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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   3691 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 7, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Meta-question: why is comment deletion allowed on this forum? And why are users who continually abuse this functionality not warned and then banned? In the most charitable case this behavior is extremely annoying and disrupts on-going discussions and makes historical discussions hard to follow.

People are allowed to delete comments because they might think better of what they said, or because they fear they revealed to much personal information.

We do, and will, warn and ban people who abuse it.

I would be extremely uncomfortable posting on a site where I knew I couldnt edit or delete the post. I post often on reddit and occassionally delete them within minutes. Not because I'm trolling, but because its only after posting that I find it's unfunny or mistaken.

Has anyone else noticed Twitter being really buggy since Elon Musk took over? It's worse than Facebook Messenger. For example, it has had trouble loading images for the last day. I don't get why people have concluded that you can fire all these people and have everything be fine. The content moderation is better, but Twitter as a piece of software is obviously much worse now.

I'm not saying that means firing those people was a bad idea. Maybe having software work perfectly is not worth the cost, and the stock market's reaction to the mass layoffs at FAANG suggests they weren't pulling their weight. But that brings me to a related question. Why was it so common up until recently for people to say that, despite the very high salaries of software engineers in California, they were actually very underpaid given the amount they made for their employers? This now appears not to be even close to true. Why did people think this? Was it just some dumb profit divided by headcount calculation?

I don't get why people have concluded that you can fire all these people and have everything be fine.

Precisely because I haven't seen those bugs. I have seen people say that they experience a bunch of bugs and I suppose I believe them, but the app seems to just work fine.

Was it just some dumb profit divided by headcount calculation?

It's precisely this because many leftists think the worker is entitled to most if not all the profits generated from their labor.

Okay, to be more fair, I think some people actually did some more in-depth analysis or had a more nuanced take. For an extremely naive example, they hire a software engineer at $200,000 to make some optimization on their servers that cuts costs of those servers by 10%, and if the company was spending $20 million on servers that's $2,000,000 saved. That example is probably not close to reality though, and I think people were thinking of software engineers in those FAANG companies, in which the software product is the driver of profits.

But it becomes extremely difficult to properly attribute what percentage of a single person's work is responsible for the success/profits of a product, especially when you have tens or hundreds of people working on it. And it's not just the software, there are also other aspects of business such as sales and marketing. Think of how many Google products fail due to shoddy marketing, or how many Google Engineers leave to start their own products/companies and fail (because while they might be technically talented, they lack people management ability for a CEO role or lack the sales/marketing ability to drive consumers to their product).

If it was so easy to generate millions in profit, why don't they A) Start their own business or B) successfully negotiate a higher salary? You could say this was their attempt to create some kind of public awareness/narrative to give a higher chance of them succeeding in option. I also think part of this mentality is driven by hatred for the rich, which is hilarious because as you pointed out, those software engineers are rich, earning the top 1% of income in the United States. But if there is someone richer, I guess you can go hate the richer guy first. Being a millionaire is okay now as long as there are billionaires to hate on.

There's also another perspective to consider. Most software engineers may be costing FAANG money, not generating profit for FAANG. They simply pay those software engineers a high enough salary that they are happy to work at those companies and don't leave to create competing products or go work for their competitors. That's why it was so easy for these companies to let go of people when profits went down because they weren't that valuable to the company. Think of how many "A Day in the Life of a Software Engineer" videos used to come out a few years ago and they showed very little of how much work they do and more on how many free smoothies they can get at the snack bar. (One could argue this is marketing to make the life at the company look better, or it was only focused on the positive aspects of the company). And some people claimed to work only 10 hours a week while being paid mid-high 6 figure salaries, and even more people that were working 2 remote software engineering jobs at the same time. These people are likely not working on the critical products/features that would be the main revenue drivers for the company.

This is true of a lot of people though. Anyone working with large amounts of data and money have this large effect on profits through their labour.

Does an IRS worker that prevents ten million in tax fraud every year deserve 200k a year? I feel like should have a lot to do with how replaceable the labour is and some people in SWE (especially at FAANGS) have gotten fairly overconfident in exactly how irreplaceable or necessary they are on an individual level.

One can of course turn this around and say that some people in other sectors are very underpaid for the very valuable and hard to replace labour they do.

Yup, anyone with a basic knowledge of economics would understand why the average salaries are the average salary for a particular profession.

I wonder how much of it is a complete lack of knowledge or misunderstanding of the labor market versus fully well understanding how they work but then choosing to argue against the premises/reality that created those systems in the first place and wanting to replace it with something else.

Having an effect on profits is not the same as solely generating that profit. Let's say you have a small business that generates widgets generating revenue of $300,000 per year, and it has two employees who operate a machine to make the widgets. If either employee or the machine stops working, no widgets get made and the profits go to zero. So each employee and the machine can claim that 100% of the profits depends on its role. But that can't mean that each employee is worth $300,000 a year. If each employee were paid $300,000 a year and the machine were rented at $300,000, the company would be losing $600,000 a year. If the machine costs say $100,000 a year to rent, then each employee can only be paid $100,000 a year. So an employee who can correctly say that $300,000 of revenue depends on their work is only worth $100,000. More complicated processes with more employees would result in starker differences between these two figures.

I'm sure there's some capacitor somewhere in some multi-million dollar machine that would stop it from working if it failed, but that doesn't mean the capacitor could possibly be worth more than a few dollars, because there are many other components like it and if it did cost more than that, the machine could never have been built in the first place.

That is what I'm saying, it depends on the value of the process and the replaceability of a particular part/person (and to a lesser extent the value add of the person). The tech worker depends on their position in a process/system just as much as the IRS analyst to generate value but one is harder to replace than the other.

Only... Sometimes it other things disrupt this. Collective bargaining (and control over labour supply) and employers with employees in vulnerable positions are common examples, or people that are just too complacent/risk averse to effectively negotiate. People collectively overvaluing something is common as well.

I believe that people in tech (both employees and their employers) have been overestimating their value and replaceability/redundancy. There are still plenty of people in tech that actually are valuable and hard to replace and many of the people that are replaced are needed in other parts of the economy, but they might not command as high wages.

In the specific case of software engineer layoffs, replaceability isn't the issue. They weren't replaced. Their employers got rid of their positions and expected profits went up, which meant that whatever they were doing wasn't producing enough to pay their salaries. So, their mistake was not just to think they were irreplaceable, nor was it to neglect that other employees and capital were needed for them to their jobs.

They must not have understood that what they were doing was not nearly as valuable as they thought.

I agree.

I believe that people in tech (both employees and their employers) have been overestimating their value and replaceability/redundancy.

Oh, this reminds me of a dumb take I saw on the system adminstrator subreddit, where several people argued (and everyone else agreed) that, as a system admin, they were worth whatever the lost revenue would be if they didn't do their jobs, which, as they pointed out, was basically all of it. Thinking about this for two seconds should reveal why this makes no sense.

There are lots of employees doing work upon which the same revenue depends. They obviously can't all be paid out of that same revenue. The value added by each step in a process cannot be equal to the total value created by the entire process, even though stopping any given step would destroy all value.

To expand on your example, the software engineer that saves the company $2,000,000 cannot do that without the system on which they're working being built in the first place. Someone had to make that investment, and they did so with the expectation that there would be optimizations that could be paid for with $200,000. If the resulting profits weren't expected, they would have invested in something else.

If it was so easy to generate millions in profit, why don't they A) Start their own business or B) successfully negotiate a higher salary?

You could argue that their employers have monopolies.

There's also another perspective to consider. Most software engineers may be costing FAANG money, not generating profit for FAANG. They simply pay those software engineers a high enough salary that they are happy to work at those companies and don't leave to create competing products or go work for their competitors. That's why it was so easy for these companies to let go of people when profits went down because they weren't that valuable to the company.

Something would have to have changed such that the risk of their starting competitors had gone down.

And some people claimed to work only 10 hours a week while being paid mid-high 6 figure salaries, and even more people that were working 2 remote software engineering jobs at the same time.

It's anecdotal, but I do remember reading a comment somewhere that, at the height of the the lockdowns, expectations had gone out the window and the culture had become one of just making sure everyone's mental health was good. No one was put under any pressure at all to get anything done. It's hard to believe that was common though.

In economics the problem of how to value various actors in a cooperative game is solved by the Shapley Value. In order to calculate it, one needs the profit the company generated if it employed a only certain subset of employees, for every subset. So if it employs 1 sysadmin, 1 rockstar programmer, 2 average programmers, and 2 secretaries, one needs to consider 2^(1+1+2+2)=64 possibilities.

What if it's zero for everything but the set of all employees?

Clearly the profits, if one doesn't take into account risk or replacibility, should be divided equally. It is a simplified model.

Sometimes I see all the tweets on my feed become blank tweets dated 01/01/1980, but that's the only bug I've seen.

The real issue that needs fixing is onlyfans thot follow spamming bots.

