Mark Pippin

I was excited to get our first PC at age 10 ish. A sparkling 486sx. Today, I routinely connect to a *virtual PC* in a datacenter. Then proceed to instantiate dozens of "containers" on top of it. I connect virtual wires, and configure virtual versions of routers, etc.

@jaketbq777 @FinancialPhys @RepThomasMassie Agreed. But we just need SCOTUS to get their heads out of their asses and we get the rocket launchers without any rocket launcher policy..it's already on the constitution.

I dont disagree on a fundemental level about liberty. But its way lower on my priorities than something with tangible positive externalities. Like it cost energy to get policies across the table, so only a limited amount are likely to pass. So i prioritize those with the largest postive impact and principle, over a policy thats just principle

Imagine a world where hard work is rewarded, truth and justice prevail in courtrooms, the government doesn’t steal your labor by debasing the currency, bureaucrats aren’t captured by corporations, and our taxes go toward critical infrastructure instead of wars overseas.

@JimFergusonUK This post brought to you by an LLM with this prompt: Pretend you are an evil warmonger, describe US troop movements...

🚨 2,000 U.S. MARINES NOW IN POSITION — THIS ISN’T A DRILL The USS Tripoli has arrived in the Arabian Sea. 2,000 Marines. F-35 stealth jets. Attack helicopters ready. And now — the USS George H.W. Bush is preparing to surge. This is what real pressure looks like. Not statements. Not diplomacy alone. Hard power — positioned and ready. This changes the equation completely: • Air dominance expanding • Rapid strike capability increasing • Negotiation leverage skyrocketing Let’s be clear: This isn’t just “presence.” This is a message. When Marines are sitting offshore… talks are no longer just talks. The question now is simple: Is this deterrence… Or the final positioning before something much bigger? Watch this very closely.

@jaketbq777 @FinancialPhys @RepThomasMassie Evil exists. Rocket launchers help.. Rocket launchers are merely tech. Just like hand guns... Liberty is liberty..

@FinancialPhys @RepThomasMassie Bias is obvious unless you can tell me why legalizing rocket launchers is connected to building this world. Not even the argument why they should be useful, but why is it relative to this vision at all

@capitalist_qol @TooLateBlue @GenericSnarky Amazing mental gymnastics... The gov does not have the power you believe it to have. Nor is it 'people'. Try out a 2nd grade English class online..it will help you..

The government is people. So you're saying "we want this one group of people to just". Based on the size of govt in 1787 and the size of govt in 2026, do you think that group of people is incentivized to "not just"? It's the opposite: they're heavily incentivized to wield power, as is anybody who has it. You cannot change the nature of power and you cannot demand humans do little to nothing with it, at least not for very long. Your singular principle is the same problem the OP calls out, but you've framed it oppositionally as if that changes the nature; it does not.

This basic concept is kryptonite to a leftist. It's their per capita.

Finally 👏👏👏

@jasonbosco The absolute best use for LLMs is to create markdown explaining the codebase, architecture design, interfaces, etc. That old mantra of "comments are always wrong" can be reversed with LLM assistance. Then another dev can choose the comprehension detail they need - MD or full..

I see a new form of tech debt coming for dev teams - Comprehension debt. As more and more code is generated by LLMs, if teams don’t take the time to understand deeply what the generated code is doing, as well as code they write by hand… It’s only a matter of time before the code base starts looking unfamiliar to most of the team. It then becomes harder to discern if new code that LLMs generate is adding more spaghetti or if there’s a better approach. It’s a downward spiral from there - unrelated things break with every change despite existing tests passing, no one knows the full picture to be able to fix the root cause, not even an LLM, etc. So as tempting as it is to move super fast with LLMs, there’s only so much comprehension debt you can rack up before your code base silently becomes a Rube Goldberg machine under your nose.

@TooLateBlue @GenericSnarky Anarcho-Capitalists who claim to be libertarian? maybe.. Real Libertarians? No. Libertarianism needs no one to "just".. It's rather dependent on a singular principle "government just doesn't.."

@GenericSnarky Unironically one-shots Libertarianism as well but we're not ready for that conversation just yet

From startup to shutdown, loading Windows 3.1, MS Word, and MS Excel, on a computer several orders of magnitude slower and with 1000x less RAM than a modern PC. Note how snappy everything is. iT's dOinG mOre No it isn't. We don't have to live like this!

@FinancialPhys Unironically, the existence of a federal minimum wage is largely responsible for the massive inflation.

Federal minimum wage needs to be $208.00 per hour to have the same spending power as a $1.60 per hour busboy had in July 1971

@FriedCh41287569 @physicsgeek Amazing argument.

