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As a lifelong student of religious cultures like Utah's (and often in particular Utah's), this isn't bad at a first approximation but could be elaborated better.

There is absolutely a class of Utah politicians that has little sincere personal investment in purity culture and associated culture war issues, but knows that they can be used for ingroup/virtue signaling. They also know that the dominant religious culture in Utah prepares the most significant statewide voting block to respond to such culture issues far more powerfully than any kind of attempt to engage on policy or detailed dialogue. This isn't that different from a common general strategy of running on symbolic issues and then devoting your time in office to favor trading/personal gain plus occasional personal pet policy issues, but the particular flavor is regional with a strong religious emphasis.

But there's also significant portion of regional religious leadership and membership with sincerely held purity culture beliefs. Some of this is rooted in psychological traits amplified via theology where adherents achieve a perceived state of purity/redemption by cleansing rituals and avoiding contaminants. Some of this is rooted in credences: the tradition makes moral claims about sexual contaminants and you have to sign on to be part of the ingroup (and also the tradition's leaders speak for God and are therefore wrong and if you challenge them you're not just outgroup, you're actually challenging the authority of the tradition which makes you opposed to God himself, so from this perspective there's little legitimate discourse about sexuality topics leaders have spoken about, there's mostly authority of religious leaders and individuals declaring of which side of the spiritual war they're on).

So, some people shaped under this culture over time do believe they are fighting crucial battles for the children, to the point where they have no problem with the erosion or even destruction of any secular treaties like those the 1st amendment supports (the fact that Latter-day Saints are quite vulnerable should secular treaties fall in a nation of much larger religious organizations that see LDS as blasphemous heretics is largely lost on most of the porn crusaders, there are some peculiar delusions that come with being a local majority with some national clout yet a national minority nonetheless).

And others know this sincere belief is a convenient lever for other power plays, and all you have to do is flatter the prejudices and signals of the ingroup in order to get broad permission for corruption and other antisocial advances.

The real divide isn’t separation of concerns or implicit vs explicit structure. It’s whether you have staff that wants to think about markup as a data format expressing domain entities and/or generalization of presentation concerns.

Most developers and organizations don’t want to and they don’t want to think why or what doing so would buy them. They will probably find the tailwind local maxima enabling that reasonably comfortable and may even repeat the familiar mantra as has been done here. It especially pairs well with unreflective product management, which is the most popular kind of product management.

This is why there are moral panics about things people feel in their guts: most people are reasonably easily unsettled and distracted by queer people, people who look different, people their people don’t trust being in charge.

It works. Most people are happier focusing and holding forth on that and repeating familiar statements than they are talking to congressional staff about policy.

Your car that you paid a lot for and you like and have positive useful experiences with every day? That’s going to be way farther down the list of things to worry about.

Which mostly seem to stem from the fundamental misalignment of OpenAI and Anthropic leaders/owners, aka the evil of the companies.

Arguably, though, their evil is well within the normal distribution of the usual evil of humanity magnified via the social technology of capitalism. The further tech is mostly raising that exponentiation to its own exponent. The unchecked singularity was embraced centuries ago.

Worth noting this dynamic when people overgeneralize “local government good, federal government bad”, a tendency that has been present and growing for at least 50 years.

The theory that local government is more accountable and responsive seems to be pretty deeply broken, what actually seems to happen is that localities lack a critical mass of attention and focus for real responsiveness and accountability.

Or the American character in general does.

For me it’s mostly media apps - Fireworks CS 6, Reason 10, maybe some version of Garage Band. There’s alternatives but these apps hit a sweet spot that I could camp out on for decades if the tech treadmill didn’t like to make software an exercise in seeing shifting shapes in the clouds.

There’s already a solid case that AI profits or revenue should be significantly taxed for public goods whether or not there are employment impacts. The models simply do not exist without vast amounts of training data much of it acquired by murky or clearly problematic methods (even before you start to get into how technical developments mean the letter of the law doesn’t cover the spirit of the situation). The source of that data is more or less everyone. Some benefit should go to everyone.

I thought the recommended honeymoon reading was Knuth’s _Surreal Numbers_

I also have a suspicion that people’s microdistributions of talents is underappreciated. Some people are good architects and average at algorithms. Some people are unusually good at debugging or QA. Some can spin out whole systems at an impressive speed that may not be a great long term fit for the larger system.

And most businesses aren’t managed in a way that’s interested in adapting to the microshapes of personnel.

with the advantage that you can discover this by reading citations.

A fascinating everyday arms race I had no idea was playing out around me.

The enlightenment and its values underly a huge portion of what’s published, both inside scholarly tradition and in popular work.

Ans the enlightenment is at heart civil libertarian, pro-social, and liberal.

Models trained on that work will reflect that approach.

How does the PWA work offline with HTMX? The “hit the server for fresh markup fragments” approach seems like it has to be abandoned here, however simplifying it is for online apps.

