My friends from #Okonek. Looks like it was frosty recently, but today it was just wet.
[#]hiking #Mosstodon #SilentSunday #boulder
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The major strength of capitalism is that money, as a measure of status and power, is countable. A peasant under a monarch would find it hard to imagine becoming a king. They might be able to perhaps raise their status in their village, or perhaps find a good husband for their daughter.
On the other hand, in capitalism, if you have some money and if you are earning some money, you can imagine more of it. And then even more β and now you have a long ladder of status to climb, and if not you won't get high enough, then perhaps your children will.
Some people believe they'll achieve it through hard work. Others by being talented and bright. Still others by good investment or gambling. Finally some through dishonest means. Even those entirely devoid of perspectives can imagine themselves winning the lottery.
And on their way to glory, capitalism will keep pulling the rug from under their feet. They will have unexpected and planned expenses, compulsive and thoughtful purchases, small setbacks and large tragedies. And on top of all that, that mystic power called inflation. The competition of greed against greed, the poor wanting to become rich, and the rich even richer, ad infinitum.
And such people, disappointed by the unfulfilled promise of greatness, will listen to what the "successful" people say. And they will believe that it's all their fault β or other people like them. Perhaps someone having more money, or perhaps even less. Or maybe those in greater need. Or maybe foreigners, with their "strange" culture, religion, language, skin color. Or maybe the "woke" ideology.
And we came full circle: we're back to our peasant, whose only perspective is to attain higher status at the cost of their neighbors. Except that they don't see the borders of their village anymore, so they think they can actually become kings.
[#]AntiCapitalism
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Since there is a catfish, there should also be a tacfish.
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Ah, and since I've praised GUGiK before (https://social.treehouse.systems/@mgorny/113831681099038340), I need to also mention that I usually use it in conjunction with BDL, or Polish Forest Data Bank β which I conveniently pronounce "BaDyL", or a dried stalk, but could extend to sticks in general.
[#]map
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Did you know that there's a Polish National Geographic Name Registry, and you can fetch the database of all towns in Poland, that includes how to create Genitive case from their names?
https://dane.gov.pl/pl/dataset/780,panstwowy-rejestr-nazw-geograficznych-prng
You can find a "ZIP (35,47MB)" there that contains the registry in "XLSX format", which .zip is actually 24M, and the .xlsx contained therein is 30M. Magic!
[#]Poland #Polish #data
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Enough stalling, time for another review:
Daniel Kahneman β Thinking, Fast and Slow
I recommend reading it, but with one warning: it's full of capitalism, stock markets, and widely understood hazard.
At the beginning, the author invokes two systems of thinking. System 1 is responsible for quick, effortless, unconscious, intuitive thinking. System 2 is responsible for conscious and controlled thought, but slower, requiring effort and focus. Then, based on this model, he goes on to explain how people interpret information and make decisions, supporting it with dozens of experimental results β which alone give great value to the tome.
I suppose it's no surprise to anyone that people are prone to manipulation. But can a screensaver with dollar notes seen in the background make people more egotistic? Are doctors likely to make different calls, depending on whether the same data is presented as "mortality" or "survival rate"? Are real estate agents' assessments affected by the asking price β even though they claim that they are not looking at it?
Why people can't handle probability? Why are they more likely to choose a sure $900 win than 90% chance of winning $1000 β and in the opposite case, they are more likely to risk 90% chance of losing $1000 than a sure loss of $900? Why do they assign a higher probability to Linda being "a feminist bank teller" than to her being "a bank teller" alone?
How far is company's success influenced by the strength of its CEO? Are the decisions made by the best mutual fund experts any better than rolling dice? Are expert predictions actually better than "dart-throwing monkeys"?
These are just a few examples off the tip of my finger. Really, there's a lot of interesting stuff there.
Quotes:
https://social.treehouse.systems/@mgorny/113680253460928950
https://social.treehouse.systems/@mgorny/113680904620393896
https://social.treehouse.systems/@mgorny/113736341194193136
[#]books #bookstodon @bookstodon
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There are some days when you need to exchange two doors. And when you're done, you suddenly notice that the handles on the bottom floor are different than the ones on the first floor, so you need to exchange these too.
So you remove one pair of handles, you remove the second pair of handles, you put the first one in its place, proudly push the handle to try it⦠and the mechanism doesn't even budge. So you go back to the first door and take the spindle that remained in the latch.
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"""
A purist might forgive snails for departure from the bilateral paradigm if only they honored an even more inclusive symmetry by growing right and left-handed spirals in equal numbers. But snails remain twisted and awry on this criterion as well β for right-handed shells vastly outnumber lefties, not only in the sacred conch [Turbinella pyrum] of India, but in virtually all species and groups. Right-handed shells are called "dextral," from the Latin dexter, meaning "right," and memorialized in our language by a host of prejudicial terms invented by the right-handed majority to honor their predominance. Right is dextrous, not to mention "correct" in many languages β awright buddy. The law, by the way, is droit in French and Recht in German, both meaning "right." [Also Polish "prawo"] (The language police will never regulate these essays, but we may still note, in fairness and for historical interest, that the "rights of man," noble as the sentiments may be, embody two linguistic prejudices of unfairly dominant groups.) Left-handed shells are called "sinistral," from the Latin sinister, meaning "left" β also denigrated in our languages as "sinister" or gauche, a French lefty. [β¦] I also canβt help wondering if we didn't make our initial decision to call a snail's apex "up" because this orientation would then allow us to designate the vastly more common direction of coiling as "right."
