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“For example, if one believes that affirmative action is good for black people, does it make sense to demand affirmative action in hostile or dogmatic terms? Obviously it would be more productive to take a diplomatic and conciliatory approach that would make at least verbal and symbolic concessions to white people who think that affirmative action discriminates against them. But leftist activists do not take such an approach because it would not satisfy their emotional needs.” – Unabomber Manifesto To date, the Trump administration has been an absolute tragedy. It has been the acting out of emotions. There are no adults in the room. I’m not saying there would have been adults in the room with the Kamala regime either, but I had some hopes for positive change with the Trump tech-bro alliance and now they are gone. At least truths are being laid bare versus heads being buried in the sands of joy, but I think there was a much better way. For example, I don’t support America funding the war in Ukraine. But the way Zelensky was treated is just dumb. See the Unabomber quote above, between this and the Munich speech, Mr. JD Vance, I hope your emotional needs are being met (at the expense of the good will of our allies). It's the economy, stupid Regardless of anyone’s long-term objectives in the US, be they decoupling from China, bringing manufacturing to the US, bringing lifestyle improvements to US citizens; I think it’s unquestionable that uncertainty about the future was needlessly increased. And unless the uncertainty was the goal, I can’t figure out why things were done the way they were. And if the uncertainty was the goal…uhhh…is our government captured by Russian or Chinese agents? Because that’s who benefits. I don’t trust the news very much. I have no idea if the guy in the El Salavdor prison had a fair trial, if the students being deported are criminals, or even if they are being deported at all. It’s really hard and time consuming to get to the truth about any of these things. However, when markets crash. that is obviously real. With the news, there’s usually no way to trade on it being real or fake, there’s nobody to take the other side. But with big public markets, there’s very deep liquidity if you think they are priced wrong. In addition to the 10% the market is down, the dollar is also down 10%. Considering the market is priced in dollars, it’s closer to 20% down. And even worse on top of all of this, prices are going up due to the tariffs. Was crashing the economy the goal? A side-effect of a greater plan? Because given how this was executed, a 3-week old LLM could have told you shit was gonna crash. And it’s not going to bring manufacturing back. I have done manufacturing in America for years, and anyone with any experience could have told you that this wouldn’t work, manufacturing requires long term investment and long term investment requires stability. What was the real goal here? Elon, you need to reconcile with your daughter Andrew Callaghan did a good piece on Elon’s radicalization. I get it, we have all been there. For me it was Gamergate (which still has a terrible wikipedia page that doesn’t explain what it was). But this doesn’t have to be you forever. You are the closest thing to an adult in any room in America. When you compare America to China, it’s really more like comparing Elon to China. ULA is a little joke compared to CNSA. And look into what percent of US car exports are Teslas. The man is singlehandedly beating the rest of the US combined. If you want any hope of standing against China, your political coalition better include him. Elon has been pretty politically quiet lately. I’m sure he knew exactly what would happen with the tariffs, but he couldn’t stop them. I got fooled too, thought it could be different this time. But it’s no different from 2017. (btw, we are finally beating climate change thanks to cheap solar panels from China) I know the idea of PR is against a lot of what you believe in, but you need to heads down put together a large scale PR campaign, distance yourself from this train wreck, denounce stupid fake right wing conspiracy theories, reconcile with your daughter (from a reader of sci-fi and The Culture, is the trans thing that hard to understand?), resolve your stupid beef with OpenAI (we are all disappointed, but you don’t have a great track record for open source either), and start building a new political party. Pro large scale legal immigration, not a single illegal border crosser. Pro choice (within reason), and also pro gun (within reason). Inclusive and diverse, with an unwavering focus on merit. Anti crime, with an understanding that victimless crime is not crime. Expose higher education and the medical system to the free market (watch how fast prices fall) Free market and trade, but not an unregulated market. Markets require regulation to be free. It’s probably the only shot we have against China. The current Republicans and Democrats are just far too stupid; the Chinese are watching this tariff drama and laughing their asses off. Their plans are measured in centuries. America, do you want to be a protectionist backwater? If so, and all the thymos is gone, then there’s no place for me there. If this is really the way things are going, the only thing for anyone to do is leave. We’ll see how it shapes up in the next few years. But if the racists or the other racists are still running the show, we really are just cooked. Enjoy your handouts to black people and your handouts to white people in a poverty stricken shithole.
