And also if you want books that can’t be altered buy a paper book

The books on my 1st generation kindle have been there 15 years unchanged. Just don’t connect devices to the internet that don’t need to be connected to the internet.

The “internet of things” that was sold to us is just a way for corporations to exert more control. I am pro-technology. I think an ebook reader is infinitely more useful and valuable than a paper book - I can fit tens of thousands of books on my Kindle, more than I could read in a lifetime, and a full charge lasts more than a month at a time.

I can use whatever font I want, I can scale the size to what I want. I can change the margins, place bookmarks, gives a % of how far I am in a book, skip to chapters, etc.

Like, it’s objectively better than a book.

But it doesn’t need to be connected to the internet.

I’m not sure where exactly they made the switch. Basically, I got my girlfriend one a year and a half ago and it did not need the software. I explained to her to turn off the wifi and just download books and drag and drop.

But then around Christmastime last year my girlfriend’s cousin wanted an ebook ready so we bought her a Kindle and I gave the same advice. But she couldn’t figure out how to drag and drop, so she brought it over. I was fussing around thinking something was wrong with my USB cable but then I realized it required that special software.

So the switch happened at some point in the last ~18 months or so my memory’s a bit hazy

Amazon just couldn’t let it be. There’s a certain set of people that just aren’t going to opt into all the bullshit. These people just want a plain and simple ebook ready to host their ebooks. They think if they force the special software they’ll be able to do things like sign into your Kindle and change your settings by force.

But what happens? Instead of gaining those people like me or you into their ecosystem, they’re just gonna lose future hardware customers. I would have been perfectly fine buying Kindles for the rest of my life if they had just kept that feature.

I’m sure it’s going to be reversed engineered at some point but it’s absurd. I don’t understand the short-sighted greed.

Up until fairly recently, you could just drag and drop files onto the Kindle with a usb. I’ve had my first generation Kindle for almost 15 years now and it still works. Just download an .epub file, convert it to .mobi with Calibre, and drag and drop it over to the Kindle.

I have a newer one too, that I got a couple of years ago as a gift.

The trick is just disable the wifi and never let it communicate with Amazon servers. They will mess with your settings and push secret updates that remove features. For example, it could “sync” your books with your Amazon account if you naively log into your Amazon account and that literally results in you not being able to remove items from your Kindle without logging into your Amazon account on your computer and going through a million menus. It won’t let you do it from the Kindle, even if you’re offline.

But if you just never let it connect it to the internet at all, you’re fine.

Although the new Kindles now require a special Amazon software to copy files over (because of “convenience”) and it won’t communicate with the usual protocol so you can’t drag and drop like you could for the last 15 years.

So yeah, don’t buy a Kindle. at least not a new one.

I think his is absolutely the right course of action. We as humans have a weird psyche and we sometimes externalize internal issues and project them outwards either onto ideas or people.

So for example, incels have serious issues with self-worth and they externalize those issues into hatred of women and society at large for their position in life. They feel, perhaps, they are not the man they feel like they should be- strong, handsome, wealthy, etc. And so they take blame at external circumstances in order to lessen the cognitive dissonance that if they are lonely and undesired- it’s almost always due to their own decision making and perspective on life.

So for example a young male teen may feel all sorts of negative emotions and decide that gender dysphoria must be the diagnosis- when maybe he’s just a little feminine and attracted to men. But if they start to identify with the trans label prematurely, they could end up doing unnecessary damage to themselves and their development.

I wholeheartedly and unapologetically support trans people and in my opinion if transitioning is determined the most effective treatment to gender dysphoria by one or two clinical physicians, I would absolutely support my kid transitioning. Trans kids have a very high rate of suicide so this is actually a very serious life and death diagnosis. It’s more dangerous statistically than some types of cancer. And if my kid had cancer, I would want to obviously look at all possible treatments plans we could take.

But just like the dad, I would start with regular therapy and work our way up. See what else is going on. I would also spend time with my kid and really try to get a sense for what’s troubling them. I don’t think there is a substitute for a parent who cares.

