Posts by Lanny

2016-02-16 at 4:46 AM UTC in I learned to PHP

Lanny Bird of Courage

2016-02-16 at 3:13 AM UTC in The retarded thread: Fuck, §m£ÂgØL made one first edition

Lanny Bird of Courage

That's not really what I wanted feedback on, philoso-autist.

What do you think about my "clubhouse" idea? In general and a strategy to attain maximum happiness and well being as an adult. Any problems you'd foresee?

No, that seems pretty reasonable. I think that is by and large what we consider friendship to be. Like sure, your candidates for friends are limited by circumstances but I don't think many people choose to associate with people they actively dislike, we survey the landscape and choose those who are the most funny/appealing/interesting whatever. I guess the risk is there's a drive towards homogeneity (we obviously tend to like like people with similar or at least compatible views, common experiences, more) which could cause issues with in-group biases, particularly in groups with narrow or obsessive interests (it's easy to see it all the time on mid-sized subreddits, TRP and atheism come to mind first but they're basically endless variations) but then groups like that generally, by merit of being small, are non-exclusive (in the sense that participation in them does not exclude you from participation in larger more general social structures) which is something of a counterbalance.

In any case though, finding and spending time with people you find interesting seems like a no brainer for fulfillment.

2016-02-15 at 8:35 AM UTC in An Alternate Internet

Lanny Bird of Courage

Your options seem to be between good privately owned infrastructure which, by definition, is beholden to corporate interests, good publicly owned infrastructure which is subject to the same issue in addition to the surveillance issue, or shitty mesh-infrastructure where it takes an indeterminate amount of time to send a packed across the continent. The mesh option means we really once and for all gives up the notion of reliable network communications but then it was an illusion to start with, you can just ignore it before getting to a certain level of ops. Public adoption is the obvious blocker, equipment and slow-as-ass connections don't exactly win over the paying public.

2016-02-15 at 7:50 AM UTC in ATTN: lanman

Lanny Bird of Courage

I've already admitted to the whole fake internet girl thing, if I were actually gay I would have just said it.

But since you asked, we went to church. Neither of us are religious but grace cathedral is a landmark and just up the hill from me so we went. One of those borderline cringey/quirky things some people seem to like. Honestly it's a prettier building from the outside than in, I'd rather look at it from the park across the street but maybe that doesn't count as a date and there's also the whole conversation thing and I can only regurgitate so much trivia about church architecture before I start to gag on my own pretentiousness.

So sploo has ashley as his lifetime love interest. What's the love life of roshambo like? Any lucky ladies in your life?

2016-02-15 at 7:29 AM UTC in I'm not very smart anymore

Lanny Bird of Courage

Drinking the blood of european teens has been known to do that to you. It's also a potent aphrodisiac, watch out.

2016-02-15 at 7:26 AM UTC in An Unresponsive Port

Lanny Bird of Courage

I think -SpectraL is a bot Lanny wrote to post retarded shit over and over again in every thread

An interesting prospect. Probably wouldn't be hard. Google the title of every T&T thread, compose a post from a random link on the third page, maybe markov chaining to make an incoherent oneliner that sounds vaguely technical if you don't have context. Then sentiment analysis on every post the quotes the first one, negative sentiment gets the stock "you don't scare me" or "I didn't fall off the turnip truck yesterday", positive gets a random non sequitur story from the "glory days" which is obvious micropenis compensation or a random screencap of totse that doesn't mean anything.

I think it could work.

Sorry spec, if this pans out your services will no longer be required.

2016-02-15 at 7:09 AM UTC in The retarded thread: Fuck, §m£ÂgØL made one first edition

Lanny Bird of Courage

Create a new alternative for the tribe and finally. Spit in the face of biology and society. This is the superior path. It reminds me of reading about Marx's circle of philosophers and whoever else was in it. Ah, here it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Freien

Lol, I didn't realize Max Stirner and Marx hung out. I knew they were contemporaries but not that they had ever met.

