Capybara

I think top-down, in that I consider myself to be quite chill, on the fence a lot, and in the middle. Spirit animal might be a capybara.

However many people I meet seem to be bottom-up thinkers, with a series of deep knowledge, rules and systems of their own that are complex, and take them all very seriously. Whereas there are little things I take seriously. I don't have any tattoos, or piercings (Existential Flexibility), I don't think I'm committed enough to anything like that, the most I commit is having graphic tees, plushies, and setting my background.

I think my key philosophies/tenets are:

• YOLO so nothing matters (Optimistic Nihilism)
• pacifism over violence
• respect regardless of your background
• most problems are caused by systems not individuals (Sociological Empathy)
• it's okay to not be okay
• ideas are essential to survival, so creativity and play are more important than exams (Constructivism, Visionary Individualism)
• we aren't perfect organisms, we make mistakes, and the brain tricks you, so we shouldn't hold each other to such high standards (Cognitive Humility)

What does insecurity look like?

Insecurity forces people to behave with heat over heart.

Attack or defend prematurely

Misinterpret neutral situations as threats

Instead: Accept humility, it's okay to be vulnerable 

Loudly assert dominance or correctness

Covers up a fear of being inadequate

Instead: Remain calm

Build walls instead of bridges

Prioritizing self-preservation over actual relationship-building

Instead:  Use empathy and open communication

Why do people support Reform?

People are rightly angry at things they can't control (like the cost of living crisis), and so they listen to the person (Farage) who can easily point blame at the problem (immigration) and markets themselves as an underdog rather than part of the establishment (has lots of photos taken having a beer at a pub).

People like Farage are the real problem: trillionaires, billionaires and multi-millionaires hoarding wealth, like Farage.

"AI is bad"

Writing a letter to your letting agency to terminate your contract isn't being creative. Asking AI to do it for you makes sense. But you're also wrongly treating AI as a monolith. AI has already been in your spam filters. Detecting cancer cells in an x-ray. Handling your cruise control. Flying your plane. The only difference now is LLMs are more easily accessible. So you can't say AI overall is bad.  

Counter-argument to finding films pointless because of the Seven Basic Plots

The problem with the Seven Basic Plots defining all films is there's several popular and successful films that don't fit in those categories: Psycho, Pulp Fiction, Boyhood, Memento, Parasite, Eraserhead, Swiss Army Man, Clockwork Orange, Sorry to Bother You, Being John Malkovich, The Lobster, Her... And a lot of horror movies don't fit in any category or actually disguise their actual genre. I've also seen some art-style films that ignore it too. But regardless, even if someone made a complete list, the descriptions of these categories are so generic that I'm not sure it means you can't enjoy films. It's what is unique about films that I enjoy them the most - what makes them stand out apart from anything else. And even then, when you look at many films, they end up being multiple genres rather than strictly one overarching plot. I watch films because they are fun or interesting, not because I know what's going to happen. Same reason that I go on living despite knowing that free will doesn't exist, or that the sun will eventually boil and consume the Earth. Paraphrasing Vision in Age of Ultron, and the entire plot of Arrival: just because something isn't made to last doesn't mean it's not beautiful or not worth the time.

Versioning Revisited

 The best versioning system is one that works seamlessly:

• File History in Windows
• Google Drive's auto-saving in browser/app, and Manage versions for non-Cloud files
• Version history in OneDrive

Systems like Git and Subversion are a massive overhead. They distract from real work.

So much time is spent on and put into resolving conflicts when it comes to collaborative coding.

But what if systems like Git and SVN could also be seamless? No need to save. Conflicts automatically resolved in most cases, or at least made so much easier to resolve. Goodbye fast forward.

Seamless versioning systems make themselves available to control only when you need them. When you want to go back, you'll look at a list of older versions and start comparing them, often manually, often side-by-side. So there's improvements to make there too.

But Git? It's a massive overhead.

1. I have to save.
2. Commit. Sign.
3. Push.
4. Fast forward. Pull. Fetch.
5. Resolve conflicts.

It's honestly a complete barrier and nightmare. Developers should be worrying about the best ways to code, not the intricacies of a frankly obtuse and batty feature-mad glorified diff.

Imagine if every time you wanted to start your car, you had to manually plug in every wire. And if you want to indicate you're going left, you have to also plug in the indicator to the stalk, on top of actually checking if it's safe to turn left or not.

We need, and could do SO much better.

Code should be auto-saved, signed and pushed.

No commands at any time.

You're only prompted to resolve genuine non-trivial conflicts in a way that is extremely simple to compare, everything else is automatically handled.

