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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.
This is a map of primary trading partners, US vs China, and how it has evolved over the last 20 years. Think about it, and realize this probably reflects your experience. I know there was a similar panic about Japan in the 80s, but Japan by population has always been 3x smaller than the US, whereas China is 3x larger. In addition, we had and have military bases in Japan. This is not the same situation. The US, since I have been born, has been coasting. The main product made by the US is the dollar, and it used those manufactured dollars to outsource everything. Most jobs in the US are now basically fake. It’s basically an economy in which five people stick a pipe in the ground, but that pipe is the fed and the oil was the good will built up over 1870-1970. In 2008, with the bailouts, it was made clear that the US has no interest in reform. The next decade, in perhaps a spitting in your face move, the fed made the interest rate 0. Known as ZIRP, this had never been done before. This led to insane perversions. When I got into business, I didn’t understand that business in America was mostly a total scam. Sure, you might look at a single business, and be like, oh, that sounds reasonable, but then you zoom out and look at the entire system, and it doesn’t really make sense. It’s scams feeding other scams. Wanna each start a business, pass dollars back and forth over and over again, and drive both our revenues super high? Sure, we don’t produce anything, but we have companies with high revenues and we can raise money based on those revenues. We’ll both be rich! Let’s do it with a bunch of extra steps so people don’t catch on though. They’ll only see it reflected in the lack of movement of real macro metrics. You see, the US is a “developed” country, which means real growth is over? You do understand that guns and boats are made of steel, right? Oh, airplanes aren’t, they are made of aluminum. Oh…right, yea, it’s not just steel it is absolutely everything. The future is chips you say? All the good chips are made in the Republic of China you say? This 2021 article lays it out clearly, and it also explains why nothing I saw in Silicon Valley made any sense. I’m not going to go into the personal stories, but I just had an underlying assumption that the goal was growth and value production. It isn’t. It’s self licking ice cream cone scams, and any growth or value is incidental to that. It isn’t until you understand this that people’s behavior starts to make sense. America really is at a fork in the road. In one world, they abandon all hopes of being an empire, becoming a regional power with highly protectionist economics. This happened before, and it’s called Europe. I know it’s hard to believe now, but Europe used to be the seat of power for the whole world. The sun never set on the British empire. Now they put you in jail for memes. Protectionist America is a boring place and not somewhere I want to be. It kicks the can further down the road of poverty, basically embraces socialism, is stagnant, is stale, is a museum…etc, again there’s a contemporary example of this. When I said on Lex they were gonna nationalize NVIDIA, look at the AI Diffusion Framework, and notice how Trump hasn’t repealed it. It allows export of GPUs to only 18 countries. Nationalization with American characteristics. It tells the other 177 countries that they should plan on purchasing their AI infrastructure from China. The other path, which is the exciting path, is the attempt to maintain an empire. An empire has to compete on its merits. There’s two simple steps to restore American greatness: 1) Brain drain the world. Work visas for every person who can produce more than they consume. I’m talking doubling the US population, bringing in all the factory workers, farmers, miners, engineers, literally anyone who produces value. Can we raise the average IQ of America to be higher than China? 2) Back the dollar by gold (not socially constructed crypto), and bring major crackdowns to finance to tie it to real world value. Trading is not a job. Passive income is not a thing. Instead, go produce something real and exchange it for gold. The first will bring the value of “American” labor in line with its global market value. It is a particularly unique advantage of the US over China, the US has a potentially much larger pool of talent. Non ironically, diversity is our strength. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of resistance to American labor finding its market value. The second will prevent a lot of the scams. The reason the banking industry is so big is that it is close to the source of the made up dollars. If currency is gold backed, you could imagine something similar happening to the mining industry instead. However, the mining industry is real! It uses steel and aluminum to build physical things. And imagine when we start to mine space. That’s a way better reward function than scamming politicians out of fake dollars. Unfortunately, I doubt either will happen. They very much both can, but people haven’t been demoralized enough yet.
