lopsotronic
Samuel Butler was a character.
Some poor-ass professor -- fighting tooth and nail for tenure, or at least some form of stability from all-powerful admin staff -- can't keep themselves from trying to figure out who's "Dominant" or "Alpha". When in reality the network isn't directed, but a mesh of arbitrary weights, vectors, and dimensionality.
Perhaps if ancient China had beat us to Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution we would be seeing scientists talking about how respectful mammals are of their ancestors.
Also, traditional beancounting on precisely matching costs to values . . . that's not how high end military action works. You have rather a lot of irons in the fire that are all part of a system. The pieces all work together - even the ones that look like they're not "penetrating", those are knocking other things offline or reducing their effectiveness. Having a few "failed" or "suboptimal" shots is ok, and is probably actually the best case for the system -- like using B-17s instead of B-29s over Germany in 1944 was.
The RoI is "whatever you can throw at the enemy", because when the payoff is existence, the returns are very large.
Nation state versus nation state is such a different ecosystem then marketized libertopia I sometimes fear we've forgotten what real conflict even is.
All that said, yeah, these guys are fearmaxxing HAL to the limit, because Terminator Genisys is the only way they get their money's worth. But under all those prairie patties there is a kernel of a problem here. Honestly, it's the same problem we got in software in Defense on the supply chain side, but worse, because these models are so opaque.
When I first heard the scheme as a kid[1] -- that my retirement depended on giving my money back to the owners, all in the hope that it will come back to me in fifty years -- my first thought was, "I'm never seeing that money". I signed for the matching contribution and not a cent more -- getting 2 bucks of Funny Money for each buck seemed like a decent gamble. As I got older I started thinking that the system must work, all the grown ups know what they're doing, "it's the responsible thing to do". Etc etc etc. Now, I'm coming back around to my teenage opinions: they're going to figure out a way to take every single cent of my money.
Shit like this makes people into goldbugs and ammo hoarders. Or worse.
[1] My generation had some of the last pension positions, and 401ks were fairly the new thing.
Due to the insane distortion of "space"[1], every spare molecule in the vicinity is going to be lighting up at the speed of $E = mc^2$ . Which tends to be real visible. Black holes power some of the brightest things in the universe - light so powerful that it sometimes has its own gravity.
A tame black hole is possibly the least fussy high-efficiency furnace imagineable. Of course, "tame black hole" possibly . . . isn't.
[1] Whatever that happens to be, either bouncy rubber sheet or emergent property from deeper Hilbert Spaces or something beyond our imaginations. Or something that's just an illusion, an artifact of our specific perspective from our little spot in existence, like a rainbow.
Mr Inbetween gets more done with thirty minutes than I thought possible.
Scott Ryan deserves a big break more than most others I can think of - which he might be on the way towards, word is he's got a lot of agents sniffing at his door. He might have to give up his fixation on writing-directing-starring . . . that combo is a very hard combo to pull off at scale. There's only so much one person can do on set . . which is why all that the creator of Mr. Inbetween has managed basically boils down to just . . Mr. Inbetween.
Unless . . . Scott Ryan isn't a great Hidden Filmmaker or Outback Actor at all, and Scott Ryan actually is Ray Shoesmith. It's not Great TV, it's just Tuesday. Which would be super awesome and horrible at the same time.
Then again, maybe understandable, since he's a veteran ex cop in the midst of tweakers, junkies, madmen, and generally people not well geared for success in life. And it makes for bigger payoff when we DO get a situation where anantagonist actually does get the better of him - that tells us we're dealing with a sharp customer.
What great frickin' writing.
It should give every greasy shiny suit film executive a bowel-evacuating fit of shame that a support character like Mike gets more audience engagement than a half billion bucks spent in SWeIX: TRoS or Justice League or that godawful Marvel Immortals movie.
Hey, Finance Guys: you find creatives you know are good (y'know, using that newfangled notion of Domain Knowledge), you give 'em a kitchen and you let 'em cook.
Nothing, and I do mean nothing, touches McKellan's 1995 Richard III in my eyes, for Shakespeare in cinema. Although calling it Richard III is a bit of a stretch. How about Richard III: The Greatest Hits?
However, today, every segment in the pipeline of judice -- LEO to PA/DA[1] to judiciary to BoPs -- is utterly subverted ideologically. What happens in this pipeline -- especially regarding a 4A case -- will have little to do with justice, but rather who you are, who is trying you, and what court they manage to pick. And of course the hands and eyes of the whole system is the Executive Branch, now in lockstep[2] at the Federal Level.
