Arubis

When I started using emacs it already felt past well-established and perhaps past its prime. Decades later it feels perhaps more relevant than it did the then. The easier-access defaults kits of the mid-2010s got a lot of new user investment, and it feels like the community really ticked up around COVID. Yes, agentic development has us spending a lot of time in harnesses; relevance-wise, things that aren’t an editor feel more threatening than alternative editors. We’ll see how that lands over time! Most of the reason I use a harness outside Emacs is to take advantage of a Claude subscription.

Technological progress is multifaceted. Some of it is more value-neutral and tends to be a general accelerant.

In terms of social effect, there's two axes that jump out at me for things that are _not_ value-neutral:

  - technology of violence, where the axis is whether it makes it easier or harder for some people to have direct power over others, and
  - centralization/decentralization technologies.

I think there's a decent argument to be made that the former category is mostly a subset of the latter anyway.

In a _very_ hand-wavey, un-nuanced take, decentralized systems shift power and profit away from the establishment and are inconvenient to use, and centralized systems tend to be easier to use -- and they support and create establishments, and give them power and profit. Unsurprisingly, a fair number of establishments exist and grow precisely because they found a way to centralize a decentralized technology.

The choices that we make in our lived systems mean these axes are mere tendencies, not predictions. The "old" Internet was largely a decentralization technology. The shift towards platforms (Facebook, Xitter...) made many of the old-internet functionality easier to use by centralizing it. Blockchain is superficially and deliberately a decentralizing technology, but with the choices we've made, it's mostly empowered people positioned to centralize it (initially in the form of fiat currency exchange points).

LLM progress is currently in a centralizing phase, but overall its direction remains unclear; will open-weight models running on cheap commodity hardware (once OpenAI won't or can't clear the aisles of available VRAM) turn the tide, or will the frontier labs retain a permanent structural advantage -- and what market and regulatory choices will we make to nudge that direction?

The descriptor that I ran across the other day that kinda lumps this all together: the internet is a store. Some of us remember that it used to be a library.

In total fairness, a Denhac membership is basically signing up to be nerd-sniped for live entertainment. (Denhac is wonderful and I wish I made it over more often.)

This is why it's virtually impossible right now to hire (a billion fake/BS applicants) _and_ to find a job (good luck standing out in aforementioned flood, _plus_ there's AI spammed posts that aren't even for real jobs), or to connect with someone via cold email (swamped).

The US political "flood the zone" strategy is being applied to anything an agent can interact with.

The regulatory overhead to grid-connect is a _significant_ portion of the price, both for the actual paperwork labor and because of the premium it imposes on the system components (you can't use inexpensive non-UL-listed panels)

This might be (unintentionally?) part of the reason for the original subject: how many jobs does the Avengers IP pipeline support? How about for a single artifact output by it--one TV show, for example?

And how many people work on a well-loved indie artifact of about the same market position?

Gonna guess the latter supports way fewer jobs. (This isn't meant as a judgment in taste or moralizing--my own entertainment tastes run indie towards pretentious, so economically I'm part of the problem.)

I am mostly in agreement. And I suspect there are many folks that’re trying to ship something AI-assisted that’s sufficient to get to income security first, and who would use success there as a stepping stone to greater things.

Identify theft/identity fraud is a bullshit risk-shifting move by the banking class.

The actual crime is classic fraud and it's directed at the banks and financiers. By inventing "identify theft", the financial sector shifts responsibility and financial consequences from themselves to the uninvolved, innocent, and frequently totally unaware individuals that fraudsters represent themselves to be.

With this system in place, instead of then requiring that banks spend the resources to verify who they believe they're doing business with (or else risk being defrauded), we have "credit monitoring" and "identity security" services and individuals being held financially and criminally liable for crimes they're often so uninvolved in they _literally don't know they happened_.

Twiiit.com/(your link) rewrites to a pool of nitter servers.

1000%. Paid upfront years ago, installed it everywhere I look at code, and the world’s a better place.

You can preview working with it with Blink.app for iOS; I’m unaffiliated but satisfied. Comes with PragmataPro preinstalled.

I can feel my shoulders unlocking looking at the screenshots.

And less mature businesses that are in highly regulated industries, since they know nobody will fund them if they can’t prove they aren’t a legal timebomb. I’ve worked across clients in edtech, fintech, healthtech, aerospace, and in all of them making sure they didn’t die by regulation was present from early on. (Granted, places that don’t care about things like that don’t work with people like me.)

Edtech in particular tends to be pretty conscious of just never having the data in the first place. PII for minors is radioactive.

In Discord’s…defense? Description? At least for understanding—it’s gamer chat. And it’s been that from the beginning. That’s the design and the intent, and while it seems Discord-the-company is trying to adapt Discord-the-product for the increase in popularity for other uses, its roots are showing. Navigating it feels similar to navigating the menu system of a AAA game.

Prop 65 appears to have become a victim of its own incentive structure. When it first landed, companies had to balance whether the potential loss of sales from applying a label was worth lowering enforcement risk, so there was reason to think: is the thing I’m selling actually potentially harmful under this regulation’s definition?

But once the momentum of having these labels on _a lot_ of products gets established, customers start to un-see them, and the sales risk of applying the label drops to negligible. So just slap it on everything, which adds more noise to the signal, which further derisks adding the label, etc.

At this point it probably just needs a hard reset; tear out prop 65 in the process of replacing it with something that learns from these lessons. Maybe make the warning label cost something e.g. mandate that its application include quantitative risk backed by a third party lab test.

