I'm sure they will get better, but while they are internet connected spying machines they won't be allowed in my flat. They can wait outside by the bike racks.

I don't think that neo bot will be able to do those things either. And the teacher would be better as a flatscreen than a humanoid.

For 500 dollars a month you could just hire a housekeeper and that wouldn't cost 20k up front nor would s/he really be a corporate spy for surveillance capitalists.

If the machine is hosted on consumer internet in your shed then you're likely to hit bandwidth issues before you really suffer much from CPU power. Just uploading files for users to download isn't very demanding on your CPU really, especially if it's mostly the same files so they're cached well.

Trouble with Chinese gadgets is they're all loaded with software from American surveillance capitalists. Completely untrustable.

Sounds great. I'm more in favour of IDs than can be created and cast aside at will, where any person may have a thousand of them and new identities can be rolled on demand so you can always present a clean one to authorities or employers. A new identity every day. A new one every post!

That's interesting about Android having an Enhanced Security mode now. If I'd noticed the setting at all I'd have probably assumed it was some euphemism for enhanced tracking really, allow-google-advert-profiles setting. 😄

$123,456 ✅

Why is your wife helping Hodl? Does she know you know?

Everyone was putting shoes on their head

Except for where it says "connect" instead of "consent", doh. Stupid no-edit-button.

> Who’s printing all this money?

The governments and the banks.

> Who is devaluing the dollar at a rate we haven’t seen since 1973

The government and the banks.

> and why isn’t this front page news?

Because the purpose of the media is to manufacture connect.

> If it were, we’d probably see a wave of retail speculation and hype.

Nah, retail hasn't got any money. Not enough to shift the price at 100k anyway.

The price is about liquidity all right, but "grounded" isn't the word I'd pick to describe insane amounts of corporate debt and leverage. Liquid, sure. But grounded? 🤨

If there is a blow off top there must be a subsequent crash. The only way to avoid a crash is to avoid a top by avoiding leverage and debt.

This market is not avoiding leverage and debt.

I see Sir Kier Starmer thinks that it's "inappropriate" for a music festival to have a band that campaigns for peace and an end to genocide, but that it's perfectly appropriate and may "alleviate" a "grave threat” for a country to bomb nuclear sites in a another country!

He thinks daubing some paint on airplanes as a protest is terrorism, but that using those planes in reconnaissance to support an ongoing genocide by Israel is a good and normal use of them.

What a fucking weasel, absolute death worshiping fuck-knuckle.

Goddamn Labour party loves them some illegal wars of aggression in the middle east. Can't get enough of it.

Please fuck off Sir Starmer.

The fire melts the ice, and then the melted water puts out the fire?

That's just physics.

I found myself always thinking "Where's Danny" and "Who is this wanker" every time I watched. So I was glad when Danny started up WBD again. Now there's a podcast that does had danny and the wankers are at least all bitcoin wankers not ethnonationalists.

His show seems to have become a wanker magnet. Just an endless line of utter wankers that I have no interest in hearing out. He seems proud to have had Liz Truss on? Scary. Rupert Reed the most credible person on the show since it started.

Seems to be some sort of conference for bankers and CEOs and politicians and suits and squares going on in Vegas this week.

😆 Missile Air Defense As a Service

MAD AS you like.

In some ways a government paying by a subscription for a missile defense service has been inevitable since Reagan started the mission to Privatize Literally Everything.

The government will own nothing, and be happy.

States must do only one thing: Pay money to rich people to get them to do the things.

The idea of Reagan's Star Wars returning is pretty crazy in itself. That launching all those satellites would massively enrich the government's biggest donor is mostly just pretty typical corruption.

But having the government pay to rent it out is just amazing. 🧑‍🍳 💋

Hey, if Russia and China outbid America during the hour they were launching the missiles, that's just the free market!

Never really even know if it works without being attacked, but the rich owners get to extract the wealth from it all the same.

Rentierism? In this economy?

🤣

https://defence-industry.eu/spacex-proposes-subscription-model-for-trumps-golden-dome-missile-defence-system-reports-reuters/

I read "Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It" by Christof Koch.

