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Cake day: August 26th, 2024

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  • I am left thinking that many people here in the US are going to have a hard time accepting that having this person, at this stage in his life, as the national figurehead will do permanent damage to the USā€™ prestige and global standing. Doesnā€™t matter if Reagan was sundowning, media was more controlled then and his handlers were there to support the institution of the presidency at least as much as they were there to support a narcissist. In 2016, other countries could look at Trump as a temporary aberration and wait him out. This time, itā€™s clear that the US is no longer a reliable partner.

    An intentional sacrifice of the USā€™ role as head manager of the global economy is not nearly as well thought out as the people pushing it think it is.



  • Atlantic writer: ā€œbetter dubble down on Twitter huhuhuhhuhā€

    https://archive.is/OtYCo

    Calls to disengage from X, now that Elon Musk has turned it into a white-supremacist haven, certainly have a moral appeal. But if this election showed how difficult it is to meaningfully ā€œdeplatformā€ speakers you disagree with, it also demonstrated the danger of ignoring the platforms where they speak. Unfortunately, the only way to change whatā€™s happening in an echo chamber may be to add your own noise.

    This is your periodic reminder that Steve Jobsā€™ widow owns that toilet-paper factory. And that they still pump out hot new singles from hitmakers like David Frum and, occasionally, my personal favorite, Eliot ā€œGW Bush Did Nothing Wrongā€ Cohen.




  • The more I think about it, the more ā€œDay Oneā€ comes across as nonsensical.

    I woke up this morning, we had multiple data centers across the globe filled with millions of serversā€¦ Day One.

    I clocked into the swing shift, we have bins overflowing with unthinkable amounts of returned items, many of which are semi-perishable toiletries and personal hygiene productsā€¦ Day One.

    As a simple-minded catchphrase to orient oneā€™s thinking, it becomes more and more absurd as the company scales. But Jeff donā€™t care, he punched out a long time ago.






  • Facebook platforms are likely to follow the same trajectory as Fox News, and perhaps Zuckerberg can see that. The main site is obviously full of bullshit and practically useless for its original purpose, and itā€™s also increasingly abandoned by core demographics because it doesnā€™t have enough of their preferred flavor of bullshit. Iā€™ve known MAGA guys who make a game out of creating secondary accounts to avoid Facebook jail. That sort of pathological use case is surely driving somebodyā€™s OKR numbers, someplace in the company. After that game stops being fun, some of these people will either decamp for other platforms or (gasp, shock, horror) give up on social media entirely!

    Instagram has almost completely subsumed the ā€œmy favorite celebrity might reply back to meā€ appeal that Twitter used to have, although TikTok is also stealing a lot of that. If they lose that shine, Zuckerbergā€™s in real trouble.








  • Yeah, this is the ā€œemperor has no clothesā€ reality that I keep bringing up with my friends who are still invested in the bubble (emotionally if not financially). The genAI/LLM tech stack defies the entire decades-long cost curve and investment thesis for computer technology. Up through the smartphone era, you bought in because you could get more utility for lower cost. Whatā€™s being pushed now is higher-cost for dubious utility gains; itā€™s just that some vendors are eating losses to hide the costs. (And of course the externalities get swept under the rug.)



  • Itā€™s slowly dawned on me over the last few years that one of the biggest reasons why I find the endless reams of Tolkien/D&D-ripoff fantasy fiction distasteful is because its popularity enables guys like this to smuggle racism into broader discourse. If your entertainment already has you primed to think in a racialized framework, itā€™s going to take you that much longer to cotton onto what this dingleberry and his buddies are actually pushing.