The good news is that the tools created were sufficiently useful that there’s still a decent job market for tech workers (assuming we’re not focused on the griftier side), it’s just focused largely in non-tech companies.

David may have won the race, but I have the first sneer!

Parents weep because making good products is insufficiently profitable.

In reading about this I’ve seen some interesting concepts from scraping the edges of management cybernetics, focusing on organizations kind of like analogue information-processing systems. The one that really stuck in my mind is the accountability sink, am organizational function that takes the responsibility for some action or decision away from the people in the organization who actually do it and places it somewhere more abstract, like a process or a policy. This ties in to a lot of what we talk about here, since a lot of the tech industry these days seems to be about centralizing things around a few major platforms and giving the people who run those platforms as many accountability sinks as they can come up with, with AI being the newest.

Absolutely, and her record in those roles imo actually suggests at least some awareness of the kinds of problems that need to be solved there, though I’m sufficiently cynical about things that I would be surprised to see significant action on federal reforms. I’m cautiously optimistic about her, but my point is that even if you don’t think she’s any different from a rank-and-file Republican that would still make it irresponsible not to vote against Trump and the very specific plans he and the people around him have to make all of those problems even worse.

There is definitely room to push the Overton window farther left and (federal) electoral politics does not give an avenue to do that as long as the Republican party continues to drift further right. But the way to do that does not involve abandoning powerful federal offices like the goddamned presidency to right-wing loons.

I think there’s definitely something to be said for the exhaustion of low-hanging fruit. Most of those big consumer innovations were either the application of novel physics or chemistry (refrigerants, synthetics, plastics, microwaves, etc) combined with automating very labor-intensive but relatively simple tasks (dish washing, laundry, manual screwdriving, etc). The digital age added some very powerful logic to that toolset, but still remains primarily limited to the kinds of activities and processes that can be defined algorithmically. The ingenuity of software developers along with the introduction of new tools and peripheral capabilities (printers, networks, sensors) have shown that the kind of problems that can be defined algorithmically is a much larger set than you would first think, but it’s still limited.

Adding on to this, it’s worth noting the degree to which defining problems algorithmically requires altering the parameters of that problem. For example, compare shopping at a store with using a vending machine. The vending machine dramatically changes the scope of the activity by limiting the variety of items you can get, only allowing one item per transaction, preventing you from examining the goods before purchasing, and so on. The high-level process is the same; I move from having no soda and some dollars to one soda and less dollars. But the changes that are made to ensure the procedure can be mechanized have some significant social tradeoffs. Each transaction has less friction, but also less potential. These consequences are even more pronounced if your point of comparison is an old-school sofa fountain where “hanging out waiting for the soda jerk and drinking together” is largely the whole point and while that activity requires more from you it also gives more opportunities to interact with and meet people and to see friends outside of work or school. Even if you don’t want to spend the time or be social (or even like me get severe social anxiety sometimes!) this still leads to a world where there are more and larger blocks of time that you can’t be expected to trade away to your job or other obligations. Your boss is likely to fire you for being late to work, unless that tardiness comes from the ferry you and your coworkers rely on being late. Because it’s inevitable friction in a necessary part of working (can’t work if you can’t get to work) and because it can’t be put entirely on the individual (even if you do want to blame the employee for taking the "wrong* boat so you really want to fire the whole team?) the system is basically forced to give you more grace than it otherwise would want to.

This is another way to frame the problems with more recent “innovations” - while social media and the gig economy both arguably empower individual consumers and producers of both cultural output and of services like taxis, they do so in ways that fundamentally change the relationship and individualize the connections between consumers, producers, and the system that they interact through. And because nobody has as direct a connection to the owners and operators of that system, they have more power to increase their profits at the expense of everyone who actually has to use the system to function.

It’s also an accountability issue. If you create something in GIMP or whatever everyone agrees that you did that and are responsible for any copyright issues or defamation or whatever else arises from that work. That becomes fuzzier when people start saying “Grok made this!” Especially because Grok does operate according to a model that can and does go beyond whatever it’s been instructed to do, so you might be able to plausibly argue that if you craft the prompt right.

And I can guarantee that the cesspool formerly known as Twitter will try to play whichever side of that is more advantageous to them. Copyright infringement? That’s on the user. Unique IP? Well, Grok had a profound and independent creative role and so we deserve a piece.

What exactly do you think the alternative is here? Not voting just surrenders what little power the electoral process does give you. Even if electoral politics aren’t a meaningful way to advance your vision of a better country, this is still an opportunity, however small, to reduce the harm that will be done under a Trump presidency. Like, even if you don’t expect Harris to meaningfully improve things (and there are a lot of areas where a former cop probably shouldn’t be expected to), the alternative is someone who continues to actively promise to make those same areas even worse.

This is broadly true, though there can be some wiggle room in the exact definitely of “immediate life-saving care” depending on where you end up. In particular, a condition like appendicitis that will inevitably lead to a crisis may be turned away until it actually becomes one, even if that makes things riskier and costlier for everyone involved.

I’m actively offended by 5. Would you forget Douglas Adams so blithely?

Given how it was marketed I’m surprised we didn’t see cybertechnicals out of some stateside militia group somewhere, though I guess not currently having dictatorial power forces them to have better opsec.

Either way this things gonna light up FIRMS like it’s a one-vehicle ammo depot if/when it goes up.

That’s the state of the job market these days: even the pick-up artists have STEM degrees.

Man, I learned that Aubrey Graham was Drake’s real name as part of tracing that beef (not a hip-hop guy, obviously) but I definitely forgot and had a whole moment of “wait what who?”

Nah, this is the kind of non-attack that Elon and friends are perfectly comfortable acknowledging. It helps their internal messaging at this point to have a public opposition who they can point to to say “these people hate you specifically and you should further consume our content and products to show them we mean business.”

I always want to point out how there are never specific metrics attached to these criticisms. Whenever I’ve seen actual numbers checked there doesn’t appear to be a significant impact between before and after companies started WFH during the pandemic.

Of course I also haven’t looked to close because I’ve been too busy enjoying my life rather than pretending my boss is funny at a water cooler.

Oh this sounds like a dog I used to have as a kid! They needed more enrichment during the day or else she’d bark into the void all night and get super excited when another dog barked back.

Have they tried taking the waymos out for walkies?

Ned Ludd told me to do it.

No it’s okay they’re using an AI model, so inevitably they can point to the huge jumble of math and say “computer did it” when asked to defend the gouging. That’s basically transparency, right?

Gah! That’s the word I was looking for!

It’s actually not legal to freeze someone who’s still alive, because the freezing process is decidedly lethal. They have to replace your blood to try and minimize cell damage from ice crystals and so on. Then there’s the “budget” option where they just chop off your head and freeze that rather than mess with your whole body, for people with a very specific level of magitech in mind for their resurrection.

Now, there is a time in history where we got good enough at resurrection that they legally redefined death. In like the 70s they changed the definition of legally dead from having your heart stop to a cessation of brain activity because we got really good at restarting people’s hearts. But it’s a weirdly specific leap from “we can restart your heart” to “we can reconstruct you from just a head in a way that will have a meaningful and tangible connection to your current life”, but not all the way to “we can reconstruct you ex nihilo by retracing the quantum echoes your life created in the Force or whatever”.

There’s one things these models can never understand: Family