I’ve had to do a number of “aptitude tests” in conjunction with applying for jobs[1] and RPMs have been a staple.

1. Swedish Defense Force aptitude test (you kind of stand out as middle aged among all the yoofs taking it)
2. one for a job at a state-owned enterprise
3. one for a job at an outfit selling this stuff for other companies[2]

I never really got a good score on them either!

[1] I don’t really like this but beggars can’t be choosers

[2] like I said, beggars can’t be choosers, lucklily I didn’t have to take the job

I knew this was good stuff when the majority of HN commenters where huffily complaining about the tone.

I don’t wanna be a wet blanket but one thing that struck me back in the Last.fm days was how little music taste correlated with how I got along with people (online and off). That said I’ll give these a fair shake but I’m an old man set in my ways when it comes to music.

FWIW I usually find what JWZ recommends/promotes to be ok.

This is hilarious. For ages every time Urbit has appeared in tech aggregators the original connection with Yarvin has been raised, and the proponents have snippily replied he’s not longer involved. No idea what passive-aggressive bullshit they’ll invent next time now that he’s back in charge, baby!

balajis has been a bitcoin shill since almost the very beginning (I was blocked from following his crap on Xhitter ages ago probably because he applied a collective banlist to everyone who had ever expressed an anti-BTC sentiment he knew of ) His probably most famous venture was trying to construct and sell a self.-contained BTC miner in an RPi form factor, which crashed and almost literally burned hilariously. Now I think he’s just coasting on his VC billions, slowly self-radicalizing in a social media soup. If the superyacht he was traveling in to his Arbeitslager island was sunk by orcas at least we’d get a decent headline out of it.

Looking at the map of Singapore there are lots of islands around it (Singapore was probably chosen as a reference datum because libertarians like it and it’s a big transport hub). Most of the islands seem to be Indonesian territory.

What or who are NSBM? National Socialist Black Metal?

Most people who buy entire islands in Sweden are evil as in they are very very rich, don’t give a crap about the local community, and do dumb things like build giant pools depleting the scarce local water supply.

But if you wanna start a cult just snag a big ole house in the relative boondocks and have it there. Creepy cults in the country are a staple of mid-budget TV action thrillers here, so apparently they’re everywhere.

It’s detailed in the 3rd para of the linked article.

I’m torn on this too, I think Torres et consortes are dignifying these idiots way too much by highlighting their views and in some ways taking them seriosuly. It’s an inadvertent form of critihype. Wholesale ridicule is the order of the day! On the other hand, before the Scientology papers reveal (god that was so long ago) the CoS was seen as weird but legitimate. When more and more people discovered Xenu, the Sea Org, and how people could be designated “unpersons”, the view slwoly shifted.

I guess both serious criticism and pointing and laughing are needed.

This will include dudes with multiple uterii in their freezer but they’re probably outliers.

Mosaic creator Marc Andreessen

I appreciate this deep cut.

Others in San Francisco are calling it “The Nerd Reich.”

Good one.

Quality sneer. Thank you for your effort.

stupid sexy basilisk

Wow I learned even more horrifying things about Yarvin from this.

Perfect comment, no notes.

Roko is of course begging the question, and the premise he is wrong about is that there is a sizable population willing to relocate to a floating iceberg, instead of living in an existing country.

Consider what the proposed citizens have to consent to:

• paying for the R&D required to implement the technical solutions Roko envisions, along with the continued higher maintenance costs
• paying higher wages for the people who are supposed to do all the boring menial jobs in this floating city, on par with existing cities
• paying higher daily cost of living for everything from food to building supplies to luxuries to entertainment that have to be imported
• being at the mercy of “legacy governments”, many of whom possess navies capable of everything from interdicting the food supply, to literally undermining the city from below, to actual assaults and airstrikes
• paying higher prices for insurance of their lives and dwellings and possessions because of all the above

Amusingly the solution for a libertarian city is a megastructure project probably only a rich nation is prepared to pay for.

This is the unsolved issue for future fusion plants. They will probably be used to generate electric power via steam, just like fission. It’s a proven, cheap technology. But that water has to be cooled somehow- and it has to exist in a pure enough form in the first place.

Gotta love how the SRD thread has more comments and updoots than the original.

The site does tend to fall over if there are more than 300 comments on a post…