You know about Critical Race Theory, right? It says that if there’s an imbalance in, say, income between races, it must be due to discrimination. This is what wokism seems to be, and it’s moronic and false. The right wing has invented something equally stupid. Introducing Critical Trade Theory, stolen from this tweet. If there’s an imbalance in trade between countries, it must be due to unfair practices. (not due to the obvious, like one country is 10x richer than the other) There’s really only one way the trade deficits will go away, and that’s if trade goes to zero (or maybe if all these countries become richer than America). Same thing with the race deficits, no amount of “leg up” bullshit will change them. Why are all the politicians in America anti-growth anti-reality idiots who want to drive us into the poor house? The way this tariff shit is being done is another stupid form of anti-merit benefits to chosen groups of people, with a whole lot of grift to go along with it. Makes me just not want to play.
Intel is sitting on a huge amount of card inventory they can’t move, largely because of bad software. Most of this is a summary of the public #intel-hardware channel in the tinygrad discord. Intel currently is sitting on: 15,000 Gaudi 2 cards (with baseboards) 5,100 Intel Data Center GPU Max 1450s (without baseboards) If you were Intel, what would you do with them? First, starting with the Gaudi cards. The open source repo needed to control them was archived on Feb 4, 2025. There’s a closed source version of this that’s maybe still maintained, but eww closed source and do you think it’s really maintained? The architecture is kind of tragic, and that’s likely why they didn’t open source it. Unlike every other accelerator I have seen, the MMEs, which is where all the FLOPS are, are not controllable by the TPCs. While the TPCs have an LLVM port, the MME is not documented. After some poking around, I found the spec: It’s highly fixed function, looks very similar to the Apple ANE. But that’s not even the real problem with it. The problem is that it is controlled by queues, not by the TPCs. Unpacking habanalabs-dkms-1.19.2-32.all.deb you can find the queues. There is some way to push a command stream to the device so you don’t actually have to deal with the host itself for the queues. But that doesn’t prevent you having to decompose the network you are trying to run into something you can put on this fixed function block. Programmability is on a spectrum, ranging from CPUs being the easiest, to GPUs, to things like the Qualcomm DSP / Google TPU (where at least you drive the MME from the program), to this and the Apple ANE being the hardest. While it’s impressive that they actually got on MLPerf Training v4.0 training GPT3, I suspect it’s all hand coded, and if you even can deviate off the trodden path you’ll get almost no perf. Accelerators like this are okay for low power inference where you can adjust the model architecture for the target, Apple does a great job of this. But this will never be acceptable for a training chip. Then there’s the Data Center GPU Max 1450. Intel actually sent us a few of these. You quickly run into a problem…how do you plug them in? They need OAM sockets, 48V power, and a cooling solution that can sink 600W. As far as I can tell, they were only ever deployed in two systems, the Aurora Supercomputer and the Dell XE9640. It’s hard to know, but I really doubt many of these Dell systems were sold. Intel then sent us this carrier board. In some ways it’s helpful, but in other ways it’s not at all. It still doesn’t solve cooling or power, and you need to buy 16x MCIO cables (cheap in quantity, but expensive and hard to find off the shelf). Also, I never got a straight answer, but I really doubt Intel has many of these boards. And that board doesn’t look cheap to manufacturer more of. The connectors alone, which you need two of per GPU, cost $26 each. That’s $104 for just the OAM connectors. tiny corp was in discussions to buy these GPUs. How much would you pay for one of these on a PCIe card? The specs look great. 