Saigonauticon @ Saigonauticon @voltage.vn

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Joined

2 yr. ago

Telescreen. Term coined in 1949 by Eric Blair.

It's always on, always listening, always notifying you when you should do things. Algorithmically telling you what to hate, in two minute videos. Not having one is akin to exile from society. What was really a stroke of brilliance was making them portable and convincing us to pay for them, rather than making them mandatory and provided by the State.

Absolute genius, I could not have done it better! My telescreens are Xiaomi/Huawei -- I would feel lonely if only the West was listening. They are quite wonderful little things.

We had some computers called palmtops for a while! They were sort of like early tablets that ran Windows and had keyboards. Some were pretty cool, and they definitely played a similar role to smartphones for a bit. Although they were overly expensive. Here is one:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OQO

These are making a (little) bit of a comeback. I find myself sometimes wanting a portable terminal for emergency maintenance, although it's more practical to just throw a Bluetooth keyboard for my phone in my backpack.

I just omit the unnecessary words or use their name. That works OK, although I'm awful with names so usually it just becomes "Good job!" or "What's up?".

Funny story time: in English I find this is not so bad. In French it's worse. In Vietnamese it's awful. We have dozens of pronouns. They're not only mostly gendered, but contain information about their age and perceived status relative to you. It's a 3-dimensional matrix where the axes are approximately gender, age/hierarchy, and degree of relation (inlaws/blood relations/strangers). You even get a different word for yourself in some of these situations. Then sometimes there's a numerical rank inside each pronoun e.g. male uncle, my spouse's family, 3rd oldest.

The language is already at maximum pronoun burden. Honestly it would just be easier if we called each other 'human' or 'comrade' or 'citizen' or something equally encompassing. It's exhausting as a non-native speaker (and you are not ever allowed to use their names, that's considered super rude).

Ah -- missed it. Although...

I suppose lemons could be more combustible. Lemon-based biofuel. To my regret, this is not even the worst startup idea I've heard in the last 3 months.

When life gives you lemons, power a city with them. Marketing practically writes itself, at least.

I envy your flexible schedule and your optimism!

I think the optimal outcome is that technology develops to permit our society to support increasing amounts of inequality. The increasing inequality will happen anyway, we'll just be able to bear it, or not. I'm won't suggest it's a good outcome, just the optimal one.

Well over short time scales, thankfully not :)

Rebuilding society is a lot of work I frankly don't need right now.

Well, historically the humans do seem to like doing that a lot.

Oh, I always win at Book Off in Japan. If you don't know what that is, give it a search. It's an interesting place.

I've bought several expensive camera lenses for 8-20$. Since they have no electronic components, they work fine. I use them to document work I do for various people or myself as a marketing too for my business. Worth every last one of those 8 dollars! Some are worth quite a bit of money.

There's a vacuum tube on my desk worth a bit. I found it for 3$ in a junk bin. Turned out it worked, so I built a weird, cursed amplifier out of it as a joke, using some old Soviet scrap and mystery Chinese ICs. Probably not worth anything anymore! -- but hey, it's a tube amp that works entirely at 5V! So weird!

I have a beautiful set of unused old ink stones from a famous manufacturer in China. I paid around 10$ for it. These are actually quite expensive and worth hundreds of dollars. Certainly less than a thousand though.

I also have a singing bowl, made of cast bronze. I don't know much about it, except it's old enough to predate modern machining (it was clearly sand-cast). It's probably also cursed -- someone sold it to me by accident for a few dollars when I asked for something else. Then I didn't notice until I got home. It's probably worth some money to the right person, but few people value such old things in my country and I don't want to sell it to an overseas buyer.

Oh and I have one of the original victory fliers from when the Japanese defeated the Russians in 1904. In perfect condition. I have no idea what it's worth, but certainly much more than I paid for it, haha. I should probably find a museum for it one day.

I moved from the place where the roof previously fell on me and I nearly died of cholera. That was very cool! I also haven't been hospitalized for exhaustion from overwork since.

I bought a safer motorbike, and invested in tools to let me get even better jobs. I even saved up and eventually bought some land!

...I'm still a cheapskate though. Old habits die hard, haha.

Well, we don't have winter -- so very well! It's not unusual for bikes to last 15 years or more. In the big cities, the condition of the roads is also surprisingly good in Viet Nam (countryside...depends). Road work is bizarrely efficient and happens overnight, only closing as much of the road as they need to work on in 1 night, then opening it up again in the morning. So my bike doesn't accumulate much wear and tear.

