The Metallica Problem occurs when an information-product like music, books, or cinema adapts to what its audience wants, which is by definition less focused than what the original creators envisioned, and so you end up with the same old slop that made shows like "C.H.I.P.S." and "Happy Days" so bonebrained moronic back in the day.

Every product over time comes to reflect its audience, but what the audience wants is a projection of themselves as they are, not what they need, which is something different to challenge them and wake them up a bit.

Thus Metallica goes from groundbreaking speed metal to 1970s country-tinged AOR over time, and no one notices because the original fanbase is tiny compared to the new fans acquired as a result of broader exposure.

The Pantera Problem occurs when other firms or bands, seeing the success of one entity, are afraid not to emulate it, so that over time, all of the entrants in that market or genre resemble each other including corner-cutting.

Both The Metallica Problem and The Pantera Problem end up at the same place: entropy reducing uniqueness and replacing it with a lowest common denominator average projected by the Crowd.

I thought this post on the groupthink nature of social media was relevant:

The recommendation algorithm of mainstream social media platforms is prime for creating echo chambers. Like animals? It will recommend more to you. Dislike a certain video game? The platform will recommend you similar things to dislike. Eventually all you will see is stuff you want to see, because that best drives engagement. Who cares if what you see eventually morphs into some specialised kind of slop if you keep scrolling. This is where the concept of âoedoomscrollingâ comes from. Just keep scrolling and scrolling and maybe eventually you find something interesting, or you keep the amusement above extreme boredom.

I am one of those âoesee all the sides of the storyâ kinds of people. I know those people are annoying, but I like seeing all sides of the story. It almost seems like the modern media landscape exists directly opposed to that motion. The news sources themselves will talk about whatever is most sensational since it will get them clicks and by extension ad revenue. The social media âoeinfluencersâ will talk about whatever is the most enraging because it gets them attention and by extension ad revenue. Attention is money (more on that coming eventually).

It reminds me of something many of us in the free speech community mentioned back in the 1980s, which was that in a relative universe, unless we hear about other viewpoints, we might not know they exist, and that means our own thought could be unbounded from lack of things to compare it to.

Time to haul out the link on viewpoint discrimination again:

Viewpoint discrimination is a form of content discrimination particularly disfavored by the courts. When the government engages in content discrimination, it is restricting speech on a given subject matter. When it engages in viewpoint discrimination, it is singling out a particular opinion or perspective on that subject matter for treatment unlike that given to other viewpoints.

To me, most speech is offensive...ly nonsensical, poorly analyzed, unrealistic, impractical, emotional, social, or otherwise delusional. But I want to hear from people nonetheless. In part, I think people need to be able to express themselves and talk it out to know what they think, and to grow intellectually, but also, you never know what someone will come up with and at least initially I want to find out what they might have discovered.

A number of people had asked, so I created an offensive music thread on the Fediverse. Expect pro-Islam, pro-Satan, pro-Purge, Luciferian, and generally intolerant or ornery lyrics and sounds. I am hoping I can get at least one Western government to ban this thread!

I'm putting this here mainly so I do not lose it. I have bookmarked a billion things and only looked up a million later. But this is a great riff on open source documentation:

In the realm of Open Source software development the adage "good enough" is often interpreted as this software is good enough for general use.

It should read "good enough for me", speaking only from the software author's perspective. ...Why are people supplying instructions that are way too complex for the new user? I know the answer to that question. It's rhetorical in nature.

"Because it's good enough for me"

It seems to me that all software needs to be focused on the user and their needs, without requiring much technical involvement. This is the reason for the success of Apple and Microsoft at least, and what has doomed FreeBSD to obscurity.

Good documentation and scripting of complex technical tasks can go a long way. Users use computers for purposes other than computer-focused stuff. Hobbyists mostly do computer-focused stuff. There needs to be a bridge there, at least in my own thinking.

