faceh
19hr ago
The Modal congressperson seems completely and utterly happy to divvy most of their time between complaining and campaigning. Complaining that somehow the other side is rendering them completely unable to act, and then occasionally proposing a bill or voting on something to make the case for re-electing them anyway.
Partisan gridlock no longer seems like a bug, but a feature as far as they're concerned. Actually passing a bill tends to mean people blame you for outcomes in the bill, and you have to write your bill or amendments to it, read the bills proposed by others, and have orderly, informed debates on them.
Why not pass off the writing part to think tanks, the reading part to your staff, and then you can just yell your list of talking points as the 'debate,' and then vote the way you were always going to vote all along.
faceh
1d ago
This is true of all free apps and sites, because the only way to monetize them is ad revenue, meaning doom-scrolling is always optimal. Incentives will out.
Yeah. And despite the fact that this is very clearly not making users happier, and is corrosive to attention spans. Then add in a gambling mechanic and you've got your user in a perfect little skinner box.
For me, it makes the choice easy. The only winning move is not to play. I will not install the gamified narcissism slop app. Any of them.
Anyone looking to be a tech innovator should try and invent a monetization method that provably enriches the users' life, or at least doesn't grind their attention span to dust for no gain.
But oh no, they don't want to solve actual hard problems when the easy solution of building a better Skinner Box to siphon money to yourself is right there. They want the status of being a hard-problem solver, though.
If something is important to you and provides value, go pay for the real thing. The 'internet' only sucks because it's free.
I only push back insofar as there's a common 'predatory' model that starts out making the thing free or reduced cost and very carefully implying that this will remain the case, but retain the right to alter the deal at any time. Then alter the deal once you sense that they've gotten invested enough that it'll be too painful to leave vs. shelling out money.
And even if you pay for the thing, they can and will shove ads into it anyway. Netflix did it.
This feels to me like a distinctly unfair practice, only maintained because its usually not worth complaining that a thing you were getting for free went away, since its not like it cost you much. But it kind of did. It cost all the time I could have put into another outlet, and it relied on one's general good faith belief that the free option would stick around unless the entire site/app went kaput.
Like, I've put a whole hell of a lot of time and thought into my Motte posts. I don't believe that I "own" the words on the site, but I would be pretty cheesed off if they started restricting my access to my own content and then stuck a paywall up if I wanted to access comments from longer than a month ago.
AND THEN said "hey its fine if you don't want to pay, we'll just start injecting ads into your comments and slapping a gambling mechanic on the Friday Fun thread unless you pony up.
I would immediately drop the site and never look back. But I WOULD put up some money to keep the site functional at the current level simply because I actually do value the community here at significantly greater than $0, which is something I can't say about many other forums.
faceh
1d ago
Am I the only one who thinks its facially insane that she purports to be so driven by pursuit of truth and LARPs a brave, crusading ace reporter meanwhile actively hiding/dodging basic information about herself that has no relevance aside from her own denial of reality?
After the whole story of how she got fired from The Washington Post, I could only conclude that she is deeply unwell.
I kinda wish we had a tipping function on this site (no, that's not actually a feature request) because this encapsulated the rant I would have made about VC much more concisely and with even sharper barbs than I would have used.
I'd just add on the "the demand for a story outweighs the demand for a technically sound assessment" point.
I hate how most modern Founders take the position that they're solving some pressing and very difficult problem facing the world. But if you point out that their proposed solution has some bad second order effects and might make things even worse you get a justification that boils down to "Well a real solution is to too hard to produce all at once so we expect to iterate towards that over time, meanwhile if we don't do this thing someone else will."
And I'm thinking "that sounds like the actual problem that needs solving, how to coordinate enough to mitigate second order effects while working towards a long term solution. Why aren't you working on THAT?"
Specifically thinking of Cluely right now. "We'll let you cheat your way through ANYTHING!"
"Okay, neat GPT wrapper. Can you see how this might cause some serious trust problems for both your customers and the people they interact with if you're encouraging them to be dishonest and hide their use of your product?"
"Not our issue."
"...Okay. I will immediately invest in any company which persuasively promises to render your company nonviable. That's the problem I want solved."
