slipperydippery

I was reminded how fucked the modern web is a couple years ago when I encountered a so-fast-it-felt-like-local-static-html website dashboard that could have been a "web app", but wasn't.

It was being hosted on another continent. It was written in PHP. It was rendering server-side with just some light JS on my end.

That used to be the norm.

40 minutes realizing they need to update Zoom, updating Zoom, then trying to figure out why their mic isn't working.

It wasn’t some other user posting this. Their own software was generating the responses. That’s not 230.

Altman needed to convince companies these things were on the verge of becoming a machine god, and their companies risked being left permanently behind if they didn’t dive in head-first now. That’s what all the “safety” stuff was and why he sold that out as soon as convenient (it was never serious, not for him, it was a sales tactic to play up how powerful his product might be) so he could get richer. He’s a flim-flam artist. That’s his history, and it’s the role he’s playing now.

And a lot of people who should have known better, bought it. Others less well-positioned to know better, also bought it.

Hell they bought it so hard that the “vibe” re: AI hype on this site has only shifted definitely against it in the last few weeks.

I like this framing even better.

This is similar to my take on things like Facebook apparently not being able to operate without psychologically destroying moderators. If that’s true… seems like they just shouldn’t operate, then.

If you’re putting up a service that you know will attempt to present itself as being capable of things it isn’t… seems like you should get in a shitload of trouble for that? Like maybe don’t do it at all? Maybe don’t unleash services you can’t constrain in ways that you definitely ought to?

They have some responsibility because they’re selling and framing these as more than the better-tuned variant on Markov chain generators that they in fucking fact are, while offering access to them to anybody who signs up while knowing that many users misunderstand what they’re dealing with (in part because these companies’ hype-meisters, like Altman, are bullshitting us)

Most safety & security dysfunction stories: high level management-tier misaligned incentives, incompetence, and ignorance, overriding the expert advice of mere peons, leading to predictable catastrophes (not to mention, usually, extra costs in the meantime—just hidden ones).

Most solutions: make the peons watch a training video or attend a training session about how they should speak up more.

I actually think that if we're going to tax-privilege capital gains to a huge degree over wages, it's entirely appropriate for the government to claim some small chunk of non-voting, least-privileged (both to avoid conflicts of interest and fucking up the regular equities & debt markets) shares of every corporation over some size, probably with some other implementation details in there (graduated percentage as company revenue size grows or whatever, that kind of thing). I also think we should consider going back to things like having some parts of the defense industry outright government-operated, like we used to do, which these days might include a chip foundry or two. Not saying we should definitely do it, but I think it should be seriously considered.

... this ain't that, though. It's a one-off, not a reliable broadly-applicable policy, and it's not clear what kind of strategy it represents in the bigger picture. I also doubt the ownership structure is as hands-off as I'd prefer, though I admit I've not looked into the details (if there even are details yet—we've had a lot of reporting on things as if they've happened, that then sometimes go on to never actually happen, lately)

[EDIT] I further think it would be better than the status quo to acknowledge that we have an economy dominated by Zaibatsu now, and to use the government to leverage them for public benefit the way the "Asian Tigers" do/have, though I don't think this is that happening, either. I think we're currently picking the worst of three options, of "intentionally use them to their fullest; break them up; do nothing" (we've been on the "do nothing" track so far, having abandoned "break them up" in the '70s).

I had a Duron chip that, for like two full years in the early '00s, would've required an Intel chip about double the price to beat it. That was wild. I assume the Celeron line in particular only hung on through that period via contract-inertia and brand recognition, because it was a total joke next to Duron, on a bang-for-your-buck basis.

Like I did (at the time) high-end gaming on it, back when gaming used to sometimes tax your CPU and not only your GPU, and in that entire time I didn't ever feel like I would have benefitted at all from an upgrade, it was so far ahead of the curve. And that was AMD's budget chip line! They simply didn't deliberately cripple it nearly as much as Intel did their Celerons.

Dozens of junk emails per day. I don't think it has anything to do with being American.

I used to try to manage it with filters and unsubscribing and such, but at some point I realized I go years at a time without receiving emails from a human. My actual usage pattern was that I only looked at it when I expected an email from a machine, in which case it'd either be in the top 5 or so messages, or it'd be the first hit or two for a naive search.

Now I just let it fill up with shit, because who cares? I basically never open it without a specific message in mind, anyway. Trying to manage it was a total waste of my time.

> Says who?

Uh, labor costs? I guess we could work to lower those, though. Like, a lot lower.

Meanwhile if the $2 wholesale-in-China shirt costs $30 on the shelf due to tariffs and the identical-quality US-made one costs $40 because that's just what it costs, the latter won't even be made, zero factories will start up to manufacture them. You'd have to raise prices a lot for it to make sense to even try, clothes are (relatively—still far less than once-upon-a-time, which is why the poor can afford to wear clothes that aren't third-hand and much-mended) labor-intensive despite lots of automation because machines remain terrible at manipulating cloth, despite decades of effort at solving that problem.

It's really expensive to make clothes in the US, and skimping on quality doesn't save all that much, percentage-wise. Being that they're also a necessity, we'd truly have to drive quality of life way down for a large chunk of the population to get that industry making low-end clothes.

