legitster

I liked season 1 of the Expanse - the settings and production were fantastic, but I found the characters just became overwritten and annoying as the show went on.

I am worried that Game of Thrones ruined a generation of sci-fi and fantasy - everyone tries to copy the dark, morally compromised, postmodern, realpolitik tone. Even besides the fact that we are manifesting a world where progress is impossible, it has turned genres that is traditionally very positive and escapist into bleak emotional slogs.

As an aside, Jean-Luc Picard's character was explicitly based on Horatio Hornblower (Stewart was given a stack of Forrester novels to prepare for the role).

In comparison between the two, Hornblower was a rather unimaginative person bound by his deep sense of duty and the extreme pressure of the Navy. Picard (as a character) replaces duty with the Prime Directive, and pressure came from feeling with the unknown.

I have a deep affection for stories where people are depicted as good, or even just good at their jobs. I appreciate for actors and writers it's a much harder ask - it's much easier to make a story of relatable bumbleheads, especially if you yourself are somewhat uninteresting and never got much life experience. It's much harder making believable characters that we can look up to and respect.

I had the pleasure of riding around once in a Detroit Electric. To call it a tea parlor on wheels would have been an understatement. It came equipped with a flower vase, and instead of a steering wheel (how unladylike!) it came with a tiller that would sit across your lap.

These were cars for very wealthy elite women. But just as big of a deal as it was for women to drive - these cars in particular did not require a servant to start, operate, or service.

> "From a global allocation perspective, actually, it's quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world's limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer, and being used maybe 5% of the time"

I don't actually have a massive problem with his logic here ... if he was to put the blame on Windows or Google treating RAM like it's a cheap commodity.

Also, if gamers weren't overbuying RAM this whole time, realistically the small set of manufacturers would have consolidated even further through the 2010s.

> Special assistance like emergency lending or direct capital infusions to prop up insolvent A.I. companies’ operations or prevent their orderly resolutions through ordinary bankruptcy processes

I appreciate the signal to the lending industry to cool the brakes on this stuff, and that the they are specifically targeting golden parachutes. But legislation like this is at best largely performative.

If the economy ends up crashing because the bubble popped, and legislators can't intervene to prevent a knock-on collapse, they are going to be out of their jobs anyway.

This is crazy to me. The amount of great games under $20 that you can get these days is overwhelming. (But it helps that Roguelikes are my favorite genre - Have recently been playing Diceomancer, Combolands,Plan B, Emberwards,Iron Nest, Against the Storm, to name just a few)

Part of getting older is naturally being less interested in new things - be it movies or music. If you find yourself scrolling through Steam not finding anything you like, it could just be a feeling of fulfillment with what you already like?

I mean, it's a patent reality.

Whether it was through serfdom, indentured servitute, state labor obligations, patriarchal labor obligations, or outright slavery - coerced human labor was a constant norm.

In Britain, quitting a job was criminal until 1875!

The idea that work is done almost exclusively through voluntary labor is a modern (post-WW2) reality, and even then mostly exclusive to Western, capitalist nations. Even in modern, non-capitalist society (Soviet Union, Maoist China) work was largely obligatory and assigned to you.

Of course, Marx would point out that all labor is obligatory if you need to work to eat. But I think he would even take for granted the ability for everyone to accept or reject what specific work they wanted to do.

Sometimes. It is just as likely to work backwards where common words becomes divisive or even slurs.

In the linked example, I don't think the author in question meant to make light of slavery when comparing it to their victimhood.

This is a classic "motte and bailey" argument.

Someone who makes this statement this really want us to equate it with racist chattel slavery - the most heinous form of worker exploitation in modern memory. "Oh, I just meant: {the most common type of work in human history}" as a retreat is not very compelling.

The distinction (besides Anthropic being too big to be thrown in jail) is that Aaron Schwartz was intentionally pirating research papers with intent to redistribute, and was publicly attacking copyright laws.

Anthropic training their model outside of public sight without intent to redistribute, and had a large paper trail that expressed they believed they were acting within fair use.

Here's my understanding, someone correct me if I'm wrong:

- Anthropic et al basically grabbed whatever content they could to scan and train the model.

- The vast majority of what they scanned were books they bought at wholesale in big lots. Stuff being weeded out from Goodwills or libraries and (mostly) bound for destruction anyway.

- They didn't copy the texts per-se, they studied the relationships between words to build a statistical/predictive model of natural language.

- Whether this a fair or illegal use of copyrighted text already seems like an adorably obsolete question. Regardless, the damage is basically done - they can neither prove one way or another how much any single text influenced their model and they cannot unscramble the egg without starting over.

