Yeah, absolutely, and as far as I understand it anarchism doesn’t really prevent large organizations from forming and coordinating.

My understanding of pure anarchism would have two main conditions for such coordinated orgs or efforts:

1. Collective decisions are made via consensus - if one person disagrees, we continue deliberating.
2. People can leave and join organizations at any time, with no obligation to stay if they no longer agree with the direction.

Now, these conditions aren’t realistic for real life all the time. Sometimes we need to be able to make decisions with a time constraint, and consensus is very, very slow. And likewise, sometimes resources are constrained and one can’t just leave and do their own thing. But if we see this as an ideal sort of direction, we can aim to get closer over time.

And this is actually how many professional organizations and technical groups work. For instance, TC39 is the committee that defines the JavaScript the language, and it works via consensus - any member can prevent a proposal from moving forward at any time. This makes it a very, very slow process, and people complain about this a lot (myself included, I was impatient when I first started working on proposals). But JavaScript also has the constraint of “no breaking changes, ever”. So these proposals are permanent, and we live with the consequences of earlier ones today. So a process that forces more thought, discussion, and agreement, that really makes us make sure it’s a good idea, is a good one here.

There are varying levels of this. 2/3rds majority rather than 51%. Requiring at least 50% and not a plurality. Approval voting is more in line with this than first-past-the-post. Etc etc.

Like I said, it’s not about preventing things from moving forward. It’s about slowing down a bit, and using that time to shore up infrastructure, solve general problems (like how do we get basic amenities for every person, or at least many more people), and getting society as a whole out of a scarcity, zero-sum mindset.

Yeah, we could. But the structures of capital as they are currently running are funneling money away from that, and toward what makes profit. Look at what they’ve done to Boeing, once an engineer led giant, now a hollow shell.

I think worker collectives and more distributed decision making would slow things down at first, but in the long run would lead to more stability, more ownership, and eventually in the long term, more speedup as we build out infrastructure. I also don’t think we’ll ever get to a fully decentralized society, for a variety of reasons. But the first step in that direction would be something like more democratic company decision making and ownership (e.g. like the German model where workers elect a board member on large companies).

I dunno, I feel like rushing forward and making hasty generalizations and doing shoddy science is also morally questionable, and also ultimately gets worse results. And I see a lot of that in the tech industry anyways.

Just a had a convo today with one my mentors about javascript framework benchmarks, and how the main ones don’t actually measure accurately at all because of the way the engine inlines and optimizes things. He went through all the trouble of building a tool to make it easier to do rigorous measurements, because engineers at the company had been doing these shoddy benchmarks, using it to justify shipping “optimizations”, getting a nice raise, and then he would come in and realize that they had really just moved the work elsewhere and it actually caused a regression here or there.

And nobody really cared in the end. They used it for a while, then it fell by the wayside.

Real scientific rigor isn’t really respected in the same way it used to be, if it ever was. It’s more about marketing, finding an angle you can sell. Because when a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric, everyone starts gaming it. And money and productivity have become the ultimate metric.

I posted more about this below, but I think it would work, it would just take much longer. Coordination takes more time, but if there isn’t a time constraint (which I think can be true in a functionally post-scarcity world) then that is much less of an issue.

Maybe it would take several decades to do what it would have taken 5 years before. But if the fundamentals are covered in the meantime, why is that an issue?

I think it’s more that it would take more time and coordination to do larger things. Like, you need to get all of the people on board, you need to convince them to work on it without coercion (either force or money), so it takes a lot longer. Everybody is going to want their basic needs met and their problems dealt with first.

But when you step back and think about it, with our current level of technology, that would be fine. Like, if I went to a hundred engineers and was like “hey I wanna build a rocket, who’s with me?” And they said “sure, once I have free time, but can we figure out food/water/shelter/entertainment/comfort first?” That would be reasonable. Maybe it takes a few decades or longer to figure those things out in a sustainable way, but at scale in society it could definitely be done.