I was lucky to be able to participate in a chat about return to the land, the death of diversity, the failure of bureaucratic-corporate society, and the need to return to nature and culture on "Knight of the Black Sun" podcast.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOyY11KutP4

I have no idea how to embed this stuff, but for all four of you who like visit this profile, you might enjoy this chat about heavy metal, punk, the collapse of Western civilization, and where we go in the post-political era.

We are seeing it now. The post-1990s web, with its emphasis on containers and safe code, is perishing because people want to get things done the right way without many layers of unnecessary code. If a 400k website does the job, who needs the rest?

Many ordinary businesspeople are now seeing IT as a liability not a form of leverage. It grew out of control and is now a major expense for many businesses, without returning proportionate value. Sure, the people who got CS/IT degrees have lots of things to talk about, but how many relate directly to doing business?

Keep it simple. Make it reliable. Simplify and remove the burdens of constant updates and many layers of frameworks. The new wisdom is that websites and in-office IT are not a wild frontier, but a type of utility, and so you want to minimize costs by relying on fewer more capable people instead of many drones following rules.

Luckily, the exodus from California has provided the rest of the world with enough competent IT workers (and many incompetents) to last a lifetime.

So it seems Silicon Valley is imploding and hopes that AI will be its next bailout, but it seems that yesterday faith in AI hit a new low. What next? All of our innovations happened decades ago and we are building on them, but none of the promised efficiency gains have come about. Silicon Valley now looks more like a parasitic utility.

On the other hand, people are realizing something about social media and its algos: they are reflecting what interests people, which tends to be more controversial and conflict-oriented than what we see in the media, academia, religion, and government. We are hitting that dystopian point that William Gibson and Queensryche wrote about.

All told, looks like big changes on the horizon. I'm hoping for monarchism and space exploration.

Mind-Blowing Discovery: Peacocks Have Lasers In Their Tails

Applying a special dye to multiple areas on a peacock's tail, researchers from Florida Polytechnic University and Youngstown State University in the US went on the hunt for structures that may emit a very different signature glow.

In a mind-blowing first for the animal kingdom, they discovered the eyespots on the fowl's fabulous feathers have unique properties that align light waves by bouncing them back and forth, effectively turning them into yellow-green lasers.

There's some crazy science news going on out there, but this one sort of wins me over. Nature decided to go all-out with peacocks, hummingbirds, hawks, and other exceptional birds, as if apologizing for the dinosaur years.

Houston 2600

When: first Friday of every month, 7-9pm (next: August 1)
Where: Taco Cabana, 3905 Kirby

https://www.hou2600.org/

Most recent episode of "Metal Cosmos"
https://cdn.deathmetal.org/radio/metal_cosmos_-_0003.mp3

Also a discussion of how Swedish language influenced their death metal
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOpDeMVKexw

The first is a metal radio show smuggled into podcast format, the other a more traditional podcast of discussion at a leisurely pace.

Also look toward our early radio

https://www.kcuf.com/

A story of hackers and metal:

"In the 80s, BBSes were the most important thing to the hacker world. They were where people met, talked, exchanged information," said legendary hacker Erik Bloodaxe, whose exploits with the hacker group Legion of Doom stirred many imaginations back in the day. "They were the central meeting places where you could find those people who actually cared about the same things you cared about."

Bloodaxe would know. In addition to being "the best hacker I ever met," according to Loyd Blankenship, the technologist and hacker who wrote "The Hacker's Manifesto" that was later quoted in the cyberpunk-slash-teen drama Hackers, Bloodaxe edited one of the first hacker publications, Phrack. Phrack -- named for a combination of the terms "phreak" and "hack" referring to phone and computer exploitation, respectively -- and is an expert at finding information. Especially hidden information, or data that is marginalized because it does not comport to society's view of itself.

I should call these posts "the gateway to Hell" because I end up flirting with the most dangerous issues of our time. The conflict is where the growth is, I guess. I can feel the flames.

Tech is... boring. Sometime around Y2K the takeover by the same people who would have been eyeless MBAs in the 1980s began, and now Google and social media preside over a world that is basically as limited as 1980s four-channel television.

