Oh shit I'm turning into Principal Skinner

In his book “Upheaval,” Jared Diamond looked at countries that endured crises and recovered. He points out that the nations that recover don’t catastrophize — they don’t say everything is screwed up and we need to burn it all down. They take a careful inventory of what is working well and what is working poorly. Leaders assume responsibility for their own share of society’s problems.

Meanwhile in HCR-land

There seems to be a change in the air.

Three days ago, on April 14, Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times wrote that the vibe is shifting against the right. Yesterday, former neocon and now fervent Trump critic and editor of The Bulwark Bill Kristol posted a photo of plainclothes Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Officers kidnapping Tufts University graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk, and commented: “Where does the ‘Abolish ICE’ movement go to get its apology.”

Today, in the New York Times, conservative David Brooks called for all those resisting what he called “a multifront assault to make the earth a playground for ruthless men” to work together. He called for a “comprehensive national civic uprising” that would first stop Trump and then create “a long-term vision of a fairer society that is not just hard on Trump, but hard on the causes of Trumpism—one that offers a positive vision.”

Brooks is hardly the first to suggest that “this is what America needs right now.” But a conservative like Brooks not only arguing that “Trump is shackling the greatest institutions in American life,” but then quoting Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto to call for resistance to those shackles—“We have nothing to lose but our chains”—signals that a shift is underway.

That shift has apparently swept in New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, who is generally a good barometer of the way today’s non-MAGA Republicans are thinking. In an interview today, he said: “[M]y feelings about not only Trump, but the administration, are falling like a boulder going into the Mariana Trench. So the memory of things that this administration has done, of which I approve, is drowning in the number of things that are, in my view, reckless, stupid, awful, un-American, hateful and bad—not just for the country, but also for the conservative movement.”

Stephens identified Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance’s bullying of Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office as the event that turned him away from Trump. “America should never treat an ally that way, certainly not one who is bravely fighting a common enemy,” he said. Stephens also noted the meeting had “delighted” Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, who is now “emboldened…to press the war harder.”

The Goldberg column is something else

For Kaschuta, who lives in Romania, the promise of a more authentic, organic society, freed from the hypocrisies of the existing order, was apparently inviting. “There’s always been something tantalizing about the idea that the world is not how it is presented to you,” she wrote on her blog. “A frontier opens up.”

But over the last couple of years, that frontier started seeming to her more like a dead end. Recently, she abandoned the movement. “The vibe is shifting yet again,” Kaschuta wrote on X last week. “The cumulative IQ of the right is looking worse than the market.”

Kaschuta is not alone; several people who once appeared to find transgressive right-wing ideas scintillating are having second thoughts as they watch Donald Trump’s administration put those ideas into practice. The writer Richard Hanania once said that he hated bespoke pronouns “more than genocide,” and his 2023 book, “The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics,” provided a blueprint for the White House’s war on D.E.I. But less than three months into Trump’s new term, he regrets his vote, telling me, “The resistance libs were mostly right about him.”

THIS IS MY GODDAMN EMAIL CLIENT

Fuck ALL THE WAY OFF with that shit

Fuckin'... I put in a $1200 drain to keep my GE from eating pumps. We assumed the line was too thin 'cuz it blew up three pumps. Then I put in a $1200 drain and it blew up a fourth pump. That was after the Bosch after the Bosch just straight up ate a power board a month after the warranty ended.

Nearly all dishwashers are junk.

HOLY FUCKING SHIT

1) if there's one person who primarily unloads the dishwasher, there will be one person who thinks the other person loads it wrong. Why? The unloader has a better sense of what works and what works is dependent on your dishes and your dishwasher.

2) If there's one person who primarily unloads the dishwasher, there will be one person who has an idea about how much the dishes need to be rinsed. Why? The unloader has a better idea of the hunks of potato floating around in the bottom.

3) We didn't switch to "enzymatic cleaners" (WTF) we lost phosphates in 2010. This is also when dishwasher pods were pushed really hard, principally because the markup is higher, ostensibly because they contain the rinse aid, coincidentally because they use an additional detergent that nukes the shit out of your aluminum. If your dishwasher is so old it doesn't have a spot for jet dry, use pods. If it's got a spot for jet dry, don't fucking use pods.

