kacey's recent activity
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Comment on What hard scifi books could you recommend? in ~books
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Comment on It's time to abandon the cargo cult metaphor in ~science
kacey Link ParentI wonder who owns language? We're all free to say what we want (so long as we avoid particular topics that rile up authorities), but who pays the price for words and terms that harm others? There...I wonder who owns language? We're all free to say what we want (so long as we avoid particular topics that rile up authorities), but who pays the price for words and terms that harm others?
There are a lot more tech-literate, English speaking people than Melanesians, so perhaps slightly inconveniencing them all is more costly than insulting every Melanesian whenever we want to describe a causal fallacy. Genuinely, it boils down to how you define your moral framework.
I’m OK to deal with a bit of annoyance to adjust my language, especially in the hope that highlighting small issues like these helps people build up toward seeing the bigger issues that hide in plain sight (feel free to fill in whichever you wish here).
No idea if that’ll ever work out. I could easily imagine a utilitarian viewing this as pointless, however, since Melanesian culture is near worthless in a market capitalism sense (ie it’s only good for making fun of rhetorically, or exporting as tchotchkes), so literally any effort expended by a high earner is wasted. If such a valuable person actually cared, they’d work slightly harder and donate to some relevant charity instead of meaninglessly policing language.
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Comment on Amazon drone delivery footage in ~tech
kacey Link ParentI’m not the OP, but I’m trying to figure out how I would estimate the long term cost of drone deliveries. How does this sound? Per flight Labour to load drone Electricity Extra packaging for hard...I’m not the OP, but I’m trying to figure out how I would estimate the long term cost of drone deliveries. How does this sound?
- Per flight
- Labour to load drone
- Electricity
- Extra packaging for hard landing
- Potential labour for operator to directly control drone
- Regulatory
- Insurance
- Permits
- Recurring
- Repair labour
- Wear items
- Rotor lifetime
- LiPo wear
- Per flight
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Comment on Amazon drone delivery footage in ~tech
kacey LinkThis is really cool! The major tech companies have spent a decade trying to get this working, and I’d imagine that the advancements in ML (re. sensing especially) have probably gone a long way...This is really cool! The major tech companies have spent a decade trying to get this working, and I’d imagine that the advancements in ML (re. sensing especially) have probably gone a long way towards making it more viable. Still, the biggest hurdles have always been regulatory and market size (coordinating and logging all these flight paths requires interop’ing with ancient government agencies, and these deliveries are currently most valuable to sparse suburban locales).
For the posters asking why this is useful, Zipline has proven its effectiveness for delivering medicine to rural areas, and I’d note that every truck mile saved delivering clarinet reeds by drone is a huge brake dust/wheel rubber/asphalt rut pollution reduction mechanism. I think I’d still prefer land-based drones, but realistically, flying seems like the best way to avoid harm.
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Comment on Elon Musk and the right’s war on Wikipedia in ~tech
kacey Link ParentAs a person who works in the field, I’d expect that firing everyone will just result in the service never getting new features or being able to respond to security threats. If everyone did their...As a person who works in the field, I’d expect that firing everyone will just result in the service never getting new features or being able to respond to security threats. If everyone did their job right, most operational burden should be automated.
It looks like Twitter has not launched anything Wikipedia-worthy since the acquisition, and two years is a short timeline to have zero days show up in one’s stack. I’m not sure what other people were expecting, but this is about what I figured would happen.
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Comment on Step 1: Slow down in ~enviro
kacey LinkI find myself wondering what the point of this article is. Is it a serious proposal? Is the author just trying to stir up drama …? What does this even mean? The ecosystem that humans fit into are...I find myself wondering what the point of this article is. Is it a serious proposal? Is the author just trying to stir up drama …?
The objective here is to deenergize our society and rejoin the ecosystem as full members. We need to take up our obligations as a keystone species. There is some evidence that we have done so before.
What does this even mean? The ecosystem that humans fit into are parts of the African savanna, several thousand years ago. We aren’t and never were keystone species; it seems like the author threw that line in to sound profound? And what does “evidence that we have done so before” even imply; they just say that and move on to discuss another tangent?
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Comment on How much growth is required to achieve good lives for all? Insights from needs-based analysis. in ~finance
kacey Link ParentSorry, I wasn't using India as an example of decommodification, I was using India's "grain slop" production pipeline as an example of how a government can secure nutrition for its population...They haven’t “decommodified rice” though, they functionally just have a version of food stamps in the form of making staple grains available with an eye towards ensuring domestic agricultural capacity. To say you want to “decommodify food” is to say you want it to not be subject to market pressures, which requires a whole apparatus for deciding what to grow and for whom.
