Notices by curtosis (curtosis@mastodon.social)

@interfluidity @ryanlcooper “the authors miss a chance to see how the inefficiency and administrative burdens they loathe in construction actually plague the welfare state too, something liberals are very much to blame for but also have no desire to fix.”

Yes!!!

Arguably even more significant impact than for building. (Though there the deadweight accrues mostly to developers and landowners, and so is harder to dislodge.)

@interfluidity I think it’s still underappreciated the degree to which billionaires are rejecting the entirety of the social contract. The problem for them becomes, at some point, that that social contract includes the bits about the people not dragging them from their homes and guillotining them in the public square.

Which is, of course, why controlling the media is existential for them.

Historically, that bet has not paid off in the long run. Ask the Romanovs and Ceaușescus, for example.

@kentpitman @mdhughes @screwtape @dougmerritt @jackdaniel @lispm

“increase the number of pages of the spec in a way that didn't let them do a certain kind of binding that they wanted to do for the document”

Is this what they meant by “early binding” and we’ve just been getting it wrong all these years?

@RufusJCooter @kims @mekkaokereke And yet … it is in fact a controversial stat in this era of heavy analytics. For example: https://hockey-graphs.com/2016/11/01/behind-the-numbers-why-plusminus-is-the-worst-statistic-in-hockey-and-should-be-abolished/

@interfluidity @rajivsethi All good points, and I’d largely agree. And to be clear I’m mostly reacting to the information environment where people can firmly believe (for example) that TFG did not say something that he explicitly did, repeatedly, on tape.

I think ultimately it has to come with a recognition that the “marketplace” is like a real one: easily overwhelmed and manipulated by monopolistic actors with wildly disproportionate access to resources. 1/

@interfluidity @rajivsethi And to the extent that’s *new* it’s the combination of a whole new magnitude of inequality and the absurdly low marginal costs of dumping and distributing idea “product” on the digital market. 2/2

@interfluidity @rajivsethi I think—at least right now—it underplays the current harms of
misinformation. To the extent we have data, it’s not just a paranoid fringe anymore that holds fundamentally wrong understandings; it appears that a large cohort of Trumpist electoral support really is based on objectively false beliefs.

@amszmidt #common-lisp#, or #*common-lisp*# if dynamic.

@Eris @mekkaokereke Underappreciated in the safety/comfort category is how comprehensively the bluesky block function works. And more recently, the ability to detach from a quote post. Extremely effective counters to bad behavior.

I would like to point out that *there is no way to fix this*.

I don’t mean it’s difficult, or expensive, or we just haven’t scienced hard enough yet. I mean there is literally no way to make an LLM not do this, or an infinite number of similar mistakes, in the same way that no improvement in ladder technology can help you reach the moon.

You’re asking a slot machine what your most likely bank balance is.
https://circumstances.run/@davidgerard/112639084548848466

@GeePawHill This is a familiar feeling, though I get it with spoken Dutch — I’m fluent in both English and German, and so my auditory processing is like an FM radio that’s on the edge of coverage for two adjacent stations. Locks in on German mode for a fragment then English and so forth. It’s an interesting experience! The only problem is that Dutch is in fact neither English nor German, but a secret, third thing, which I do not actually understand at all. :p

@msw IANAL but it strikes me as entirely plausible that Redis is promissorily estopped from enforcing the new license against anyone who made investments in reliance on that statement.

Not great for the small fish, but they’d be nuts to go after an IBM or Amazon.

@jmorris Okay, but… surely there are some downsides??