I'm shocked and dismayed that this book is not more prominent. The book opened my eyes not only to the fact that these companies would become enshitty, but why they weren't in the first place.
I mean this is why Nassim Taleb got extremely controversial with his via negativa approach during his Antifragile and Skin in the Game period (I am a huge fan of his writing).
>Drink no liquid that isn’t at least a thousand years old (wine, water, coffee). Eat nothing invented or re-engineered by humans.
The argument is straightforward, that human beings are a wildly complex multi-variate system and that throwing wrenches into a complex multi-variate system is
generally a horrible idea (this heuristic is inverted and encouraged when the that system is breaking down).
Is there a bit of a naturalistic fallacy here? I think sort of, but not significant one. The idea that we could screw up our bodies is obviously there. The flip side of this coin is that I see something as trivial as depression and/or most other non-fatal ailments as completely independent of the evolutionary process, such that experimenting on ourselves to improve our life (again, quality of life over time should not be directly related to probability of genetic reproduction success, as is made obvious from the gay uncle hypothesis).
The implications of this extend to where you live, so a bunch of genetically German hippies living in California, pretending to be one with nature, really are being dishonest about the health benefits they pretend to have, when the argument pretty much insists that the region of evolutionary development occurs will be crucial to the benefits of that evolution. Taleb himself lives in NYC, not his genetic homeland of Lebanon.
We really just need to be more honest about how little we know about health... especially health outside of the highly reproductive window (13-45).
I agree with your major points, but depression is far from trivial. People sometimes refer to feeling a bit down as depression, but in medical terminology depression is specifically a disorder which has severe impact on your life, as well as being one of the main causes of suicide. As such it will be a factor in evolution, both as a cause of death and a cause of failure to reproduce.
The inverse of via negativa is that when the for potential death is there, interventions should be used without hesitation.
Insofar as death removing someone from the gene pool, again this is exactly the reason I bring up the gay uncle hypothesis. The idea being that the reproduction problems of gene for an individual may be outweighed by the reproductive benefits of the genetic family.
The other idea is that it may be caused by a common error like genetic disease.
I've never played it, so I really can't speak to the though, but my obvious comparison is Minecraft.
I really think the deep lore of Minecraft does a lot of work. When you find a new and interesting random place to explore, it usually ties in with your view of the place you are in, and eventually you find your way to an ending of sorts.
Another similar game from my youth that was the same was Wing Commander: Privateer. It was a sandbox, where a game suddenly appears after you've been exploring for months, but it's not much more than some cut scenes within the sandbox.
I have no qualms with a sandbox game, but I'd prefer it were generally tied into a narrative, either in a lore narrative or with a direct story.
I'm getting close to a building a honey pot, because I want responsible robots to be able to crawl my site! It's about sharing information after all. If it gets large enough to have a positive monetary benefit to me, I'd happily let the ai bots crawl it responsibly too.
It's a wiki, so I don't want it to me my information, ever. I'm just the one footing the bill right now.
Yeah, I used to do that. I'd put bad actors into a randomly generated never ending link farm. I'd put a special link in my robots.txt and any bot that visited it, I would assume was a bad actor. This link was not accessible from any other location.
The results were striking, how many bots just stupidly tumbled down the random link rabbit hole. I'm not sure what they were searching for, but all they got from me was gobbledygook text and more links.
I quickly checked for you, and my Cloudflare account currently has the following option: "Block AI Bots" under xxx.com > Security > Bots which I think does what you want.
I am not paying for Cloudflare and it allows me to enable this option. If you use the (other) Bot Fight Mode or captcha options, then yes, you will block crawlers. AFAIK specific bot user agents can also be blocked (or allowed) using a Page Rule, which is also a free tier feature.
I’m fine with a burst of traffic… that’s what it’s designed for. What it’s not designed for is 24-7-365 being slowly pinged on every single page (thousands), by every single robot (thousands).
I don’t think it’s over, we’ve just hit the end of post war prosperity, and we are shifting our parties’ respective structures.
The idea that we’ve literally never elected any president younger than a boomer is telling. The party is facing an intergenerational crisis, and but both parties are captured by one generation. If the electorate realigns or one party begins to concern itself with the struggles of the 80’s and 90’s, things will go back to normal.