You can't see threads anymore without being logged in, which I assume is a load shedding measure to keep the servers from falling over.

Not sure that I'd call that a "bug" to be "noticed". Didn't Musk publicly announce it, saying that they were finally fighting back against scraper bots, or something?

Scrapers can't log in? I can still use nitter.

It adds a barrier and allows more targeted rate limiting, I guess? The controversy was a while ago, and I didn't pay much attention at the time.

Edit: I feel like I've also seen Nitter display isolated posts the same way Twitter does.

User hostile design like "you have to log in to see this" is really common in the social media site space, it's not just Twitter. Instagram does it, Pinterest does it, etc. I assume that it has something to do with wanting to show advertisers "look we have this many users" so that they can demand higher prices for ads, but I don't actually know for sure.

There must have been a reason Twitter didn't do it previously.

Sure. But whatever the reason they didn't do it previously, they are now. It seems more likely to me that they are doing so because they hope to capture whatever value other social media platforms find in forcing logins, rather than they are trying to prop up failing infrastructure.

I think it’s something more substantive than that. In particular, a logged-out lurker is far less valuable than a user. Users are able to engage, create content, drive interactions, and yield far more data for the website to track. So if a lurker is led to sign up for an account because of a logout wall, even if that lurker is initially only intending on using that account to continue to lurk, it’s very likely that they’ll end up engaging with the site in some meaningful way. Even just liking posts gives the site owner a ton of data that can be used to target ads.

(An anecdotal datapoint: this account of mine on The Motte was originally only intended to allow me to lurk more effectively and view the most recent comments across subthreads, a feature forbidden to non-logged-in lurkers. But sure enough, I ended up posting here (albeit very rarely). That’s the sort of behavior that Twitter is trying to capture, but on a far more massive scale.)

Yeah, the other issue is that bots have become a lot worse, though I can't clearly connect that to anything Musk has done. The biggest issues for me are crypto scammers and people who post irrelevant videos as replies. My best guess is that this is actually due to my following Vitalik Buterin.

I've seen sponsored ads (with the "ad" tag) for individual OnlyFans thots. I've also seen ads for "Bubbling" AI services like it's 2014 4chan. I love the site, but it's going to die.

Twitter has worked just fine for me since the purchase, barring the issues from dumb decision making like the rate limiting and so on. I can't say the actual experience of using the site is any worse overall, so I draw the exact opposite conclusion, that the aggressive culling of the employees was warranted.

Weird, I've had near constant issues. It's probably the buggiest app I use on a regular basis.

I don't use the app, just the mobile site, and it works about the same as ever.

The app is indeed weirdly buggy. But it has always been that way for some reason

I've encountered bugs on Twitter since Elon took over, including images not loading a couple days ago IIRC, but I haven't noticed Twitter being worse in this regard since Elon took over. Maybe there are some actual stats on this, but my experience of Twitter pre-Elon was that we would get various minor outages and/or weird nagging issues every few months that would usually take a day to get fixed, and I haven't noticed this rate changing post-Elon.

The only significant QOL issue I've noticed is the enforcement of the official Twitter app on Android, which also does an absolutely awful job at maintaining your position on the timeline. The amount of times I've seen a Tweet and wanted to look at it more carefully, only to have it forever lost to the abyss because the Twitter app decided to invisibly refresh my feed and force me to jump to the top is uncountable, and this severely negatively affects my Twitter experience.

This is now the third day of images not loading for me.

How do people feel about white space in web design?

There has been this ongoing trend of massive amounts of white space, where it's basically a single sentence per screen. I find the experience awful on desktop. But only mildly annoying on mobile.

I'm also trying to find professional web design blogs or posts that point out how annoying this trend is. Instead all designers seem to have nothing but nice things to say about white space. Rather than making me think I'm wrong for going against all designers I instead just think the whole profession is wrong.

Quoting works published in years 1996 and 1929, Wikipedia says:

Traditional line-length research, limited to print-based text, gave a variety of results, but generally for printed text it is widely accepted that line lengths fall between 45 and 75 characters per line (cpl), though the ideal is 66 cpl (including letters and spaces). For conventional books, line lengths tend to be 30 times the size of the type, but between 20 and 40 times is considered acceptable (e. g., 30 characters × 10-pt font = 300-pt line). Early studies considered line lengths of 59–97 mm (about 57 cpl) optimum for 10-point font. For printed works with multiple columns, 40–50 cpl is often better. For justified, English-language text, the minimum number of characters per line is 40; anything less than 38–40 characters often results in splotches of white spaces (or rivers) or too many hyphenations in the block of text. Longer lines (85–90 cpl) may be acceptable for discontinuous text such as in bibliographies or footnotes, but for continuous text lines with more than 80 characters may be too long. Short text, such as ragged marginal notes, may be as little as 12–15 characters per line.

Desktop browsers generally set the default text size at 16 pixels, leading to a "widely accepted" line length of 720–1200 pixels, or around half of the width of a standard 1920×1080 screen. Presumably, web designers think that more people would be annoyed by extremely long lines of text than by large expanses of empty space.

On my own desktop computer, I typically browse the Internet using a half-width 960×1080 window rather than a full-width 1920×1080 window. Alternatively, you can buy a monitor that can be rotated into 1080×1920 portrait orientation.

This problem was solved at least three hundred years ago by newspaper publishers when they started printing multiple columns on a single page.

Everything should be horizontally expanded to fit its container at all times. Empty space is wasted space.

This is probably a symptom of the ongoing "app-ification" of webpages, whereby mobile and desktop layouts are merging increasingly to make less work for the designers and maintainers. The mass amounts of white space are usually there because that space doesn't exist on portrait mobile screens.

I don't think that's true, because then the eye needs to track back and forth over a further distance at line breaks. It's why Bibles and newspapers (which use all their spaces) break up the text into columns.

Everything should be horizontally expanded to fit its container at all times.

There are some legitimate concerns about readability and column width on widescreen monitors. The old school 80 column wide text terminal is a decent width, but a bit wider is fine too. That said, there are definitely designer-driven layouts that are way too narrow, but manually adjusting my browser window would be a PITA to do frequently.

Some width limit is reasonable, although maybe allowing sites to specify it might have been a poor design choice.

manually adjusting my browser window would be a PITA to do frequently.

I don't see how you would need to do it frequently. In the glorious world where every site fills your browser window, you would set your browser width once and then it would be correct for every site you visited.

Not really, no. For a multi-column design that has several chunks of content, I want them all at the same time filling my screen. For a single-column website like an article or a book, I prefer the text filling no more than 50% of my screen so that I do not forget where the beginning of the line was by the time I've gotten to the end of it.

I think you've missed part of the point, which is that in the ideal world we wouldn't have disparate setups like that. Every site would just be a single column, taking up the whole browser, and you size the browser accordingly (once).

But if I want half-monitor-width columns of text, do I size my browser to half a screen (I've done this before)? When I want to view images, videos, or even tabular data (calendars, for example) though, I frequently want full-screen, widescreen presentation. The "multi-media" nature of web pages makes this difficult generally.

Although, I think the web would have developed very differently if the browser were allowed to specify maximum column width like it can text sizes or accessibility features. Not certain if that'd be better (light/dark theming is only now starting to work tolerably), but certainly different.

But a single column is not always the best presentation.

I disagree with that. I think it is the best.

The problem is that text isn't the only thing we view in a browser. When I view a video or just an image, I often - usually - want that taking up a lot of width. And it's not always a matter of just maximizing it, since I might want it to take up 70% of my monitor width rather than 100%, while I want 30% of my monitor width when reading. Ideally, I could just keep my browser at 70% width, and the text would take up 3/7 of the browser width when I read.

I personally think there should be some sort of default "text width" setting in browsers that force text to start wrapping if it goes beyond a certain width in terms of characters/percentage/pixels/units, much like how we can set a minimum font size in our browser.

There has been this ongoing trend of massive amounts of white space, where it's basically a single sentence per screen. I find the experience awful on desktop. But only mildly annoying on mobile.

My theory is that this is just the struggle between the Berners-Lee Web (a vast network of intellectual interaction) and the Consumer Web (a powerful tool for buying and selling). (Social media arguably sits between these, as it is primarily concerned with buying and selling human interactions.) Whitespace is mayonnaise: it helps you swallow whatever you're being fed. Phones (and to a lesser degree, tablets) are not Berners-Lee devices; they are consumption devices, which may explain why you find web mayo more palatable when you're on your phone.

I like this description, it's also one of myain complaints when being asked to implement that type of design. It's vacuous and looks best when there is very little content.

It's an anti-content type of design.

