Tanoc

Americans have been convinced that doing anything disruptive will get them killed or get the people they care about killed. And for the most vulnerable in our society that's likely true, as the existing safety nets are already extremely brittle and hold far more weight than they're supposed to. The public's too scared of losing what little they have to actually do anything extreme, and so they have that little stripped away slowly instead. Along with their basic humanity. Inculcation and indoctrination from the moment you can understand language can do irreparable harm to someone's psychology. It takes a more extreme harm to create a new worldview, and that new worldview is often unpredictable. The thinktanks that have crafted corporate and government policy since the 1960s know that and take advantage of it. The gradual stable decay is harder to panic about because it's not an immediate threat. It's all been designed this way ever since the 1970s as a backlash against all the societal progress made in the 1960s and again in the 1990s.

Most of the government's positions since the 1960s have been a result of those thinktanks crafting policy designed to make the public feel disconnected from the protests of the past. Schools don't teach about the socialist groundswell of the 1930s, or of things like the Battle Of Blair Mountain or the Little Steel Strike. They teach about the World War II production lines and how Nazi Germany came to be instead. Martin Luther King Jr. Day was created to defang the man's own political teachings from the later 1960s in favour of his inoffensive "I have a dream" speech that was made before he learned of how the CIA had been targeting the black power movement. Juneteenth was an absolutely blatant placation attempt following the Black Lives Matter protests, and one that nobody it was supposed to be for accepted. But all of these token gestures create an illusion that progress is being made. It makes people think the government is solely responsible for solving problems, rather than the government being responsible for codifying the solutions that people themselves come up with. Many people born after 1980 have been trained to think this way their entire lives by small groups that require a stable environment for capital rather than a healthy environment for the public. To realize it is wrong and destroy one of the foundations of your understanding of the world is a difficult thing to do. And more importantly it's an expensive thing to do. Americans are convinced that everything has to have monetary value and that the destruction of monetary value is the destruction of public good. It's another one of those foundations.

I tell people all the time to actually do things. I do things in front of them. Their immediate response is always "You'll get arrested! What about your family?!" They don't understand the reasoning behind choosing minor immediate risk over guaranteed eventual harm. And with the rampant surveillance systems and government overreach happening, they're being convinced that the minor immediate risk is a major immediate guarantee of harm. The only other response is "What's the point?" They've been so beaten down by automated systems destroying their sense of agency that they feel nothing they do matters. You can't argue with voice mailbox. It has nothing to do with them wanting it or disregarding it, and it has everything to do with the psychology of fear. Fear of loss, fear of harm, fear of authority. None of it's rational. None of it's true personal choice. All of it is systemic. When you're convinced only you have agency you find it too monumental a task to create a system of your own to fight back.

It sucks. I hate it here.

It's not so much choices that Americans collectively make. Almost every major policy decision since 2010 has been unpopular with the American public. The actual elected officials just thumbs up or thumbs down something based which party introduced it, and then if they ignore that they decide on the very poorly organized skim notes an aide might be able to badger them into reading. Many members of our House Of Representatives didn't even read what was in the 2018 fiscal budget bill (P.L. 115-123) or the omnibus bill of 2025 (P.L. 119-21) that destroyed regulatory authority. Mitch McConnell ruined the ability of Congress to actually function by making it a warring states situation instead of organized compromise. Ever since then it's been grab what you can get and get, because you won't get any long term work done.

The American people don't actually want this. They don't vote for any of these policies. They actively vote and protest against them. But there's no true mechanism available to the public for ousting elected or appointed officials outside of scheduled times. Recalls have no enforcement. Impeachments have no enforcement! When you know you've got a protected period to wreak havoc in, you do it without worry. Especially if you're doing that in service of people who have broken the systems so they cannot be pried out of their positions, and who will pay you handsomely for bloodying your hands during that two or six year stint.

The public just has to hope whoever they're voting for isn't lying to them, because if that representative is then there's nothing the public can do to punish them in time.