Tech is broke because it has not invented anything new since that time, only refinements of the same, and broken because it has no plan for innovation. Tech is now a jobs program for mediocrities instead of the Wild West that attracted me back in the day.

Science is under threat, but not from where you expect. The federal funding thing will blow over because private business will step up, especially since R&D is deductible. If you pay out the amount of your expected taxes in R&D each year, you will pay zero taxes. That's a non-issue.

No, science is dying from what killed academia, careerism. You must publish to get noticed, and you need some attention-getting radical topic. So you write about how the treatment of bugs in Gabriel Garcia Marquez' works is a metaphor for sexism and make a broad conclusion about transgenderism being the ultimate fulfillment of feminism in a Marxist quantum mechanics view. It's buzzword gibberish but you get that full professorship. Now imagine millions of people doing the same, and you have a gibberish engine. The same is now true of science.

There's good happening in tech and science, but I tend to post science news because it is less stale than tech at this point, and I go for all that solid nerd shit. I like creative and realistic innovation like the MIT AIDS vax:

Researchers from MIT and Scripps have unveiled a promising new HIV vaccine approach that generates a powerful immune response with just one dose. By combining two immune-boosting adjuvants alum and SMNP the vaccine lingers in lymph nodes for nearly a month, encouraging the body to produce a vast array of antibodies. This one-shot strategy could revolutionize how we fight not just HIV, but many infectious diseases. It mimics the natural infection process and opens the door to broadly neutralizing antibody responses, a holy grail in vaccine design. And best of all, it's built on components already known to medicine.

Uses known components, combines them advantageously, and works by training the immune system in the natural way... this is well-done science. At this point, that interests me more than the latest frameworks, AIs, or Twitter-enabled fridges.

The only people I know who camp out on social media these days are Boomers looking for mutual validation of their illusions, whether of the radical Christian or radical Leftist variety.

This creates a situation where censorship is normalized, leading to absurd results:

âoeHello Bluesky, I've been told this app has become the place to go for common sense political discussion and analysis,â Vance wrote. âoeSo I'm thrilled to be here to engage with all of you.â

The same crisis has hit the Fediverse/Mastodon, which has become a little hugbox and echo chamber for people who hate anything further Right-wing than Bernie Sanders, prompting a rise of free speech alternatives.

From a post that was downvoted by the usual neurotics, bigots, and spiteful mutants:

Over the past couple decades, as people warned, our security services have turned from defending against foreign threats to enforcing false unity through government censorship [censorship...omplex.org] implemented by private firms:

Governments of democracies have moved from fighting ISIS recruiters and Russian bots to censoring and de-platforming ordinary citizens and public figures they donâ(TM)t like. In the US, the Censorship Industrial Complex is funded by billions of taxpayer dollars, and is using direct coercion along with the most sophisticated AI tools to manipulate people, label social media posts, and discredit factual information. Just because they donâ(TM)t agree with them. Governments around the globe are attacking the free speech of its citizens. From Ireland to Germany, Canada to Mexico, laws are being passed that are stifling free speech in ways that would make the East German secret police proud. This complex is a network of government agencies, academic institutions, and NGOs that are censoring ordinary citizens on a whole host of issues, all without their knowledge.

This involved a variety of Soviet-style methods like the use of the term disinformation [house.gov] to identify what must be censored:

âoeDisinformationâ think tanks and âoeexperts,â government task forces, and university centers were formed, all to study and combat the alleged rise in alleged mis- and disinformation. As the House Committee on the Judiciary and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government have shown previously, these efforts to combat so-called foreign influence and misinformation quickly mutated to include domesticâ"that is, Americanâ"speech.

Not only was the censorship-industrial complex [house.gov] active in the US, but in the UK:

The CTIL framework and the public-private model are the seeds of what both the US and UK would put into place in 2020 and 2021, including masking censorship within cybersecurity institutions and counter-disinformation agendas; a heavy focus on stopping disfavored narratives, not just wrong facts; and pressuring social media platforms to take down information or take other actions to prevent content from going viral.