Like, the story is "VCs and Founders work together to coordinate capital towards creating a better world."
It really seems in practice "VCs throw money at any Founders who seem smart enough to turn that money into a viable product and capture a 10-100X ROI even if it makes the world worse in some less-tangible way." Any benefits to the consumer/society are a byproduct of this process. (Which may be enough of a justification, mind).
faceh
1d ago
I giggled. Yes, that's about the only impression you need.
Okay, maybe this one, too. (Very SFW, but will induce extreme cringe).
faceh
1d ago
Bless you.
Incidentally, I think the only appropriate outcome here is that Sam fights Hasan (in the ring) and winner gets the dog.
faceh
1d ago
I'd bet a lot of the time it's just a matter of individuals following their incentives.
Safest bet imaginable. Identify the incentives, I'll explain and predict the behavior.
faceh
1d ago
Oh man I could do a rant on the current state of VC too, although it'd be from a position of ignorance as to the on-the-ground-realities.
I remember Juicero.
I think that your point rings true, though. Founders these days apparently want to exit as big as possible as quickly as possible. Your initial product, your initial audience is really just there to springboard you to mainstream attention, where you grab as many new users as you can, crow about your growth metrics to you can bring in more investors, at which point you're either going to make it to an IPO or blow up b/c the stats were straight up faked or simply not maintainable.
Or get bought by one of the big players who sees you as potential competition, which still gives you a major payday.
Its weird that I've grown some grudging respect for Mark Zuckerberg. Despite hating what FB has become compared to what it was... he sticks around and owns his decisions, remains the face of the company, and makes BIG plays like paying a BILLION FACKING DOLLARS to poach top AI researchers. Also he seems to really love his wife and has stuck with her, no whiff of scandal, for over a decade now.
Indie games seem to be a counterargument to my point, the internet allows them to find and cultivate audiences and while some of them elevate to smash hits, they all thrive on being unique and playing to their specific strengths, and while you still see tons of copycatting, most of the time the ones that 'win' are truly imaginative.
faceh
1d ago
Amouranth is an apex predator in this environment, its more likely that most of her drama is planned out in advance, since I've yet to see her make any moves that would be very likely to result in legal consequences if they were faked. I.e. there's no 'cost' to faking this stuff, so they probably do fake it.
But I also would be willing to believe that she is instinctively willing to convert ANY source of drama, authentic or no, into further attention, and thus the dysfunction of her and those around her is actually adaptive?
faceh
1d ago
Being FAIR, we don't now how he acquired the collar in question, whether it was purchased by him on a card associated with him directly or not, or whether he was even the guy who made the decision to buy it.
Maybe it was a cash transaction inside a brick-and-mortar store.
Hence I put a little more weight on evidence that he is actively using it like a shock collar, and thus knows exactly what it in fact is. His 'winning' move would have been to pull the collar off the dog, on-camera, RIGHT after the incident, to show that it isn't a shock collar. Beyond that, proving a 'negative' is always fraught.
The fact that almost every site tends to converge towards the exact same general use modes has soured me on the idea of internet as innovation engine. i.e. "forced" competition with other sites for users would in theory lead to differentiation in features and, one would expect, aiming for different audiences and cultivating that niche.
But no, instead they all try to appeal as broadly as possible, discard the factors that made them unique and appealing, and constantly copy each other when they see anything that looks like it 'works' to draw and retain viewership.
Innovation seems to be driven by some other force somewhat external to the web, and the internet just enables rapid copying of a new, winning formula. Something something Zero to One is easier than One to One Thousand.
Elon bought Twitter and made some quick, semi-drastic changes to how things work and lo-and-behold virtually every site made very similar changes in short order. They could have done this stuff all along but something made them reluctant to step out in that direction.
Same thing happened with dating apps. Anything that might set one apart and drive people to it disappears, they all converge on the doomswiping model.
Similar trend seems to be arising with LLMs, honestly.
Now a gaming chat service (discord) is stuck being one of the default discussion and comment sections for the internet. Which its bad at, but at least it isn't fighting that role like reddit has been since its inception.
