Cacajao calvus ucayalii

“Fuck you” money is anti-social

The markets are Goodhart’s Law

Why hasn’t anyone named their AI “Shoggoth” yet?

@jalefkowit@vmst.io I remember the $100 videos as being licensed to be rentable, as opposed to the more common $20-or-so price for VHS tapes licensed to watch privately, in a single home.

It’s eerie to watch every part of Universal Paperclips coming true

One must correct for grammar in dead languages, but I strongly suspect that “Tekeli-li” is how the Old Ones would have said, “It’s not X, it’s Y”

I remember thinking in the late ‘90s that the NNTP protocol was better suited to discussion than the web was. I thought, “with Usenet, your ISP pays once to bring the discussion close to the reader, while with the web, the site owner must pay for everyone who wants to access their server.” It recently struck me that thing I thought was a cost is a big part of why the web took everything over: it says, “for access, you have to come through me.” Not the only reason the web won, but maybe part.

@mttaggart@infosec.exchange see also Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy

The film was cynical, sure, but it seems like a time where that cynicism was, umm, not as societally determinative. These days, I wonder if Harry Lime's crime would be considered a great business idea, shrinkflation for medicine. #MovieClub

[deleting something i was wrong about]

I've come to view Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy as the most evil iron law I know. Institutions led by folks aiming to increase the power of the institution have an end goal of the institution becoming (as Cory says) too big to care. Humanitarian societies require our institutions to be accountable.

https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/podcast/frankly
I listened to the April 10th and 11th episodes of this podcast, highly recommended.

@AlSweigart@mastodon.social My 10-11yo's like fantasy. Rick Riordan books, The Ranger's Apprentice series, Janitors, Septimus Heap. The Wayside School series.

It's not obvious that LLMs (with current architectures) can solve current software engineering concerns, fully. It *does* seem clear to me that LLMs can solve *personal* engineering concerns with much less friction than the general-purpose, long-lived, maintainability-oriented software we're used to using.