Think about electricity. It is currently functionally limitless (yes, there are limits, but we don’t treat it like that in day to day life). And to keep it that way is relatively low maintenance, once we figure out renewables (or nuclear, or both) anyways. Same with the internet, once it’s built it’s fairly easy to maintain, and we’re at the point with fiber where it’s fairly difficult to overuse it, so giving it to everyone as baseline would be easy.

Once we had a better system for the basics, one that essentially is low maintenance and ensures everyone gets everything they need (with choice and freedom too, if everyone is fed but all we have is potatoes, the next question would be “ok how do we get more variety?”), then there would be a lot more time to focus on large efforts.

Those still would take longer, because even when we have all of the basics handled, it would take much longer to make decisions, there would be long, frustrating debates, somebody might storm off, etc. It might take a lifetime. But there wouldn’t be urgency either, because we all have the basics, plus luxuries, essentially our modern lives as they are. Just without the need to produce more every second of every day.

All of this could be decentralized too. It’s not like I’m saying there would be a command economy, necessarily. In fact, it shouldn’t be centralized too much ideally, that could over concentrate power.

Where this falls apart is game theory essentially. If I choose to be less productive and focus on that basic infrastructure, and take my time, that lets other players get ahead. If that goes on long enough, those other players may have advanced enough that they can dominate the game. It’s a literal arms race in that sense, this is playing out with AI right now. For it to work, everyone would need to agree to slow down, all at once.

This is a major issue because what’s happening is we’re hitting artificial maximum’s because of this strategy. I deal with this all the time working on software infrastructure. People want to push for product non stop, and then their code turns out completely unmaintainable. Infra comes along, analyzes, figures out a better pattern, and eventually we fix it, but not before the damage is done and it takes years to fix, or we just rewrite it all. If we had taken the time to build it the right way the first time, it would have likely been a much faster process. BUT, the startup may have folded in the meantime, because someone else put together a dumpster fire, spruced it up to look real nice, and got a bunch of people to choose them instead. And now they won.

So yeah, I think about this a lot haha 😅 we are, technologically speaking, capable of being post scarcity. Why are we still acting like technological advancement is about life and death? Why do we have to race to the bottom?

Edit: Oh, speed also does matter for coordinating in emergencies, so there is an argument for “we don’t have time because the environment will fall apart or we have an asteroid incoming, etc.” but like, re: the environment, that is not only happening, but the productivity arms race is making it worse! That’s an example of an artificial maximum’s there.

Absolutely agreed that macs suck for gaming, but honestly Windows is super annoying too. It was getting better, but with all the spamware in the OS now it gets kind of annoying just to get games booted. Gamepass is cool, but it is very toxic for modding or anything because they like, lock down the new install locations to an insane degree, I couldn’t even copy a save file into there when I was trying to recover some save game state. And it’s yet another install locations for games/apps 🙃 like, why are there like 3+ locations for Program Files???

I’m honestly thinking about trying to run SteamOS on my desktop cause I really just need a launcher. I wanna get booted up any ready to play in like, under 30 seconds, and my Steam Deck is great for that.

Hard disagree, I’m a huge fan of the way spaces work on Mac. Windows is a nightmare, and linux is good but takes a lot of time to tune and maintain. I honestly haven’t ever noticed the hidden files issue because I use a terminal for launching anything that would need them, though it does sound annoying if you do.

Where MacOS shines is being able to customize the important parts of your workflow, while ignoring the basic parts because those all “just work” in a standard way. The biggest win is all of the a11y APIs they’ve added for apps, they really let you get in there and change almost anything. I use Karabiner to layer on custom keymappings, capslock is an extra modifier that turns my home row into arrows/delete, hold down command is jump by subword, and many more optimizations. And that is system-wide, it works the same in every single app. I basically have Emacs style macros universally across the entire operating system, every app, and it’s awesome (oh, and I don’t need an external keyboard for it, so I can work on the train and have the same keymaps).

You might not like the base OS’s UX, but it does “just work” for what it is, and that lets you focus on layering on so much more.

And I feel the same way when I look over the shoulder of my collegues who are seasoned mac users. Things which I would do in no time on PC seems to take many additional clicks and more time for them as well.

