fallous

You can buy $100,000 of the best fishing equipment in the world, but if you don't know how to fish it won't do you much good. Of course, if your goal is to collect great fishing equipment then you have no need to fish... but then you shouldn't consider yourself a fisherman.

There are no Dixiecrats if you've hanged all the slave owners after the Civil War, and clearly Reconstruction is entirely different since you've purged most of the white population in the South (as well as some from the Union, since Delaware, Kentucky, and New Jersey still had slavery).

Your argument/timeline seems a bit confused in a couple of places. Our problem was "not stringing up all the slave owners after the Civil War," yet you then point out American industrialists (going back to the robber baron era) loved fascism. But the industrial parts of the US were the Northern states, not the South. Additionally you complain that the Democrats are no effective opposition but don't appear to consider that the Democratic Party would be even less effective if you had strung up all the slave owners after the Civil War given that it was that party which chose to secede from the Union in order to maintain slavery.

History indeed did not begin with the War on Terror, but I'm not sure you're entirely familiar with it.

Nukes launch Chuck Norris at their enemies.

Agreed that on first blush it looks like Chesterton's Fence but it may be more of a cargo culting situation.

Mutually Assured Distraction.

It's not a linear cognitive decline but more like hitting a wall (usually late 40s/early 50s). What's it like? Frustrating as Hell because you can remember your prior capabilities but have to deal with things like randomly forgetting words/names temporarily, decreased short-term memory abilities, etc.

Adding AI to an organization that is somehow making process decisions based on "vibes" isn't going to solve problems, it's simply going to add yet another problem generator to a dysfunctional system.

The question is does this eventually lead us back to genetic programming and can we adequately avoid the problems of over-fitting to specific hardware that tended to crop up in the past?

Yes, but as with outsourcing those who are making such decisions often lack the awareness, or even skills, to properly specify the requirements and be able to evaluate the results.

If the on-premise offshoring centers around the use of LLMs then I suggest the term "off-braining." :)

The investor being the customer rather than actual paying customers was something I noticed occurring in the late 90s in the startup and tech world. Between that shift in focus and the influx of naive money the Dot Bomb was inevitable.

Sadly the fallout from the Dotcom era wasn't a rejection of the asinine Business 2.0 mindset but instead an infection that spread across the entirety of finance.

Heh, I was at Netscape when the Sun-Netscape Alliance was created. Tip of the hat to a fellow gray beard. ;)

You just described the burden of outsourcing programming.

So many are desperately wishing to be the next Tom Wolfe rather than striving to find their own voice and style (as Wolfe did).

You're arguing from an end-user perspective, I'm pointing out that the Internet wasn't designed to solve easy but fragile problems but instead was intended to be a resilient network capable of surviving failures and route around them.

"I want to use a power tool and simply plug it into a wall" is not the same class of problem as "we're using a heart-lung machine during this bypass operation and power loss results in dead patients."

The widespread dependence upon Cloudflare has resulted in the "heart-lung machine" problem of DNS, among other things, being "solved" by a "power tool" class of solution.

Your electricity to servers IS a single point of failure, if all you do is depend upon the power company to reliably feed power. There is a reason that co-location centers have UPS and generator backups for power.

It may have been unthinkable to some casual observers that creating a giant single point of failure for the internet was a bad idea but it was entirely thinkable to others.

"My architecture depends upon a single point of failure" is a great way to get laughed out of a design meeting. Outsourcing that single point of failure doesn't cure my design of that flaw, especially when that architecture's intended use-case is to provide redundancy and fault-tolerance.

The problem with pursuing efficiency as the primary value prop is that you will necessarily end up with a brittle result.

If you combine a 3 year-old, whose favorite word is "why?", and the ambition of a 7 year-old you might just end up with the most productive genius possible.

If you think that resolution is terrible, you should've tried my lightpen-based "scanner." ;)

It precludes many of the advantages of a flatbed scanner (such as scanning book pages without requiring removal of the pages), which existed at the same time as the Thunderscan. Things like hand scanners established themselves at the low-end by the early 90s.

Prior to the iPhone (but within the years Jobs was in charge), Apple was a company whose target demographic was the professional/semi-professional creative market. Once iPod and iPhone demonstrated a huge sales potential the company abandoned the creatives market and became a consumer-oriented company that provided means of media consumption.

