/cyb/ - Cyberpunk Fiction and Fact

Why does a house costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to build? Why should we spend our whole lives paying back debt in order to satisfy a central need for shelter?

I posit that modern society is misguided and forced to buy into a system which enslaves them. Building codes have become bureaucratic checklists which don't necessarily fit every unique scenario. We are forced to live in standardized boxes with no creativity or ingenuity and no personal connection with the materials. To remedy this, we should take the initiative to learn how to build a house ourselves, while exploring alternative and historically sound building methods.

One approach to cutting the cost of housing is the tiny house movement. I started out researching how much it would cost to build. It varies greatly based on how much space you actually want inside and what type of construction you are planning. Additionally, I've seen people save drastic amounts of money by finding windows, doors, scrap wood, and other materials for free on craigslist and from people throwing them away.

The three main types of tiny houses I've been interested in so far are traditional stick frame on a foundation, stick frame trailers, post frame (pole barn style), and yurts. Stick frame and trailer tiny houses have the advantage of being familiar construction methods if you have to hire contractors. They require a lot of wood cost and a lot of modern materials cost such as exterior siding, roofing materials, insulation, waterproofing, and moisture management. These seem to cost around $40,000, more or less depending on if you have to hire contractors for plumbing and electric or if you can do it yourself and get it inspected. If you're creative with sourcing materials for free or cheap, then this might be a good choice, as long as you can live with the extremely small floorplans. Might be hard if you have a family, The biggest advantage of this type of construction is that it seems much easier to get building permits since the building method is so close to traditional stick frame. However, in many jurisdictions in the US, you aren't allowed to build a house under a certain square footage and would have to fight to get a permit through.

Post frame buildings are similar to pole barns; they use large wooden posts dug 4-5' into the ground with a skirting of concrete around each post as a foundation. When done right, it's very resilient against bad weather, especially since the roof can be bolted into the thick posts directly instead of fastened to the tops of stick frame walls. With this method, you put in posts about every 8' and use wood screws to tie boards from post to post. This makes it a lot simpler to frame up exterior and interior walls, since you can do it one board at a time horizontally rather than having to build the whole wall as one piece and raise it up later. The roofing ends up being about equivalent to stick frame houses, depending on if you use rafters or trusses. You can weigh the options between the two based on what kind of attic you want and how strong the roof needs to be against rain and snow. This building method has the advantage of being MUCH easier to build by yourself or with fewer people. It also allows for much larger wall cavities for more insulation and easier wiring. I don't know if post frame buildings are accepted generally or not; they likely would take a special permit and a design plan which is signed by a civil engineer. This is the construction method which I was designing for before covid jacked the wood prices to oblivion.

Yurts are weird. They are way cheaper to get a starter home down, which is appealing to quit paying mortgages or rent, but they have a lot of problems with insulation and with how flimsy the walls are. Racoons can get in for example.

I can post a lot more about each of these construction methods if anyone has questions.

In the following posts I'll introduce the alternative building methods which interest me now.

Good news! AI is racist as fuck.

http://www.livescience.com/58675-artificial-intelligence-learns-biases-from-human-language.html

Archive
https://mlpol.net/archive/mlpol/13081.html

What are you doing to make pony waifus real
https://mlpol.net/archive/mlpol/11399.html

jesus dude it's a ghost town, what happened?

>The Secret Surveillance Catalogue
>Concerned about the militarization of law enforcement, a source within the intelligence community has provided The Intercept with a secret, internal U.S. government catalogue of dozens of cellphone surveillance devices used by the military and by intelligence agencies. Some of the devices are already in use by federal law enforcement and local police forces domestically, and civil liberties advocates believe others will eventually find their way into use inside the U.S. This product catalogue provides rare insight into the current spy capabilities of local law enforcement and offers a preview of the future of mass surveillance of mobile communications.
https://theintercept.com/surveillance-catalogue/
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/2648148/Cellphone-Surveillance-Catalogue.pdf (160 MB)

Self-sufficient food production thread.

Please post anything related to gardening, meat production, or production of alternative foods.

I've been stuck in an apartment for 5 years and it's going to still take me a while to move out to a house with land. In the meantime I've been getting sick of the poison that is industrialized food. In the spirit of health and independence, I've been attempting to learn as much as possible about growing plants as I can, despite being locked inside with no land to farm.

There's two schools of thought on this: guerilla gardening and indoor farming. Guerilla gardening is when you find unused land outside and plant stuff on it. A lot of people used to do this in medians in cities or in unused grass lots. I tried this half-heartedly this year but didn't really do it right, so I don't have much to show for it.

The other path is indoor farming. With the advent of (relatively) cheap grow lights, I've seen a lot of farmers start seedlings indoors weeks to a month before moving them outside. I've also seen companies do vertical farms in warehouses using massive arrays of grow lights and shelves. With those operations, they go from seed to harvest completely indoors. It costs more than farming on land outside of course, but it's a way to produce things in a smaller indoor space when the land isn't available. The other huge advantage is the ability to grow plants year-round, meaning that I can have many failure cycles to learn from within a shorter time span. All this inspired me to try to grow some basic food crops indoors as a way to learn through failures before I even get out on land.