I admit I expected Discord to pass by the wayside for something new by now. I've been around for Ventrilo, teamspeak, Mumble, AIM, Skype, others. Discord is kind of bad at its function insofar as its a bloated piece of poorly-optimized software that has features 90% of users won't need or use. I just want an app that gives me voice and text support, a friends list, and a decently attractive and intuitive UI. Livestreaming/screen-sharing is neat too, I guess.
I wouldn't have called Discord as the one people land on and stay with, but as you say its now the default "forum" software too.
There are of course like 50 different messaging apps that people use.
Wake me up when (Eternal) September ends.
Its worse than just that, since the "he's clearly an animal abuser" crowd then pored over every single hour of footage involving Hasan and any dogs (there's gotta be thousands) to find other bits of evidence scattered about that sort of support the thesis that he is constantly shocking his dog.
People aren't just watching two different screens, they're able to custom-build their post-hoc interpretation of everything from scratch, if they want.
Straight up confirmation bias, rather than trying to find something that was convincingly exonerating/falsify their hypothesis. We know from the "WE DID IT, REDDIT!" days how well this usually goes.
Of course, the guy has gone about defending himself as sketchily as possible.
Applying some epistemic hygiene, I don't think the original video is strong proof of him actually shocking the dog. That said, the specific set of events that the camera did capture requires a more complex coincidence to explain than the pretty dead simple "the dog left its spot, he reached over to hit a button to correct the dog, the dog reacted to the correction" one.
Given what I know of Hasan, given the fact that the dog did have that particular style of collar on, given the aforementioned set of events, given the fact that the dog does seem trained to stay on that little bed for hours on end, I think it is more likely than not (call it 55%) that he shocked the dog on stream. How much weight you give that conclusion probably hinges on how much you care about streamer drama in general.
And I am willing to believe that Hasan is 'abusive' to the animal in that he cares way more for his own image than said dog's comfort and happiness. And I would judge him pretty harshly for that... but it doesn't budge my opinion much, given how low said opinion already is.
Everything about the situation is pretty well explained by the apparent motives of the people involved. There's nothing 'interesting' here its all just precisely what you'd expect from every single person who has touched it.
The Livestreamer world has been in utter shambles lately, if you ask me. If you are paying too much attention to it you're participating in a circus of self-harm, in my absolute honest opinion. There are some 'decent' people in there that you can give attention to but obviously its the nature of the whole platform to elevate some of the worst, most narcissistic, poorly-adjusted personalities to the fore and inflict their behavior on the viewers. And then rewards them for generating outrage, sometimes to the tune of millions of dollars, so of course they will follow the incentive gradient.
We're a LONG way from the wholesome days of "Twitch Plays Pokemon." The current state of it reads more as "Gen Z Jerry Springer Show." Not that I want to exonerate Millenials.
The 'good' people who make it big either get pulled into the mire of degeneracy or make their bag and escape. Likewise, you can usually tell the 'good' people as the ones who had their lives in order, solid relationships, and a tendency to avoid drama before they came in, and maintained those while they were active.
Hey, remember that time Ninja caught flack for stating his general refusal to co-stream with females other than his wife?
Given what just came to light with Mizkif (and he's far from the first) this just seemed like a smart move.
If you don't recognize any of these names, congratulations, you are winning at life, please avoid contaminating your brain by gaining awareness of their existence.
I think I said it before, probably YEARS ago, but if Twitch had made a serious effort to stick to its core model of "person records and broadcasts themselves as they play a video game on their computer" they'd be having an easier time avoiding scandal. That would also mean nuking gambling, prostitution ads (I'd literally say the policy should be "if you have any presence on an e-prostitution site where you appear to engage in any sex acts we ban you instantly"), political commentary, most 'real life' type streams, or active drama farming. When in doubt, make the rules more strict rather than less.
Of course, that would have risked them losing out to a competitor, such as Kick, with a more 'anything goes' ethos.
Sorry for the tangent. I really just despise that most of these people exist while having any kind of mainstream sway.
faceh
1d ago
Massive chunks of capital, diminished mental capacity, a poor grasp on how new technology works... and often a more trusting nature than average.