Sorry, I wasn't using India as an example of decommodification, I was using India's "grain slop" production pipeline as an example of how a government can secure nutrition for its population without immediately backsliding into a situation where all other food production takes a backseat.
Maybe we're working off of different definitions or goals? My understanding was that decommodification of food would ensure access to nutritious food (e.g. vegetables, grains, etc.), but doesn't necessarily have the wide reaching impacts that I think you're suggesting? (e.g. nothing other than what the government says can be farmed, no one farms anything other than calorie crops, state-level bans on meat, etc.) Do correct me if I'm wrong though, please; I'm having difficulty understanding the full argument, so I think we might be working off of different understandings of the topic at hand.
I don’t think big agribusiness can be relied upon to determine what’s “actually applicable,”
They don't; regulate it. My third sentence links to a Government of Canada webpage establishing the processes used to determine safety. If we care about things other than human safety, then we should vote for governments that will set up those processes (e.g. in the EU you need to continue monitoring your crop for environmental impacts (search the page for 'Post-authorisation monitoring'))
They’re designed to be conducive to mechanized agriculture and resistance to pesticides and pests, but in the process it drives artisanal and heirloom varietals of crops to extinction and moves everyone to a monoculture of a handful of optimized staple grains that are efficient to produce at scale.
Yes, this is capitalism and market economies in action. If we don't use GMOs for it, we'll breed pest resistance and harvest efficiencies into plants the slow way.
I'm not sure how this is an argument against genetic modification as a tool in agriculture. We can also breed pest resistance and productivity into heirloom varieties without eliminating flavour or affecting non-target genes, so it sounds like it could also help with your concerns?
People don’t burn down rainforest because of a lack of available arable land, they do it because they don’t manage the water and soil health so they’re depleting the land they do have through unsustainable farming methods.
No, it's because international agricultural businesses such as Cargil are farming cattle feed in a rainforest. Since cow is a very inefficient crop, it requires a lot of cheap land, and no one important complains when massive agricultural industries annihilate irreplaceable natural resources far away from western eyes. The beef market keeps growing, hence needing to burn down more irreplaceable rainforest. Unless the terrain desertifies (note: it can't, because this is a rainforest) I doubt that any of this will stop, since applying synthetic fertilizers until the crops grow is a well established process (which also causes huge problems downstream of farms!)
At some point there’s just an inadmissible loss in biodiversity and diversity of food cultures that starts to make human society look pretty dystopian pretty fast. Like, many types of fish just aren’t going be accessible to most people within the next hundred years. If not for the heroic efforts of preservationists, most of the good sorts of corn would be extinct already and literally nobody would be alive who remembers that corn tortillas aren’t supposed to resemble wet cardboard. At some point people will need to decide to make societal level decisions to prioritize access to enjoyable, non-processed food as something other than a luxury. Even if that makes the share of income spent on food go up relative to disposable consumer bric-a-brac.
No one is saying that feeding people will require hunting down every horticulturalist and forcing them at gunpoint to breed worse tomatoes for Big Ag, or gunning down farmers who dare grow heirloom squashes. You can have both. I truly do not understand where you're coming from; it's like we've read entirely different pieces. The literal article says that we only need 30% of our current resource input to end starvation, lack of housing, etc. in the entire world. There's plenty of space left for breeding weird pumpkins and preserving chestnut trees in the remaining 70% (or, ideally, much much less than that).
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Comment on Inside VillageOS: A ‘SimCity’-like tool for regenerative living spaces in ~tech
kacey Link ParentMmhm, gotcha, and agreed! I suppose I'm not sure how this tangent was formed, since I had assumed you were taking issue with something I said in my original comment? Which -- and just to clarify...Mmhm, gotcha, and agreed! I suppose I'm not sure how this tangent was formed, since I had assumed you were taking issue with something I said in my original comment? Which -- and just to clarify once more; apologies for all the clarifications -- was a critique leveled at Aaron Frank (author of that post on Singularity Hub), and perhaps transitively at James Ehrlich, for insufficiently analyzing the problem of sustainability in the built environment.
If they'd said "and then all the externalities to our analysis will be solved by a powerful government entity pulling the big money lever", I could at least critique that. But the absence of it makes it seem like I'm either reading a poorly paraphrased argument for the value of ecovillages (and by extension, VillageOS), or that the original argument was deeply flawed from the get-go.