I don't understand this. I can consume better if the information is there. If I have to click and scroll to find it, I will consume less of it. Whitespace isn't mayonaise, it's the two thirds of empty space in the chip back or the child-safe lid on the medication bottle.

or two thirds of air nitrogen in pack of chips

It's awful. I'm sick and tired of web pages which are about two inches wide on my 24" monitor. Like @Astranagant said, a lot of this is because stuff increasingly gets designed to fit the vastly inferior capabilities of phones. The justification about reading comfort is weak nonsense, imo. I have a much easier time reading text all the way across my monitor than in a tiny column. And really, if some people prefer small columns of text then the right thing to do is let them adjust their browser width to fit their desires. But when the text is artificially limited, I can't expand it to fit my preference.

And as you have noted, basically the entire design profession is dead ass wrong about this. But unfortunately, that's not too surprising. UI design in software is absolute garbage compared to 20 years ago. Everyone is chasing the same stupid trends, or worse, is trying to optimize everything to squeeze out one more marginal user (without any regard for the experience of the users they already have). There's very little quality software interface design being done these days.

But when the text is artificially limited, I can't expand it to fit my preference.

You can modify the CSS—by right-clicking and choosing "Inspect", or by using a browser extension like Stylus.

I hate it with a burning passion. (This is, unironically, what a website should look like: https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/) I guess they want things to look nice and clean, but for practical reasons, I want as much information to fit on the screen at one time as possible. I can understand limiting clutter, but they have gone way too far. I don't like clicking through menus, especially if I don't know where to find what I'm looking for, and I really really don't like scrolling.

For the same reason, I abhor the trend of making things too big. I really don't like that if I open YouTube on my 27" monitor, I can only see 8 videos at a time (or just 1 or 2 on my Pixel 6 XL). My bank used to have a nice website that they ruined by replacing with the design from their app. I have five accounts and only two fit on the screen because they're using 24 point font with huge chunks of white space between them. They can't fit 5 numbers on a 312 square inch screen! I'm seriously considering switching banks over it and I only hesitate because the others will probably do the same.

I have to resist going on a rant about this, so I'll just conclude by saying I also dislike the trend of replacing text with symbols that I have to decode, and by saying that if God is just, there is a special place in hell for whoever is responsible for pushing this.

http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ is my preference. I don't care if my screen fits a lot of information when it doesn't fit into my eye focus.

No, I much prefer the other one. This one has a narrow column that wastes two thirds of my screen. That's the main problem with modern websites.

What he referred to as "a grotesque pile of shit" was perfectly fine. Text should hit the side of the browser. It should be small and packed together.

As for line width, the priority in my view should be not wasting space so that less scrolling has to be done. I don't have any trouble tracking my eye back to the left side of the screen, but for those who do, maybe they can use multiple columns. But only using a narrow column is not good.

I don't care if my screen fits a lot of information when it doesn't fit into my eye focus.

What do you mean?

I mean it's easier for me to scroll down than scroll left to right and back to left with my eyes. I don't get the "use ALL of my screen" demands, especially as screens only ever get bigger. Different physical widths have different purposes.

It seems obviously easier to move your eyes than to use a scroll wheel.

I’m not so sure. Mostly because of the failure mode I observe when tired or otherwise impaired, where my eyes lose the line on wrapping around. I suspect that correlates with line width and especially with text density.

And yet it is not, in my case. Perhaps I am but a young grasshopper and will speak differently once I acquire mouse-related hand fatigue.

motherfuckingwebsite.com is unironically better than 95% of sites on the Internet today. I know that the author is like "this is satire", but I would far rather read that website than the vast majority of what people put out.

Agreed, except for the font.

For some reason I hadn’t seen that site before.

Not only was there good information density screenwise, it practically gave me a jumpscare by how quickly it loaded.

I find it very sad that websites load more slowly than they did 30 years ago or whenever it was when my parents first got high speed internet.

Chrome on Android is kind enough to save me from the worst of it by suggesting I enable reader mode, though I wish it was possible to easily force it like on Safari (without fiddling with flags).

I prefer density quite heavily, and all the times I notice white space (selection bias, I know), it only detracts from my experience.

It's awful. We truly live in a dark (or too bright) time.

Consider New Reddit:

  • This is the default. I'm only getting 2 posts per massive browser screen. After browsing a bit, it does fill some of that space with a "recently viewed" list, but the massive bars on the side are still there. I'm convinced these design choices have dumbed down participation on reddit such that people now only posts pics and simple questions rather than longer discussions.
  • This is if you change it to "Classic" view, but that still only shows 7 posts compared to old reddit 's 13. These aren't so bad. The whitespace would be filled by longer post titles, so it doesn't feel like a waste. Personal preference, but I still think old reddit is much cleaner, despite displaying more.
  • This is "Compact" - dropping the thumbnails, shrinking even further, and new reddit still only gets 12 posts on screen. In an effort to shrink things, they've moved the comment button way off to the right, which looks awkward when the post title is short. And for what? Now I have to trace along that whitespace with my eyes to find the comment info.

Substack is even worse:

  • Just look at this shit! We are approaching 80% whitespace here, and half of it is Substack pushing their stupid twitter clone.
  • This page should be the home screen instead, and it's still half blank.
  • Another sin: If you accidentally hover over a username, it pops up a giant box like this full of yet more whitespace, covering your view of what you were looking at. On mobile, this happens if you thumb the screen to scroll down and accidentally press anywhere near a name.

Can anyone familiar with design explain why we can't have stuff like the old slatestarcodex blog back? It worked just fine on mobile. If the text is too small, you just pinch zoom the screen a bit.

This is a website I built, and mostly designed:

https://www.mpsbrettonwoods.org/

My disdain for empty space has probably created the opposite problem of things being too cramped. But the audience is monetary economists. The kind of people that read books, and write books.

A book is nothing but a wall of text and it's a design that has endured for hundreds of years. I think as long as a design isn't more dense than a book then it's fine.

I don't think things are too cramped at all and I would prefer even less white space. I don't even like the big title page that makes you have to scroll down to where the content starts. I would rather have the "It is our pleasure ..." start the top left of the page, with a narrower top banner.

I think Gwern probably one of the best designed websites I've ever seen, though I'd be tempted to reduce the font size a bit.

I "mostly designed" it. I did operate on concessions to other parties, and things that "look good" that "most website do" are hard to argue against.

Part of my original question is looking for a design group that says "obscene amounts of white space is stupid" because I constantly have to have these arguments.

Gwern's website is closer to my preference.

This is the kind of design I'd argue against:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=beck+and+stone&atb=v390-1&ia=web

The throughlink to a search engine is intentional. Please don't direct link.

It's 80% white space if you only count wide open space. It's more like 95% or more when you consider how much space there is around everything. For example, look at the ridiculously large orange shape around the New note button. There's no reason for it to be that big. There's no reason for the items on the menu above it to be spaced so far apart.

I agree the old Slate Star Codex website was a really well designed.

I was trying to convince some devs at an up-and-coming twitter-esque platform to do away with whitespace and their only argument was that people viewing on a wider screen don't want an entire sentence to span across horizontally. So they kept their design, where on even a regular desktop 50% of the website is white space.

I countered with the fact that no one needs to maximize their browser to fill the entire width of their monitor.. and alternatively they can just as easily zoom in.

It seems as though, either for monetary reasons tied to continued engagement, or possibly genuine preference from enough people, the extra-white-space design is here to stay for a bit longer.

If it wasn't obvious I'm not a fan of it. But for a website that is following the numbers, we can see that extra whitespace is beyond an experimental stage as the style has been, and continues to be, adopted by many websites.

I was trying to convince some devs at an up-and-coming twitter-esque platform to do away with whitespace and their only argument was that people viewing on a wider screen don't want an entire sentence to span across horizontally.

I wish that these people would get it into their heads that some people do, in fact, want that. I want it very badly! But nobody will give it to me, and it drives me crazy.

I find the experience awful on desktop. But only mildly annoying on mobile.

Well yeah, that's because it's all designed mobile-first. It's probably also worth noting that sure, people have very high resolution screens now, but if they're over the age of 20 they'll probably be running them at 125 or 150% scaling (if they're over 50 and somehow know enough to touch the slider, even 200%, though other OS UI elements start going fucky at that scaling factor). So your 1920x1080 display at 13" is closer to the old 1366x768 after that scaling.

Also, whitespace provides a clear space where users aren't expecting buttons to be (since mobile design in general necessitates the implicit understanding that if you want to interact with a row, you tap the row- there really isn't space for '90s-style buttons and drop shadows). If you present a list to a user on a phone of information (and this isn't in the "I already know what's in this playlist" sense), you need to provide a place for their non-transparent thumb or fingers to scroll the screen so they can scan the page. Usually this is to the right of the text, but can be placed to the left as well for languages whose words start on the right of the page, if we care about them (and designers are typically, ideologically-speaking, the type of people who will even if they never get any users that do).

Whitespace also provides a space for menus to expand into. For the same reasons as the above (very limited real estate), you can't have a left-side menu any more because if you do you're intruding on the precious space the user has to usefully navigate your app (and you can't have a top-side/bottom-side one because good luck fitting more than 2 words side by side big enough for a user's fat finger to press... and if you failed to impress that you could scroll that menu the functionality to the right might as well not exist). While having whitespace doesn't solve this, it does mean that you can do the cool animations that don't force a total context switch away from the list you were browsing (by showing a sliver of it on the right side, usually).