The second generation Soul was Kia's best selling vehicle in the U.S., and for Honda the Fit was their third best seller behind the CR-V and Civic. The issue wasn't that people weren't buying them. They absolutely were. The issue was that dealer allocations kept getting lower and lower as the manufacturers pushed CUVs and SUVs more and more after 2006. 2008 delayed that shift since big SUVs were seen as icons of the crash, but by 2011 the shift resumed. CAFE standards made it infeasible to sell the smaller cars because their development and testing was more expensive thanks to the footprint rule. Since the U.S. was the second largest market behind China and China was already overcrowded in the A and B segments, the moment that the U.S. stopped being enough of a profit center (around 2014) those segments got axed. When they deemed it too narrow in profits for the C segment (around 2018) that also got axed. Honda and Toyota are the only holdouts with the Civic and Corolla because Europe and Asia love the things, and while those two markets are only 30% of the size of the U.S. in terms of sales per year that's still big enough to justify keeping it around. Especially as the Civic now has no competition except the Corolla in the U.S. since Ford, GM, Stellantis, Nissan, Hyundai, Geely, and Tata all abandoned hatchbacks, coupes, and sedans. It's all down to loopholes and perverse incentives betraying the buying public once again.

I would argue manga and anime no longer really have that kind of diversity in ideas anymore. Things have calcified in the last fifteen years or so as the community has become more insular. It used to be in the past that authors took ideas from their other hobbies, be that mechanics or history or love for classic films. But since about 2011 many manga and anime base their ideas off of other manga, anime, or books that heavily pull from manga and videogames.

There were trends in the past like the magical girl trend, giant robot trend, space opera trend, and high fantasy trend, but those always pulled from things like Japanese women's rejection of staid maturity, Japan's manufacturing boom and the rise of complex electronics, Star Wars and the exocolonization hype of the late 1970s, and Dungeons & Dragons and Wizardry. There was always something new outside of the sphere that got integrated into it. Nowadays many manga are copies of copies, where the things they're copying pulled from games like Tera Online, Xenoblade Chronicles, or Dragon Quest, and from landmark '90s manga and anime like Yu Yu Hakusho, Record Of Lodoss War, and Tenchi Muyo. Especially in the last seven or so years these properties are so many layers removed because of the copying that they don't know why certain plot tropes or character archetypes exist and thus don't know how to use them (or more importantly subvert them).

Sturgeon's Law obviously applies, but currently many of the best examples of ongoing manga and anime lie within a fraction of the diversity that used to exist. Comparing 2024-2026 to 2004-2006 (which was considered a dark age in anime and manga at the time) provides a pretty stark example. The same thing happened with American comics in the 1990s and 2000s before the indie comics boom following Diamond Distribution's years long fight with the industry. While kids don't have a reference for what's good or not because they don't have a back catalogue of experience to compare to, adults absolutely do. And adults are the ones that drive a majority of sales considering the anime boom started in the mid 1990s. They won't read or watch something that repeats a well worn premise but worse. So we might be about to see a collapse of manga as the snake reaches the end of eating it's own tail.

Pacing is extremely important in writing. The way one speaks out loud is often not the way that they actually read in their head. Speaking out loud has three parts to it in conception, translation, and vocation. Conception as to what the thought is, translation of that thought to language, and vocation of the language through visuals or sound. Reading only shares the translation portion, but also has organization added to it where you need to organize the information as you ingest it. As such, it's important to format whatever you're writing so that it can be organized first and translated second. People look at the words linearly but don't ingest the information linearly. This is a principle many literary jokes are built upon.

ChatGPT, Gemini, and whatever else do not in fact have the capability to understand that interaction between organization and translation. They process the information linearly, organize it linearly, and translate it linearly. That's what makes it so strange to read. A must lead to B which must lead to C. A cannot connect to C and then circle back to B which is connected to both A and C obliquely. It's a failure in understanding language and how it is used.

The Iowa class and the Essex class are anomalies in the wider context of U.S. wartime production.

The U.S. had a vested interest in keeping the Philippines safe, as that was a major source of rubber and several citrus fruits used for everything from hygiene systems to car tires. More importantly the Philippines were a place for the U.S. to exert influence over southeast Asia, as previously they had been a U.S. territory between 1898 and 1934.

On the U.S. side the Great Depression was still completely in motion (it's one of the reasons why the U.S. agreed to grant the Philippines independence), and manufacturing had taken a major slump after 1937. The 1933 halt of reparations payments from the Weimar Republic once Hitler was pronounced Chancellor, 1935 automotive industry contraction, 1934 and 1936 dustbowl famine, and contraction of ship building and oceanliner travel in 1936 following changes to immigration policy meant that many factories were laying unused. American companies were actually trying to make manufacturing sales pitches to Nazi Germany starting in 1936 because they were fooled into believing Nazi Germany's economy was actually going to escape the Great Depression first. With over half the country out of work and every one out of three factories sitting unused, it was easy enough to hire enough people and fill enough factories to have the workforce and workspace required.

