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smfugit

28 karma · joined August 20, 2023

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smfugit··on The inside story of Threads
These systems should not scale. Giving everyone free broadcast capability is a sign of mentally bankruptcy.

Its like giving every neuron in your head broadcast capability. What happens when they all fire at the same time? Or like giving everyone in the world a radio transmitter that can broadcast on any frequency. What happens when they all transmit on the same frequency at the same time?

These idiots are scaling things because its become possible technically. There is no other logic to whats going on. And its producing/enabling massive amounts of useless noise. The UN report on the Attention Economy says 0.5% of content on the net is actually consumed by anyone.

smfugit··on Tech Workers Deserve a Union: An Interview with Ethan Marcotte
The environment resembles more a circus or a zoo where the animals are trained/fed and kept in well designed (sometimes golden) cages.

Hard to expect such conditioning to generate the imagination required to reconstruct the environments.

New environments and the space for new ideas is only possible outside the circuses and the zoos.

smfugit··on India Keeps Pulling the Plug on Its Digital Economy
Its digital economy doesnt add up. Very few of that 1 billion online has cash. About 10% can afford things. The next 20-30% function on credit. The remaining either depend on govt funded services or ad supported services (why anyone even wants to pay for those ads targeting the cashless is an unsolved mystery but I guess subprime ads are similar to subprime mortgages). And its probably easier to get away pulling the plug on a sub prime digital economy than a real one.
smfugit··on Physicists Observe ‘Unobservable’ Quantum Phase Transition
Its almost sounding like sociology, watching groups of people bumping into each other and measuring what info is retained.
smfugit··on Spain’s Lessons for American Decline
Diversity does make a diff but it depends on the problem. Its sort of the Explore-Exploit trade off.

For Explore type problems diversity has a much bigger impact then Exploit type problems. To add to the drama/misunderstandings/confusion sometimes you assemble a team for explore and they do find the gold mine, but then they arent suited to exploit it cuz its in their nature to explore. And vice versa.

smfugit··on A student-debt bubble fueled a housing bubble
Easy to fix instead of ranting about what the 1% thinks.

People should pick a month and just stop paying their credit bills as a protest. Suddenly overnight there will be a debt jubilee announced.

smfugit··on Why do so many people hate EU bureaucracy?
Its a veblen style leisure class. 95% signalling 5% work.
smfugit··on Google redraws the borders on maps depending on who’s looking (2020)
It only matters to the empire builders and scale bots. They are the ones who are desperate for common reality to simplify their mindless goals usually planted in their head by some other dumbass.

End of the day everyone has a 3 inch chimp brain. Its not designed for common reality.

2 brains growing in same environments, exposed to the same things through their live can turn out to have totally different beliefs. And thats just looking at my own family members.

Its like planting 2 seeds in the same soil, giving them the same sun and water dont produce the same exact number of leaves, flowers or fruits.

smfugit··on Dennis Austin, developer of PowerPoint, has died
Books beat them all imho :)
smfugit··on Housewives Are One Surprising Solution to “Millennial Burnout”
Yup things can/will get complicated but avoidance of risk doesnt solve the og problem of burnout. And with age/time/screwing up both sides learn that. There is probably no other way to build that trust.
smfugit··on Housewives Are One Surprising Solution to “Millennial Burnout”
You are splitting the cost though. Greater the time you spend on bread winning, and it always increases as work/fam responsibilities & fam size increase with time, less time you have on the home front. It makes a big diff(a real relief infact) if SO is full time manning that front.
smfugit··on NSO group iPhone zero-click, zero-day exploit captured in the wild
No big political leaders out of the tech world yet. So "the tech community" doesnt have anyone to rally around. And this more a political prob than a technical problem.
smfugit··on NASA finally admits what everyone already knows: SLS is unaffordable
> weakens belief in our system of governance as a whole

That already happened with 2008 GFC. Whats happening with NASA is a small rounding error compared to the amount of pure junk that has accumulated on the FED balance sheet since then, to keep delusions afloat. So the stock market/health care/edu/real estate/iphone/sls prices keep rising. Even though its all pure junk.

smfugit··on Is Google's looming monopoly trial a watershed moment for Big Tech?
Since they have done a great job dealing with big oil, big tobacco, big ag, big pharma, big banks, big auto, big telco, big media, big soda, big accounting, the mil complex etc I shall not be holding my breath.

The US political class is bought and paid for. They exist to do what the corps want. There is a good reason Tim Wu quit. Its a non contest.

smfugit··on What OpenAI really wants
"A Wealth of Information produces a Poverty of Attention" The real need is an efficient allocation of Attention. That has not been solved. And is far away from being solved if you pay attention to the kind of things people pay attention too today.

