Annoying

Getting Poorer

Chill Annoying, Political Economy

I can’t speak for all of Europe, but certainly I feel very rich in the UK in a way I do not feel in the US. A lot of the sceptred isle is obviously shabby and declining. Even London has gone downhill a lot. It felt wealthy indeed (mutatis mutandis my own relative wealth) when I visited in 1989 or 1990. Now it has the atmosphere and sense of disarray befitting a third-tier American city in a lot of ways.

Europe is getting relatively poorer, and in many cases, absolutely poorer. Not all of it, but a whole lot of it. Krugman et al. are just wrong. They want to hold on to the fantasy.

Am I Secretly a Robot?

Chill Annoying

I increasingly get these with no way to get around them when I visit various sites:

To see if could make it to the site, I temporarily disabled all the many, many things I block and tried it on six different browsers (Safari, Firefox, Chrome, Brave, Vivaldi, Edge) on three different OSes (Windows, Linux and Mac) on two different ISPs. No dice.

Guess they really do not want me to go to that site.

Checked

Chill Annoying

(1) _s.a.m.e.m.e.m.e_ (@st_louis_stan) / X

Indeed, that has not ended well. Female neuroticism and hypocrisy needs to be checked just as much as male aggression and their variants of hypocrisy need to be regulated too. These days, we’ve just declared women get a free pass on everything. What I want is equality.

Future Lookback

Chill Annoying, Gutter Philosophy

(1) Sam White on X: "Future people will look back on current discussions about LLMs being conscious in the same way that we look back on Victorians discussing whether the telephone could be used to contact the spirit world." / X

What is it with these mooks and their dipshit-ass doofy metaphors that aren’t clever, smart, interesting or accurate? These people are such intellectual lightweights the Casimir effect could buffet them into another dimension.

What people are asking about LLMs is whether the physical computational process itself has experience. So the actual correct Victorian parallel would be Victorians wondering whether the telephone infrastructure itself could be an experiential phenomenon which essentially nobody back then wondered or asked.

Second, there is no empirical test for consciousness. None. Whether something is “really” conscious or not is simply not an answerable question at this time. It might never be. The spirit world is a testable set of hypotheses, as opposed to consciousnesses. And so far, there has not been a shred of evidence that it exists across millions of trials over hundreds of years. Further, it’s not clear what the difference is — if any — versus an entity being “really” conscious and only pretending to be. These questions have no resolution. As with quantum mechanics, if you profess to understand it, that only means you definitely do not.

And thus, the tard-ass idea that the future will obviously see how silly we are is completely unsubstantiated. Humans have a history of both over-attribution of consciousness and under-attribution. That is to say, it was once believed that animals’ and babies’ cries of pain and terror were just mechanistic, while some believed that mountains and clouds were certainly conscious. You know a belief is bunk when you could just as easily swap the opposite statement in — that is, it’d be equivalent to say that the “dismissal of consciousnesses” would be obviously as ridiculous to our descendants as “definitely conscious.”

Not everyone can be intellectually competent. But are these people even trying here? They sound like children.

Be Ept

Chill Annoying, Tech

Why are developers some of the most IT inept users?

That has always puzzled me too. My partner is a dev and is extremely competent, but some of the worst users of all are devs. One of the most memorable is requesting a developer to go to the command line in Windows and the person having no idea what I was talking about. Getting them to find and provide their local IP address was beyond frustrating, as they also did not know what an IP address was.

I’ve also done way more troubleshooting of dev code in my day than anyone who is not an actual programmer should ever have to do.

And no, the “can’t open the command line” dev was not junior; he had at least 10 years of experience, and this was well before coding bootcamps became a thing.

Some devs are just no better than regular end users. I’d say about 60% or so.

It is funny in that thread how many devs are like, “I should be able to use my specialized tool used by three people only and never security audited because if not I am being oppressed!”

Like, get over yourself. If I allowed every dev to use their shit-level “necessary” tool, we’d have more Chinese malware than Windows XP pre-SP2 put on the open web.

There’s a reason security exists, and almost no dev gives a crap about that.

How To Always Be the Bad Guy

Chill Annoying

(1) Wilfred Reilly (@wil_da_beast630) / X

This is a bit unfair to women, but research shows they are generally more neurotic. They simply clean more no matter what than men do, on average.

I lived with a woman who demanded we vacuum every day of the week, among other things. I refused, as that’s insane. But I was the bad guy there, of course, in modern feminist telling of it because I would not go along with that and her other neurotic-obsessive tendencies. Meanwhile, all the labor I did was not counted as I “enjoyed it” because “all men do” according to her. Which was a total fabrication.

Women need help with their neuroticism just as men need assistance with taming their aggression. And they are really not getting that.

Spacing

Chill Amusing, Annoying

Brother, while you fantasize about all of us living some austere ascetic life, I want an actual spaceship. And want everyone else to have one too.

