Chris Beiser

Pretty fucked up how, starting in the 13th century, Big Tech enclosed the commons, deeding the land to feudal lords and forcing smallholders to rent the land they worked.

we fr gotta move on from uncocracy

valuing effort for its own sake is antihuman

@isaacinthesky 3m more on the Acela + something like 20 million on the NJ Transit Northeast Corridor lines.

it's sort of wild that the Northeast Regional and Caltrain have roughly the same ridership?

@CaliforniaDFPI extremely bad look for the DFPI to pocket the penalty while customers are still short funds

The DFPI announced today that Yotta Technologies must pay a $1 million penalty for engaging in deceptive practices and misleading consumers into believing that their accounts were FDIC-insured. For full details, read the press release: hubs.li/Q04gRJn50.

@krel404 @yitong i hope you one day get to experience their munitions directly

@ctbeiser @yitong okay but whats wrong w anduril?

man this ad is so derivative, snarky, mean-spirited, and in bad faith. exactly the opposite of what you'd want from your investor. i'd take money from the guy on the left 10 times out of 10 i'm sure gc is a great firm, but this video just makes them look like douchebags

@sonyasupposedly paraxanthine gives you energy though. that's why they don't want you to have it.

barista at my local coffee shop told me that caffeine doesn't give you extra energy, just steals energy from your future self. this immediately struck me as true and I was like WHY WOULD YOU TELL ME THAT 😭

@hopes_revenge it seems unlikely that the institutions would be unaffected, by transformative AI power ..

@TheStalwart certain things are provable. but generally within a formal frame. as provable surface expands, attackers move outwards towards issues in what was assumed to be axiomatic.

Cybersecurity is something I’ve literally never spent much time learning about. And probably I should change that. But I’m curious, is there such thing as provably secure software, or is security always relative to state of the art hacking technology?

@yitong their portcos list is alphabetical so it's the first thing you see

@ctbeiser yeah it's just so phony...

@simonsarris this is because profits in construction are dictated by efficiency in navigating the planning and permitting apparatus. if you have by-right zoning, profits have to depend on quality instead.

In my town a new luxury build now means being wedged between *two* two-car garages, rather than one. The gray bedrooms still have gray carpet, however. Why can't developers think of a single luxurious thing they would add beyond car doors?

@drumm_colin john dewey explains this in Experience and Nature. few talk about this.

It's really just so embarrassing for "modern western thought" that this moron is its central figure. Just nothing even vaguely valuable about it

It's funny how kants theory is basically just about how he just cant comprehend the idea of childhood development. If we realize childhood happens none of this makes sense

@litemagere what i like most about generated images is that the more i use them and the better they get, the more they hollow out the aesthetics of visible effort, and the more i'm drawn to a neutral interest in forms for their own qualities

the closer GenAI looks to well-made work product, the costlier the signal. what missing, though, is that that’s also why you might be so into it. after all, using GenAI *is* a costly signal. *you* can afford to be thought to be cheap.

beyond bad work product, we dislike GenAI because it isn’t a costly signal. i can afford to do this, well, really well, rather than that, cheaply. what does that tell you about everything else I can do?

@geoffreylitt Part of what makes OS X work in this is also that they would ship an opinionated version to the testing base, and only when people actually seem to need configurability would they add it. The top-down designed approach and the bottom-up user desires need eachother.

Many systems have one of these qualities but few achieve both. Apps made by talented designers often offer strong "omakase" opinions, but weak customizability. Locally they're making good decisions: it's true that a million settings sucks. Meanwhile, many hackable systems are only for nerds who enjoy the setup journey as a hobby. Most people don't care enough or have time for that. Personally I'm not really a setup nerd myself. It may seem like there is an irreconcilable tension between these poles. But in fact, with the right design philosophy that is not the case! Rails has a lot of swappable / modular seams, while offering an amazing day 1 experience. (or at least it did back in the 2010s when I was a heavy user.) Mac OS is built around beautiful UNIX primitives but gives an easy entry point. Heroku comes to mind as another example: easy one-click deploy, but deep customizability too. The key is to not think of it as bolting settings onto an app, or giving users a pile of raw materials. You have to build around a composable set of primitives, but then also do the hard work of giving users awesome, opinionated, preassembled experiences on day 1.

My favorite flavor of software is "omakase + hackable". Ruby on Rails and classic Mac OS X are shining examples. Opinionated starting point, no fiddly setup. But very deeply customizable if you want.

@johnloeber you can write text messages with an artful quality too

Back when people sent each other letters, that was a very different communication style from messaging today. Not just because of length and cadence, but because each letter constituted something like a small, completed artwork unto itself. A mini essay. There's a creative act in drafting and finishing something. Instant messages are never finished but part of an endless flow of exchange.

@joodalooped what if we built more software and also better

what if we built less software period?

Would you still love me if the bears in Novaya Zemlya were white?

@adaobiadibe_ you'd think by this point they'd start asking if the PM isn't the problem

If the U.K. gets a new prime minister again….. I just. Children. The lot of them.

@schwarz_seher its a company with 35 employees… it's not real…

so do we know whether this is adversarial advertising yet? seeing them everywhere in london, trying not to go insane about it