Git/Subversion must and should be abstracted away.

AI could easily help with this too. Rather than reviewing lines of + and -, instead just "You refactored the database connection while Sarah optimized the payload parsing."

Coding should feel like solving a Rubik's cube and painting some art. Not like you need to run to the shops because you're out of red acrylic, and while you head out, there's a marathon in town today, you realise there's a hole in your shoe, and your peace lily is being a drama queen again.

Just like we don't write machine code anymore because we have compilers, developers shouldn't write Git commands, because the IDE should compile our actions into version history.

The best interface is no interface.

You should just code, and the history should just exist.

Resolving the Ship of Theseus

How I resolve the problem philosophically is how it's handled in the Frictional Games masterpiece SOMA, when Mark Sarang says: "How do we remain the same? A continuous flow of thought and perception keeps an unbroken chain of continuity that we know as our self. Our conscious mind is not the pattern of our brain, but a continuous emergent entity based on that pattern."

And if you take into the fact that our bodies are constantly replacing and renewing our cells, and consider that most of the matter in you is not human, it is mostly a mix of good bacteria.

And if you take in the morality from The Good Place: "What matters isn't if people are good or bad. What matters is if they're trying to be better today than they were yesterday", then in all senses, you are an emergent entity from moment to moment.

Every second your cells are dying and dividing. Every day you try to be a better person than you were yesterday. And over time you might have metal stuck in you holding you together, have a root canal with a crown, or have a pacemaker, and even that may be replaced again. You may change friends, move house, move countries, change partners, and every year get older and put more skills on your CV.

'You' is a constantly changing entity, stretched across time and space, starting from the explosions of a supernova millions of lightyears away and creating stardust that coalesced together in the Earth and eventually created you as you are now. You are stardust, holding itself together with memories, bacteria, titanium screws, and a desire to do a little better tomorrow. So worry less about what you're made of, and more about what you want to become.

Thames Water vs Channel 4's Dirty Business

 

Fact checking this leaflet from Thames Water received today:

"Improvements" -> EPA Rating is 1/4 stars

"£20b investment" -> £104m fine by Ofwat for underreported sewage spills

"No dividends since 2017" -> £88.4b siphoned by water companies paid to international investors like Macquarie and paying off court cases to avoid blame

"8p per £1 on financing" -> paying the £15b debt interest to corporate bonds and parent companies

"37p on service" -> paying the £104m fine and fixing leaks (600m litres leak per day)

"Tideway Tunnel progress" -> does nothing for the rest of Thames Water's massive 140,000km network

"Climate change and population growth are to blame" -> these have been predictable and heavily modelled for 30 years since privatisation.

No mention of the children killed by swimming in illegally spilled sewage in our waters.

Your bills are going up to fix 30 years of deliberate under-investment, which has left it more broken than ever. You're paying for Thames Water's negligence.

Pixel upgrade trade-in deals

 The trade-in deals on the Google Store usually make it worth upgrading.

Since they brought out the Pixel line, they've done the excellent trade in deals, with a gift of some kind worth at least £150. Last couple years the gift was the £250 extra on trade in, plus the subscription for Google One. In the past they gave away Bose wireless headphones, or their own in ear pods. I did skip upgrading a couple years cos either the gift wasn't as good or I didn't like the model. The below is from end of last year.

I've had the Pixel 1, 2, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10. Wasn't a fan of the 3, 4, or 7 so skipped those.

The trade in as well, it doesn't have to be a Google phone, they also take iPhones and Samsung and others, and they sometimes pay out more for those than Google's own phones

Having had buggy android phones before with HTC and LG I started with the Nexus 4 cos and just stuck ever since cos I know if there's a problem they'll sort it. And you can get support directly for the whole pixel range, I don't think I've ever had to wait to be talking to someone. They reply to people directly on Reddit and Twitter as well so they know their community.

Plus I'm on their Superfans discord group for meetups and competitions to win tickets and tech.

Rick & Morty S9E1

The compression algorithm that the Collective absorbed in Rick & Morty, I think is related to a real life type of malware called a logic bomb/zip bomb: a very small zip file that contains recursive, self-referential, or 99.9999% compressed dud files and directories.

Meaning it would run forever and fill up all your resources very quickly. Which is why sandboxing and heuristic analysis are invaluable in virus detection, because it's so easy to obfuscate.

A similar idea is used by Superman in the third film, he takes a liquid that is inert when contained, but when exposed to oxygen, heat and iron, turns into violent acid, which probably isn't true to real life but not far off reality.