Anonymous McRealname

It's amazing how I've been a simmering ball of rage and disappointment for the last three-odd years. And it still keeps getting worse.

@HMBohemond The bizarre thing to me is that Herbert didn't really give a shit about any of those; his obsession was the ecology of Arrakis and the social impact of extreme water scarcity + long-term planning. Everything else was groundwork for that

@HMBohemond Dune is fundamentally built on three technological premises; 1. The Holtzman effect (shields, warp drives, antigravity) 2. The Butlerian prohibition (no computers) 3. Human potential (mentats, reverend mothers, precognition, Tleilaxu) All three are intimately linked as well

The Hotlzman Shield in Dune is one of the perfect examples of adding a tiny thing to a setting to get a vibe you want out of it. In Dune's case: - Holtzman Shields stop fast moving objects. - Lasguns (particle beam guns in Dune) can cause a nuclear explosion if they hit a shield, so they're not commonly used. - Melee is the dominant form of combat, trying to strike slow to penetrate the shields. - Projectile weapons exist but they're designed around boring through or disrupting shields, but a skilled combatant can deflect the slow moving projectiles. - Heavy artillery can still kill shielded humans through sheer transfer of force or heat, which the shield can't block. - Anti-vehicle weapons are built around these principles because the vehicle might be shielded. Dune codified the idea of high tech sci-fi where you still have melee and the idea of "oh here's this piece of technobabble that let's me have what I want in my sci-fi setting." Gundam's Minovsky Particle and Mass Effect's Element Zero owe the Holtzman Shield their existence.

@AlHendiify Anything hot enough to still be meaningfully dangerous in 500 years is fuel. For the rest, just drop it in the ocean. Water is an excellent radiation absorber; a field of concrete casks wouldn't even be detectible from the surface

Now show us 10,000 years worth of safely stored waste and how you communicate to a society 500 years into the future that no longer speaks the same language that this is an incredibly dangerous material.

@frontierindica Another day, another dollar, another person on the internet pretending to not understand differences in purchasing power and costs of living

The American minimum wage worker earns more than the average worker in 90% of the countries on earth. The practical floor for unskilled labour in the US is $15-18/hour, no degree needed. Someone with even average intelligence and a half-decent work ethic can build a genuinely comfortable life in America within a few years. It is the easiest place on the planet to not be poor. Being stuck in poverty in India or Nigeria or Egypt is understandable. The systems are broken, the opportunities are scarce, the deck is stacked against ordinary people from birth. But America? Where a warehouse worker or a fast food cook already lives better than most of the planet? If someone is destitute in that environment, blaming Elon Musk is simply communist cope. That's addiction, terrible spending habits, or a complete refusal to work. Billionaires didn't force you to blow your money on crack or rack up $100K in gambling debt.

@Merrydawg Gomu Gomu no Runtime

Ugh. Seriously? I was excited about the One Piece remake, but this just ruined that. Why do they always have to change things? Why can't they just follow what the original work does? How is One Piece gonna be One Piece without the stretching? How do they expect that to work? How's Luffy even going to fight people if he can't use his devil fruit power?

@TukiFromKL It came way too early and way too weak. Current hardware is too expensive and crappy to use. Current Internet connections are too slow and inconsistent. Current design/implementation paradigms are too slow and clunky. An idea that came before its time

The metaverse could've been the biggest job creator since the internet.. Right when AI is about to kill millions of jobs. Think about it.. Virtual architects, Digital real estate agents, 3D fashion designers, Concert venues with no capacity limits, Schools where a kid in US sits next to a kid in Tokyo.. Imagine hiring a trainer who's physically in your living room as a hologram.. Imagine test-driving a car without leaving your bed, Imagine attending court, seeing your doctor, touring a university - all without a plane ticket. An entire parallel economy... Millions of jobs that never existed before. Instead, Zuckerberg gave us legless avatars in an empty room and burned $80 billion proving that the greatest idea of the decade can still die if the wrong person builds it... Someone's gonna build all of this eventually. It just won't be Zuckerberg.

@uncledoomer Someone either find a way to teach people the difference between private and governmental regulation of speech or just fucking shoot me already

for the entire biden presidency, you would get banned from all social media for saying objectively true things about covid

@goneers Because voting is how you decide what the rules around Real ID are, while getting on a plane is just a commercial transaction. Can someone explain to *me* why so many people seem to not understand that voting is a uniquely important category of activity in a democracy?

Can someone explain to me the difference between requiring Americans to have a Real ID to get on a plane and asking them to show that same Real ID in order to vote? Why isn't it a hardship to get a copy of your marriage license or birth certificate in order to get a Real ID but it is in order to vote for the leader of the free world? Make it make sense, please!

@pegobry_en There's no question that we have more to gain through collaboration than through competition. But there is an open question of whether the end of the trans-atlantic partnership would harm Europe or America more.