Much of what we know was filtered by censors at Reddit, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other privatized arms of the government, hence the name "censorship-industrial complex":

Enter the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), a consortium of âoedisinformationâ academics led by Stanford Universityâ(TM)s Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) that worked directly with the Department of Homeland Security and the Global Engagement Center, a multi-agency entity housed within the State Department, to monitor and censor Americansâ(TM) online speech in advance of the 2020 presidential election. Created in the summer of 2020 âoeat the requestâ of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA),3 the EIP provided a way for the federal government to launder its censorship activities in hopes of bypassing both the First Amendment and public scrutiny.

With government as a silent partner, many tech firms displaced others [house.gov]:

The Global Engagement Center (GEC), an interagency body housed within the U.S. Department of State (State), circumvented its strict international mandate by funding, developing, then promoting tech start-ups and other small businesses in the disinformation detection space to private sector entities with domestic censorship capabilities.

So not only did this distort the news and information people could receive, but it also distorted the markets. Some of the journalists investigating it opined that the censorship-industrial complex is merely the military-industrial complex [racket.news] grown up for an information age:

The âoeCensorship-Industrial Complexâ is just the Military-Industrial Complex reborn for the âoehybrid warfareâ age.

Much like the war industry, pleased to call itself the âoedefenseâ sector, the âoeanti-disinformationâ complex markets itself as merely defensive, designed to fend off the hostile attacks of foreign cyber-adversaries who unlike us have âoemilitary limitations.â The CIC, however, is neither wholly about defense, nor even mostly focused on foreign âoedisinformation.â Itâ(TM)s become instead a relentless, unified messaging system aimed primarily at domestic populations, who are told that political discord at home aids the enemyâ(TM)s undeclared hybrid assault on democracy.

They suggest we must rethink old conceptions about rights, and give ourselves over to new surveillance techniques like âoetoxicity monitoring,â replace the musty old free press with editors claiming a âoenose for newsâ with an updated model that uses automated assignment tools like âoenewsworthy claim extraction,â and submit to frank thought-policing mechanisms like the âoeredirect method,â which sends ads at online browsers of dangerous content, pushing them toward âoeconstructive alternative messages.â

In any case, YouTube was part of this and now that it has lost funding, they are seeking a new revenue model in the Musk-like style of new Twitter. Does this mean a serious commitment to free speech, ending viewpoint discrimination, and free expression? No, if the funding comes back, they will just delete all of the controversial videos about genetic inequality and go back to churning out propaganda for stimulus bucks.

Every now and then, when I have a turd of a day, I read this article for the brief levity of righteous but funny mockery:

The tag team of incompetence from tech support and development perfectly encapsulates the overall culture at LinkedIn.

I wish the author had used "cascade" instead of "tag team," but this is a minor and debatable quibble.

Big point is: User Interface / User Experience sucks ass across the web.

However, the enemy of your enemy is not your friend... or at least the self-identified enemy of your enemy is not your friend.

User interface designers and user experience experts generally make everything worse.

What does not? Old school web sites like old Reddit, Slashdot, Plenty of Fish, Craigslist, and so on.

These are mostly function and low interface drag.

Interface drag is really high on all the millennial (millennials can't code) websites. They fancy them up and add "accessibility" pretending they care about the disabled, but really it is merely job security. Everyone suffers.

And the hidden factor? Oh, that's easy: management makes compromises in committees and that results in paradoxical design, basically gryphons and chimerae all the way down.

Oftentimes the bad user experience is simply bad function, sort of like how Amazon broke its search algorithm and often ends up generating empty webpages while it waits for a resource. The company ran better under arch-fascist-crusader-warlord-jihadist Bezos.

You know what improves user design? Clear statements of purpose, simplified methods, and low interface drag through not projecting all of the needs of the designers and executives onto the users.

Rant over, thanks for coming to my TERD Talk, subscribe to my newsletter with the button below, etc.