Lanny, imagine this. And, hey, I read every one of your lengthy drunken/methed up rants and have no problem getting through it, even in my state, if you have a problem reading through this at an acceptable rate you need to work on your reading speed and ability to sustain attention. Now, there would still be the issue of whether this is worth reading (boring) or irrelevant to you, but the same is true from me to you: You eventually become well off enough to be able to afford a nice size home in a good neighborhood where many of your friends live, or can at least access rapidly enough. You've set it up with a banquet table, open kitchen, and nice recreation area (video games, other items for social events/group activities, drug/alcohol bar). Due to not having children, family, or a wife, or if you have a wife you've found someone who is similar to you, has similar traits, worldview, ideals, and is open to the following idea, and you're still able to have an area you can retreat to when you desire privacy. This region is always open at any time for whoever you've selected to use, let's say using a fingerprint system for safety. Fears of theft would be unfounded if you had selected high quality people in a good neighborhood, educated, lack of financial problems, and not having sociopathic or kleptomaniacal traits or some other form of mental illness/instability that would be cause for concern (mean world syndrome, cognitive biases, risks generally being greatly overestimated, particularly by women, especially those with children, on average). Considering the quality of the average person, even above average, which, using IQ as a proxy, would simply be anyone over 100, a low bar, even the average college graduate, I wouldn't blame the majority of people for not being open to this idea, for their concerns. God, particularly for the lower classes, those poor fools, this would never work for them and the people they have available. But were elitist here, we only want the best.

Wait, so I was with you for the "read my post" part, and then it went into me fanfic (which sounds pretty cool but I don't know what it has to do with anything) and then it's women and the proles are inhuman fools? I'm kinda confused. Like I get each point individually, but I'm failing to see the relationship.

*Only a tiny fraction, Buddhist monks/hermits, members of other religions consumed by some ecstatic rapture, usually described as a feeling of connection or oneness to god, or a feeling of deep meaning or love mediated by some icon in their fables, most likely due to mental illness, but, hey, let's be honest, genuinely being able to believe something of that nature could make you genuinely blissful. I suppose you would then question whether it would be worth deluding yourself. Even then, Buddhism would be a better path and it wouldn't require isolation. As to the concept you've brought up before of being able to choose your own mental state, there's still an underlying biological framework, we evolved so that certain things make us happy, and there are still going to be limitations, channels you're essentially following. Even if you were pushing a boulder up a hill, you'd have to convince yourself and truly believe there was some deeper meaning to it, that it was amounting to something, contributing to the advancement of the human race, the joy/well being/utility of others; and this would essentially be a delusion, and it's questionable whether everyone would have the capacity for it, then you'd have to decide why you would even want to, and whether you could do so without essentially going mad, which would bring a host of other problems.

So the pleasure/reality tradeoff is always going to be a point of tension but it comes back to the "useful lie" situation I mentioned earlier. I think we can agree, at least on an intellectual level, that there is no transcending human subjectivity. There may well be an external world that closely fits our mental models but it's still incoherent to talk about an objective experience. The only things we'll ever have direct interaction with are our experiences. That's pretty much the gist of what defines an empiricist (interesting since it's almost opposite to the usage of "empirical" as a synonym for "science stuff"). Given that, so long as delusion or mental illness or any other functioning of the mind does not cause meaningfully harmful state-change in whatever level of external world we want to suppose, we can find no reason to find fault with it. If my subjective experience is of being a maniacal tyrant taking immense pleasure from the suffering of others but my objective actions, for some reason or another, are of a doctor or a great writer or inventor then how can we say that discongruency between reality and mental experience is wrong, or undesirable?

Of course there's the question of what our power to cultivate those acceptable deviations between experience and biologically implied value judgments are (and I'd argue there's a long history of this being something within the reach of the everyman, not prescribing any particular lifestyle) but if you put that aside you should realize there's no rational objection to be had. Since Socrates we've been carrying the albatross of The Truth around our collective cultural necks, and the truth is important, but conflating it with goodness has been a bane upon our people. Socrates was a man so concerned with the truth, with shoving it in other peoples faces, he managed to get himself democratically voted to die. The Apology may be a seminal work even now but it didn't convince many Athenians and while foundational I don't think it convinces many moderns either. The stoics on the other hand, they didn't have anyone go get crucified for their ideals before that was the cool thing to do but sometimes I think in a few generations of, as far as we can tell, genuinely happy human beings, not through ignorance but willful happiness, may have been a better thing that anything philosophy jesus ever gave us.

