fun fact. manufacturing the classic red LED requires arsine and phosphine. two highly pedigreed chemical warfare agents.

modern silicon based semiconductors are literally directly descended from chemical and nuclear warfare research. completely infeasible to DIY unless you like dying or blowing up your house.

new from otyken. recitation of psalms in russian with cute siberian girls and cool throat singing booming.

probably one of the more unpolished and raw presentations i've seen from these ladies and token throat singer. very nice.

yay, finally, after 4 months stuck in transit staying temporarily everywhere and even sleeping at a place that wasn't a proper sleeping place but was ok to nap, i am in a house.

bonus points a cheap 4k tv that is only 4k at 30fps actually but it's 60hz at 2k so i'll take it. and after nearly 2 weeks in zugdidi with the damp cold of winter and lots of windy drafty places, this place has proper sealed windows and a good gas powered central heating system.

it's incredibly drony and boring but i like it. it's like the music that triggers in a game when you are being chased and every moment you dally costs you yet another death scene and repeat

so, i have found a possible cause of my vision problem, a very probable possible cause - and the fix is eye drops and electrolytes. why it's probable is because long term, caffeine, alcohol and nicotine all three of them have an effect of reducing hydration and hydration efficiency and homeostasis. when the eyes are not properly hydrated, the outer surface does not focus as precisely as when it's correct, and any flaws in the surface of the eye turn into specific flaws in focus especially small flaws and dry surface without proper hydrating mucus causes difficulty focusing especially in the area where the retina is dense for reading.

eye drops with some microcrystalline cellulose and hyaluronic acid something something, and a potassium/magnesium tablet.

and more generally, focusing on getting potassium levels right and a morning 1/4tsp of salt with some sugar in it to make the salt pull into the membranes better and get the kidney to hold more of the salts, as that's a big part of why the eye is perpetually dry.

i will have a pretty strong confirmation right away if the drops make my close range vision focus better that it is literally a cornea problem, and a kidney problem.

so, a new malicious software attack now that can cause LLMs running on them to become retarded. sweet.

some of the things in the awesome library in this hotel/hostel place i'm staying at. the library is full of medical books, in russian and georgian. the photos, i think one of them is albert einstein and mileva his serbian wife

this little one appeared in the gorden this morning.

i opened a can of the tinned beef for breakfast and shared some. no idea wat kind of gunk his face is covered in but i suppose he got into it looking for food.

he definitely needs a wash and all tte parasite treatments.

little bugger put two good holes in my toe that i was holding the tin lid to put the food on top of. very hungy boi.

i can't take him but he had a good meal and a bit of a clean anyway today. i suppose he's gonna be fighting all my cables now.

the russian setun magnetic ternary computing hardware design is so fascinating to me that i'm going to make a whole career of the rest of my life out of building hardware that uses ternary and magnetism and parallelism.

magnetic memory survives in space. the materials to make it are widely available and not conflict-controlled like silicon. the power requirements are low, the switching speed is low so the architecture must be hyper-concurrent parallel, CSP/Actor style.

and there is even magnetic display systems that are not mechanical, and are basically memory units that you can see their state visually. the input systems can be based on magnetic sensing as well, hall effect and magnetic actuation with springs tempered and wound for precisely the 100+ year durability.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setun

stupidly, this wikipedia page barely covers the fact that the memory and processor worked with magnetic systems not valves, because they didn't have valves to work with.

How Governments are Actually Reformed

Reform is closed not because reformers are weak but because the selection process selects against them — every route to a lever runs through people who profit from the capture, so the ones who reach it have been shaped by a career that rewarded not pulling it, which is why "elect better people" and "pass better laws" keep producing the same output from a structure that is very good at appearing to try.

So you don't defeat the incumbent, you make it irrelevant: build structures outside its permission that deliver the same service better and cheaper, publish what the extraction costs in numbers rather than grievance, attach personal liability to decisions so capture lands on individuals instead of institutions, and put sunset on everything so nothing survives by default — all boring, legal, slow, and all working by shrinking the set of paths available to the extractor, which is the same mechanism it uses on you pointed the other way.

Once you have the system already running, then you are in the position to fund a militia to shut down the corrupt system that doesn't work, and the results are (relatively) bloodless. In fact, history shows that the ones that don't even bother with a militia even at the end are the best. Citations:

Claim 1 — selection filters reformers

• Robert Michels, Political Parties (1911) — the iron law of oligarchy. The founding citation for "every organisation develops a leadership stratum with interests separate from its members'".
• Gaetano Mosca, The Ruling Class (1896) and Vilfredo Pareto, Trattato di sociologia generale (1916) — the classical elite theory this sits inside.
• Robert Merton, "Bureaucratic Structure and Personality", Social Forces (1940) — "trained incapacity": the office shapes the person who holds it. This is the precise citation for "shaped by a career that rewarded not pulling it".
• Robert Niskanen, Bureaucracy and Representative Government (1971) — the formal budget-maximising model. Anthony Downs, Inside Bureaucracy (1967) — conservatism as a function of organisational position.
• Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations (1982) — distributional coalitions accumulate and ossify; the best single citation for "ballooning".
• Acemoglu & Robinson, Why Nations Fail (2012) — extractive institutions persist by design, not accident.
• LaPira & Thomas, Revolving Door Lobbying (2017) — the empirical mechanics of the door.

