I wanted to gauge like how much people read outside the main ML theory. I have dozens of books like this physically on my bookshelf myself. But I’ve never heard like an ML mention the Art of War when recomending things to read. So was curious what people thought about it. One reason I find it interesting is modern China actually does incorporate a lot of Sun Tzu and Confucian style thinking into how they do things and it works quite well for them, but it’s not something I see highlighted often.

I’ve used Newegg but never heard of B&H what is that? Newegg is good for PC parts but not really for other things. Like RV electronics for example. Altho you can find some of that on other sites too. I do try to diversify when I can and not support the monopoly. One of the main issues I’ve found is just shipping. Even if you can find something somewhere else sometimes it’ll take a month to get there, or it’s out of stock, or something like that. Especially more recently. I even had something happen one time where I tried to buy from LattePanda on their site and my bank BLOCKED the transaction and wouldn’t let me buy from them directly because they were an “untrusted” vendor lol. But I was allowed to buy the exact same thing 2nd hand from Amazon.

How could I know the answer to my question when my question was what other peoples opinions on the topic were?

Say’s who? The community is supposed to just organically resist this? There’s no organizational structure? Because that would be a government.

Well I’m not just talking about critiquing them. Some do deserve it, but I think they also just have a lot of useful information regarding strategy, mindfulness, and tactics that transcends ideology.

Well there’s a walmart that has electronics stuff but at that point you may as well just buy from Amazon anyway lmao

And then there’s the british who haven’t even managed to abolish monarchy yet

Specify how what I described is different than what you’d do then. What mechanisms or institutions would you put in place to prevent step 3?

Mine said “has 2 adults” and I was trying to figure out why because I’m very much by myself, and I realized it is because my mother sends things to my address with her amazon account sometimes. So it thinks she lives here.

Honestly I wish I didn’t. I don’t have a google account. Don’t have any Meta accounts. Don’t have accounts for basically anything I’m not functionally REQUIRED to have (banking for example). But Amazon is hard to avoid. I do a lot of buying in person, but in person shopping is just horrible these days. You need to find something specific and you are screwed. I do try to find other places online to get something when I can but a lot of times I just have to fall back to amazon. Maybe part of it is just the area I’m in though. Tons of the more specialty stores here have closed down. We don’t even have an electronics store anymore after Best Buy closed.

I worked for an airline for awhile. What you get on the plane is determined by the length of the flight usually. The longer you are on the plane the more things you will get. And of course the class matters.

Well it’s a 747 and United flew those from 1970 to 2017. Not sure when they stopped allowing smoking on board, but I’m guessing it was allowed in the 70s?

The term authoritarianism is utterly meaningless because all governments rely on coercion to maintain their authority. The state is fundamentally an instrument that’s used by the ruling class to maintain its dominance. The whole notion that political systems can be neatly categorized into authoritarian or democratic binaries is deeply infantile.

The reality is that every government derives its authority from its monopoly on legal violence. The ability to enforce laws, suppress dissent, and maintain order is derived from control over police, military, and judicial systems. Whether a government is labelled authoritarian or democratic, the fundamental basis of its power lies here. Therefore, the only meaningful questions to ask are which class interests it represents, and to what extent can it be held accountable to them.

I honestly think we should have a bot where anytime someone says the word authoritarian it just spits this out at them.

The Latitude 7400 (Non 2-in-one version) is genuinely an amazing laptop if you underclock the CPU a bit so it doesn’t sound like a jet engine. I run Debian on it and the thing gets 12 hours of battery life, and does everything I need. Build quality is pretty good too. I got it for like 200$ refurbished.

Here: https://okular.kde.org/

Okular

Red Star OS

Step 1: Abolish Government

Step 2: Establish absolutely no institutional infrastucture to ensure nobody else makes a new government. Because that would be authoritatian.

Step 3: Someone makes another government by establishing a monopoly on violence.

Step 4: Abolish Government… wait what?

What do you actually know about soviet housing? I’ve done significant academic research on the topic. It’s not just a simple “they built a certain type of building”. The reason they all look so similar is that their construction method was pre-fab concrete panels. It was a revolutionary technology at the time, and allowed them to solve their housing crisis. They were called “Khrushchyovka” after whom you can guess. He made it his mission to solve the Soviet Housing crisis when he took over and was largely successful.

You have to keep in mind the historical context. The people moving into these buildings were coming from a pre-industrial society where they commonly had so electricity, dirt floors, and no insulation. These were a significant upgrade from the pre-USSR constructions. They started construction in the 1940s, and really took off in the 50s.

I think the main takeaways from them shouldn’t be “We should build these exact things”. and I don’t think that’s what people who support them are advocating for. I think what they are trying to point out is that if you standardize production, and use economies of scale, it is entirely possible to build tons of housing quickly and cheaply. And considering the way housing prices look these days I’d expect that to be an idea anyone can get behind.

If you are interested here is an article about how modern China is using similar practices: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/17/10695

Refer to your toes as your “little piggies”