No, it's not a parasocial relationship. Those are one-sided and usually a passive consumer of media believing they have a real relationship with those who appear within said media.

If you are a customer you most assuredly have an actual relationship with the company. Your options when dissatisfied with that relationship is to end it, send your complaints to the company, or decide the dissatisfaction is overcome by the value you receive.

A muscle car is as much a visceral experience as it is a means of transportation, and never under-sell the fun of driving a slow car fast. Modern cars are sensory deprivation chambers that turn the joy of driving into the tedium of transporting oneself from one place to another.

We're decades past the time when a 1960s car was remotely competitive on any measurable aspect of performance but, just as rock climbing is not a valid competitor for taking a train/ski lift/whatever to the top of a mountain, there will always be those that revel in the joy of doing something that calls to our more primitive selves.

Muscle cars are the essence of being young... they're unreasonable, loud, reckless, and beautiful.

I'm not sure that you can reach the conclusion that "people don't have world models" based on beliefs that do not fully integrate with such a model. We too often try to misapply binary truth requirements to domains in which there exists at least a trinary logic, if not a greater number of logic truths.

If I meet a random stranger, do I trust them or distrust them? The answer is "both/neither," because a concept such as "trust" isn't a binary logic in such a circumstance. They are neither trustworthy nor untrustworthy, they are in a state of nontrustworthiness (the absence of trust, but not the opposite of truth).

World models tend to have foundational principles/truths that inform what can be compatible for inclusion. A belief that is non-compatible, rather than compatible/incompatible, can exist in such a model (often weakly) since it does not meet the requirements for rejection. Incomplete information can be integrated into a world model as long as the aspects being evaluated for compatibility conform to the model.

Requiring a world model to contain complete information and logical consistency at all possible levels from the granular to the metaphysical seems to be one Hell of a high bar that makes demands no other system is expected to achieve.

Everything? How about legal liability for the car killing someone? Are all the self-driving vendors stepping up and accepting full legal liability for the outcomes of their non-deterministic software?

There is a reason that newspapers had old saws about their business such as "if it bleeds, it leads" and "dog bites man isn't newsworthy, man bites dog is."

And there is the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect that was coined by Michael Crichton back in the early 2000s.

A common mistake that some managers make is pushing the burdens of managing onto those you're managing. Any of us who have been managers can look back and see things that we tried to push down to those we've managed because it made it easier for us while later realizing that wasn't the best solution.

If there's a catch-all channel that employees are using to share knowledge that's not a bug, it's a feature. If, as a manager, you want a more structured means of conveying institutional knowledge generated within such channels then it's on you to put that together. Trying to push that burden down the chain often results in that institutional knowledge being shared verbally or via private emails/DMs in order to avoid the burden of documentation, which is a net negative.

Such information is a force multiplier for teams as well as a great asset for onboarding new hires. Both of those are direct benefits for the manager and the company, so take the advantage of that kind of spontaneous documentation rather than insisting on passing on the cognitive burden.

After having a stress-induced LAD heart attack at the age of 46, my cardiologist gave me the "you need to reduce stress" line and I responded with "Oh, so you're not going to send me a bill for that stent in order to help me reduce my stress?" Apparently he believed that my heart could handle the stress of that bill after all.

If, as a humorist, you are concerned about whether you can publish your humorous book you can be certain that you live in a cursed timeline. Additionally if you think there are two kinds of jokes: those that were once funny and those that were never funny, then I suggest that your jokes were at best lazy. The human condition is pretty constant throughout the ages and those jokes that are aimed at such universal experiences continue to amuse for centuries or millennia.

Understandably the humor of the inexperienced 20-something will differ from that of the 40+ year-old. The simple and absolute world that we believe to see and understand in our younger years tends to vanish from our grasp as we become older and attain the wisdom of experience. Perhaps the author's belief that "it has been done already" reflects some of that wisdom, and just maybe those of a certain age at the time of the publishing of "Crap Towns" felt exactly the same way about his book. It seems, after all, that every generation believes that it is the first to do or discover a thing without considering that humans have been doing human things for an awfully long time and that the observation "there is nothing new under the sun" has some merit.