And they often have people in their lives who are capable of looking out for them, but the sheer volume of scam attempts means they likely cannot catch them all, and it only takes one or two to get through to do some real damage. And these are highly adapted organisms, your poor grandma isn't equipped to fight off the barrage.
Sad to say it, but when you have an overstuffed wealth Piñata like the U.S. boomer class, everyone, even their loved ones, is licking their chops to crack it open and snag as much of it as they can.
And being more direct, the domestic political world, both sides of the ideological divide, is rife with this. The benign grifters who use ragebait to maintain an audience, and the more slimy types running nonprofits, PACs, and indeed running whole election campaigns solely designed to get elderly people to donate large sums of money on the vague idea that it would help achieve some nice-sounding political objective.
And that leaves aside the actual politicians already in office.
Trump has managed to tap into it to great success, but there are small scale imitators everywhere.
faceh
2d ago
My sample size is biased by living in an area where people tend to move when they retire.
But the entire cruise industry, RV Industry, and the existence of Margaritaville resorts is upheld by the consumption spending of Boomers.
Most governmental retirement systems picked their age thresholds when the human population pyramid was fundamentally a lot different, work was far more likely to be physically arduous, the elderly were better incorporated into the social fabric of their families (which has changed due to a plethora of reasons) and end of life medical care was far more palliative.
Yeah.
Sheer reality is programs are designed around outdated assumptions and what few updates have occurred have been outpaced by social and technological change.
I also suspect (can't prove) that the healthcare industry has adapted to maximize the amount of money it squeezes from elderly patients whose quality of life cannot be recovered.
Like, not even a joke. End-of-life care can cost 10-12k a month around here, and its not like these people are receiving major surgeries or rare experimental drugs or something.
So there's a perverse(?) incentive to keep someone just barely alive for another month to run up the bill. Maybe this helps make up for the losses from various nonpayers, maybe not. Its almost certainly a profit center.
Look, I'm not the type to tell people they shouldn't 'enjoy' retirement. But this concept of "consume the most frivolous luxuries imaginable for a decade or two and then hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of medical care to extent the worst period of your life by 10%" is a very new innovation, and probably not ideal for social thriving at large. I do believe that one would be better off using some of those funds seeding their offspring for longer-term success.
But a whole aging-industrial complex has sprung up that is exceedingly efficient at separating the elderly from the wealth they acquired over their lives. Maybe this is just how Secular Capitalism processes the concept of mortality right now.
faceh
2d ago
Strictly speaking I don't believe that, but practically speaking that's where we're at.
faceh
3d ago
And to extend and further strain the analogy, the Devs probably don't care much as long as the whales continue to pay into the system to keep the game going, and average players who just want to play the game 'as intended' and not get stomped by whales or griefed by hackers and sweats have their experience degraded the most.
As @zeke5123a stated, its a knowledge problem, and the likely fix is to let people set up their own 'private servers' where they can retool the rules and mechanics more to their liking, and ban known cheaters and use social forces to try to shame and discourage pure meta builds in favor of a more overall enjoyable experience, and thus attract the types of players they prefer to join up.
Not without its problems, but sure beats forcing everyone to follow the same inherently flawed ruleset.
people will figure out how to MinMax
And on top of that, they will then teach all their friends how to minmax, and entire communities will become devoted to and dependent on minmaxxing according to strategies shared by the hivemind to keep the gravy train running for them all.
Effectively cargo cults that just happen to succeed at evoking their intended goal.
Its not that far removed from multiplayer game communities that are constantly creating the 'meta' builds and strategies for competition, then the Devs try to shake things up and patch the game's rules and within a couple days a new meta emerges, and game mechanics become completely secondary to whatever set of items and strategies gives players an edge under standard competitive conditions.
faceh
3d ago
You’re going to die.
Not if I can help it.
At least, I don't plan to die on the standard schedule, barring absolutely unavoidable risks.
Now I just got engaged (grammas ring!) and all of a sudden care again. She makes as much as me. We’ll both eventually make more (my American dream isn’t dead - just angrily smoldering).
So you may not know the lore that I've occasionally mentioned in here.
The last time I went on an extended vacation, 5 years ago, it was with my Girlfriend at the time. I proposed to her on that trip. And ultimately she broke up with me, cheated on me, and left two weeks before the wedding.
