now I’m wondering if themotte was one of the places where they coordinated flooding the nix community with fash horseshit, or if they just feel that comfortable signaling that only fucking nazis are allowed in the Nix bar

lix is really cool! it’s very important to have a Nix evaluator that isn’t under fash control because none of the technology can exist without the language, and they’ve made some big improvements already to Nix’s build system, ergonomics, and internal docs — namely, a lot of the improvements the fash parts of the community fought hard to block, because technology that’s both powerful and obscure like Nix can easily be leveraged for political gain (see my previous post on this topic if you’d like more details on what the political side of this most likely looks like). I’m hoping lix proves generally resistant to assholes coming and ruining things — unfortunately, what happened to Nix keeps happening with other open source projects.

aux is another project that’s along the same lines as lix. it used to be a nixpkgs replacement, but since then it’s become something that’s a bit harder for me to decipher but probably more promising if it works — I believe it’s a reworking of the Nix standard library and other foundational pieces to be less dependent on a centralized repo and more modular. they seem to be planning a package set (tidepool) on top of that new modular foundation too, plus they’re writing up a bunch of missing language docs. if what they’re doing pans out, aux and lix could be a good basis for a Nix replacement.

the full NixOS system is unfortunately still irreplaceable for me, which fucking sucks — every computer I touch still runs it (my desktops, my laptops, the Lemmy instance where this thread lives, my fucking air conditioner thermostats…). replacing the NixOS options set and all its services and mechanisms is definitely a big job, and nobody’s managed it yet — I’ve even briefly considered GuixSD, but it’s actively becoming more hostile to running on real hardware (in the stupidest GNU way imaginable) including the hardware I run NixOS on, and the packages I rely on the most are weirdly primitive in guix (including emacs of all things).

the technology is excellent, which makes what happened a shame. I’m still astounded that the fash elements of the community had this easy of a time getting their way.

and speaking of what happened, check out the little fascists who run the NixOS wiki (the third party one that was the only source of docs for a bunch of things for several years, to the point where the new official wiki just copied the third party wiki’s text on a bunch of topics) telling on themselves

“endless drug-fueled prose about drugs” is an entire, unfortunate subgenre of Rationalist authorship. it takes them a surprisingly long time (usually a couple years or so) to spiral out and stop posting, but the posts usually get even less coherent as they approach burnout

there’s so much to sneer at here, but the style is so long and rambling it’s almost like someone with a meth problem wrote it

But you might draw the line of “not good drugs” at psychedelics and think other class-equals are wrong. If so, fair. But where this becomes obviously organized by class is in the regard of MDMA. Note that prior to Scott Alexander’s articles on Desoxyn, virtually no one talked about microdosing methamphetamine as a substitute for Adderall, which is more accurately phrased “therapeutically dosing” as the aim was to imitate a Desoxyn prescription. I know this because I was one of the few to do it, and you were absolutely thought of as a scary person doing the Wrong Kind Of Drug. MDMA, however, is meth; it’s literally its name: thre-four-methylene-deoxy-methamphetamine. Not only is it more cardiotoxic than vanilla meth, it’s significantly more metabolically demanding.

Alexander Shulgin has never quite stopped spinning in his grave, but the RPMs have noticeably increased

chemistry is when you ignore most of the structure of a molecule and its properties and decide it’s close enough to another drug you’re thinking of (and, come to mention, you can’t stop thinking of)

So you might as I do find it palpably weird that a demographic of people ostensibly concerned with rationality and longevity and biohacking and all manner of experimentation will accept MDMA because it is “mind expanding”, and be scared of drugs like cocaine because, um, uh,

—and since we’ve asspulled the idea that all substituted amphetamines are equivalent to meth in spite of all pharmacological research, that means there’s no reason you shouldn’t be biohacking by snorting coke. you know, I think the author of this rant might be severely underestimating how much biohacking was really just coke the whole time

