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Quit Your Job

March 30, 2023    Link    https://www.palladiummag.com/2022/01/06/quit-your-job/

Working even a good job cramps your sense of possibility, imposes narrow objectives, and eats away at the little things that could grow into big things if they weren’t so oppressed by the rigors of existing structure. I’ve seen this with my friends, in how they are full of ideas and adventurous spirit a few months after I convince them to quit their jobs. The world is full of ideas and opportunities to explore, but it takes time outside of structure to even adjust your eyes to the landscape of possibility. You are cramped by your job, unable to make the class of investments that is necessary for a life beyond the existing tracks.

If your role in the universe is structured work within order found and built by someone else, those off-road investments are pointless. This conventional work is usually more immediately valuable than anything you could do on your own and it does not require much open-ended exploratory leisure. This efficient pursuit of predictable value is the quiet dignity of the mass of working people. But if we are to solve the bigger structural, spiritual, and intellectual problems which aren’t addressed by existing institutions, someone needs to be exploring off of the established road, where there is a high probability of failing to accomplish anything at all, and a significant probability of discovering and exploiting the next big breakthroughs.

Wolf Tivy

The Year is 2030

March 29, 2023   Post   312 words  2 mins read

The Year is 2030. The USA did not fight the Vietnam War, and instead invested money into high speed railways, teletext, and 10-storey modernist carpark-trainstation-airport-mall megaplexes. There’s one in every town.

Everybody is an urbanite, all farming is done by agricultural robots with their solar panels glistening under the haze of high-power irrigators.

You can vacation in the countryside, but residing there is illegal. However, penalties being as light as they are (a public spanking during the now-revived festival of Lupercalia), it has become an adolescent rite of passage to play-act as Thoreau.

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Breached and its future

March 23, 2023   Post   2582 words  13 mins read

Again, the Breached forum will not be coming back. If it’s back for any reason, you need to assume that is an attempt to target our users and is not safe. I will not suddenly come back online and tell everyone I was just kidding and we will bringing back the forum, so please use your best logic here. Baphomet

TLDR: Stay away from the Breached infrastructure.

In case you didn’t already know, one of the Breached forums administrators, Pompompurin, got arrested on cybercrime charges in the land of the free. The other admin, Baphomet, posted several updates on his website regarding the future of the Breached forums.

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The Age of Loneliness

March 22, 2023   Post   874 words  5 mins read

The inability to enjoy loneliness leads to the desire to communicate with idiots.

Or is it

The inability to enjoy communication with idiots leads to a desire for loneliness.

Can’t remember, just press play, friend, and read on.

The feeling of loneliness derives from the (false) perception that experience is “my” experience. Without the identification with the feeling of “me” as a basis it is impossible to feel lonely, even though there is awareness of the fact that your experience is indeed unique. Your personality is not yours and it is not you, it is just another element of experience.

On the other hand, it is possible to perceive the being of others as an extension of your perception of your own being. It is like a isomorphic relation between elements of two spaces.

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Terminally online in a cyberpunk world?

March 14, 2023   Post   821 words  4 mins read
Map of Online Communities

We have sealed ourselves away behind our money, growing inward, generating a seamless universe of self. William Gibson, Neuromancer

If you really want to know the answer to this question, look around. Increasingly we live in a world controlled and manipulated via the net, the wired, the metaverse. Where content and creators, programmers and artists coalesce into vast seas of content. Evermore our youth are lost in the infancy of the virtual worlds that our tablets, screens, and now headsets provide. You need not look at the specific technological forms or functions from these stories to see how well they predicted the future. If you look at the broader picture, the broader result of the technological singularity our civilization is undergoing you can see they were dead on.

How do point-of-sale systems work? Via the net. How do modern humans communicate, even those born before the net. Via the net. How do government and military organizations communicate? Via the net. How do criminal organizations and rebel insurgencies communicate? Via the net. How are business and financial transactions, managed, monitored, and completed? Via the net.

Then remember that while one is on the net they are interacting with any number of hidden algorithms, ad trackers, as well as the websites and services they are using. Our entire financial system at this point is essentially just predictive autonomic algorithms trading money and stocks in such quantity on a minute by minute basis that it would make even the rubber barons of the earliest 20th century blush.

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The 100 Year Computer

March 13, 2023    Link    https://thedorkweb.substack.com/p/the-100-year-computer

We could approach computing completely differently. Currently we build software to fill new hardware. We build hardware to provide capacity for new software. What if we focused on improving sustainability for that which was already ‘good enough’? What if instead of designing computers with 5 year lifespans, we designed them with 50-100 year lifespans?

My favourite computer is my Commodore Amiga 4000. It was my dream machine growing up. I do stuff on it that nobody in their right mind would do, from hanging out on Telegram to modeling COVID stats. But even my nearly 30-year old Amiga was never designed for a 50, let alone 100 year lifespan. The Amiga uses custom chips that were last made in the 90s. To design something with a 100 year lifespan we must think very differently about a computer’s use and role.

We used to use computers mostly offline. At home we’d play games, look up facts, write letters, store recipes, maybe a small inventory. Most would buy (or copy) programs. Some would write their own. Today we do most of this but the systems are permanently online. This convenience comes at a cost. Outages cut off access to data that should’ve been local. Exporting information can be difficult, if not impossible.

Steve Lord