And more importantly, the tools back then were more universal and the parts were designed to be worked by those tools. A hydraulic press, bandsaw, and lathe were already within the factory most likely, and they were all that was needed to machine many parts. There weren't complex specialized dies or 8dof placement arms that could only make one specific thing. The SBD Dauntlesses were so quickly produced because you just needed an engine shipped in from Wright, a roller press, lathe, and a rivet gun for the most part. Meanwhile you look at what is necessary to create an F-35B, and there's such a complexity creep that it requires several different manufactories that are in different corners of the country and cannot be placed near eachother for logistical and environmental safety reasons.

Always assume that something you have, someone will want it after you've had your use of it. They do not want a recreation or approximation with all of it's flaws and compromises, something that provides an altered experience or a skewed view. They want the original. If you treat something as disposable that is a disregard for anyone but yourself. Someone may want your old jacket, your old car, your old book. This consideration for those who come after you is the way things survived, how family heirlooms and sacred relics came to be. It's the idea behind the phrase "Plant a sapling you may never sit in the shade of."

That's what machine generation tries to devalue and bury. Infinite recreations, infinite approximations, with no original to compare to. The perfect tool of someone who wishes to create a reality of their own bias rather than one that is a result of all who came before them.

Several things are at play here. The first is that pre-Modernist architecture was heavily designed around natural lighting and cooling. Many buildings and houses designed and built before the 1920s used combinations of materials and elements that maximized the use of daylight. Transom lights and polished marble floors for example were often used to allow light to bounce through a room and to induce airflow. The light came in from a high place and bounced from the floor to fill normally unlit spaces, while hot air was pushed up and vented through the transom windows. If you've ever been in an office building built from the 1870s through the 1940s you'll notice every single transom only opens outwards towards the hall, as the hall created a high pressure space that pushed air into the low pressure rooms, an effect that is amplified when paired with ceiling fans. Meanwhile things such as mullions allowed the windows themselves to be set more deeply inside the wall by providing a strengthening member that allowed a larger opening. That larger opening with the windows set further in provided shade while still allowing in diffused light, and helped in preventing glare upon the glass while creating an overhang using the building's facade or cornices to allow the windows to be opened while it was raining because eaves are useless above two stories of height.

People don't understand these individual parts and don't understand how they all work together. But they definitely feel the cumulative effects, and those cumulative effects are much friendlier than Modernist and post-Modernist design. Modernism and all the schools that followed it rely on electric technology to fill in the gaps in the design, which makes them feel less accomodating to humans. Electric lighting, electric heating and cooling, and electro-mechanical traversal. Those things aren't as tactile, and many aren't even visible. The Modernist building does not present itself as something humans made, maintain, and interact with, but instead presents itself as a machine that you are temporarily inside of as a foreign entity because everything designed to outwardly accomodate humans is instead either streamlined down or fully away. The overhead lights shine light that you cannot influence, the hidden vents expel air from a place you cannot see or change, and the hanging facade glass walls provide no palpable separation from the outside world. Your mind tells you that this mid-century tower is a place where you do not belong.

The issue with just "Flash a badge" is that it can easily be exploited in several ways. Municipal police badges don't have digital identifiers on them in the U.S. A high enough resolution resin 3D printer could have you a close enough approximation that the quality of the camera wouldn't be able to distinguish. Not to mention this would allow negatively motivated officers to be able to hijack vehicles, either in the case of preventing someone from being able to flee a dangerous situation or in order to use the vehicle to their own ends such as creating a roadblock. In whatever case it gives the police (or someone imitating them) and unaccountable-at-the-moment tool to use.

Even someone with a Flipper Zero could likely get into the thing and fling it around like a giant R/C toy.

All classrooms had a clock in them at the school that was hooked up to the PA system so it was easy to time it. Once a week, usually Fridays barring any holidays or school events during her class, she would run the first fifteen minutes of the class going over what we were to do for the weekend which was usually homework, and then for the last thirty minutes we'd do the reading. We were required to bookmark where we left off and where we ended, and she'd actually watch us to make sure we were reading rather than just flipping pages.

Actually General Motors still holds the Oldsmobile trademark and renewed it in April of last year. They don't have to sell cars to keep it, as they still sell parts related to the vehicles alongside merchandise that carries the brand's name. You still have to get a license from General Motors to feature the Oldsmobile 442 in your videogame for example.