839 TFLOPS, 128 GB of ram, 3.3 TB/s of bandwidth. However…read this article. Even in simple synthetic benchmarks, the chip doesn’t get anywhere near its max performance, and it looks to be for fundamental reasons like memory latency. We estimate we could sell PCIe versions of these GPUs for $1,000; I don’t think most people know how hard it is to move non NVIDIA hardware. Before you say you’d pay more, ask yourself, do you really want to deal with the software? An adapter card has four pieces. A PCB for the card, a 12->48V voltage converter, a heatsink, and a fan. My quote from the guy who makes an OAM adapter board was $310 for 10+ PCBs and $75 for the voltage converter. A heatsink that can handle 600W (heat pipes + vapor chamber) is going to cost $100, then maybe $20 more for the fan. That’s $505, and you still need to assemble and test them, oh and now there’s tariffs. Maybe you can get this down to $400 in ~1000 quantity. So $200 for the GPU, $400 for the adapter, $100 for shipping/fulfillment/returns (more if you use Amazon), and 30% profit if you sell at $1k. tiny would net $1M on this, which has to cover NRE and you have risk of unsold inventory. We offered Intel $200 per GPU (a $680k wire) and they said no. They wanted $600. I suspect that unless a supercomputer person who already uses these GPUs wants to buy more, they will ride it to zero. tl;dr: there’s 5100 of these GPUs with no simple way to plug them in. It’s unclear if they worth the cost of the slot they go in. I bet they end up shredded, or maybe dumped on eBay for $50 each in a year like the Xeon Phi cards. If you buy one, good luck plugging it in! The reason Meta and friends buy some AMD is as a hedge against NVIDIA. Even if it’s not usable, AMD has progressed on a solid steady roadmap, with a clear continuation from the 2018 MI50 (which you can now buy for 99% off), to the MI325X which is a super exciting chip (AMD is king of chiplets). They are even showing signs of finally investing in software, which makes me bullish. If NVIDIA stumbles for a generation, this is AMD’s game. The ROCm “copy each NVIDIA repo” strategy actually works if your competition stumbles. They can win GPUs with slow and steady improvement + competition stumbling, that’s how AMD won server CPUs. With these Intel chips, I’m not sure who they would appeal to. Ponte Vecchio is cancelled. There’s no point in investing in the platform if there’s not going to be a next generation, and therefore nobody can justify the cost of developing software, therefore there won’t be software, therefore they aren’t worth plugging in. Where does this leave Intel’s AI roadmap? The successor to Ponte Vecchio was Rialto Bridge, but that was cancelled. The successor to that was Falcon Shores, but that was also cancelled. Intel claims the next GPU will be “Jaguar Shores”, but fool me once… To quote JazzLord1234 from reddit “No point even bothering to listen to their roadmaps anymore. They have squandered all their credibility.” Gaudi 3 is a flop due to “unbaked software”, but as much as I usually do blame software, nothing has changed from Gaudi 2 and it’s just a really hard chip to program for. So there’s no future there either. I can’t say that “Jaguar Shores” square instills confidence. It didn’t inspire confidence for “Joseph B.” on LinkedIn either. From my interactions with Intel people, it seems there’s no individuals with power there, it’s all committee like leadership. The problem with this is there’s nobody who can say yes, just many people who can say no. Hence all the cancellations and the nonsense strategy. AMD’s dysfunction is different. from the beginning they had leadership that can do things (Lisa Su replied to my first e-mail), they just didn’t see the value in investing in software until recently. They sort of had a point if they were only targeting hyperscalars. but it seems like SemiAnalysis got through to them that hyperscalars aren’t going to deal with bad software either. It remains to be seem if they can shift culture to actually deliver good software, but there’s movement in that direction, and if they succeed AMD is so undervalued. Their hardware is good. With Intel, until that committee style leadership is gone, there’s 0 chance for success. Committee leadership is fine if you are trying to maintain, but Intel’s AI situation is even more hopeless than AMDs, and you’d need something major to turn it around. At least with AMD, you can try installing ROCm and be frustrated when there are bugs. Every time I have tried Intel’s software I can’t even recall getting the import to work, and the card wasn’t powerful enough that I cared. Intel needs actual leadership to turn this around, or there’s 0 future in Intel AI.