That’s really strange, can you give some examples? Just curious what things are easier to do on Windows (assuming that’s what you mean), I just have never had that be the case. Maybe it’s cause I’m a webdev and most tooling for web stuff is tailored for *nix systems?

But the thing that really works me up is when I ask people about the hardware issues. The answer is always “you need to buy apple hardware”.

Uh whaaaaat that’s crazy. Yeah I’m the same way, I’ve cycled through a lot of different mechanical keyboards and whatnot to find the one I like now (Ultimate Hacking Keyboard, dumb name but nice features lol). But I can’t say I’ve ever had an issue with a keyboard having hardware compatibility like that… I guess I don’t really use function keys. Again I use Karabiner to remap that kinda stuff to a different layer, which works universally so the same layering works on my laptop as my mechanical keyboard and I don’t need to have different muscle memory for different work-zone setups.

This is the article that got me introduced to Karabiner, even if you hate Mac I do recommend giving it a look. One of the best things I ever did was use Karabiner to modify my layout and reduce hand movement/chording. It completely fixed my RSI issues. My current layout treats the JKL; home row keys as arrow keys when I hold down Capslock, and Capslock + CMD turns them into jump-by-word so I can navigate really fast. Rarely use a mouse when writing code these days. Oh, and Capslock + ’ is delete, surprising how often that is a common hand movement. Plus plenty of other small optimizations. Really couldn’t live without it.

I dunno, I used PCs pretty exclusively until about halfway through college when I switched and every time I try to go back it’s pretty bad. Windows sucks, it just does everything different than *nix systems, and they have like, 5 different ways of doing things? It feels like they’ve had multiple efforts to clean up the tech debt and never completed them.

And Linux is just lacking for day to day use. I still would love to switch at some point, but it just doesn’t have the right tools and polish. Like, I rely on Karabiner for key remapping and layering and the Linux story is pretty lacking there (though I haven’t looked in a while so could have gotten better). Core stuff for my day to day.

I think a lot of it is muscle memory. Like yeah, it’s hard to relearn a lot of muscle memory type things. But if you open a terminal, it’s just like any *nix based system, same layout. You can navigate anywhere and open the Finder with open, etc.

Ok, let’s continue to focus on this technicality then.

Let’s say that’s true, and that anything other than witnessing the vows and signing the form is “ceremonial” and covered under freedom of speech. (Forget the part where you need to, you know, prompt each party for their vows. Not like you just sit there, stone cold, and they walk up and start talking to each other. But anyways.) The role of public servants is to be impartial and provide a common good or service to all citizens. And for a judge especially, this is extremely important. If a judge shows signs of bias, it could call into question the ways that they interpret the law. Did they also make biased judgements? Did they interpret laws to target certain classes of people, when they could get away with it?

So, if all of that is speech, then I propose that judges should be required to perform the same procedure for all couples when they are doing so as a service in a court. If they say “kiss the bride” to one couple, they have to say “kiss the ___” to all of them. That’s fair, prevents judges from seeming biased and prevents the institution from seeming biased, and allows judges to decide what they want to do as part of the proceedings. They can each have their own flair, or just do the basic witness + signing.

Would that be acceptable, in your view?

Look, we’re talking past each other.

I don’t believe that any judge or person in general should be forced to perform a ceremony of a different religion or belief system. I agree with you on that point, because full ceremonies are indeed performances with a lot of layered, cultural meanings.

The issue here is you are then taking that and asserting that any proceeding that is more involved than signing a piece of paper is, in fact, a ceremony. This is where we differ, and I’ll tell you why: by that definition, signing the paper is ceremonial.

Yes, it does record a real world event. But that is a ceremony that we have culturally come to accept after a long history of doing it. We could have come up with many other types of ceremonies to confirm a contract - it could have been a wax seal, or using a broke stick like stocks originally were. Anything can fit the definition of ceremony if you squint hard enough.

So, what’s a reasonable place for us to draw the line? I would argue that the current status quo is not particularly religious or meaningful outside of the contract.