The countries in blue on this map (I picked countries that sanctioned Russia after invading Ukraine but I could have picked something else) are, to varying degrees, but profoundly, integrated economically, politically, technologically, and culturally. The idea that this doesn’t *enormously* benefit the biggest country in that group, America, is insane. The idea that if the blue blob in the middle (Europe) went its own way it wouldn’t have massive ramifications for the US and the average American is insane. The US + Europe + Japan + South Korea + ANZ together *dominates* the world. At everything. Military, technology, economy, you name it. The US cut off from all of this? Would it eventually be fine because it’s a great country with a great people? Sure. Would there be a lot of pain, a lot of reduced horizons, in the meantime? Yes. Again, these are just facts about the world. I am presenting them to MAGA Republicans. They can do with it what they will. This has been the role of the French in our beautiful 250 year old alliance and friendship: tell you bluntly the truths you don’t want to hear.

@NoahRevoy Cool. Have fun with that, and discovering why boxing is no longer part of the school curriculum

If I were to start a private school, it would be a boys-only institution. All teachers would be male. Most would come from military backgrounds, with preference given to those with special forces experience. The structure would prioritize physical and practical development. Each morning would begin with physical training. Boxing. Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Obstacle courses. Firearms training. There would also be a strong emphasis on building. Shop classes. Hands-on work. The ability to construct something real. Even for someone who becomes an IT engineer, knowing how to build a chair matters. Real-world construction develops thinking. It trains problem-solving in a way abstract learning does not. Academic instruction would be concentrated. No more than three hours per day at a desk. That is sufficient to meet curriculum requirements and maintain academic competence. The rest of the day would be spent developing strength, discipline, and practical skill.

@JohnLeePettim13 You use solar or wind to electrolyze water and get hydrogen; it's an effective, if not very dense, energy storage mechanism.

Hydrogen is the stupidest, most ridiculous, and most impossible energy alternative. It takes 5 to 10 times more energy than it returns. This has been known since 2004, yet hydrogen refuses to die. It is far from renewable because it contains no energy at all—energy must be forced into it like a battery—and you lose even more when converting it back to electricity. It has the worst energy return of any alternative: far more energy goes in than you ever get back. Consider the process: you first split hydrogen from natural gas or use far more energy to electrolyze it from water, then compress or liquefy it, build extremely expensive and short-lived steel containers and pipelines (since hydrogen embrittles them), and finally deliver it to virtually non-existent hydrogen vehicles. Fuel cell technology remains far from commercial. It is also highly explosive. Hydrogen requires 12 times less energy to ignite than gasoline vapor, so the smallest spark or heat source can turn it into a bomb.

@AnalyticaCamil1 Thinking Russia is a real economy in any sense is, frankly, kind of adorable. Russia's economy is less diversified and productive than New York, much less the US as a whole. Mentioning them in the same breath as China on any economic matter is hilarious

@AnalyticaCamil1 I think Iran is getting a very direct introduction to the real products of Raytheon, actually. No idea why anyone would choose them for this meme. Which is silly anyway; the US produces more raw resources than Russia in every category, especially oil, and we can actually use it

Quote tweeting myself because I’m still baffled that everyone’s confusing the Iranian government/economy not having access to USD and a plurality of the global market (which depresses their economic figures, because we calculate GDP in terms of USD), with Iran being a broke oil state. In ‘nominal’ GDP terms, Iran’s economy is smaller than Israel’s ($375 billion, $667 billion) — in PPP terms, Iran has a $1.9 ‘Trillion’ economy, compared to Israel’s $600 billion economy. The Iranian economy is also wildly diversified and essentially modern — Iran isn’t Yemen. The longer this war goes on (with the #1 and #4 countries wrt GDP PPP assisting them no less), the more likely it is that we’ll stumble into the problem flagged by this meme.

@thinkingshivers Funnily enough, it's almost exactly like trying to wrangle people

Not enough people talk about how unpleasant vibecoding is. The best analogy I can think of is driving. It's cool that we can just hop in a car and drive to the store. It's a lot faster than walking. And yet, it's so stressful and infuriating, we had to invent a new word just to describe its effect on people: "road rage." AI-assisted coding is the same. It's so much faster--there's no going back to coding everything by hand, the equivalent of walking everywhere. And yet it's incredibly annoying and stressful. It's characterized by annoying delays between requests, time-wasting misunderstandings, blatant lying, and absurd overconfidence. Hopefully this gets better as models improve.

@Authw8 More often, someone got rich selling a "solution" to the last two problems, and are willing to spend a lot to stay in business. Usually by convincing idiots that change would either help a group they hate or hurt a group they like.

thought experiment. suppose a society faces 100 unsolved problems that all have an easy fix. 98 of the problems are fixed immediately. 2 remain unfixed due to some dumb cultural aversion to the easy fix. then another 100 problems show up and the same thing happens. now we have 4 unfixed problems left hanging because of dumb cultural hangups. over time you just keep accumulating problems that seem unsolvable despite being very solvable if everyone would just X, for some X. but everyone won't just X.

