No, I'm afraid it's not a grand thesis uniting all of the above. Wouldn't that be something, though!
2019-10-10 14:38 UTC
shrysr: Hey there! Wanted to connect and say hi... your website looks cool :)
jfw: Hey, thanks. Some homespun html/css. The content is certainly aging though, I've got my blogging work cut out for me!
jfw: Your struggle is an inspiration. To think, just 3 months ago you had minimal idea about WoT and thought Cloudflare and HTTPS were things...
jfw: I do hope you'll make the time and commitment to keep at it; with diana_coman's guidance I expect you can go far.
jfw: Feel free to ask me questions on v.py -- though surely there are others better qualified, still I've studied and hacked on it a bit.
jfw: For my part, I think I'm still hung up on the 'full submission to master' thing, even as I'm increasingly seeing the value/need - like, I'm necessarily blind to or unable to fix my own stupidities, otherwise I'd have fixed 'em already
jfw: If you have links from the July-September log on the topic, I'd appreciate.
shrysr: glad to hear from you. hmm.. tbh - i think the key is simply reducing friction. Emacs and org mode did that for me some years ago. i've essentially been writing easily 1000+ words a day but publishing almost nothing. even now - tbh - i think publishing intimate details for the wide world to know is a risk... particularly in an age where employers and etc look you up online. It's true to say non-tmsr perception is
shrysr: their problem and the truth is important - absolutely... but the fact is also that unless you are being paid by tmsr - its important to guide the perceptions of the outside world abt you for your own purpose. fwiw : i think if you observe very closely - this is practised by the so called lords themselves in #t. You can diss the non-tmsr world till you choke... but cannot live aloof from it.. nations trade with
shrysr: each other and make compromises every day... its really a dynamic balance imho.
shrysr: re: submission - What I would profer as advice is that...... it is totally worth taking your time and assessing very deeply. I will be honest in stating that I joined #o - to do projects... under guidance. I had no idea abt tmsr/diana etc at all. i.e I kindda went there to submit, without thinking much at all... i'm naive that way and instead put in safe guards in the background to protect maself. It's not
shrysr: efficient... but it helps me.. not become terribly biased and blind. imho ---- the logs provide explicit evidence of both good, bad, inconsistent things from everybody, lord /master /page-boi. Lets say you are blind to your stupidity - how will I (external person) know? --- when you communicate. As you continue to communicate - you'll see it takes time and energy, and beyond this... no amount of words... fully
shrysr: describe anything! it takes even more to find the right words. Lets say you pour out words that dont indicate your stupidity - then I being.. master or whatever crap am still inclined to say something.. being human - i'm not immune to My Own ego, faults and world view.... i gotta guide you ...somehow or what guide am i? But that guidance is based the words that come out from you +++ my understanding of
shrysr: those words. Now it gets murky if I have an underlying.. somewhat hidden motive of 'making you better, but also useful to me/the cause/ w/e', and if I am employed by somebody whose wordz I gotta listen to. .............>>>> what I'm trying to say is that.... guidance is there, but imho - many other things too, and you gotta be..clear abt what You want... and what you Don't want.
shrysr: sorry if i overstepped... it was with the intention to help. You prolly kno a lot more than me abt all this. I'm not bereft of stupidity myself - but I guess the above is not irrational. and they are based on... the logs. I guess i'm just saying that...stupidity set aside, not knowing your goals and needs... and submitting can easily mean you are catering to goals and needs enforced by another who does not truly
shrysr: know you.
shrysr: Re: V >> sure. as of now, i will be coming back to V and etc in christmas... I gotta learn some stuff to bridge the gap in my skills... for next job :) so sure.. will bombard you with questions then, dont worry :)
jfw: hmm, this strikes me as something of a jumble of halfway-developed thoughts; kind of a conversation with yourself rather than an attempt to communicate clearly with me. Not overstepping so much as stepping every which way, if that makes sense. I'd guess it comes from all that practice with writing kilowordz into journal and minimal outside feedback. Or perhaps feedback from people who are more
jfw: concerned about guiding your perception of them than about honesty!
jfw: I don't know that you need to be hard on yourself for not deciding things clearly upfront - what basis would you have had to decide?
jfw: For me and others who already had some clue of what's what, she put it more bluntly, e.g. with the Pageboy's Pledge.
jfw: One problem with trying to hide things about yourself, is that you end up surrounded by people who you need to hide things about yourself around.
jfw: As far as worrying about what employers think, on the one hand, you might be overestimating how much 'outsiders' will actually read. (asciilifeform said something to this effect, I couldn't find it just now.) If they have 'allergic reactions' to some bad words they stumbled on, there's usually a ready counterpoint. E.g., "these people call themselves terrorists!" - well there's a qntra where
jfw: terrorist action by the USG is documented in gorey detail.
jfw: And if they don't see reason... where exactly is the loss in not being allowed to submit to an unreasonable boss?
jfw: And on the other hand, the strategy is to become skilled / valuable enough that they're just not gonna care. Businesses really can't afford not to hire good people, just as you can't live without engaging them.