We are not the same. And that’s because degrowthers suck.

Buddammit

Chill Amusing, Annoying

Can’t let go of the convenience now (wireless earbuds).

I hate earbuds — wireless or not — mostly because I have never found a pair that doesn’t fall out within 10-15 seconds, no matter how hard I shove them in. They are also heinously uncomfortable for the small amount of time they stay in.

My sister gave me a brand-new pair of AirPods that she didn’t want. I did try them and I could get them to stay inserted for around 30 seconds if I stayed as still as humanly possible. If I moved at all, they immediately fell out.

That people are able to do things like run in earbuds is mystifying to me. Not sure what is going on, but I’ve tried 4-5 pairs over the years and all fell out in ~10 seconds if I moved at all.

Pronk You

Chill Amusing, Annoying, Clowns

Meagan: "Somebody made a great analogy …" - the Timeloop Café

Unfortunately, this is a dumbass metaphor. It’s inapt, inept, and inapposite. It makes no sense if you know even the first thing about cognition, the history of galvanism and the fact that several extremely important results were discovered thereby, or that whether or not AI is conscious is not particularly relevant. Conflating “conscious” and “AI” does not make sense, for a whole host of reasons. “AI1” has been the industry-standard term since the 1950s and encompasses many different technologies. I know that to most people AI is new, but it’s not at all novel to those working in computer-adjacent fields2.

This is intellectual stotting. But unfortunately to someone with an actual capable brain like the bad-ass motherfucker writing to you now, it merely seems like an antelope with three left feet glued to a food truck attempting aerial acrobatics. It only impresses co-dumbasses who haven’t read actual books and who do not know the history of anything at all.

The scientific debate in the era of galvanism was not whether or not the dead could be resurrected via electrical stimulation. That was fiction fodder and the equivalent of pop-sci sensationalism at the time, no different than watching the latest space robots movie and concluding that this represents our era’s science. What Galvani actually discovered was that animals possess what he called “animal electricity,” and though he didn’t understand it he believed it was somehow fundamental to how animals function. And he was correct. That insight alone was an important discovery. Involved in the debate was Alessandro Volta who believed that animal systems did not use electrical impulses to operate and that the frog was just detecting something external only.

Attempting to do more research for his side of this scientific dispute, Volta constructed what was called a “voltaic pile” in 1800. This was the world’s first battery. And, folks, if I need to point out how important that was….well, you’re probably on the wrong site.

Ok, y’all, time to pull it on back now. These people are just fundamentally dumb. Their pseudointellectual faux-superiority only impresses those who can’t completely mog them effortlessly. Luckily I can and I make no bones about it.

To think about it from a larger perspective, what is the point of what people like Meagan are doing there? I know, showing off for their also-moronic friends. But in a larger sense, what is the purpose of publicly looking like a dipshit for anyone with eyes to see? I just cannot make sense of covering yourself in ignominy and dishonor this way.

  1. One does not need consciousness to have artificial intelligence.
  2. For instance, I was tweaking AI-based spam filters in the late 1990s, and had a friend who worked on creating them.

Impatience

Chill Annoying, Evil

I didn’t read the poem but in my mind it goes like this:

I forgot the procedure for carotid endarterectomy
Not sure what the heck got into me
The patient is dead and gone
While I’m shopping Amazon
My dog is mourning
And I am not
But, oh, look at all the goodies I got!

Clowns All Around

Chill Annoying, Clowns, Political Economy

Any idiot clown who thinks AI is “fake growth” because companies buy shit from one another does not understand even a little bit how economies work, how large corporations function, how they scale, what is involved in gigantic high-CapEx businesses, why circular buying and entangled supply chains are incredibly common1, nor why certain models not only make sense but are inevitable in certain fairly-predictable situations.

Jesus Christ, you fucking mooks. Read a book. Read anything. But mostly, just shut up.

  1. Take a peek at China.

Client Side

Chill Annoying, Tech

Exhausted Everything – Mail Disappearing.

Some of the commenters are correct. This is clearly a client-side rule running on some other device (personal computer/laptop, tablet, something). I’ve seen it too many times. It always looks just like this.

Find that and problem will be solved.

Worst one of these I got was in 2013 or so where a user had some rule set up on a tablet that he had not used in two years. I tracked it down by making him assemble all his devices, even ones he “didn’t use,” and go through mail rules+settings over the phone with me device by device.

Found the rule deleting email on a first-gen (IIRC) iPad and all was well. I was the ninth or tenth person to work on that problem over the course of a few months and I solved it in a day.

Shape of It

Chill Annoying, Cool

Solar+batteries is the future.

Anyone who claims anything is else is absurdly, insanely wrong, no matter what mistakes the US is making there currently. That isn’t evidence. That’s just typical US clownery. Absent nuclear apocalypse, it’s just going to win as it’s cheaper, abundant, cleaner and available nearly everywhere.

Simple as that.