So, wouldn't that seem ideal? Like, imagine this by your university, so you could draw in your favorite professors and students, just seek out people to abduct into your inner circle, which is even easier when you have someone with you. Ideally they would filled the hell out of the bay (opportunity cost, pollution and inefficiency caused by using bridges instead of what could have been roads/highways or mass/rapid transit going straight across, greater area for housing and business development, the bay being a lousy area for wildlife anyway (fucking environmentalists, fuck them!), this would more than have justified it, but of course people are fucking retarded and don't think like economists/rationalists) so you could have a rapid route straight to Berkeley, particularly UC Berkeley, as well, maybe a bit of Emeryville and downtown Oakland too.

As opposed to being in some boring fucking suburb people choose for their children, because they think it's a good environment for them, a good "family environment", school district often heavily factoring into it. Pair up and team off. There are so many problems with the idea of having children, I'm an avowed anti-natalist and would not have biological children simply on this principle, I truly believe it is immoral and would be willing to sacrifice any joy, the experience, any advantages of the natural process (Filthy and animalistic and mainly for the women, the fucking women!).

So are you hyping the suburbs or not? Either way, I'm happy to pay the toll for urban living as long as it stays the same. And when it gets ruined there's always Portland, or Seattle, or whatever other city becomes a hub for the things that make SF appealing. I do think the "work in the city, live in the suburbs" lifestyle is kinda harmful. I don't think I'll ever have a kid (posted about the subjective reasons for this before but it felt incoherent, ultimately I'm not an antinatalist but I am a eugenicist. More of me is not what I'd like to see in the world) but if I did I'd send them to school in the city. If I'm going to be in a place, live there, make my living there, it would seem disingenuous to act like it's not good enough for children. If I make money somewhere and I fail to ensure its habitability, or my government fails to extract the resources from me to do the same, then there's a deeper problem that divestment is only going to pass onto someone more poorly equipped to deal with it.

Remember, only 6% or unmarried women in their 40s don't have children, so don't think it can't happen to you. If you genuinely don't want them you're going to have a hard time finding someone compatible, a rationalist female, because there are immense on average differences and strong biological drives.

And tremendously lower numbers of women were in the workplace 50 years ago. Someone then could have said "women have such strong biological drives to stay out of the workplace that they'll never be significantly represented there" and they would have been dead wrong. Yes biological pressures exist that affect our behavior but so do social pressures, the latter of which is amenable to intra-generational and human driven change. It is also empirically more powerful since we can find all sorts of divergences between biological drives and social drives wherein humans largely conform to the social model. Tabla rasa or no, human history is a history of curbing ("sublimating") our natural inclinations.

There are so many problems, grievances, I have with the idea of having children. It's a generic route that does not appeal to me and I want nothing to do with it. Jesus, just think of the whole process, you're bringing someone who had no need to exist into the world to fulfill your own selfish desires, the desire to be needed, to evoke emotions in you, give you something to nurture, there's the opportunity cause argument for immorality

Do you actually believe that? All of our ideas evolve with time of course, but last I remember you thought morality just didn't fly, looked at the is/ought gap and sat down with the conclusion that there was nothing more to be said. Has that changed?

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/...utiful_bu.html

Bleh, I don't know if I should pity the author for being such a profoundly broken human being or hate him for being so inauthentic. I don't know Bryan Caplan from a hole in the ground and have no idea what he did to consider himself "elite" but even putting aside the issue of how one proposes to elevate their situation without incurring infrastructural debt to the system that assigns them their wealth there's still no logic to connects "I have material resources to isolate myself" to "I'm going to blind myself to the condition of other human beings". And the tacit implication that being disadvantaged somehow entails greater responsibility to the community is not only absurd but frankly disgusting.