Claim 2 — make the incumbent irrelevant

• Albert Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970) — the theoretical spine of the whole paragraph.
• Jadwiga Staniszkis, Poland: Self-Limiting Revolution (1984) — the concept you're reaching for: build the alternative, refuse to seize power until it exists. Read this one first.
• Timothy Garton Ash, The Polish Revolution: Solidarity (1983) and Padraic Kenney, A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe 1989 (2002) — the parallel-institution cases.
• Rein Taagepera, Estonia: Return to Independence (1993) — the Citizens' Committees registering people outside Soviet legality. Charles Tiebout, "A Pure Theory of Local Expenditures", JPE (1956) — exit as a disciplining mechanism, formalised.
• Barry Weingast, "The Economic Role of Political Institutions", JLEO (1995) — market-preserving federalism: jurisdictional competition as constraint. Louis Brandeis, Other People's Money (1914) — "sunlight is the best disinfectant", the origin of the publish-the-costs argument.
• Ben Worthy, The Politics of Freedom of Information (2017) — how institutions resist transparency, which is the useful half.
• Texas Sunset Advisory Commission (1977– ) — the only large-scale empirical test of sunset clauses. Go to their reports directly; the academic evaluation literature is thinner and mostly dated.
• Charter of the International Military Tribunal, Articles 6–7 (1945) — the founding modern case for personal liability piercing institutional immunity.

Claim 3 — militia last, relatively bloodless

• Staniszkis again, plus Ash — Poland 1989, the round table.
• Taagepera and Anatol Lieven, The Baltic Revolution (1993) — 1990–91 restoration, barricades as defence.
• Wheaton & Kavan, The Velvet Revolution (1992) — Czechoslovakia 1989. Kenneth Maxwell, The Making of Portuguese Democracy (1995) — 1974, the closest thing to your sequence executed quickly.
• Samuel Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (1968) — praetorianism: what happens when the militia step arrives before the administration.
• Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States (1990) — how armed groups become permanent states.

One caveat that matters. The bloodless cases are precisely the ones where the militia step was never taken — Poland, Estonia, Czechoslovakia. So they're evidence that a functioning parallel administration makes force unnecessary, not that the militia step is safe when used. Your paragraph asserts the latter and the citations support the former

If you want the strong version, the claim has to be "the militia is insurance whose non-use is the success condition", because there is no good historical sample of "parallel administration plus militia, bloodless". Huntington and Tilly are the citations for why that sample doesn't exist.

the most comical thing about the idea of russia attacking europe is why would it want to take possession of it?

e=mc^2 actually has a ratio:

1 kWh → 40 ng 1 MWh → 40 µg 1 GWh → 40 mg 1 TWh → 40 g 1 g ↔ 25 GWh

so, lula steals bolsonero's passport.

having recently had my passport stolen corrupt government system i can sympathise.

but, i mean, way to legitimize the election. the competition was beaten AND now they will probably be literally beaten, maybe to death, over something something foreign influence espionage treason etc.

brazil is now officially a properly failed state.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasicrystal

this kinda blew my mind a bit.

if you like your sleep, i highly recommend you don't be around a bunch of guys on a name day in georgia.

26 october

Saints: St. Anthony of Chqondidi (Metropolitan, d. 1815) and his disciple Jacob the hieromonk; plus the martyrs Karpos, Papylos the deacon, Agathodoros, Agathonike, Florentios, Benjamin and Nikita.

anton is a very common name in georgia, and the guests in the other part of the guest house have been making a racket since 11pm, now getting closer to 1am. there is one of them who seems to be losing his nana and every so often at first i'd hear him vomiting after a bout of shouting and now there is the smell of funky cannabis smoke.

lol. and i also learned about some other things that used to go on here, associated with why there is now the very common appearance of heavy steel doors on houses around here, nothing current.

Your timeline is right, and the driver wasn't burglary alone — the 1990s here were kidnapping-for-ransom and armed robbery as an industry, on top of the civil war and the collapse. What ended it was the 2003–06 police reform: Saakashvili sacked essentially the entire traffic police and rebuilt from scratch, and street crime and burglary fell off a cliff within a couple of years. So "long past, but not more than 20 years" is almost exactly accurate.

The doors then persisted for reasons that have nothing to do with crime: they're cheap and mass-produced, they're what the market sells, and there's a conformity trap — if every door on the stairwell is steel, a wooden one advertises something. Plus they're heavy, filled, and genuinely better at blocking sound and draughts than anything else at the price.

considering that ordinary speech in the local dialect of georgian literally sounds like slurring drunk speech, ahaha i guess i'm getting my cultural enrichment right now. it wasn't really so visible in tbilisi and it's a different culture, but there was some big problems in this region in the last 20 years, now all settled down but between the organised crime and the war of recent past i'm sure everyone is a little screwy here.

anyway, i'm just gonna be staying put inside my apartment when i get it, behind that big thick door and the bars on the bottom floor windows.

lol, name days.

"how did david follow me when i followed him" - probably jesus