You may have seen Carl Hart’s admission to smoking heroin. You may have also seen his presentation at the 51st Nobel conference. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dzjKlfHChU). The combination of these two things is jarring because heroin is a Big Kid drug, not a prestige drug, and how, of course, could a neuroscientist smoke heroin? His talk answers this question indirectly: the risk profile of drugs, as any pharmacologically literate person knows, is a matter of dosage and dose frequency and route of administration. This is not the framework the educated, lesswrong rationalist crowd is using, which is despite all pretensions much more qualitative and sociological. His status as a neuroscientist ensures that people less educated on the topic won’t rebuke him for fear of looking stupid, but were he not so esteemed we know what the result would be: implicitly patronizing DMs like “are you okay?” and “I’m just here if you need anything.”

how dare the people in my life patronize me with their concern and support when I tell them I’m doing fucking meth

I’m not gonna watch Carl’s video cause it sounds boring as shit, but I am gonna point out the fucking obvious: no, you aren’t qualified to freely control the dosage, frequency, and route of administration of your own heroin, regardless of your academic credentials. managing the dependency and tolerance profile for high-risk and (let’s be real) low reward shit like meth and coke yourself is extremely difficult in ways that education doesn’t fix, and what in the fuck is even the point of it? you’re just biohacking yourself into becoming the kind of asshole who acts like he’s on coke all the time

don’t threaten me with a good time

now, between writing Rationalist Raven and braving the attic in a respirator (I’m terribly allergic to the dust around here) to finally replace my AC’s filters… it could go either way

my brain is generating a Rationalist version of That’s So Raven where instead of psychic powers she scored really high on an online IQ test and constantly updates her Bayesian priors, and I feel like I need to drink this idea out of existence before Yud turns it into an extensive fan fiction

that’s a good point! it’s also quite a lot simpler to moderate too. a while ago I had some bad experiences with fascists using Reddit music recommendation threads to get people listening to subtly but definitely fash bands. my expectation is like the stubsack, our off-topic music threads will be mostly regulars. a dedicated music sub will definitely be more likely to break containment, so I’d like to have a dedicated moderator lined up for it who’s better at critical listening and knows more about the music industry in general than me (and I’d hate to start something like this just to have it fall onto @[email protected]’s overfull plate, though he’d have exactly the right kind of skills for the role)

I play in a band, Constellation, and we’re sending it to be mastered this week. Kind of throwback to 90’s post-hardcore like Fugazi (yeah, we got cowbell) and Drive Like Jehu. Really excited about it.

fuck yeah! please link this when it’s released in whatever accessible form your band prefers

and here I was about to figure out what’s wrong with our permalinks! (which, there is at least one thing wrong with our permalinks, just not this time around)

this is a late follow-up from the topic in the last stubsack, but I do like the idea of a music sub. for now though, I think doing a variety of casual off-topic music threads in other subs is the right move, until we’ve got a good volume of posts and a cross-section of the types of threads we might want to post in a new sub.

(I’ll post some music recommendations in this thread when I get the chance later)

believe it or not, yes. there’s an extensive early awful.systems thread where @[email protected] and I found Yarvin’s original spec that described this (since then Urbit’s gotten much more intentionally obscure, but the ideological base is exactly the same) which I can dig up if you’re interested

non-edit: fuck it here you go, and if you’d like more psychic damage just search our local threads for urbit because there’s so much more and it gets so much stupider

lisp machines but networked

urbit’s even stupider than this, cause lisp machines were infamously network-reliant (MIT, symbolics, and LMI machines wouldn’t even boot properly without a particular set of delicately-configured early network services, though they had the core of their OS on local storage), so yarvin’s brain took that and went “what if all I/O was treated like a network connection”, a decision that causes endless problems of its own

speaking of, one day soon I should release my code that sets up a proper network environment for an MIT cadr machine (which mostly relies on a PDP-10 emulator running one of the AI lab archive images) and a complete Symbolics Virtual Lisp Machine environment (which needs a fuckton of brittle old Unix services, including a particular version of an old pre-ntp time daemon (this is so important for booting the lisp machine for some reason) and NFSv1 (with its included port mapper dependency and required utterly insecure permissions)) so there’s at least a nice way to experience some of this history that people keep stealing from firsthand