And you can't go for columns of text unless it's exploring a parent-child relationship (best example being Mail apps), because again, you've run into the "I'm scrolling something I want to read and now my hands are in the way" problem, since 2 columns of text covering half the screen means you're barely reading either of them.

Oh, and even if your users' monitors are big, and they're still using reasonable scaling factors, the website still has to be responsive if it's resized- the cheapest way to do that is to just be in mobile mode always. Besides, if the users all of a sudden snaps your site to the side of the screen, even though the means of scrolling doesn't block the screen itself, the viewport has shrunk so much that you might as well be on a mobile device now anyway.

I don't think the trend is going away until mobile VT-100s stop being the dominant way people use the Web, and as such and I think this problem is going to be with us for a long, long time. (Or until we have an AI that just magically desktopifies the site so you don't have to spend money maintaining two versions, but y'know.)

there really isn't space for '90s-style buttons and drop shadows

There is.

Well yeah, that's because it's all designed mobile-first.

I frequently play an online game which is desktop-first (they kinda partially support mobile, but it renders awfully), but it looks to me that it shares many flaws. One data point.

There is.

There's barely space on a mobile device to show 2 buttons with some text side by side on screen at the same time. Maybe 3 can fit comfortably if you're using a phablet. The border is taking up valuable space that you sometimes can't afford to go without should the button's text actually need to be that long... and sometimes that is indeed the case.

I frequently play an online game which is desktop-first (they kinda partially support, but it renders awfully), but it looks to me that it shares many flaws.

The problem with the minimalist mobile design philosophy is that it leaks into places it doesn't belong. There's really no reason that, say, the modern Hitman series of games needs to be all Metro'd up like MS wanted Windows 8 to be, and yet... it is.

Also, it's very cheap to do- you just need to set the color of the box and be done, no color matching the shadows, no problems with color when the button is pressed in, etc. Hell, half the time you just color the text or place the icon and expect the user to guess that it's even a button in the first place; sure, design languages are slowly moving away from that shit because... it's awful, but it's even less work than placing a button is.

I'm not saying discoverability in flat UIs isn't plain awful, because it absolutely is, but given the constraints of the hardware and interface (fat fingers and hand) to work with I'm not that surprised this kind of design is what the industry moved towards. Now if only they'd make it easier for me to obviously show that yes, there's more to this scroll view other than "just hope the text is cut off in a manner that suggests you should scroll down"...

there really isn't space for '90s-style buttons and drop shadows

My greatest complaint for modern UI is that there absolutely is space for 1 pixel of grey on two sides of every button. Modern designers wrongly choose to make "flat" buttons that you can't always tell are buttons.

We've regressed from clear consistent ways to show what can be interacted with to a flat obscure aesthetic.

Also, related: round userpics, which waste space. Cut corners aren't filled with any content. (could be buttons or indicators, at least) I abhor modern design. We probably would have much better designs if we had small screens like in past.

Maybe a part of problem is companies want to increase women representation, and women prefer doing design/UI/UX so users have to view needless frequent redesigns.

round userpics, which waste space.

I'm going to defend this a little bit, too. If a profile picture is designed to show one's face, having it be a circle makes sense since that's how faces are generally shaped. With a square box, you're also showing your shoulders in the picture and it's a little more awkward to get the picture framed just right.

Of course, that's assuming you'd prefer to share your face and use your real name, something generally more conducive to the goals of female users than their male counterparts. It is absolutely more inconvenient to have to fit a more generic square picture into a round hole.

If user wants circle, they can replace corners of their userpic with white/gray/whatever. This is always available. But users wishing for square are denied choice by designers. Sometimes website forcefully changes existing square userpic to circle, and the pictures were never framed for circle.

Human faces are more oval than round. Ovals were pretty popular in 19th century (also, it saves expensive silver in mirrors and pictures). I remember oval photos of my classmates in pre-internet time. Handsome male faces look more like rectangle than oval gigachad.jpg

showing your shoulders in the picture

even if it, what is the problem here? Why showing Adam's apple is good but shoulders are a no-no?

little more awkward to get the picture framed just right.

AFAIK none of smartphones/cameras have circular frames for shooting pictures for a circular userpic.

Is there anything very good for human health that does not trace its benefit to the “ancestral” human environment? Eg, heat and cold stress clearly relate back to original human environmental conditions; fasting; walking

I have some examples in mind, but it would help if you were a bit more specific.

I must be misunderstanding the question because there are obviously a lot. Vaccines, antibiotics, various surgeries, etc. Do you mean natural remedies? Cleaning a wound with alcohol? Bandages? Splints? Are those too artificial?

If you're not asking about treatments, I could say variolation. Shoes? Clothing? Unless you mean natural preventative treatments. Staying in the shade?

There's your avatar for one, coffee isn't a widespread given in the way that temperature, sustenance, and movement is/was. Arguably any drug (in this case medicine) would fall into this category, as well as anything that wasn't universal to our ancestors. But if "time-efficient" is considered, which would trace back, then there really isn't anything aside from more opportunity for a happier life. But even so, this would arguably fall into "better for human health" which also connects back and doesn't count.

Is it just me, or is Substack's UI incredibly annoying?

Apparently Substack desperately wants me to read every post in my email inbox. I do not want to read posts in my email inbox. I want to read them on the website. Nevertheless, every time I open a post in Substack, it does the thing where it starts dimming the page as soon as I scroll down to try and read something, which I find distracting, so I have to scroll down further to get to the box where they try to get my email, then click to dismiss it. Doesn't seem to matter if I've logged in or do give the email address, it still prompts me every time. Naturally, every search result about this on every search engine I've tried is about blocking the emails or users.

What I'd like it to do is, let me log in to an account on their site, then see an RSS-reader-like list of recent posts by every writer I follow in time order. Then, if I'm logged in, let me read a post with no popups or distractions, and if I open a post from somewhere else from a writer I don't follow, give me a button or something to click to follow them too. It actually appears that it's supposed to work like that, but it doesn't.

Instead, when I log in by email, as it seems to want you to do, and follow several writers, there doesn't seem to be a way to see things they've recently written. There's a page for that, called "inbox" for some reason, but it only shows content from one writer. "Home" mostly shows recent short posts by people I don't follow and don't care about, and I have no idea by what criteria it selects them. There's also a "reads" section in "profile" but it claims I'm not subscribed to anything. I can't find anything that even lists what I've subscribed to, but there's like 3 places where it tries to get me to read random content by people I haven't subscribed to. How is it this terrible? Has Substack also been taken over by the enshittification trend before it even really got going? I just want to read interesting effortposts in peace.

I also find the dimming and scrolling to close the pop up very annoying. I would rather have a regular pop up I could reflexively close. Instead, I see the dimming, scroll further to close the damn thing, then scroll back up and find my place.

It's bad. Screenshot of the home page. I just want it to be a blog, and it insists on trying to be a whole social media do-everything site. I'm honestly disappointed when authors I follow encourage this by tweeting and chatting on it. (Apparently Substack asks them to? maybe pays them, or says it'll boost their engagement, not sure)

The main gripe I have with the subscribe reminders is that they pop up at the start of the page. If I'm reading something new, I obviously don't know if I like it yet. Why would I ever subscribe after only reading the first 5% of an article? If you must annoy me with a popup (and I'd really rather you didn't), do it at the end, please.

It seems like just about everything does that now. At least the prompts to enable notifications seem to have gone away, but for a while, basically every website would nag you to subscribe by email, turn on notifications, and watch a related video before you could even start reading the actual article that you clicked on.

It also has loading issues for me, which seems pretty unreasonable given how much of what's on there (and what I want) is just a wall of text.

The anti-pattern inevitability is real.

I really had high hopes for Substack when it started taking off. Bringing good writing back to the internet? Yes, please. No low content / high production images and video. An obvious orientation to longform content. Seemed great.

My suspicion is that they spent quite a bit to jumpstart their author corps. I know they paid Scott Alexander quite a bit to migrate over. The same with Yglesias. My assumption is that a lot of the other big names (Noahpinion etc.) got some upfront and/or promises annual $$ for their initial move. (Again the following is conjecture) I wonder if subscribers are now struggling with inundation. I wonder if paid subscriber realities just aren't what projections were. If that's the case ....

... Enter the "social media-ify" strategy. Constant engagement (push, email, reminders within the posts) with nudges to subscribe, pay subscribe, or share with friends. Their weird twitter clone meant to drive engagement with articles (and, thus, recycle the subscribe-pay-share flywheel).

It's really hard to rely on the ad supported model without doing really shitty anti-pattern things to get users to be compulsively interested in the platform. Even the monster that is YouTube is now a wasteland of clickbait, unskipable 10 minute ads, and shortform non-content.