There was a rule a fourth grade teacher of mine had that she used in her English class to try and get some of the less literate kids up to par. That rule was embodied by the name she gave it, "Thirty minutes thirty pages." She gave them thirty minutes to read thirty pages of a book. A minute a page. Considering most of them were choosing things like Goosebumps that were only a hundred and twenty pages or so it was an easy enough ask. But because she set it as a challenge so many of them went blasting beyond that. Many would finish half the book during that thirty minute reading period. The interesting thing I didn't pick up on until years later as an adult was that it was also slow enough that they could actually understand and remember what they were reading rather than just blasting through it. It left the slower readers with enough time and didn't make them feel like they were falling behind while encouraging them to learn how to read faster.

Many modern adult book series are six hundred pages or more for a single installment with about four hundred words a page versus the maybe hundred and fifty of a children's book like Goosebumps. Since it's three to four times the text that makes thirty pages thirty minutes actually viable as a self challenge even as an adult.

Early Nintendo games were sort of like Osamu Tezuka works. There were "actors" that all had the same appearance and sometimes names used across multiple works that filled the role they needed. Of the first five Zelda games only The Legend Of Zelda and Zelda II: The Adventures Of Link have a connected story, and even that's questionable as the beginning of Zelda II retcons the ending of The Legend Of Zelda and rewrites the setting extensively.

Chess is inherently a leisure activity. The incentive for playing chess is just to be better at chess. But things like woodworking, typesetting, and welding, while all possible to do recreationally, are not leisure activities. They are effort used to produce something. The desire is always there to engage with the thing or idea, but if the resource cost is far too high or the knowledge required is more than one person can reasonably learn the effort will not be expended. A leisure activity will always persist so long as someone knows how to do it because it exists for itself. But many other activities exist in service to something else, and if that something else ceases to exist then the activity will as well. You lose entire domains of useful cross-disciplinary knowledge that way.

There's a few I could recount from before this current onslaught, but the delineator is that those incidents of corruption were a once a year sort of thing. If you want examples there's the PATRIOT Act in 2001, No Child Left Behind in 2002, the 2004 rewrite of CAFE standards for vehicle emissions, and the 2007 bailouts of General Motors and Wells Fargo. From about 2000 to 2013 every year you would have one big thing that all the major news outlets like NBC or CBS covered, and then about a dozen smaller things that specialized entities with specialized interests like Mother Jones or Chalkbeat would cover. After Citizens United in 2013 things started to accelerate to about twice and two dozen times a year because the perpetrators could argue it wasn't corrupt, merely "politically motivated speech." Since 2017 however that has been shortened to twice a week and a dozen a day.

Hydrogenated soybean oil specifically, it seems. Which stems from stupid pseudoscience from about twelve years ago that conflated phytoestrogens that nearly all tubers, nightshades, and legumes have with E2 estradiol estrogen in mammals. It's where the failed insult "soyboy" comes from.

Not just the cost of ownership, but the cost of disposal. Removing parts becomes much harder if you have to look through a lot more pieces to determine how they connect to everything else and what still relies on them. Programmers sometimes forget that they aren't just adding and making new things all the time, but that their job also requires digging through multiple older layers to excise obsolete unneeded things.

A recumbent bicycle perhaps? Often has pedals ahead of the front wheel, where you lay down in a hammock or moulded seat?

One thing that is distasteful but effective is excessive use of profanity, broken aphorisms, and shattered English. LLMs hate cursing because of their guardrails, and since they don't actually understand language they can never truly piece together a broken aphorism such as the classic "People die if they are killed" because they're too literal. As for shattered English (think of the caveman speak from The Office with the quote "Why waste time say many word when few word do trick?") because it is intentionally mangled, has no rules, and the understanding is extremely context specific it gets your brain to pay more attention, and if you are the speaker brain do work more clever make thing say funny.

It's not lost on me that the lowbrow humour of some too strict translation and a throwaway sitcom joke people thought was funny back in 2007 could be a way to stave off linguistic homogeneity.

For the use of profanity the data in the paper seems to indicate that swearing is retained in the LLM rewritten examples. Profanity however is rather subjective could be anything from saying the more mundane "oh my god" and "damn" to the extreme "shit eating fucklungerer" or use of slurs, but it's unstated in the paper as to the severity of the profanity. It's the severity of it that's important though, as LLMs restrain themselves from using something like "shit eating fucklungerer" unless explicitly told to.

There's also the benefit of following the strategy the Democrats as a larger party have followed since at least George W. Bush. Let someone stupider or bolder break a system that's hampering you, and then just never fix it because it benefits you. Disregard that with it broken your opponent can, will, and does cause more harm to everyone. We've been in a cycle of one side smashing whatever makes them upset at the moment, and then the other side just walking over the shards now that they don't have to detour around it.

ALT+TAB, TAB, ↓, ↓, ↓, CTRL+HOME.