- Rather than get stuck in court for decades splitting the hairs about copyright law, they wrote massive checks to the publishing industry and agreed to a bunch of restrictions around copyrights.

- For the foreseeable future, every independent copyright holder now has grounds to take grievances to Anthropic and get some form of compensation.

The article points out the primary source is recycling operations.

This is not some big currency or export program. It's most likely Grandma and Grandpa hawking their jewelry.

The cash for gold industry in the US is absolutely massive and growing. Most of it is fueled by boomers dumping their assets into gold and silver - and then cashing it out when times get worse.

Trumps spent hours every day on the campaign trail rambling random ideas off the top of his head. He "telegraphed" everything from baby bonds, flying cars, free women's healthcare, "Freedom Cities", etc.

The reality is that he promised so many things to so many people that no matter what he does it can be spun to look calculated.

Regardless, from a realpolitik point of view, it's easier to remind people that are not getting what they wanted and were tricked, rather than try to convince them they were wrong this whole time.

But then they also tried raising revenue through tariffs.

So they DID massively try raising taxes, just on everybody.

> From what I heard, no combination of groups in the beltway bothered to expend the political capital to actually force through across the board cuts.

The administration successfully passed through some recisissions (the ones that gutted the entire USAID program, CPB, and etc) and passed the OBBBA. To say the "backed out" I think is a bit too generous. They essentially threw out anything that wasn't hard bolted down by the Constitution.

The reality is there is not any real way to achieve significant cuts without entitlement reforms or defense cuts (lol).

What's really striking is the current administration performed one of the most brutal cost cutting programs in recent memory. And despite the massive amount of disruption caused (and to be caused) there is almost nothing to show for it financially. Just pennies in the ashtray of a Lamborghini.

Obviously the people behind it were not serious, and did nothing to actually address government waste or reform the welfare system. But the result is the same - the idea of cost cutting as a means of addressing the deficit is effectively dead. There is no dry powder on the "slash budgets" side of the ledger. All that's left is raising taxes. (Or do nothing until there's an actual hyperinflation event).

The only reason software engineering existed is because coding and programming was unnecessarily hard. It was never meant to be an exclusive skill.

If you step back, the LLM revolution is just "computers now respond to human instruction, like they were always supposed to".

If you think of this field as a historic accident, and the current shift is a very unfortunate reset - it's a little less dystopian. In the long run, if it didn't affect me immediately, I don't mind a society that values "keeping restrooms clean" a little bit more and "talking to computers good" a little bit less.

One thing I've been thinking about is Baumol's Cost Disease. It's usually applied in at a macro scale across an economy: when a job somewhere becomes much more efficient, it makes all other jobs comparatively more expensive.

I've started to notice this on a micro scale as well. I am 20x more productive at coding and scripting, but I don't spend more of my time coding. My time is now filled with things like presentations, Jira, QA, etc. Ironically, despite all of the automation, the things that are painstaking and time consuming disproportionately require more time now.

Have you actually taken any of these cars along a twisty country road? They are not at all similar.

911 is not really a roadster - it's a full on sports car. Even then the older ones top out at about a ton. Same as the Boxster and Miata.

Most serious sports EVs start at 2 tons or more. It's really impressive what they can do to hide the weight, but because it's all digitally controlled, it's really not a dynamic driving experience in the same way.

More importantly to my point - all of them have nearly identical drive characteristics. Outside of raw performance, if you put a gun to my head and asked me to describe the difference in handling between a Tesla, Mach-E, or a Polestar - I'm not sure I could give you anything.

The reality of EVs is that they all provide more or less identical driving experience - immense amounts of speed in straight lines and pure control around corners. But you can't really make something nimble or chuckable when it weighs 1.5 tons.

(Calling it a "roadster" is cute, but this has nothing in common with a Boxster or Miata. If anything, the ICE analogue would be muscle cars.)

Because there are no real unique driving characteristics, the only engineering you can compete with is raw speed or price. That and crazy gimmicks.

Washington Post, LA Times, Grantland, New Republic, most of the traditional Conde Nast publications.

More importantly, you can add in all of the local independent newspaper, tv, and radio channels that were either shut down or gobbled up by large corporations and gutted (Sinclair, Clear Channel, etc). Over 3000 newspapers were closed down, as well as nearly every foreign or government bureau.

This is when the largest drop ever of professional reporters in the US happened - we entered the 2020s with less than half of the number of employed reporters as we had in 2000.

The slopification of news started before AI.

