I bought a plasma cutter and a GPU. In the past I would get used GPU from eBay because it’s cheaper but the demand for them has made the market a little crazy and there’s very little price difference new vs used (UK). The price performance sweet spot seems to be AMD 9070xt (£550, ouch).

The plasma cutter is an old three phase machine that no one wanted because it’s 400V. However, looking at the circuit diagram there’s very little difference between single and 3-phase configuration so the plan is to convert it to a domestic supply or cannibalise the internals and torch assembly.

I mostly got fired for being a bad employee but my employers were no angels either. One of my first jobs was repairing computers and the money was garbage. Eventually learned that I was the lowest paid in the dept so put a sign on my desk with my salary. It was embarrassing for the manager when clients came to visit so they gave me more money.

It’s ofcom but my phone desperately wants it to be Offcom for some reason

Offcom has been drinking, came home in a blackout and committed domestic abuse of 4chan. Does Offcom even internet? Alternative plot twist, Offcom is trolling 4chan.

I wanna say that Offcom is doing a good job and trying to protect British people in good faith but I feel like they are being used as a cudgel by the British ruling class to advance an anachronistic agenda. Don’t forget, they fired their expert drugs advisor for telling them that MDMA is comparable to horse riding in terms of safety. They want certain things to be true, regardless of the scientific accuracy.

Set up the guillotines

In the UK we have a public petition that triggers a parliamentary debate when the petition attracts 100k signatories. I believe there are similar systems elsewhere.

Haven’t felt the need to block anyone but it’s nice to have the functionality

Would you get the least worst candidate? I would try it.

Another scheme is random selection of a citizen, like jury duty. You have professional civil servants but the leader is randomly selected and if the leader is doing badly it triggers a new selection.

If only someone warned us about uncle Joe ahead of time, like around 2020 when his platform grew exponentially due to COVID misinformation.

Burger King is getting in on the action with a promotional offer called Whooper and fries.

I didn’t know it had a name but marginal utility sounds like the concept behind the early form of eBay, before it became a corporation. You can still find people giving stuff away on there but that sort of exchange has now moved to places like Freegle, Freecycle and Facebook Marketplace, to a lesser extent. What people value has always been a mystery to me, I would be horrible in business. Most of my decisions are pretty much utilitarian, aside from food and drugs. I am happy in a junk yard, salvaging materials and components, that stuff feels under utilised and valuable to me.

It feels like you’re asking what value is. Value is a sentiment that depends on many factors but it eventually decomposes to some utility factor. You could argue that water is not valuable because it is abundant but that depends on context. In the desert it becomes extremely valuable for people to live. It’s difficult to make a numerical assessment of value and measurement implies a level of precision and universality that is inappropriate. We estimate value based on contextual factors such as supply and demand. It’s not a great way to assess it but better than nothing.

I’m always pleased when I buy stone construction materials because they deliver 1000kg of material and it only costs £20. I don’t know of any other material that is seemingly so abundant, inexpensive and useful. I’m not convinced I would feel the same way about a tonne of gold, aside from the scarcity. Maybe I would make a gold toilet and get x amount of fame on social media, that’s apparently extremely valuable.

Making a monthly contribution. Who knows where the money goes but I’ve never heard of a wiki project I disapproved of and there is a lot to like about what they do.

This is a sane way to use LLM. Also, pick your poison, some bots are better than others for a specific task. It’s kinda fascinating to see how other people solve coding problems and that is essentially on tap with a bot, it will churn out as many examples as you want. It’s a really useful tool for learning syntax and libraries of unfamiliar languages.

On one extreme side of LLM there is this insane hype and at the other extreme a great pessimism but in the middle is a nice labour saving educational tool.

Use Wolfram Alpha for mathematics

I spend a lot of time in my workshop. It’s not free but upcycling materials into something new is infinitely satisfying and often saves money.

Drug Science. A campaign to improve drug literacy and advocate for novel therapy, harm reduction, decriminalisation and legalisation via podcasts, mass meetings and seminars by experts in neuroscience, psychopharmakinetics, pharmacology and related fields.

Wikipedia, duh. It works because it’s free of advertising and corporate influence. That costs money and I am a happy subscriber.

Electronic Frontier Foundation. A campaign to defend our right to privacy and freedom from exploitation in the digital space.

Sustrans. A campaign to maintain, improve and extend the alternatives to using cars and make a humane and ecologically sustainable transport network.

Capitalism prevailed during the rise of the internet but correlation is not causation.

Rockets were sent into space and capitalists would surely love to claim that achievement too, unfortunately it was first fascists followed by communists with the capitalists getting the bronze medal. Should we now decide that space flight is fascist-communist? No. Only scientists and engineers know how to do that. Why didn’t Genghis Khan invent the internet? He didn’t have enough capitalists, surely that was the problem.

We can claim anything we like and also retract any statement except when a user claims to be 14. That person remains at age 14 for all time. Is this the logic? What about all the ‘damage’ that was done before they discovered the underage user? Somebody should look into that, they might find themselves face to face with a 51 year old who takes a prescription stimulant every day.

Philosophy gets a bad rap, even by fellow academics sometimes. Commonly cited criticisms are that it has become too prosaic and detached from society at large. Maybe that’s true of some philosophers but I don’t see a problem with people studying something purely for the joy of learning and there are philosophers who do an excellent job of explaining philosophical ideas to lay audiences, Alain de Botton immediately springs to mind. Status Anxiety is among my favourite videos.

The reality is that we have too few people who think about what it means to live a good life and make a wholesome society