If you give some monkeys a slice of cucumber each, they are all pretty happy. Then you give one monkey a grape, and nobody is happy with their cucumber any more. They might even throw the slices back at the experimenter. He got a god damned grape this is bullshit I don’t want a cucumber anymore! Nobody was in absolute terms worse off, but that doesn’t prevent the monkeys from being upset. And this isn’t unique to monkeys, I see this same behavior on display when I hear about billionaires. It’s not about what I have, they got a grape. The tweet is here. What do you do about this? Of course, you can fire this women, but what percent of people in American society feel the same way? How much of this can you tolerate and still have a functioning society? What’s particularly absurd about the critique in the video is that it hasn’t been thought through very far. If that house and its friends stopped “ordering shit”, the company would stop making money and she wouldn’t have that job. There’s nothing preventing her from quitting today and getting the same outcome for herself. But of course, that isn’t what it’s about, because then somebody else would be delivering the packages. You see, that house got a grape. So how do we get through this? I’ll propose something, but it’s sort of horrible. Bring people to power based on this feeling. Let everyone indulge fully in their resentment. Kill the bourgeois. They got grapes, kill them all! Watch the situation not improve. Realize that this must be because there’s still counterrevolutionaries in the mix, still a few grapefuckers. Some billionaire is trying to hide his billions! Let the purge continue! And still, things are not improving. People are starving. The economy isn’t even tracked anymore. Things are bad. Millions are dead. The demoralization is complete. Starvation and real poverty are more powerful emotions than resentment. It was bad when people were getting grapes, but now there aren’t even cucumbers anymore. In the face of true poverty for all, the resentment fades. Society begins to heal. People are grateful to have food, they are grateful for what they have. Expectations are back in line with market value. You have another way to fix this? Cause this is what seems to happen in history, and it takes a generation. The demoralization is just beginning.
More in programming
One of the first types we learn about is the boolean. It's pretty natural to use, because boolean logic underpins much of modern computing. And yet, it's one of the types we should probably be using a lot less of. In almost every single instance when you use a boolean, it should be something else. The trick is figuring out what "something else" is. Doing this is worth the effort. It tells you a lot about your system, and it will improve your design (even if you end up using a boolean). There are a few possible types that come up often, hiding as booleans. Let's take a look at each of these, as well as the case where using a boolean does make sense. This isn't exhaustive—[1]there are surely other types that can make sense, too. Datetimes A lot of boolean data is representing a temporal event having happened. For example, websites often have you confirm your email. This may be stored as a boolean column, is_confirmed, in the database. It makes a lot of sense. But, you're throwing away data: when the confirmation happened. You can instead store when the user confirmed their email in a nullable column. You can still get the same information by checking whether the column is null. But you also get richer data for other purposes. Maybe you find out down the road that there was a bug in your confirmation process. You can use these timestamps to check which users would be affected by that, based on when their confirmation was stored. This is the one I've seen discussed the most of all these. We run into it with almost every database we design, after all. You can detect it by asking if an action has to occur for the boolean to change values, and if values can only change one time. If you have both of these, then it really looks like it is a datetime being transformed into a boolean. Store the datetime! Enums Much of the remaining boolean data indicates either what type something is, or its status. Is a user an admin or not? Check the is_admin column! Did that job fail? Check the failed column! Is the user allowed to take this action? Return a boolean for that, yes or no! These usually make more sense as an enum. Consider the admin case: this is really a user role, and you should have an enum for it. If it's a boolean, you're going to eventually need more columns, and you'll keep adding on other statuses. Oh, we had users and admins, but now we also need guest users and we need super-admins. With an enum, you can add those easily. enum UserRole { User, Admin, Guest, SuperAdmin, } And then you can usually use your tooling to make sure that all the new cases are covered in your code. With a boolean, you have to add more booleans, and then you have to make sure you find all the places where the old booleans were used and make sure they