That's not what was said. The line of comments was "free markets are not under attack" followed by "From this perspective, they are." There was no judgement passed. I don't find your response curious or otherwise insightful.
1,752 karma · joined May 4, 2021
That being said, if we're here, we're here. Paul Graham is defining wokeness as a form of performative moral superiority, so let's use that definition here. I think we can all agree that performance moral superiority is at the very least annoying, so wokeness sounds pretty bad and we should try to avoid it. So this leaves me very curious as to examples. Graham unhelpfully gives very few specific examples, but one he does give is the Bud Light controversy. This one is particularly interesting to me because I'm not sure that Bud Light ever did anything particularly priggish. As I understand it, all they did was sponsor a social media influencer who happened to be transgender and suddenly half of the country lost their minds? Mulvanney's transgender identity had nothing to do with her Bud Light advertisement. I cannot see any priggishness here. No one made any statements about how anyone else should speak or act, no one was removed from any position of power. But the right was outraged by this and Graham refers to it as wokeness despite it not matching his definition. I'll put the subtext away and just say what I'm thinking. I think Graham's wokeness is real and legitimately annoying. But I don't believe it's anywhere near the scale of problem he's claiming it is and most importantly I think he's using it as a sort of effigy for underlying leftist ideas of inclusion and diversity. Graham makes wokeness out to be just about moral pricks but not the underlying ideas, but then classifies the protests after George Floyd's death as wokeness. Similarly to the Bud Light example, I see no performance there. I think it's hard to argue that protests and riots are purely performative and not real actions designed to make change. So to me, as a reader, it feels like Graham is masking his distaste for liberal ideology behind an obviously agreeable distaste of prigs. I don't necessarily think he's even doing this consciously and I think he's projecting the frustration from threat he sees to his power by liberal ideology towards this particular target. I know the feeling. This post has been long enough but I want to at least mention that this is how I feel about a lot of propaganda (from every side, mind you). People use real problems as stand-ins for things they can't talk about and get unreasonably upset at what's on the surface, not a big problem. It's important to read critically and pay attention to your own feelings and the logic of the arguments you're reading, because at least for me, it's very easy to be manipulated into believing something that's nonsensical or inconsistent with your values.
It's just so damn hard for any in-person activities to compete with instant gratification and addictive rage. In college in 2022, I was a member of several clubs with varying subjects and members. Every one of them struggled to get anyone to attend. The CS club hosted drone races and 3d printed model painting. The improv club had weekly themed meetings. The theater department hosted at least 1 large and 1 small show per semester and we couldn't even get people to sit in the audience. And this is college, where demands on participants' time are relatively lacking (compared to kids and a 9-5). I imagine a lot of social activities have failed to get members and then just ceased to exist as a result. Several of the clubs I was in no longer exist due to a lack of participants to take up leadership after my class graduated.
Don't even get me started on how people talk and talk about causes they admire on the internet but then never actually volunteer their time to make anything better.
I really think society has just fucked itself over by letting social media companies run rampant with our attention, feeding us lies and gossip that doesn't matter 24 hours later. I genuinely just don't know if most people can be conscious and disciplined enough to get themselves out of the trap. At the very least, it will take a few generations to develop new mores and standards and who knows what new tech will be around to ruin their lives by then. I find it hard to believe that anyone was ever hopeful about working in this industry.
If anyone reading is working on a chip-8 emulator for the first time, a word of warning: for instructions that affect the vF register, be sure to check whether the register should be set before running the instruction but actually set it after. This is subtle but affects several popular roms.
My test program if anyone wants to marvel at my inefficient assembly: https://github.com/dreary-dugong/fib8_benchmark
There's some fun stuff in there though, animated graphics and self modifying code. Highly recommend hacking on chip-8.
It's gotten much less laggy since the post OP linked to for info was posted, with many improvements in the last 3 years including one very recently. Mojang gets a lot of hate from every direction. It took them so long to make Redstone less laggy because every time they touch Redstone in any way, the community screams at them and any time they do anything other than introduce brand new features the community screams at them so it just wasn't worth it. Getting mad on the Internet and saying they don't know graph algorithms isn't helpful. Mojang has repeatedly hired some of the best and brightest minds in the Minecraft community to work for them (e.g. Panda4994, Kingbdogz, Gnembon) so they do have the technical expertise to do anything they want. What they don't have is infinite time/budget and it turns out that working on a 15 year old Java codebase and a massive multiplatform C++ app at the same time and trying to keep them in sync is really damn hard so can we please give them grace? I'm just tired of so much hate from every direction every second of the day. Can we please just say that Minecraft is awesome? Thanks
The days maybe not even literal "people"
Perhaps consider simply reading the description for an accurate summary.
From the description:
> Abstract: In this talk I’ll highlight several exciting trends in the field of AI and machine learning. Through a combination of improved algorithms and major efficiency improvements in ML-specialized hardware, we are now able to build much more capable, general purpose machine learning systems than ever before. As one example of this, I’ll give an overview of the Gemini family of multimodal models and their capabilities. These new models and approaches have dramatic implications for applying ML to many problems in the world, and I’ll highlight some of these applications in science, engineering, and health. This talk will present work done by many people at Google.
Does the cost of buying and reselling games for slightly less end up equaling out to the cost of a games subscription model? Maybe, but my concern is fragmentation. I definitely can't afford more than one game subscription so I don't like this trend.
Also, imagine this scenario from the perspective of a non-technical user: You buy an expensive but high quality phone that's easy to use and has a great camera and great apps. Most of your friends have the same phone and everything works great with them. Then you try to talk to someone new but they have a phone that was probably cheaper and has a worse camera and looks like it's harder to use and full of ads. Every time they message you it turns off a bunch of your features and ruins group chats for everyone. Who are you going to blame, your phone manufacturer whose product seems to work great, or this guy with a phone so cheap and buggy that it breaks everyone else's?
Thus, non-technical iMessage users see no reason to go out of their way to use weird third party messengers. It's not their fault - it's the android users' faults for being cheap.
(For clarity, I am a hardcore android phone but I'm not delusional enough to think the average person will have a better experience on Android then iOS. I had to install fdroid and a custom launcher and a bunch of side loaded apps to get a decent experience. The average person doesn't and arguably shouldn't need to know about all that)