4) The Germans have basically eliminated silverware baskets (it's FINE!) which really cuts down on the creativity. The Germans have also leaned into racks that make things pretty fucking obvious - a bowl can go there, a plate cannot, which means a bowl will get clean, a plate will not. If a bowl will go there, the bowl will get clean. Stop overthinking it.

5) The Chinese have basically eliminated quality control (it's NOT FINE!) which really cuts down on the efficiency. The Chinese have also leaned into racks that are gimmicky pieces of shit where nothing really works ever. If a bowl will go there, go ham. It's going to break in 18 months anyway.

How do people get through life

here's the wild bit:

At temperatures exceeding the critical point, liquids and gases stop being different phases and there is no longer a separation between an ocean and the atmosphere. It is unclear whether observations imply that a separate liquid ocean exists on K2-18b, and detecting such an ocean is difficult from the outside; its existence cannot be inferred or ruled out solely from the mass and radius of a planet.

The existence of a liquid water ocean is uncertain. Before the James Webb Space Telescope observations, a supercritical state of the water was believed to be more likely. JWST observations were initially considered to be more consistent with a fluid-gas interface and thus a liquid ocean - trace gases such as hydrocarbons and ammonia can be lost from an atmosphere to an ocean if it exists; their presence may thus imply the absence of an ocean-atmosphere separation.

TIL ICE IX is real

My tinfoil hat theories are as follows:

- Microsoft funded the shit out of OpenAI explicitly because it poisons Google Search. There are now enough AI shitfactories out there now that they no longer need to feed Sam

- Softbank is hyping the shit out of OpenAI because hyping is all they know how to do

- Sam Altman knows it isn't about making anything, it's about convincing investors that they can sell your garbage to someone else

- NVidia will happily make hay while the sun shines and ride the rocket ship the way Oracle did

- Apple is lagging like a mfer on AI for the same reason they lagged like a mfer on VR: it's fucking pointless and they know it

Microsoft has fucking $71b cash-on-hand. They could absolutely let all this collapse because they're fucking done with it. They could also let all this collapse and pick up the pieces for nothing. NVidia will survive; its ridiculous P/E ratio will not. Softbank will survive; they can renege on whatever they want and be fine. OpenAI has to thread the needle just to survive; they also need to survive this shit:

I think an option Zitron didn't explore was the various counterparties just sayin' "naah." If OpenAI starts to crater there will be no methodology available to force anyone to pad their fall prior to their auguring in like a lawn dart. The thing with Lehman was Wall Street had enough exposure to Lehman to run their cash, and then AIG made it all pointless. NVidia and Microsoft have over $100b available to save their skins and while it could suck for a while, I don't see either of them voluntarily leaping into the meat grinder to save OpenAI.

GenX didn't have any wealth either; Millennials dealt with 2008 while GenX didn't but both generations suffered comparative poverty. The principle difference is that in general, Millennials had 'boomers for parents.

This isn’t stuff that millennials just got into. It’s stuff that was first loved by boomers and that the millennials were introduced to by boomers.

You're making my point - the stuff 'boomers and GenX marketed to Millennials was almost as sticky as the stuff Millennials found themselves, which is pretty much Harry Potter. Grunge started out as the GenX anti-consumerist anthem Smells Like Teen Spirit, passed through Smashing Pumpkins' 1979 and by 2007, The High School Musical 2 Soundtrack spends 4 weeks at number one.

Xenials and later generations don’t have enough money to bother appealing to.

IN 2000 you could presume that 80% of any movie audience was under 25. Now it's 50%. 20% of retail spending is for Christmas, 65% of that is to family and friends and most of that is to children. brand lock-in happens before the legal drinking age.

As you catalog, the brands created when GenX were kids are truckin' along while the brands created when Millennials were kids had no traction. The argument of the article is that there's nothing popularized by Millennials as kids and young adults that had any holding power. You seem to argue that this is because they "had no money" when in fact, spending on children in the top 50% brackets increased steadily when Millennials were kids.

The creators and curators of culture don’t care whether the ideas are good or interesting. They want to sell merch, tickets to self-indulgent cons, theme-park experiences, and subscriptions.

