Tech companies don’t really give a damn what customers want anymore.

Ed Zitron wrote an article about how leadership is business idiots. They don’t know the products or users but they make decisions and get paid. Long, like everything he writes, but interesting

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/

Our economy is run by people that don’t participate in it and our tech companies are directed by people that don’t experience the problems they allege to solve for their customers, as the modern executive is no longer a person with demands or responsibilities beyond their allegiance to shareholder value.

If I was raising kids, I absolutely would not want to do it in the suburbs. It’s isolating and limiting. I was always so jealous of the kids I knew that lived in the city. They could do things. I was stuck indoors , or walking for like 90 minutes to get anywhere.

I do not miss driving. Public transit forever.

But when I did drive, after my reckless youth, I’d usually just chill in the right lane. I don’t care. Fly by at 120mph. I’ll be here going with the flow of traffic, or about the speed limit if I’m alone.

I do remember one time in the suburbs when I was visiting my parents, I was driving to the grocery store. It’s a short drive (because it’s the suburbs, you can’t safely walk to the supermarket), no highways. About 10 minutes to get there from driveway to parking lot. Some guy behind me started absolutely losing his shit, screaming, and passed me dangerously by driving onto the shoulder. He pulled into the same parking lot. I parked well away from him because I didn’t want to deal with crazy.

I’m not good at math, but if the entire trip was about 10 minutes, I feel like the time difference between me going about the speed limit and me speeding is, at most, what, 2 minutes? 5 minutes? The guy probably took more than 5 minutes off his life being so angry.

There are credible allegations that the AI companies are not merely scraping publicly available resources, but are also consuming content in violation of the terms of use / copyright law. Like, a site has a robots.txt file that says “no scrapers” and they scrape it anyway. People would be mad about traditional search doing that as well.

Secondly, if a search service scrapes your site and then directs relevant users to it, that’s probably fine. Most websites want users to visit. A lot of AI stuff sucks up the content, and then the creators of that content get nothing. No users are sent there. The scraper hitting the site takes resources, and gives nothing back.

Google has also gotten some flak for putting stuff on their own site instead of sending users to the source. Like you do a search and get a snippet on the google page, and you never click through to example.com/cool-stuff. Well, now the owner of example.com/cool-stuff doesn’t get the click. If they run ads, they get no credit. If they have metrics, they probably don’t see any visitors. If they have like forums, people are less likely to engage.

If the “AI Search” includes links back to the source, that’s not perfect either. One, it’s kind of excessive to use an LLM to parse text when the origin site is already there and readable. If I search for “population of london”, you can just send me to a census website or even wikipedia. You don’t need to use a whole ass LLM. Two, as I touched on in the previous paragraph, users are less likely to click through if google is putting the core of the information right there (even if it’s not always accurate). It’s still lessening traffic to the origin site, and traffic is often the lifeblood of websites.

Lastly, a lot of AI stuff is simply inaccurate or misleading. We’ve all laughed at the “use glue on your pizza” stuff or the “there are two Rs in ‘strawberry’” fuckups. If traditional search was really bad, like you type in “cat food” and you got a webpage that was all jewelry and “buy gold” scams, you’d be annoyed, too. That’s more like how search was before old google came about. There were a lot more low effort “SEO” hacks like putting a bunch of keywords in tiny print to fool the search indexer. Now google is the shitty old guard, but they have too much money and power to be easily replaced.

That’s just off the top of my head. Scraping for AI isn’t the same as scraping to make a searchable index.

Another finger on the monkey’s paw curls closed :(

I live there. Why?

, systematic defending of public education

Going to assume you meant “defunding of public education”, heh.

Call the function from the if block.

Now your tests can more easily call it.

I think at my last job we did argument parsing in the if block, and passed stuff into the main function.

I think a lot of people in the US have their head so far up their ass being racist and doing other xenophobia, they’d rather drown in their own shit than than have “one of them” get something “for free”.

I had a director of eng once who asked me to mind my language when I said “For fuck’s sake it returns 200 OK even when there’s an error”.

So I started naively replacing “fuck” with “fudge”. “That’s pretty fudged up.” “Well, fudge it, we’ll deal with that next.” “Fudge if I know.”

He didn’t really like it, but he can go fudge himself.

I do sometimes joke that in order to hold office you must be able to win a game of Civilization with 2 different victory types.

I know it’s not for everyone, but for me I feel like buying music I like directly from the artist/label or via bandcamp has been a better experience. Now I have a library of DRM free music, and I know the musicians got a better cut.

There are many approaches to this problem, but as a reminder and context setter I’d like you to look at “wealth to scale” https://dbkrupp.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/

It’s kind of infuriating that if you’re wealthy you basically get basic income. You can put some of your money in safe stuff (high yield savings, bonds, whatever) and just get more money without working. But a poor person needs to debase themselves for food.

Yeah I was going to say. It’s like that “no take only throw” meme with the dog. Capitalists want us to spend money, but they don’t want to pay us enough money. Just spend what we don’t have.

If I had a nice job I’d be out spending a lot more money. But they want to replace everyone with AI, or off shore, or whatever.

Conservatives often have very poor media literacy. They’re often not smart or empathetic, because if they were then they wouldn’t be conservative.

They’re never satiated.

They’re broken people and aren’t addressing the actual problems.

I read a post about different communication styles, and this is “builder vs maintainer”. https://www.haileymagee.com/blog/three-communication-differences

A builder will try to add to the conversation by adding their own experiences. A maintainer will not add their own, but will focus on the other person’s.

A builder talking about something may feel like a maintainer isn’t that interested because they’re not adding anything.

A maintainer talking to a builder may feel annoyed because the builder keeps talking about themselves.

Less access to goods and services made it generally unpleasant.

Less access? what? What places are you comparing?

I live in a city and have never felt like I have less access than when I was in the car centered suburbs.

It was a good game. Not perfect, but very good.

Even the things I don’t like are pretty minor.

• upgrading weapons is kind of tedious. Once you know where the stones are or the bearings, it’s kind of a chore to get them.
• related: once you know where some high value items are, it’s really tempting to just beeline for them from the start. But that’s kind of tedious. I guess I could just pretend I don’t know where the +5 stats talisman is.
• a lot of side content isn’t especially rewarding. The first time you play it’s exciting because you don’t know what you’ll find. But later it’s like “nah, this catacomb has a useless ash and boss I’ll fight elsewhere”. Which is a shame because most of the level design is great.