I think it’s still good to go with the HDD instead. You can always later get M.2 SSD with a USB enclosure if you run “busier” databases that will benefit from faster speeds. They’re small enough to dangle from USB ports.

When you go refurbished it’s always luck when it comes to any type of storage. My server’s root fs runs on an SSD that’s like 10 years old, yet I bought second hand hard drives that are 4 years old and they were broken beyond repair.

Make sure to backup your stuff regardless.

Welcome to the club!

The build sounds good, and yes a little bit overkill. I host way more on much older gear, comfortably. For “homelab” stuff I wouldn’t buy a Xeon like the other commenter said lmao, you’re not going to like your bills. That’s way too overkill as you’re mostly likely going to be memory-bound, not CPU-bound.

Just for reference, I have ~65 containers running and using ~8 GB RAM. I started with 8 GB and added another 8 GB to have a bigger buffer, and to try out new stuff from time to time.

In general, don’t worry about hardware too much, get what is within your budget to build up knowledge and skills. You will figure out what you need later down the line.

Also, I prefer Adguard Home over Pi Hole, and check out Vaultwarden, the community Rust version of Bitwarden as well.

I had a few shower thoughts today regarding this and remembered your thread. Might as well leave it here.

Teleology ascribes a purpose or and end to things, maybe to all things, but more often than not it is ascribed to some deity. The first is what my thoughts were about. As for the second, others have effort posted already so I won’t go into it. The second one also addresses elements of spirituality, which I think deserves a place in an imperfect world, and I don’t mean imperfect in a capitalist destruction kind of way, just in terms of mortality, disease, love and desires.

Anyhow, I think I’d consider teology ultimately harmful, especially when it comes organic things. SJ Gould and R Lewontin’s “Spandrels” is a good paper that challenges the crude or overly keen adaptationist’s stance towards ascribing functions and reason to body parts (but not the organism as a whole, whatever that may mean). They call them “just-so stories”, but is in fact random, or have no clear cut “reason” as to why such features emerged.

It’s inherently undialectical to stop at the seemingly most “whole” unit, and then over analyze so that everything beneath this level have assigned roles and functions to merely sustain this unit.

Of course, when it comes to cases where it’s a group consisting of smaller “organisms”, each good at doing specific tasks, then are they parts now, or organisms? What is their purpose? To die for their queen and hive? That sounds like just-so stories to me. They are coventions. Not teological ends.

If the organism as a self-contained concept breaks down, we can substitute worker ants and bees with somatic cells and other “sub”-something organisms. Their serving us seems like mutuality rather than because they have assigned purposes. If there are any purposes to be prescribed, as in physiology, it belongs as a dialectical moment, as a concrete object, but not as a permanent and static one.

This can be used for medicine, science, etc. However, to reify its very existence as serving a purpose would mean medicine and biology will one day be “completed” once all of the functions are filled in. To me that is very undialectical.

Relatedly, such an approach is also transphobic (?), as it priorities the goals and purposes of our body parts and amplifies their mechanisms that fulfill such goals. This is because they are reified in our textbooks and in our education, but our feelings and experiences are not factored in with the same priority (well, this is true in western healthcare at least, where treatment of illness is treatment of diseases, not of persons, which is very alienating). Due to our phenomenology being dumbed down for our physiology, healthcare that treats persons are nonexistent, only the dysfunction of said parts.

As for our own teleology, well, if what I’ve said checks out, then I don’t think we have a purpose or end.

I was going to suggest put.icu (seems like max 4GB) but their max expiry is 1 day. I found a list of privatebin instances here (it’s a pastebin but you can also attach files). From the table, you can select ones with file upload, but some of them have quite low file size limit. I was able to upload a 10 MB file over at https://privatebin.at.

While these institutions can be progressive and may seem to foster that “unlimited freeze peach”, they also function as businesses who want to attract as many intellectuals as possible with the hope of boosting their reputation.