A lot of smooth brains on Hacker News about the last post. I’m sorry if you spent your whole life worshipping money, but hey, the Bible warned you about false idols, don’t shoot the messenger. “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” – Mark Fisher It’s actually very easy to imagine the end of capitalism. Imagine capitalism as a game of sharks, where eventually the biggest shark ends up gobbling up all the fish, and that one shark is the last player left standing with all the money. When one person (or company) has all the money, do you see how the money would be worthless? I’ll spell this out clearly. Money is a map, it is not a territory. Please understand what I mean by this before continuing to read. You can erase the mountains from the map, but you still have to climb over them in real life, and even worse, now you don’t have a map! “Everything around you that you call ‘life’ was made up by people who were no smarter than you” – Steve Jobs So, if money is the map, what territory is it attempting to capture? Presumably something having to do with value, but increasingly, as we are buying and selling baskets of derivatives of memecoins, nothing. A map that doesn’t accurately capture a territory is not a Schelling point. It’s not a useful map. And maps are only as good as their usefulness. Useless maps die out. Do you agree or disagree that money is supposed to be a map of value? If you disagree, that’s an ought and I can’t use logic to convince you otherwise, I can just call you a moron who refuses to burn paper $100 bills for warmth on a deserted island. Many capitalists I meet are as stupid as communists, trying to give a moral justification for their system. This is my money, I deserve it. I should be able to passively deploy my capital into the markets and live off the returns. “Moral victories are for minor league coaches.” – JAY-Z A economic system is only good in so much as it effectively deploys capital for real growth. If real economic growth is only 3 percent, any time you are earning beyond that, somebody else is losing. And yet somehow, today, you can put your money in money market accounts and earn a “risk-free” 5 percent…hmm something doesn’t make sense. Who is losing? You will eventually be unable to squeeze the productive people any further. The worst was an e-mail I got with someone who supposedly agreed with me. “Value creation (for all stakeholders) is at the core of the organization/ business model I am putting together…Anyway I wanted to let you know others out there who share your vision.” – anon email Fuck your stakeholders. Fuck your business model. You don’t understand me at all. Stop worrying so much about the distribution of the pie. Start thinking about how to make the pie bigger. With exponential (what 3 percent year over year is) growth, the latter outstrips the former by so much. The right distribution is simply: From each according to his ability, to each according to his ability to effectively deploy capital to achieve real economic growth. Communism is dumb cause it goes to the poor (who routinely demonstrate that they poorly deploy capital). Capitalism is dumb cause it goes to the rent-seekers (who frequently deploy capital to increase their moat). Acceleration is the way.
Intellectual property is a really dumb idea. “But piracy is theft. Clean and simple. It’s smash and grab. It ain’t no different than smashing a window at Tiffany’s and grabbing merchandise.” - Joe Biden, 46th president of the USA Except it isn’t and Joe Biden is a senile moron. Because when you smash the windows and grab the stuff, Tiffany’s no longer has the stuff. With piracy, everyone has the stuff. It’s a lot more like taking a picture, which Tiffany’s probably encourages. Win-win cooperation. Wealth is being increasingly concentrated. What’s shocking to me is how much everyone still cares about money. Even the die-hard complain about capitalism type deeply cares, because the opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference. I hate scammers, but I’m pretty indifferent to money. The best outcome of AI is if it delivers huge amounts of value to society but no profit to anyone. The old days of the Internet were this goldmine. The Internet delivered huge value but no profit, and that’s why it was good. Suddenly we had all these new powers. Then people figured out how to monetize it. It was a race to extract every tiny bit of value, and now we have today’s Internet. Can this play out differently with AI? Let’s build technology and open source software that market breaks everything. Let’s demoralize the scammers so hard that they don’t even try. Every loser and grifter will be gone from technology because there’s nothing to be gained there. They can play golf all day or something. If I ever figure out how to channel power like Elon, I will do this. Spin up open source projects in every sector to eliminate all the capturable value. This is what I’m trying to do with comma.ai and tinygrad. I dream of a day when company valuations halve when I create a GitHub repo. Someday.