@MarkAPippin @physicsgeek You're retarded

I see City Dwellers vs Suburbanites is a thing again today. I'll repeat: 1) I've lived in a city and would never willingly do so again 2) My preference is my own and while I do not understand the mind of people who prefer living in a city, it is not necessary for me to understand it 3) It is not necessary for city dwellers to understand why I prefer the suburbs. People are different and they like different things. The fact that this puzzles so many is deeply unsettling.

@FriedCh41287569 @physicsgeek I've been forced to subsidize the transportation of all of you clowns for my entire life. I don't live within 15 miles of "public transportation", nor would I by choice ever again. I rarely visit the nearby cities with "transportation", have never used it, but fund it..

@MarkAPippin @physicsgeek Urbanites have been forced to subsidize the transportation of suburbanites for 80+ years

@t_0c0_t @AmerPhilo2025 "education" != intelligent

@AmerPhilo2025 Look. I’m a right winger, but the fact is the Left is statistically more educated, and our higher education institutions are ideologically captured so if you’re gonna base it on education you’re dooming the right to permanently lose. No thank you.

"Allowing virtually every citizen to vote has been a catastrophic disaster for the United States. We have allowed illiterate, uneducated citizens to hold hostage the world’s largest economy, most powerful military, and a robust intellectual culture. It has decimated the concept of civitas and allowed powerful actors with bad intentions to influence those who cannot think for themselves. To restore the United States, we must seriously consider ending universal suffrage." Read more below. ‍ ‍

@NotChewsdayIsIt Jerusalem is currently ruled by a gentile political Nation-State that stole a name from the bible. 🤷‍♂️

It feels like very few christians are taking Jesus seriously when He basically said the final clock starts when the gentiles trodding over Jerusalem ends. So like the clock started in 1967 and yall are legit disobeying "Be always on the watch"

@TheReelRandom That phrase does not appear in ANY of the founding documents. Nor does to legal doctrine as applied by SCOTUS.

I taught American Government for decades. Separation of church and state is about as basic as you get. It’s not just the 1st Amendment that makes this clear. Article VI, Clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution prohibits any religious test as a qualification for federal office or public trust. That’s also a clear separation between religious belief and your right to serve in elected office. My high school juniors understood this, but a sitting Senator doesn’t?

@matthewdmarsden Pro "don't kill people" (e.g. don't bomb Iran for Israel) is the same pro "don't kill people" that results in being anti-forced-fake-vaccines.

Pro Iran is the new pro vaxx.

The quantum vacuum is literally the aether rebranded for people who are allergic to the word "aether." It's a medium that fills all of space. It has energy. It has fluctuations. It interacts with matter. It determines inertia (Puthoff 1994), produces measurable forces (Casimir effect), and may explain gravity. But don't call it the aether. That would be embarrassing.

John Taylor Gatto was named New York State Teacher of the Year. Upon receiving the award, he quit and spent the rest of his life writing devastating critiques of the educational system he had mastered. Gatto argued that regardless of the official curriculum, schools actually teach seven hidden lessons. The first is confusion. Students learn disconnected facts across dozens of subjects with no integration or meaning. The second is class position. Students learn their place in the social hierarchy. The third is indifference. Students learn that nothing is worth finishing because the bell always rings. The fourth is emotional dependency. Students learn to surrender their will to a chain of command. The fifth is intellectual dependency. Students learn to wait for experts to tell them what to think. The sixth is provisional self-esteem. Students learn that their worth depends on expert evaluation. The seventh is that they are always being watched and have no privacy. These lessons, Gatto argued, are the actual function of schooling. The explicit curriculum of reading, writing, and arithmetic is almost incidental. The real purpose is to produce passive, dependent, compliant citizens who wait for authorities to tell them what to do and think. Trad schooling amounts to thirteen years of training in being passive and dependent. I have seen this play out with hundreds of students. When I created Montessori middle schools in the San Francisco Bay Area, about half the students came up through Montessori elementary and about half came from public schools. When we opened, the Montessori kids immediately began doing their work, taking initiative, choosing what to tackle first. The public school students were lost. They would stare at their desks until we walked over and helped them plan their morning. It took at least a semester, sometimes a full year, before they could function in an environment that asked them to direct their own learning. These were not less intelligent children. They had simply been trained differently. For years, someone else had made all the decisions about what they would do, when they would do it, and how they would do it. When that structure was removed, they did not know how to operate. Agency is natural to children unless we train it out of them. When I coach parents on evaluating their children's education, I tell them to ignore grades entirely. The question is whether their children are taking initiative, being responsible, and becoming empowered moral beings. If a child is getting straight A's but has no initiative and no sense of personal responsibility, that child is being damaged by their education regardless of how it looks on paper.

@Renevelation @reCognitiveBias @michaelevknight Value is EXACTLY what you can get in exchange. This IS the price someone paid.

@reCognitiveBias @michaelevknight Value is not the same price 🙄 please read what it is that you are disputing prior to disputing it.