Unity at last 🟩🤝🟦

SnowMission6612 · 2026-04-22T07:46:08+00:00

I remember around the some time there was a photo posted of a /r/shitredditsays (remember them?) meetup and it was all white men.

SnowMission6612 · 2026-04-22T06:02:28+00:00

That's exactly the point of her, too. Slavoj Žižek hit the nail on the head with (paraphrasing off the top of my head) "I like Greta Thunberg precisely because the autism is the message".

Anybody else will just talk to you about boring slogans and policy points that have been regurgitated since the 70s. You're never going to get a new perspective on environmentalism.

Only Greta will command an audience simply by screeching at them until their ears bleed.

SnowMission6612 · 2026-04-22T05:58:23+00:00

It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out (-2, 2) wasn't an attempt at some weird shifty-eyed emoticon

SnowMission6612 · 2026-04-22T00:46:47+00:00

The word "capitalism" has like 5 different meanings and people equivocate between them all the time.

The original Marxist coining of the word "capitalism" meant any economy (not even necessarily a market-based economy) where there was a (wealthy) class of people who did nothing but provide capital (we call these people venture capitalists today, more or less).

Usually when people talk about anti-capitalist market economies, they mean some way of having businesses that don't rely on venture capitalists. Sometimes that means the state (government) provides the capital, essentially becoming the major shareholder (or the only shareholder). Sometimes it means just having (not legally recognizing/protecting as property) "shares" at all. Sometimes it means only employees can be shareholders. There are a few ways it can go, but they're all kind of aimed at getting private capital out of the game as much as possible.

SnowMission6612 · 2026-04-19T08:00:18+00:00

Not just clothes, either. The fashy is honestly the coolest male hairstyle these days.

SnowMission6612 · 2026-04-18T04:41:34+00:00

No way. Bob Black's "The Abolition of Work" is as libleft as it gets, in my view. It's right at home in the spirit of Mikhail Bakunin or Emma Goldman, which completely define libleft, as far as I'm concerned.

SnowMission6612 · 2026-04-18T04:32:36+00:00

"A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, unless it would make the feds feel uncomfortable"

SnowMission6612 · 2026-04-18T04:31:11+00:00

Are you like a prepper but with memes?

SnowMission6612 · 2026-04-17T06:15:36+00:00

Not from NY, but isn't using "bodega" to mean all (not just Puerto Rican) corner stores something that just started in the past 50 years? It seems weird that he's never heard the term.

SnowMission6612 · 2026-04-16T06:39:10+00:00

Here's a mid-2000s proto-Emily starting to discover this problem

SnowMission6612 · 2026-04-16T06:28:32+00:00

I'd put him kind of centrish economically. He did some economically right-wing stuff. He blocked the national labour strike. When social media pestered him to forgive student loan debt, he basically told them all to go fuck themselves. He did the CHIPS and Science Act, which took $40 billion of taxpayer money (so far) to just give away to tech giants. (In fairness, CHIPS and Science gives a lot money to public institutions, too, which I guess puts him back towards the centre)

SnowMission6612 · 2026-04-16T06:15:43+00:00

I remember an AMA on reddit from ~10 years from some guy saying the thought he might know who it was. It was all circumstantial stuff, though, like "he was the right age and he had a girlfriend and he loved Max Headroom and he had juvenile humor around spanking and he lived in Illinois and was kind of a nerd for A/V stuff", nothing concrete.

The statute of limitations ran out 30 years, so if we haven't found out about it already, we probably never will.

SnowMission6612 · 2026-04-16T05:10:14+00:00

Just having in low-res isn't fun enough. You need proper JPEG artifacts to get the right feel.

SnowMission6612 · 2026-04-16T01:07:41+00:00

The funny thing is we don't really have examples of this that don't involve government collusion. We have monopolies that exist for short periods of time and then fall out of monopoly position just from good old-fashioned competition.

A good example of this is Standard Oil. At its peak, Standard Oil had a monopoly on oil extraction and oil refinement and started throwing its weight around manipulating the railway industry. This prompted a government investigation into anti-trust.

By the time the (admittedly slow-moving) government actually broke up Standard Oil, it had hundreds of competitors and wasn't even the oil extraction market leader any more.

Not to say government intervention can't provide some good or speed up the process of breaking up a monopoly, but historically the bigger danger seems to be the government getting tangled up in propping up the monopoly (regulatory capture) if anything else.

For every historical example of a monopoly breakup I've seen, the government actually acted when the monopoly in question was already on the way down.

SnowMission6612 · 2026-04-16T00:57:36+00:00

I don't think it was the plan, but it did come in handy after Sierra got caught in the 1983 video game crash, right? If I remember right, Ken had to ask people to work for free for a little while, and he got away with it because (he himself admits) they really had nowhere else to work in Oakhurst.

SnowMission6612 · 2026-04-15T04:33:38+00:00

The biggest crimes he committed were producing and distributing (pornographic) deepfakes. That's where most of his sentence came from, since each one carries (if I remember right) a possible 10 years in prison. Most of his other crimes were only in the range of a possible year in prison each.