I think one thing to keep in mind as to why all of the other media empires are so quick to roll over and embrace AI - all of these companies are survivors of the massive media purge of the late 2000s, when blogs and cheap online news just completely gutted the traditional news and publishing world.

Outside of a few standouts, the companies that survived did not do so by embracing quality journalism and independent reporting.

Now the bloggers and upstart publishers that killed traditional media are the incumbents.

I'm employed, but have been in the job market for over a year.

Right now, any job opening is like fighting for a seat on the last helicopter out of Saigon. Whenever I do get an interview - I'm one of over a dozen applicants interviewing for the same position. Everyone is desperate, hiring managers have extreme power, and the bar is constantly being raised on how much you need to be willing to do be considered.

The irony is everyone wants to see a portfolio of AI work, but if you use AI for any part of the hiring process it's a demerit against you.

No one's saying there aren't legitimate reasons to be disillusioned with the world - but that's not mutually exclusive from people socializing or having community. If anything, it's one reasons people are so exhausted and defeated to begin with.

There's a reason people call it "doomscrolling", and it's not because it's healthy escapism. Bad news and defeatism is psychologically addictive, and platforms have financial incentive to pump your brain full of negativity. Regardless of how bad it is outside, the internet is not a protective bubble - it's an opium den.

> but you have nearly entirely white cities like Portland that also experienced their own explosive suburban growth in the same time period

Yes, it was exactly my point that Portland was already the whitest metropolitan area in the country. And yes, I am well aware of the extensive redlining (my grandparents lived in Vanport before it was destroyed). And yet they still had people explode out into the suburbs through the 50s and 60s.

This is a counter-example to the thesis that urban flight was purely a racist response to "preserve apartheid".

No one is arguing that racism didn't exist. But suburbanization happened everywhere around the world where cars were introduced (even places with almost no diversity). To blame suburbanization as a purely racial phenomenon is not true.

Racism might be part of the reason, but you have nearly entirely white cities like Portland that also experienced their own explosive suburban growth in the same time period.

Also, if "suburbanization" was really the explanation for the decline in community, you would see a clear pattern where people (regardless of race) in the suburbs have fewer friends and social lives and people in urban areas have more. But the opposite is largely true!

> It seems like people are increasingly exhausted and disillusioned with life.

Is life today bleaker or harder than it was during the Great Depression? People still made time for each other.

What if it is the media that is making people exhausted and disillusioned? Not the other way around.

> It doesn't, for example, cover the privatization of public spaces, it doesn't mention mass white flight from cities to suburban sprawl due to people wanting to preserve apartheid

That's because, contrary to the way it's often depicted, the 20th century was overwhelmingly a flight from rural areas to cities. Suburbs were an outgrowth of that, but the reality is that rural areas were hollowed out the most. (Also, community engagement in rural areas with lots of sprawl was even higher than in cities).

> that they have day jobs that exhaust them

The median adult is spending 5+ hours on their phone a day. This is what is exhausting people. Everyone is essentially working a second job that involves lots of reading and attention and social engagement. It's a parasitic draw on our lives.

> they need to pick up a second shift or another job to cover their basic needs.

Maybe that's true for some people, but the data usually shows that income and free time is inversely related to community time. Poorer people are making more time for friends and family.

I can see what you're trying to do - reframe this problem as another outgrowth of class struggle. But it doesn't really explain the reality. A steelworker in the 1920s coming off of a 10-hour shift would still find the time and energy to go out dancing. A software engineer in 2026 is going to get off of work at 5pm and watch 3.4 more hours of screen time in a day.

My controversial idea for urban planning: age and demographic based zoning.

There is lots of urban planning in the US that is poorly optimized. Walkable neighborhoods close to parks and schools are often filled with retirees, whereas young families are often crowded into newer neighborhoods at the edge of town with little infrastructure nearby.

You wouldn't even have to do much pressure to move the needle. Cities are already putting in millions of dollars to place their parks and schools, and etc. Offer tax incentives that encourage young families to move into family areas, singles into single areas, and retirees into retiree areas.

It sounds kind of crazy, but we more or less do this for student areas around colleges.

This has actually been a trend since the 1960s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone

The simple answer is media. First television, then internet, then smartphones.

People used to actively seek the company of others - if for no other reason than out of boredom. Entertainment and parasocial relationships have filled that hole.

Another reason I might posit is declining birth rates and an aging population. Entire neighborhoods used to be filled with young families of roughly the same age. Now on any given city block in the US, there may only be 1 or 2 houses that have kids of any age in them. Smaller concentration of kids -> thinner market for playdates and sleepovers -> less interactions between families.