What are /r/ranprieur's favorite Products & Services?

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From wikiquote:

"My people and I," he said, "have come to an agreement which satisfies us both. They are to say what they please, and I am to do what I please."

-Attributed by Thomas Babington Macaulay, Life of Frederick the Great (1882), pg 48.

-Repeated by Thomas Babington Macaulay in a review of "Frederick the Great and his Times. Edited, with an Introduction, by Thomas Campbell, Esq". Edinburgh Review, ISSN 1751-8482, 04/1842, Volume 75, Issue 151, p. 241-242, though it does not appear in the original work.

-Knowles, Oxford Dictionary Of Quotations (5th Edition) (Oxford University Press, 1999)

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Frederick_II_of_Prussia

Over the last few years, the subreddit where I've found the most good links is probably /r/Foodforthought.

Hacker News always has a few good links that you can understand without being a programmer.

It's a pretty well-known strategy for people who aren't very interested in stuff and value their time and energy more than money. The strategy is detailed over various blogs and books probably the most famous being the book "Your Money or Your Life". Blogs include the defunct "Early Retirement Extreme" and "Mr. Money Mustache". It's all about saving WAY more than you spend.

I think it is because we have hit "peak everything." New movies suck, they are almost always rehashes of some older plot. New music sucks, because there are only so many ways it can be arranged and still sound appealing. Those ways have been pretty well explored. Computers are at the peak speed they can run at, as long as the physics don't change. They can only add more processing cores, as transistors cannot get any smaller or faster. Moore's Law is pretty much done. Cars are about as powerful and sophisticated as they will ever get, short of the self-driving feature presently in the works. I can't remember an invention that really blew me away since the DVR came out in 1999. If you browse the kickstarter website, you can quickly see how devoid people are of good, original ideas. The Hack-a-Day prize winner last year was for homebrew satellite tracking stations. Seriously? That's the most original idea anyone could come up with? The Archdruid even says we've reached peak meaninglessness.

> Quite simply, you don't just port something for Linux because you have hundreds of different flavors of Linux out there and they are not binary compatible. Source-compatible yes; binary compatible no. So a vendor ports a Linux version, and rolls it into a binary package that will run on the current version of Ubuntu. That's what it'll run on; the current version of Ubuntu. It may not work on the last version or the next; Linux absolutely blows at backwards compatibility. So if they want to keep their software working on Ubuntu they have to roll a new binary every time a new release of Ubuntu hits the streets... and we haven't even gotten into the fact that it's only working on Ubuntu. By contrast, a properly designed (meaning it doesn't fuck with the registry) piece of software for Windows 95 can in most cases be made to run on Windows 10. THAT'S what backwards binary compatibility looks like.

Actually there are now "universal" snap packages (see https://snapcraft.io/), that include all dependencies (although they can use already installed versions if desired) and will run on any computer that has snapd installed.

Linux usage stats have actually been creeping up at last in recent times. It's hard to predict what will happen of course, but the game is far from over. I think as cloud software gets more powerful we're going to find our devices getting 'dumber', and when they do there won't be any point having Windows on them.

I wonder if it would be fair to say that you take a reductionist position w.r.t. the hard problem of conscious? I do not mean this as a pejorative.

>There is no consensus about the status of the explanatory gap. Reductionists deny that the gap exists. They argue that the hard problem reduces to a combination of easy problems or derives from misconceptions about the nature of consciousness. For example, Daniel Dennett (2005) argues that, on reflection, consciousness is functionally definable. On his view, once the easy problems are solved, there will be nothing about consciousness and the physical left to explain.

http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Hard_problem_of_consciousness#Reductionism

I bought Cal Newport's book "So Good They Can't Ignore You" and thought it was pretty paradigm shifting. Instead of thinking "What am I passionate enough about to make a career from?," the idea is "What am I willing to put the time into getting really really good at?"

Then once you've reached a very high level of competency, instead of trading your new skills for higher pay and more responsibility, you trade it for increased autonomy and control over your work, whether that's literally by negotiating with your boss, going freelance, or whatever.

Another idea of his is that passion flows once you have competence and autonomy in your job, assuming that you're not doing something that you think is bad for the world or having to work with people you hate etc. Rather than competence flowing from passion.

It's a good book.

I see UBI of $5000 per month, made possible as people realize money is a made-up thing.

> I see firsthand what happens when they try.

So have I. I used to be a junkie. My buddy died of a heroin OD; my brother died by taking horse tranquilizers; my Dad took a pill (he had terminal cancer). The problem is you. Your society was not worth sticking around for. You need to give us an exit from the neoliberal nightmare world you have created.

Exploding pintos were best handled by word-of-mouth and engineers not working under corporate pressure ...

Anything by Mary Midgley. In her last book, <em>What is Philosophy For?</em> (2018), the 99-year-old wrote: >What makes me write books is usually exasperation, and this time it was a rather general exasperation against the whole reductive, scientistic, mechanistic, fantasy-ridden creed which still constantly distorts the world-view of our age.

The Kindle version of her <em>The Myths We Live By</em> was free last time I checked.

Weakening the grip of materialism isn't really a rabbit hole, it's more like pulling back the curtain on the Wizard of Oz, or backing out of an intellectual cul de sac; or, in Midgley's metaphor, fixing the plumbing. Once it's done, you can pretty much carry on with your day if you want to.

Edit: typo

Two thoughts.

> I don't care who wins either, as long as the game takes place.

Are you James Carse? (His book is a must-read.)

> I could be content picking up litter along the highway too, but it would only be because I gave up on life altogether.

This whole subject reminds me of this talk by Mr. Money Moustache. (aka Peter Adeney.) The sooner you can get rich enough that you don't have to work, the more your work becomes meaningful.

The part at the end of the talk where you compares "work done for love" versus "scammy work" really struck a deep chord with me. The word he pulls out is "authenticity". This guy has it really figured out.

If your values connect to your work, you get meaning from it.

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