jfw: As far as catering to goals/needs of others, I tend to believe that diana_coman really does mean "what you need, whether you see it or not". Sure, she's taking on noobs because she needs help in the long run, but the thing about TMSR is that - if you can bring yourself up to be good enough here, odds are you won't want to do anything else, any more than strictly necessary
shrysr: You can be surrounded by anything and still be whatever you wanna be if you know what that is. You can be 200% honest in a public chan while saying its important to choose who you are vulnerable to. Not all external feedback is worth listening to or even relevant. You identify your Own stupidity and while 'guidance' is great - its not an infallible 'god' who is providing the guidance. Re: overestimating - thats
shrysr: strange. How exactly can you predict somebody stumbling onto something or not? Why do people and businesses have to 'market' things, why is one tennet of the defunct pizarro 'social engineering'? It is to Guide perception. You can see evidence of that in the way the ISP negotiation is going on. THe point the matter is - one has to submit to a boss by definition and if you want to have your own way - you
shrysr: manipulate the situation/boss/whatever. Its not just 'technical skill', tis also about navigating the politics of a workplace.
jfw: "important to choose who you are vulnerable to. Not all external feedback is worth listening to" - certainly.
jfw: "How exactly can you predict somebody stumbling onto something or not?" - you cannot, nor what their reaction will be; kinda why "acting towards purposes" is a problem in general, as I understand it. (http://trilema.com/2015/causes-and-purposes/, which I'm due for a reread)
jfw: re 'social engineering', you could read about MPOE-PR for the canonical example.
jfw: e.g. http://trilema.com/2012/strategic-superiority-a-saga/
jfw: (mind if I publish the conversation at some point, btw?)
shrysr: nope i consider this convo personal. i liked your website and wanted to talk to you and know your thinking, and fwiw: all of this will anyway come out as long as I am in #o... as i have said - there are good points and bad, and I won't be leaving good things when i find em :)
shrysr: causes and purposes! nice point to bring up my man. the point is simple - if there is nothing for unwanted dicks to read about me - there is nothing to worry about.. there is No purpose. ... i'ma read the strategic superiority thing later - but you seem to not see - social engg by definition is dress up marketing. Ask any company - they will tell you they are being absolutely honest. You can even read abt this in
shrysr: the logs. You can call my thoughts half baked and stepping everywhere... but you can't evaluate anything without stepping everywhere and in fact you will see the same kind of thinking in the logs as well! Those are the 'good points' i was talking about.
jfw: re the first - cool, and perhaps in time we discover merit in the "bad points" too. To be clear, that's a "nope I don't mind" right? (Keeping things private is something of a cost, thus one isn't really entitled to expect it from others without cause; I just figure it's best to be explicit.)
shrysr: what exactly is that cost?
jfw: well for example, IRC is unencrypted, and let's say my client logs to an unencrypted disk. Am I now responsible for properly incinerating the disk before disposal? And what if it's in The Cloud? I gotta run a separate client now? Keep backups in a vault instead of on the desk? And on the other side there's a loss of benefit: it takes me however long it takes me to write here, on topics that will
jfw: surely come up again in some other context. I then have to repeat myself rather than just linking. Some stuff I said here would certainly be of interest to others interested in what I'm thinking - so now I gotta write a separate article to fill them in? And fwiw, I don't see anything "incriminating" that you've said here - as you say, it'll come up eventually
jfw: (and as usual, it's on trilema: http://trilema.com/2014/this-privacy-thing/ )
shrysr: lol. No - i do not mind actually. ima already writing abt it maself anyway. and no therez nothing incriminating at all. and rofl : in case you Have read the logs - i've already admitted to a lotta things.
jfw: cool.
shrysr: btw: if its important to choose who you are vulnerable to - how does a public chan apply ?
shrysr: I can read MPOE-PR and all that - but i would rather observe at exactly whats actually happening.
jfw: It's more a matter of who you listen to & spend time on than who can read about it from the sidelines, I reckon. Like a blog: anyone can read, but only the owner can write.
jfw: And if any random passerby can write - that's a "vulnerability"!
shrysr: who you listen to and spend time on is certainly important. However, i think it is also ignorant to think that that public perception can have no detrimental impact whatsoever, or that it cannot be used against you if somebody wants to.
shrysr: btw the clock app on your site is nice. but org mode + ledger is prolly better :P
shrysr: okz. i better get to bed. ttyl. been wanting to connect since awhile.. nice talking to ya.
jfw: lolz, I don't believe I said "no detrimental impact whatsoever". There's costs and benefits; all I mean is you may be overestimating the costs, or underestimating the benefits, and sure, what the hell would I know. The fact that you need to breathe can be used against you too.
jfw: alright, later, and thanks for the chat.
jfw: I've improved the clock program btw, been stagnating on my todo list to clean up & publish. And yeah, I'm sure emacs is fine, I'm just not into the lifestyle.
jfw: heh, and it occurs to me I'm also arguing with my own reclusive/secretive tendencies here, and will likely have to continue doing so for a while.
shrysr: i'm curious to kno - how long you been following trilema, and whether you read books or w/e outside the logs?