Buying up old books is legal. Digitizing and distilling them arguably is too. And also:

> paying extortion fees to the copyright-mongers

Yes yes, greedy fat cat publishing oligarchs treading on the poor put-upon scrappy AI underdogs. /s

Back in reality, the fraction of people who got into publishing books to get rich collecting rents is… not large. There’s so many other fields that are likely to reward participants with more wealth that it’s absurd — even with all the passion for the work in tech it’s probably relatively less pure.

And whatever the excesses of copyright have been, the whole bargain has always been on more pro-social foundations and stronger intellectual foundations than “extortion” sneers. It recognizes that incentives matter and work that’s valuable should be rewarded and incentivized.

A culture that takes a Robin Hood approach to low marginal cost billing points but fawns over the hypercapitalized distribution King Johns isn’t creating a freer or richer society or fighting the real cartel center, it’s indulging resentment and caricature.

> A person can type 3,000 words by hand and have no thought pass through their head beyond the need to finish before lunch.

This isn’t the common case. How many of the thoughts produced while working on the words have much novelty or high quality may be an open question, but it’s rare to type or handwrite 3000 words and not have any thoughts.

> Another can dictate an idea, argue with a language model for an hour, reject six drafts, rearrange the whole piece, rewrite half of it, and publish something they understand down to the final comma

Also probably not the common case. And so far my experience is that models make decent to good editors/critics, but average originators (though with remarkable breadth and sometimes outlier originations).

If the “protocols not platforms” philosophy is the right track, usenet/nntp.

Speaking as someone who has run courses designed to take late teens / early 20somethings with a variety of backgrounds and tried to teach them 1st semester programming concepts in two weeks, I think anyone who thinks tcp/ip an easy four week dunk for most doesn’t remember how much they’ve already learned and take for granted.

Sure, if you’ve already learned enough groundwork, tcp/ip is accessible in weeks. The same is true of most of the algebraic concepts in play here. And both have rabbit holes you can also spend a much longer time going down (though here I am willing to give the edge to math which offers much greater opportunities for hypergeneralization and new vistas of abstraction along which not only specific rabbit holes but entire new generalizations of both rabbits and holes may be found).

If you’re not redistributing ebooks you bought, it’s hard to imagine what legal claim someone could make against you, and even harder to establish the ethics of that claim.

To say nothing of Amazon’s ethics.

Yeah, we’re early culturewise in the digitization experiment and high on optimism about the benefits, but not very far into reckoning with the downsides and incentives skew a bit towards carelessness.

The real danger is that we’ll be so careless we’ll discard other enduring ways of doing things before we smarten up to their particular benefits.

My hope is that disciplined people still have an intuition for this, even among the digitally steeped. Sysadmin/ops types tend to a culture of diversifying backup location and even media type. Maybe that can reach back to human legible hard copy.

I’m having trouble imagining the privacy concern. If someone’s vehicle is topping 90db then it’s hard to argue what they really want is privacy, and even the most invasive monitoring method I can think of (widespread mics) could be nerfed by requiring hardware that only responds at db threshholds well above conversation.

I’m at the point where I don’t just want ticketing and other enforcement on this front, I want yanked licenses for this after a warning, and I might even want it legal to shoot vehicles guilty of noise violations and their drivers with paintballs to mark them for further enforcement and shame.

Smoking is the atmospheric equivalent of peeing in the pool; noise pollution is something between that and opting everyone into your dumb M80 party. It’s antisocial, it causes health problems on top of discomfort, and it should stop.

I might imagine that even this cycle could change, if the resources necessary to support step 1 and step 2 are much lower. Which might mean step 3 isn’t as necessity driven.

Of course, it’s possible other things can drive step 3.

And frontier models are already a study in unusual levels of resources dedicated to step 1.

It has now been longer since apps on smartphones were introduced than it was between the web’s birth and smartphones (to say nothing of popular uptake, it’d be generous to give the web a full decade there before the rise of the smartphone). Combine that with recency bias and the marketing serving incentives of platforms and vendors to push towards “native” and the point seems pretty strong.

There’s some minority of apps where work is offline resource bound or mostly offline regardless, those certainly have always made sense on device, other than that habit and mindset probably is the main driver of preference.

See also Bill Thurston’s classic Math Overflow answer to a student wondering where they fit compared to a Gauss or Euler:

https://mathoverflow.net/questions/43690/whats-a-mathematici...

“The product of mathematics is clarity and understanding. Not theorems, by themselves. [Their importance is not just in their specific statements], but their role in challenging our understanding, presenting challenges that led to mathematical developments that increased our understanding.

The world does not suffer from an oversupply of clarity and understanding (to put it mildly)… In short, mathematics only exists in a living community of mathematicians that spreads understanding and breaths life into ideas both old and new. The real satisfaction from mathematics is in learning from others and sharing with others. All of us have clear understanding of a few things and murky concepts of many more. There is no way to run out of ideas in need of clarification. The question of who is the first person to ever set foot on some square meter of land is really secondary. Revolutionary change does matter, but revolutions are few, and they are not self-sustaining --- they depend very heavily on the community of mathematicians.”