As a whole, they form the intellegentsia that shape and steer our culture. I wouldn’t say they’re the sole dominating force of the cultural hegemon, but I think they play a very important role in manufacturing consent, under the guise of the scientific method ™. I don’t doubt the ability to find purity in any research program, but more often than not those that are directly applicable to society (so maybe not the string theory department) can be weaponized to influence public opinion. See how institutions influence the meat/factory farm industry, as an example.

Considering these elements, it isn’t suprising that academics who are dissenters against the status quo will likely have their career terminated (at least in the west). Take a look at David Miller in the UK.

Alongside the prestige and allure of many scientific journals, academics also talk of the “publish or perish” mentality. Now, I don’t know if this is still a strong sociological phenomena, but everyone I know with a PhD or doing one who want to pursue academia really submit to that belief.

There has also been frequent news of academic fraud, or exposé of academic journals being extremely careless with what they publish.

With all of this in mind (I’m sure I can think of more), the “image” I had of academia has also been shattered. I’ve always known it is imperfect, but it is not the safe haven it paints itself to be. With that being said, I know many academics who mainly teach and seldom publish and who are great people. Many modern Marxists whose works I enjoy reading on MR also have a position in academia. So it’s not all that bad I think.

Ah you caught me out on that one, I was recalling from memory. Everything still holds, but it’s actually US helping to detoxify the consequences of Agent Orange, support its victims, clearing out bombs, mines, etc. AND also recover and identify Vietnamese soldiers’ remains. They never paid reparations for the damage so I guess this is it.

What’s driving this involvement with the US?

International relations stuff is not just A is bad B is now friend. For Vietnam to get as much resources as it can while staying friendly and peaceful towards those that offer to help, it cannot always stir the history soup and make a big deal out of its painful past. Vietnam is more than just whatever came out of the US-Vietnam war.

I’m not sure I agree with the take that Vietnam favors US relations because China did bad things. It paints Vietnam as antagonizing US and China relations. While US-China relations are in fact poor, the reality is Vietnam is a much smaller country that seeks cooperation and as much help as it needs, and has no chance to point out this antagonism publicly.

Vietnamese being very warm and welcoming to visitors may skew their sentiment towards USians coming from the Wild West. The fact that y’all come at all is pretty cool, shows that the food is good and the landscape nice.

Vietnam also receives Chinese visitors, all the time and all day of the year. They show the same appreciation, but it is quite normalized. Both China and Vietnam relations also go a long way back, so there is less of an element of novelty, therefore less need to be humble and polite. China, after all, is like a (much) bigger brother.

“US better” is definitely not the sentiment when I ask Vietnamese this question. They admit China’s support is more appreciated and frankly, useful, but wishes to be less coupled to China. The US involvement is annoying to some, and appreciated by others. I don’t know if there is much heft to it other than friendly words on paper and in the press.

When Biden visited, Vietnam agreed to receive a lot of help and support in technological, scientific, and energy domain from the US, as well as help to (continue) undoing the mass destruction the US has caused in return for the bodies of US soldiers. I don’t think Vietnam has forgotten at all. The agreement is not because US is better. Sino-Vietnamese trade stands strong.

Here’s another element to the story. China borders Vietnam and thus it (under various names and governments) has history with Vietnam (also under various names and governments) that spans way back to before either were communist.

In Vietnam, it is taught in history classes at a primary level about conflicts and wars with China that last a total of a thousand years. Was this communist China? No, neither was it communist Vietnam. But is it still significant to the extent that it is historical knowledge that is taught in the main curriculum. Otherwise if we solely teach (joint North-South) communist Vietnam history you’d run out of content pretty quick as the country is so recently established.

I don’t know what or if at all communist Chinese history is taught in the curriculum. But yeah Chinese warlords did engage in a lot of wars and invasions with the warlords down south in Vietnam.

Now the Sino-Vietnamese war did happen. The sentiment was perhaps a feeling of betrayal and shock. Many understand why China might have invaded, including the involvement of Pol Pot.