What is apparent is OpenAI is run by totally clueless mindlessly ambitious one dimensional buffoons.

smfugit··on Ask HN: Isn't it hard to find a programmer's job that is a bit greener?
Get used to it. There is no manual or answer to it.

But the word to fixate on is information. Is the org causing info explosions? Is the org increasing info asymmetry? Is the org producing info pollution? What kind of information is the org pumping into your head? Etc

smfugit··on Govt to bring resolution to rename India as Bharat
And the people shall be called brats.
smfugit··on The Apple $2T Economy
And Apple has basically said the 150-200 billion in cash that has accumulated, parked in tax havens, selling their veblen goods, they cant find a single thing on the planet worth investing it in. So its just growing like a nice fat pointless tumor.

Think about that for 2 seconds. What does it mean?

It shows us in 2023, corporate robots can design a highly optimized runaway process of cash extraction from the chimp troupe, for no reason other than it being possible. There is no purpose to these processes.

When a corporate robot finds a scaling rule it keeps scaling. Scale always needs purpose. Otherwise we end up like Apple. And only fools think the Apple story of mindless scaling is going well or going to end well.

smfugit··on Sag-AFTRA votes unanimously to expand its strike to include the games industry
The UN report on the Attention Economy says 0.5% of content produced is consumed.

No other industry works like this. And thats without any AI involvement.

In that context this entire fight between creators and content publishers/distributors is a gigantic farce.

We are already drowning in an ever growing ocean of content. These people want to be rewarded without doing any single thing to reduce the size of that ocean. They think the ocean will alway expand. Its just as absurd to watch as the sub prime crisis.

smfugit··on UPI Payments: 10B transactions a month done, next stop 100B
Dont get carried away by tech thats offered for "free".

Even if you subtract all the margins corporations (visa/mastercard etc) extract there is a gigantic bill when you make services free for everyone.

Everything is beautiful when google, youtube, fb, twitter offered their stuff for free. But we know the true cost 20 years later.

Sooner or later some one has to foot the bill. In this case a very small pool of indian tax payers.

smfugit··on The Fandomization of News
When I was 16 there were better things to do than pay attention to the news. I mean if the "adults" were struggling to solve complex issues, why give me anxiety over it.

The over riding goal today has become attention capture/Like/View/Click collection. But this is a temporary blip.

The story is breaking down with the platforms seeing growth stall, reduction in free content (pushed behind paywalls/login screens), banks collapsing, period of low interest rates ending, advertising budgets shrinking, subscription charges rising, new regulations that are upending how things used to work etc etc.

The Attention Economy is under assault and things are going to change. Content creators (be it news orgs or influencers) are functioning under the belief that if they create the "right" content they will get the views.

But the platforms (just like HN) dont inform them as more and more content creators enter the chat, and more and more content is Produced, the amount of content being Consumed doesn't increase cause total collective Attention is a constant. It has become easy to produce content, copy it, broadcast it. So supply goes on rising. But demand cant match it. And then spending time analyzing what "works" for the content creators is delusion.

smfugit··on How ‘Rich Men North of Richmond’ Reached the Top of the Charts
No one has interest in everything that goes viral or gets popular. I mean I just tune it out, if its not interesting to me.

Which means whatever is currently at the top of any list (eg obama or trump), the Attention Economy throws up (including HN) doesn't really means what people think it means. There are lots of people who are paying attention to something totally different, cause whats available on the buffet is endless. Meanwhile those who go viral (ala obama and trump) think they are having impact.

smfugit··on ‘The Peripheral’ Canceled at Amazon Despite Season 2 Renewal
Good I couldn't sit through the absurd 1st season. It feels like Writers are all just so depressed, that they are just using these shows as coping mechanism. No one cracks a joke. Everything is serious and the world is going to end. Old school scifi and fantasy had a lot more humor and hope.
smfugit··on Onsen: A Peek into Japan’s Hot Springs
Its marketing + the "conspicuous leisure" class over uses Japan all the time to signal/buy status. If you can afford it great. If you cant, its not the end of the world.
smfugit··on Astronomers Find Star Is a Powerful Magnet
:) Those busy electrons! And they never seem to get bored or die.
smfugit··on W. H. Auden’s 1954 review of The Fellowship of the Ring
There are no essential stories for "everyone". Cause everyone is different. What the cactus needs and what the redwood needs are not the same thing. The stories they need will always be different.