I’ve got an old DX. The fact that it doesn’t have net access anymore is now a security feature and an anti distraction mechanism. I can load what I want by USB. It doesn’t do epub3 which is a problem, but it does PDFs and conversion tricks are possible.

The Amazon ecosystem isn’t uniquely untrustworthy, but it’s not where I want to keep future electronic purchases.

That makes sense — decisions that are about personal benefits beyond technical/product choices and their merits.

When you say “political“, what do you mean? It’s easy for me to relate to talk of software development aesthetics or philosophy and I’ve certainly had plenty of conversations that I think are accurately described that way. But I can’t think of software development discussions that I’d describe as political (except in the sense that politics is what happens when people disagree on anything).

It does seem to be true that voters are often content to select and re-select congressional representation that will hide from too much critical attention, give evasive responses, or otherwise dodge direct accountability.

People's stated preferences are as you say. Most agree we'd like responsive representation that's conscientiously engaged in opinion gauging and fact-finding to determine what the people want and need. We can even select for those preferences, and be consistently unkind to those who are evasive. Yet we're not always consistent about that, and different preferences are often revealed at the ballot box.

This is the inescapable fact of the electoral system: officeholders are selected by voters in elections. There is no other mechanism for selecting them. That's a key difference between your other "is like" examples and elected representation. Pollution and health care are interesting problems to consider in their own right, they even have collective action components, but they also both actually have other identifiable agents and dynamics to whom more of the responsibility can be assigned. When it comes to elected representation, not only are there no agents with more responsibility, there are no other agents with power to select representation. Who else can bear ultimate responsibility for who is selected and how they govern?

You can identify things that make it difficult for people to meet that responsibility productively, and that's reasonable enough, all my comments here are essentially identifying the psychological barriers that assign agency elsewhere, and I'm happy to talk about others.

But there is no other place responsibility lies. The hands on the levers are ours collectively. No one else is coming to save us but us. No system fix will let us run on rote habit and get better results (and also, to fix the system, you have to work to win big under the system as it is).

The insane thing is that nobody listens when they do talk about it.

A huge thing in the Harris campaign was that her policies polled much better than Trump's (including housing accessibility by increasing construction, regulations for a fairer rental market, downpayment support for firstime buyers). Nobody knew the policies were hers, though, just like awareness of the accomplishments of the Biden admin seem to be shockingly rare.

You can put part of that on the Democratic party, which could clearly up their media game.

But especially in the algorithm age, a lot of what you see is based off your preferences. This makes people who think their main leverage is their resentments really easy pickings. Someone posts content about how the housing market is unfair and politicians aren't doing enough and everyone who agrees teaches their algorithm that's what they find engaging and important -- not that housing policy and who is doing what is important.

So who hears about this?

https://newdemocratcoalition.house.gov/media-center/press-re...

The people who tell their algorithms that's what they want or are more deliberate about their communication channels and what they go looking for.

It's reasonable to acknowledge that some individuals are so overwhelmed by the demands of their circumstances that they truly have no disposable time & attention to direct to the society they live in.

The statistics I've encountered suggest that this is smaller than 10%. Between there and the percentage of people who even vote is one margin of responsibility, and there are many people who have time for more but put it somewhere else.

That's a choice, and people are free to make it. It also has consequences, like the elections that select officeholders.

Calling this "victim blaming" seems like rhetorical lane-shifting. We're not discussing crimes where someone suffers a violent attack of some kind they had no agency in, we're discussing a society where those who govern are selected by voters in elections, which at some level means issues are representative of those who vote (and those who don't).

We're all very used to locating agency in large systems somewhere we don't have control over, and at one level that's even pretty understandable as a first approximation -- most people don't have substantial influence at an individual level. And no individual contribution to your retirement account will leave you comfortable, it's the collected effort over time that might. That's true for individual influence too, and magnified by organized cooperation.

You brought up OWS. That's a reasonable example to consider in a lot of ways -- it was collective cooperation, certainly better than apathy, and I respect it for that (and did not take kindly to the ways it was disparaged especially in some partisan media).

It was also a movement that was probably overfocused on the the idea that social leverage is primarily about expressed demand, especially given that the goals of participants were diverse and unfocused. At times it almost seemed like the tactic (occupation) was the goal. It was successful in injecting some longstanding ideas into some parts of public consciousness (there's a 99% that's poorly served by things as they are now and 1% that are dramatically overserved) and may have created some networks that have had a longer influence. But I think it also showed that many participants don't know what effective ongoing influential cooperation looks like.

We want achievements like the civil rights movement but we have Woodstock ideas about what that looks like instead of movement-momentum habits.

I've had this conversation enough to know that I'm also in a sense making a similar mistake, expressing ideas and expecting that alone to change things, which is especially naive given that I know the mindset shift is a bit of a hard sell. At least I know that someone who argues back and forth over a series of comments probably cares more than average, maybe enough to create ongoing habits of influence themselves.