And after dealing with all the fallout from that, I've kinda been focused on getting myself stabilized and rendering myself safe from most financial shocks (like having the person you were splitting the bills with up and leave... after you bought a house together).
I'm happy to take a vacation, if I find someone else worth sharing it with. But I've got a healthy, sustainable routine, a good group of friends, and activities I enjoy (like motteposting) so she'd have to be WORTH all that.
faceh
3d ago
I think the market price for bread would drop to the point where a rat could probably afford a loaf or two from a few hours of whatever work rats can do.
And if she achieved THOSE kinds of efficiency gains, the very least we could do to reward her is make her a multi billionaire.
faceh
3d ago
Was I a parasite during covid? I worked for a company that did HVAC basically only for restaurants, and took a furlough because unemployment would be better than the very limited hours available.
We were all kinda parasites, except (contingent on which state you were in) there was no actual choice to do otherwise.
I actually worked through Covid, and it was a rough time money-wise but my boss ALSO saw fit to give me an 'unearned' bonus for sticking it out, which I have been eternally grateful for and have tried to pay back in terms of loyalty and continued productive work.
As with many things, I wonder if programs like the PPP loans (which got AGGRESSIVELY exploited) alerted many 'normal' people to how easy it is to squeeze benefits from the government if you're willing to lie a little. And so in the wake of Covid, as with many things, the standard for 'normal' behavior were shifted in ways that have NOT 'reverted' even as the rules returned to normal.
faceh
3d ago
"Participating in the economy such that your presence creates more 'value' (as defined by economic activity) than the value of the resources you consume."
At the 'firm' level, a nonproductive worker would be one who doesn't do enough useful work (as captured on the company's books) to exceed the amount they're paid.
Nonproductive isn't inherently bad, if for example someone runs off to live in the woods and just lives in a cabin with basic necessities.
But if you're nonproductive AND not paying your own way, your presence can be a net drag on said economy.
faceh
3d ago
Its a historical quirk that one wouldn't be aware of unless one had studied the Federalist/Anti-Federalist debates.
Which I have.
But the common parlance has changed.
faceh
3d ago
Simply put, I don't believe in any sort of Cosmic Scale or Ledger such that bad behavior is guaranteed to be punished. Bad people will 'get away with it' in many cases.
But there's a level of path dependence to bad behavior. If you like to commit acts of violence and terrorize others, you're much more likely to hang around violent people and thus you're far more likely to be victimized and/or killed by violence.
Similar if you like to commit theft, scam others, leach off people's goodwill, the sort of people you hang around are more likely to steal from you, scam you, and leach off of you. Which can be its own punishment.
Do things that damage others, at the very least you're risking that one of those people will flip out and come for you in a rage.
The risks you accept by engaging in antisocial, harmful conduct may or may not ever come back to bite you, but you are inviting those risks.
Consider the ending scene of the film It's a Wonderful Life. George Bailey lived a life of relative destitution thanks to making choices that kept him from achieving wealth and fame. And yet, by constantly sticking to his guns and doing the "good" thing, the thing that benefited others, he is a beloved figure and nobody hesitates to come to his aid at the drop of a hat.
Mr. Potter, in contrast, will probably still die rich, but very much alone.
There is no 'just world,' but the world we create is indeed defined by our actions, and just actions will tend to create more justice, if only in your local environment.
Yeah, I would agree that at this point the coverup is bigger than the 'crime.'
Its very interesting to me that Hasan immediately clocks that it will hurt his status if people realize he's shocking his dog as a training tool, but for some reason it never occurred to him not to use a dog as a prop in the first place.
He generally just comes across as a control freak (part and parcel with Narcissism) both for wanting his dog to be so strictly trained as to sit quietly in the backdrop of his stream, and for wanting everybody to believe he's NOT a control freak who would strictly train his dog to sit quietly in the backdrop. To the point where he's clearly pressuring/threatening others to bolster his position.
Noticing that this is the Orwellian sort of tactics that most leftist governments implement when they have power well, that's an exercise for the reader.
I daresay Mr. Piker is behaving Stalin-esque. He'd probably be having anyone who disagreed with his lie purged if he could.
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