Interesting book which spends like 8 or 9 chapters detailing all the experiments which prove beyond much doubt that consciousness, and self awareness, is a thing done by a brain.

It describes how perception is a construction of a description, has a chapter called "computational mind"

And then spends the last two chapters describing why he thinks the mind can't be computed, because drugs have made him think experience is some kind of magic associated with highly interconnected causal structures.

Apparently, he thinks, once things become interconnected enough they become able to cause things independently of the physics running those connections.

Which is crazy, obviously. There's nothing causal in direct connections between neurons that isn't equally causal in modeled connections between virtual neurons.

All his evidence in the book from neural MRI scans to the effects of psychedelic drugs and symptoms of strokes and disease point to the brain simulating a virtual reality which is the basis of perception.

That simulated world in which we live is full of colour and shape and sounds and emotions and millions of mental constructs that are built to be correlated by the senses with the outside world, but are not equal to the world itself. We live in a dream constructed to correlate with reality.

But then instead of taking the next step: That consciousness itself is a property of a simulated being inside that mental model of the universe, a property which the brain simulates and applies to the virtual self that's doing the experiencing inside that model, he jumps towards some magic implying pan-psychism or that sufficiently interconnected networks become causally self-complete for some reason nobody can fathom.

Sure, colour and shape and emotions are all made up by the brain but experience can't be! For some reason.

You see in truth dualism is false, in that there is no spirit realm in which ghosts animate the matter of the body somehow.

Yet also, dualism is true, in that there is a simulated mental reality which we live in, computed by the brain in which all perception and experience are created, which is related-to but separate-from the unfolding complicated dance of energy that is the universe our bodies interact with.

People take some DMT trip, and the model of the universe emulated by their brain collapses and breaks. Their virtual simulated self inside their mind has these experiences of being one with the universe or the experience of feeling dead yet conscious or whatever, and these hippies think that the broken down simulated experience is real and reflects how consciousness is more fundamental than the atoms that make up the neurons in their brain.

Instead of realizing it shows them that their experienced universe is a simulacrum, they think they get a more direct experience of reality somehow. A consciousness more pure than any mere base atom.

"Then I am myself the world" is a great title. Everything you ever experience is created and simulated in your brain like a dream, the whole universe is inside your head. Even the fact of experience itself.

But that isn't the conclusion Koch reaches somehow, he just jumps from describing the evidence that this is so straight into ascribing super-causal magic consciousness to particular arrangements of atoms that integrated information theory suggest have high correlation, and thinks therefore conciousness is itself the entire universe.

Ah well, fun book. I like arguing in my head with authors that are wrong.

#reading #books #consciousness #thenIAmMyselfTheWorld

The Python library "YFinance" decided to force an upgrade. They did this by making the old version report a rate-limit error on every request.

Confusing.

Would have been better if they reported a "old version not supported" error or something instead. So that wasted some time.

That upgrade had dependencies which have dependencies upon a newer version of Python, so needed a whole OS upgrade really.

Which failed. Bricking the Rasp PI it was running on.

Oh well, complete rebuild of the whole machine and software it runs from scratch then.

That took all day yesterday. At the end I notice that the touch-screen doesn't touch. Needs drivers.

The drivers haven't been upgraded in six years. They brick the machine again when trying to install them on Debian Trixie.

Luckily, I kept good notes and could rebuild it all again much faster with no mistakes and knowing what to do and all the required custom software changes already made and saved.

So now I spent a whole day on annoying upgrade work because a single Python library decided to break the old version, and my Rasp Pi has no touch-screen. Which isn't ideal for a machine mostly operating as a fancy light switch for all the LED strips in the house.

This happens all the time in software. Millions of man hours wasted, so much hardware dumped because the drivers get abandoned.

In other news: Microsoft abandons Windows 10 any day now. Good luck to everyone faced with doing that lap on the upgrade treadmill.

I still have more work to do to bring up this RaspPi's software to where it was, but it'll have to wait, other things to do. At least it's back to sending me the nightly finance report and controlling the LED strips. If without a touch screen now.

Stupid patriarchy. Never should have been imprisoned in the first place. Free the Heroines!