He believes something incredibly toxic and nuts, but I’m not sure it’s exactly that Christianity is “true,” but rather that it’s just so incredibly useful that it might as well be, and therefore it’s not hypocritical to espouse it with gusto, regardless of what you personally think about the supernatural.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-real-stakes-real-story-peter-thiels-antichrist-obsession/
I don’t recall the link for now, but there was a fairly long piece a couple of weeks (months?) ago that went into the Thiel religious awakening. The short version is that he doesn’t necessarily believe in Jesus so much as he believes that organized religion is so important as a binding agent in society that you’re better off pretending to believe in it, advocating for it, and imposing it by force if it seems necessary, all to satisfy the human need for mimesis, or imitative desires and behaviors.
Society’s movement away from Christianity in particular as a uniquely humane and sophisticated global-ready religion means it’s okay to fall back on older “tribal” religious patterns like assertive scapegoating to reimpose the world order. There is room for regions of the world with independent traditions to impose them as a means of having a safe and orderly society, because it allows the Christian region to interact with a relatively small number of competing ideologies, which satisfy similar psychological needs for their populations, and therefore a balance can be maintained. It’s better for the system if most people hold sincere beliefs about the supernatural aspects, but it’s not utterly critical, particularly for elites, as long as folks legitimately buy into the societal repercussions of failing to rely on religion for social control. It’s like Pascal’s wager on meth, which is appropriate because a lot of it dates back to a German guy who was a Nazi apologist through most of the thirties until being discarded by them right before WW2. Some of this is strictly IIRC, so be on notice, LOL.
Conveniently, all this allows the Christianized advocates for this worldview to declare any systemic threat to the triumph of their vision for world peace to be accurately-enough referred to as the Antichrist, and the things you’re allowed to do to oppose the Antichrist are quite broad.
JD Vance is thought to be well-ensconced in the ideology.
EDIT: Found it, plus a couple of others that discuss the same thing. Thiel is absolutely nuts, but not quite the way he’s sometimes portrayed.
This is interesting to consider. One of the reasons car centric countries make their peace with fatalities is that there is a regime and cultural expectations in place for assigning blame and imposing punishment, both criminal and civil. We know that other drivers are assholes and idiots, but there is the grim solace that if something happens they (or their insurers) will compensate us and that if it’s bad enough they may even go to jail. Furthermore, we presume that the assholes and idiots know that as well, and they will at least try not to do something stupid, especially since they could get hurt/killed too.
Given the available tech, a system relying on driverless cars is pretty much guaranteed to be safer overall, but people will resist it if there is a sense that no identifiable human is incentivized to minimize harm. If somebody gets killed in an accident and you just have Waymo (or whoever) stonewalling any efforts at compensation or justice, it becomes further dehumanizing and people will continue to prefer to take their chances with the assholes and idiots who might actually be held to account.
You come up with a regulatory regime that ensures proper insurance coverage with equal or preferably lesser friction (lord knows the American system has its issues), and also meaningful punishments to actual humans for reckless code/maintenance/routing/etc, then cultural acceptance will come.
Sounds like he’s made peace with its living on in forks as well. Nice to see he’s doing okay.
Can’t contaminate the motor oil, soot, rubber, broken glass, microplastics, litter, and accidentally-spilled coffee with purposely-spilled coffee! I hope the enforcement officers didn’t damage their pearls, or let them slip into the drain, from all that clutching.
More seriously, this smacks of citation quotas to me.
I wonder if this is just because it was made cheaply in Asia and not designed for the average heft of a trumpet.
I’m sure it’s this. Everything about this, down to the variable delays that different customers endure, screams out that this is a shady, shoestring operation stalling until they finally hit minimum order quantity with their drop-shipper in China.
My groom’s cake at my wedding was Tux.
I’m not even particularly hard core, lol. I still dual boot my desktop because of CAD, and I have to look up most console commands more complex than cd and cp and apt, but I’ve been using Linux off and on for over twenty years.
I certainly didn’t mean to imply they’re actually incorrect, just that presumably working to fix it was part of their mandate, and the frank admission that they didn’t magically fix everything is kinda darkly funny.
I did particularly like this:
“We did not make this organisation insolvent, it was already insolvent,” the management committee said on Sunday.
Saying that in an indignant Australian accent makes it feel like it came straight out of some antipodean cringe-humor sitcom (FYI “Fisk” is pretty good!).
My theory is that it’s less that they’re truly dumb as fuck, but rather that they’re not particularly special – or does that make them dumb as fuck, LOL? – and there’s almost a dunning-kruger like effect. They see how powerful they are, able to act with near-impunity, and they don’t realize how much of that has to do with whatever distribution of power and hesitance to use state violence exists in the flawed but democracy-ish systems they’re currently dominating.