But things have changed. I always say this: historical events are real events that happened but they don’t act as static backdrop to reduce present phenomenon to simple yes no causality. They are for personal remembrance and for future lessons. Both China and Vietnam have made strict plans to normalize relations in the early 90s. Here is a translated excerpt from a recent article on 45 years after the Sino-Vietnamese war:

With the spirit of “Putting the past aside, looking forward to the future”, we have built a bridge across the painful pit of war, working together to build an increasingly sustainable relationship between Vietnam and China!

It is more often discussed how terrible the Pol Pot government was during that time (they also killed and tortured many Vietnamese) and how necessary Vietnamese involvement was. There is also Cambodian-Vietnamese relations to sort out in this equation. While these wars are coupled in a way, modern treatments isolate them in order to rectify the relations individually with its neighbors.

Vietnam has also decided to move on with the US in a similar vein to how it did with China. But the sentiment is not the same. To contrast, here’s an excerpt from 2020 on 45 years after the US-Vietnam war:

The victory of Ho Chi Minh’s campaign marked a major turning point in the nation’s history, fully completing the goal of “Fighting the Americans out, fighting the puppets” as set out by President Ho Chi Minh; liberate all of South Vietnam, ending 21 years of national division, leading to the unity, independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity of Vietnam on land, airspace and sea; bringing our nation into a new era, the era of national independence and socialism throughout the entire Vietnamese Fatherland.

Conflicts in the South China Sea is a tricky one, but it’s not swept under the rug. China and Vietnam have sought to sort out naval and armed conflicts in the area. While it is somewhat of a stale issue by now, I think we just have to wait to see how they decide to settle/regulate it.

It’s not open source though.

I’m going to use local names since idk the translation for these things. You can copy paste into search engine and machine translate blogs for food places.

General tip: don’t bother too much about Michelin stars in Hanoi, especially in phố cổ, as all the restaurants in there all taste more or less the same. Otherwise you have to queue very long with other tourists. As always, eat where the locals eat.

Hanoi

(make sure to keep masks with you for walking along roads)

Electric buses available here.

Go see uncle Ho, I missed him last time I went to Hanoi. The mausoleum closes early (like 10:30) so you have to get up relatively early for that.

Go around the back of the mausoleum to see chùa một cột.

There are several national museums dotted around the centre, if you have time. Monday is a bad day for museums as most of them will close.

Massive government buildings/military areas in the centre as well. Lots of hammer and sickles everywhere.

Go to Lenin park to see a cool Lenin statue.

On Trúc Bạch lake, there is a cool war monument of John McCain being shot down and kept as POW. His plane landed there. Some USians actually pay respect at the monument even if it’s anti US lol.

Go to phố cổ, hồ gươm, văn miếu quốc tử giám.

Eat bún chả, phở hà nội, cơm rang, chè, bún gan, bánh cốm, xôi cốm, bún riêu, bánh cuốn. Honestly there’s so much food in Hanoi, explore around.

Ho Chi Minh

You will notice the difference from Hanoi. More lights, more people out, busier and more urban.

Museum by dinh độc lập.

Many parks in general where young people hang out, dance, play sports. If you skate, phố đi bộ is a good spot, even when busy.

There’s a big zoo, with a lot of greenery. Zoos are not my thing in general but if you’re bored and want to see cool birds and reptiles (they’ve got a lot of them funny birds at the moment to get them out of critical endangered status).

Several smaller museums by the zoo. You might spot a few US planes that were shot down on display.

There’s a city hall and opera house, they look very fr*nch and the latter looks bourgeoise as fuck.

I like walking around phố đi bộ and the city centre area to see what people are up to. Bùi viện is like a party street for tourists and I hate it.

There’s Saigon waterbus that takes you around the city via the river. It’s really nice.

Outside of the centre, there’s chợ lớn, which is a ‘chinatown’. Lots of pagodas and chinese cuisine.

There is so much food in general, both local and asian in general, you’d be overwhelmed. Worth trying: cơm tấm, bánh xèo, hủ tiếu nam vang, chả cá lã vọng, bánh canh, bún bò huế, gỏi cuốn, bánh pía.

