Ginger-Pickles

> Oxford's "team of expert lexicographers" have decided on three words to choose from for the crown, and one of them is the fucking metaverse. Need I remind you? The metaverse is bullshit. The other choice is #IStandWith which is such a milquetoast prefix-ass modifier I ain't even gonna start.

> The Oxygen of Amplification has three interlocking parts:

> Part 1 provides a historical overview of the relationship between the news media and far-right manipulators who leveraged trolling and meme culture during the 2016 US presidential election.

The film Feels Good Man (2020)[0] is a visually beautiful example of the same idea. Unexpected psychedelic sleeper hit of the year.

[0] https://linktr.ee/feelsgoodmanfilm

> To emulate the dynamical behavior of synapses at the molecular level, the researchers combined fast electron transfer (akin to action potentials and fast depolarization processes in biology) with slow proton coupling limited by diffusion (akin to the role of biological calcium ions or neurotransmitters).

> Since the electron transfer and proton coupling steps inside the material occur at very different time scales, the transformation can emulate the plastic behavior of synapse neuronal junctions, Pavlovian learning, and all logic gates for digital circuits, simply by changing the applied voltage and the duration of voltage pulses during the synthesis, they explained.

> We deliberately encourage people to create documents rather than build slide decks. Slide decks can mask poorly-written content with decorative font, sleek formatting, and compelling images.

>In a document, the content is all you have. It forces people to focus on communicating their ideas as clearly as possible.

> if Musk was hoping to hold onto anyone else, one assumes a carrot would have been offered. Instead, as Clowes wrote yesterday, there were only sticks and lots of them.

> If you were to plot on a graph how many planets of each size astronomers have discovered, you'd find two peaks: one at 1.4 times Earth's radius, and another at 2.4 times Earth's radius. Between them is a dip or valley, at around 1.8 times the radius of Earth, signifying the relative scarcity of planets of that size.

Show. The fucking. Plot.

> It is only by ignoring the torrent of low-quality information that people can focus on applying critical search skills to the remaining now-manageable pool of potentially relevant information.

> Georgescu-Roegen, a Romanian-born economist, dismissed the free market fairy tale of a pendulum swinging back and forth, effortlessly seeking a natural state of equilibrium. He argued that the economy was more like an hourglass, a one-way process converting valuable resources into useless waste.

> But to ignore the internet, he said, is to give up on making an impact in your own time. Cultural cycles move so fast online that being unplugged for a few years will render anyone culturally defunct, functionally a separate species from the digitally engaged. The internet is a superhighway. Step off and you might be safer, but you will also be quickly left behind.

The business model for all CAD software companies inevitably trends toward stagnation and lock-in, because CAD software companies don't use CAD software -- they just develop it. The motivations are self-defeating.

Typical CAD companies can only ever try to keep up with user demands and keep them from leaving to greener pastures, while squeezing customers for profit. Examples: Dassault Solidworks (stagnant), PTC ProE/Creo (dying), OnShape (bought by PTC, on the road to death), Autodesk AutoCAD (stagnant), Inventor (stagnant), Fusion (new, cloud-based, pay-to-use vending machine).

The only commercial exception to this is CAD software from Siemens, which is forty years old and continues to get better. Siemens is an infrastructure company [0], not a CAD software company. They use the software they develop to do the things their company does. Their CAD products -- NX (top-tier) and Solid Edge (mid-tier) -- are used by Siemens to design the hardware (motors, turbines, and so on) that make up their core business (trains, generators, etc.). Revenue from selling CAD software is just a side-effect.

Improvement and maintenance of NX & Solid Edge serves to improve the product for its users, who are also its owners. They are not motivated simply to find new ways to increase profitability by squeezing out recurring revenue from their CAD customers. This is why Siemens can license the Parasolid kernel to other CAD vendors -- because the others will will never catch up. For years, Siemens barely marketed Solid Edge at all -- they are that good.

(Apple is another example of a company that uses the tools and products they sell to develop the tools and products they sell; Steve Jobs may not have been a programmer, but dropping acid probably helped him to understand recursion.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens#Products,_services_and...

> PayPal, as it’s known today, is a subset of a feature roadmap that we wrote in July of 2000. Roughly speaking, you want to basically populate a balance for every verified Twitter user. [...] We need money transfer licenses for that, which we’ve applied for.

> Then over time, [...] we will be the people’s financial institution.

More evidence that Elon Musk believes he is working toward turning Twitter into X (the "everything app").

He recently mentioned this in the big collection of subpoenaed IM conversations (IIRC).