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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • Slavery in the US before the civil war didn’t happen in a vacuum. There were slaves in the south that didn’t consume anything, producing goods that in a large part were exported to britain. And the money from that was used to buy more slaves and land. But some of it was used to buy goods and expertise from the north that the slave economy was lacking, which in turn drove industrialization in the north.

    But i stand by my point that over time the artificially low prices due to slave labor causes outflows of money from the rest of the world, depriving workers in other countries of money/wages and causing them to spend less. So all those slaves would overproduce things that there isn’t demand anymore and it’s still worse for the rich fucks than if they had paid slaves a fair wages.

    Just to be clear, I’m not saying such a system can’t exist or work, just that in the long run it’s worse for everyone, even the rich who thrive on exploiting poor people.

    Sadly the billionaire class don’t seem to understand this and there’s not much to do other than teaching them by force every 50-150 years.


  • Well, profitable in the short term. If the lowly peons don’t have money because you took it all, they cant spend it on stuff from your factories and your profit goes down and everything grinds to a halt. of course you can try to sell it to other countries, which fucks over their economies and makes them more susceptible to populism/facism (well after an initial phase of excitement over those sweet cheap imports) and then it’s facism all around and everyone is fucked. You just need to plan it well enough so you’re on your private island/mars colony with robot butlers by that point



  • ‘Programming from the ground up’ the main idea of this one is to teach programming in a bottom up way, so very low level.

    it’s mostly about teaching (linux) assembly to beginners, so in a way it is just learning a new language. But it’s mainly about understanding low level how a computer works, like registers, kernel calls, how function calls are handled, all for beginners. It’s really easy to pick up.

    Knowing those fundamentals can go a long way in understanding other computing concepts.

    Others that come to mind are :

    • Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems
    • A Philosophy of Software Design
    • Software Architecture: The Hard Parts"







  • I always thought the Mer de Glace at the Mont Blanc illustrates this really well. You arrive and there’s a sign “the glacier was here in 1910” and that’s where tourists back then.

    To get to the actual glacier, you have to eall down many flights of metal stairs for about half an hour and there’s several signs for different years, 1950, 1990, 2002, 2006, 2009, 2012, 2014, 2015, something like this, with the years between each sign getting shorter but the distance staying roughly the same. And from the top it’s really far away.

    Of course, once you actually reach the glacier, you get to the main attraction, a 3m diameter tunnel they bored 100m deep into it as a tourist attraction with ice sculptures inside. Above the tunnel you can see the remains of the tunnel from the previous year, half melted…






  • Just to add to this, because it’s fascinating. GPS satellites signals are about as strong as radiation from a light bulb, 20000km away. The signal that arrives on earth is 20db weaker than the noise floor, so background noise is a lot stronger than the signal is.

    The way it works is that the background noise is random and the signal is repeated many times a second, so you can split the signal and add it together. The random background noise averages out and you’re left with a strong signal. But due to this, it’s enough to have a very weak signal that adds non random noise on the correct frequency for it to just break.

    And actually what I desribed above is just the first layer of a GPS signal, it gets a lot more complicated with signals within signals, it’s pretty crazy how well it works. this is an amazing write uo on how the signal actually works, in case anyone is interested