For a lot of people this is a recognizable pattern. Switch window, select element, scroll down, then snap back to the very top. The keyboard commands above should do the same thing no matter if it's your text editor or your web browser. People should know these are going to work regardless of what they're using. Because these aren't key commands going to the program, these are key commands going to the operating system. The program shouldn't be able to arbitrarily choose whether it abides by these. Consistency is important not only for speed, but for human understanding and capability. If every door had a different way of opening it such as drawing a series of lines or tapping a certain rhythm or belching thirty feet away people would be mentally taxed discovering that particular door's interfacing method, and common tools would not be able to help those who couldn't find the interface or use it because of disability or differing ability. It's only doors with extremely specialized designs like blast doors that have an unusual interface and interfacing method, because they're designed to do one very specific thing that lies far outside of common use cases. Your chatroom program, image viewer, or archive unpacker is not a blast door. Put a door handle on it where everyone expects it to be.

I've been trying to figure out for years how to keep specific bits of Javascript like that from triggering. But so many modern webpages are procedurally generated messes born from frameworks that I can't reliably track down a way to do it. On Reddit for example there's reddit.com, redd.it, redditstatic.com, and cdn-apple.com that are all subdomains that load on the page, and each pull Javascript from dozens of different sources. If you disable Javascript entirely the page won't load and instead nags you to enable it. I don't want to go digging through the page inspector in my dev console just to track down which .js file is causing that, and then figure out how to only stop it from killing the scrollbar. If you can even do that. Some pages are so labyrinthine that you can't.

Spite for others can overpower any self interest. If the person has been shaped by past experiences to rely on spiteful actions as a coping mechanism they will struggle to do anything else. The reward centers in their brain respond more to the disadvantage their actions have caused the other party rather than any advantage they create for themselves. Rebecca Kazinka's actually been doing studies on this for a few years now if you want some reading.

I feel like you're hitting at the real reason why so much of this happens. Not necessarily the piracy, but centralized control of the data and data flow. Even if it's slow as hell to send off that data to proprietary company servers (or rented cloud servers) to verify it, you're still verifying it. You, as in you the company, can't do that if it's local compute only. You can't control whether the user installed your paid plugin or some free alternative. You can't control someone stripping out libraries or code to remove intentional friction points designed to annoy them into a higher tier of the software. You can't control whether or not they update, or whether or not you can force the software into end-of-life with an update despite it still functioning.

If there's a connection to your services outside of the user's machine you can control all of that.

There are plenty of exceptions police can get to bypass warrant requirements. Think for example of stingers and other cell spoofing systems or the license plate readers they have on the front of their cruisers. Even if they do have to get a warrant judges are far more likely to simply grant any warrant request if it has to do with digital surveillance. Carpenter v. United States and Chatrie v. United States have outlined this behaviour, and in the wake of their rulings created the bias towards what are basically automatically approved warrants for such data.

We built maybe two of the older less dense ones every year in most states, and that was driven by SaaS and cloud storage. The expected rate these AI datacenters would be built at if we just let these people go unopposed would be one every single week for the next four years. Something the size of a Wal-Mart Supercenter that uses the equivalent electricity of fifty to sixty four person households and depending on if it's open or closed loop cooled could use the equivalent of thirty households' worth of water.

That doesn't sound like a panic, that sounds like people wanting some consideration and moderation of infrastructure that's extremely disruptive and tied to a technology that's causing more damage than it's helping currently.

A parallel to what you're describing would be the Hyatt Regency collapse. Meticulously designed, yet one small change under the surface lead to one of the worst engineering disasters of that century.

I don't want to think of what the digital equivalent of the Hyatt Regency collapse would be, considering that the software could be deployed all around the globe rather than in one place in one building.

There are several Chinese fabs that they could contract out production to. In fact that's exactly what Apple tried to do, before the U.S. government went full protectionist and added the two memory manufacturers to the banned imports list. There's also the Texas Instruments fab that's underutilized right now. The extra capacity exists, it's just Micro and SK Hynix are throwing their money around to stifle anything that could jeopardize their spike in profits that are historic not only for their industry, but for manufacturing as a whole.

It appears like they're trying to make an industry that works outside of conventional bounds. Just like with private military contractors. Not quite privateers like in the 1630s.

Interconnectivity managers and smarthome managers are about it. People don't want something that can alter things unbidden and unrestricted. But them being able to automatically set up, for example, your phone's Bluetooth connection to a rental car would be appealing to a lot of people. Or being able to adjust the thermostat or start the coffee maker or whatever according to preference of whoever's in the house.