wwweston

5 ms·

1.
by wwweston 3d ago
This is why there are moral panics about things people feel in their guts: most people are reasonably easily unsettled and distracted by queer people, people who look different, people their people don’t trust being in charge. It works. Mos
2.
by wwweston 3d ago
Which mostly seem to stem from the fundamental misalignment of OpenAI and Anthropic leaders/owners, aka the evil of the companies. Arguably, though, their evil is well within the normal distribution of the usual evil of humanity magnif
3.
by wwweston 14d ago
Worth noting this dynamic when people overgeneralize “local government good, federal government bad”, a tendency that has been present and growing for at least 50 years. The theory that local government is more accountable and responsive se
4.
by wwweston 16d ago
For me it’s mostly media apps - Fireworks CS 6, Reason 10, maybe some version of Garage Band. There’s alternatives but these apps hit a sweet spot that I could camp out on for decades if the tech treadmill didn’t like to make software an ex
5.
by wwweston 29d ago
There’s already a solid case that AI profits or revenue should be significantly taxed for public goods whether or not there are employment impacts. The models simply do not exist without vast amounts of training data much of it acquired by
6.
by wwweston 1mo ago
I thought the recommended honeymoon reading was Knuth’s _Surreal Numbers_
7.
by wwweston 1mo ago
I also have a suspicion that people’s microdistributions of talents is underappreciated. Some people are good architects and average at algorithms. Some people are unusually good at debugging or QA. Some can spin out whole systems at an imp
8.
by wwweston 2mo ago
with the advantage that you can discover this by reading citations.
9.
by wwweston 2mo ago
A fascinating everyday arms race I had no idea was playing out around me.
10.
by wwweston 2mo ago
The enlightenment and its values underly a huge portion of what’s published, both inside scholarly tradition and in popular work. Ans the enlightenment is at heart civil libertarian, pro-social, and liberal. Models trained on that work will
11.
by wwweston 2mo ago
How does the PWA work offline with HTMX? The “hit the server for fresh markup fragments” approach seems like it has to be abandoned here, however simplifying it is for online apps.
12.
by wwweston 2mo ago
Buying up old books is legal. Digitizing and distilling them arguably is too. And also: > paying extortion fees to the copyright-mongers Yes yes, greedy fat cat publishing oligarchs treading on the poor put-upon scrappy AI underdogs. &#x
13.
by wwweston 2mo ago
> A person can type 3,000 words by hand and have no thought pass through their head beyond the need to finish before lunch. This isn’t the common case. How many of the thoughts produced while working on the words have much novelty or hig
14.
by wwweston 2mo ago
If the “protocols not platforms” philosophy is the right track, usenet/nntp.
15.
by wwweston 2mo ago
Speaking as someone who has run courses designed to take late teens / early 20somethings with a variety of backgrounds and tried to teach them 1st semester programming concepts in two weeks, I think anyone who thinks tcp/ip an eas
16.
by wwweston 2mo ago
If you’re not redistributing ebooks you bought, it’s hard to imagine what legal claim someone could make against you, and even harder to establish the ethics of that claim. To say nothing of Amazon’s ethics.
17.
by wwweston 2mo ago
Yeah, we’re early culturewise in the digitization experiment and high on optimism about the benefits, but not very far into reckoning with the downsides and incentives skew a bit towards carelessness. The real danger is that we’ll be so car
18.
by wwweston 2mo ago
I’m having trouble imagining the privacy concern. If someone’s vehicle is topping 90db then it’s hard to argue what they really want is privacy, and even the most invasive monitoring method I can think of (widespread mics) could be nerfed b
19.
by wwweston 2mo ago
I’m at the point where I don’t just want ticketing and other enforcement on this front, I want yanked licenses for this after a warning, and I might even want it legal to shoot vehicles guilty of noise violations and their drivers with pain
20.
by wwweston 2mo ago
I might imagine that even this cycle could change, if the resources necessary to support step 1 and step 2 are much lower. Which might mean step 3 isn’t as necessity driven. Of course, it’s possible other things can drive step 3. And fron
21.
by wwweston 2mo ago
It has now been longer since apps on smartphones were introduced than it was between the web’s birth and smartphones (to say nothing of popular uptake, it’d be generous to give the web a full decade there before the rise of the smartphone).
22.
by wwweston 2mo ago
See also Bill Thurston’s classic Math Overflow answer to a student wondering where they fit compared to a Gauss or Euler: https://mathoverflow.net/questions/43690/whats-a-mathematici... “The product of mathematics
23.
by wwweston 2mo ago
I’ve got an old DX. The fact that it doesn’t have net access anymore is now a security feature and an anti distraction mechanism. I can load what I want by USB. It doesn’t do epub3 which is a problem, but it does PDFs and conversion tricks
24.
by wwweston 2mo ago
That makes sense — decisions that are about personal benefits beyond technical/product choices and their merits.
25.
by wwweston 2mo ago
When you say “political“, what do you mean? It’s easy for me to relate to talk of software development aesthetics or philosophy and I’ve certainly had plenty of conversations that I think are accurately described that way. But I can’t think
26.
by wwweston 2mo ago
It does seem to be true that voters are often content to select and re-select congressional representation that will hide from too much critical attention, give evasive responses, or otherwise dodge direct accountability. People's sta
27.
by wwweston 2mo ago
The insane thing is that nobody listens when they do talk about it. A huge thing in the Harris campaign was that her policies polled much better than Trump's (including housing accessibility by increasing construction, regulations for
28.
by wwweston 2mo ago
It's reasonable to acknowledge that some individuals are so overwhelmed by the demands of their circumstances that they truly have no disposable time & attention to direct to the society they live in. The statistics I've encou
29.
by wwweston 3mo ago
When the electorate is literally the mechanism by which officeholders are selected, how is the electorate not responsible? This is not the same situation as someone who is the victim of a violent crime they didn’t volunteer for, choosing
30.
by wwweston 3mo ago
You’re correct that time is the fundamental challenge. It’s also really what the money is always a proxy for at some level. Meetings in DC are probably not the right focus. Every congressional officeholder has offices in the region they rep

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