"America's a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there"

I always assume the right's chest beating over "making place great again" is disingenuous rhetoric but thinking about this I really hope people really are deluded enough to believe that. Because the alternative, "place is broken, not my problem" is tantamount to malice.

2016-02-15 at 4 AM UTC in An Unresponsive Port

Lanny Bird of Courage

all paping is going to do is test connection establishment, won't tell you anything about the service

the only real way to get anything out of it is to try and guess what protocol it expects and throw data at it until it responds - first thing I'd try is just send some linefeeds via tcp then udp if you get no response, then as sophie suggested, try to guess the service based on the port and send a command in that protocol to see if you get a response. it might be worth using wireshark or tcpdump to inspect the initial connection, as the connect response from the server may give clues as to what the service is.

This is the correct answer, paping doesn't tell you anything above and beyond that you can connect on a port, it's anyone's guess what the protocol is. Spectral just copy pastes things to try to seem smart.

I've never heard of FCP before today so I can't give any specific advice there. One thing you probably know but is worth pointing out anyway: there's no necessary relationship between port numbers and the protocol the listening service speaks. Almost anything will let you pick the port it serves on and some things will specifically choose random ports (this was a quasi-popular thing with video games in the era where LAN gaming was still more popular than matchmaking for whatever reason). I imagine tooling exists for this type of situation, something to test some list of known protocols against a given target, but I'm not sure what it would be. The ole "serve it on a non-standard port" is considered security through obscurity and has been out of fashion as a security measure for a while now.

2016-02-14 at 9:52 PM UTC in Petition to ban Sploo, Rocklin, Sophie, Bill Krozbyler, Idio, Dissociator, Lanny and Arnox

Lanny Bird of Courage

2016-02-14 at 9:50 PM UTC in Wrote a new love letter to Ashley

Lanny Bird of Courage

Corporate backstabbing, possibly other events related to drugs, leads to you losing your job or becoming demoted/reprimanded, which leads to an emotional outburst/childish hissyfit, possibly influenced by drugs or stress from your father dying, then you become unemployed and spiral into a cycle of depression, alcoholism, and isolation, ending up like me.

Not outside the realm of possibility, although I could probably burn a lot of professional bridges and still be employable. I really don't need to be poor to destroy myself, might actually help with the whole substance abuse thing. Woke up this morning, checked my phone, bad news as always. I laid in bed for a few minutes before the prospect of having to write and deliver a eulogy occurred to me. How is this a thing? In what world do people who just lost a loved one want to go deliver a speech about them over a corpse? The tradition was either conceived by sociopaths or there's some fundamental element of the grieving process I'm missing here because even the thought of having to deal with a funeral makes me want to grab a handle, set everything I own on fire, and go set up camp under the nearest freeway.

Ehh, no real chance of doing it, the math doesn't work. But who knows, you may be right, maybe all it takes is the right nudge on the right day to see how far the rabbit hole goes. That's a fun thought.

2016-02-14 at 9:22 PM UTC in What are you listening to right now, space nigga?

Lanny Bird of Courage

Blue Flowers-Dr. Octagon

Haha, I used to love Dr. Octagon. I think that was probably the first hiphop album I ever enjoyed unless you count like singles off Late Registration era Kanye.

Anyway, I'm listening to Turnover's Peripheral Vision, a release that really came out of left field to be a fan favorite and popped up on a lot of 2015 AOTY lists. It's doesn't do anything new per se but it's kind of the perfect storm of great execution and authenticity that makes it an instant classic. In particular the combo of syrupy guitars that are a shoegaze staple and pop-esq hooks that shine through in all the right places makes for something that's immediately accessible but still holds a few surprises, subversions of each genre it draws from:

2016-02-13 at 8:04 AM UTC in The retarded thread: Fuck, §m£ÂgØL made one first edition

Lanny Bird of Courage

The fact that "uncle tom" is considered a slur these days is kinda odd. I wonder how many people who use it that way undersand what its supposed to mean.

