don’t have to work on technique and my body just knows what to do.
I’ll do 185 again and a few more times, then I bet I can hit 200 in short order.
Don’t Speak
Report: It’s Not Okay To Just Start Talking To People You Don’t Know.
That’s The Onion, but that is becoming the liberal party line so I am not really sure it’s good satire. According to modern liberals, don’t talk to anyone who’s not exactly like you, not within exactly a month or two of your age (even if you are both in your 40s), and definitely don’t speak to women (even if you are a woman), the disabled, or anyone, because the only proper interaction is regulated and controlled and preferably done on a smartphone. And woe betide you if you accidentally utter a forbidden word or commit a dreaded micro-aggression!
You know, I think Clarissa’s blog is right: modern feminism as practiced and liberal fear of the world combined with the painting of women as fragile, mentally weak creatures by selfsame libs is going to inevitably lead to things like chaperoned dates, more restrictive clothing mores, and severe diminution of women’s agency and freedom.
You Really Real
The horror of personality tests is not that they don’t work, but that there is not a “real you” out there as a Platonic ideal that imbues your husk with animus and action.
It’s far worse than that, though. It’s that personality tests do work, but only in that very moment, because nearly all personality is situational, contingent, context-dependent. People want personality tests to be true because it tells them that they couldn’t be the concentration camp guard, the executioner. The murderer.
But the truth is that most of them would be up in that tower, shooting the escapees, severing the head. Burning down the village. That’s the horror: deep down, most people know this and they don’t want to know it.
Do nut
Any country where the dominant pastry is donuts is no kind of country.
Steg
I once had a dream where my emotional support animal was a stegosaurus. We weren’t on a plane, but a spaceship.
We died, though.