agentwiggles
$35 on some level seems like a great deal for something that can save a life (or even 2!) - I just worry that for the crowd who really needs it the most, $35 might be tough to part with. (I realize that a lot of harm reduction programs hand it out for free, though).
Still, it's extremely encouraging to see that overdose rates are falling this much. I spent a little time a few months ago watching some of Andrew Callaghan's videos covering homelessness and open air drug markets and it's grim out there.
The previous project I was on involved a "monorepo" using Nx (which sucks, imo), and a crazily frustrating zeal for abstracting every detail so that any given file contains 4 lines and finding out what anything fucking does involves opening 19 files and testing how many things my aging ex-stoner brain can hold in short term memory before the plates stop spinning and I catch myself wishing I dug ditches for a living, because at least you know when the ditch is done and there's no failed-upward idiot trying to deduplicate every detail of the digging.
So, idk. It can definitely vary.
I don't really drink either, so my vices now are limited to vaping and a very occasional small dose of mushrooms.
/shrug, worse problems to have I guess.
The "mids" I used to smoke back in my teenage years gave a better (read: more fun and relaxing) high than most of the "dank" weed I've smoked as an adult.
It's really nice to have an interface that doesn't require me to try to route audio through my computer. It just works exactly like a (slightly complicated) regular amp all the time, and behaves exactly the same while recording as it does when it's not.
It's got all kinds of built in amp sims and effects, but I play it on the same setting about 95% of the time (I've never been much for tone chasing). But it also has a built in looper, which I use all the time.
I really love the thing, great piece of hardware. It's got some warts but nothing I can't work around.
One of the major problems with prohibition is that it closes off a lot of the avenues we could normally use to reduce harm, while creating a black market and, in the case of the utterly senseless "War on Drugs," pushing tons of people into the criminal justice system and creating a massive industry for incarceration of low-level users. After all this voluntarily created human misery, we've still got a crisis of opioid and other drug abuse in our society, and it's not clear that prohibition does much at all to reduce real rates of usage on the ground. A quick Google suggests that over 100,000 people died of overdoses in 2021.
What a goddamn victory for prohibition.
The decline of tobacco use is proof that there is a better way. It's just harder, takes longer, and, yes, despite the sneers of those who think they know better, has to respect individual liberty.
Cigarettes are some of the best evidence we have that we don't need prohibition to change behavior. We actually are capable of using regulation, taxation, and education to help encourage people to make smart choices on a society-wide scale. It's rare, it takes decades, and boy oh boy do a lot of incentives have to align. But it can be done!
I agree that the image is funny, but it's not the _worst _ way to give someone in need $10.
However, I am somewhat skeptical that this is the case. The odds of encountering a stunningly well engineered annoyance device when stealing are still pretty low, and while thieves aren't known for their competence with statistics, I think that logic is fairly low-hanging fruit.
With sadness, I have to imagine that for every case of a kid or thief being converted to the path of goodness by these boxes, there are just as many who will angrily continue what they're doing as a "fuck you" to those who would impose punishment on them - which seems to be a large part of the ethos that drives these kinds of thefts in the first place.
Still, as I said - it's the level of effort put into the punishment machines, and the extraction of entertainment value from the punishments, that gives me the odd feeling that something about these videos might cross a moral line.
To each their own, I'm not trying to discourage anyone from watching and enjoying the videos. For me personally, they give me more heartache than joy, so I stick to his other videos - despite the rampant exploitation of innocent squirrels ;)
And look - steal a package off a porch, you deserve the ultimately harmless annoyance for sure. But even with that in mind, there's something kind of cruel about the level of effort that's put into the package traps. Once you've found a target that no one will defend, it's just fine to douse them in fart spray and glitter. People cheer because, well, fuck thieves, right?
I get it - I really do. But ultimately, it's fun at the expense of other humans and those videos have always left me feeling a bit gross.