Anyhow, interesting post, thanks for sharing this intimate exchange. It’s a reminder that we are all humans and even those who we may label as “conservative” cannot be condensed down to one statement. This is one of the reasons, for example, I love Florida even though it’s a red state. I’m the furthest thing from right wing, but you’ll find that many Latinos who identify as right-wing have many views that would be considered “progressive”.

We’re all ultimately people who hold multitudes.

Get an old Kindle. The new ones make it hard for you to connect to your computer. They require you to download a “convenient” piece of software meant to allow you to transfer files. But conveniently it also makes it so you can’t transfer files easily without it.

Even just a couple of years back you could plug in your Kindle to your computer through a USB and just drag and drop files. It only reads the proprietary .mobi format but Calibre, an excellent piece of software, will automatically convert .epub files to .mobi for you and it has a great algorithm.

Then all you gotta do is look up whatever you want on libgen and for the price of one kindle you can have a virtually infinite library of books.

I’ve actually had my first generation Kindle for about ~14 years now and my newer one for about ~3 years. I won’t ever buy a new one, but the ones from ~3 years ago are excellent pieces of hardware.

You just have to disconnect it from the internet and never turn on the wifi. If you do, Amazon will fuck with your settings and make your life difficult.

Basically, if you’re on a budget a used Kindle from ~3 years ago is a great choice in my opinion. If you want something new, stay far away from Amazon.

this was was always going to end with Russia taking a large chunk of Ukraine. there was some collective delusion for a while that it wasn’t because of strong state war propaganda

but Russia is always going to care more about Ukraine than the US. It’s their neighbor who they have more or less controlled directly or indirectly for hundreds of years.

US support was always limited and self-interested. Just like every time US hypes up some international ally to inevitably discard them. Remember the Kurds? I’m guessing Taiwan is the next one going forward

i’m kind of lost on how to respond to this. we weren’t talking about games, the card analogy was to show that even with a relatively small set of starting conditions you can get to relatively absurd possibilities very quickly. it was to highlight the chaos theory that rules our lives.

the OP wasn’t about winning or losing anything, it was about “having experienced all life has to offer”. that would necessarily include both winning and losing combinations, no matter your subjective definition of “winning” or “losing”

and even having said all that and to follow your analogy- there are many games where drawing a face card (a-k) is a bad thing.

you ever play rummy? you want the least amount of points at the end of the round and face cards are worth more points.

you can make a straight flush with a 2 3 4 5 6 in poker, a face card can be enough to bust you in blackjack, etc.

this is the wildest statement i’ve seen all month

the breadth and depth of the experiences that life has to offer is unfathomable. do not be so brazen to assume you have experienced even a tiny drop of vast ocean of what humans have actually lived through

From suicide in the trenches to the raising of a child; from gazing upon Earth from space to hunting a predator with a spear; from meditating in silence for weeks to leading a entire nation through a crisis; from winning a chess tournament to starting a business—and losing it all in a bankruptcy—existence is infinite, or may as well be.

think of it this way

there are 52 cards in a deck. that means every single deck has a specific order, right? what are the chances of you getting one specific order of cards if you shuffle? Well, how many different combinations are there? 52! ( ! means both factorial and emphasis here)

That’s 52 × 51 x 50 … all the way to × 2 × 1

That’s 8x10⁶⁷

That’s 8 with 67 zeros. Here

80000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

For reference… the number of seconds since the Big Bang is estimated to be about 4×10¹⁷

Now think of your life and human life in general. Think of all the variables. Hell, there are 7 days in a week. 52 weeks in a year. Coincidentally the same as a deck of cards.

If you do something different every week, there are going to be 8000000000… different ways your year could turn out.

So, please do not fall victim to this type of irrational thought. I’m not sure if it’s arrogance, depression, or something else leading to that delusion, but it’s a wild statement—absolutely nuts

I guess the main difference is that I think things are salvageable

To be honest, I think we are very ideologically aligned. I agree that government power is something that should be used with very precise care. Look at what happens for example when we introduce Pell Grants, giving lower income kids the opportunity to go to college.

That sounds great, right? Who doesn’t support that? Well, I sure want poor kids to be afforded the opportunity to go to school.