In both places: If you drink coffee, please try out the cà phê phin there. It’s good black, with milk, hot, or cold. There are hundreds of cafes and most stay opened til late. Sit by a balcony and watch the streets and the people. The culture is very relaxed and laid back.

In both places, you can get around one area to the other via motorbike, and if you can’t ride one, there are many cheap uber-like taxi services for both types of vehicles. You gotta get the apps for that, a bit of a pain, but everyone switches between them to get good deals. Cycling might be an option but just be careful.

I’m still sad Agalloch disbanded.

I also like Dawn Ray’d, Wiegedood, Der Weg Einer Freiheit, Ulver.

I don’t get it either. I’m from one of these countries that celebrate the Lunar New Year but live in the imperial core, and I’ve been to parties or gatherings with a mix of East asians celebrating and I don’t think anyone there took issue with it being called Lunar New Year as a quick reference to the different holidays around the same time. You can phone your parents and use your own lingo then but when returning to English it really is no big deal?

I get the “Chinese” in CNY being a boogeyman thing for western whitewashed people, but personally as someone from East Asia I think Hexbear who think this is 100% a Sinophobic thing should log off and go to a new year party.

For not having to remember ports, use a reverse proxy. Keep configuration text files in a repository somewhere, online or offline. Then maybe write an ansible playbook to install all the packages you need and configure as you want. For services that don’t have config files, document in a personal wiki what you do to have it set up.

I currently have a lot of things installed and use a mixture of docker compose files and config files (podman can also use compose-style files). I’ve written down a guide for myself on how to redeploy my whole server and plan to use ansible to reproduce the setup.

Flow charts are also good to visualize the state of things.

Bell’s theorem imposes that a hidden variable theory that makes the spontaneity of quantum measurement unspontaneous is only possible if it is nonlocal.

Nonlocality means two things can be correlated and their corresponding nature be known simultaneously at once due to this correlation. Once you know one, you know the other, without any relaying of information between them.

I agree. While we are finite individually, we can acknowledge the transgenerational flow of ideas and thus treat our knowledge-making enterprises as also constantly developing, so what is knowable can flexibly grow. For me there is little purpose in conjuring up a demon with perfect knowledge or complete systems of knowledge as that is very rigid and undialectical.

The following is rambling so feel free to ignore if it doesn’t cohere, I need to do more thinking and reading about these related ideas to build up my understanding further.

From David Bohm in Chance and Causality

Now, as we shall see in this chapter and in other parts of the book, the mechanistic philosophy has taken many specific forms throughout the development of science. The most essential aspects of this philosophy seem to the author, however, to be its assumption that the great diversity of things that appear in all of our experience, every day as well as scientific, can all be reduced completely and perfectly to nothing more than consequences of the operation of an absolute and final set of purely quantitative laws determining the behaviour of a few kinds of basic entities or variables. (p. 37)

But we do not assume, as is generally done in a mechanistic philosophy, that the whole of nature can eventually be treated completely perfectly and unconditionally in terms of just one of these sides, so that the other will be seen to be inessential, a mere shadow, that makes no fundamental contribution to our representation of nature as a whole. (p. 143)

There’s plenty of space to reinterpret free-will (or concretized moments of free-will recognized or experienced by humans, if you’d like) into this representation of nature as wholly infinite and constantly developing.

If you scrap the indeterminism = free-will assumption, you can interpret this way:

• determinism and no free-will.
• indeterminism but genes + environment/structure govern everything, so free-will illusion.
• indeterminism and genes + environment/structure impact culture and cultural learning, but meaning and content delivered through understanding and cognition is still an experience and hence uniquely free to interpret and reinterpret itself, leaving room for some freedom of the will.

To preface, I have no logical or syllogistic arguments against determinism. Many arguments are sophistic or simply ahistorical and undialectical.

Also, I take it that you’re assuming “free-will = indeterminism” and “no free-will = determinism”? I’ll roll with this for now.