(edit) (and just underlining this one more time too, I also agree that governments spending their way out of infrastructural holes is reasonable. I would further suggest that most folks don't have any desire to investigate the interplay between national debt, market economies, and infrastructure, so discussing this at all is often fraught)
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Comment on Inside VillageOS: A ‘SimCity’-like tool for regenerative living spaces in ~tech
kacey Link ParentAah, thank you! I was just working off of a Google search for "definition materialism", since I only knew of the term as used vaguely in philosophy. I also don't intentionally expose myself to...Aah, thank you! I was just working off of a Google search for "definition materialism", since I only knew of the term as used vaguely in philosophy. I also don't intentionally expose myself to much political ideology online, and I intentionally run away screaming from groups that try to boil my entire being down to a 1d line, whichever one we're talking about 😅 (or worse yet, two points on it).
I read through the Wikipedia articles on those topics and they were very interesting! I'd heard the term Marx before, fading into the horizon as I sprinted over the hills to another politics-free zone, so it was cool to do some reading on the topic :) definitely a lot of interesting ideas there.
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Comment on Inside VillageOS: A ‘SimCity’-like tool for regenerative living spaces in ~tech
kacey (edited )Link ParentI’m not sure what materialist means! Below is Oxford dictionary’s definition [1], but I’m not sure how it applies to my argument. Which, put succinctly, is that ignoring industrial production and...I’m not sure what materialist means! Below is Oxford dictionary’s definition [1], but I’m not sure how it applies to my argument. Which, put succinctly, is that ignoring industrial production and manufacturing when designing sustainable human population centres fundamentally leads back to the resiliency issues that the author is trying to address (albeit at a potentially reduced rate). How you build the robots which make your ecovillage’s agriculture sustainable w/o falling back on imported labour is not something I feel should be external to their analysis. My concern is that they haven’t looked at the full system, and are focusing on the fun part (urban planning).
We have a solution: Not leaving it to a market that expects returns on investments.
Er, sorry, I think my post was too long and confusing? I don’t disagree with the sentiment behind anything you’re saying. My intention behind the part of my post I think you’re quoting wasn’t to justify the status quo; I’m agreeing that it is a bad thing that we keep failing to invest in infrastructure, resiliency, etc.
I don’t happen to agree that printing public money for industry barons so they can metaphorically repair the damage they caused by tearing the copper out of the walls is the right approach, but that might be a quibbling point and not the thrust of your comment?
[1]:
a person who considers material possessions and physical comfort as more important than spiritual values.
"greedy materialists lusting for consumer baubles" -
Comment on Inside VillageOS: A ‘SimCity’-like tool for regenerative living spaces in ~tech
kacey (edited )LinkI feel a little conflicted about this. On one hand: the app is cool, and if it's intended for incremental progress in existing urban/suburban landscapes, then that's neat. I wholeheartedly agree...I feel a little conflicted about this. On one hand: the app is cool, and if it's intended for incremental progress in existing urban/suburban landscapes, then that's neat. I wholeheartedly agree with the thesis that modern societies are built on extremely brittle foundations. I figure that modern cities bidirectionally rely on modern industries: minor disruptions to either system cause the other to collapse in a chain. It's much worse in a sense, since we're capable of rapidly building massive chains with single points of failure all along them: Evergreen in the Panama canal; Helene hitting the Baxter, NC IV fluid plant; bird flu wiping out monoculture chicken flocks in 2022 and 2024; etc..
Resiliency is key, but it costs money. It's historically been trivial to hide that your industry is cutting corners by removing redundancies, buffers, and safeties in order to increase profits. Especially in the modern era of regulatory capture (preventing inspections to catch this, or legislation to address loopholes) and oligopolies (the industry is "too big to fail" and gets bailed out, or fires thousands of people to move to greener pastures). So yeah, agreed with the author on that front.
On the other hand, I disagree with the new single points of failure that they're introducing. I'm not sure if it's fluff for the article, but per this quote (highlights are mine):
Their core planning tool, VillageOS, can help conceive residential infrastructure incorporating everything from clean water systems and housing to renewable energy, organic food production, and even robotic and autonomous systems.
If the goal is to start from scratch and avoid the failure modes from p1 of this rant, then the highlighted objectives seem to run counter to them: they presume an external, advanced industrial production pipeline that is outside of their analysis that can feed the ecovillage with machinery and electronics. Not to mention medical concerns (both diagnostic/treatment and pharmaceutical), which doesn't seem to have come up at all.
I'm not sure if I have a great solution to that problem, but it still seems present in this one.