But look at what actually happens. Now you have a whole new class of people with a sizable chunk of government money. The demand for college goes up. Tuition rates skyrocket. The few thousand you get from the Pell Grant is now meaningless and it counter intuitively costs you more even with the grant.

Who benefits? Not the kids. Not the working class. The college administrators.

Kamala was campaigning “taxes incentives for first time homeowners!” Great. Who is going to say to no to that, right? Support young families. Sure.

What would inevitably happen? Large increase in spending => large increase in price. So if they get a $10,000 tax credit but the houses are $15,000 more expensive- what’s the difference? These are arbitrary numbers, obviously, and not borne out of some analysis.

But who would benefit? Not young families. Banks and land owners.

Government action, usually disguised as something to help is almost always going to be twisted to hurt average people.

But yes, I agree 100%. I rather like Chomsky’s take on this. I’m not an anarchist but he has advocated before for a system where every single use of government power should be consistently and continually challenged. Every single time the government spends a dollar, it needs to be transparent and justified and there needs to be a way to challenge it.

The thing is, government spending is not inherently a bad thing. Government action sometimes is exactly what is needed. For example in an economic crisis, government stimulus can be enough to turn things around or at least ameliorate the situation for the working class.

But and the big but - and the but that basically had made me lose all faith in democracy over the last 10 years or so is the way you put it

But no, “drugs bad,” and the public wants to control “bad” things

Politicians do not do what is rational. They do what is popular. These are two separate things entirely. And even worse, they can modify what is popular with a variety of mechanisms. For a simple example- look at the death tax. You ask average Americans whether they support a death tax, they will say of course not. It sounds absurd, right?

If you call it an inheritance tax, all of a sudden majority of people support it.

So yeah, I think you’re right in that we more or less align on what the ideal system should be but you still believe in the ideals of the Enlightenment and believe that egalitarianism and liberty is possible.

I think humanity is brutal and stupid by nature and we are bound to be ruled by people with strength. I think all government systems eventually deteriorate into fancy feudalism.

For a bit of an absurd statement- I think what we need to do is create a constitution that is very explicit. And then what we need to do is let an AI enforce it. Assuming the AI is objective and not able to be influenced, I think then and only then would we have a free society. And the irony is- we wouldn’t be in control of it.

Maybe I’m just a pessimist about human nature. Don’t misinterpret me, I consider myself a humanist. I like humans. I feel empathy for others. I want the best world possible for everyone.

But I think humans in a group are stupid. The crowd is like a locust swarm, destroying without thinking. It’s sad

You said you’re not pushing socialism, but you didn’t offer what you do support, so I’ll speak broadly.

I’m a bit of a pessimist here. I think free market capitalism is a terrible system that will inevitably crash and fail. It is also the best thing we have come up with so far. Essentially Churchill’s quote. I only hope that after our next foray into fascism we will come out the other side with a new 21st century ideology that is somehow able to fix the fundamental contradictions.

I really support Liberalism (and I mean you know, freedom of speech, free market, pursuit of happiness, etc). I would always prefer to live in a society that gives me the freedom to live life on my terms. In theory, we could have a socialist version of this, but I think like we discussed it falls victim to precisely the same fate. When the Soviets initially took power, they were genuine in their desire for revolutionary emancipation. They did many great things- they created written languages for all of the local ethnicities that didn’t have them. They put local leaders in positions of power. They increased literacy and invested in education strictly for altruism.

That only lasted a couple short decades, however, because the wheels of power inevitably turn. I shouldn’t have to go into detail on the horrific abuses of power that resulted from the developed Soviet state

Here’s the thing, I think you make great points. And the solutions you propose would benefit the system both in the short and long term. But I think collapse is inevitable anyway, and specifically collapse into fascism. Perhaps in a system where the institutions are strong and we have policies in the line of what you’re suggesting (campaign finance reform, proportional representation, etc. I’d even say higher salaries for politicians counter intuitively) the descent will be slowed for a long period of time.

But ultimately, it’s the classic criminal versus police officer. You can put up a border wall to stop drugs coming in, they’ll go under the ground. You put ground penetrating radar sensors, they build DIY-submarines. You invest in a coast guard, they build drones. Etc Etc

It’s a constant battle that requires constant vigilance. However, here’s the kicker. Here’s the reason why it will always inevitably fail.