Hard (Laplacian) determinism presupposes that you can fully predict the future once you know all the initial conditions. This means all events must necessarily have one-to-one connections between their cause and effect, granted we know the initial conditions and the functions to evolve it. Thus, “knowing what’s likely” is, in my opinion, not convincing enough to believe in metaphysical determinism.

Notice the connection between knowledge and reality here:

The universe could be deterministic for all we know, but we cannot know all the initial conditions to evolve it deterministically for ourselves. Here, if we subscribe to some kind of technical limits to our knowledge acquisition, then we have “seemingly” random or stochastic processes, but governed by completely deterministic processes. Our physical theories have mathematical equations we can solve to connect cause and effects. Sounds too good and simple to be real? From the text I linked above:

Nature, however, is much more clever than this. Towards the end of the 1800’s, mathematicians and scientists began encountering some very difficult equations to solve — some in fact were completely unsolvable. A particularly troublesome set of mathematical equations were non-linear differential equations. Much in the same vein, there existed the horribly difficult and outstanding problem of three mutually gravitationally attracted bodies — the so called “three-body problem” (or its generalization to “n-bodies”).

At first, problems such as these were cast-off as special cases and largely ignored. It would turn out that these so-called “special cases” would bring the birth of a new way of thinking. When these equations were finally studied in detail a fundamental change, which would ultimately overthrow the ideas of determinism, began to occur in mathematics and science. Inklings of the science that would be come to be known as “chaos” began to appear.

So are our theories just incomplete? That there is a deterministic fabric but we are not clever enough to figure it out? If we can’t figure that out then for all we know we do recognize a psychological free-will. One might retort that this free-will is an “illusion” (i.e. not real; doesn’t exist in a metaphysical sense). I don’t like this because I take phenomenology/experience to be first class, not mathematical equations, the latter is chauvinistic and reductive. The content of people’s thoughts and decisions are meaningful to them. One’s action could be interpreted by outsiders as both determined and completely unpredictable, depending on who you ask. If you psychoanalyze someone to “get down to the bottom” of their desires to explain how they are currently, then it functions as therapy, not necessarily something logically right or wrong.

If you say to your coworkers and fellow working class people that their lives are ultimately governed by mathematics and physics, then you either depress a potential comrade from future actions or set the ball rolling for their revolutionary escape (through negating what you’ve just said).

Either way, free-will in the sense of phenomenology versus free-will in the sense of indeterminism are really separate concepts in my eyes.

But then, by accepting the former free-will and being on the fence about the latter free-will, am I conceding that nature-in-itself is truly deterministic and that we’re too dumb to figure it out?

To have a nature-in-itself being deterministic while everyone believes they have free-will, you might subscribe to the existence of a Kantian unknowable thing-in-itself. This, I presume, refers to the ultimate in what you mean by “ultimately no freedom”. In other words, if this nature-in-itself is actually governed by deterministic principles, then we ultimately have no free-will.

But why do we have this assumption of determinism (and scientific reductionism; if we believe from the Big Bang, everything was determined)? Just because our 19th century mathematics and mechanistic physics worked out well then? Why is this determinism a fallback epistemological assumption? Are we just influenced by the way mathematical and physical sciences are taught in schools? That we can know these bits of proofs and derivations once we grasp these abstractions of nature taught by our teachers?

On the other hand, the universe might be infinitely complex and constantly changing. Let’s take this assumption à la Engels: The ebbs and flows of our scientific development is a dialectical grapple with this dialectical nature. The dialetheistic structure of {abstraction}, {negation}, {concrete; production of new knowledge} is not a static method, but manifests itself in how we might choose to best move forward and develop new ways to understand the world.

This means not projecting our assumptions and dogma. Events that have no one-to-one connections between their cause and effect, but rather one-to-many, or many-to-many, are still caused, but they are indeterministic. Quantum physics can be interpreted to be completely indeterministic, but still caused. This is acceptable if one accepts the infinite nature of the universe that allows itself to be captured and abstracted by humans (inb4 occam’s razor). We are to understand it at some certain levels and parts, but not the whole all at once. If we understand this, the “necessity” of one-to-one cause and effect seems like a dogmatic belief that only function to hinder further development. It can be a limiting case of certain physical theories (classical physics), but that is where it ends.