This is a series of repudiations, not an embrace of fascism.
Do you think the people who are suffering consequences that are typically imposed by fascism care for your distinctions that we are not fascist enough?
it starts small and snowballs. these executive orders are using the same demonizing language and actions as the early anti-Jewish laws of 1930s Germany and we know how that turned out.
I'm a liberal democrat. I'm just going to be up front about that. I think the left has made some real tactical errors in their policy, and it's upsetting people. Most people just want to live their lives and are fine with others living theirs.
On the trans topic, I obviously think trans folks should be able to live their lives, and I think the nonsense about bathrooms is ridiculous. The solution is obviously just not segregating bathrooms by sex.
Most of the hostility here has to do with sport. Where I think the left has fumbled this is not taking the argument for trans folks seriously enough. Gender is a social construct, sex is not... but we don't segregate our sports because of gender differences (that it's somehow icky to have boys touching girls), we segregate our sports because sex differences means biologically female folks are at a natural disadvantage. If we on the left actually took this argument seriously, we should be arguing for trans women competing in (biologically) male sport, because the point of gender being a social construct means we shouldn't see this as a problem. Same for trans men competing in (biologically) female sport.
That we conflate them is an unforced error and honestly undermines the entire argument that trans solidarity is based on (an argument that I generally support).
The conflations continue when we are discussing "immigrants." I've long held that I have no idea why the American left seems totally fine with ignoring the fact that people are overstaying their visas. I'm pretty close to an open borders guy, so I very obviously hate our immigration policy. However, that doesn't mean we should just ignore laws we don't like. We fight to change them. If we're allowed to just ignore perfectly reasonable laws like visa limitations, then there's no reason the right can't start ignoring background checks for gun purchases, or prosecutions for civil rights violations of, say, trans folks. Ignoring laws we don't like breaks the "faithfully execute" oath that executives generally take... it's also wildly undemocratic.
Overstaying a visa is not something we should be exercising civil disobedience over. It has nothing to do with asylum seekers or refugees. It's just people ignoring the perfectly legitimate -- if onerous -- rules for visiting. If I want to live in France, it would be ridiculous to suggest that I should just go their on vacation and then stay.
Again, we elected a fascist, I'm not denying that, but the main complaints I've heard from the right that have led here aren't fascist arguments. They all seem like legitimate complaints about the left, complains I generally disagree with or are low priorities for me, but legitimate. When I start hearing actual fascist desires from the electorate, like eliminating opposition parties, then I'll start freaking out. That's not to say it's not bad, it is, my point is only that the previous three cycles look much more like repudiation results -- because the US is facing financial headwinds and an awkwardly divided electorate -- and the coalitions are shifting.
there's more nuance to sport than that. pre-puberty is not the same as college athletics. I'm not going to deep dive all the flawed logic around removing trans people from sport. internet search is there for you.
as to immigration... we're about to see what happens to the US food supply when you remove migrant workers from the equation. why do they never go after the employers, just the employees? (we both know the answer)
"first they came for..." resonates for a reason... this is the first line of a longer poem playing out.
>"I'm not going to deep dive all the flawed logic around removing trans people from sport. internet search is there for you."
I gave you paragraphs of my time. I'm trying to be open and honest about things that I honestly find difficult to discuss.
Again I completely understand and support the argument that gender is a social construct. Intersex and pre-puberty trans folks are deserving of dignity and respect. They are an absolutely minuscule part of society, and will always be a special case. When the vast, vast, vast, vast majority of trans athletes are trans women, I can understand when parents think it's not fair. Again, I think it's pretty clear that our sport segregation is about sex differences, not gender differences. There just aren't many Chris Mosier's out there.
>as to immigration... we're about to see what happens to the US food supply when you remove migrant workers from the equation. why do they never go after the employers, just the employees? (we both know the answer)
I fully agree, it's going to suck. If it helps us get to a sensible immigration system, it'll be a silver lining, but I'm not optimistic.
I am trans. I am scared. I am exhausted. do your own research.
