magpi3

There is an excellent "This American Life" episode on rats. The first act is about a guy who keeps rats as pets. It's a sweet story.

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/801/transcript

There is something to be said for how the technology stack keeps growing for businesses and what this might mean for the future.

Thirty years ago, you had an OS and you installed applications. No problem.

Later, you had to build and use apps on the internet, an infrastructure that is susceptible to DDOS attacks, government firewalls, and other security risks. Still fine, sort of.

Now, you not only have to build apps on the internet, you also have use LLMs to build apps to remain competitive with other developers. Future (human) maintainers of your code might not properly understand how it works, and if the providers of the LLMs screw up or go rogue, you are properly fucked.

There is a dependency/technology stack debt that is creating risks that need to be acknowledged.

It takes the view that anyone in an administrative position will put the survival of the organization as their primary goal, while lower-level employees (who are far less invested in the organization) can remain invested in the organization's ostensible goals.

I find it to be very true after almost 30 years in the working world, and I always keep it in mind wherever I work.

Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy absolutely applies here:

https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html

"Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:

First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers, launch technicians, and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers' union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

The Iron Law states that, in every case, the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules and control promotions within the organization."

Yeah, Karateka deserves more than a simple aside here. It's amazing that he made that on his own as a college student. I loved that game.

I've thought this for a while: a day will come when the anonymous internet becomes a thing of the past. It really feels like we are already there but not everyone realizes it yet. What's the point of conversing with someone on the internet (like right now) if you can't tell the difference between a bot and a real person? And it will only get worse.

But what does an anon-free internet even look like? Is it even possible? Or will all online content eventually be considered untrustable and worthless? You can see a world where newspapers (online or otherwise) make a comeback simply because of the need for a trusted gatekeeper (which is what I imagine made them valuable in the first place). It's wild to think about.

I don't really have a stance one way or the other, but I don't think people just produce content for ad revenue. A lot of people produce content just to get their name out there/increase their branding, an incentive that AI summaries undermine. There really is no motivation to produce something if it is just going to be regurgitated by AI agents. And, yes, I know they cite sources in their responses (at least Google does), but that is a pretty paltry substitute for actual traffic to your site.

The issue is that people produce content because they want visitors to their sites. If ChatGPT and Google just vacuum up content for AI summaries, people may stop producing that content. It really is, in the long-term, an existential issue for the web if search providers push people away from visiting websites.

He may have meant abdicated

There are always creative ways to present data. Dismissing the needs of a minority of people just because we don't share their visual impairment is lazy, and we can do better.

White with black text for success and black with white text for failure. People would figure it out.

He mentioned in the article that his Kindle is not connected to the internet (didn't explain why), so this is a no-go for him.

Even if they found the culprits, what's a judge's verdict against a presidential pardon?

This is bad logic. A presidential pardon at least exposes the corruption, and exposing the corruption is more important than a prison sentence.

Maybe because the rot runs so deep in Washington that nobody really wants this to be a big deal. A little like the Epstein files: so many people would be caught up in the web if insider trading in DC were properly investigated that nobody wants to go there.

Yes

The bill also prevents senior government officials from betting on prediction markets if they are participating personally in the event on which they are betting.

https://www.merkley.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/End-Predic...

But what happens when the bill comes in? That's my biggest fear. I heard on a recent podcast that it is a great time to be a micro-entrepreneur, and I think that's true right now because AI is so cheap. But AI companies are hemorraghing money. What happens to those micro-entrepreneurs when the price goes up? Are we going to live in a world where only large, rich corporations can afford to competitively develop things? Maybe so, but it is depressing to think about.

For the plebeians (like me), I think hand-coding skills will always be relevant and necessary.

Or it could be an awful lot of productivity. We have to think bigger. What would the world look like if every programmer were a 10x (or whatever) programmer?

In the 90s, you would have said the exact same thing about linux on the PC.

Free software ultimately has time on its side. As long as a project has enough mindshare to keep its momentum, it really is unstoppable in the long run.

As you noted, fan fiction is legal. You just can't make a profit from it, which I think is fair. Also, IP laws force people to come up with their own characters and their own twists on old stories. I would argue this is a good thing. Inventive ideas like Pokemon may not exist if people could just reuse other people's IP to make a buck.

Purpose-driven institutions built around transparency, cooperation, and accountability empower individuals to take intellectual risks and challenge the status quo.

I am not sure if I am off-topic, but I am having a lot of trouble with this statement. Institutions are often opaque, and I have never belonged to an institution that empowered me to "take intellectual risks and challenge the status quo." Quite the contrary.

Healthcare, schools, roads, generative AI. One of these things is not like the others.

It's someone asking to open up a communication channel after they (Mozilla) had already overwritten another person's work to the point that person is no longer willing to participate in the organization. What is there to talk about?

The volunteer was kind to list their grievances before bouncing. A lot of people would have just quietly quit.

https://archive.is/NIBMJ

https://htdp.org/

How to design programs (mentioned in the article).

The only difference is that the money given is laundered through donors. I am an American, and I am very cynical.

Do you think Trump's being paid by ByteDance to lift the ban?

There is never a need to be that direct. Republican and Democrat donors tell politicians what positions to take. Trump doesn't need to take money directly from a company. He takes it from his donors, who in turn take it from the company in some form.

In this case, the theory is that billionaire Jeff Yass (an investor in Tik Tok) has "persuaded" Trump to flip his position.

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/jeff-yass-billionaire...

Honest question: wouldn't it be simpler for text-only email readers to have plugins that runs HTML-only emails through a command that converts the HTML to text?

I'm a teacher, and Google Classroom is ubiquitous in American schools. I was not tricked into using Chrome. It is without a doubt the best browser for Google Apps. Mozilla is laggy when editing documents and doesn't have an extension for offline editing.

Give Google credit: they have created a very useful ecosystem that has won people over in the marketplace. I NEVER thought anything would convince companies to move off of Microsoft Office, but Google is actually doing it (on a small scale at least).

This always made sense to me. Think of Super Mario Bros. No way you come up with something like that from a top-down design document. Probably slapped Mario on a screen, played with the physics a bunch, and threw a lot of different stuff at the wall to see what stuck before they came up with the final product.