Clowns

Libris Calibris

Chill Annoying, Clowns

Stewart has the right idea. Anthropic should’ve included more books; all the books it could get its hands on. The idea that AI is a “plagiarism machine” is a fucking ludicrous notion by unserious people. And that $1.5 billion is a ridiculous judgment as no actual author was harmed in any way by an AI “reading” their work that then transforms the text into tokens, runs that through the LLM’s network and then only keeps the weights at the end (no book text). That’s a really, really basic gloss of how LLMs work. If you accept that as plagiarism, then your brain is also plagiarizing any time it reads something.

I’d like to give an throp up side the head to anyone who instigates shit like this. Copyright prevents so much, and now the idiot left — after being against copyright maximalism for three decades — has gone to that camp because it now appeals to their degrowther tendencies. Fortunately, Stewart is on the left but not the now-majority idiot left.

Goalpost Movement

Chill Annoying, Clowns

The degrowthers are always moving the goalposts. For example, with self-driving cars. Degrowthers:

1) Self-driving is impossible anywhere and shouldn’t even be tried!

Reality: Self-driving is working pretty well via Waymo in quite a few cities, and is improving all the time.

2) Ok, self-driving works but it’s incredibly dangerous.

Reality: Self-driving appears to be much safer by any measure.

3) Self-driving can’t work in bad weather conditions! Ever!

Reality: Also improving all the time and humans are also terrible, terrible drivers in adverse weather.

4) Self-driving cars can’t work while being attacked by a dinosaur during an earthquake combined with an alien invasion and the gates of Hell opening up!

Reality: Well, ok, you got me there.

Degrowthers just hate any improvement in life, tech (especially) or anything else. It’s like some horrid personal affront to them. So let’s affront them a lot more, since they suck!

Micro Milli

Chill Annoying, Clowns

In the main, developers attempt to implement microservices because they have no networking knowledge and do not understand the huge latency of network calls compared to a local call. Concomitantly, they believe that a millisecond is not much longer than a microsecond1. (In fact, a millisecond is 1,000 times longer than a microsecond.)

From this nonchalant cluelessness, much pain is caused.

  1. I’ve had a developer say this to me directly in person

Opportunity Cost

Chill Annoying, Clowns, Evil

It’s annoying to think about how much better and actually-used and useful Firefox could have been if the devs had concentrated on making it distinguishable from other browsers rather than attempting to shape it into a third-rate Chrome clone. That was never going to be a successful strategy as many, many people including me told them over the years. In fact, I even got banned from all of Reddit for laying out the case in very clear terms. (And no, I didn’t violate the Reddit TOS. I just got the ire of every Firefox dev because my predictions started coming true).

Firefox was the last bastion of the old internet. Now effectively dead; a walking corpse that’ll fall into the first pit it stumbles across. It could’ve been different and the path there was fairly clear, but the devs chose a direction that granted them the most power rather than empowering the users.

And that was their grave mistake.

Contra Con

Chill Annoying, Clowns, Evil

I think this is accurate. Just as with the clownish anti-vax rightists where anti-vax beliefs can only prosper where there are safe, effective vaccines, the sort of sentiments that Alyssa expresses can only proliferate when people are safe and cloistered from most harms.

It’s a disease of prosperity and safety. In both cases. “Suicidal empathy” like many other symptoms of terminal civilizational decline will be largely wiped out in the world war that’s coming up in the next decade or so.

Everyone buckled in?

Burnt Offering

Chill Annoying, Clowns

Something else I’ve noticed about Gen Z and younger Millennials: they are extremely concerned with their “boundaries” and telling you all about them, but not at all interested in what they themselves have to offer in a relationship.

This is a symptom of how terrified they are of, well, everything and how closed off from the world they are. There is nothing wrong with boundaries as we used to think of them back in the 1990s. However, the version of those bounds now is designed to prevent any risk, stand in the way of closeness, and to forestall even the possibility of vulnerability.

Those aren’t “boundaries,” unless you consider four walls in a 6×8 cell with bars for a door to be a safe haven. No, all they’ve done is created a prison with a more PR-friendly name.

Parent

Chill Clowns, Evil

Mozilla and Firefox dev idiocy example number eleventy billion.

Used to, you could have an extension that allowed the parent menu item in a right-click menu to trigger a click. Extremely useful for a search tool (etc.) that had sub-menus. Saved loads of time and just made things easier.

But not allowed anymore because it might confuse dear old Gramma. Even though she doesn’t know how to use her computer in any other way anyway and this change helps no one. Just another Mozilla dev power trip.

Clown-level crap like this is why Mozilla lost.

Mode of Clown

Chill Clowns

Many women need to get over the fact that it’s not sexual harassment if someone they are not attracted to is attracted to them. Jesus Christ, idiots.

And to keep it fair, many men need to realize that women aren’t insane or too demanding for wanting you to listen to her and make some sort of effort.

Gen Z is in full clown mode now. We did it to them, so they can’t be blamed. But it’s terrible to witness.

Bullydom

Chill Amusing, Annoying, Clowns

To a lot of the left, “bullying” is telling them truths they don’t want to hear. I’ve been accused of bullying by leftist clowns because I’ve said things like:

  • You don’t have to be a fat useless slob. That you can change your life and it’s up to you to do so.
  • That not everyone is exactly identical.
  • That IQ exists, or at least measures something that exists in the context of our civilization.
  • That the Fat Acceptance movement is actively harmful.

You get this picture. Pathetic. If that’s bullying, then fuck yes I am a bully. Proud to be.