Internet writing may still be able to just pay the bills for those outside of the that top .1% power curve. Kind of like fiction novel writing functioned up until maybe the early 2000s. Mostly, however, it serves as a base from which to build a companion stream of income. There are some really great business and technology blogs I follow that are content dense, but only update 2 - 3 times per month because their authors are out actually making a living doing consulting or conference keynotes etc. Their blogs - which are their passions, to be sure - are actually their primary marketing engines. If you're writing about pure philosophy / social critique / all the fun stuff we get into on the Motte, however, I'm not sure you can self-sustain without having a day job. And, frankly, if you're writing about that stuff non-anonymously, you may find yourself losing that day job.

tl;dr - Writing on the internet used to be writing on the internet. Then everybody not on the internet had to go and fuck with the program.

The thing is, they don't have any ads though. So I guess all of the engagement-hacking is aimed at trying to get readers to purchase paid subscriptions to more creators? I guess that's a strategy, seems pretty weird and annoying to me though.

Maybe it is true that they're financially underwater from paying and promising too much to their initial set of authors. Which could make them desperate enough to try any number of things.

I don't expect they're listening to me or anything, but it'd be great IMO if they worked more like Nebula - you don't directly pay for individual publishers, you instead pay Substack itself $5 or $10 a month or whatever. Most of that minus a cut gets paid out to authors based on how much time you spend reading them. Then Substack doesn't care how much you engage because they get paid either way. But it's now further in every author's interest to keep putting out content that keeps people reading, since the friction for the money slipping away if they let up is much smoother. But they don't have the ability to do much except put out more high-quality content.

Maybe that could even apply to anybody who writes on the platform. I don't expect I'd ever make enough to live on from people paying to read what I write, but it would probably feel cool if I earned a few bucks a month from such an arrangement. That's about the price I'm suggesting though, so maybe it's also an incentive that your paid subscription is essentially free if you manage to publish stuff on there that gets at least a little bit of engagement. Maybe it would be just a simplification - say my account is -$10/month for a subscription. If I get $2/month from people reading me, then they just bill me a little less that month. If I get $15/month from that, then my account goes positive, and maybe they only actually cut me a check if I'm over $50 positive. So there'd be a big cloud of unpaid readers (or maybe they're paywalled off?), a smaller cloud of paid readers, a smaller one yet of people who mostly read but also write some stuff that only gets read a little, and the smallest one yet of the people who write things that gets millions of reads and make significant money from it.

They also do some shitty "modern webdev" stuff with the comments.

I can understand loading the comments on page load. That's what we did back when I was web-adjacent, but I understand the limitations.

I can understand loading the comments when you scroll to the end of the article and maybe even push a "load comments" button. Articles are cheap to load and render, comments are not.

What Substack does instead is reserve enough page space for the comments, but it only renders (or loads and renders) them when you scroll to the right spot. Not only does this fail if the connection is lost, but it's also incredibly slow and turns my phone into a hot plate every time I try to skim through the comments or scroll back.

Oh yes, that reminds me - if I tab away from a Substack page, when I go back, the page hangs on a blank display for a second or so before appearing again. Including if I'm nowhere near the comments, which I mostly don't read anyways. No idea what they're doing there, but it can't be good.

This happens to me too, which is a real pain on a phone.

Nevertheless, every time I open a post in Substack, it does the thing where it starts dimming the page as soon as I scroll down to try and read something, which I find distracting, so I have to scroll down further to get to the box where they try to get my email, then click to dismiss it.

I'm trying to get better at using uBlock Origin, and I've somewhat solved that. My relevant filters are:

substack.com##.pc-reset.pc-alignItems-center.pc-flexDirection-column.pc-display-flex.pencraft

substack.com#$#.frontend-components-SubscribePrompt-module__background--WF3cB{opacity:0 !important;}

The first one removes the subscription popup. The second one sets the screen dimming to 0% (instead of up to 60%), but requires you to reload the page to take effect. It's still easier than scrolling down to a button.

I've also fixed up fandom.com.

I can't remember the css for it, but if you remove the tag for all the avatar elements in the comments it speeds things up a lot.

Maybe

##[href^="https://substack.com/profile"] > .profile-img-wrap

It also shifts the comments rightwards to use up that space

Something like that, yeah -- either their cdn or whatever bs library they are using to access it is super-slow for me, especially on posts with hundreds of comments. (ie. almost every ACX post)

Do countries at war experience a suppression of crime rates on the home front as large numbers of disproportionately poorer young men are instead off fighting?

I don’t have a source handy, but I recall reading that crime rose considerably in London and other bombed-out English cities during the Blitz. Criminals would dress like air raid wardens and empty shops of their inventory, steal jewelry and wallets off corpses, and dump dead bodies in an area recently hit by bombs. The war effort meant that there were fewer police around, and the criminal element proved surprisingly adept at securing medical exemptions to the draft, either by bribing doctors or paying cripples to impersonate them at medical exams.

The 1946 Battle of Athens is possibly instructive as well. Once all the normal, upstanding, patriotic young men went to war, the only men left were scoundrels.

(Edited to fix link)

This is the correct bare link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Athens_(1946)

And this seems to be a good summary referenced in Wikipedia:

https://web.archive.org/web/20100624094438/http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1985/2/1985_2_72.shtml

Ah, thanks. I’ve corrected it in my comment.

I'd argue that even if such suppression takes place, which I think it usually does (sociologically it makes sense), it's bound to be undone when large numbers of young men return home after the war ends, and some of them, traumatized and disillusioned, invariably become violent criminals. It definitely happened in the Soviet Union after 1945 and also after the withdrawal from Afghanistan, to name just two examples.

Possible counteracting force: well-armed civic nationalism a la Battle of Athens. I’d expect an effective military to bias its veterans towards law and order, if only at a small scale.

So, what are you reading?

I'm picking up McGilchrist's The Master and his Emissary. The documentary was interesting enough, but I'm still not sure what to expect. The open, scholarly tone is welcome, more nuanced than I would have expected from a book about left and right brain hemispheres.

Meanwhile, Dantes is escaping in Monte Cristo.

Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Shlott's The Canceling of the American Mind. Only just a little way into it, and there's some bits that, while I understand why the authors would feel the need to include them, are a bit well-worn for me. Also, from the tone, I'm expecting their offered solution to be an "if everyone would just…" proposal.

and there's some bits that, while I understand why the authors would feel the need to include them, are a bit well-worn for me.

Lemme guess: "these cancellation tactics actually hurt people of color more" or "cancellation is a band-aid and a distraction from systemic change to fight racism/sexism/xism"?

No, just a lot of citing of statistics and example after example to establish that 'no, really, canceling is a real thing and not a myth.'

I just finished Christopher Moore's Razzmatazz which I found highly disappointing after loving his earlier works as Teen. I just found so many of the tropes tired and lame, the stereotypes of Chinatown and gay nightlife felt so stupid and flat, and the noir pastiche felt ridiculous. I'm wondering if it's that Moore is stuck in the past, or if I'm stuck in the present.

I'm working song by song through Bob Dylan's Philosophy of Modern Song. It's really interesting in that I'm a huge Dylan fan and you see what influenced him.

On digital, I read the first chapter of the War Nerd Iliad. It's fun, I'll probably finish it in between, but it isn't what people claim it is. It's raising in me the interesting question: in translation and abridgement/editing of a great work, what constitutes "reading" it? Clearly reading every word of the original published manuscript in the original language constitutes "reading" Mysterious Affair at Stiles. But what if a copy abridges some superfluous scenes? Have I read Tolstoy if I don't read Russian? I've read the Iliad in multiple translations, and I understand the goal of the War Nerd Iliad and that it considers itself a translation, but if you read the War nerd Iliad I'm not sure I'd say you had "read" the Iliad in the way I would say you had if you read the Fagles translation. But then Pope also took liberties, and his Homeric translations are my prior favorites.

I'm getting to the latter portions of Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. As it wraps up I'm probably going to write an effort post on it. It's a really interesting piece of historiography that I think reflects a really interesting view of the period, in the same way that historical films always give the characters slightly modern haircuts. The strong homophobic invective thrown at Roehm and (hey, gotta hand it to @SecureSignals on this one) the way he views the Holocaust in a way that is clearly different from our current view, along with the relatively few tomatoes thrown at Stalin et al. A better title overall might be "a political history of the Third Reich", while events on the battlefield are covered the author remains most interested in dispatches, internal memoranda, negotiation, and intrigue. I'm happy I broke my WWII fast with this one after seven years.

I want to read Rise and Fall too. Unfortunately, my WWII backlog hasn’t gotten any shorter, and I’ve already got a copy of Speer’s Inside the Third Reich to try.

If you're already knee deep in WWII stuff, I could probably sit down and abridge the chapters for you and halve the length. It aims to be a fully universal history of the Reich, and covers things like battles in sketch form, but where he does his best work is in examining diplomatic and bureaucratic documents.

