warcher

Must be a weird new Twitter thing. The thread is very thorough.

The solution is obvious and inevitable.

These businesses are going to go under. You cannot run food manufacturing operations with the amount of water they have available. We will grow food someplace with more water.

The people who own those businesses will hold on until the bitter end. This is expected. They will try increasingly desperate measures to continue running their business, including but not limited to ecologically destructive practices. It won’t work. There’s no water.

I mean, it’s good to be open minded, it’s good to be introspective, it’s critical to take feedback.

It’s not wrong to have a take. You can sit down and say “no this is the way I’m going and I don’t think the other way is correct.”

There’s plenty of shit in this world that is destructive and dangerous. It’s more than fine to not engage with people who are beyond reason, but having confidence in your convictions isn’t a sin. You need courage to make a change in the world.

I am dismayed at the number of people I increasingly run into online who I disagree with, where I’m unable to find common ground with. I’m pretty sure this is a result of their online identity being rather narrowly tuned to exclusively present popular frames of mind that I reject wholesale, but I can’t afford to discount the unsettling possibility that it’s me who’s lost the plot.

In the end, I’m only consoled by the fact that I’m the only one of us who’s asking that question. The people I’m referring to are quite certain I’m the villain.

Those guys are top tier you have to admit— tank their company, get acquired, keep their jobs, eventually wrangle their way into managing their acquirer, tank the acquiring company… this is god tier MBAing.

It’s just not that hard. Problem domains are hard. If you asked me to work in computer vision that’d be hard for me. Same for high frequency trading. Asking me to write this device driver in rust versus nasty old C, whatever man, bits is bits. I lie about my experience in different stacks solving the same old troubles all the time.

Languages are boring. Problem domains can be a lot of fun.

I think the frustration comes around the constraints. It’s great for reminders and timers, and those meaningfully improve my life. It sometimes can successfully make a call. It interrupts me in the most obnoxious way at least once a week.

But it seems almost willfully stupid when compared to its potential.

The ideas begin to repeat after a while. I’m a bit of a rolling stone. Most folks tend to specialize but I get bored easily.

At this point pretty much any language you want to pick for me is a couple weeks’ ramp up time. I couldn’t really care less.

What’s the right language? Probably the language you’re already using for the rest of your stuff so we can interface with the rest of the org efficiently.

Is it new? Grab whatever the industry standard is for your segment. Lots of libs, lots of mindshare, easy to hire, get it done.

I do get caught in HR filters a lot without a bunch of projects in gooby though.

Yeah but what’s with the masochism attached to it?

I have yet to come to a satisfying explanation for the origin of that fetish.

I suppose in the absence of any historical record you can make up whatever story you like, but the self flagellation that comes with it is so weird.

As an exercise I would encourage you to review the news from one year ago today and audit things that a: didn’t end up mattering b: haven’t changed c: weren’t true d: actually made a difference to you in some way.

You’d be surprised how little falls into the “useful or relevant” bucket a year out. And if a year has passed without any change or action on your part, how useful could it possibly be?

You got better things to do. I don’t know you or what you’re up to, but you have better things to do than that.

Do your civic duty and leave the rest alone. It’s the most toxic form of entertainment available.

I get a lot of interesting insights out of TikTok, as well as funny joke videos.

I like a good laugh. If something is boring or dumb I swipe past pretty fast. TikTok catches on quick and treats me pretty good.

In the end if reading content, especially content that is emotionally evocative, does not initiate some sort of change in action or thinking, it is useless.

The overwhelming majority of political content is useless. Did you do anything? Did anything actually happen? You could spend a week in late October doing whatever reading you need to inform your vote, and nothing more, and it would still more than is ultimately useful if you’re not going to do anything about it.

Common sense? Restricting exhalation to reduce transmission of airborne disease? Have you never been taught to cover your mouth when you sneeze or cough?

Like it would be remarkable if it did nothing. THAT would be a blockbuster result.