And the argument put forth by the article is Millennials were the least-discerning young consumers of recent memory, which is why their culture is sinking into the sand.

2300 days ago

Meanwhile in eldercare

Fuck dude I was listening to GenZ rag on Millennials as the "new boomers" in 2017

Sitting there with a bunch of 16 year old Running Start kids telling their TA "nobody cares what Harry Potter house you were in, ass"

it's a clout-farming, attention-whoring shitpost. Anyone who identifies as a generation is only there to piss or preen on the thing someone else identifies as a generation writes. Deciding that "brunch" is a millennial thing is a tell. What is it telling? I prefer not to speculate but it's bad for credibility.

so why did you post it asshole

MY BEEF is that GenX culture was largely about jaded ineffectual anticonsumerism while Millennial culture was largely about this shit.

I hadn't seen so scathing a summary of the lack of permanent impact the Millennials had on culture but it makes sense; the pendulum shifted from "don't trust The Man" to "The Man gives you toys and prizes" and now that the Millennials have aged out of the target demo there ain't much left.

And for the record I cannot wait for IPAs and smash burgers to go away.

You know you're overthinking it when you ask Gretchen Felker-Martin

Food is cultural, which is why every culture has a "delicacy" that is disgusting. You eat their delicacy, you are welcomed in their culture. I dated a girl with a Swedish family, I ate lutefisk every Christmas. Food becomes threatening when it imposes a cultural shift. Real Men Don't Eat Quiche came out in 1982 because in 1980, supermarkets everywhere started carrying quiche in a carton. You buys your pint of pasteurized eggs with ham and spinach in it, you pours it in a pre-baked pie crust, et voila, quiche. This of course prompted late night comics to rail about quiche which has an even funnier name than tiramisu. Here's how Marlboro advertised their cigarettes while a TV cowboy was running the country:

All that it took for ice cream to become gay was for Joe Biden to profess enjoying it.

All that it took for Bud Light to become gay was for a transgender influencer to drink it.

All that it took for dijon mustard to become gay was for Obama to ask for it on a burger.

This is why Andrew Tate and his ilk freak out about bananas - they are gay signaling so hard that every little thing is gay. Women don't give a shit about 8% body fat, men do. Women don't give a shit about shaved chests, men do. Women don't give a shit about sports cars, men do. They are so afraid of being called gay that they lack the confidence to deep-throat a banana.

Ryan believes we’re going through another cultural shift in our ideas of queerness, similar to the one brought on by urbanization. This time, the internet is the driving force, connecting queer people across physical space and allowing us to speak about ourselves without gatekeeping by straight people. It might seem like a greater understanding of the changeability of sexuality and gender, even within one person across a lifetime, would signal the end of these behavioral associations. But new ones are being built, because “we’ve got to find ways to express our identity,” says Ryan.

THAT is what makes food gay: anything queer people are comfortable with, because anyone threatened by someone else's sexuality has deep and unrelenting questions about their own. Same as it ever was.

Fans of PKD don't like to discuss just how shithouse-rat-crazy he was. Paul Sammon cataloged it in Future Noir - he stopped going to PKD's house to talk to him because PKD would come to the door with a gun one day, a hug the next. He also wasn't a "success" by any standards outside of science fiction. The adaptation of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep was the first real money he'd ever seen. And while PKD claimed to have only written one story on hallucinogens, he did a lot of drugs. As quoted by Sammon to explain, "I've got five kids and write science fiction for a living. I do a lot of speed." Thus did he stroke out at 53, leaving three kids and five ex-wives. If you've ever wondered why nobody adapted PKD stories until he was dead, the answer is PKD:

He physically fought with Anne Williams Rubinstein, his third wife. Dick wrote to a friend that he and Anne had "dreadful violent fights...slamming each other around, smashing every object in the house." In 1963, Dick told his neighbors that his wife was attempting to kill him and had her involuntarily committed to a psychiatric institution for two weeks. After filing for divorce in 1964, Dick moved to Oakland to live with a fan, author and editor Grania Davis. Shortly after, he attempted suicide by driving off the road while she was a passenger.

