Notices by Liam :fnord: (liamvhogan@aus.social)

The thing about disasters is that we are all primed with frameworks to interpret them, that we develop in our everyday lives, before they happen. Me, I’m off this morning to a planning meeting and I’m certain that’s how I’ll meet the end of the world; a bit too early in the morning, in a meeting room, with an agenda

As I was saying before, the American way of disaster as it is of war is to throw very large logistical resources at a problem, which is their strength, in this case to be admired, because no other society in world history has anything like it.

It’s also a source of their conspiracy—from weird ones like Chinese warfare, to the ‘Elon is helping!’—the idea that problems can *only* be met through application of high technology is very set in culture.

Okay the answer of course is that developers recognise they’re building for households of non-romantically-cohabiting adults sharing for economy. That much makes sense and it’s even good that the market is responding to conditions. But that doesn’t explain why you need a Versailles Hall of Toilet Bowls

My partner found an ad for a flat that was three bedrooms, four toilets. Who shits that much? Who is the market for this?

Current status

The thing about commercial AI is that they’re the evil mirror version of the personal computing vision of the 1980s: that ordinary people would be able to personally, reliably, securely, automate their own data, and have control over their own productive processes, and LLMs fail on every count. The promise is now that my own work is in competition with these things

AI, make me a William Morris wallpaper

[the ghost of the crafts movement reaches out from the past to punch me straight in the testicles]

The promise of LLMs that hope to replace working processes is instead to destroy any link between creative endeavour and worth. Since they’re fundamentally about stealing, who can know what was made with great effort and what was just a prompt and a process? It makes everything low-effort, high-throughput, low-margin work.

The labour theory of value has been threadbare as a theory for a long time but it’s destroyed now.

It’s perverse. We have computers powerful enough to do literally unimaginable tasks with data, tools that can and do create extraordinary things. Tools that the arts and crafts people of the late 19thC would have boggled at, the potential to push creative activity right down to anyone’s personal computer

And yet the prevailing culture of using them is so bad that even *programmers*, who by rights ought to relish the privilege of making whatever they want, resent computing. This is a culture not a tech issue.

Anyway IMO the area of greatest and least justified paternalism which has reduced the scope of young people in society, inhibited their freedom, impoverished them in experience *and* materially, and forced them out of public life, is my own profession, urban planning

Why don’t you just use libre office. Why don’t you just choose your own working conditions. Why don’t you simply walk out of your office and never go back to your job

Put your hand in the hbox, Paul. The box contains badness 10,000. I hold at your neck the Gom Jabbar

Citizens, it is time to march toward the sound of the #tgif :tgif:

Bluesky is the Microsoft Word of social media, which I mean in the derogatory sense, as the fediverse is the LaTeX of social media, which I also mean in the derogatory sense

What you think archaeologists do: maintain a long-term view of human habitation and the challenges of our species, discovering revelations about past traumas and achievements, and unimaginably unfamiliar cultures

What an archaeologist actually does: look at near maps to tell you probably where the 1920s night soil toilet block went, and a bit too excitedly about it to be honest

The thing about Sydney and real estate is that you look at a price guide, you say, fucking hell that’s a lot of fucking money, and you haven’t even accounted for the standard Real Estate Lie that the real price is actually 15-20% higher.

If it goes beyond that it’s not underquoting, it’s ‘an extraordinary result for the market’

@zens what the hell how can they not have cream? Isn’t sour cream a huge thing

Send me more ludicrous American ‘I voted’ stickers I cannot get enough of them

The post-1940s were fascinated by the emergence of Organisational Man (and later, his female counterpart), the skilled worker whose skill was purely in being part of such a large system, understanding and working in it, rather than a profession or technical doing-skill, someone dedicated to the Department or company or firm or whatever. Implied in that is that the organisation is loyal in return; that’s not a notable feature of firms nowadays. To put it mildy.

The thing people observe around the world is that things aren’t working as well in common, even though our technology is advancing. Seems to me it’s not a tech problem, it’s a loyalty problem, and the emergence of the ideology of ‘hacking’ (improvising, making-do, overcoming) is our response

A half-formed thought: the common prevailing ideology of developed countries through the whole of the 20thC was that the energies of very large numbers of skilled people could be harnessed somehow (markets, central planning, some combination) to produce better and better things. And that had to be accompanied by better and better systems, and learning in common, which is why all spent so much on education, training, universities.

The modern emphasis on ‘hacking’ and individualised technical skill is almost the opposite of that dream. For better and worse