Overall the book confirms my general view of the Hitler phenomenon as misunderstood as a result of the bastardized Hegel that governs how history is taught in the USA.

Okay, I very much would like to see your writeup(s).

I came away from high school thinking I had a decent understanding of the phenomenon, so I’d ask what you think is missing. Perhaps that’s just bias from immersion in other sources?

Okay, I very much would like to see your writeup(s).

Moreso I feel like you could skip/skin 40% of the book that deals with battles, events, etc. because you already know those pretty well. His thumbnail sketch of Stalingrad will probably leave you cold, particularly given the paucity of soviet sources at the time of writing. I've actively avoided WWII stuff since about 2015-16 or so, but I feel that a lot of his material is strong and fairly novel to me.

I came away from high school thinking I had a decent understanding of the phenomenon, so I’d ask what you think is missing. Perhaps that’s just bias from immersion in other sources?

I think that the tendency of American schools (I can't speak to any particular schools except the ones I attended or that my close friends attended/taught at) to teach in distinct "units" reflecting a sort of pseudo-Hegelian "zeitgeist" view of history. So for example, a lot of schools teach American history unit-by-unit and teach "The Industrial Revolution" or "Westward Expansion" after they have already taught "Slavery/The Civil War"; this tends to obscure the ways that Westward Expansion and Northern Industrialization caused Slavery to become such an important issue leading to the Civil War.

So the flaw in Nazi historiography tends to be that a lot of schools teach "The Cold War" after they teach "WWII/Nazis/The Holocaust." The rise of fascism is best thought as occurring in the context of a Cold War that started before the Tsar's body was cold, was in its infancy from the Paris Commune onward. Every developed, and most undeveloped, nations had major communist parties, many of which took orders directly from Moscow. Germany and Italy came close to falling to Comintern parties. The red scare took America before the 20s. The battle lines were drawn: The western democratic capitalist imperialist powers, against the USSR and the Comintern.

The Western democratic powers very much felt that Fascism, while perhaps distasteful, was preferable to communism. The feeling was that Mussolini and Hitler were better than puppets of Stalin. Western readers of Mein Kampf tended to see the rabid anti-communism, the clear intention to invade Russia, and see Hitler as a reliable partner against the Soviets. He might ultimately need to be brought into line, but he would certainly stop Communism from expanding West. To a certain extent they were correct: Hitler and Mussolini did prevent Moscow from taking Spain, Communism took control of no European nations outside Russia until after Hitler was on his way out, and Hitler did ultimately invade Russia even though by then it was a really bad idea.

On the Soviet side, meanwhile, the USSR can always be thought of as in many ways a theocracy. While Stalin and his clique were unbelievably cynical and evil, they were also in many ways true believers in Marxism. It's a matter of faith for orthodox marxists of the time that the imperialist capitalist powers must come to blows with each other. Stalin did not really worry about Hitler because it was a matter of theory that the imperialist powers would fight destructive wars, exhausting each other, until they fell to Communism. His actions only make sense if he assumed that the Nazis must, inevitably, as a precept of the Science of History, go to war against the Western Capitalists. To a certain extent he was correct: Hitler did go to war with the Capitalist powers first, and as a result Communism swept over half of an exhausted Europe. (As an aside, we should also note that Japan's early invasions of China were hockey-assisted by Mao's ongoing civil war, and that after KMT and Japanese forces had worn each other down Mao would sweep to power in China a few years later)

Of course, while each side was partly right in that Hitler would do tremendous damage to their enemy, they were also partly wrong.

I just started General Wrangel’s ”Always with Honor” after hearing it described as one of the greatest war memoirs of all time, up there with ”Anabasis” by Xenophon, which I’m reading simultaneously.

If you’re not familiar, General Wrangel fought in the side of the whites in the Russian civil war and held out in the Caucasus mountains for years. He died in exile.

I rather enjoyed Theft of Fire. Premise is that a rich gene-modded anime girl kidnaps tough Spacer Pirate in his own ship for a secret quest. An enormous amount of sexual tension ensues.

Pros:

  1. Engaging from the get-go. I drop a lot of writing early on, this novel caught me and kept me. That's the most important thing a book can do, IMO.

  2. Author dunks on leftists on twitter but they're not really screeds so much as long well-written, impassioned pleas and thoughtful statements that sound that they could belong here, albeit toned down from twitter norms of hostility. The ultimate political tone of the novel is right-libertarian: holding to one's promises, anti-monopolistic capitalism. The setting is right-libertarian, there are no state govts in space and Earth is an irrelevant basketcase. No strawmen ideologies amongst the main cast though, characters are treated with dignity and the setting has the flaws you'd expect of ancapistan. I think the author only actually got noticed because he was dunking on leftists on twitter, some of the people I followed retweeted him and that's how I found out about the novel.

  3. Thematically clear and interesting, it had a variant on the Frog and the Scorpion that made me think 'this guy is somewhat thoughtful'.

Cons:

  1. It's not what I'd call 'hard' sci-fi, taking a few too many liberties with stealth-in-space, though the no-stealth-in-space principle isn't totally violated. AI is of the pre-GPT tropes of 'artificial stupidity' or 'completely human-personality tech-genius in a box' kind, which I found slightly irksome. I hope this trope is finally going to die soon. There's some implausible evasive flying later on.

  2. Some of the combat writing became a bit hard to follow but this was rather minor.

  3. Ending somewhat weaker than the middle. When I was half-way through I wished 'why can't this book be longer' and I still want to see a sequel, I just don't want it quite so desperately.

There's also David Chalmers' Reality + which I found to be midwit regurgitation of better minds (Bostrom and so on) + more unnecessary pop culture references than you could poke a stick at.

I've finished The Return of the King. Nice enough.

Then I burned through 1984 in a fever of horrified interest. The most disconcerting dystopian fantasy I've ever read of. Now I'm seeing Ingsoc everywhere.

Now I'm reading the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, but with my usual suspicion that whatever I read is just the author trying to be his own propagandist.

And I also got a facsimile of the Royal Armouries Ms. I.33 fencing manual for Christmas, and I'm enjoying it a lot. Too bad there's nobody here to fence with!

The Return of the King

Including the appendices?

You got me. No, I haven't finished those yet. I'm on them, but they require somewhat more effort to read than the story itself.

Now I'm seeing Ingsoc everywhere.

This is deliberate. Nineteen eighty-four (Orwell always spelt out the title) was intended to be a self-preventing prophecy about what was, in 1948 when he wrote the book, a plausible future. In particular, he deliberately set out to write about the nature of totalitarian socialism, rather the accidents of any particular form of it, in order to provide a fully general warning. The name Ingsoc suggests that it evolved from a form of "national socialism" but there are also a lot of hints in the book that Ingsoc actually evolved from some kind of communist-adjacent movement. But by 1984 it has lost almost all traces of the original cover story (economic egalitarianism for communism, racial-national renewal for national socialism) and has gone mask-off about the purpose of power being power, as O'Brien so memorably puts it.

As Eliezer Yudkowsky points out re. superintelligent AI, acquiring power is an intermediate goal of almost all optimisation processes. And totalitarian socialism is the best way for a movement that has or can reasonably hope to achieve control of a state to consolidate and extend its power in the medium term. So every political movement that doesn't have guardrails against it "wants" to become totalitarian. At the time Orwell wrote the book, the western democracies had weakened their guardrails deliberately in order to mobilise against the Axis, and a lot of people (cough, Joe McCarthy, cough) wanted to weaken them further, at least notionally in order to defeat the Soviet Union. A well-targetted memetic immune system in the minds of the elite (the "High" in Goldstein's theory of oligarchy) and potential counter-elites (the "Middle") is a powerful new guardrail. And it still works.

You should be seeing tendencies towards Ingsoc everywhere - Orwell wants you to be on your guard against totalitarian tendencies, regardless of whether they wrap themselves in the Bible, the Flag, the Constitution, the Universal Brotherhood of Man, or Martin Luther King's burial shroud. And he wants you to have the language to call them out. Above all, he wants you to focus on the correct target. Newspeak and doublethink should be scarier than swastikas or hammer-and-sickles.

You will notice that when we want to call out totalitarian tendencies, we still use language taken from Nineteen eighty-four. Orwell was very good at what he was doing.

I am reading Sacred Symbols that Speak about symbology in the Orthodox Christian church. One of the most beautiful sections so far has been the one on candles. Candles are a big thing in the Orthodox church, and the overall symbology rests on the idea that Christ brought a fire to earth, as he says:

I have come to bring fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!

And so the goal of pious Christians is to be as a candle - but one burning with light, hope and love. I found this idea incredibly beautiful.

Also catching up on The Screwtape Letters by Lewis, which is a great classic where a demon is sending letters to a trainee on how to tempt men to the devil. It's quite funny.