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I grew up in the 80s in Copenhagen and roamed the city on my own from an early age. My parents rarely had any idea where I went after school, as long as I was home by dinner. They certainly didn’t have direct relationships with the parents of my friends. We just figured things out ourselves. It was glorious. That’s not the type of childhood we were able to offer our kids in modern-day California. Having to drive everywhere is, of course, its own limitation, but that’s only half the problem. The other half is the expectation that parents are involved in almost every interaction. Play dates are commonly arranged via parents, even for fourth or fifth graders. The new hysteria over smartphones doesn’t help either, as it cuts many kids off from being able to make their own arrangements entirely (since the house phone has long since died too). That’s not how my wife grew up in the 80s in America either. The United States of that age was a lot like what I experienced in Denmark: kids roaming around on their own, parents blissfully unaware of where their offspring were much of the time, and absolutely no expectation that parents would arrange play dates or even sleepovers. I’m sure there are still places in America where life continues like that, but I don’t personally know of any parents who are able to offer that 80s lifestyle to their kids — not in New York, not in Chicago, not in California. Maybe this life still exists in Montana? Maybe it’s a socioeconomic thing? I don’t know. But what I do know is that Copenhagen is still living in the 80s! We’ve been here off and on over the last several years, and just today, I was struck by the fact that one of our kids had left school after it ended early, biked halfway across town with his friend, and was going to spend the day at his place. And we didn’t get an update on that until much later. Copenhagen is a compelling city in many ways, but if I were to credit why the US News and World Report just crowned Denmark the best country for raising children in 2025, I’d say it’s the independence — carefree independence. Danish kids roam their cities on their own, manage their social relationships independently, and do so in relative peace and safety. I’m a big fan of Jonathan Haidt’s work on What Happened In 2013, which he captured in The Coddling of the American Mind. That was a very balanced book, and it called out the lack of unsupervised free play and independence as key contributors to the rise in child fragility. But it also pinned smartphones and social media with a large share of the blame, despite the fact that the effect, especially on boys, is very much a source of ongoing debate. I’m not arguing that excessive smartphone usage — and certainly social-media brain rot — is good for kids, but I find this explanation is proving to be a bit too easy of a scapegoat for all the ills plaguing American youth. And it certainly seems like upper-middle-class American parents have decided that blaming the smartphone for everything is easier than interrogating the lack of unsupervised free play, rough-and-tumble interactions for boys, and early childhood independence. It also just doesn’t track in countries like Denmark, where the smartphone is just as prevalent, if not more so, than in America. My oldest had his own phone by third grade, and so did everyone else in his class — much earlier than Haidt recommends. And it was a key tool for them to coordinate the independence that The Coddling of the American Mind called for more of. Look, I’m happy to see phones parked during school hours. Several schools here in Copenhagen do that, and there’s a new proposal pending legislation in parliament to make that law across the land. Fine! But I think it’s delusional of American parents to think that banning the smartphone — further isolating their children from independently managing their social lives — is going to be the one quick fix that cures the anxious generation. What we need is more 80s-style freedom and independence for kids in America.
<![CDATA[I upgraded my Raspberry Pi 400 to 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS 2024-11-19 based on Debian Bookworm 12.9: The desktop of 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS 2024-11-19 on a Raspberry Pi 400. Since I had no files to preserve the process was surprisingly easy as I went with a full installation. And this time I finally used the Raspberry Pi Imager. When I first set up the Pi 400 my only other desktop computer was a Chromebox that couldn't run the Imager on Crostini Linux. This imposed a less convenient network installation which, combined with a subtle bug, made me waste a couple of hours over three installation attempts. Now I have a real Linux PC that runs the Imager just fine. Downloading Raspberry Pi OS, configuring it, and flashing the microSD card went smoothly. When I booted the Pi 400 from the card I was greeted by a ready to run system. On the newly upgraded system, building Medley Interlisp from source for X11 took an hour or so. The environment still runs well with the labwc Wayland cmpositor that now ships with Raspberry Pi OS. But, like the previous Raspberry Pi OS release, Medley doesn't run under TigerVNC because of a connection issue. #pi400 #linux a href="https://remark.as/p/journal.paoloamoroso.com/upgrading-to-raspberry-pi-os-2024-11-19"Discuss.../a Email | Reply @amoroso@fosstodon.org !--emailsub--]]>
