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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Many ancient practitioners of stoicism were wealthy statesmen, including emperors. And, the literate elite were certainly enamored with it. I’m not a historian, but stoicism was shaped by wealthy and powerful people, as was every popular philosophy.

    I’m not opposed to it. I like aspects of Stoicism. But, When it comes to wealth, it always rubbed me the wrong way. It seemed so often to me that wealthy stoics make a virtue out of possessing, but not coveting wealth, and in doing so make a vice of dissatisfaction with one’s wealth. For a rich man, this is reasonable. However, a poor man is correct to be dissatisfied. Poor men need to be angry, and to rise up and demand wealth (in my opinion), their pain and anguish is meant to be felt and to stoke action.

    Stoicism is not often presented as compatible with this mindset of mine. I’m sure there are types of stoicism which address this, but most influencers seem to present Stoicism though a relatively uncritical lense.


  • My caveat to this is that many of the foundational individuals to stoicism, as well as present influencers, are members of the upper class, and while there are a lot of great ideas in there, stoicism can often be distilled into a philosophy of rugged individualism which is more easily achieved with wealth, power, and privilege.

    I am of the opinion that stoicism is good, but a disproportional number of those who practice it are often out of touch.



  • Something which clarified Zuck’s behavior in my mind was an interview where he said something along the lines of, “I could sell meta for x amount of dollars, but then I’d just start another company anyways, so I might as well not.”

    The guy isn’t doing what financially makes sense. He’s Uber rich and working on whatever projects he thinks are cool. I wish Zuck would stop sucking in all his other ways, but he just doesn’t care about whether his ideas are going to succeed or not.





  • I do wonder, hypothetically, if free Linux distros had 80% of the consumer market, would we see just as many dangerous exploits and malware as we do on Windows today? It seems to me that the consumer community is so small that it’s hard to say if it’s secure or just obscure.

    I understand in theory Linux is more secure… But are individual users really not opening themselves up to attacks, downloading foss software right and left? Using built in stores? Wine emulation?








  • It’s worth mentioning that in this instance the guy did send porn to a minor. This isn’t exactly a cut and dry, “guy used stable diffusion wrong” case. He was distributing it and grooming a kid.

    The major concern to me, is that there isn’t really any guidance from the FBI on what you can and can’t do, which may lead to some big issues.

    For example, websites like novelai make a business out of providing pornographic, anime-style image generation. The models they use deliberately tuned to provide abstract, “artistic” styles, but they can generate semi realistic images.

    Now, let’s say a criminal group uses novelai to produce CSAM of real people via the inpainting tools. Let’s say the FBI cast a wide net and begins surveillance of novelai’s userbase.

    Is every person who goes on there and types, “Loli” or “Anya from spy x family, realistic, NSFW” (that’s an underaged character) going to get a letter in the mail from the FBI? I feel like it’s within the realm of possibility. What about “teen girls gone wild, NSFW?” Or “young man, no facial body hair, naked, NSFW?”

    This is NOT a good scenario, imo. The systems used to produce harmful images being the same systems used to produce benign or borderline images. It’s a dangerous mix, and throws the whole enterprise into question.




  • The attrition is slow, but every user lost to Linux is likely lost forever. After a year or so of totally free software, who is going to build a new windows compatible PC, buy a Windows 11 license, and pay for subscription service just to do word processing, or play a few incompatible games?

    Windows completely overestimates people’s willingness to throw out their laptop or PC just to get a new OS paintjob. For every person who does it, another one will leave their ecosystem forever.