Reactionaries will insist to their dying day that the opposing ideology did this first, so today they have the right to do it back harder.
What this means is that it doesn't matter what your rights are, or who has what paper. Because who's taking your case? Where will it go? How long will it take?
In one sense, the reactionaries are right: an opposing ideology HAS been doing this, for a long time. But it's not hollywood or the academy or the commmunists or the legions of wokedom. It's your boss, and your boss' boss. Using their cushion of money to avoid any kind of criminal and civil responsibilities by simply waiting out everyone else in court. They're the ones who broke the ground here, and the post-GWoT security state drove a bus through it, as if Keanu Reeves was at the wheel.
Anyway at this late hour in our accursed year of 2026 . . none of it matters. Doesn't matter who started it, doesn't matter what side you happen to like or not like. Same result: the laws on paper will not protect you. Don't make the possibly fatal mistake of thinking they will. Think like a guerilla, think like Snowden.
[1] But not quite with every SAO, a hairline fracture in the cathedral of oppression we've voted to have built all around us.
[2] Or at least as much "lockstep" as can be bought with the current executive's level of competence. The Dominionists and the Dark Enlightenment sorts are the beating heart of intelligence in the reactionary wing today, and they are still mostly staying in the background, waiting for the collapse.
The high points, anyway. The parts worth remembering.
Something I am taking away from this, is every optimization he makes here, takes away from the technologies supporting the overall dynamism of the scene, "dynamism" in terms of things interacting with things. The long solution might well be a very tightly described engine of "dynamism" - data formats, algorithms - that then feeds an optimized splat renderer, millisecond by millisecond.
In a hardware manufacturing setting, particularly a new or "garage" sort of shop doing lots of new business, you quickly get into a nightmare scenario of "Too Many Configurations" running headfirst into the problem of "People Are Buying Too Much of Our Stuff". As a garage shop you can do OK making five or six units of all kinds, but once the orders for 1000, 10000 start coming in, you will be torpedoed by the complexity of keeping all those lines operational. Eventually you'll screw something up, and get dinged or even blacklisted (a big deal in Defense).
But it's a problem that can be steered around by applying some graph theory to the parts data system. Some PDMs actually do this natively - Oleg Shilovitsky's OpenBOM; Yoann Maingon's Ganister, both smart guys buy their stuff! - but this network theory can be used as a reporting layer on top of any big dumb PDM.
Examples include:
(Asciidoc table from a previous slide I've used, sorry)
|===
| Method | Primary Use
| In-degree centrality | Shared/high-risk components
| Out-degree centrality | Complex assemblies
| Betweenness centrality | Change risk
| Closeness centrality | Architectural centrality
| PageRank | Strategic component
| Degree distribution | Architecture health / power law check
| Connected components | Find orphans
| Shortest path / diameter | BOM depth, lineage distance
| Clustering coefficient | Modularity vs. coupling
| Community detection | Platform map, family boundaries
| Ego network | "Minimum Safe Distance" of a change impact
| Jaccard similarity | Variant/redundancy
| Structural holes | "Bridge" component(s)
| Topological sort | Flat assembly sequence
| Longest path | Maximum BOM depth
| Transitive closure | Full ancestor/descendant sets
| Treewidth | Overall architectural complexity score
|===
Some of the old security state nomenklatura even stayed on into the Hi Tech Grandee era. In-Q-Tel. LifeLog. Regina Dugan. Douglas Gage, Jim Breyer, Howard Cox. Thiel and Palantir. And many more besides. Und so weiter, und so weiter.
They're not deviating from their mission or their "morals"; today, now -- with the chips finally down, i.e. global hegemony switching for the first time in the nuclear age -- these "companies" are returning to their roots.
"Welcome to the only Game in Town"Eh? Eh?
honks clown nose
I guarantee the instant - the millisecond - that CSS PMM goes into the browser, that is the second the PDF ecosystem goes poof[2].
Aside from all that, back to the core point, it's quite late in the day to restrict HTML to page-based UX. It's been at least a decade since the "browser" has become a sorta-crappy sandbox for what we used to call client-server computing and a sort of just-in-time software development. But the thing about software, writing software, is that it's diametrically opposed to language, natural language, like the kind you use in documents. That's why we call one a "formal" language versus what we call "natural" language. The interface of these two, trying to make them the same thing, is an ever-bountiful cornucopia of suffering.