“what kind of a boy is Curtis Yarvin?”

well… he’s a birthday boy

Most shockingly to Urbit devotees and outsiders alike, the board welcomed back Curtis Yarvin, the project’s founder, who left in 2019.

nothing has ever shocked me less than Yarvin “returning” to urbit

In 2015, a technical conference rescinded his speaking invitation. The following year, another tech conference lost sponsors and was almost canceled because it allowed him to speak, over objections that this verbose, bespectacled engineer would make attendees feel somehow “unsafe.” (Perhaps some feared he would bore everyone to death by reading his posts aloud, or torture them with his poetry.)

[…]

While the cancel culture of the 2010s and early 2020s may be subsiding, bringing Yarvin back remains a calculated risk for Urbit, William Ball, the board member, said on the developer call.

these fuckers are still fucking seething over their adult baby godking being asked not to come to a functional programming conference because he publicly advocates for a fascist takeover of the United States, receives funding from fascists, does press interviews promoting the fascist influencer circles he hangs out in, and is the computer science equivalent of a flat earther. how will our industry ever recover from the absolutely no value that was lost by disinviting him?

ah shit, I wrote the above before the edit to Holium — I remember that twitter post! (also, xcancel link for anyone who wants to see this weird shit and can’t)

now that’s definitely worth digging into — I want to see the specific political angle these shitheads are going after. it really could be a renewal of the “web3 crypto OS, whatever the fuck that means” angle now that Thiel and company are pumping so much money into getting pro-crypto politicians elected

I need to look more into this, but I’ve got the sinking suspicion that the technofascists have come to a realization: that ultra-obscure non-functioning systems like urbit play well if your techfash inroad is forming an influential technocratic thinktank (and there’s plenty of precedent for exactly this type of shit working to gain lasting political influence), but it’s utterly worthless if your path to fascist takeover is through, say, the defense industry. urbit is useless for reliably launching or controlling a missile; urbit can’t even do normal desktop shit right, and unlike a lot of defense contracting failures, this is utterly obvious and can’t be papered over.

NixOS is too heavy to run on a missile (it might have a place onboard a drone, maybe), but Nix can easily be (and has been) sold as a massive boon to missile firmware development, and a way to modernize a number of launch and control systems external to a missile. that’s why Nix was a good fucking get for the fascists — it’s working, unique technology none of them were smart enough to come up with, its creators are too socially immature and hateful to know what happens when they become a nazi bar, and Nix itself is still obscure and impenetrable enough (and the techfash element of the community has absolutely ensured this has gotten worse) that having a monopoly on software engineering contractors with Nix expertise and clearance can still be used as a wedge to establish an unassailable position with a high level of political control.

Kinode can’t be used in a missile or a drone, but it’s definitely an adaptation of the non-language parts of urbit to something that wants to look like a more typical cloud deployment. I wish I could analyze what Kinode’s political inroad is, but all the docs on their terrible website 404, so I should dig in and see if they’re still active, or if their funders have decided there’s a more promising inroad elsewhere.

@self and i both keep saying we’ll write that one up but never do, but it was a hoot

oh yeah! I need to dig up my notes for that and finally polish it into a long post. the prominent post-urbit still-reactionary system I’m thinking of took a ton of (cited, this time) inspiration from Nix, and I’m wondering if I’ll notice a change in that project’s focus after Nix went openly fash and accepted a ton of funding from the same types of sources that fund urbit and its descendants

how do yall usually handle down payments, like on cars and houses and such? those are the only times I’d really expect to use a check in my part of the US

oh thank fuck it wasn’t just me who thought the rule was counterintuitive as hell