Yea I think my own preference for self-hosting boils down to a distrust of a continuous dependency on a service in control of a company and a desire to minimize such dependencies. While there are FOSS and self-hostable alternatives to tailscale or indeed claude code, using those services themselves simply replaces old dependencies on externally-controlled cloud-based services on new ones
I dunno, I spend less time fighting with any of my several linux systems than the macbook I'm required to use for work, even without trying to do anything new with it. I choose to view this charitably and assume most of the time investment people perceive when switching operating systems is familiarity penalties, essentially a switching cost. The longer this remains the case, the less charitably I'm willing to view this.
You can also mitigate a lot of the "familiarity penalties" by planning ahead. For example, by the time I made the decision to switch from Windows around 15 years ago, I'd already been preferring multi-platform FOSS software for many years because I had in mind that I might switch one day. This meant that when it came time to switch, I was able to go through the list of all the software I was using and find that almost all of it was already available in Linux, leaving just a small handful of cases that I was able to easily find replacements for.
The result was that from day 1 of using Linux I never looked back.
Of course, MS seems to enjoy inflicting familiarity penalties on its established user base every couple of years anyway. After having your skills negated in this way enough times, the jump to Linux might not look so bad.
We live in a world with the internet and distributed version control, so essentially every piece of software in the world has a tradeoff where the people maintaining it might push an update that breaks something at any time, but also those updates often do good things too, like add functionality, make stuff more efficient, fix bugs, or probably most crucially, patch out security vulnerabilities.
My experience with FOSS has mostly been that mature projects with any reasonable-sized userbase tend to more reliably not break things in updates than is the case for proprietary software, whether it's an OS or just some SaaS product. YMMV. However, I think probably the most potent way to avoid problems like this actually ever mattering is a combination of doing my updates manually (or at least on an opt-in basis) and being willing to go back a version if something breaks. Usually this isn't necessary for more than a week or so for well-maintained software even in the worst case. I use arch with downgrade (Which lets you go back and choose an old version of any given package) and need to actually use downgrade maybe once a year on average, less in the last 5
I like it, though I do notice that like most LLMs it seems to take criticism of LLM rollout kinda personally (actually circa 2023 this was considerably less true across every popular model)
I also think the predictions section seems kinda generic where the roast section felt better-personalized, which seems like a prompting issue
In many moral frameworks, inconsistency isn't the only wrong someone can commit. The argument constructed in this article is essentially utilitarian, making the claim that the mechanisms of surveillance and privacy make this behavior harmful to others, regardless of their intentions or internal sense of morality. In fact, the author doesn't mention hating these people at all, although I suppose that's not a completely unreasonable thing to infer. From the perspective of this argument, this only lacks the harm the "deviancy signal" would itself do to the individual, though in the oppressive regime proposed they would perhaps take greater risk by openly deviating
> In fact, the author doesn't mention hating these people at all
The article opens with:
>> There's a special kind of contempt I reserve for the person who says, "I have nothing to hide."
Which isn't literally saying "I hate them" but I'm not sure how else to interpret "a special kind of contempt." Regardless, I've edited my original post.
I didn't do it consciously. When I wrote my original post, I'd hallucinated that the author had used the term "hate".
When Advael responded "the author doesn't mention hating these people at all", I went back to the article and checked. Advael was right, but I can understand where my hallucination came from. The first three sentences read:
> There's a special kind of contempt I reserve for the person who says, "I have nothing to hide." It's not the gentle pity you'd have for the naive. It's the cold, hard anger you hold for a collaborator.
A "special kind of contempt" mixed with "cold, hard anger" really seems like hatred to me.
(Anyway, this really isn't the point I was trying to make.)
It is very interesting, in our polarized times, what people read into a statement, and if they interpret it charitably or in the worst possible way. Like you, I find contempt and hate very different.
The author clarifies a couple sentences later that the contempt they feel is "the cold, hard anger you hold for a collaborator" - "collaborator" apparently meaning something like the very bad WWII kind of collaborator, rather than the benign artistic co-author kind. So, despite the implicit acknowledgement that there are multiple types of contempt, this particular contempt does sound fairly close to hatred.