handle these new cases, too. Enums help you avoid these bugs. Job status is one that's pretty clearly an enum as well. If you use booleans, you'll have is_failed, is_started, is_queued, and on and on. Or you could just have one single field, status, which is an enum with the various statuses. (Note, though, that you probably do want timestamp fields for each of these events—but you're still best having the status stored explicitly as well.) This begins to resemble a state machine once you store the status, and it means that you can make much cleaner code and analyze things along state transition lines. And it's not just for storing in a database, either. If you're checking a user's permissions, you often return a boolean for that. fn check_permissions(user: User) -> bool { false // no one is allowed to do anything i guess } In this case, true means the user can do it and false means they can't. Usually. I think. But you can really start to have doubts here, and with any boolean, because the application logic meaning of the value cannot be inferred from the type. Instead, this can be represented as an enum, even when there are just two choices. enum PermissionCheck { Allowed, NotPermitted(reason: String), } As a bonus, though, if you use an enum? You can end up with richer information, like returning a reason for a permission check failing. And you are safe for future expansions of the enum, just like with roles. You can detect when something should be an enum a proliferation of booleans which are mutually exclusive or depend on one another. You'll see multiple columns which are all changed at the same time. Or you'll see a boolean which is returned and used for a long time. It's important to use enums here to keep your program maintainable and understandable. Conditionals But when should we use a boolean? I've mainly run into one case where it makes sense: when you're (temporarily) storing the result of a conditional expression for evaluation. This is in some ways an optimization, either for the computer (reuse a variable[2]) or for the programmer (make it more comprehensible by giving a name to a big conditional) by storing an intermediate value. Here's a contrived example where using a boolean as an intermediate value. fn calculate_user_data(user: User, records: RecordStore) { // this would be some nice long conditional, // but I don't have one. So variables it is! let user_can_do_this: bool = (a && b) && (c || !d); if user_can_do_this && records.ready() { // do the thing } else if user_can_do_this && records.in_progress() { // do another thing } else { // and something else! } } But even here in this contrived example, some enums would make more sense. I'd keep the boolean, probably, simply to give a name to what we're calculating. But the rest of it should be a match on an enum! * * * Sure, not every boolean should go away. There's probably no single rule in software design that is always true. But, we should be paying a lot more attention to booleans. They're sneaky. They feel like they make sense for our data, but they make sense for our logic. The data is usually something different underneath. By storing a boolean as our data, we're coupling that data tightly to our application logic. Instead, we should remain critical and ask what data the boolean depends on, and should we maybe store that instead? It comes easier with practice. Really, all good design does. A little thinking up front saves you a lot of time in the long run. I know that using an em-dash is treated as a sign of using LLMs. LLMs are never used for my writing. I just really like em-dashes and have a dedicated key for them on one of my keyboard layers. ↩ This one is probably best left to the compiler. ↩
As I slowly but surely work towards the next release of my setcmd project for the Amiga (see the 68k branch for the gory details and my total noob-like C flailing around), I’ve made heavy use of documentation in the AmigaGuide format. Despite it’s age, it’s a great Amiga-native format and there’s a wealth of great information out there for things like the C API, as well as language guides and tutorials for tools like the Installer utility - and the AmigaGuide markup syntax itself. The only snag is, I had to have access to an Amiga (real or emulated), or install one of the various viewer programs on my laptops. Because like many, I spend a lot of time in a web browser and occasionally want to check something on my mobile phone, this is less than convenient. Fortunately, there’s a great AmigaGuideJS online viewer which renders AmigaGuide format documents using Javascript. I’ve started building up a collection of useful developer guides and other files in my own reference library so that I can access this documentation whenever I’m not at my Amiga or am coding in my “modern” dev environment. It’s really just for my own personal use, but I’ll be adding to it whenever I come across a useful piece of documentation so I hope it’s of some use to others as well! And on a related note, I now have a “unified” code-base so that SetCmd now builds and runs on 68k-based OS 3.x systems