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Comment on Sweden is a nearly cashless society – here's how it affects people who are left out in ~finance
kacey Link ParentExamples such as Detroit ID (in conjunction with local credit unions), or Old Glory Bank seem like a refutation of the assertion that KYC compliance exclusively prevents banks from offering...[KYC laws]
Examples such as Detroit ID (in conjunction with local credit unions), or Old Glory Bank seem like a refutation of the assertion that KYC compliance exclusively prevents banks from offering services to people without home addresses. As a guess, I would assume that for-profit banking institutions are more interested in avoiding all potential legal risk than working in good faith to determine their customers identities, as the trade off for low-value accounts is not fiscally prudent.
So the problem is solvable, while staying compliant, but it’s not profitable for non-vertically integrated companies to offer homeless people banking services. Now, if the same company was vertically integrated into the security, medical, and welfare industries, they’d probably see an overall boost in ROI by converting them into productive, self sustaining workers.
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Comment on The ugly truth about Spotify is finally revealed in ~music
kacey LinkIt looks like this is largely based on another article (The Ghosts in the Machine).It looks like this is largely based on another article (The Ghosts in the Machine).
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Comment on Sweden is a nearly cashless society – here's how it affects people who are left out in ~finance
kacey Link ParentRe. addressing this issue, I think the article raised two points: (1) how people who are unbanked can interact in a society which relies on electronic cash transfer, and (2) how to deal with...Re. addressing this issue, I think the article raised two points: (1) how people who are unbanked can interact in a society which relies on electronic cash transfer, and (2) how to deal with services that exclusively interact over phone apps.
Re. 1, banks can offer programs that allow homeless people to get bank accounts without a fixed address (example), and the elderly can be taught via community outreach programs how to navigate systems in society that they're unfamiliar with. Both of these probably require some amount of external funding and government imperatives to get the ball rolling, but they've sprung up without large coordinated efforts before.
Re. 2, we need to legislate universal access requirements. The Americans with Disabilities Act had to be written and approved, but before it, people who suffered mobility issues physically could not interact with many parts of society (e.g. can't operate doors, climb stairs, roll up steep ramps, etc.). We now exist in a world where it's cheaper to have a low-quality Android app churned out by AI as the interface for your service than it is to offer a physical terminal, so that people without phones (or who run out of battery power) can still pay for parking.
Hopefully that helps?
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Comment on How much growth is required to achieve good lives for all? Insights from needs-based analysis. in ~finance
kacey Link Parent(edited to avoid rhetorical question asking, and I changed my tone to be more direct) Not saying that they don't have other problems, but India has guaranteed 15 kg of rice per month per family...(edited to avoid rhetorical question asking, and I changed my tone to be more direct)
If your policy apparatus has decided “we know how many staple grains people need to eat” then you’re functionally saying “We’re going to force production of ____ grain slop” and all other food production takes a backseat.
Not saying that they don't have other problems, but India has guaranteed 15 kg of rice per month per family (35 kg under the poverty line) for the last twenty years and the sky hasn't fallen yet. All other agricultural production has not halted, and I would imagine that most people in India do not consider a side of rice to be "grain slop".
And as a follow-up, I believe we should use GMO crops as much as is applicable. To be clear, I'm not suggesting glow-in-the-dark petunias, I'm suggesting adding blight resistance to potatoes. Properly studying and certifying GMO crops as safe works. And it means we slow down poisoning the environment with agricultural pesticide use.
Equally, we should be pursuing greater crop yields, so we don't have to burn down rainforests to feed all eight billion people on Earth.
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Comment on How do you do, fellow web developers? A growing disconnect. in ~comp
kacey Link ParentAh ... yeah, no, that sounds similar. n=2 but I get the impression that's just large companies ... That's definitely cool! I've also found it useful for picking up new libraries and whatnot,...So far the AI nonsense isn't bothering me too much. It's more the people that are doing that (mainly project managers, middle management, etc.) and the "politics" of work. Maybe it's just my company, but getting yourself lined up for promotions is basically a part-time job in and of itself.
Ah ... yeah, no, that sounds similar. n=2 but I get the impression that's just large companies ...
[utility of AI]
That's definitely cool! I've also found it useful for picking up new libraries and whatnot, although when I last tried the tools (a couple months ago briefly, then more thoroughly a year ago), they really struggled with any library that couldn't be found on Stack Overflow. Ultimately it wound up more useful to look through those automated search results which steal code samples from GitHub and boost their SEO.
I have no doubt though that as it evolves and weaves its way more and more into the industry that I'll get sick of it. They'll start using AI to assess your commits and analyze readiness for promotion. Or check your work against AI solutions and penalize you somehow for not being as efficient as a robot that stole other people's code. sigh
I'm looking forward to code review bots that tell me to do something incorrect, then having to justify ignoring the comment to management! Ah, and having to review AI generated code, or to assist coworkers when the AI gives them something that doesn't work.