Notably, this was basically never true of the modern, post-Nixon and post-authoritarian-christian-courting Republican voters.

They (and a lot of democratic voters!) were always skeptical of things like very-liberal trade policy. The gap between that long-running strain in the voters, and what the bipartisan neoliberal consensus on trade (and immigration, for all Republican politicians complained about it when campaigning) had looked like among nearly all Federal elected officials from the early '80s on, is exactly the kind of thing that Trump exploited to swiftly take over the entire party.

Get Out the Vote is where it's at. "True swing" (not self-reported swing, most people lie because they think being a swing voter is more socially desirable, I suppose) is indeed a tiny sliver.

It's about convincing your people they need to show up or the other side will make your grandkids shit in litter boxes, or whatever lies it takes.

Combine a very-high necessary floor of funding for a wasteful Red Queen's Race opened up by Citizens United, and a bad system of elections that guarantees only two stably-viable parties, and you've got a system where money may not determine the winner, but it very much determines who even makes it on the ballot and the positions they are allowed to take on various issues, in a big way.

This has gotten a lot more complex to accurately track since Citizens United.

Campaign spending isn't even close to the actual total spent on a campaign, any more.

1) This is, amusingly, kind of a shift back to when portraits had to be painted.

2) This seems very similar to me to those weird fuzzy double-exposure, heavily posed portraits that used to be really popular, or in general not that different from going and having family photos taken at a cheap mall photo studio with one of five shitty looking background-tarps.

I suspect there are some interesting class components to that second one (Fussell may even have mentioned it in his book, I can't recall, but it's definitely the kind of thing that probably could have served his analysis) but overall I think the "unwashed masses" have long preferred really shitty, lazily/poorly staged & manipulated photos to authentic ones. Now they can just apply that same aesthetic preference to photos that weren't originally like that.

> Right... but now that is (arguably) cost competitive with American labor and manufacturing. Or at least it's more cost competitive than it otherwise would be.

This won't work for clothes. We'd need Wal-mart shoppers to be spending like $400/outfit (incl. shoes) to even maybe bring those jobs back to the US. For clothes specifically, short of raising prices so much that the poorest few tens of a percent of the population are reduced to wearing shit-tier disposable clothes covered in also-cheap patches and often worn threadbare, shoes fully wrapped in duct-tape because the soles are practically gone, et c, there's no way you're bringing those jobs back. We'll just pay more for the exact same stuff, with few or no extra jobs as a trade-off.

Meanwhile, goods partially manufactured here (materials made here, finished elsewhere; materials foreign, construction domestic) will see price increases due to tariffs, which may harm sales, which may reduce employment. Between that and any broader economic down-turn resulting from these policies (can't buy as many things if prices are up, can't spend more on expensive US goods if your basics go up in price) I wouldn't be surprised if we see a bunch of the remaining US clothing manufacturers go out of business in the next few years. I have several brands I like that are already showing visible signs of distress (things like products lines being reduced, no new models showing up) and am worried I'll soon have almost no US clothes to choose from, due to these "protectionist" policies.

The real harm of the sunscreen thing is that the FDA being weirdly far behind the rest of the OECD at approving new agents means we're stuck with stuff that's a pain to apply and feels gross to wear. This harms health, because people will be less consistent about applying and re-applying when it takes more time than it might, and when the product feels nasty on the skin.

Many grey-market imported sunscreens apply in like 1/4 the time of US ones, feel like nothing at all once rubbed in, don't leave your hands feeling oily and like you need to scrub hard with soap and water right after applying, and have almost no odor. We're like decades behind on that tech, for reasons that I don't understand.

Approximately all of those kinds of books are ghost-written. People with money who aren't otherwise authors only very rarely write their own books. It takes a lot of time, and business "leader" sorts especially are extremely comfortable delegating that and then putting (only) their name on it.

Trump's is unusual in that it's widely known not just that it was ghost written, but who did it. Often the real writer's name isn't known, and we can only guess at whether it was ghost written (again, the answer is almost always "yes").

> However, our current insurance industry based system (colloquially known as the ACA or Obamacare) has caused "health care" to pivot away from providing medical treatment to individual patients, and toward a system of "health care" companies charging insurance companies for services provided to a 3rd party (the patient).

I have never encountered the notion that the ACA is the cause of this, and I was around before the ACA and don't see how that part wasn't the same before it, except other things were worse (the whole "pre-existing conditions" thing, for one). What do you mean?

> I heard that east-coast mafias had something to do with the over-the-top levels of cronyism involved

I'm in a fairly densely-populated part of the east coast and we have lots of options for trash hauling, and none of them are "official" or provided by the city.

... I do wonder about the wear-n-tear on the neighborhood roads from having like 5+x as many trash truck trips on them per week versus a municipal solution, given how fast road wear scales with axel weight. I bet it's enough to matter, which means we're all paying a hidden cost for being able to choose among trash companies. It also seems like the base costs would have to be significantly higher, given far more trucks required and way fewer pick-ups per mile driven.