The irony of your username is not lost on me.

That said, I’m in agreement in principle. A lot of what you’re asking for is statecraft, and doing that with a profit model is brittle to corruption. But I’d greatly prefer to see folks trying to build things on hope then on bloodshed.

Spot on, modulo grief is a spiral: we revisit each of these phases in order over and over as different aspects and experiences within the overall loss reveal themselves.

Dangerous, yes, and in a way that’s sufficiently obvious that it’s a highly regulated space. Getting one of these things to market is expensive, lengthy, and arduous. With reason! But to a would-be inventor, a huge turnoff.

These are such a cool, fun, wonderful idea right up until you try to put them anywhere that shares space with a human eyeball.

Something about mosquito-borne diseases lands on HN every year or so, resulting in hand-wringing about whether we should deliberately cause species extinction. I have seen the suffering they cause firsthand, and so my response has become rather consistent:

Do we want to eradicate mosquitoes?

Yes; fuck them.

We (intentionally or no, mostly not) cause the extinction of hundreds to thousands of species every year for much more mundane reasons: deforestation is the big one, climate change another. And that buys us arguably nothing but enriching people that benefit from the process of deforestation and climate change--folks that're economically desperate enough to log illegally, and energy barons. These extinctions are mostly tragic, and the net benefit to human societies is likely negative.

Mosquitoes are fucking evil. They kill more humans every year than any other animal. Malaria is only the most well-known disease they spread; see also dengue ("breakbone fever", named for what it feels like), West Nile virus, and more. Those that malaria doesn't kill are frequently left with a low-level chronic infection that makes them less effective as people. Malaria and mosquitoes kill children, disable the working population, and economically cripple entire nations.

As best we can tell, things that eat mosquitoes also eat other things. But I'd vote for nuking the mozzies from orbit even if that weren't the case. They're such an unmitigated cause of human suffering and hardship.

OmniWM is pretty snappy! Lots of unhandled cases that aren’t even really edge cases. Floating windows and custom menus from the toolbar are poorly handled, as is window minimization (the BSP space for a minimized window remains held). Seems to be moving in the right direction, though.

I could almost see these being darkly encouraging. Yes, everything is awful, but everything was _already_ awful, and most of us are still mostly okay?

Oh yeah, the Clipper chip was a great idea too

Cryptonomicon definitely differs from Stephenson’s first phase but he’s had other phases since then. I’d lump that into the Shaftoe/Waterhouse small universe alongside the Baroque Cycle; some of the same names show up in REAMDE. (Sort of how there’s universe/character overlap between Snow Crash and Diamond Age.) Anathem has a similar vibe, though IIRC no character overlap.

These were indeed verbose. Some folks love it, some not as much. Then there was a deliberately semi-utopian near-futurism phase (Seveneves, whatever one it is with the cloud-seeding gun in West Texas) and now we’re into some historical fiction (Russian spy stuff).

Might be worth dipping in a toe again to see if any of these fits your fancy. Stephenson didn’t just swap to Cryptonomicon and stop there.

I’d argue that Seveneves DID end 2/3rds of the way through! There’s at least another third of a book that would’ve cleanly followed the end.

> I've always thought eternal life would steal from the next generation if resources are scarce.

This is almost the stated intention of longevists.

> Wouldn't they rather be arbitrarily rich instead?

Generally no, though you won't get this answer directly.

Many people prefer to be rich relative to others than arbitrarily rich. If you ask a bunch of random folks if they'd rather be in the middle class in their current country of residence in 2005, or of noble birth in ~1100 CE, you'll get the latter answer _a lot_ despite that being an objectively worse quality of living.

You are correct; I was wrong on this one! I’d read it so many times and far enough back, coupled with DHS’s general attitude of “we’ll do what we want”, that I’d taken it as true. Delighted not to be right here.

In broad strokes, I agree. You still have to make decisions and apply taste. It's _extremely_ unlikely that you'll have the full spec and shape and architecture of something large fully settled in your head before you start.

It's also unlikely that you're going to make those realizations, expressions, and decisions when your harness is asking you to choose between what _it_ identifies as being important decisions. If you're in the loop you're getting dumped on with lots of stuff that barely differentiates and you're biased away from catching things that matter.

If you're in the loop, use the loop. It's not a terrible construct. It will give you a mediocre outcome. And if mediocre is sufficient, you're done.

And here's the part that didn't make it into my prior comment -- if mediocre isn't sufficient, _stop the loop_. Play with what you've got. See how it behaves. Explore the edge cases yourself. Sketch how it works on paper, and how you want it to work, and think about how that should be constructed. Use your brain.

Then write a really long prompt (maybe referencing your files and notes and assets) to get back into the loop again.

I guess what I'm ultimately getting at is that the loop is useful _and_ a mind-killer, and using your mind is _also_ high value, so do both those things, but don't do them at the same time.

China probably has the fiscal firepower to replace Eurodollars, but while their financial system remains split between "internally used currency" and "currency for everyone else" and while external investment is treated with deep suspicion and harsh rules, it would be limited to liquidity and exchange purposes. Nobody wants to hold a currency like the yuan over an appreciable period of time. That might be enough; that confers a lot of power and influence to the currency issuer. But definitely different ground than US Treasuries cover.

Historically this is also where we'd insert something into the conversation about who gets to hold the moral high ground, but as you've noted, that's something the current US administration has abandoned entirely.