hallettj @ hallettj @leminal.space

Just a basic programmer living in California

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1 yr. ago

You might be interested to learn some history of societies without state-issued currency. The book "Debt: The First 5000 years" by David Graeber has lots to say about pre-modern systems of account. I'm aware there are some criticisms of the book so I don't want present it as absolute truth - but it is an interesting on read, and it cites lots of anthropological studies.

One of the points of the book - and I see there are also other anthropologists who take this view - is there is no evidence that there has ever been a barter economy. Economics curriculum typically talks about prehistoric barter as an introduction; but it looks like the barter story may have been made up by Adam Smith. Smith's "Wealth of Nations" is highly insightful, and even predicts problems with capitalism that we currently face. But he probably didn't have the anthropological background to write authoritatively about economies of prehistoric societies.

Graeber does claim that there have been times when barter has been a stop-gap when there is a problem with money supply. So that's a case where something like your app might come in,

When barter has appeared, it wasn’t as part of a purely barter economy, and money didn’t emerge from it—rather, it emerged from money. After Rome fell, for instance, Europeans used barter as a substitute for the Roman currency people had gotten used to. “In most of the cases we know about, [barter] takes place between people who are familiar with the use of money, but for one reason or another, don’t have a lot of it around.

These were temporary situations. The fall of Rome probably seemed like the end of the world to some people at the time. But new societal structures and currencies filled the gaps.

I've heard something about juggling exercising brain hemisphere connection. Maybe try spending a bit of time regularly juggling, or doing something else that requires bilateral coordination. I mean, besides typing

Some more points about Nix:

• It's a fast way to get to a specific setup, like a particular DE or Vulkan gaming support, thanks to abstraction that NixOS modules provide
• There are tons of packages
• Because packages are installed by adding a config entry you don't accumulate random software you forgot you installed
• Immutable updates and rollbacks - this is similar to benefits of atomic ostree distros, but the nix solutions are more general, so you have one system that does more things with a consistent interface
  • in addition to updating the base system, rollbacks also roll back user-installed packages, and configurations if those are managed via Nix
  • devshells provide per-directory packages and configuration using the same package repos as the host system, without needing to manage docker images
• Nix is portable - much of what it does on NixOS can also be used in other distros, or even on Macos or Windows with the Linux subsystem
  • Configurations often combine NixOS and Home Manager parts. The Home Manager part can be used à la carte on other OSes is a way that is fully isolated from the host OS package management. For example on Macos this is a much nicer alternative to Homebrew.
  • devshells also work on other OSes
• similar to Guix - but NixOS uses systemd, and is (from what I understand) more tolerant of non-free software (whether these are pros or cons is up to individual interpretation)

Arch wiki is the best! I reference often, even though I'm generally applying the information to other distros

Maybe the bubble rings are like the psps sound people make to cats - which is another behavior that appears unrelated to feeding, mating, or defense

My guess was the point is that it's difficult to install CLI tools using Flatpak

Hospitals are required to provide emergency treatment - what we call ED or ER visits - regardless of ability to pay. Patients are expected to pay for that treatment. It's just that the hospital isn't supposed to deny treatment based on whether they think patients will or won't pay the bill. This is getting-stabilized treatment.

This is an important point in arguing for universal healthcare: if people can't afford treatment, they're more likely to go to the ED where they won't be turned away. ED visits tend to cost more than non-emergency, so that drives costs up.

One of favorites cds to the root of a project directory from a subdirectory,

 bash

    
# Changes to top-level directory of git repository.
alias gtop="cd \$(git rev-parse --show-toplevel)"

  

That's a helpful one! I also add a function that creates a tmp directory, and cds to it which I frequently use to open a scratch space. I use it a lot for unpacking tar files, but for other stuff too.

(These are nushell functions)

 nu

    
# Create a directory, and immediately cd into it.
# The --env flag propagates the PWD environment variable to the caller, which is
# necessary to make the directory change stick.
def --env dir [dirname: string] {
  mkdir $dirname
  cd $dirname
}

# Create a temporary directory, and cd into it.
def --env tmp [
  dirname?: string # the name of the directory - if omitted the directory is named randomly
] {
  if ($dirname != null) {
    dir $"/tmp/($dirname)"
  } else {
    cd (mktemp -d)
  }
}

  

Fair enough - although I interpreted it as a flag like at the end of a sed match-and-replace command. Or I guess a closing HTML tag would make sense.

Our decisions are heavily influenced by emotion. We have the sense of empathy, which is an adaptation that makes communal living work. Empathy motivates us to do things for other people sometimes. You can say, "you do helpful things to satisfy your own emotional needs." But that's pretty much saying, "you do helpful things because you want to." I think self-interest is a big factor in how we act, but I don't think it's the only factor.

Since traditional tiling window management hasn't caught your interest you might check out Niri, which is a scrolling tiling wm. The differences are that windows always stay the size you set them to, remain in the relative layout you put them in, and you don't fiddle with layout switching. Niri is also especially mouse- and touchpad-friendly. It's great for pure keyboard use too - you have both options to suit your preference & mood.

I mention Niri despite it not being what you asked for because it checks all the boxes you listed (apart from stacking), and it's amazing! https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri

That's quite a poster!

Oh... oh dear!

Linux on ARM is getting better all the time!

I sometimes tell my kids about things I was taught, and survival habits I picked up in the "dad qualification program". I based the idea of the program on a brief description of air force officer survival training in the book The Hatchet, and a generous dose of imagination. The kids have never questioned it.

Good point! We should only use date formats that are allowed by both standards! https://ijmacd.github.io/rfc3339-iso8601/

Don't say "acronym" when you mean "abbreviation"!

"Acronym" specifically refers to an initialism that forms a new word. For example,

• scuba (self-contained underwater breathing apparatus)
• NASA (pronounced like a word - you don't say "ehn eh ess eh").

It's acro- (height) -nym (word) - a word that exists on top of / above other words.

In contrast "NIH" is not an acronym because it isn't pronounced or read as a word. It's appropriate to say, "'NIH' is an abbreviation" or "'NIH' is an initialism". But saying "'NIH' is an acronym" is wrong!

The images probably don't have to look meaningful as long as it is difficult to distinguish them from real images using a fast, statistical test. Nepenthes uses Markov chains to generate nonsense text that statistically resembles real content, which is a lot cheaper than LLM generation. Maybe Markov chains would also work to generate images? A chain could generate each pixel by based on the previous pixel, or based on neighbors, or some such thing.

Yes, I meant miles, but I forgot about the abbreviation collision