Same way with my guitar - bought pedals, gear, etc for years in high school. Now I have one main guitar and play my amp on the same setting almost every time I play.
Also same deal with all my programming setup shit, I did vim/tmux, played with emacs, and now I almost always just use VSCode.
I guess my archetype is that I like to tinker and fuck around, but once I settle in to something that works for me, I largely lose interest in that, and just do whatever makes for the lowest friction to do the actual thing.
Last time I was on vacation, and might have bought a pack of cigarettes, I decided "hey, why not try a Juul instead," and, the rest is history.
While I'm overall in favor of vapes and think that they're a valuable cessation device, the problem, for me, is that it's all to easy to vape while I work in my home office - no smell, no fire, etc. I think that makes it a lot easier to continually dose nicotine and really settle into addiction. Also, while I'm sure they're safer than cigarettes, I still have doubts that they're safe, and I can't help but think of the attitudes that used to prevail with regards to tobacco back in the 40s and 50s when I hear folks talking about how totally OK for your body vaping is.
I like mushrooms. I enjoy them recreationally a few times a year. I think there are benefits to be derived from their use. I think I've derived some of those benefits. But I also think, sometimes, it's just fucking fun to be high at a concert, and I don't think there's anything wrong with doing that in a responsible and safe manner.
I want to see us move in a less prohibition direction, and I think that legalizing psychedelics for therapy could be a boon for many people. But I would also like to live in a world where I can be trusted to consume an occasional dose of a non-addictive, naturally occurring substance without the whole thing being medicalized, regulated, and only allowed to happen with the guidance of a psychiatrist.
I sort of like the approach Ann Arbor took, where they're not illegal for personal possession and cultivation, but also not legal for sale. Seems like a decent balance for personal responsibility to me.
I truly understand the fear and caution around these substances. They require serious forethought and care to be used safely. But at the end of the day, I know I'm more than capable of that forethought and care and resent being told that I'm not allowed to grow a mushroom because psychedelics are scary.
Unsong is a very idiosyncratic web serial novel by Scott Alexander (the Slate Star Codex/ Astral Codex Ten guy). It's a weird mixture of religion, sci fi, fantasy, comedy, and probably some other genres too. It's among my favorite things I've read, but due to the weirdness might not be for everyone. Still I think most of the HN crowd would appreciate it, it's truly special in my opinion
Because we recognize, as creatures of language, that names have real, true power. There is something so magical and cool about the act of assigning a name to anything, it shapes the way we think about that thing.
In some of my favorite stories, finding somethings "True Name" gives you some form of power over it. That combination of sounds and syllables that lets you grasp something's essence, understand it, hold a whole abstraction in your mind at once - of course that would be something of great power!
I also love the correspondence to mathematics. Think of Maxwell's equations for electromagnetism for an example, or the long quest for a "Unified Theory of Physics". Maybe names need not be words, exactly. Maybe names can be equations, or snippets of music, or any other lossless compression of some deep concept - where, by knowing the name, you gain an understanding of the whole of something without losing anything in the reduction.
Anyway, spiritual mystical hokey pokey mumbo jumbo, I know - but certainly fun to think about!
That's fine, you do you, AFOLs - but the way we played with Lego was we'd get a new set, build it, play with it in that form for a while, and then eventually, it got taken apart for some new idea and thrown into the bin.
There are 2 or 3 30 gallon tubs at my parent's house still filled with Lego, it must be the collected output of at least 100 different sets that were given to us for birthdays, Christmas, and also bought by us when we were old enough to have our own money and young enough to spend it on Lego. We had an air hockey table in the basement that was almost always covered with a landscape of fortresses, spaceships, and weird Bionicle monsters. Good times.
This is suggested semi-facetiously, but at the same time, feels like there's something to it.
Decriminalize, tax, regulate, and focus enforcement efforts on black market dealers.
The waste of human effort and life that has gone into the last 60 years of drug policy is insane to consider. We have got to try _something_ other than what we're doing now with prohibition.