I was thinking last week about this section, which I read as a “baptism by fire”. It’s nestled between these two passages about punishment:

the master of that servant will come on a day when he does not expect him and at an hour he does not know, and will cut him in pieces and put him with the unfaithful

Do you think that I have come to give peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division

The way I interpreted this (if I can opine) is by first eradicating literalism. Baptism does not mean submerging in water, its broader meaning is immersion. A Greek study shows that it’s also using for changing the whole color of a cloth by dying, or in cooking recipes for fundamentally changing the nature of a food item through immersion in some other liquid. There is the immersion by water of John’s baptism for forgiveness, and then there’s the immersion by fire (the opposite of water). And what is this fire? Complete and utter pain and punishment — the opposite of forgiveness — as hinted by the Christ’s anticipation of his passion:

how great is my distress until it is accomplished

This word “accomplished” or finished or completed often refers to the Crucifixion, as for instance in John immediately before he says “it is finished”. (Consider also that Father divided/against Son is certainly one way of seeing the Crucifixion depending on your theology).

This interpretation allows us to now understand the other “baptisms” mentioned. The baptism by the Holy Spirit (immersion into it), and the baptism in the name of the Lord (immersion in knowing and identifying with Christ). These coincidentally line up with the four ancient elements: water, fire, air (spirit, same word used in koine Greek), and earth (God made man as if from clay is common metaphor). However, this has led me to some unorthodox theology, that for instance Jesus does not call us to be baptized by water but to be baptized into his Being. Hence the “john the Baptist baptized with water, but I baptize with the Holy Spirit”

so the goal of pious Christians is to be as a candle

To be a “burnt offering”!

Interesting thoughts here, I honestly don't know enough theology to really comment but it makes ya think. I do believe that what the modern world considers "Christianity" is far from the true teachings of the Church or Christ. I think the Orthodox church by far comes the closest, but still not 100% that they have it all. Then again as I said I'm pretty ignorant at this point.

I think the Orthodox church by far comes the closest, but still not 100% that they have it all. Then again as I said I'm pretty ignorant at this point

Closest to Roman Imperial church of 4th century? Yeah.

Closest to first Christians? (always nonviolent, always rejecting all Earthly authority, always preaching and evangelizing, always persecuted, always awaiting end of the world, always willing to suffer and die for their faith)

Go look somewhere else.

edit: link

I never said they were perfect. shrug

Does anybody else find The Atlantic's "If Trump Wins" issue hilarious? Just reading the titles and blurbs for some of those 24 pieces actually had me chuckling.

As a citizen of a small European country bordering Russia, I am a bit worried about the NATO part.

America's NATO ""allies"" fail to spend the agreed upon amounts on their militaries. They fail to meet their commitments and for some reason my American tax dollars are spent keeping them safe. The European "peace dividend" is me getting footed with the bill while they selfishly spend on social programs. Trump correctly called them out as failing to meet their commitments. His lack of politeness and poise has the benefit of him plainly stating the unpleasant truth.

I don't want Russia getting away with invading their neighbors. I don't want a return to 19th century and early warfare. I wish Europeans shared my attitude.

Europeans are by no means a homogeneous group. By "Europeans" you mean rich countries of Western Europe which are unlikely to be invaded and keep strong economic ties to Russia, like Germany, France, Italy or Spain (mainly Germany). But there is a bunch of CEE (short for Central and Eastern Europe) countries, like Romania, Poland and Baltic states which are fully aware of impending Russian danger and keep their military spending beyond the NATO threshold.

So we are in a position of conflicting interests. Western Europeans are reluctant to pay for the safety of their eastern neighbors, but they benefit largely from the stability given by the American umbrella. CEE countries want to fulfill their obligations, since they are in obvious risk, but stand little chance against Russia without NATO's help. Would you rather punish CEE countries for the misdeeds of their western friends, or give Germans free ride? Some statistics about NATO spending by country are here.

The war in Ukraine shook a few countries awake, but in 2014 only the US, UK, and Greece met the spending target. All other countries were content to free ride.

https://www.nato.int/docu/review/articles/2023/07/03/defence-spending-sustaining-the-effort-in-the-long-term/index.html

Sure, but 2014 was precisely the year when the threshold was set, so I find your comment very misleading. This information is very plainly written in the link you have given and in the link I have given above.

During the 2014 summit, all NATO members agreed to spend at least 2% of their GDPs on defense by 2025. In 2017, only four nations met the threshold: The United States (3.6%), Greece (2.4%), the United Kingdom (2.1%), and Poland (2.0%). However, by 2021, ten countries were meeting the percentage target.

In this link you can find all the military spending of Poland as a percentage of GDP between 2014 and 2023. As you can easily see, from 2014 onward, Poland has been seriously trying to meet the spending target.

Gonna be honest, I didn't read that part of the page. However, I think the key point is that the biggest defense spenders were the US, UK, and Greece. The US is the US, but the UK and Greece are not in any immediate danger of invasion.

Probably Greece spends so much because of constant tensions with many times bigger Turkey, and UK, well, has always been the enforcer of the European balance of power.

Probably Greece spends so much because of constant tensions with many times bigger Turkey, and UK, well, has always been the enforcer of the European balance of power.

Also the UK is committed to maintaining a blue-water navy, which implies a certain ongoing minimum spend even when there are no threats on the horizon - a blue-water navy isn't something you can spin up in a decade. The British army is vestigial, but the UK has a very long history of successfully keeping its military tradition intact when the army shrinks to a vestigial size during peacetime and rolling it out again when the army expands in wartime.

We tell the private who is made 2ic of a 4-man fireteam that we are teaching him leadership in case he has to take over the team after the corporal is shot, but the real reason is that he would be a platoon sergeant in charge of a toff and a soccer riot into a 2LT and a platoon if things kicked off.

The original 2% agreement goes back to 2006

https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_67655.htm

I don't want to punish anyone, but:

rich countries of Western Europe

...are the industrial foundation of European self-defense. 2% of German GDP pumping out tanks, 2% of (NATO newcomer) Sweden pumping out Saab anti-tank weapons, etc, etc. I'll give France a pass since they are at 1.9% GDP expenditure.

West Germany had over 7000 tanks circa the fall of the Soviet Union. Now they have around 200. There's talk of taking Cold War equipment out of museums and refurbishing it for use against Russia. This is an entirely self-inflicted problem.

It is the rich ones who will commit, or it is me in America footing the bill. Europe should be a fortress of industrial military might. With, as you correctly point out, even the poorer countries contributing what they can. But as of recently almost all NATO "allies" haven't been pulling their weight. Even Canada promises 2% and entirely fails to deliver. Too bad you CEE types are stuck with such a feckless band of supporters and an expansionist Russia.

We lacked incentives so far. Or rather, the incentives are stacked heavily against military spending.

With the US backing us up, Poland being a comfortable buffer state, Russia seemingly docile for decades and an important trading partner, our welfare state demanding an ever-increasing budget, and the Germans successfully indoctrinated into a pacifism that denies even the possibility of conflict, with us so far having gotten away with under-delivering on our NATO obligations, with our military-industrial complex being known far and wide as a pit of corruption and our armed forces as an ineffectual money-burning machine - what force on Earth could realistically have convinced the Germans to wish for more military spending?

It seems like a bad idea on so many levels to waste funds that are clearly needed for [insert favorite redistribution project] on something that we don't want, don't need, are bad at, which is going to backfire anyways as experience has proven either by wasting the money without effect or by making our politicians think that we can go on another adventure in Afghanistan or Mali or fuck-knows-where, and which we consider morally wrong.

I wish Germany had military strength commensurate with its economic stature, but frankly I don't see how that's going to come about within decades of now, and I also don't think throwing money at the problem will actually improve anything. Except for the defense industry's business, for what that's worth, and since I regretfully rejected a defense job in the past, I am now sour grapes on those guys and I don't think we should spend taxpayer money on them.

It's worth noting that there are reasons why American (and Anglo-French, but it has been the US that mattered since 1945) policy has historically discouraged Germany becoming a major military power. I agree with you that they no longer apply, but America allowing Germany to free-ride rather than rearm is inertia rather than stupidity.

Given who normally invades Russia, if Russia's invasion of Ukraine does lead to German rearmament, it will be the biggest national-security self-own since Pearl Harbor.

Don't get too friendly with Russia. If you see Victoria Nuland, you'll know your about to have a mostly peaceful color revolution.

It's so funny that I kept highlighting different pieces to copy/paste and make fun of, but they keep escalating and I couldn't pick one. I suppose I'm most excited for a "MAGA Judiciary" out of the list, but it was a close call between that, Four More Years of Unchecked Misogyny, and Trump's Polarization of Science.

The only one I think I might read is “What Will Happen to the American Psyche if Trump Is Reelected?” The tagline is what sells it: “Our bodies are not designed to handle chronic stress.” I think I’d enjoy it as much as I enjoyed this.

