@djc he can decide whether to permit or forbid communications for specific military operations. i’m not afraid of China invading the US. i am concerned about the overall distribution of geopolitical power, but Musk and his colleagues have in fact achieved a level of relevance their, and their interests and mine may not be well aligned.
“You and I have money. But it isn’t tidal-force money. There are meaningful gradations of money among normal human beings — the poverty line, food insecurity, a living wage, the cost of housing, student debt, retirement planning, etc. These are all vitally important, and/but they can all be grouped under a heading that we might term ‘normal-people shit.’ Public policy and govt funding, if well-administered, can have measurable, predictable impacts on normal-people-shit.” https://davekarpf.substack.com/p/the-gravitational-force-of-tech-money
i’d support a law that made it impossible for tiktok to operate as it does, as long as it was equitable and made it impossible for facebook, instagram, twitter, and youtube to operate as they do. i trust the Chinese Communist Party to act in the US public interest about as much as i trust Elon Musk to.
“In reality equity and fairness are narrowly defined, contextual notions. When we decide it’s fair to use a FICO score in order to determine an interest rate on a loan, that’s very different from using a FICO score to decide how many weeks of unemployment insurance you should receive after breaking your leg. You cannot decide that ‘FICO scores are legitimate discriminators’ as a universal rule, just as ‘diverse skin tones and genders’ is not a universal good” #CathyONeil https://mathbabe.org/2024/03/12/googles-mistake-with-gemini/
@susannah@octodon.social @xerophile sounds woke. and bad for ranchers. what is bad for today’s ranchers is bad for ‘murica forever.
it’s the freedom agenda. ht @xerophile
@LesterB99 their value proposition definitely is price based. i love them for that. but building pretend customer service that does nothing but literally play for time until the customer goes away is negative value at zero price. i'd prefer they simply not offer the channel, or offer a real one at an upcharge.
i think i’ve had my most kafkaesque customer service experience ever on a Spirit Airlines chat line. more than two hours, allegedly three humans in addition to the chatbot, but i’m disinclined to believe there were any humans in the loop at all. no comprehension, no help, now in addition to the problem we were trying to resolve we’re in danger of missing the plane. this is a brave new world where really, really, there is nobody on the other end who has any inclination or capacity to give a fuck.
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@scott whatever the physics of a brick wall is, we don't call it "friction"!
Unsurprisingly, @akkartik is well ahead of me:
"it is all too common for seamless experiences to hide all manner of deeper malfeasance. When we push for more seamless experiences we’re also encouraging the organisms we interact with to grow more tentacles (hiring! HR!), make them more muscular (growth team!), use them more ceaselessly in search of advantage (an ad protruding slickly from the bottom of the pane! Marketing materials persuading people to not organize!)" https://lobste.rs/s/idi1wt/open_source_vs_ux
@dingodog19 @guacamayan we could have just two timezones: UTC, and sunrise is exactly 6am.
i have come to have a very negative reaction to high quality user-interfaces. not just dark patterns and stuff like that, but genuine user-interface quality.
UI quality is painstaking and expensive, much more than most backend functionality. i associate investment in UI with well-funded growth-seeking ventures, and i associate those kinds of ventures with traps, enshittification, neofeudalism. 1/
the world of UNIX command lines and emacs/vi-ish editors is, not unreasonably, associated with a kind of bearded-dude elitism, a caste of self-styled wizards not always very inclusive or kind to those who have better things than try master its arcana. 2/
but what has been touted to supplant that caste is capitalist "democratization", which has nothing to do with democracy at all. it just means widespread access to products in the role of often captive consumers, rather than agents who exercise meaningful control. 3/
i think it's probably more helpful expand the circle that enjoys the broad, flexible agency provided by cheap user-interface tools than to treat as progress expensively making capabilities very widely accessible, but always under the control of and largely captive to the people who paid the expense. /fin
@guacamayan @BruceMirken it has to be changed, perhaps, in coordination with the work day. but that can be done as well!
winning isn't everything it's the only thing only in places where soon there will be nothing at all.
@BruceMirken @guacamayan isn't the whole point of education to begin in darkness and then end in light?
@erispoe @scott @guacamayan yes. we humans, we are not atoms. clocks and times and time zones exist for our coordination, and asking us to individually opt to our preference is like telling people who can't afford some charming mixed-use neighborhood that if they don't love cars they can always just not drive. we have to make collective choices. i say late-in-day sun supercedes symmetry.
if you’re going to be mad, be mad you ever had to do “standard” time, not at daylight savings time, which is brilliant and bright.
why can’t one simply make both choices, and then snip away the timeline that least well works out?