Inflation is great for making people feel rich.

You literally can now, that was one of the first things changed by Elon.

Go to Twitter and click on the "Following" tab. It even remains selected between visits, so you don't have to see the AI shovelware unless you click on the other tab.

I loved that book but it was a thick one and a long time ago, so I don't remember that specifically. But I believe you.

I am reminded of Ted K's writings - specifically on the enablement-virtuous-cycle between tech level, state control, authortarianism, etc.

The replacement of uniform broadcast media with "decentralized" culture and media has thrown a wrench in things. The tech we had in the 50s-80s enabed one form of mass control. The changing tech broke those specific mechanisms, but the System responded.

The fight over control of twitter was actually like trying to re-litigate WW1 The dying princes of the dying imperial system were all trying to install their preferred ruler; not realizing that decentralization had already won.

People will occupy twitter if they can, but holding that territory was already non-essential by the time it changed hands.

The system response has certainly not let go of trying to reclaim overt control over all top-100 information warfare tiles on the board, but has invested in subterfuge and compartmentalization as well.

If the system cannot control a single monoculture, it is also happy to have significant influence over 100 microcultures that are functionally disjoint with non-porous boundaries.

Ted K would say that America has become functionally ungovernable. I agree. We have much evidence of being a failed state. Now, if you shut off the internet and the news, and just went about your life, you might not see any evidence of it. But we are sort of like an observer on the ground, watching a plane fly overhead at FL350. The plane's engines are out because it is out of gas. From the ground, to us, it looks fine. It looks like every other plane. It will stay up there, really high, for a good long while. It will have passed out of our view by the time it has lost enough altitude to notice.

But the plane is doomed. The people onboard know. The people with the right sensors know.

America is like that plane. It is going to fall out of the sky. But most observers don't know that yet.

Internet censorship won't restart the engines. That doesn't mean they won't keep trying anyway.

"You young pup!"

Now I'm sad. :(

He used to do a one man show of a Christmas Carol on stage. I never got to see it, but I always imagined it being amazing (based on the fact that it happened more than once... if it were ass, it would not have recurred). While the source material is relatively friendly to the idea, one man shows are hard to do well.

I remember the Internet before Eternal September. You need to go back at least that far.

Not a financial person either, but wouldn't writing it down mean that a company no longer considers it to have value? Is there something unique to the hardware they use for search-specific AI that prevents it from being leased out as part of Google Cloud or being used to run other teams' models?

If you're China why wouldn't you spy on him? If you're Chinese intelligence, you'd be derelict in your duties.

Free speech has never been free as in beer, or at least not at any meaningful volume level. Talking to a single person was free, but that's not going to spread your ideas very far or very quickly. In the early days, you paid scribes, but that would cost you money. Later, the printing press brought the costs down, but you still needed money. Radio and TV made it possible to reach even more people more quickly, but at a significantly nonzero cost.

The Internet is no different in that regard. In theory, you can always spin up your own server and post anything you want to. But that won't guarantee that anybody is going to actually visit your site. To get eyes, you'll still have to buy ads, etc.

The enshittification continues. Ruin things in the name of profit.

The uncomfortable truth is that a significant portion of the population prefers the enshittified feed, otherwise it wouldn't be profitable.

The Reddit algorithm is really weird anyway. It is an illogical mix of "recent" and "popular" that sometimes includes things that are neither recent, nor popular.

For programmers, you need to be able to get the computer to do what you want it to do (with code).That is the baseline. There are other things that can be learned, but without that baseline, I'm going to need to review literally every line of the candidate's code (if they get hired), and I'd rather not do that.

Tivo broke Civilization.

The olds will remember.

In the early 80s, every American watched the same TV programs at the same time. LIve, broadcast TV. It was the national American culture. Everyone at work and at school the next morning talked about their shared experience and varying reactions to the BroadCast that The Party had shown them the prior night.

Cable TV - by offering a few more channels - had _some_ impact on the "breakup" of America.

But it was Tivo - mass-scale consumer time shifting. Americans no longer watched all the same propaganda at the same time.

The monoculture started to crack.

The rest of it is downstream from there. The bigs tried to retain their control of culture and opinion, but it became too fragmented and too decentralized. They couldn't.

Nobody is mad about the internet. They are mad they don't control the internet.

It depends on what I'm trying to determine. If I'm trying to determine if they can use AI, then yes I will let them use it.

If I'm trying to determine if they can think (or control the computer), probably not. If they are having trouble, one of the interviewers can pretend to be AI and give answers. In the past I've had one of the interviewers pretend to be auto-complete, since the candidate depended on that, and I care if they can logic, not if they've memorized all the function names.

I use $12 Aftermarket “Pencil” with my iPad.

Works great.