The people with significant wealth and by extension power- they will always have incentive to change the system to their advance and they will always have the ability to influence it. They will never stop trying to come up with new ways to either exploit current laws or create new ones.

The average people, the consumers and voters, they will sometimes have the incentive to change the system and they will sometimes have the ability to influence it. In times of trouble, people get upset and they start protesting. They start voting for new measures, different policies get enacted. Like you mentioned, we broke up Standard Oil. Or when we broke up the Bell Telephone Company.

During that time people were both discontent, which means they had the incentive to change the system and coincidentally that also gives them the ability to influence the system- politicians are only scared into making positive change for the average person when there is large scale dissent.

But what happened to both of those examples (and virtually every other anti-trust regulation we’ve ever tried to implement)?

Today, Bell Telephone’s descendant is AT&T- a behemoth of a megacorp that participates in an oligopoly over the telecommunications market. Today, Standard Oil’s descendant is Exxon Mobil and remains the largest oil and gas company in the US.

What happened here? Well, the public interest eventually fades. Some other crisis shows up on the news channels and people become content with their lives. If the economy is doing well, people are paying their bills, etc, they don’t care. If they economy isn’t, the politicians have become exceedingly proficient at redirecting that discontent towards scapegoats (today it’s immigrants for example).

So, it’s a simple math equation. Let’s say the corporations win 51% of the coin flips and the free market / law abiding public wins 49% of the time. For a very long time, it can stay more or less even. Cops versus robbers- the equilibrium stays intact.

But imagine a limit that goes to infinity. What happens? Eventually the interest of wealth wins. Now, different societies can have different coin flip ratios.

I think our society is nowhere near 51% / 49%. I think your solutions would bring us closer to that 50 / 50 but due to again, the very nature of the capitalist system- the law will never be in the driving seat.

Two very simple axioms determine that, which we have discussed above

1. wealth tends to accumulate due to economies of scale

2. wealth leads to power and power self-perpetuates

It’s little more than a scary story they tell to convince people to go along with their authoritarian ideas

This is where I think you may have misinterpreted me. I’m not trying to push socialism. I think we’re genuinely fucked and there is no way out.

Sure, but that overlap should be as small as possible while still ensuring a competitive market

This is a fantasy. We talk about “free market capitalism” as if it’s some pristine, untouched mechanism that would work perfectly fine if only the government followed the rules. But the moment big money arises, the entire political field is lured in. Wealth itself becomes a gravitational force that pulls legislators, laws, and lobbyists into its orbit.

This is not a bug, it’s a feature. It’s fundamental to the system. A free market can never remain a free market. For two very simple reasons.

a) economies of scale. It’s cheaper to a lot of something per thing compared to a little of something per thing. so there is a financial incentive to get bigger and that is a self-perpetuating cycle. Eventually at the end of the game of Monopoly, there’s only one landlord standing who bought everything else up.

b) wealth is power. if you have power, you will use it to ensure your position is improved. this is human nature. this works the same in any other political economic system.

It’s not that a pure free market is corrupted by government, or that a pure socialism is corrupted by incompetent central planners; both are myths in the sense that they never truly exist in the real world. We either get forms of crony capitalism or state-managed capitalism, but the “free” part is always an abstraction.

What we need to acknowledge is that the political and economic systems are not two separate worlds that only overlap by accident. They’re conjoined twins. Pretending one can neatly excise government from the economy is a fantasy—just as fantastical as imagining the perfect socialist utopia.

The trick is to recognize that the moment large-scale wealth accumulates, it necessarily accumulates political clout. And from there, the “free market” gradually becomes a marketplace that’s anything but free.

This is what people mean by late stage capitalism. It’s capitalism that has eroded all of the public institutions and in a short amount of time fascism will take root. We’re witnessing the transition right now as we speak.

You blame Disney for our terrible copyright laws, yet Disney didn’t pass or sign that law, they merely lobbied for it. The problem isn’t Disney, the problem is Congress.

I think one thing we need to get out of the way is that the political system and the economic system are intertwined. There is no way to have a democratic capitalist society without having one influence the other.