I don’t know extensively about it, but I have engaged with crossover science/biology/economic topics that deal with modelling “rational agents” to derive predictions. I find it overly reductive and hyper-individualist. It uses weird justification from “human nature” and static ideas of “conformity”, “cooperation” and “non-cooperation” that only concern form and quantitative measures, depriving it of symbolic and meaning content. Its games and experiments are hyper static, isolated scenarios where real world implications and (material) relations are cast aside as “irrational” or unimportant factors, whereas for real humans these factors are central to their decisions and worldview.

Many have already said a lot, so I won’t write an essay here. I agree to a certain extent that culture is steered by the US in the popular consumer market. But if you take the center/periphery model of culture seriously (I don’t), then you can expect a lot of niche/scene things to come out of periphery nations and in turn influence the center nations, like US/UK. I can comment a few things:

• Artistic merit lies in the eye of the beholder.
• Just because something is popular doesn’t mean it’s good. Likewise, if something that isn’t popular doesn’t mean it’s bad.
• Hollywood has a lot of budget, big music labels in the US/UK have a lot of budget. They can hire experienced producer, promoters, gig/cinema managers etc. to promote and distribute their stuff. Art in the East does not often have the same budget to distribute and promote. This means lack of exposure on the consumer end.
• Lack of local exposure on the artist end. If “Western” music is enjoyable, and Eastern musicians make music inspired from it, what’s the power play here? It’s not necessarily a hegemony, it’s a matter of recognising lineage and historical contingency.
• Watch some USSR movies (e.g. Tarkovsky) and listen to some USSR music (e.g. Kino).
• A lot of Japanese anime/manga also has “unlikeable and selfish main characters, and boilerplate, tropey plots.” Big budget and high incentive to pump out a lot of content will lead to slop, but there’s always a % that produces instant hits and cult-classics.
• There’s a lot of cool and hip Eastern-based music out there, you will have to look outside the top charts though (same goes for Western music). Again, your opinion lies ultimately in the eye of the beholder: I find Hollywood movies too cookie-cutter, and Western top chart music too overproduced and formulaic still. There are small scenes and collectives anywhere, pushing the frontier for arts and media. What about ZA/UM, making Disco Elysium?
• Lots of cool scenes in London/New York come from immigrant/world musicians. Just because it comes from the US/UK doesn’t make it “Western”.

What about https://floccus.org/?

Empiricism is a narrower concept. It requires one to setup a system which defines “evidence”, “verification”, and a criterion for “true knowledge”, and probably more. Afaik, Marx did not busy himself with this, and both him and Engels did not like the static manner in which British empiricism treats knowledge and reality.

While this “materialism” might sound positivistic, it isn’t just merely about empirical evidence (where do raw senses stop and interpretive perception starts?) but rather it’s more about aligning and rationalising our cognition as to make sense of everything (myself and everything else); to encompass as much of the whole and not only selective parts of it that bode well to our feelings and will-to-power (like superstitions or irrationalism, or fascism).

At this point I’ve strayed far from existence and “true meaning”, which you’ve discussed under the CW section. You mentioned physicalism and lost of “meaning”, and idealism, or turning to the primacy of minds, as an existential escape from this. Here, you come round to justify meaning with inferences from seeing others. Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with that, but some will take issue in analytical philosophy of minds and the like, with all kinds of problems: hard problem of consciousness, problem of other minds (solipsism) etc.

You’ve mentioned meaning quite a lot that I think you should additionally look at phenomenology for the existential question, maybe with Merleau-Ponty, then all kinds of feminist philosophy, metaphilosophy, hermeneutics, philosophy of history etc.

I have found this top down approach more empowering than looking for answers to life within the rigid framework of (often white men’s) Anglo philosophy that, from bottom up, relies too heavily on the existential quantifier, a literal logical notation, to more fully deliver meaning to life.