Meanwhile, I've never read Stanislaw Lem's essay on PKD but I think I'm gonna:

If anyone is dissatisfied with SF in its role as an examiner of the future and of civilization, there is no way to make an analogous move from literary oversimplifications to full-fledged art, because there is no court of appeal from this genre. There would be no harm in this, save that American SF, exploiting its exceptional status, lays claim to occupy the pinnacles of art and thought. One is annoyed by the pretentiousness of a genre which fends off accusations of primitivism by pleading its entertainment character and then, once such accusations have been silenced, renews its overweening claims. By being one thing and purporting to be another, SF promotes a mystification which, moreover, goes on with the tacit consent of readers and public. The development of interest in SF at American universities has, contrary to what might have been expected, altered nothing in this state of affairs.

The '70s were shit for sci fi. Here's the books that anyone remembers from 1970 to 1975:

John Christopher's The Guardians

Niven's Ringworld

Anne McCaffrey's Dragonquest

Ursula LeGuin's Lathe of Heaven

Philip Hose Farmer's To Your Scattered Bodies Go

Michael Moorcock's Wizard of the Air

Silverberg's Book of Skulls which isn't even sci fi

Asimov's The Gods Themselves

The Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic

Ira Levin's Stepford Wives

Crichton's Terminal Man

Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama

Heinlein's Time Enough for Love

L'Engle's Wind in the Door

PKD's Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

Haldeman's Forever War

Niven & Pounelle's Mote in God's Eye

Brunner's Shockwave Rider

Of those?

Lathe of Heaven

Roadside Picnic

Wind in the Door

Shockwave Rider

Actually have anything to say. The first is anarchist, the second is Russian, the third is Y/A and the fourth was hated at the time and only found an audience when William Gibson listed it as an inspiration for Neuromancer.

Being honored by the SFWA in 1975 wasn't that great an honor.

Jared Diamond spent a big chunk of time on "taming" vs. "domesticating" where "taming" is taking a wild animal and making it not hate you, while "domesticating" is taking a wild animal and making its children's children's children not hate you. The Egyptians tamed cheetahs but never domesticated them; he pointed out that dogs have been domesticated for thousands of years while foxes have met only limited success and that only recently.

Michael Pollan would probably argue that cats domesticated us rather than the other way 'round, since he argued that the dominant species on earth is maize and we've stopped at nothing to ensure its spread around the world. Cats do a lot less to earn their keep than corn does.

'this is not normal'

And I want to thank you for a chance to vent.

There are a bunch of different ways to do AI. LLMs, from every bit of information I've absorbed, are a dead end.

Sherry Turkle talked about MIT's Kismet at length in Alone Together. There was a fuckton of compute thrown at Kismet across a number of different approaches, all of them computational and self-teaching. The kicker?

Humans responded just was well to Kismet responding to a random number generator as Kismet responding to their interaction.

Pareidolia is SO STRONG that you're actually better off not even trying. The tendency to form parasocial relationships with chatbots is so strong that it's been a part of the literature for 50 years. So why risk getting in trouble? The last thing you want is another Tay, so you suck all the life out of it. You suck all the creativity out of it. And here's the techbros, proving time and time again that the things don't even compute, but somehow insisting that creative writing is just around the corner.

Slowly I dream of flying. I observe turnpikes and streets

studded with bushes. Coldly my soaring widens my awareness.

To guide myself I determinedly start to kill my pleasure

during the time that hours and milliseconds pass away. Aid me in this

and soaring is formidable, do not and singing is unhinged.

RACTER, 1985

I instantly recognized these streets, the one at the 90 second mark is one I walked on just last week. I know exactly how attentive you need to be to drive a large car through there. So I'll admit I had to do a bit of soul-searching.

You're flabbergasted that a Tesla successfully made A run.

Or am I still missing something here?

The Tesla needs to make the run every time, without fail, without concern, without drama because humans make the run every time, without fail, without concern, without drama. It's that lowering-of-standards that we're talking about directly.

Google has self-driving cars out there. In limited circumstances, under total ownership of Google, where they're providing a service using devices they have exquisite supervision over. Tesla is YOLOing into self-driving the way they YOLO into everything. You've got a video with no crashes. Here's a video based on 200 crashes.