The vast majority of forms grow a dextral shell, although a few sinistral specimens have been found in most species. For example, in Cerion, the West Indian land snail that forms the subject of my own technical research, only six sinistral specimens have ever been found, out of millions examined (while, as stated above, lefty Turbinellas in India were literally worth their weight in gold). A few species grow exclusively or predominantly sinistral shells, but related species of the same group are usually dextral. We often exact a price from these rare sinistrals by giving them names to match their apostasyβas in Busycon contrarium or Busycon perversum, the technical monikers variously awarded to the most common sinistral species of northern Atlantic waters. A few groups of species (notably the family Clansiliidae) are predominantly sinistral, but, again, all closely related lineages are dextral. In short, dextral snails greatly predominate (at a far higher frequency than human righties vs. lefties), and at all levels: individuals within a species, species within a lineage, and lineages within larger groups.
"""
(Stephen Jay Gould, Dinosaur in a Haystack, 16. Left Snails and Right Minds)
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News for #RustLang support in #Gentoo:
https://github.com/gentoo-crate-dist/
--no-write-crate-tarball option, that updates the .ebuild for crate tarball use, but doesn't actually create one. It's useful either when you have the tarball already (e.g. taking it from the automation), or when upstream vendored the crates themselves.https://pypi.org/project/pycargoebuild/0.13.5/
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Okay, I have to say that #Furiosa is quite good. It's got the right #MadMax vibes⦠and the ending, it's just epic.
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Typical modern person: "I have to buy [groceries] on sale, because I can't afford to pay the full price."
Also typical modern person: buying tons of useless shit over the Internet, regularly commenting "it's no money."
[#]AntiCapitalism #consumerism
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Okay, I'm mostly done with the ideas I have, so time to request feedback from others. I've started preparing a "discussion" for packaging.python.org that aims to explain to #Python package upstreams how downstream #packaging works, and what they could do to help us. I've based it on my #Gentoo experience, and I'd appreciate feedback from other distributions, since their experience may be different from mine.
https://github.com/pypa/packaging.python.org/pull/1791
[#]ArchLinux #CondaForge #Debian #Fedora #Homebrew
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You're taking the suburban train to KoΕcian to get to KoΕcian. I'm taking the suburban train to KoΕciana tut o change into fast REGIO train to Szklarska PorΔba, to change in Lesznie into the clothes iron train to Krotoszyn. We are not the same.
(Homeric meme)
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Ok, I have to admit it to #RustLang. You can have no clue what you're doing, you can not have bothered doing a single tutorial and yet you can write a complex patch to a project. The compiler will keep telling you what you're doing wrong, so you can bash it until it works.
I'm very sorry for the person who will have to facepalm at my code xD.
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"""
One night in 1847, partly to escape her parents' noisy dinner party, Maria Mitchell of Nantucket lugged her telescope to the roof of the Pacific National Bank (where her father worked as chief cashier) and discovered a comet five degrees from Polaris, the North Star. For this discovery, the first comet found by an American woman, Mitchell received many honors, including a gold medal from the King of Denmark and election, as the first woman ever so recognized, to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Boston.
(Mitchell's certificate of election still hangs on the wall of her birth house in Nantucket, and it is a painful and ambiguous thing to see. Two statements are crossed out: the printed salutation "Sir" has been altered to "Madam" by hand, and the designation of "fellow" has been replaced by "honorary member," meaning that Mitchell had not been granted voting privileges. The document is signed by Harvard's great professor of botany, Asa Gray, later one of Darwin's stoutest supporters. More than ninety years would pass before another woman won election. Today, I am happy to report, for I am a member and the Academy's house lies just around the corner from my own, people of all shapes, sexes, colors, and backgrounds cavort in one of the oldest intellectual societies of our land with liberty and justice for all.)
"""
(Stephen Jay Gould, Dinosaur in a Haystack, 13. Jove's Thunderbolts)
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I suppose it's not fashionable to talk of one's exes, but I just recalled something that I've found quite impressive at the time.
She wasn't someone you'd call a tech-savvy person, rather a regular teenager. Yet after exchanging a few emails with me, she suddenly stopped top posting, and started replying below quotes. No, I didn't suggest it or anything β all it took were a handful of replies from me, and she noticed the superiority of this style of conversation herself. And it was over 15 years ago.
Now let's dedicate a minute of meaningful silence to the modern IT professionals.
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Whenever Stephen Jay Gould uses the expression "tooting my own horn", I get a long train of associations, spanning from #Mastodon on one end, to the human horn, so sought after by Lrrr, ruler of the Planet Omicron Persei 8, on the other.
[#]Futurama
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It's late, so just a short #MusicRecommendation. Just a reminder that:
Epica β The Phantom Agony
β¦is an epic album. Very symphonic, nice female vocals. And then I read that Β«"Cry for the Moon" is based on the abuse of children by Catholic priests.Β»
https://www.metal-archives.com/albums/Epica/The_Phantom_Agony/22459
[#]metal #SymphonicMetal
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[#]Leszno Grzybowo, through the train window.
(Of course it was the clothes iron, PKP class SA108)
[#]rail #sunrise #hiking
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Why do people use a sports car icon as a symbol of something being fast? Trains can achieve far greater speedsβ¦
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text/gemini