The thing worth studying is if the effect is worth the trouble or not. It could be worth doing or it could effectively be a waste of time due to whatever other factor.

Yup. Don’t like siri? Go kick rocks.

Since time immemorial we have been coming up with euphemisms for “I need to shit”.

I actually find this one minimally objectionable. I am a meat robot and I must attend to biological necessities. This is a convenient abstraction for my working relationships.

they can.

you can’t.

Imagine how many people I actually pissed off to get those downvotes!

Delete early, delete often. Never keep an old Reddit account around. I torch mine and build anew every year just out of principle.

It’s the rule of ten (I made that up) 1:10 upvote. 1:10 of them comment. 1:10 post.

The people barking are actually the least worrisome, they’re highly engaged. The meat of your users say nothing and are only visible in-house.

That said, they also don’t give a shit about most of this. They want their content and they want it now. I am very confident spez knows exactly what he’s talking about.

You know I took some time to compare versus just reading the analysis and in particular I listened to the OpenAI demo and a scene from “her”.

Yeah not moving from my position at all. Just a very generic featureless female voice. I suppose I hear some similarities in timbre, but it’s such an unremarkable voice and diction that it’s hard to put your finger on anything past “generic low affect American alto”.

It’s a great computer voice. Taking it down is for sure the right call PR wise, regardless of whether they may have done.

I think self driving and public transport are actually complimentary. The principal benefits of owning your own automobile are convenience, as it’s always available for your use, and range— it will go wherever you want. Enabling vast fleets of on demand taxis is already well underway, making owning your own vehicle less attractive. The next step imho is bundling rides together, making NOT owning your car cheaper still. For urban cores, I would expect shared self driving to crowd out private cars pretty quickly.

It’s just that her voice by itself is relatively unremarkable. Someone like say, Morgan freeman, or Barack Obama, someone with a distinctive vocal delivery, that’s one thing. Scarlett Johansson, I couldn’t place her voice out of a lineup. I’m sure it’s pleasant I just can’t think of it.

Extraordinarily more difficult to get rich that way vs cashing out in the public markets. A 10x revenue multiple vs whatever share of profits your equity gets you after your nvestment terms are satisfied?

Yeah the math on what, 300k in equity on a 100MM “valuation” by retail investors is… hey it ain’t nothing. 0.3% of 5MM dividends is 15K.

For a dude who’s only alive because his investors decided to walk away from their 8MM investment, that’s kinda tight. But freelancers just want the cash, so if he’s paying cash, this is just some weirdo being weird in tolerable ways.

The whole performance here is off putting to me though. You got gifted a huge amount of money and kept almost all of it for yourself. Alright man. You got the right. Everybody is a big boy and agreed to the deal.

But let’s not play around about how you got rich, or how much of the pie goes in your own pocket versus everybody else’s.

Honestly I’ve never had a shit landlord that didn’t fly every single red flag imaginable within minutes of meeting them or touring the property.

Not SF but I recall the accepted manner of doing business in my city, should you want a taxi on the big party holidays, was to gather your group and war dial taxi companies until somebody actually arrived. All of them. They would swear they’d show up, and you would swear you’d wait for them to show up, and everybody knew they were lying.

Then when you wanted to go home you’d do the same thing except out on the street and you’d steal the first unattended cab, regardless of who’d called them.

Sorry homie, utopia is ten years old. Check the date. People freaking love it. Still.

I’m specifically saying, in the US, we don’t do anything special with our trash. Mostly no recycling of anything but metal. We put it more or less securely in the ground and bury it. That’s all.

And that is fine. We would have to fix a whole RAFT of serious serious problems before landfills are anybody’s radar. We will never see it our lifetime and I hazard that we may never see the day.

Other countries have tighter land requirements and they might be more forward thinking, but the idea that plastic packaging is impacting the environment is just not supported by data.

As long as you’re not throwing it in the river, plastics waste just doesn’t matter much.