alwa

This feels like Claude thought to me—assertions and comparisons that look impressive on the surface, but kind of make me scratch my head the more I think about them.

I think what made me throw in the towel was “Figure 2 — Two Instruments, One Shape” [0]. That chart comparing when contracts reset. Weirdly consistent norms! [looks at the sourcing] Oh… it’s… not from data at all… it’s just notional…

Is there anything here other than “the people financing the factory are betting that it’ll be able to sell what it makes once it’s built”?

I mean… isn’t “an instrument that splits time in two” kind of… what capital financing is? And this risk is what earns investors their interest, and the rest of the financial system involves different ways for people to calibrate their bets on the risk materializing?

Including derivative instruments that allow investors to smear out the point-in-time “cliffs” this writer is concerned about? If you think the revenue is never going to come, you can bet on that now. Or go into the distressed datacenter acquisition business to prepare! Conversely if Payment Day comes and you think they just need a couple more months, you can adjust the loan or make them a new loan to cover those first few months’ payments, etc., right? Since both parties stand to lose if it blows up completely, unless it’d be worth more to sell to somebody else?

These are also not individual homeowners’ “investments.” The risk is coordinated, and it’s big, but we know that already, right? Yes we know the revenue, yes it’s different from the costs of paying down their capital investments, yes both are reported on the financial disclosures.

How is the claim here any stronger than “all this depends on them actually being able to sell this crap once they get it built”?

[0] https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!-2DS!,f_auto,q_auto:...

For that matter, I admire their relative transparency about their incidents. I can think of other big players who will cheerfully show green statuses across the board while everyone can see that their pants are down...

Mine came much later, in the Triplets of Belleville (2003). In case it brings a nostalgic smile to anyone else’s face, too:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=N0VrHQ-cHUA&

Doesn’t literally every bathroom need someone to clean up body fluids and odors from time to time? At the last gas station, big box hardware store, and McDonalds I visited in the West, log sheets hung inside the bathrooms indicating they’re supposedly cleaned as often as hourly.

It doesn’t really bother me. At many of the places I work and volunteer, our norm is to establish a rota, so as not to shove the job onto whoever’s lowest paid, least experienced, or most willing to be bullied into it.

Why is that a problem? Two schools can both produce good work, and still illustrate a contrast.

If a muscular Soviet art scene embarrassed the Americans into juicing up their own art scene, isn’t that good and healthy for both?

That page seems to indicate that the subscription is to a real-time data feed, rather than the software itself—am I mistaken?

I feel like I could think of a way to word a letter that pointed out the problem without pointing out specific locations or people.

I can’t imagine that kind of race to the bottom is too fun for the low level employers laboring under it. It sounds like gaming the system involves a lot of operational stress. And a manager who’s willing to cheat to screw the people above or beside them tends to be willing to screw the people beneath them too—whether the manager got that way on their own or whether the system forced them into it.

I could especially see it working to the low-level employees’ disadvantage if “the metrics” “prove” they don’t need as much help in order to “hit their numbers.”

But as long as everyone else is doing it, they realistically have no choice but to join in the chaos or be culled. That’s a letter the low-level employees can’t write themselves without jeopardizing themselves, but that an outside party could.

Eh… seems to me that in a lot of scenes, “volunteer”-vs-“paid” is something of a spectrum…

Lesbians too [0]. And people who don’t make much money [1]. And people who aren’t Asian [2]. And athletes, and people who like sports [3].

Applying group statistics to judge individual people is almost never proper, and lies at the root of an awful lot of inhumanity. I hope and imagine the women in question are capable of thinking (and judging) for themselves.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_violence_in_lesbian_r...

[1] https://www.cawc.org/news/socioeconomic-risk-factors-for-dom...

[2] https://bjs.ojp.gov/violent-victimization-race-or-hispanic-o...

[3] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10087409/#hsc14028-...

> raise concerns about data being shared with third-party companies or federal agencies.

What, you don’t like “sharing”? It would be selfish not to “share”!

Truly the move from “send copies to” to “share” is one of the great linguistic dirty tricks the social-media-era firms have pulled.

Especially here, where what’s being “shared” is, in a meaningful sense, operational control and enforcement prerogative.

And don’t get me started on the minimizing formulation “third-party companies and federal agencies”…

Future jobs? I thought AGI was the future of work!

And plus, their duty is to a higher cause! All humanity needs them to win, so that the superintelligence is “aligned” to their superior values… like “all’s fair in love and war”! (/s)

…rumblings of “divine mandate” in there somewhere…

So, but… where do most fish go when they die?

So… @lazide replied with a hahaha. It got flagged to death, understandably.

If it were anybody but @lazide I’d have flagged it too, but… I can’t help but grimace and nod.

