LNSY

I've been using DuckDuckGo's Privacy Browser. It has made the mobile web far more pleasant to use.

Probably not. American Masculinity is both violently enforced and generates a bunch of whiny cry babies. I mean, just look at Donald Trump.

Also: Facebook could go a long ways to counter covid disinformation by removing the billions of bots and fake accounts that infest its service. But if they did that we would find out that most of their market share is, in fact, fake. And then they wouldn't be worth nearly as much money as they say they are.

Alas, poor Mark Zuckerberg, a victim of society.

Has been for years. What is frightening is we have a bubble bigger than the dotcom bubble of the late 90's, but it's all tied up with private capital -- we don't even know how leveraged it is.

I hope what comes out of the next bubble burst are more smaller, sturdier companies with real business models. Distribution is part of it, but getting back to the fundamentals of capitalism and away from mercantilism.

More smaller firms. More interoperability between services. Fairer data collection practices. And real business models.

One can dream.

I'll take any opportunity to post this William S. Burroughs essay: https://introcritsfai.blogspot.com/2015/03/immortality-by-wi...

Only Burroughs could truly capture the ghastly consequences.

Slightly off topic, but: Jesus turning water into wine makes a lot more sense when he has access to some kind of potent hallucinogen. It also might explain everything else that went on back in Palestine 2000 years ago.

I think we should have Krampus horns instead.

I know a lot of data scientists for the City of LA are using literate programming, and I'm bumping into younger programmers who are really into it. I think its swell and very useful.

I love the new Custom Elements api. Creating a new HTML Element is incredibly easy:

https://github.com/lindseymysse/custom-html-element/blob/mai...

This is my favorite feature in HTML / ES6.

I really love programming without pre-processors or compilers. It feels so much more immediate and clear. I think the browser is not just acceptable, but is really good these days.

One thing I have found among junior devs is they will know React really well but not remember things like how the box model works or basic HTML elements like the <br /> tag. This leads to all sorts of frustrating code for everyone.

What I would like to see is more designers writing pure HTML and CSS instead of working in vector editors. Our designs will get better when they understand what HTML is good at. I think custom HTML components are a great start to this.

So, I checked and I'm currently only using 4gb in my laptop. I think this laptop and I are going to get along just fine!

Also, I will be able to upgrade that part as it comes available. Plenty of room!

My current laptop is a Thinkpad X200t from 10+ years ago. The MNT has a modern GPU and a nice keyboard. I think it's going to work quite well.

I'm left handed and track-pads have never agreed with me.

Other people on this site have recommended the MNT Reform to me: https://www.crowdsupply.com/mnt/reform

It seems like a different flavor of an open source laptop that people who want a better keyboard and has the option of a trackball (!!!) instead of the trackpad.

I think the MNT is going to be my next laptop, but the Frame.work is pretty cool.

They could solve a lot of drunk driving by having real mass transit in America. Cars kill more kids in America than anything else:

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmsr1804754#:~:text=...

I doubt these deaths are all drunk driving incidents.

I wish, instead of trying to add regulation and technology to the problem, our government would look at the actual problem.

Drop City and Los Angeles, while we're at it.

When I use AI I consider the entire algorithm as part of it. There is a signal -- a human censor says this cannot be shown-- and then generative expansion of that signal across nodes on a network.

It doesn't matter on what machine the algorithm runs on -- wetware or cloud -- it gets incorporated into a larger, generated intelligence.

Same math.

The current state of the economy and facebook, yes.

Let's create creatures more complicated than ourselves and then give them domain over us. What could possibly go wrong?

The AI crisis is here, and it arrived when computation was added to our market system.

I think the solution is lots of smaller AIs -- distributed social media and financial services that will prevent the big shocks these black boxes of computation seem to generate. We already have the technology -- TensorFlow is open source, the chips are available. We just have to use them in a way that expands human freedom.

Is anyone writing about the political economy of AI? I can think of Byung-Chul Han's In the Swarm, but that's more about social media sans algorithmic moderation.

Obligatory reference to "Seeing Like a State". We are in a similar situation to Russia in the 1930's -- an ideological chasm where recognizing science and reality disrupts the order of society. We are careening into the ditch.

Mammon then Famine.