Unrelatedly I'm trying to get out of tech in the next several years to find something else to spend my life on hahaha
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Comment on How do you do, fellow web developers? A growing disconnect. in ~comp
kacey Link ParentThat’s very cool! Also please never dig into how React works; it’s not terribly important, and I only brought it up as an example because the article did :) and I’m surprised that N64 games were...That’s very cool! Also please never dig into how React works; it’s not terribly important, and I only brought it up as an example because the article did :) and I’m surprised that N64 games were even compiled; I’d thought that that was still the era of mostly handwritten assembly! TIL!
it's far more likely that they only care about a different part of the machine. Almost every developer I have ever worked with has had their own little niche topic of interest […]
My coworkers have interests such as sports, alcohol, and travel. I’m glad that you’ve been able to find people who have similar interests as you — having had that before, it’s a fantastic experience! — but please understand that it’s not universal. A lot of people are in this career because it was both easy to get into and very lucrative.
For context I’m not saying that the above is the case for every developer on planet earth, just that chasing a decent salary inevitably removed the selection bias of shared interest from my cohort, which was both sad (for me) and predictable.
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Comment on How do you do, fellow web developers? A growing disconnect. in ~comp
kacey Link ParentYep, and agreed (except I’m not sure what you mean by “philosophical”; for context, I’m saying that you could throw a dart and hit a coworker who doesn’t know mechanically understand what a packet...Yep, and agreed (except I’m not sure what you mean by “philosophical”; for context, I’m saying that you could throw a dart and hit a coworker who doesn’t know mechanically understand what a packet is).
I’m a decade into my career, and I spent the first half of it working for smaller, local businesses, where there was a selection bias for people that would trade pay for interesting problems. I (correctly, imo) decided that retiring was more important than job satisfaction, so I switched to a role at a larger company … hence this conundrum.
And yeah, very much agreed re. deep understanding vs. hitting deadlines. I wouldn’t want anyone to sacrifice time outside of work to build up understanding, it’s that this is my “hobby” (as it was for several coworkers of jobs gone past), so they (and I at the time) didn’t view it as a sacrifice — it was fun, at the time.
Er, in sum, sorry that you’re in a similar position, I think. Hope the AI nonsense doesn’t chase you out of the job.
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Comment on How do you do, fellow web developers? A growing disconnect. in ~comp
kacey LinkMy browser deleted a longer, rantier comment. Probably for the best; this one is pretty bad too … I got into the industry because taking apart complex machines was fun, and building them even...My browser deleted a longer, rantier comment. Probably for the best; this one is pretty bad too …
I got into the industry because taking apart complex machines was fun, and building them even moreso. Being paid never felt like it diminished the enjoyment; rather, that came from realizing that my cohort desperately hated the parts of the work that I enjoyed. The fiddly bits in ECMAscript, which show off its weird prototypal heritage. How distributed systems fundamentally break sequentiality. All the little details which one can grasp to make a “thing” that works as well as it can, given the material circumstances, and our knowledge of mathematics.
I recognize that everyone needs to be paid, and software development has historically been extremely easy work for the pay. Thus the hordes of people who don’t care about the machine, since actual understanding is wasted effort if your interest stops at 5pm.
It’d be nice to surround myself with people who want to care, and will dig deeper to understand — for example — “how” React works, instead of just assuming its existence. But understanding isn’t a job prerequisite, which will only get worse with AI. RIP to the author and me, I suppose.
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Comment on Transparent bamboo: A fireproof and waterproof alternative to glass in ~engineering
kacey Link ParentPractical Engineering did a nice piece on this earlier in the year, in case it’s of interest. (edit) Oh, your first linked article summarizes my understanding anyways. In that we’re running out of...Practical Engineering did a nice piece on this earlier in the year, in case it’s of interest.
(edit) Oh, your first linked article summarizes my understanding anyways. In that we’re running out of cheap resources that can be strip mined out of the planet, typically in poorer regions whose governments or regulations are too weak to survive exposure to large corporations.
I was a big fan of the Honorverse series back in university! The way it handled ship to ship combat was exquisite, and the characters were quite fun. Admittedly my interest ran dry as I realized (1) space communism is portrayed as bad, actually, and (2) David Weber hits the same story beats a fair bit.
It still holds a special place in my heart, though, and I’m still disappointed there’s no game adaptation.
(edit) also I’d put it as a ricotta on the cheese sci-fi hardness scale, so very far away from a sibling to Blindsight in that sense. Still quite fun though!