@_The_Prophet__ There is no power in heaven or on earth that can make a man understand something when his livelihood depends on ignorance, and AI still depends on human interfaces. All it takes is one or two publicized fuckups (already happening) for a generation to write it off as a fad

@_The_Prophet__ I'm of two minds about this. On one hand, I've long believed that the bulk of white-collar jobs were essentially a corporate welfare state for otherwise useless but highly educated/credentialed people. On the other, those same people are the ones making decisions about AI

⚡️The professional middle is entering a slow liquidation. That is what is coming. A lot of six figure workers still think they own scarce cognition. They do not. What they actually own is a seat inside an organizational diagram that is about to be rewritten. For twenty years, companies paid armies of people to summarize, coordinate, package, analyze, report, reassure, sell, recruit, and administratively maintain complexity. AI is about to reveal how much of that layer was never true scarcity. It was overhead wearing prestige. That is why this gets dangerous. The people in that layer built expensive lives around the illusion that their salaries were durable. Big mortgages. daycare. two income households. private schools. lifestyle debt. identity fused to title. So when the compression starts, it does not feel like a normal labor shock. It feels like your class position is being revoked. A person loses the job and suddenly realizes the house was never a fortress. It was a fixed-cost trap financed by continuity. The next 12 to 18 months are likely to be ugly because companies have finally been handed a believable excuse to thin the white collar herd. They can say AI. They can say efficiency. They can say macro caution. They can say market conditions. The language does not matter. The result does. Fewer seats. Longer hiring cycles. More ghosting. Lower offers. Higher bars. More people with impressive resumes chasing jobs beneath prior status. The market will keep telling itself this is temporary. A lot of it is structural. And the cruelest part is that this probably will not arrive as one cinematic crash. It will arrive as social downgrading. The title gets softer. The comp gets cut. The search takes longer. The savings get chewed through. The role accepted is smaller than the last one. The family says it is fine. The person knows something has broken. That kind of decline is much more psychologically destructive than one violent break because it makes people live inside the decay of their own ranking. Housing is where this becomes visible. The professional class was supposed to be the stable bid under the market. If enough of them lose income security while carrying large mortgages, the house stops being optionality and becomes a restraint device. People stop moving. Listings freeze. Spending contracts. Families become geographically trapped because leaving means crystallizing loss or taking a much worse payment elsewhere. The labor shock and the housing shock start feeding each other. Society is about to discover how much of the tax base, consumption base, and institutional calm sat on a white collar class whose value was inflated by a pre-AI information economy. That class thought it had made it because it was paid well. A lot of them were just being temporarily overcompensated to keep the administrative machine running. When the machine needs fewer humans, the paycheck premium gets repriced hard. Bottom line: A lot of six figure jobs are going away. A lot of the people in them will not get equivalent replacements. The pain will concentrate in the salaried professional class with high fixed costs and no ownership cushion. The official data will lag the lived reality. The social mood will get darker long before the statistics fully admit why. The real truth is simple: The next phase is the collapse of professional security. The middle is about to learn that income is not the same thing as safety.

@Jack_Raines Anything that involves a computer is either directly translated into plain text, or could be translated with a bit of effort. We've worked very, very hard to make sure this was true. Our entire civilization is an artifice of written language, and LLMs are literate.

@Jack_Raines Everything is text under the hood. Spreadsheets? Text. Web design? Text. PowerPoint slide decks? Text. Meetings? Text. Planning? Text. Legal coordination? Text. Voice calls? Text. Your operating system? Text. Graphic design? Text. Video? Believe it or not, text.

One of the funnier things about the AGI/pilled folks is that people are extrapolating what happened with coding automation to the rest of the world, but I don’t think that extrapolation holds up. Coding is, at its core, the generation of texts and numbers to tell a computer to do things. There is, obviously, a lot more to it then that. Like understanding how systems connect / should flow together matters as you can better think through what the complete code “should” look like. But to build that system, the primitives are letters and numbers. LLMs are trained on a gazillion examples of letters and numbers. Much of that is code (thank you Stack Overflow). They just take text inputs and make text outputs. Now, there are derivatives to this. Like LLMs can now call tools, and the outputs of those tools can be used as inputs to trigger other things, but they’re just writing letters and numbers which a harness then knows to “trigger” to do a thing. Which means the things that can be fully automated are things where the input and output are purely numbers and letters. So, writing (marketing copy, emails, books?!, code, Excel functions, etc.) But most other domains just have more nuance or friction or edge cases that, even if a lot of the flows can be automated, have something that they system can’t “get” or “do” that throws off the whole loop. And basically any job that isn’t purely “read/write text” has a lot of those friction points. So SWEs kind of built a thing that replaced their jobs, but I just don’t see that pattern matching to too many other fields.