The technological innovations of the last fifteen years, from advertising enshittifcation to AI cheating, have largely been a disaster. We are sadly at the point where, as Ted Gioia says, “most so-called innovations are now anti-progress by any honest definition.” I dare say that if we could revert all digital technology to where it was in 2009 – before the invention of the retweet – we’d all be better off.

I’d go back even further (to 2007) before the invention of the iPhone. The smartphone has, arguably, IMO been a bad, or at least premature invention. It created a generation of kids obsessed with their photographies, giving girls eating disorders and creating/spreading unrealistic beauty ideals, etc… Also it has severely disrupted teenagers’ social living, created sleeping disorders, chronic doomscrolling, addiction, and more bad stuff. The iPhone was, IMO, not ready for this world.

Depression has many causes:

• For once, people work too much. It exhausts the body and we feel tired.
• For two, there’s the meaninglessness of life. It’s difficult to stay motivated when nothing makes sense/there is no future.
• Thirdly, positive sexual experiences strongly cure depression. Since the dating market is largely fucked (no pun intended), well that option doesn’t exist to large parts of the population.
• Fourtly we’re socialized to hide depression. As everybody knows, the first step to solve a problem is to recognize it exists. Stigmatization of depression has held back effective treatment for way too long.

isn’t that why the hippie movement ended?

… and I came to believe that our current cosmology is incomplete or wrong.

Well, yes, I agree with you.

Ok maybe my numbers were a little bit off but the point is: if the universe were created slowly, we’d see clear traces of that. but the evidence points into the opposite direction, that the universe, at some point, was very hot and dense, before stars started forming. So the question is, where would all that matter come from? I deem it’s unlikely to all just be “one huge quantum fluctuation”, but i’m not sure about that; cosmology is exotic sometimes.

Our theoretical framework, allowing matter creation (*) provides a possible origin for the universe (without the need of a Big Bang).

If you look at the typical composition of a star today, you will find that it is mostly (99%) hydrogen.

We know that a star burns hydrogen into helium, and therefore the relative fraction of hydrogen in the star’s composition decreases annually by a specific rate (let’s say 0.0000001%). That means that a star might have an average lifetime of 1 billion years, before its composition changes and it has only small fraction of hydrogen left.

If the universe were created slowly (by a slow process, such as spontaneous particle creation would be), then stars would burn out while they are being created; In other words, we wouldn’t see stars that are mostly unconsumed hydrogen, but instead, stars that are mostly already consumed helium, with slow rates of hydrogen being created continuously.

But that would lead to stars having a drastically different composition: instead of 99% hydrogen and 1% helium, we might see 1% hydrogen and 99% helium. That is why I believe a “slow creation” of the universe to be unlikely.

Very interesting read.

I also like how, at the end, it changed perspective to say “actually, our problem is not software, but politics”.

We must be aware of what agents we encourage and discourage through our actions.

so, Facebook?

If the disk is internal and only used by linux, you should 100% use ext4.

NTFS is what windows uses. exFAT is like really, really old file system that is only used because of its wide compatibility nowadays. USB-sticks use them, because they have to be compatible with any device where you couls potentially stick them in.

You get only one boot partition (EFI partition) which contains the kernel and the initramfs for both operating systems. Then, you would create two partitions to hold the rest of each individual operating system.

Shared partitions can be ext4, but if they should be read-/writable by windows, I would recommend ntfs or exFAT.

It would technically work, yes.

But also, you’re wasting a lot of storage space that way, especially if you do it often. You really only should backup your home directory, it contains all your data. You can simply re-install the rest from the internet.

TIL there is a standard editor

Same with people who say solar panels can’t ever work. They haven’t tried them in the last few years.

I would not consider integration to be basic maths, honestly. Basic maths is addition and multiplication, and maybe vector geometry.