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  The thing that's slowly making me crazy is that so many things could be better for everybody at much lower cost, but both in business and politics the people we've put in charge refuse to think systemically. Some are greedy, some are not the sharpest and can't admit it, many need feelings of control, and some just don't want things to be better for everybody, because that would diminish their apparent primate status level. What if we stopped giving power to people who are emot...

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  One reason we see the same thing in different time periods is replication. E.g., cats, or Catholicism. There's a line of descent. Another reason is that similar situations allow the same thing to arise separately at different times. Like raindrops or canyons or stars. It seems to me that the revival of fascism isn't the first. American fascists mostly aren't the grandchildren and children of OG fascists. I thus expect that fascism has to be in the second category. Assuming that&#3...

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  Every time I go to my bank's website, I enjoy the photo, which I believe to be titled "Noble Heroes Also Sometimes Get Distracted". But I always feel like the woman with the phone looks familiar. I finally figured it out.

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  We need a name for the phenomenon when a person, out loud or written, seems so inauthentic that you're pretty sure they're just spouting LLM-generated slop. Reverse Turing? Meat Bot? Borged? Chipped? (As in have you been...) What are your ideas?

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  One of the things I liked about UPS was that when you had a delivery problem you could call and speak to somebody who a) understood that it was a problem, and b) could fix it. That seems over. Their slow, clunky, and unreliable website now has a low-grade chatbot, and all the support people have been replaced by grotesquely over-polite people who apparently can do nothing but tell you why it's fine and/or your fault and send you back to the website. Maddening.

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  I think I've figured out why the incidence (and centrality) of assholes is so much higher on the right. What conservatives have proven to be most concerned with conserving is systems that run on trauma. Patriarchy. White supremacy. Oligarchy. None of these work without abuse. Without people excited about abuse. That is, assholes.

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  Just learned about this. What a legend. https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-41650345

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  Earlier this week I read a compelling first-person account of AI-induced skill decay but couldn't remember where. Mastodon was the first place I looked, so let me put it here: https://becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys.tumblr.com/post/810086608414146560/the-real-impact-of-ai-at-university-level-that

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  I think this, a discussion of the parallels between "AI" and "crypto", is a good take. I want to dig into the bit on "AI" being different because it has practical use. "AI" is a marketing term. There's the stuff that was mainly called "ML" up until 2021 or so, which definitely has practical uses. E.g., if you're running a social network and need to help humans find the toxic stuff, ML can...

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  current mood

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  In the 15+ years people have been promoting blockchains, this flowchart remains undefeated.

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  My modest proposal: we ban indirect monetization. If you get something of value, either it's a gift or you pay for it directly. So no more ad-supported services, no more selling people's data, no more things where you are the product.

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  If you see somebody described as "he's just like that" or "he can't help himself", ask if he's like that when he might be held accountable. E.g., in front of his boss, his mom, at church, when a video camera is recording. Occasionally, he really can't help himself. But it usually turns out that he can, and that there's a pattern to when he can't. E.g., he's a jerk to juniors and peer women, but perfectly...

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  Has anybody seen any good articles about vibe coding from addicts in recovery? I see people talking about it being addictive, but in the "gosh I love smoking" style you see from people talking about addictive games. I'd love to see it from the perspective of somebody who deeply understands addiction because they've had to move away from one.

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  Just deleted my 23AndMe data. As suggested by CA's attorney general: https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bonta-urgently-issues-consumer-alert-23andme-customers

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  This is the sort of pedantry with which I am delighted.

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  It occurs to me that LLM "AI" may be the perfect technology for this era. The ancients anthropomorphized what they didn't understand, from Odin and Zeus down to spirits of glen and glade. As we slide into this post-rational age, many sanewash a deranged, decaying old man because they can't stand to think of vast powers driven by a swirling coalition of personality defects and obsessions. So it seems almost reasonable that people are treating corporate megascal...

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  In my darker moments I suspect AI coding will win out not because the code is any good, but because so many of my fellow developers are used to working in large, no-good code bases they won't even notice the problems.