as well as OS 4.x PPC systems like my X5000. I need to: Tidy up my code and fix all the “TODO” stuff Update the Installer to run on OS 3.x systems Update the documentation Build a new package and upload to Aminet/OS4Depot Hopefully I’ll get that done in the next month or so. With the pressures of work and family life (and my other hobbies), progress has been a lot slower these last few years but I’m still really enjoying working on Amiga code and it’s great to have a fun personal project that’s there for me whenever I want to hack away at something for the sheer hell of it. I’ve learned a lot along the way and the AmigaOS is still an absolute joy to develop for. I even brought my X5000 to the most recent Kickstart Amiga User Group BBQ/meetup and had a fun day working on the code with fellow Amigans and enjoying some classic gaming & demos - there was also a MorphOS machine there, which I think will be my next target as the codebase is slowly becoming more portable. Just got to find some room in the “retro cave” now… This stuff is addictive :)
A little while back I heard about the White House launching their version of a Drudge Report style website called White House Wire. According to Axios, a White House official said the site’s purpose was to serve as “a place for supporters of the president’s agenda to get the real news all in one place”. So a link blog, if you will. As a self-professed connoisseur of websites and link blogs, this got me thinking: “I wonder what kind of links they’re considering as ‘real news’ and what they’re linking to?” So I decided to do quick analysis using Quadratic, a programmable spreadsheet where you can write code and return values to a 2d interface of rows and columns. I wrote some JavaScript to: Fetch the HTML page at whitehouse.gov/wire Parse it with cheerio Select all the external links on the page Return a list of links and their headline text In a few minutes I had a quick analysis of what kind of links were on the page: This immediately sparked my curiosity to know more about the meta information around the links, like: If you grouped all the links together, which sites get linked to the most? What kind of interesting data could you pull from the headlines they’re writing, like the most frequently used words? What if you did this analysis, but with snapshots of the website over time (rather than just the current moment)? So I got to building. Quadratic today doesn’t yet have the ability for your spreadsheet to run in the background on a schedule and append data. So I had to look elsewhere for a little extra functionality. My mind went to val.town which lets you write little scripts that can 1) run on a schedule (cron), 2) store information (blobs), and 3) retrieve stored information via their API. After a quick read of their docs, I figured out how to write a little script that’ll run once a day, scrape the site, and save the resulting HTML page in their key/value storage. From there, I was back to Quadratic writing code to talk to val.town’s API and retrieve my HTML, parse it, and turn it into good, structured data. There were some things I had to do, like: Fine-tune how I select all the editorial links on the page from the source HTML (I didn’t want, for example, to include external links to the White House’s social pages which appear on every page). This required a little finessing, but I eventually got a collection of links that corresponded to what I was seeing on the page. Parse the links and pull out the top-level domains so I could group links by domain occurrence. Create charts and graphs to visualize the structured data I had created. Selfish plug: Quadratic made this all super easy, as I could program in JavaScript and use third-party tools like tldts to do the analysis, all while visualizing my output on a 2d grid in real-time which made for a super fast feedback loop! Once I got all that done, I just had to sit back and wait for the HTML snapshots to begin accumulating! It’s been about a month and a half since I started this and I have about fifty days worth of data. The results? Here’s the top 10 domains that the White House Wire links to (by occurrence), from May 8 to June 24, 2025: youtube.com (133) foxnews.com (72) thepostmillennial.com (67) foxbusiness.com (66) breitbart.com (64) x.com (63) reuters.com (51) truthsocial.com (48) nypost.com (47) dailywire.com (36) From the links, here’s a word cloud of the most commonly recurring words in the link headlines: “trump” (343) “president” (145) “us” (134) “big” (131) “bill” (127) “beautiful” (113) “trumps” (92) “one” (72) “million” (57) “house” (56) The data and these graphs are all in my spreadsheet, so I can open it up whenever I want to see the latest data and re-run my script to pull the latest from val.town. In response to the new data that comes in, the spreadsheet automatically parses it, turn it into links, and updates the graphs. Cool! If you want to check out the spreadsheet — sorry! My API key for val.town is in it (“secrets management” is on the roadmap). But I created a duplicate where I inlined the data from the API (rather than the code which dynamically pulls it) which you can check out here at your convenience. Email · Mastodon · Bluesky