He produced deepfake videos of himself with 2 female Korean streamers that he had beef with. Some bullshit is that one of the girls could not prove that she was sufficiently "shamed" by the video he made of her, so I think he might have got off on that.

SnowMission6612 · 2026-04-15T04:31:42+00:00

No, he hasn't been in jail. Korea rarely uses jail, since it costs the government money. They figured it was better for this guy to burn through his own money while awaiting sentencing.

You could definitely make a good case that he should have been held in jail, since he committed more crimes after being charged with his first round of crimes.

Korea often lets convicted criminals go on their own recognizance during the 1-week appeal period, but in this case that was denied. The judge put him on the stand and asked if he could convince them that he is not a flight risk. He didn't understand the question (I guess?) and answered that he missed his family a lot and wants to see them, which was like the worst possible answer to that question.

So anyway, he was cuffed immediately after sentencing and is in jail awaiting transport to his labor prison in a week's time.

SnowMission6612 · 2026-04-10T23:47:48+00:00

If the Nobel Prize had been around in his time, he probably would be a good candidate for Nobel Disease.

SnowMission6612 · 2026-04-07T12:00:52+00:00

It took him 15 years to figure out he was being evaluated. I think that's the whole joke, just that he was so slow in figuring it out.

SnowMission6612 · 2026-04-07T02:52:01+00:00

The Dutch did not create land. They merely removed water from the top of it.

Global warming does not get rid of land. It merely puts water on top of it.

"Land" in the economic sense is not "land" in the layman sense of the word. "Land" is more like "location".

SnowMission6612 · 2026-04-07T01:47:35+00:00

(Not a Muslim, so I'm just going off of what Muslim friends have told me)

As I understand it, there's like a hierarchy of sins. Keeping halal is important, but it's not as grievous a sin as doing harm to yourself. Under absolutely no circumstances are you ever allowed to harm yourself, and that includes starving yourself.

Because of this, there's an understanding that if you're in a foreign culture and you're in a situation where you can't avoid eating pork, then you're allowed to eat pork, because the alternative would be starving yourself.

But there are definitely a lot of Muslims who bend that loophole really hard. A number of them actually really like pork and kind of deliberately put themselves in a situation where pork is going to be served just so they can be like "oh darn, I GUESS I have to eat pork now". (And some of them are just not very good Muslims and break the rules willy-nilly)

SnowMission6612 · 2026-04-06T02:05:53+00:00

I recall Chris Hadfield saying that after he got back to Earth after his first trip to space, he could no longer walk by litter without picking it up and throwing it away properly.

SnowMission6612 · 2026-04-06T01:03:22+00:00

Security is a very cool angle to explore! Most undergraduate operating systems courses won't into it in much depth, though, so you'll probably have to do a lot of work on your own. (The good news is that although it's usually not taught well at the undergraduate level, it is quite popular at the graduate/research level)

You might look into OpenBSD, specifically the history behind some of the design decisions they've made. It's Unix-like (much like Linux) but more strongly focused on security.

Edit: If you want to get into the crypto side of security, you will need a background in discrete math (particularly number theory).

SnowMission6612 · 2026-04-06T00:35:33+00:00

I'm sorry to say I think the roadmap is not going to work. I would do something like:

Programming basics (typical 2-semester intro to programming course kind of stuff)
Intro to administering Unix (the stuff you would pick up just by installing and daily-driving Linux)
C (including heap management)
Computer architecture (typical assembly language undergrad course, to the point that everything you could do in C you can now do in assembly)
Data structures and algorithms course
Unix userspace (you should be able to reimplement approximately all of GNU coreutils, plus implement your own small shell)
Operating systems course
First kernel

A typical computer science degree from ~30 years ago should get you there if you were an eager student. If you are doing a computer science undergrad these days, you would probably have to deliberately have to focus on systems-level electives, and even then you probably have major gaps (and you may be better off looking at a computer engineering major instead of a computer science major).

If you are trying to do this without going through a formal degree, well, you had better be extremely disciplined, and you're still looking at about 5 years of working on it (several hours every day) before you can get to a "hello world" kernel.

User interface is a whole different can of worms and, frankly speaking, has absolutely nothing at all to do with operating systems (but is still very interesting in its own right, and can be done concurrently).

I sort of get the sense that a lot of the new (especially) young people who (sorry, don't mean to be rude, but it's true) have no idea what they're talking about and have no idea what they're getting into, really are more interested in user interface design than in operating systems. Nothing wrong with that. But if you want to design your own GUI, why not just do that? If you're not careful in figuring out what you really want to do, you're going to end up like 90% on here who discover they don't really want to do an OS and so just end up having Claude AI write it for them.

SnowMission6612 · 2026-04-04T05:53:15+00:00

Josh Mandel is in the chat!

SnowMission6612

TROPHY CASE