2016-02-13 at 4:35 AM UTC in I think about killing myself a lot

Lanny Bird of Courage

For a lot of years I had this thing where I'd remember some awkward and embarrassing or guilty moment in my past and just feel terrible about it, which is fairly standard I think, we all cringe at our younger selves a bit, but I developed the habit of responding to memories like that by imagining myself dying. Like I'd be walking along, remember that time I lied about watching whatever TV show my 10 year old friends were talking about and got caught, and in response picture the nearest person to me pulling out a gun and shooting me in the head. Or I'd think about jumping out in front of a car or something. That's kind of a mild example of social embarrassment but it was one of a handful of things that really bugged me for whatever reason, a couple of them actually being pretty grim. I think the logic behind it was that creating as immediate of a fear of death as possible would be enough to trigger some part of the fight/flight response and I'd be able to forget whatever I had just thought, which sounds kinda similar to what you're talking about. I did this from grade school until I was like 21.

Eventually it occurred to me (during a trip actually) that that seemed really unhealthy. I made a concerted effort, when I remembered something awkward/painful like that, to engage with the memory and be like "yeah, I did that, I'm responsible for that, but I can't change it". It was actually a pretty hard habit to break because it required I acknowledge something I really didn't want to but I found that as I did so those moments of shame or embarrassment stopped being a cause for anxiety. The stupid things I can laugh about now and the worse ones I still regret but at least I can admit to.

I don't know if any of that is relevant to you, but I think if it is then you're better off engaging with the awful things you're afraid of, even if that's painful to do so, than to be like "well if that happens I'm calling it quits". The stoics had some interesting ideas around preparing yourself for the worst. I think it was Epictetus in particular who advocated always contemplating the worse possible outcomes to a situation so that if it is realized it will be defanged, he thought that our emotional states are fundamentally self-determined and if we refuse, in advance of an outcome, declare ourselves destroyed or crushed by a particular turn of events, then such an outcome won't have power over how we feel. I'm not sure doting on the worst is always the answer but if we place anything as outside the real of "I can deal with that", if we refuse to even contemplate some things, then all we're doing is building it up as the thing that will be our undoing when there's no necessary reason to.

2016-02-13 at 3:58 AM UTC in Nihilism

Lanny Bird of Courage

How many of you are nihilists? I'm a nihilist as well as an atheist. After decades of intensive study in physics, philosophy and theology, I reject the concepts of God and meaning.

Rejecting meaning categorically seems strange, I don't think even most nihilists would agree. The fact that human communication seems to work means something is being exchanged when you, say, post a thread here and get responses that are relevant (at least informed by what you posted). If it's not meaning that we share through communication then what? "Information" obviously isn't a sufficient answer, we can exchange information without sharing whatever it is that makes communication useful (you could have posted a random string, people do from time to time, a string of the same length as your post would definitionally contain more information but less "something"(presumably meaning)).

If you mean you only reject privileged or "ultimate" meaning then you seem to need to find a reason why the appropriate move is to throw your hands up and settle at nihilism as opposed to other philosophical frameworks ala exestentialism that assume all the same facts but seem to offer us some actually useful insight into the human condition?

2016-02-13 at 3:19 AM UTC in The retarded thread: Fuck, §m£ÂgØL made one first edition

Lanny Bird of Courage

wtf Why did I smoke weed. I'm all antsy and paranoid. I feel like I need a beer to mellow myself out.

Same, hard for me to enjoy weed on its own but one hit and N drinks makes for a pretty good buzz.

Another day I won't remember, another day I wished away.
Tedious days punctuated by dismay,
everyday feels the same.

It tickles me that you seem to like crywank. Pity sex is in the same genre in terms of being "so bad it's good" plus severe depression:

and Have a Nice Life's Deathconsciousness is also considered to be essential depression-core while being, musically, a really interesting album (a genre-buster if there ever was one).

2016-02-12 at 5:52 AM UTC in What are you hacking on?