You’re not wrong, yet this is still quite awful.
Somebvody posted a link from Australian ABC about this story, but it was American ABC.
Thanks, Richard.
I learned to shoot at Boy Scout camp when I was about 13. We shot .22 long rifle and 20 gauge shotguns. Many of my friends hunted (never appealed to me) and learned even earlier.
For the layout, KLE is the old standby and is used by several other tools. You can then import THAT into a plate generator, the one HERE by ai03 (fairly well known designer in the small world of keyboard people) is probably the best and most reliable. That will let you generate DXF files for your cutter. At it’s simplest, a switch plate, a bottom plate, and some standard brass standoffs are enough to make the physical structure. Once you have the dimensions, though, it’s not TOO hard to design a 3D printed case or a more sophisticated set of slices to go on your laser (LibreCAD, Inkscape, or even direct in Lightburn IIRC), and acrylic stack cases are very much a thing, though not so much in vogue as commercial products anymore. The board in this post started as a completely Masonite build, because my little 5W diode could cut it reasonably well. It was only in the last week or so that I took it apart and replaced the laser-cut standoff spacers with a 3D printed version with a sidewall to make it look slightly more like a finished keyboard.
For wiring, I sort of play in the kiddie pool. Most of my boards are hand-wires, and there as many tweaks to the formula as there are makers, but THIS older set of posts from Matt3o (another well known designer) is as good as any for the basics. I find Raspberry Pi Picos and other RP2040 clones easier to work with, but YMMV and the concepts are the same. I have done two PCBs. Both of them are just traces and through-holes. The first one just has a spot to run wire to a Pi Pico or other dev board. The other adds a few spots for indicator LEDs and actually crams in a spot for Pi Pico compatible board, which means it’s easier to keep my firmware on hand. For firmware, KMK is in interpreted python and is very easy to set up, but QMK and its tweaked versions for the VIA and VIAL graphical remapping software are more sophisticated and extensible.
I had to learn KiCAD well enough to muddle through (and the second PCB does have a few errors, but not enough that I had to scrap them, thank goodness). More clever people than I, actually design proper PCBs with the microcontroller and necessary components included during fabrication, and there are custom keyboards all over github with KiCAD files to look through (the “GH60” is the classic example). There are even plugins to take a schematic view in KiCAD (the line diagrams of circuits) and populate the actual physically-representative footprints based on KLE data. There are also customized libraries of keyboard-switch footprints that are a little nicer than the ones built into KiCAD (though there ARE usable ones built in).
The keyboard is one I designed myself. It doesn’t use any stabilizers, the extra parts needed to make long keys press evenly. I did this by, well, not using any long keys. Otherwise, I did as much as I could to keep it pretty mainstream, unless you touch type lots of numerical digits or need your arrow keys in the traditional shape.
It has a bigger brother with a numpad, but I had to order 5 PCBs, so for this one I simply snapped off the numpad and used a wire to bridge the one broken connection. It’s fairly low profile, using the narrowest height I could cram everything into and using switches that are reduced height above the “plate” but are otherwise normal mechanical keyboard switches. I got blank low-profile keycaps and designed my own legends and used a laser engraver (instead of an iron or press) on Cricut’s infusible ink markers. They photograph better than IRL, but they did come out pretty well. There is a Raspberry Pi Pico wired to the circuit board and running custom firmware (KMK). The rest is made of painted Masonite hardboard and 3D prints.
If you wanna know you can type in about:support into the firefox address bar and check if HARDWARE_VIDEO_DECODING says available. Cool stuff either way tho, thanks for sharing :)
Ahh, well in that case, it appears not, at least for this distro. “Runtime | unavailable | Force disabled by gfxinfo”
That’s the beauty here. I don’t HAVE to write anything, so it’s not technically a failure if I don’t, and either way I got to do something amusing and pointless with a piece of technology!
I’m not sure, but there’s also the Postmarket Arch-based distro that has a more polished website, and its page for this class of devices says 3D acceleration is generally working. Whether that extends to video decoding in the browser, I am not sure. I guess I could pull up some videos and see if they play well, LOL. “Jailbreaking” tablets and getting an OS someone else worked out how to install onto them is towards the edge of my technical skillset, TBH.
If you would like my thoughts on the Shakespeare authorship question or why The Last Jedi is unfairly maligned, I can help you out all day, however.
A Dog Took My Face And Gave Me A Better Face To Change The World: The Celeste Cunningham Story