Apocryphon

He who laughs at last, laughs best.

It shall be us, the audience

Isn’t Mearsheimer a crank these days anyway?

Heavens forfend that those who work in an industry that preens and postures about innovation and reinventing every facet of life to be better try to build a better union. Oh, so taxis, software tools, the very act of courtship, loans, the concept of socialization can be innovated upon, but not labor unions? How unfortunate.

That is the sort of thinking that allowed tech companies to offer perks like remote work when labor power was higher, only to yank them away once labor was on the downswing.

Better than IBM Tay.

I wonder which tech nonprofit would be best to champion this cause. Doesn't seem quite the EFF's domain.

It's just "sheeple" for this decade. The hoi polloi. Same as it ever was.

Seth MacFarlane and Mark Wahlberg were famously supposed to be on American Airlines Flight 11, and Jackie Chan was supposed to start filming a movie at the World Trade Center that very morning. I’m sure more near-brushes exist.

What kind of development in your community are you exactly opposed to?

I was referring to the Xia, the mythical precursor/founding dynasty.

What's his explanation for what happened? iirc, immediately after Hiroshima the survivors had thought the Allies had used some sort of fuel bomb.

Every ancient empire did this with their primordial beginnings, from Romulus and Remus to Izanagi and Izanami.

The Moon landings invented the Tang dynasty

Since it's popular among youth on social media, maybe this is like Helen Keller skepticism?

https://www.perkins.org/qa-a-factual-look-at-helen-kellers-a...

> You want to decouple from them but you obsess about their politics.

It’s a transnational world, despite all that’s happened. Leftists in America obsess about Corbyn and Sheinbaum. Right-wingers supported Bolsonaro and now Milei. Liberals used to have the hots for Justin Trudeau. Everyone thinks the grass is greener, they just disagree on where.

Telling what? STEM academics are busier than Pokémon fans to contribute to Wikipedia? Or they care less about the cause of Wikipedia? That as a society we produce more of the latter than the former? There’s no definitive rationale to be told simply by that observation.

I thought GPT was the model that spoke most like blog clickbait? Isn't Claude somewhat better about it?

Google was also characterized by their infamous data-first 41 shades of blue A/B test. It seems like they went into an extreme where design was informed by user behavior, by empiricism, rather than by the taste of the designer.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/05/why-googl...

> Actually, I’ll grant the Oculus division, which was mostly about engineering and designed cool products.

Oculus was an acquisition, so maybe that's why.

I think the distaste is more against feature bloat. This sub-thread is reacting to dedicated e-readers succumbing to becoming full-fledged app-running devices. Is the refresh rate on an e-ink display even suitable for general computing?

Plus, isn't it fairly old hat to get root access on a Linux consumer device and then running whatever you want on it? Oh, it makes for a neat party trick you could make an Action Retro YouTube video out of. But perhaps people are just jaded since they've seen it done on a million types of devices by now. Maybe there are more interesting ways, and things, to hack.

Product/design-first vs. engineering-first orgs

That was before it was discovered that every single counterculture could be marketed to and commercialized.

There are attempts to make stylized "coolness" in tech. That's how you get the Cybertruck, or RGB lights everywhere in custom desktops. Be careful of what you wish for.

Those aesthetics are only "cool" in the sense that stylized comic book / military sci-fi conceptions of tech are cool. Also '80s nostalgia, and satire. In reality, none of that could exist practically in the modern day. Real-world high-tech is either consumer-oriented family friendly or hopelessly enterprise beige and gray. LA NIMBYs are not going to let you build a corporate pyramid. The closest we have in reality is the Memphis Bass Pro Shop.

More of a John Brunner future, really.

I only read the "Do this instead" section and it sounds eminently reasonable, if not common sense.

It's fascinating history and theorizing but didn't Jobs kill many, many moribund product lines upon his return?

Well, at the extreme end of free market, Sears CEO Eddie Lampert drew from Objectivism and had his company's divisions internally compete with one another:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2013/07/16/do-inte...

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/4385-failing-to-plan-h...

Presumably those who eat it find the form factor the opposite of wasting time, given how quick it is to consume it.

Also didn't pretty much every tech guru from that time (if not from all time) drop acid? Gates certainly did, and more than once.