You see this in complex markup constructs, like conditionals and transcludes[3], that cross blades with natural language, i.e., documents. This is a big part of why every WYSIWYG "just like paper" XML editor ever made sucks so horribly. It's not that the developers are all idiots - I know a lot of them, and they're some of the smartest/canniest developers I've ever known - it's that they're taking on a task that is conceptually unworkable.
[1] Paged Media Module
[2] Well, everywhere outside of high end print production, glossy prints, executive whitepapers. But even there, I predict a huge falloff, due to the existential pain of developing custom PDF pipelines.
[3] AsciiDoc (include::[] with tag=/lines= partials; ifdef::[], ifndef::[], ifeval::[], endif::[]); DITA (@conref, @conkeyref, @conrefend, @keyref; blah blah blah blah); S1000D (CIR, applics, whatever your Program Officer says); DocBook (all sorts of stuff); ATA iSpec 2200 (SGML crap); reStructuredText/Sphinx (.. include::, .. literalinclude::; .. only::, .. ifconfig::); and new kid on the block Typst[a] (#include, #import; #if … else expressions).
[3a] Speaking of which, if you want to see what paper markup looks like, I seriously recommend a look at Typst. It's like LaTeX for humans.
Many lesser directors often end up with "lightning in a bottle" -- aka a film that far exceeds their normal ability -- because the common stress of the experience on direction, on production, on the talent made for a synthesis better than sum of its parts.
It doesn't always work that way, but when it does it's very striking.
As I believe pointed out by Tommy Lee Jones in _Men in Black_, somewhat more succinctly.
The really poisonous aspect is how individual empathy in social groups can incite even greater violence, so as to reassure the group that you're all on board with atrocity lest you become another target for it. Diaries of German soldiers on the Eastern Front relay this. Also the stereotype of the ex-prisoner camp guard who is more cruel than the actual occupiers. Samuel Jackson's character in _Django Unchained_.
Or, in this specific case under discussion, exchanging dollars for raw slices of the state's monopoly of force.
Unfortunately, like the RU oligarchs before them, they will find all these trinkets hold value rather poorly when the state apparatus entirely disintegrates.
And those that flee with their capital to other more stable powers will find themselves . . probably less than pleased with the, ah, the level of service that Jiang has in his pleasure bucket. But we're ALL in for it, in a Han-dominant globe. You thought Southerners were racist? Oh, oh goodness . .
Thank the American Rural Voter. This is what they wanted, I am going to watch them eat the whole damn cake.
Much more equivalent to phenomenon surrounding the collapse of the Soviet Union: liquidation of an entire state's infrastructure via foreign exchange controlled exclusively by the security state . . with plenty of братва duocracy of course.
We've already seen equivalents, even before the 2008 Econopalypse, but activities like those of the Trump-affiliated circle is the terminal end: where USD-denominated assets are exchanged for pure state power. It's just that this is a particularly pure form of it.
There will be no unravelling of this, not until the system of USD seigniorage itself unravels.
They're not deviating from their mission; they're returning to their Dark Enlightenment roots.
You could say the same about techbro culture as a whole - it comes from the missile men culture of the 1950s-1960s, which was . . . pretty cozy . . with some personalities of the Old European Right. To this day you still hear "well we weren't able to get to orbit without the god-given aid of Glorious Aryan Rocketmen". When the truth is a little more venal, more like the various departments of the armed forces couldn't keep their daggers out of each others' backs. But the seemingly-hippy-ish libertarian culture of the Valley was a veneer on some very dark crap.
ANYWAY. The same technologists have also given us the tools to create true open communications, it's just we haven't been living under the barrel of the gun for long enough yet. I suspect all the tricks will be coming out before too long.
I'm not an in-the-know cyber kind of guy, so maybe those guys are like the U.N. of hackers. But it's really hard to think about this story without at least cracking a smile. Seriously, you try it. Pretend you are a news anchor on the 6 o'clock national news, if such a thing still existed. Try saying the first bullet in a news voice and try not to bust out laughing.
I mean, ok, I get what he's saying - trying to say. But the big things each of these units do, they're not related. It's not like a guy who makes antennas buying a television manufacturer. The "end to end" lacks ends.
Anchor Positioning would be sweet and doesn't feel like it's got so much baggage.