With the really young kids you could lead with One Hundred Years of Solitude. There are lots of times you're not really showing them pictures in the book—or they're too young even for that, really, can't focus their eyes well—and they just need to hear the sounds and flow of language, not to understand every word (or any words). I read mine To the Lighthouse and shit like that, it was great, I think each kid got three or four "classics" while very young. I could pare down my own to-read list while being "a good parent", LOL, felt like a cheat code.

That's a dream come true... provided they fix multi-accounts and game visibility/accessibility in the Steam UI.

I already have a Steam Deck that I can't let my kids touch, which is stupid. I can't hook something like this up in a shared space of any kind without improved parental controls, including ability to toggle visibility of game library entries, and (ideally, but not strictly necessary) the ability to say "do not show this user's entire library to anyone else on this machine, or on the network, nobody with a different login"

PCs are different for a few reasons, for me.

One big part's the library. I can still play Steam games I bought when the Gamecube was current. My Gamecube games do not work on the Switch. My Dreamcast games certainly don't! The library for the PC is enormous and generally you don't have to re-buy old games to keep playing them, even after major hardware upgrades. Hell I got like a few hundred games on Itch.io years ago for so little money they may as well have been free, and sure they're mostly short "jank" games and art games and stuff, but that's still games and I like them! You can't get that kind of thing (with that kind of "OMG I may never even get through all these..." magnitude, I don't mean jank or art games, both exist on consoles, even if they're not well represented) on a console.

To do anything similar with consoles, you need, like... a dozen consoles, or more, with keeping that number down requiring putting a lot of money and time into careful curation and selection. A single PC does the trick, though.

Another's longevity & archiving (not unrelated to the library thing, but not exactly the same thing). The PC is my platform of last resort for console game archiving. Consoles don't really fill this role at all. Even a "hacked" console (if it's hackable) is on borrowed time. The hardware dies, and eventually the only ones left are in museums or crazy-expensive private collections. Meanwhile I play freeware PC games I downloaded in the 1990s, sometimes, like the exact same binary (to the degree it's "the same", which it isn't, but I just mean I didn't have to go download it again) that's been shuffled from one disk to another ever since. They're not gone. And thanks to PCs, neither are old console games (this is a state of affairs that's on life support, for newer consoles, but not quite dead yet)

Another's the controls. I don't really want a console at my desk (and there's gonna be a PC regardless, so that's nothing extra) because I definitely want one on my TV, and I don't want two of the same console. I don't really want to use a mouse & keyboard on my couch, I've done it, the best solutions I've found take up a bunch of space, look bad, and are still a worse experience than a desk. Some games that I love, I have no interest in playing them if it's not with a mouse and keyboard (and for plenty of others, a controller is better! I like tons of games that are best played with a controller, but for some, it's mouse & keyboard or I'll simply not play them).

Another factor's modding. I've gotten hundreds of extra hours out of games I've bought, thanks to mods. 50+% of my time in the Half Life and Source engines has been in total conversion mods. I'd probably only have put about a quarter as many hours into Morrowind or Skyrim as I have, without mods. I never touched the base game of Rome: Total War again after I discovered the Europa Barbarorum mod, which I sunk probably a hundred or more hours into. All for free, and you don't get that on consoles, the closest you get are things like level designers, sometimes, in LittleBigPlanet or what have you... and those all die when the game servers die.

FWIW I have... a lot of consoles, I don't hate them or anything, and these days most (90%?) of my gaming is on consoles. But they're not a gaming PC.

(Really, if gaming PCs were more-stable, less-janky, and didn't have such a hard time consistently pairing with and juggling multiple BlueTooth controllers [even the SteamDeck fails to live up to "real" consoles, on any of those fronts] I'd probably not bother with consoles at all, but that's such a crippling issue for PC hardware that instead I have a bunch of consoles, and have even re-bought games 3 or 4 times just for the convenience of being able to play them on one of the small set of real consoles currently connected to my TV)

Video drivers & hardware are a plague on both Windows and Linux. Hell, adding a discrete video card to the config was even a way to increase your odds of serious problems with a Mac by a large multiple, back in the Intel Mac days. Any complaint-session online by Mac owners tended to be dominated by folks rocking non-Intel video chips in their MacBook.

Part of the trouble is that an Earth with "ruined" habitability (let's throw together both severe climate change and also a nuclear exchange, why not?) is still far better & easier to live on than anywhere else we know about.

That's what I mean about space being just the worst. Like, it's so bad. Even Mars, which is relatively decent by space standards, is complete shit. Complete shit that's also insanely expensive to reach.

> We are destined for the stars.

The stars suck, though. Even Mars is entirely awful.

Like, that's not very different from "we're destined for Hell". Not an inspiring sentiment, right? It's really bad.

How awful it is aside, it's also roughly as realistic as "we're destined for Tolkien's Middle Earth". Only marginally less fantastical.

They’re proof you learned the topic well enough to coherently write a very-few pages about it. That’s what they’re for.

Making them open book + AI would just mean you need “larger” questions to be as effective a test, so you’re adding work for the graders for basically no reason.

K.

I think we’re going to be dealing with so many things in ten years that this’ll hardly even register.