MS ended support for it, so it won’t get security updates or fixes going forward.

As a side note, Karp seems to think most people’s concern with surveillance is that they are going to get caught cheating for some reason. For instance, when giving an example of what he thinks is a valid skeptical question to ask about what Palantir is doing, he said, “Is this product being used to take away my right to go have a hot dog with a coworker I’m flirting with while being married? Which, honestly, I think is the god-given right of people in this country.” He later brings this up again, saying that most surveillance technology isn’t determining, “Am I shagging too many people on the side and lying to my partner?” Your guess is as good as any as to what that’s all about.

The big problem with Mercury is that it’s actually very expensive to get to in terms of energy, hence why we’ve had very few missions to it. On the other hand, Venus is a surprisingly good candidate. While it’s hellish at ground level. There is a layer of upper atmosphere that has effectively Earth like conditions in terms of temperature and and ambient pressure. And you have a ton of volatiles in the atmosphere that could be harvested. So you could technically build cloud cities there. The main problem is that the atmosphere is fairly corrosive, so you’d need materials that wouldn’t degrade in it.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20161019-the-amazing-cloud-cities-we-could-build-on-venus

The moon could theoretically keep an Earth density atmosphere, but only for a fairly short time of maybe 1000 years or so. However, even if that could somehow be achieved there would still be some problems. For example, in longest days of the night, the atmosphere might freeze. It would also have a high wind volume, at the day/night terminator. It would lose a lot of its atmosphere due to Solar Wind and simple lose by having too much energy.

who could’ve possibly predicted this 🤣

China has an actual carbon neutral plan, and short term use of coal is part of that. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/chinas-energy-transition-in-5-charts/

A study showed that China’s use of coal is perfectly in line with their targets https://www.carbonbrief.org/chinas-2060-climate-pledge-is-largely-consistent-with-1-5c-goal-study-finds

the key bit of the article

China is now making more money from exporting green technology than America makes from exporting fossil fuels. This trend will continue simply because renewables are cheap; if you doubt the appeal, count the solar panels on Pakistani roofs. The work China does on cutting emissions at home—ever cheaper renewables, more abundant storage which makes those renewables more useful, better electricity markets, long transmission lines and all sorts of associated expertise—will thus be increasingly relevant, and sellable, beyond its borders.

that’s right, authoritarian just like your bedtime

To make sense of our current political moment, and to understand why electoral politics under capitalism is a stage managed by and for the wealthy, we must turn to one of the most consequential political thinkers of the last century: Vladimir Lenin.

If you were educated in the US, you almost certainly never encountered Lenin. Not in your high school textbooks, not in your university lecture halls. You will not see his ideas debated seriously on the corporate news channels. No mainstream politician, not even the most progressive, would dare utter his name.

It’s rather is a curious omission, is it not? For a man whose ideas shook the world, inspiring millions of workers to shake off their chains and establishing the official ideology of some of the largest countries on the planet.

So, in the land of free speech, why is the work of such a globally monumental figure treated as a forbidden text? Why is a thinker who provides a master-key to understanding modern imperialism and state power so diligently scrubbed from the curriculum?

Even at the most elite universities, in political science departments that posture as fonts of rigorous inquiry, you will not read Lenin. You will not be asked to critique him.

You might find a sanitized, fleeting reference to Marx, often dwarfed by the required reading of boosterish pieces from The Economist. In fact, at places like Harvard, the curriculum often reads less like political science and more like a corporate training manual. So why is Lenin a forbidden subject of study even in an adversarial way?

The answer is not complicated. Lenin’s genius was to lucidly dissect the rotting core of the capitalist system, exposing contradictions that cannot be patched over with mere reforms. And he did not stop at critique. He was not a moralist or an utopian, content with moral posturing.

And that is his unpardonable crime. Lenin wrote about the actual mechanics of seizing power, about smashing the bourgeois state and building a proletarian one. He provided a concrete analysis of how to win. This is the kind of dangerous knowledge the system cannot abide. It cannot be refuted, so it must be disappeared.

Consider the irony of how we would rightly condemn the Soviet Union as a brainwashed society if its citizens were taught to hate capitalism without ever reading Adam Smith. We would call it crude propaganda. Yet, millions of Americans are taught to reflexively recoil at the word communism by a system that ensures they will never encounter its theories.

What we find in practice is not free speech and academic freedom, but ideological policing. The very question of whether we could organize our economy differently is rendered unaskable. Those who advocate for a world beyond capitalism are systematically excluded from every institution that shapes public thought.

So, if you have any genuine belief in free inquiry, you have a duty to seek out the ideas that the guardians of power have placed beyond the pale.

Resources on Lenin:

State and Revolution https://marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/index.htm

What Is To Be Done? https://marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/index.htm

Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism https://marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/index.htm

Oh that’s pretty awesome, I’d be interested to see this approach applied for coding agents as well. You could make a language that focuses on specifying a formal contract the agent has to fill, and then you could have LLM and evaluator converge on a solution.

Incidentally, I can highly recommend Consciousness Explained by Dennett, it’s a really good dive into origin of internal experience, what purpose consciousness serves, and how it might work https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_Explained

how is this real lmfao

That’s similar to how my mind works as well.

The way I like to look at it is that we build models of the world in our heads. Our subjectivity is basically our own distinct understanding of the world that we develop through our unique experience. It’s not the objective reality itself, but it’s how we represent it and make sense of it.

Yeah that’s a really good way to describe it. Basically, it’s like a visual field, but not from the eyes, and my brain just kind of suppresses it. But practising focusing on it could help with making myself more attuned to paying direct attention to it. I really should try spend a bit of time on that.

It’s really fascinating to hear how other people’s mental processes work, it’s not something we tend to talk about. And it’s kind of easy to assume that other people’s minds work roughly like your own, but clearly there are some pretty big differences.

I do that sometimes if the article is dense.

I mean some people complain when you change the title, you just can’t please everybody 🤷

it’s just such a great meme, you don’t even have to edit it, it’s perfect the way it is

Big corps never really wanted people to be able to run their own software and have control over their devices. What they want is to sell appliances as opposed to general purpose computing devices.

When I close my eyelids and relax, I tend to see random noise in darkness. I can manipulate it to an extent in terms of shape, so I can see how that can be worked on with some patience to shape what I see more intentionally. So, I think you’re right that with some dedicated effort I could gain more control over what I’m seeing with my eyes closed.

In general, I find when I try to visualize things, it feels like I perceive the shapes I’m thinking about, but not in my visual field. It’s more like I have a concept of the object I’m thinking of, and it can be detailed enough to explore, but it’s very distinct from actually seeing it. It feels more like there’s a ghostly shape floating in my mind.