Lanny Bird of Courage

There's this dumb proprietary DB we use at work and the only way to query it is through this shitty late 90s era windows legacy app. All it does is send off SQL and wait for a response. And since it's an ugly ass GUI there's no way to automate anything with it. People ask me to run daily reports using this thing which is a drag. I'm working on a CLI client to the same DB that will, gods willing, at least let me rig this thing up to a cronjob and take out some of the tedium of generating reports done.

The more interesting project I'm working on is an implementation of Yinsh. I'm trying to make it as purely functional as possible (drawing to the screen is obviously not pure, but everything up to rendering is) and that's pretty fun. I have the rules implemented and a 2D representation of the game but now I want to write a webGL frontend to it because I want to do at least one 3D graphics project before I die.

2016-02-12 at 5:10 AM UTC in The retarded thread: Fuck, §m£ÂgØL made one first edition

Lanny Bird of Courage

Lanny, what do you think about this?

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/...erring-it.html
http://bain4weeks.com/

I've never heard of a college that doesn't have a residency requirement (apparently this Excelsior doesn't though). Still, pretty sure CLEP doesn't exist for anything beyond GE requirements tier stuff, english comp, 200 level math, stuff like that. It is a much faster way to earn credits, I think everyone should do it because most of GE is stupid anyway (although it was what got me into my first phil course which I suppose I should be grateful for that) but really the only part of an undergraduate education that I think justifies the institution anymore is upper division courses that tend to be more free form, (much) more challenging and if you're going to skip that then it's not even worth spending $20 on. That may not be true for everyone, you can still hack it in my field without a degree so maybe there's a more meaningful value in the accreditation but "at what cost?" etc.

Going beyond that, I wonder if you could somehow manage to weasle into a master's program where you'd have access to much higher quality classes, environment, and peers, with the stupid people having largely been weeded out.

Couldn't ever see it working, graduate admissions are based heavily on recommendations, which you of course can't get with CLEP (if that plan could work at all). And they are checked, there are people employed for the express purpose of validating these things.

A 3D printer seems like it would be perfect for making a replication mold, but I don't have access to one or any experience.

Noisebridge has a 3D printer you could use, I did to fab some custom keycaps a while. It's a weird place, not really my cup of tea, but it's a 3D printer when you need it. Minimal issue for the socially anxious since everyone there is top-tier autistic. Acknowledging the existence of other humans almost seems like a faux pas.

2016-02-11 at 2:52 AM UTC in Wrote a new love letter to Ashley

Lanny Bird of Courage

How much did you take? I've had days where the hangover felt toxic. Literally like I was poisoned. I've only had this after dosing big, though. Like >3g. I have developed a great sensitivity for the effects and really feel them immediately. The peak is delayed as fuck, though. Sometimes 10 hours after the onset. It is a weird drug. I haven't been able to get a consistent result from it in years of taking it.

Like 1.75g over a couple of hours. No usage in several months but I imagine the alcohol cross tolerance was non-negligible.

I ended up needing to head out to work while still really nauseated so I smoked some pot and went to work, I figured I could pass it off as a regular hangover and that would be better than throwing up on my keyboard. Had this stupid training course thing that was super boring and I couldn't take it so I ended up zoning out and playing flash games for the whole thing. The person sitting next to me kept giving me the evil eyes but I was too out of it to give a shit.

2016-02-10 at 4:51 PM UTC in Wrote a new love letter to Ashley

Lanny Bird of Courage

That's a bummer.

I was like "Oh shit, there must be some new meth analogue." when I saw that wall and what you quoted.

Yeah, that would be pretty sweet, methposting is one of life's greatest pastimes. Jesus though, I woke up like 12 hours later still feeling it a bit and with waves of crippling nausea (although I did have a cup of coffee on an empty stomach which wouldn't cause this but certainly isn't helping either). Is this normal? I knew about the long half life and slow onset but I didn't think there'd be a considerably worse hangover relative to other gaba drugs.

2016-02-10 at 9:47 AM UTC in How did you get your username?

Lanny Bird of Courage

What did you think of the 200whatever Rob Zombie remake?

How do you think Halloween stacks up against more critically acclaimed Carpenter films ala The Thing?

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