Consent morality is the idea that there are no higher values or virtues than allowing consenting adults to do whatever they please. As long as they're not hurting anyone, it's all good, and whoever might have a problem with that is by definition a bigot. This was the overriding morality I picked up as a child of the 90s. From TV, movies, music, and popular culture. Fly your freak! Whatever feels right is right! It doesn't seem like much has changed since then. What a moral dead end. I first heard the term consent morality as part of Louise Perry's critique of the sexual revolution. That in the context of hook-up culture, situationships, and falling birthrates, we have to wrestle with the fact that the sexual revolution — and it's insistence that, say, a sky-high body count mustn't be taboo — has led society to screwy dating market in the internet age that few people are actually happy with. But the application of consent morality that I actually find even more troubling is towards parenthood. As is widely acknowledged now, we're in a bit of a birthrate crisis all over the world. And I think consent morality can help explain part of it. I was reminded of this when I posted a cute video of a young girl so over-the-moon excited for her dad getting off work to argue that you'd be crazy to trade that for some nebulous concept of "personal freedom". Predictably, consent morality immediately appeared in the comments: Some people just don't want children and that's TOTALLY OKAY and you're actually bad for suggesting they should! No. It's the role of a well-functioning culture to guide people towards The Good Life. Not force, but guide. Nobody wants to be convinced by the morality police at the pointy end of a bayonet, but giving up on the whole idea of objective higher values and virtues is a nihilistic and cowardly alternative. Humans are deeply mimetic creatures. It's imperative that we celebrate what's good, true, and beautiful, such that these ideals become collective markers for morality. Such that they guide behavior. I don't think we've done a good job at doing that with parenthood in the last thirty-plus years. In fact, I'd argue we've done just about everything to undermine the cultural appeal of the simple yet divine satisfaction of child rearing (and by extension maligned the square family unit with mom, dad, and a few kids). Partly out of a coordinated campaign against the family unit as some sort of trad (possibly fascist!) identity marker in a long-waged culture war, but perhaps just as much out of the banal denigration of how boring and limiting it must be to carry such simple burdens as being a father or a mother in modern society. It's no wonder that if you incessantly focus on how expensive it is, how little sleep you get, how terrifying the responsibility is, and how much stress is involved with parenthood that it doesn't seem all that appealing! This is where Jordan Peterson does his best work. In advocating for the deeper meaning of embracing burden and responsibility. In diagnosing that much of our modern malaise does not come from carrying too much, but from carrying too little. That a myopic focus on personal freedom — the nights out, the "me time", the money saved — is a spiritual mirage: You think you want the paradise of nothing ever being asked of you, but it turns out to be the hell of nobody ever needing you. Whatever the cause, I think part of the cure is for our culture to reembrace the virtue and the value of parenthood without reservation. To stop centering the margins and their pathologies. To start centering the overwhelming middle where most people make for good parents, and will come to see that role as the most meaningful part they've played in their time on this planet. But this requires giving up on consent morality as the only way to find our path to The Good Life. It involves taking a moral stance that some ways of living are better than other ways of living for the broad many. That parenthood is good, that we need more children both for the literal survival of civilization, but also for the collective motivation to guard against the bad, the false, and the ugly. There's more to life than what you feel like doing in the moment. The worst thing in the world is not to have others ask more of you. Giving up on the total freedom of the unmoored life is a small price to pay for finding the deeper meaning in a tethered relationship with continuing a bloodline that's been drawn for hundreds of thousands of years before it came to you. You're never going to be "ready" before you take the leap. If you keep waiting, you'll wait until the window has closed, and all you see is regret. Summon a bit of bravery, don't overthink it, and do your part for the future of the world. It's 2.1 or bust, baby!
An interactive demo of bisection search and golden ratio search algorithms. There is also a motivation to learn them both. Spoiler alert! One converges better, and the other has a better computational cost.