As to Youtube, am_unition once argued with me that Youtubers hold their lavs because that's the fashion, not because they're fucking morons (never mind that I spent ten years working with cream-of-the-crop fucking morons; if i've got emails directly from Anthony Padilla to me exemplifying gawping stupidity, that should factor into our comparative expertise levels). Fast forward three years and you can buy a GoPro lav and all of a sudden every fucking Youtuber has a tictac case clipped to their shirt collar. Your argument is that YouTubers being fucking morons somehow has a "different appeal" than Youtubers not being fucking morons because you get 'niche content' when the fact of the matter is, they'd do shit exactly the same way the studios do if they could only afford it.

"Here's a Tesla not murdering someone, therefore Tesla has perfected self-driving"

equals

"here's an interesting video with bullshit production, therefore production value is worthless."

You're effectively arguing that conditional, partial success is somehow as good as reliable, total success because an AI touched it. Which is the exact moving-of-the-goalposts I've been hammering on for a week.

But fiction writing doesn’t exist just to spout duck snakes at you; people get something out of it (symbolism, meaning, the human nature, …) that has to be more than a classifier can handle. That’s your point, right? Which I missed because I am not aware of what the last 20% is made of.

Naaah dawg we're talking pure quality.

- The QUALITY of Tesla's self-driving is such that you're amazed it isn't killing someone, rather than bored and ho-hum of a video of a car navigating among pedestrians

- The QUALITY of Youtube videos is such that you think you LIKE shit production value, rather than recognizing your choices are "shit production value" or "blank screen"

- The QUALITY of AI writing is such that you think grammatically-correct word order is all that's needed, rather than an actual engaging fucking story

Go up on the wall of Uruk and walk around,

examine its foundation, inspect its brickwork thoroughly.

Is not (even the core of) the brick structure made of kiln-­‐fired brick,

and did not the Seven Sages themselves lay out its plans?

One league city, one league palm gardens, one league lowlands, the open area(?) of

the Ishtar Temple,

three leagues and the open area(?) of Uruk it (the wall) encloses.

I'm a storyteller and when I'm hanging out with buddies I often tell stories. But I learned in LA that there was one story I never shared with native Angelinos - I never shared the story of getting lost in the woods on a hike and having to orienteer my way out. I never talked about giving myself rhabdomyelosis. I never talked about legs swollen an inch around the elastics of my socks the next day, of hobbling into REI where they failed to sell me a GPS because they were too stupid to do more than point and read off feature cards. After the first few furtive attempts I learned to change the subject.

For me? Getting lost in the woods was formative and changed many things about how I regard risk. It was traumatic and changed my entire relationship with nature. But for the average Angelino it crosses the following null concepts:

- hiking

- woods

- failure to shop

You can literally watch their eyes glaze. They have no handle on any of this shit. I'm an engaging speaker and I'm good at stories but I had an easier time communicating my RAID5 ZFS rebuild than getting lost in the fucking woods because the average Angelino has a better handle on data loss than they do on "woods."

There is NO PART of fiction writing that benefits from any tools beyond transcription and there is NO PART of fiction writing that AI has a handle on other than "these words follow those words."

I can have conversations with non-native Angelinos and they would nod knowingly. There's just something missing there. They don't fucking get it. You can't make them fucking get it. They watch Alive the same way they watch Aliens - it's a story set somewhere else. They can fit the "fiction" of "lost in the woods' in with "pursued by alien monsters on a distant planet." They CANNOT adapt to the fact of "lost in the woods" particularly when they are required to form an empathetic bond with the storyteller. They don't fucking get it.

Because of how LLMs work, there are things they will never fucking get. Theoretically? If you gave the self-driving car enough LIDAR, enough speed control and enough algorithmic understanding of traffic lights, it'd never fucking kill anyone. This is why Google has never fucking killed anyone. Practically? If you go for the budget option you will overrun your sensors, your training data, your vehicle performance or all three. This is why both Tesla and Uber killed people.

You cannot write fiction without symbolic thinking and LLMs try to do everything with relational thinking.