I haven’t read it either. There is however a If Books Could Kill episode about it that is very worth listening to.

Ah, yes. The famously singular “westerners” who all 100% agreed with every foreign affairs policy of their government over the past century.

330 micrograms per gram

That seems like… a lot. Way more than I expected or am comfortable thinking about.

Ya know, all perfectly fair.

Good choice on reddit. As much as I love a good 'ol sneer, there’s a lot of jargon and clowning to wade through. There are a lot of genuinely solid critiques of his views there, though.

I appreciate you doing your due diligence on this, but I’m not really sure where to keep this discussion going. I still stand by my original comment’s warning. Reading Siskind is probably not going to corrupt an unassuming reader to immediately think XYZ bad thing. His writings tend to be very data heavy and nuanced, to his credit.

Is he Hitler 2.0? No, far from it.

But he shares a set of core assumptions with the other ideologies, and the circles between his community and the other communities have large overlap. If you start with one, it’s likely you encounter the other. If you start to think like one, it’s a small jump to start thinking like the other. (From experience).

In my opinion, anyone encountering Siskind for the first time is well-served by an understanding of TESCREAL—which they are likely to encounter in either his posts, its comments, or linked material—, and its critiques—which should help them assess what they encounter through a critical lense.

That’s more or less what I wanted to give caution about, which may or may not have come across correctly.

(Not that his stuff is entirely innocent either, but beside the point)

I understand, a good instinct to have. Unfortunately I have read so much in such a piecemeal way I cannot really compile a specific list. But I can point you to where “evidence” can be found. I don’t expect you to read any of this, but if you want to evaluate Alexander’s views further it will help:

• The New York Times did a piece on him that does a good job outlining Alexander’s ties to and influence on Silicone Valley. Probably the best actual piece of journalism on him.
• There used to be a reddit community (/r/SneerClub) that would read his (mountainous, as you point out) posts and pull out errors and misteps to “sneer” at, but that’s been dead since the API revolts. The old posts are still up. Basically you had a club of people that spent years finding (cherry-picking, mind) the juicy bits for you.
• You may find some passing reference to Alexander is one of Émile Torres’s articles or interviews on the subject of TESCREAL, but probably nothing substantial.
• If you spend time on communites like LessWrong and the EA Forum, you will see heavy reference to and influence from Alexander’s writing among members.

A lot of what I say comes from my experiencd spending way too much time following these socisl circles and their critics online. Unfortunately, the best way I know to see for yourself is to dive in yourself. Godspeed, if you choose to go that way.

Edit: of course, reading his work itself is a great way , too, if you have time for that.

The example is pretty standard, but I feel obligated to caution people about the author (just because he’s linked to here and some unassuming people might dive in).

Scott Alexander falls loosely under the TESCREAL umbrella of ideologies. Even in this article, he ends up concluding the only way out is to build a superintelligent AI to govern us… which is like the least productive, if not counterproductive, approach to solving the problem. He’s just another technoptimist shunting problems onto future technologies that may or may not exist.

So, yeah, if anyone decides they want to read more of his stuff, make sure to go in informed / having read critiques of TESCREALism.

What even is federation in the context of a distributed vcs like Git? Does it mean federation of the typical dev ops tools (issues, PRs, etc.)?

I have a thing for experimental CAD and modeling softwares, but hadn’t heard of PicoCAD! I’ll have to try it out, thanks for sharing.

Some other cools ones:

• OpenSCAD
• Dust3D
• Antimony
• LibFive (same dev as Antimony)

I’m glad to see for once the fines are proportional to revenue, and not a fixed amount. 6% hurts.

There is a theory based around how ocean tankers’ exhaust historically included sulfates, which can actually seed cloud formation.

Recent emissions regulations reduced this effect, so fewer clouds are being seeded over the ocean, and the oceans are absorbing more sunlight and heating more.

So we were basically painting large swaths of reflective clouds over the oceans, masking the heating. And now we’re seeing unencumbered heating effects.

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I have enjoyed Kdenlive on the rare occasions I need to edit something. Haven’t used Blender to compare, and I’m not sure about scripting. But for casual stuff it’s solid.

Well the general principle is that you can’t be punished for behavior that was legal when you did it. Otherwise you open the door to “doing X is illegal now” and then locking everyone who was documented doing X in the last several years.

Which maybe sounds nice when it’s destroying the climate… but it’s less nice when it’s gay marriage, alcohol consumption, owning X book, etc.

This is how the legal system typically works when a new law is introduced.