I mean, I'm in Moscow and it's barely below 0 degC.

But - yes.

Wearing a sweater still makes sense there. To spend less energy.

But in that case it'll be more a matter of heat isolation. Though when such a low temperature exists on the outside consistently, air humidity drops and it sucks heat less. I think it works this way, but that's pure intuition or something, my physics knowledge sucks definitely.

I personally agree that this is a kind of a regulator.

Like what Tao Te Ching says. Humans shouldn't have too much of what they desire. Such a reality in some area fails them as an opportunity to learn. It's also a dead end - you can't have children with a robot. You can't grow children with a robot, or maybe you can, but it will not be sufficiently complex and it will have different criteria of success.

But this doesn't limit advanced civilization.

It's just that in these things we are trying to cheat. Advancement to AGI, if it ever happens, should be done in its own turn. We have means to solve a lot of purely technical problems, but we haven't yet. There's no reason to hurry with AGI.

The reason Europe has conquered the world was that European cultures had this respect to simplicity, born from Christian morality, but also respect to choice and logic. Remove any one of these three, and you lose that power.

Europeans had sometimes less sophisticated technologies in any particular area than, say, China or Safavid Persia or Ottomans or Southeast Asian nations or even at some point some African nations. But what they had was complete and comprehensive system, civilization as a whole. They always had the lower level of the building finished before going to the next one.

This was due to that Christian modesty combined with antique philosophy.

I also think we've diverted from that relatively recently - around the dotcom bubble crash, maybe. I think it had deeper implications than what people think, because the trust into said philosophy started eroding at that very point. Which created imbalance in favor of forces less affected, like Microsoft and others, who have eroded it further, and the "good" forces, like Sun or Compaq or Motorola or what not, have contributed more into it with their attempts to survive after the 90s than they would if they'd die with the crash immediately, because they showed the public something that looked like a loss in honest competition.

It also helps that the golden age is over

Even the stone age is coming to an end - in favor of clay dicks. Talking about games.

Countries with more efficient governments lose fewer lives than countries with less efficient governments. But also more open countries lose more lives than more closed countries. And authoritarian countries, other things equal, lose fewer lives.

This means that structures that immobilize small power, but not big power, and have better infrastructure for big power, are encouraged.

Thus corporations with oligarchic ambitions are, yes, interested in big pandemics.

A bit like Hanseatic cities and other such unions became much stronger after European populations shrinking from plague.

Except then it would also lead to servitude becoming softer and less normal, because of shortage of hands. Our current world does not have that shortage. No pandemic will bring it. Maybe a nuclear war and planetary hunger.

This is a level higher. Modern nation states are being dismantled slowly. We will have that cyberpunk dystopia, but as always, it will be different from what's been predicted. There will be genocide, and there will be nationalism, and there will be death squadrons, and there will be militant marxist groups, and there will be mafia organizations.

I mean, they all already exist, it's just that 90s worldview was a rare period of truthful representation of reality in public perception, where we felt how huge the world is. Now it's glossy bullshit again.

I'm sorry, but there are plenty of invasive primates there already, much worse than macaques at that.

So I hope yes.

I would have a novel or two finished by now, if not for various Ds and Ses.

It usually (in attempts from my teens) goes like the first couple of paragraphs describing nature, some for the later parts of the book describing various locations and situations, and then I find myself unable to describe people as they behave. That would be my ASD chiming in, I guess, impaired theory of mind and all that. My characters are pretentious, awkward and flat. Sometimes I'd figure out the mood to write from their POV, and then it would seem to feel better. But all that doesn't matter cause ADHD.

It comes from a story about baron Munchausen

After 46 years they may be already dead.

offtopic: it's funny that 4% is also the approximate chance of being a person without any condition from DSM-5 .

This is a consequence of intellectual property laws. What in 60s and 70s was possible to do with recent enough culturally significant things, now has been indefinitely postponed.

But more than that, a consequence of human vanity.

Making nuclear weapons by 50 years old technologies is good enough for those who need nukes.

But personal computers and operating systems of year 1999 kind, which are realistic to do in many places on the globe, are not good enough even for people who may not be able to afford healthy food.

Matrix the movie really was onto something.

I guess as a homeless shelter it'd be fine. There's some value in all the glassy parts too - hydroponics would combine well aesthetically with a shelter.

However, the space inside it should be treated carefully, or it can turn into something similar to Soviet micro-districts in the criminal sense.

Again, maybe making it some kind of a huge pond and releasing fish there is a good idea? I dunno.

Decided then.

And that round building of theirs should be demolished, only Apple fans can think it looks futuristic.

Yes, that's exactly my point. Every valuable political ideology works at keeping some important dimension in the minds of the masses. There's none as far as I can see in that part about responsibility. That is, it was existent in fringe things I've read about religion and deontology in my childhood\teens, in the context of science and philosophy and ethics, but not generally popular.

I'd say Apple is just a step or two behind on that.

One most important to murder is Microsoft.

And even when they are not on paper, they are in fact.

It's good to bug them about it, but last I checked they just didn't want to.

Starship Troopers is a kinda subtle book, and the author wasn't a huge sympathizer of compulsory anything, or of subservience.

It separates civil rights and citizen rights. Everyone has civil rights - no such thing as an unregistered alien, no such thing as forbidding abortions or whatever one wants to do. But citizen status (ability to vote in elections, hold political posts and even work for the government in less important positions, like that veteran with prosthetics in the office who accepted the friends' papers in the book) is something requiring commitment, so it's gained by making a sacrifice in the form of federal service.

It's also not only gained by military service, there are a lot of dangerous and important jobs eligible for that.

Unlike with typical fascism, everyone capable of understanding the oath is eligible for federal service, so if they are not fit for anything military or space related, there still are such jobs to be found.

So IMHO one shouldn't judge it by Verhoeven's movie alone.

Evading service is definitely not punishable there. Except there'll be no second chance to serve.

DOpus is one thing I can't really understand why is not ported yet. It comes from Amiga anyway, I understand they might have done a lot of OS-dependent things since moving to Windows, but it should be doable, no?

For audio specifically you might find FreeBSD easier to set up. As a DAW, not as a desktop in general.

ALSA+PulseAudio\Pipewire+JACK are kinda messy compared to newpcm+JACK .