To hazard a loosely-informed guess at their subtext… and politely ignoring your opening salvo of calorie-free populism… I’m not speaking from a place of certainty, but my impression is that there seem to be elements of “not even wrong” here. Some contra- lines of argument:

* code, especially in the huge fundamental aspects, tends to flow from the NEC downward, rather than from municipal experiments in playing with literal fire. Not insurmountable, I guess, but it seems like a pretty big chicken-and-egg kind of obstacle to your proposed course of action;

* individual household demand is several orders of magnitude removed from the considerations informing grid design and operations;

* the last thing a grid needs is a meaningful amount of random feed-in that it can’t centrally (and near-instantly) manage;

* the costs of home-scale labor/permits/whatever are only the biggest ones from the perspective of toting up individual homeowners considering uneconomical projects, not from utility-scale (much less whole-polity-scale) scratchwork… would an army of volunteer homeowners’ labor really still outperform specialist labor installing hundreds-of-homes’ worth of capacity per day at an energy facility somewhere?

* the thing holding back the “explosion of products,” consumerist-salvation overtones aside, seems more likely to be {physics vs the existing built environment} than permits—that, plus the lack of a mass market;

* one barrier to “plug and play” is that said plugs are safe only because of an interlocking set of assumptions upstream of said plugs—which definitely do not contemplate feeding back in whole-home current from a random convenience outlet on your front porch;

* Rate tiers are an economic device to influence consumption patterns under the status quo. As the Californians are learning, there’s a hard floor on the price of “having a grid” vs “not having a grid”; as consumption patterns shift, rate schemes can and must shift too;

* building codes care about safety, grids and ISOs and energy providers care about capacity and stability. Players on grids can realize enormous economies of scale with respect to pretty much any generation or storage technology. The bottleneck you describe is…

I dunno, man… the only bottleneck to energy too cheap to meter is fusion, obviously all we have to do is just go crack fusion and we’ll have a fusion pot on every stove!

I love your sense of empowerment; I’d encourage you to bring it to bear at a scale where it matters— much bigger than a home, much smaller than a whole polity… I think there are benefits to decentralization and to independence but I don’t think those are the benefits you’re emphasizing here.

I think this is an ancillary specifically for economy class passengers—you pay a certain amount to reserve a 4-hour slot on a bunk or something. I have no idea, but my guess is economy + nap slot would still come in well under the cost of a business seat. Plus they can sell those same 6 berths what, 4 or 5 times over in the same 22-hour flight?

If I recall correctly they’re not certified for use during taxi takeoff and landing, I’d imagine due to orderly-evacuation kinds of requirements.

Matteo Wong writing on new “Nano Banana” features in Google Earth. He is not a fan, but he did create some rather impressive fake satellite imagery of cataclysm.

Linkbait title as published: “Google Just Ruined One of Its Most Important Tools”

Corresponding Google press release—I’m not sure whether or not we’d consider it a more appropriate/neutral source:

https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/earth/na...

Especially on the same routes where you’d think about using this kind of airliner...

https://www.airnewzealand.com/economy-skynest

Good enough for what? Certainly good enough to direct people to the correct links for their platform.

And, to me at least, to signal ahead of time that it’s a Claude-flavored game. Personally I’m not much for those (I don’t really snack on games) but I know people who enjoy burning through them. And “Claude-game” does feel like a steadily-more-coherent genre, with its own aesthetic language and high- and low-quality examples.

But of course it all comes back to the same old open-source questions. Is it marketing if you’re not selling anything? Does somebody have to be good at—or care about—writing or marketing in order to share their GPL game with the public for free?

To skip the landing page, the source repo is here:

https://github.com/PubDeer/astro-loop

I mean

Some of these municipal water plants in the US are independently operated by municipalities of awfully few people and even fewer resources to spare, often serving relatively vast areas…

It’s probably not how you or I would set things up—especially after many years of warnings and slick best practices guides-but I can sympathize with “if it’s not broken…”-style maintenance, especially at the local level.

These things have lifespans measured in decades, and budgetary cycles to match… and for all of CISA’s good work (on limited budgets, and with power that’s more persuasive than fearsome) [0], it seems hard to get all 148,000 [1] system operators to afford to care, much less to afford to fix things—much less to check their work.

[0] https://www.cisa.gov/topics/industrial-control-systems , and https://www.gao.gov/assets/d24106576.pdf for an idea of the staffing they’re doing it with…

[1] https://www.epa.gov/dwreginfo/information-about-public-water...

Oh boy. The human here is effectively assuming the role of a Magic 8 Ball…

What a weird species of halting problem…

It's not a conversation at that point, it's a performance. I walk away.