If we go back to Adam Smith- he’s seen as the father of economics. But he didn’t consider himself an economist. He considered a moral philosopher and a political economist. The political system and the economic system are one and the same.

You believe these large corporations gaining too much influence is because of poor maintenance. Because of a corrupt government. You believe it’s because we’re not enforcing our anti-trust laws and so on.

I disagree and say this was always inevitable. It is impossible to keep your garden free of weeds starting from a free market economy. Again- wealth snowballs and wealth buys influence.

It’s a simple cause and effect. As long as the profit incentive is the main motivator in our political economy, the political system will be shaped by those with the most money. And they have the incentive to remove those free-market systems in order to maximize their own profit.

It’s a deterministic cycle. Free market capitalism -> late stage capitalism -> fascism

To me, apathy and amorality when the consequences are harm towards others is evil. It’s sort of like if a driver was in a rush and ran over a protestor on his way to work.

Sure, he did not wish any harm on the protestor. He just simply needed to get past them and chose the most effective and efficient path.

It’s an amoral act but the act (and the driver) is still evil. Evil is not just a mustache twirling genocidal dictator or sadistic serial killers… In fact, the amoral does infinitely more harm than the malicious. The Nazis did not come to power because of malice. They did not kill millions of Jews because of malice. They got there through apathy and amorality.

They didn’t want to kill the Jews at first- they wanted to deport them. But once they got them in the camps… it was impractical to supply enough logistical power to actually move them all. So while they figure out a plan, let’s have them do slave labor.

And then after a while, since we can’t move them, we may as well just kill them. It’s the most effective path to where we want to be. The driver driving over the protestor.

If this isn’t “evil”, what is?

Healthy competition tends to make “evil” actions unprofitable

Competition helps. I agree that this negative aspect of capitalism is exponentially magnified when monopolies form.

The thing is, in capitalist the wealth tends to snowball. Wealth is power and wealth buys influence. Look at how Disney singlehandedly changed copyright law when Mickey Mouse was about to enter public domain. Once you reach a certain size, you can modify the rules of the game. So it creates a self-perpetuating cycle.

This position we are in is the natural consequence of free market capitalism. I agree that free market is better. But this is the grown up version of free market. There was never going to be any other scenario but the one we are in.

We’ve neglected the garden for decades and allowed some truly nasty weeds in, but that doesn’t make the weeds “evil,” that means we were poor gardeners.

We can debate on the ontology of the world evil. It really is an interesting debate. But for all practical purposes, if the weeds are killing the crops that feed your family… what is the difference? Whether they want to kill you indirectly through starvation or don’t want to kill you- you’re dead either way.

What difference does this make? Some lower level employee will see this, roll his eyes, and then continue on with his day.

Beyond this, do you think Apple can actually take any other position than aligning with fascism? That was always going to happen. They literally can’t help but align with fascism- this is the culmination of late stage capitalism.

It’s like politely asking a dog not to salivate when it sees a steak in front of it.

You’re not gonna get anywhere and you’re just wasting time.

Also on a side note- you should switch to Linux because you should take charge of your own hardware and learn how it works before it’s taken away from you. You should do it for open source and for freedom. Not threaten to do something because a company is doing company things.

Corporations, at their core, are profit-generating engines—nothing more, nothing less. The corporate board’s one legal imperative is to ensure the shareholders see a return on their investment, by any means necessary. Morality? A marketing gimmick when convenient- not an operating principle.

All companies are evil. Google is not any more or less evil than any other company. The difference is they have a significant power base and therefore have a lot to gain or lose in the transition to fascism. They understand that Trump is spiteful and willing to bend and even break the law to punish those who defy him. They also understand he rewards those who bend the knee. Therefore, the most profitable path of action is bending the knee.

This should not surprise anybody. You substitute Google for any large corporation and they would have done the same thing. Don’t believe me? Google around (while you still can freely search for information) for the Coca-Cola saga in Colombia, where union leaders were getting forcibly suicided by narco-paramilitary death squads hired by Coca-Cola.

You know- the commercials that make you feel all warm and fuzzy around Christmas time with the polar bears and Santa Claus? Yeah, they’ll murder you if you threaten their bottom line. It’s just what they do.

