Linux (windows at work tho).

Late-Permian extinction. Not very imaginative, but I find it cool that there are so many hypotheses even about the largest mass extinction ever.

I used to be afraid of looking at mirrors at night. Idk what it’s called, spectrophobia maybe? Well, anyway, one night I took acid and happened to look at a mirror while blasted off my mind. Staring at it felt so disappointingly mundane that I laughed at myself for expecting anything to go wrong. Lost my fear permanently.

Imagine a situation wherein everyone has more or less the same amount of money. They can afford the same number of houses, let’s say, two small, or one larger house. Even if there’s some inequality, it’s not hard to imagine people buying larger or smaller homes and yet everyone being able to afford one. Renting is an afterthought in this scenario.

If inequality grows larger, some people will not be able to afford ownership, and then renting becomes profitable; those who can afford more than one house will buy more than they need, increasing demand and then offering those homes for renting and getting profit. This in turn increases inequality, but as long as the forces pushing it down prevail, this state can last for long.

The crisis breaks out when these mechanisms eventually come out of balance, pushing a large share of people out of the market, and homeownership starts concentrating.

The idea is that investing is only profitable when people don’t have what they need; any solution that gives them that (increasing public housing is a popular proposal here) will reduce profit. In fact, profitability is at a maximum now because of the housing crisis, and even just going back to step 2 would reduce it. A “perfect” solution would give everyone homes at the best price physically possible and with full liquidity, which would sink renting yields to basically zero.

Objectively, yes. But it was polarizing at the time because some of the people present were investing heavily in real estate.

You can imagine ;)

Seriously, though, I said (irl) the home affordability crisis in my country can’t be truly solved in any way that simultaneously still allows people to invest in homes (rent them out, sell them at higher prices, do business with tourism, etc) to any meaningful degree. Everyone around had very strong, diverse opinions on that.

Tissue, cell and organ donation (including blood, semen and oocytes) can and should be done strictly not-for-profit. This is how it’s done in Spain (well, you do get a snack when donating blood and a small amount of money for oocytes since the process is quite long) and there’s usually no shortage of blood components in hospitals. Local governments do a lot of campaigning, set up mobile units etc., which seems to work; people see all of that, think of it when planning their day, and many even go in small groups to donate.

Haha yeah, absolutely! Might be too messy to consider it “well used” though… But it does motivate me, seeing all the signs I put there and imagining one day I will conquer that mountain. Maybe not even on the second attempt, but definitely one day.

Yes, that’s true and a better way to look at it, thanks!

Well, I was amazed by proof systems like Coq or Isabelle, that let one formally verify the correctness of their code. I learnt Coq and coded a few toy projects with it, but doing so felt pretty cumbersome. I looked at other options but none of them had a really good workflow.

So, I attempted to design one from scratch. I tried to understand Coq’s mathematical foundation and reimplement it into a simpler language with more familiar syntax and a native compiler frontend. But I rushed through it and turns out I had barely scratched the surface of the theory. Not just regarding the proof system, but also with language design in general.

I did learn a lot though. Since then I’ve been reading more about proof systems and language design in my spare time, and I’ve collected quite the stack of notes and drafts. Recently I’ve begun coding a way more polished version of that project, so on to round two I guess!

One of the largest projects under my GitHub account is an attempt at a proof-based programming language that I had to abandon because I underestimated the theoretical work involved, did not RTFM enough and months into it realized the entire thing was unsound af.

Just applied it. Super cool!

Relevant context

As a child, running as fast as I could, I didn’t see some sort of horizontal metal bar at about my forehead’s height. I bounced and fell backwards to the ground.

They count it as Linux, yes!

I wanted to delete all the subfolders in the current directory:

 rm -rf ./*

After a few seconds, I realize in horror that I had mistyped the path. Whole system nuked. Had backups though.

“Escanciar” in Spanish means pouring from a height for the purpose of mixing a beverage (usually cider) with air. I suppose it would still be valid if you’re pouring a mix from some height.

“Socialism turns out to work pretty well and is beating our ass” --> “Now, no one — certainly not me — is discounting the power of markets,” Sullivan noted at the time. “But in the name of oversimplified market efficiency, a large non-market economy had been integrated into the international economic order in a way that posed considerable challenges.”

If you can’t find a tool, this has worked to some degree for me. Open on e.g. GIMP, scale the images to the desired size in different layers, use perspective transform to align them very precisely, then set layer opacity so that you can merge them down with equal weight on each photo. It’s not a really good method, but might do the job. Good luck!

One way to see it is that if you tried to use a Linux filesystem on Windows, it would entirely refuse to read it. At least Linux can handle Window’s filesystems to a reasonable degree.

What you’re saying is that children should carry the responsibility for the acts of their ancestors.

No. I’m not saying that at all. I’m saying that people carry the responsibility to choose against unfairness if they have a choice. Whether the unfairness was created by your ancestors or someone else’s is irrelevant. If you are in an unfair position thanks to past unfair acts, and you can choose to let go of that position (or do some other action) to remove that unfairness from the world, then you should. Or, put otherwise, you don’t “deserve” that position, because it was attained unfairly.

Who’s the judge calculate the outstanding balance they both will naturally come to the conclusion that they’ve been unjustly treated

Well, I’m just stating that forgetting the past is not a good ethical standpoint. It is reasonable to believe it’s at least a practical one, and maybe it’s interesting to reason about the role it should have in lawmaking, resolving conflicts on a case-by-case basis, etc., but that is far from applicable in this case, or in general. I find no reason to use that simplification (which gives different outcomes) unless we’re in a situation where it’s become really difficult to reach consensus.

What if it turns out that your grand grandfather was a soldier who brought home some gold of dubious origins?

Then I would have the obligation to act according to it (return it, etc.). I would still have the right to get that wealth back, but then I would be forced to do something with it.

Anyway, I think I might be overexplaining and making it way more complicated than necessary. Everything I said can be summarized as follows: people have the right to not be affected by anything outside their control. Managing to provide that right is equivalent to effectively deleting the effects of every past and present unfair action. For example, if you properly redistribute wealth, then all of this family wealth robbery stuff simply fades away over time, as redistribution favors differences of recent origin and smooths out older variations.