shrysr: n whaddya mean by emacs lifestyle ?
jfw: Been lurking off and on since maybe 2015. In hindsight, I had the notion that I could apply the parts I liked or were convenient to me and ignore the rest -- this dissonance that TMSR was a buncha madmen that just magically happened to be saying smarter things about Bitcoin and computing than anyone else I'd come across. I wouldn't recommend this!
jfw: Not to say you can't take your time and think things through / ask questions.
jfw: Paper books I haven't been reading much these days; in theory I'm working on Don Quijote for learning Spanish, The Black Swan by Taleb, John Hull on options / derivatives, and Peter Drucker on management. In practice I haven't been putting in much time.
jfw: Emacs - it's a large program with 'ecosystem' of packages, wants you to make a large investment on learning and tweaking to your tastes and then use it for everything, as opposed to 'doing one thing well' 'Unix way'. It really wants to be its own operating system, indeed it was born as a component of Lisp environments as I understand.
jfw: I've used it at various points but it didn't stick, and I find the 'vim' commands more efficient and easier on the fingers once you've learned them.
jfw: I've even tried vim modes for emacs, lol, just not the same though.
jfw: I might be more interested in Emacs if it were based on a good Lisp like Scheme or CL and maintained by sane people rather than fungi. Maybe some day.
jfw: Do you read books?
jfw: Hmm, to be more precise, it wasn't so much that I thought them 'madmen'; more like ideological misalignment. In the early 2010's I became a pretty staunch libertarian, meaning I saw socialism as an evil on the basis that it was predicated on aggression - taking from productive people by force to feed the leeches. TMSR otoh is about elitism; it has no categorical ban on aggression but holds
jfw: socialism as an evil because it's predicated on the tempting but poisonous falsehood that people can be in any way equal.
jfw: I'd gotten stuck halfway out of the "Our Democracy USA #1 Land of the Free" indoctrination -- even to the point of fleeing the Zone -- but its last tendrils have been painful to cut.
shrysr: hmm. yea emacs has its deficiencies, as does any tool i guess. I got into emacs primarily for Org mode. [...] Finger pain some yes.. but it was okay when i switched ctrl <-> capslock and got a large ass thumb trackball mouse.
shrysr: Re: trilema /mad men / convenience: hmm... well in general - I would not discard anything out of inconvenience or because i dont understand, or even something I don't particularly give a shit about without a cursory consideration atleast. I don't view trilema et all as mad men; some initial cultural shock in a few places, which evaporated quickly, but myeah general ideological rigidity, narcissism, elitism are my
shrysr: thoughts so far. Things I don't understand usually intrigue me. I reckon I tend to chew on 'troubling concepts' for a longggg time before concluding (if I have to conclude at all, which is an important consideration). imo every pov has pros and cons, and so I find it inefficient to conform to any contrived/historical pov/demarcation and rigidly subscribe to any 'ism' unless I reach the point where I see no holes
shrysr: in it (which I think atm is highly unlikely). I think combining different philosophies (and intelligence) are needed to extract what you want/need from the world and your particular situation. I'd rather be flexible in my evolution while striving to identify and hold on to values that matter (to me, and ones that reasonably dont harm, or preferably help society/environment etc)... and also try to consciously and
shrysr: continuously re-evaluate whether such values.. are not illusions/non-sense (all of which ofc is not easy at all, but still imo the repeated empirical and somewhat painful approach has yielded some results over time). At any rate, I reckon policy making /thinking at the state or nation level cannot be deemed universally applicable at the individual level or atleast it cannot reliably hope to solve unique problems
shrysr: (as each individual is unique, and is dealing with different flavors of constraints in the least - if not quite different problems).
shrysr: Re: books, well I used to be what ppl call a bookworm, and still enjoy reading. Pretty much used to read anything I got my hands on, but curiously, would always forget the title and author even before finishing the book. Thankfully my observation is that the message is not lost and it seems what I manage to absorb meld together somehow churning away in the mess of my brain over time. [...] hohum one thing i like abt canada are the
shrysr: cool public libraries! but fuck me - i finally found work in a town with no working library lol; hopefully that will change in some months. Black swan I've read bits, and fooled by randomness a little more. Haven't read any finance book properly, though i have on my list intelligent investor by ben graham. Can rem reading - thinking fast and slow, blink, outliers.. finished 'kings of cocaine' though...lol. nice i
shrysr: rem some names.. but yea - I guess i do read.
jfw: Emacs does have its champions in the forum, e.g. asciilifeform. I gather it benefits from deep study, not assuming the defaults are sane and working to make it your own
shrysr: oh yeah - emacs defaults are lol... the main strength is in the ability to customise. There are starter kits like emacs prelude which cut the learning curve significantly. I settled on the starter kit scimax ... the guy behind scimax is or was a prof at carnegie and quite responsive on github issues.. i enjoy corresponding with him. http://kitchingroup.cheme.cmu.edu/scimax
shrysr: there are different philosophies really... some say its better to start with vanilla emacs and add customisations. thats actually what i did before choosing scimax... but i think its debatable. plenty you can get done with a starter kit faster.