Look up the definition of "hate". How is "cold, hard anger" like one might feel toward a N*zi collaborator not adjacent to that? Why quibble over this?
Geez, what an insane semantic debate. The author clearly has strong, negative emotions towards the people this article is about. Folks who want to nitpick the technicality of these terms are just misunderstanding how language works.
I think a major problem with advice for a general audience is that different people need different advice. I agree with you that a path to mastery usually involves putting in a lot of effortful practice and then learning to operate without conscious effort, to let muscle memory and such take over. I think people fail at this in different ways, however. I'm sure a lot of people fall off of mastery because they mistake the feeling of effort for lack of an innate talent or the endeavor being futile, and a lot of people fail to achieve fluency because they're unable to let go of the effortful, conscious mode of thinking. Advice for either of those groups is probably going to be counterproductive for the other
That said, I do think this article frames its advice in a clickbaity way by handwaving cumulative effort while talking about instantaneous effort
Reminds me of this quote from Walter Murch, from In the Blink of an Eye I think:
"Most of us are searching-consciously or unconsciously- for a degree of internal balance and harmony between ourselves and the outside world, and if we happen to become aware-like Stravinsky- of a volcano within us, we will compensate by urging restraint. By that same token, someone who bore a glacier within them might urge passionate abandon. The danger is, as Bergman points out, that a glacial personality in need of passionate abandon may read Stravinsky and apply restraint instead."
This quote gives me such pause. I came back to read it again several times today. Conversations about echo chambers and filter bubbles are everywhere, and it's hard to sort into real data-driven arguments that there is an upward trend in the tendency to consume information that reaffirms our beliefs, but it does seem like our mechanisms for doing this have gotten a lot better, and that one could stay in a bubble indefinitely and never run out of content. I wonder if Murch is even still right to assume that we search for balance and harmony with an outside world we more often interact with through our abstractions, many chosen by us, most at least chosen by something. I wonder how many glaciers to read of restraint, how many volcanoes read of passionate abandon today, whether the feedback loop of escalation of flattery drives people to disappear into cages of their own making, or to burn themselves out, to use only this one dichotomy. I wonder how many of these feedback loops anyone is in about how many things. I wonder if I can even know which ones I'm in. Even if anyone succeeds at questioning everything they believe all the time, are they actually better off being a leaf on the wind, unable to form opinions?
I guess in short, this quote brings into sharp focus how brainrotting all this information and curation is, automatic and pervasive as it's become
From my experience riding in them and news reports I've read, any tesla fits the bill
Sadly, the most reliable signal american tech companies send is that they are primarily concerned with building a surveillance state. Whether this is for the US government or just their own fiefdoms (franchulates?) seems to vary a lot both within and between them, but neither prospect is particularly appealing to me as a prospective customer and/or target
I don't think I'm completely oblivious to social status, but I've never understood at a deep level the way most people seem to process concepts like "fame" and "celebrity". I have never had the experience of being awestruck by a person, or elevating them above personhood, though I admire plenty of people. With the few brushes with, maybe we can say "microcelebrity" I've had myself, the opportunities and status benefits, while nice, seemed not worth the bizarre distorting effect on social reality it has, like the thing where someone's heard of me and talks to me like they know me when we've never met is uncomfortable at best, and most people considered various degrees of famous I've met who I came to respect seemed to be similarly jaded with this awestruck or even worshipful reaction some people seem to have when they idolize someone. I really think this whole cluster of behaviors is unhealthy and weird, and the fact that mass-communication technologies and the massive societal resources bent toward persuasion (both commercial and political) have drastically amplified it is probably one of the major causal factors in the polycrisis of the modern world
This is a phenomenon that, like many social phenomena, seems to scale superlinearly, and you've described a gradient of economic advantage along which this will tend to accelerate. These properties suggest to me that an attitude like "it's fine as long as it's not taken too far" is at best pretty naive
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