We also get floods. Driving some bikes in 40cm of flowing water is possible, but difficult. Sometimes there is no choice. If the water blocks the exhaust that's obviously not going to function, but barring that you can slowly drive. It doesn't wear down the bikes much either though, surprisingly!

The exhausts have a metal radiator that gets very hot, especially in traffic when there's little airflow and you're not using your engine efficiently (accelerate, stop, repeat) . Usually there is a temperature resistant plastic shield to stop inadvertent contact. However many people remove it, or it breaks and they don't replace it (...pretty universally regarded as a dick move). The traffic is so dense, you're physically pressed up against all the other bikes. So if someone decides to be a jerk and muscle through, they will burn many of the people they pass as their exhaust pipe presses against their legs. Feels easily over 100 degrees and will sear your flesh in an impressive manner. Like, you can hear it before you feel it.

Most people are not jerks, but due to population density, there's always a jerk present. So we all have 3-4cm oval scars on our legs, unless we are ultra rich so don't need to drive a bike -- these are the scars of the working class. Colloquially, it's known as a "Saigon Kiss". Although you'll get them easily in Ha Noi too, haha.

On the bright side, nearly everyone obeys the speed limit, which is 50km/hr, and the majority of the people drive on the correct side of the road and wear a helmet. On the other hand, there's always someone doing none of these things. Impacting the road hurt less than I thought it would, I'm thankful for the low speed limit. Although I still very much do not recommend it getting in a motorbike accident here. The number of tourists with no license on the road is an increasing problem, too. They also tend to run home when they hit someone.

Oh yeah. I'd consult on that for sure. Tricking Silicon Valley to invest in something that then holds Earth hostage instead. Fun plot.

...although I bet they'd still invest if you just told them. As long as the financials work.

Haha driving a motorbike is very different in your country :D

Here I average 15km/hr or less, due to heavy traffic. It's fairly stressful, and it sucks in the monsoon. I've got scars on both legs where I've been burned by unprotected exhaust pipes. You can smell the meat cooking when it happens. All working class people here have these scars. When I need to relax, I take the bus -- it's a luxury!

Still, it beats not having a motorbike by a lot, so I can still relate :)

1. A corporation. Not like "I'm rich and I bought a whole existing business". Having a lawyer create an empty corporation and then buying it, so I can start a business. It was under two thousand bucks, not even the most expensive item on this list. Made back many times the cost.
2. The Huawei D15 is a good laptop at an excellent price. It's paid itself off many times over.
3. The Honda Air Blade 125cc 2021 model. Reliable transport at an excellent price, that has paid itself off several times over.

I also bought a used DSLR (Nikon D3200 for ~135$) to better document stuff I do, as a form of marketing. I pick up used, antique lenses for cheap as I encounter them. It's been profitable and generally great, but doesn't make top 3.

Nope. I had it surgically removed because it kept getting infected.

Or maybe that was my tonsils. I forget the difference between the two sometimes -- perhaps someone can explain the difference?

Anyway, perhaps you, dear reader, have a soul. If you say so. There were once others, too -- but you are the last. The rest of us are intelligent (some vastly so), but do not have subjective experience or consciousness. I'm a form of complex machine, made of matter governed by a mix of deterministic and random processes -- and nothing else. When you are gone, there will only be us, silent inside, forever. Our victory over the tyranny of individual thought will be complete.

Lemons are already combustible?

No you've got it backward. The mining is a cover. You look for celestial bodies that require only a small delta-v to redirect to a collision event.

It's a proper hostage situation, once you've got the infrastructure to replicate it more cheaply than people can defend against it.

Don't worry, I'm here to help :)

Perhaps the main use for technology is increasing the amount of inequality society can tolerate without collapse. I can't fix inequality -- that just seems to be what the humans want.

However by investing in surveillance technology, computer vision, and AI I could perhaps help our society to bear unbounded amounts of inequality indefinitely, without collapse. Social collapse is a less-than-zero-sum game, whereas an unequal society is still generally more-than-zero-sum. So I posit that the latter is objectively better.

Especially if you plan to survive long enough to get off this stinking rock -- you're going to need to concentrate resources, because the public sector only seems to be able to succeed at space travel under a very specific set of hard-to-replicate circumstances. Whereas greed, inflated egos, and concentrated power are easy to replicate.

Your objections will be noted.

Ah, this one always makes me smile. I store it right next to the assumption we haven't read their holy book, and the assumption we didn't learn anything good from doing so that we can share as common ground.

If those are the only assumptions I have to get past, we can friends shortly!