There’s a simple math equation:

Let

P = Probability of getting caught,

F = Expected fine or penalty,

R = Potential revenue or profit,

Constants

α = The weight assigned to the probability of getting caught ( P ). If this constant is high, the corporation is more cautious… if it’s low, the corporation is willing to make more risks. In Colombia, this is much lower than in the US.

β = The weight assigned to the probable size of the penalty ( F ). A high β means there’s a serious potential danger. However, if β is low (like when Ford decided the cost of simply paying lawsuits from deaths due to known car malfunctions was probably lower than the price of recalls) then they’ll be more likely to push forward

γ = The weight assigned to the impact on their bottom line ( R ). For example, if Boeing thinks they will lose a lot of money from whistleblowers, they will find a way to suicide them. If the impact is small, then it’s not worth the potential risks.

C = ( αP ⋅ βF ) − γR

Let’s give an imaginary example. Let’s say a corporation is considering dumping toxic waste illegally into a river, potentially giving thousands of people cancer. Let’s say they’re gonna save $10M a year from doing this.

R = 10,000,000

The probability of getting caught is 10%

P = 0.10

The expected fine is $5M

F = 5,00,000

Let’s try out some constants

α = 1.5 ⇒ they’re somewhat cautious about getting caught

β = 1.2 ⇒ they’re moderately concerned about the penalty

γ = 2.0 ⇒ they’re really motivated by profit (maybe their profits went down 10% last year, a big no-no)

Plug in the values

C = (1.5 · 0.10 · 1.2 · 5,000,000) - (2.0 · 10,000,000)

C = (900,000) - (20,000,000)

C = -19,100,000

C is less than 0? Dump that toxic waste, baby. It’s the logical position if you’re trying to maximize profit. Sometimes you will get caught, but imagine you did this in a simulation 1,000 times. Most of the times, you will be more profitable because of it and therefore you dump the waste.

It’s like a poker player. If you get AA, you raise pre-flop. Sometimes you will lose on the flop to some dunce who goes in with 2-7… but in the long term, most of the time, you will win. Therefore it’s the right move.

This is what companies do. People need to realize and internalize this. They are profit generating engines. Nothing more, nothing less. They are not your friends. They don’t care about the environment. They don’t care about the future of the world or anything. Literally nothing at all.

They are a math formula and if destroying everything you love happens to be the most profitable move most of the time, they will do it without second guessing. Because they aren’t people. They are a machine.

Literally 3+ billion people’s lives are the training data.

yep. I never thought about it but you’re absolutely right. that is Facebook’s “competitive advantage” that the other AI companies don’t have.

although that’s part of it. I’m sure they do web scraping, novels, movie transcripts, college textbooks, research papers, newspapers, etc.

portuguese. i was in the midwest as a child but moved to southern florida in the 2nd half of high school

no. not many people spoke my native tongue.

when i finally did move and found more people speaking the language, we would speak our language not to hide from the teacher but just because it was more comfortable

if you stick to your workouts and train to failure, your muscles will grow.

however to eliminate fat, you don’t exercise. you eat less. when you are eating below caloric maintenance, your body makes up the difference in fat. you can’t control where the fat comes from. you just have to maintain that for a long time and it’ll go away. everyone stores fat differently. some in legs, some in stomach, etc.

but you cannot exercise away body fat. it’s like 80/20 diet exercise

It is defined legally in the EU

https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/

https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/high-level-summary/

There are different requirements if the provider falls under “Free and open licence GPAI model providers”

Which is legally defined in that piece of legislation

otherwise companies will get the benefits of “open source” without doing the actual work.

Meta has done a lot for Open source, to their credit. React Native is my preferred framework for mobile development, for example.

Again- I fully acknowledge they are a large evil megacorp but without evil large megacorps we would not have Open Source as we know it today. There are certain realities we need to accept based on the system we live in. Open Source only exists because corporations benefit off of this shared infrastructure.

Our laws should encourage this type of behavior and not restrict it. By limiting the scope, it gives Meta less incentive to open source the code behind their AI models. We want the opposite. We want to incentivize