The officiant confirms that both parties understand what is happening, that this is a contract that will legally bind them together. It’s very serious. Be very sure.

Then, they announce that the couple is officially wed, and they sign the document.

Last, they usually say “you may kiss” or something to that effect.

The most objectionable thing here is the final statement, but even that is hardly objectionable. It is a statement of fact and does not imply any level of endorsement beyond confirming that the deed is done.

This is a very, very small formality. There are courtroom procedures that are more lengthy and involved than this regularly. But you are pushing to say this counts as a ceremony, because if it does, then the judge doesn’t have to do this and she’s in the right.

I just don’t buy it. The only part of that which can be called remotely ceremonial is the statement about kissing, and honestly if the judge refused to say that in the end I would not care. But every other part is a reasonable procedure to make sure both parties understand the stakes, are not being coerced, etc.

Ok, cool. Law should be updated. Noted.

In the meantime, here in reality, I know this because I got married at city hall as a formality and my wife and I tried to just have it signed, since our real ceremony was months later. We were refused, because according to the clerk, we needed to follow a full procedure.

Stop arguing in bad faith, you’re just plain wrong here. Until laws and procedures actually change, the fact is that those are the minimum requirements and she refused to do them.

The point is that it’s part of standard process and procedure, and she made an off-duty judge come in on her day off to do it instead.

It’s an asshole move. She should not be a public servant if she intends to hold up proceedings based on her beliefs. Especially one with authority like a judges.

The ceremony aspect of marriage is not just a ceremony, it’s a requirement. Asking the basic questions is part of the court procedure, it’s what makes an officiant different than a notary.

She refused to sign the paper, essentially.

Yes, because in order for the marriage to happen, you need an officiant to ask some questions of both parties and confirm that they know what they signed and that it was all above board. That is not a performance, that is standard court procedure and the minimum requirement to get married.

This was a court proceeding, look at the actual article. The marriage happened in court.

By the sound of it, she was the on-duty judge at city hall. It was a public service because it’s the most basic kind of legal marriage, a courthouse marriage. There is barely any ceremony or performance, and lots of people do it prior to the real ceremony because it is considered a formality.

Why shouldn’t a public servant who is assigned that duty be required to follow through? I understand not wanting to do it if it’s a whole ordeal, but if this is the bare minimum required to formalize a marriage, should that not always be available to all people regardless of their race, sex, etc?

This really conflicts with the idea that, as platforms, websites are not legally liable for the content their user’s produce. At least at a high level, it feels like those two should be mutually exclusive. If X owns all of the accounts on its site, it should be legally liable for all of them. If X is not legally liable, it should imply some amount of individual ownership.

Like, yes federation is better and we should be pushing for it, but also, we should be trying to push for better regulation of incumbent social media platforms too if we can. Seems unlikely but we can try.

NY to DC is solid, it’s the one inter-metro train I’ve taken that’s faster than driving or flying (when accounting for security and travel to/from the airport).

Using it really makes you realize how much better the train system could be. Not even bullet trains, and they’re so much better than cars.

I don’t care what bad-faith conservatives are saying, yes they’re full of it. Here are the facts:

• We are pushing forward full-tilt on renewables in general. Factories are going up, the IRA was 80% focused on renewables, and as long as the incoming admin doesn’t actively roll things back, we’re heading in the right direction.
• Headlines like this one are coming up because private companies are starting to invest in nuclear for their own purposes. This is spare money and effort that we could be leaving on the table.
• If we start seeing politicians actively shutting down green energy in favor of nuclear, we should absolutely say “fuck no”.
• As of yet, I have not been seeing this in policy or in reality, and every year the renewable industry becomes more self-sustaining and grows without active pushes from the government (though we can and should continue to subsidize).

From where I’m standing, we should be encouraging the private sector and investing some percentage of our portfolio in restarting and building nukes with all of that context.

This is the same logic behind building an investment portfolio. You could go all in on Bitcoin, or you could spread out your portfolio in the market. 80% into the solid, tried and true stocks, 15% into up and comers, 5% into moonshots like crypto or gamestop or whatever. Same deal here.