I think knowing what you want (and being able to articulate it with adequate specificity, and detecting when processes drift away from it) is a real skill/field of expertise. I just don't think it's specific to interfacing with "AI."

I’m familiar with cities that conduct time-bounded surges of policing in reaction to specific outbreaks of criminality.

When inter-faction violence in a neighborhood escalates to the level of a murder, for example, they surge for a couple weeks. Massively increased visible patrol presence—cops on every corner—portable light towers attached to generators, to provide near-daylight-level illumination on the sidewalks and streets... a conspicuous level of “eyes on the street” that discourages retaliation and responds to residents’ heightened fear in the immediate aftermath. While at the same time being obviously temporary—not permanent measures that signal the neighborhood as structurally crime-ridden.

It’s a “fly the flag at half mast for a bit” kind of signal, not “this neighborhood is full of criminals and deserves the corresponding built environment.”

I wonder if something in that spirit might be a reasonable long-term equilibrium for things like Flock. Garbage bags over the camera poles for ordinary times, almost as a point of civic pride that the place we’ve built and maintained is safe enough not to need to use them. Pull the garbage bags off if there’s a problem—spate of auto thefts, high-profile crime, fugitive on the loose—but we demand an explanation when that happens and a concrete end point where they go back on.

Suspicious, maybe; but not criminal (like lying to a federal officer in the course of an investigation, or willfully destroying what they’re lawfully trying to search).

Probably even more suspicious if you make sketchy excuses when the truth is fine. I’d go with “I (or %COMPANY%) figure electronic devices get imaged at borders or potentially stolen abroad, so we don’t carry them when we travel.” Blame the other country you’re coming from if you want.

Although I’d just not carry a phone across a border in the first place.

Related, regarding the “hiding a partition on a thumb drive” thing (8 days ago, 287 / 166; project is cool but note that tptacek and others in the comments know what they’re talking about):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48974862

And the immortal words of James Mickens come to mind:

https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf

Chasing eternal profit growth isn’t a fact of life, notwithstanding the mythology of commodification. Neither are all investors motivated purely by profit. Neither is it clear that everything can be improved upon (much less that outsiders can improve on it better than the incumbent). Sometimes “do a thing, do it with excellence, make a modest living from it” is enough.

One thing I like about Mr. Sapp’s work at Worse On Purpose here—he (or perhaps his LLM, or perhaps he’s LLM) gives considerable attention to firms that don’t do it that way. Where:

> Quality, ownership, and stewardship all check out. […] Most of these are family-owned, trust-owned, employee-owned, or publicly traded with a long track record of not selling out.

It’s useful to have actionable alternatives, and I put more stock in his organizing thesis given how well its brand preferences line up with my own.

https://ledger.worseonpurpose.com/status/approved

https://ledger.worseonpurpose.com/methodology

Is this different from the per-app enumeration in Account —> iCloud —> Storage? That provides a means to delete per app

It sounds like you and I share the author’s view that, for all its sparkle, Claude is a thin substitute for the company of interesting people.

What might it look like to lower the barriers to that kind of situation, to extend that extreme luxury to more people—ideally to anybody who decides they’d rather lead interesting lives-of-the-mind themselves?

(Related:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48959090 [3 days ago / 469 / 212] )

I mean… not to put too fine a point on it, but…

jeevacation@gmail.com

Unless, of course, Cameron Carpenter is involved:

https://archive.is/DQQq0

https://www.marshallandogletree.com/opus8

…though it was in fact maintenance costs that did in the I.T.O., may it rest in peace…

> “It travels in a 53-foot truck,” he says. “It has workshop and carpenter facilities that travel with the organ at all times. It has a massive accoutrement of spare parts. And it has two sound systems.”

> The system is controlled by a bank of computers running software built on Linux, the open-source operating system.

> Maintenance costs are not inconsiderable.

> “Big computer mainframes don’t like to be turned off,” Carpenter says.

I, for one, specialize my sonic practice in immersive cat-yowl soundscapes…

It’s the “within their reach” that constitutes the targeting, it seems to me. Maybe “particularized scrutiny” is a better word?

Each fancy radio can only be in one place at one time, and presumably with a human operator in the vehicle or wearing the backpack. Which emulates a cell station, not all tens of thousands of them in the state simultaneously.

That feels much more like “DUI checkpoint checking all cars on this road at this time,” or “canvassing the neighborhood around the crime,” or “the stadium operator invited the cops into the security office to watch their CCTV feeds during the big game.” Precipitated on some reason—maybe not the specific human, but something that’s different about that place and time that warrants a human targeting their attention there.

As opposed to the network-level, “all communications between all people all the time just in case” that constituted the “mass” surveillance that Snowden described (and Flock has since innovated and extended to the physical world).