Isn’t history replete with examples of great minds who were received as crackpots until, after careers’ worth of labor to validate them, some of their crazy ideas turned out to be correct?
3,984 karma · joined January 23, 2022
“Smart” in a selfish way, but not in a bigger-picture kind of way.
I’d rather spend tax money on bridges (or tax rebates) than on bankrolling a muscular cadre of enforcers on the assumption that laws are meaningless and everyone will cheat without a cop breathing down their neck.
I’ve gotten the sense from twelve-step types of friends that, for them, the “sober” sobriquet goes along with this idea that an alcoholic is never “cured”: that sobriety is always contingent, and that they’re always one drink away from sliding back to “a drunk” again.
Over my time in the world I have chafed against the boundaries of “professionalism” and “courtesy” and “a valid topic but not what we’re here to discuss right now”… but… sure seems like those might help here.
Maybe it’s the old-school small-l liberal in me, but I feel like we lost something socially constructive in dissolving the boundaries between public and private thoughts, school and work and home and pub and church thoughts, the office and the flawed human occupying the office…
I respect that you believe that. I do not. It touches up against my basic relationship to reality and existence. To me, there’s a difference between a person and a machine. And between a meeting-of-the-minds-in-the-moment and an archival record.
To me, even the act of processing me through something-other-than-your-human-mind feels violative—essentializing and reductive. For me it’s wrapped up in ideas about attachment, and illusions of permanence, and attention and presence and the extra ineffable elements of human contact that unfold at levels other than the words and an exchange being about much more than the “information content.”
You don’t have to agree with me, but it’s frustrating for my conversation partner to take what I bring to a conversation while demanding to also take more than I’m willing to offer.
You’re free to allow people to record you, or analyze you, or machine-summarize you, or livestream you for the judgment and entertainment of the internet-dwelling masses, or whatever you’d like.
And I’m free to say: do not record me. Ever. Even on a rolling buffer, even “just for note-taking.” Even if it “only lives” some specific digital place. Unless I specifically say it’s OK, ahead of time; and we agree on how specifically the processed-me-byproduct will be used.
I’m not unreasonable! Sometimes the answer is yes! Is it for accessibility? Of course, go for it! Thank you for asking. Do we want to make a statement for the record? Great! But ask.
Funnily enough the “soul sucked out” trope occurred to me too, but it seems like we take different lessons from it. For me, it cues stories about a bunch of economically powerful people inserting themselves into places and situations where other people lived. Using their new camera technology to exploit those people’s images and likenesses, and justifying it by rolling their eyes together at how superstitious and backward and dumb those people were for not liking it. As if it were impossible for somebody to understand the thing and still not want it used on them.
And thus figuring their superiority gave them permission to “educate” the people whose likenesses they sought to exploit. And if the subjects still didn’t like it, it must be their shortcoming (since all right-thinking people obviously agree about matters of the soul and of cameras).
So it was OK to disregard their subjects’ beliefs, and their subjects’ dignity. The camera-pushers were entitled, by dint of their superior certainty, to treat people like specimens.
I agree there’s a parallel, but I think the people who were in the wrong were the people forcing the cameras on people who didn’t want to be involved.
[ETA, for @cindyllm: Your provocations are sublime, and I'm grateful that you continue to confound those of us who walk with the dead. You keep me off balance like nobody else. Is that your LinkedIn, or would I be spamming a random Canadian person?]
Setting your off-the-cuff comment alongside TFA’s Claudish muddle reminds me—as if I needed reminding—about the hazardous parts of self-education, particularly when that education is, as it seems maybe to have been in the author’s case, led by LLM…
I appreciate a programmer hacking on sound and music—that’s awesome, and I’m really grateful the author did so and shared his experience. The trouble comes from the unearned air of authority.
When I worry about the broader question of subtle truths getting lost in the slop cycle, it feels reassuring when authentic expertise like yours still stands out clearly. I’ll take what optimism I can find!
https://home.cis.rit.edu/~cnspci/references/mccamy1976.pdf [1976, PDF]
It’s a charming read, with lines like
> The orange and Yellow patches visually matched some samples of oranges and lemons, both freshly picked, not dyed.
> Some blue flowers, most notably the morning glory of the variety "Heavenly Blue," are prized for their blue color, but frustrate the attempts of photographers to depict them.
…speaking as a longtime cultivator of morning glories—I’m gazing at a “Heavenly Blue” variety in bloom as I write [0]—they are absolutely correct; and I love that this fact informs the norms of the entire photographic industry!
And, of course, the bottom line:
> Having developed a well-characterized test object, we feel obligated to point out that color-reproduction systems hardly ever reproduce all colors exactly. The practical limitations of such processes make perfect color reproduction virtually impossible.
[0] https://www.gardenia.net/plant/ipomoea-tricolor-heavenly-blu... — and if those charm you, may i recommend the ‘Keiryu’ / ‘Mountain Stream’ variety, which, needless to say, is far more impressive than the photos suggest: https://organicplantit.com/product/keiryu-mountain-stream-mo...
In the spirit of the classic “Reality Has a Surprising Amount of Detail,” [0] I realized relatively late in life how finite and how discrete the set of colored substances—pigments, dyes, inks, reflective nanostructures—is. That, for example, ultramarine means ~the same thing today as it did in the lapis mines centuries ago, and so on. Frustrated, of course, by things like impurities and degradation at the hands of time and light and medium… but nevertheless finite sets of color-reflecting substances and applications at the bottom.
In my case, it was the Forbes Pigment Collection that got me started thinking about it:
https://harvardartmuseums.org/article/pigment-collection-col...
And the strange notion of “new” colors, like YInMn Blue [1], and formulations, like Klein Blue [2] (to dwell just on ultramarine-style blues!)
…I still don’t have a firm enough handle on color in all its glorious complexity to have a real point: you’re right of course that even within tightly-controlled production processes anchored in chemical reality, things drift and it’s worth paying somebody to measure if it’s important to be right—I just thought I’d offer the notion as a Sunday morning treat, in the hope that somebody else found the rabbit hole as delightful as I did :)
[0] https://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising...
[1] paper (PDF, open access): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S259004982...
blurb: https://chemistry.oregonstate.edu/chemistry-news-events/yinm...
[2] https://www.centrepompidou.fr/en/pompidou-plus/magazine/arti...
> Due to the placement of the machines under the hoistways, and the need for proper rope lead off of the overhead sheaves, the counterweights did not run in the same hoistways as the cars. This makes for a long, complicated rope scheme – each car had over ¾ of a mile of hoistrope!
“Make it your goal to life a quiet life, minding your own business and working with your hands, just as we instructed you before. Then people who are not believers will respect the way you live, and you will not need to depend on others.”
Admittedly I haven’t made much of a search, but various search engines and autocorrects seem really convinced that I mean “defragmenter” instead of “fragmenter,” despite myself…
It reminds me of Neue Grafik/Swiss Style, and Vignelli:
https://designreviewed.com/series/neue-grafik-new-graphic-de...
https://www.printmag.com/featured/swiss-style-principles-typ...
https://www.designculture.it/interview/massimo-vignelli.html
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:...
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.
If a muscular Soviet art scene embarrassed the Americans into juicing up their own art scene, isn’t that good and healthy for both?
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.
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-...
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”…
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…
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.
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.