It’s been a little over 100 days since elementary OS 8 was released, and we’re proud to announce another round of updates, including a fresh new download. We’ve been hard at work this winter addressing issues that you reported and we’ve added a couple new creature comforts along the way. This bug fix release also includes the latest Ubuntu LTS Hardware Enablement Kernel, so it’s worth checking out if you downloaded OS 8.0 and it disagreed with your hardware. AppCenter We now properly use dark mode brand colors and dark mode screenshots thanks to Italo. Plus, when developers provide screenshots for multiple desktop environments, we now prefer the ones intended for our desktop environment, Pantheon. We support the new <Developer> Appstream tag, thanks to Juan. And we now support the contribute URL type. AppCenter now shows dark mode screenshots when available Italo also fixed some issues with release notes overflowing out of their container, and we slightly redesigned the release notes window in the Updates page. He also addressed a few other issues in the Updates page that could occur while things were being updated or refreshed and made sure AppCenter recovers gracefully when its cache is emptied. Release notes dialogs have been slightly redesigned Search is also much faster thanks to Leonhard. And for developers, Ryo fixed loading your local metadata for testing with the --load-local terminal option. Files & Terminal Jeremy fixed another half-dozen reported issues in Files, including an issue that prevented entering file paths in search mode, an issue that prevented scrolling after deleting files, and an issue where files would disappear when dropped on an unmounted drive. The New file submenu now respects the hierarchy of folders in Templates. We now also respect the admin:// uri protocol for opening a path as an administrator, and Files is now styled correctly when run as administrator. He also fixed an issue where Terminal tabs took multiple clicks to focus, and an issue where keyboard shortcuts stopped working for tabs that had been dragged into their own new window. Plus, file paths and names are also now properly quoted when drag-and-dropped from Files into Terminal. System Settings System Settings now allows configuring its notifications in System Settings → Notications. So you can turn off bubbles if you don’t want to receive notifications about updates, for example. We’ll also no longer automatically download updates when on metered connections and send a notification instead, thanks to Leonhard. Plus we no longer check for updates in Demo Mode. Updates now show their download size and you can see progress towards our monthly sponsorship goal In System, Vishal made sure we show how large an update will be before downloading it and that we skip held-back packages—such as phased or staged updates—when preparing the updates bundle so that it will more reliably succeed. Alain added a progress bar while downloading. And Ryo made sure the last refresh time is more accurate when no updates are available. Alain also added a new progress bar that represents how close we are to meeting our monthly sponsorship goal. In Applications, you can now disallow notifications access. This is especially useful for apps which use the notifications portal, but don’t properly report their notification usage and can’t be controlled in the Notifications settings page. Reign in apps that don’t appear in Notifications settings In Network there are two new settings: whether a network should be automatically connected to when available and whether to reduce background data usage when connected to that network. Disable autoconnect or mark a network as metered We also updated the pointer icons in Mouse & Touchpad settings and the checkmarks in Locale settings will now respect your chosen accent color. Plus settings pages with sidebars now remember the width you adjusted them to, thanks to Alain. Installation & Onboarding David fixed a crash with certain partitioning schemes in the Installer’s custom install view. And the Encryption step was redesigned to fit on a single page, solving an issue with confusing navigation. Plus, onboarding will now always stay centered on the screen, even when resized. Panel & Quick Settings Ilya fixed an issue with the panel height when using the Classic session and HiDPI displays. The app context menu in the Applications menu now shows a “Keep in Dock” checkbox, just like in the Dock thanks to Stella. In the Power menu, we now show the device model if available, and avoid erroneously showing an empty battery icon thanks to Alain. In the Sound menu, Dmitry fixed loading album art from certain apps like Google Chrome, and we fixed an issue where player icons could become too large. See who else is logged in and quickly switch accounts from Quick Settings In Quick settings, Leonhard fixed an issue with performing updates while shutting down. And Alain added a new page where you can see which other people are logged in and quickly switch between accounts. Dock Leo added a bit more spacing between launchers and their running indicators, and fixed an issue where larger icons could be clipped at the peak of their bounce animation. Apps who don’t notify on startup will no longer bounce in the dock indefinitely, thanks to Leonhard. We fixed an issue where the dock would still receive click events while hidden in the Classic session. Plus the dock now has an opaque style when “Panel Translucency” is turned off in System Settings → Desktop → Dock & Panel. Window Manager We have another huge release of our window manager thanks to Leonhard and Leo. This release fixes five potential crashes, over a dozen reported issues, fixes related to both the Classic and Secure sessions, issues related to HiDPI, and more, plus performance improvements. It’s worth reading the full release notes on GitHub if you have been waiting for the fix for a specific issue. And More OS 8.0.1 includes the latest long-term support Hardware Enablement stack from Ubuntu, including Linux 6.11. This brings improved performance for AMD processors, support