I bought one of these grow lights to begin the tests:
https://www.amazon.com/Lights-Spectrum-Indoor-Succulents-Seedling/dp/B07FKF6BT4/

Starting out I tried radishes and spinach. Both of them I didn't water right and so the seeds didn't hatch, or the seedlings died soon. After a couple tries, I got both to grow to seedlings, but left them in the seed flats for the rest of their life (a few are still alive). This was retarded and stunted them of course but I knew zero before attempting all this.

In the meantime, I've been experimenting with different LED grow lights and trying to see which of the cheap options works reasonably well. Nothing conclusive yet because I still struggle to keep a consistent growth cycle (water, temperature in the apartment, airflow, etc.). Also, I hooked up a raspberry pi to a power strip relay and have the lights on an automated schedule now, which is making my tests much more regular.

After several different attempts at spinach, I keep getting them to sprout but they seem to bolt immediately (bolting means going to seed, and the leaves aren't as edible once that starts). For the life of me I cannot get the spinach to produce nice big leaves. From what I was reading, spinach is actually a spring crop which tanks the cold weather and waits till the first sign of longer daylight and warmer temperatures so it can bolt. It seems like I'll need to lower the amount of light hours I'm providing it.

The radishes have had a poor go of it. However, this is mostly my fault in the container management. The seed flats were too tiny for them, and the 5-gallon bucket setup I tried next was a fluke. Whatever soil I put into that bucket seems to drain all its water straight through without absorbing anything, and the excess water was sitting under it for weeks and rotted. This killed off the latest batch of radishes before they really had a shot to mature. I'm going to have to remake the bucket with better potting soil this time.

At the same time, I grew several hot pepper seedlings in the seed flats alongside the radishes. They were stunted for a month, until I transplanted them into their own 5-gallon buckets. With these buckets, I planted one or a couple pepper plants evenly spaced out. Then, all around the peppers, I planted spinach in one bucket and carrots in the other bucket. The spinach borked again, but the peppers and the carrots are looking so green and full-leaved that it's getting exciting. I'm even seeing some flowers starting on one of the pepper plants! These have been a few months in the making at this point.

I'll pose some pictures of the pepper buckets in the following posts. These crops are set 1/3 of my indoor farming focus right now.

Cyberpunk Music Thread -- First edition.

What is Cyberpunk Music? Well there's two different ways to break this down.

Purist.
>The music must contain dark lyrical elements
>The music must contain electronic music and punk elements
>The music must be related to the advent of technology somehow
>The music must contain at least a few accessory elements of Cyberpunk culture, such as drug use and cyber crime.

Non-Purist
>The music must seem like it could emerge from the cyberpunk future
>The music must be (of ideas or expression) bold, new or experimental
>The ideas must be futuristic or experimental in nature, or relate to the strange relationship between technology and humans

Everything else is fair game. If you've been listening to music that you would consider cyberpunk, drop it in the thread with a brief description of why. This thread will be a place to find music, share music, and listen to music. If you are a creator of what you consider to be cyberpunk music, go ahead and share it! Almost anything can be extrapolated to be futuristic in ways that could be cyberpunk, so have at it!

I'll start us off with some recommended listening:

>The Doldrums - I'm Homesick Sittin' Up Here in My Satellite
Category: Non-Purist
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1Uok6zdDA0
The Doldrums have usually been what I'd call loose Cyberpunk. Their front-man is a lanklet faggot with a contralto voice but to be honest I love everything that he makes. I'm Homesick... is another song that talks about the relationship between tech and humans, and finding yourself longing for human contact through the addiction of the screen. The instrumental is this aggressive, almost Toxic by Britney Spears style jungle beat with synthesized and sampled violins, guitars, drums. Its a great song

>Machine Girl - Status
Category: Purist
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhNJPqBwKcQ
Machine Girl... goddamn Machine Girl, they never cease to amaze. It's two white dudes from the American east coast who make this shit. One just does some drum sampling and live drums and the other one is the real idea-talent behind it. Status is a song, expressed in the most cyberpunk terms, about getting way too fucking high. "Status? Whats your condition?!/Manic! I'm pickin blisters/Static - cut off transmission/I've had it, this trip will take me off the planet/..." The song is riddled with weird polyrhythms, strange samples, strange math music, expert screaming. Some of the best shit I've ever heard to be honest. If you're into weird music then listen to Machine Girl. They're some of the best out there.

>Show Me The Body - Trash
Category: Purist
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITkvtZGTyHk
Fresh from the streets of NYC, this is some of what I'd call the purest cyberpunk. Gritty vocals, anti-establisment/drug/crime drenched vocals, electronic sampling in almost every song. The creation philosphy of these fuckers is to create by destruction, throwing up the compression, the filters, taking samples and then aurally obliterating them, reducing it to noise rubble. They mention tech sometimes, but its not the focus of their music.

Alright fuckers, have fun. I made this thread because I love you guys.

The absolute state of malware these days.

How many layers of autism OPSEC are you on?

My router runs DD-WRT (Hardened), I use DNSCrypt, and I have a librebooted Dankpad running OpenBSD. (I use the thinkpad for things that require privacy) and I follow the obvious practices of OPSEC.

My main machine runs Debian GNU/Linux using only free software. I dual boot with windows server 2017

My home folder is encrypted using eCryptFS over in GNU/Linux land

What are the best crypto currencies to invest in?