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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • I read left hand of darkness and loved it. It was my first Le Guin. I had heard a lot about the gender themes, and was surprised to find how it does not it you over the head at all. It was a great adventure and just really stuck on your head thinking. The dispossessed was another one like that. Its message is a little bit more obvious, but is an incredibly well built world that really is anarchist. All of her works I’ve read so far are great to read. There are extremely strong themes, but she seems to present it a bit more as a take it or leave it approach than a lot of the other (cough, Heinlein) I grew up reading.






  • There’s a bit more as well. Corporations have been closing their research labs over several decades and chasing short term profits over longer-term-payoff research. All that risk is passed onto university research labs (and the grad students that actually do the work) and heavily subsidized by the government. There is then little to no incentive for a professor to care about teaching and is rewarded for bringing in grant money. Students incentives are papers (and the prestige that follows) and the machine is born.

    Basically, the neoliberal project is moving the risk of research out of corporations and the public pays for it.





  • I completely understand what you’re saying. It works for synchronizing well as things run on an absolute time. However, you are still going to do a localization shift, and you end right back up with time zones.

    In your example, you work at 1500. Cool. I need to coordinate with Bob from Bulgaria. Its also 1500 there. Is he working? Who knows. I need to get out ye old solar map and find out. Or, I’m flying to Tokyo. My body is going to follow its diurnal cycle and want to wake up when the sun rises. We are still going to have a local abstraction of what the day hours are that shift with respect to longitude. A universal time doesn’t get rid of that. I agree that flight coordinating would be easier. But, if I know I want to arrive somewhere in the morning, right now I sort by AM arrival, and boom I’m done. In a UTC system, I now have to go look up the solar morning hours for my destination sort by time, find the window I want to arrive in, and then I can be good. I still might not have a good sense of what is super early versus what is closer to middle of the day.



  • I mean you’re not wrong, but its also a larger societal thing which ends up meaning government who negotiates such things. Its not just work, but school start times and bus schedules, public transport times, parking fees/times. It balloons out a bit, so its easier to have some official stance. However, it doesn’t have to be federal, and could just be local municipal governments.

    In general, though. Yes, individuals could just shift what they do, and this is exactly what humans did for a long time. The industrial revolution changed us so that we needed to coordinate and regiment societal schedules, and here we are now.




  • I thought that the assembler is a specific program that translates mnemonics into the corresponding machine code. Perhaps in early computing this was done by hand so a person was the assembler (and worked in assembler), but now that is handled by software (and supports various macros). So programming in assembly would generate a stream of text that must be assembled by an assembler. (Although I have heard people refer to programming in assembler as well, just not often.)