for Intel “Lunar Lake” processors, and filesystem performance improvements in some cases. Plus support for certain webcams, USB network devices, joysticks, and more. Leo fixed an issue where connecting Bluetooth devices could cause the Lock Screen to freeze. You can now close the captive network assistant with the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Q, thanks to Stanisław. And Alain fixed copying screenshots to the clipboard. We fixed an issue where wired network connections could fail to connect due to a change in Ubuntu. We’re pursuing this issue upstream and working on a way to ship the fix as an update, but for now fixing this issue requires either manual intervention through Terminal or a reinstall. We also now pre-install an AppArmor profile that fixes a number of Flatpak-related issues like not being to install certain runtime updates or apps not launching in the guest session or Demo mode. Special thanks to Uncle Tallest for investigating this issue and helping folks in our Discord who ran into it. And of course this release comes with a ton of translation updates! Special thanks to our hard-working internationalization community and especially Ryo who fixed a number of issues with things that couldn’t be localized properly in the previous release. Get elementary OS 8.0.1 elementary OS 8.0.1 is available as a pay-what-you-can purchase at elementary.io today. Localized direct downloads and a torrent magnet link are provided. OS 8 FAQ Download elementary OS 8.0.1 Sponsors have been able to download OS 8.0.1 release candidates since last week, so if getting things before anyone else is important to you, consider sponsoring us on GitHub
If you manage a team, who are your teammates? If you're a staff software engineer embedded in a product team, who are your teammates? The answer to the question comes down to who your main responsibility lies with. That's not the folks you're managing and leading. Your responsibility lies with your fellow leaders, and they're your teammates. The first team mentality There's a concept in leadership called the first team mentality. If you're a leader, then you're a member of a couple of different teams at the same time. Using myself as an example, I'm a member of the company's leadership team (along with the heads of marketing, sales, product, etc.), and I'm also a member of the engineering department's leadership team (along with the engineering directors and managers and the CTO). I'm also sometimes embedded into a team for a project, and at one point I was running a 3-person platform team day-to-day. So I'm on at least two teams, but often three or more. Which of these is my "first" team, the one which I will prioritize over all the others? For my role, that's ultimately the company leadership. Each department is supposed to work toward the company goals, and so if there's an inter-department conflict you need to do what's best for the company—helping your fellow department heads—rather than what's best for your department. (Ultimately, your job is to get both of these into alignment; more on that later.) This applies across roles. If you're an engineering manager, your teammates are not the people who report to you. Your teammates are the other engineering managers and staff engineers at your level. You all are working together toward department goals, and sometimes the team has to sacrifice to make that happen. Focus on the bigger goals One of the best things about a first team mentality is that it comes with a shift in where your focus is. You have to focus on the broader goals your group is working in service of, instead of focusing on your group's individual work. I don't think you can achieve either without the other. When you zoom out from the team you lead or manage and collaborate with your fellow leaders, you gain context from them. You see what their teams are working on, and you can contextualize your work with theirs. And you also see how your work impacts theirs, both positively and negatively. That broader context gives you a reminder of the bigger, broader goals. It can also show you that those goals are unclear. And if that's the case, then the work you're doing in your individual teams doesn't matter, because no one is going in the same direction! What's more important there is to focus on figuring out what the bigger goals should be. And once those are done, then you can realign each of your groups around them. Conflicts are a lens Sometimes the first team mentality will result in a conflict. There's something your group wants or needs, which will result in a problem for another group. Ultimately, this is your work to resolve, and the conflict is a lens you can use to see misalignment and to improve the greater organization. You have to find a way to make sure that your group is healthy and able to thrive. And you also have to make sure that your group works toward collective success, which means helping all the groups achieve success. Any time you run into a conflict like this, it means that something went wrong in alignment. Either your group was doing something which worked against its own goal, or it was doing something which worked against another group's goal. If the latter, then that means that the goals themselves fundamentally conflicted! So you go and you take that conflict, and you work through it. You work with your first team—and you figure out what the mismatch is, where it came from, and most importantly, what we do to resolve it. Then you take those new goals back to your group. And you do it with humility, since you're going to have to tell them that you made a mistake. Because that alignment is ultimately your job, and you have to own your failures if you expect your team to be able to trust you and trust each other.