I'll just say this... there aren't even vast vast vast vast numbers of trans athletes. Most states where this legislative is being pushed don't even have trans athletes. This is a wedge issue designed to create divison and it is working. It is designed to separate trans people and create hatred and it is working.
I'm in SF. I agree it's a wedge issue. My concern is that those of us on the left are losing. This entire thread started by being about my belief that we aren't falling into a fascist hole, even if we did elect a fascist again. We have real economic issues we are dealing with, neither party is actually dealing with them, and so the traditional parties are shifting in coalitions.
My hope is that we can find some middle way that gets us to a better place. I think the trans athlete issue is a distraction, but one I think it might want to reconsider, as it's mostly symbolic. I want trans folks to be treated with dignity and respect, and every day gender discrimination issues I see as non-negotiable.
I've been into investing for my entire adult life, and base my strategy mostly on John Neff's work on total return.
I have missed out on a lot of investments in the QE period, because many of them seem like "if this mid-level company becomes the biggest company in the world, you'll make a reasonable return," which has always seemed insane to me, but we've seen it happen again and again. I realize that we are probably in a place where insider trading is much more prevalent that we expect, and that the point of an IPO has been turned on it's head, but these type of potential blowups of high PE stocks is something I've never really come to terms with.
I will never stop being a regular at the local bar. I may switch to NA beers as I get older, but it is entirely important to me to engage in the rituals that predate history. Having a local bar/pub, generally walking distance away from a residence, where people gather and know each other (even if they are not friends) seems important to me.
This line of thinking has also nearly convinced my to go to some kind of church, but growing up with zealots as parents has pretty much nullified that. I only wish that universities took on the roll of a third place community center, offering/advertising free lectures to locals.
I think people attended those as sort of a nightly news service. Where intellectuals would talk about the days events. Now, with modern tech, people can do that from their own how with experts just by watching the news or youtube.
I really think the automobile and television are more to blame for the loneliness epidemic than we give credit for.
Yes, I notice the benefit of having the same faces around regularly at the $sport I do few times per week. You don’t say much more than hello and goodbye, but after a while you appreciate each other's company and really miss it when you can’t go.
This has been a constant back and forth for me. My personal project https://golfcourse.wiki was built on the idea that I wanted to make a wiki for golf nerds because nobody pays attention to 95% of fun golf courses because those courses don't have a marketing department in touch with social media.
I basically decided that using AI content would waste everyone's time. However, it's a real chicken-or-egg problem in content creation. Faking it to the point of project viability has been a real issue in the past (I remember the reddit founders talking about posting fake comments and posts from fake users to make it look like more people were using the product). AI is very tempting for something like this, especially when a lot of people just don't care.
So far I've stuck to my guns, and think that the key to a course wiki is absolutely having locals insight into these courses, because the nuance is massive. At the same time, I'm trying to find ways that I can reduced the friction for contributions, and AI may end up being one way to do that.
This is a really interesting conundrum. And I'm a golfer, so...
Of the top of my head I wonder if there's a way to have AI generate a summary from existing (on-line) information about a course with a very explicit "this is what AI says about this course" or some similar disclosure until you get 'real' local insight. No one could then say 'it's just AI slop', but you're still providing value as there's something about each course. As much as I personally have reservations about AI, I (personally, YMMV) am much more forgiving if you are explicit about what's AI and what's not and not trying to BS me.
This is a good suggestion, and I'll think long and hard about it. My biggest concern is that the type of people who would contribute to such a public project are the type of folks who would be offended at the use of AI in general. That concern, again, leads me back to the conundrum of what to do.
I've always insisted that if it is financially feasible, I'd want the app to become a 501(c)(3) or at least a B-Corp, maybe even sold to Wikimedia. Still, the number of people who contribute to the side vs the number who visit is somewhere in the range of 1:10,000 (if that) right now, so concern about offending contributors is non-trivial.
As it stands, I've generally gone to the courses' sites and just quoted what they have to say about their own course, but that really isn't what I want to do, even if it is generally informative. Unfortunately, there is rarely hole-by-hole information, which is the level of granularity I'm going for.
I'm shocked and dismayed that this book is not more prominent. The book opened my eyes not only to the fact that these companies would become enshitty, but why they weren't in the first place.
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