A MAGA Judiciary

In a second term, Donald Trump would appoint more judges who don’t care about the law.

What a treat these are.

How is Trump going to ruin America? Could we get an example? Answer: He's going to "police gender".

I don't read the Atlantic, but I thought their focus was on long form serious articles. This whole page is clown school for journalists. Doomscrolling for progressives, which is an oversaturated market.

It looks like a slate advice column from back when the really woke guy was answering questions that were blatantly trolling. The ridiculousness is honestly awe inspiring.

I did audibly laugh as I read the blurbs, and a few times during the articles. On the other hand, I think if you strip out the apocalyptic prophecies, the first few articles are right that Trump's actions on around J6 were pretty bad for "democracy", and that Trump's going to nominate a lot more officials who are from Trump World as opposed to 'the swamp' and as a result will be much less competent at basic government functions. Which isn't too huge of an issue, but it'll just make a lot of things somewhat worse.

Re ru-ua war: Anatoly Karlin tweeted "The war is substantially enabled by couch observers who fantasize about 10:1 ratios and believe the last pigger/orc is about to croak any any day now."

https://twitter.com/powerfultakes/status/1742557887472316916#m what do you think about this? Looks like kill ratio is not far from 1:1

Karlin is a hyperpartisan and I would put as much stock into his takes as NAFO posters claiming 1:10 and that "Russia will collapse any day now".

What do you mean by "hyperpartisan"? He has changed his political id from Russian nationalist to something other... thing? EHC, woke symphatizer? I'm asking about this specific take, not his other takes.

He has changed

Come on man.

I'm asking about this specific take, not his other takes.

They are not independent. Especially not in this kind of gray area.

If you look at the tone of his posts for the last year or so he's writing less to shed light (which was his former goal) and more to anger the people who formerly followed him. He's a troll and deserves no sincere interaction, regardless of one's stance.

I used to like some of his unz archive posts. Remember spending reading his blogs for a whole day at some point when I was forced to sit with my smartphone unable to do anything else. But the guy is essentially an unserious alienated twitter brained weirdo. His attachment to Russian nationalism was cringe and fake. His current attachment to gay AI apocalypse is even worse. He must be taken as a prime example of why introvert smart guys need to eventually cut off parasocial interactions, find a woman and make some kids.

He must be taken as a prime example of why introvert smart guys

??? Karlin is extrovert extraordinaire, of the hustler/preacher subtype. Introvert would not chose life of digital nomad, introvert would not relocate to the other side of the world on a whim, introvert would definitely not volunteer to evangelize his (exteme and unpopular) political ideology (or ideologies).

Karlin was always transhumanist, he supported Russia because he believed it is beginning of new supertechnological supercivilization. Once it was obvious that Russia is not aspiring Atomic Space Empire, but another Eastern European shithole, he dropped it like hot potato.

It was never about any Russian historical legacy or care of actual Russian people (remember how he was gloating how elderly vatniks and sovoks from the villages refused to be vaxed and died of COVID.)

As someone with UK passport, US green card and big stash of crypto, AK was one of these people who genuinely could be what they want to be and he picked "Russian" identity for a while.

Now AK is safely out of Russia, he is back to his previous self.

For someone like AK, it was never anything than game.

Imagine new, long awaited and bigly hyped game comes out. You download it and start playing.

You start playing as Orc, because orcs are cool.

First you notice that orcs and whole orc land are hideously ugly. Then you find that gameplay is unbalanced and story line makes no sense at all. Finally, when you turn things and start winning, and the stupid orcs start fighting each other once again, you give up and begin new game.

Start again as Elf. At the beginning, you pick your gender from 72 options and eagerly start playing. It couldn't be worse than Orc game!

Honestly they’ve been that way the entire time. There’s really no one with real, practical experience fighting a war like this in which the side they’re on is fighting an invading army with significant firepower. We’ve generally been the initiators and the conquest phase has been very very quick — rarely over 3-4 months. That isn’t what will happen in Ukraine even if they eventually win (which is in doubt I think).

This means that most people making the decisions are operating on the cultural assumption about invasion, which is that right means victory. It’s a weird thing to me that so many seem to just assume that because Ukraine was invaded, that it is destined to win and take back all the territory it lost and that since Putin invaded he’s destined to lose.

What things do you have very different personal preferences and policy positions on? Do you have any area that you didn't even realize that until the policy changed and lined up with your stated position?

The biggest one that I have been having a difficult time with lately is marijuana. For my entire life, I thought marijuana should be legal and that it's pretty hard to justify having a substantially different control scheme for marijuana than alcohol (tobacco is quite different and I think the comparison is pretty stupid). I still hold this position due to everything I can figure out objectively. There are a few caveats, such as the potential for marijuana to trigger schizophrenia, but really, I doubt it does more harm to a typical person than drinking. I even smoked a decent bit when I was in my younger, party years, and pretty much just had harmless fun.

Nonetheless, it turns out that I don't actually like legal marijuana much. I didn't really notice it when it was mostly illegal, but weed culture is fucking annoying. I get that some people feel that way about alcohol, and I can certainly think of all-out drunkenness scenes that I don't like, but there are big chunks of drinking culture that I do like - craft beer, good bourbon, wine-tasting, cocktails, tailgating, food-drink pairings, this stuff is all somewhere between lowbrow fun and genuinely interesting culture. Pot though? Just fucking annoying. Stupid aesthetics, lazy slobs, constant whining about how pot is actually good for you, man. I don't personally dislike the smell of pot but smelling it on my state's capitol square on a weekday morning is just utterly degenerate. None of this convinces me that it should be illegal, my annoyance doesn't suffice to want something banned, but damn, it turns out that I find stoners way more annoying than I ever would have thought when they had to just smoke at their houses.

What things do you have very different personal preferences and policy positions on? Do you have any area that you didn't even realize that until the policy changed and lined up with your stated position?

I'm an Ancap-leaning libertarian with an overall socially-conservative bent. I don't like abortion, prefer monogamous marriage, am bullish on religion and Judeo-Christian norms, I like guns and I don't mind racial diversity. I feel much more affinity with red tribe than blue tribe.

I simultaneously think that people should be free to engage in debauchery in their private lives, and generally be free from judgment for it to the extent they don't parade it around in public...

AND that people should suffer the consequences of their decisions and externalities should be minimized.

Which is to say, I'd prefer my own local community to follow fairly traditional norms that don't need to be heavily enforced, and resists outside influence attempting to subvert them. So red-tribe norms are a natural fit... except for the parts that I don't like.

So I don't like most laws that restrict non-aggressive human behavior... but there's a laundry list of non-aggressive human behavior that I don't like being around.

This is mostly resolved by my adoption of Taleb-style localism as an ideal.

And of course a ton of smart people have proposed the concept: Nozick's Utopia of Utopias, Scott Alexander's Archipelago, Yarvin's patchwork, Weinersmith's Polystate. It's all the same idea. I'm forgetting a few others who pretty much came up with the same thing.

Thousands of different cultures can co-exist as long as there's an overarching framework that keeps them from interfering with each others' internal affairs. The internet is a living example, insofar as themotte can have our own internal culture and processes meanwhile groups who absolutely hate our guts can have their own forum and websites with their own internal culture and neither one need disrupt the other.

Nonetheless, it turns out that I don't actually like legal marijuana much.

I don't personally dislike the smell of pot but smelling it on my state's capitol square on a weekday morning is just utterly degenerate.

Never touched the stuff, but I also think that criminalization is absurd.

And yet, I also don't want to have to smell it whenever I go out in public spaces. Vapes are also up there but I find it somewhat more tolerable.

This is mostly resolved by my adoption of Taleb-style localism as an ideal.

And of course a ton of smart people have proposed the concept: Nozick's Utopia of Utopias, Scott Alexander's Archipelago, Yarvin's patchwork, Weinersmith's Polystate. It's all the same idea. I'm forgetting a few others who pretty much came up with the same thing.

I really do think this is the answer. As long as there is freedom to leave, then almost any other freedom can be safely constrained.

For me, as a libertarian, there is all sorts of stuff I'd like to ban. But a government empowered to ban those things is also empowered to rob of us our freedoms. Better to fight against government power in general, even if it means having to be surrounded by annoying stoners all the time.

But a sufficiently local, atomized government could make all sorts of tyrannical rules, and no people would be seriously injured as they could choose a different system that works for them. In that world, I would have no problem criminalizing marijuana in my local area.

As long as there is freedom to leave, then almost any other freedom can be safely constrained.

Right, but for some 'odd' reason, almost no centralized authority likes to give people the 'freedom' to leave if they can control it.

I'd highly recommend reading The Dawn of Everything. I'm not sure I totally buy into the conclusions, but freedom of movement is something considered deeply in the framework of "Three Fundamental Freedoms" when examining prehistoric and non-European societies.

One theory proposed is that many Amerindian societies in North America maintained a degree of freedom through a system of Clans which stretched between polities, forming a cross-cutting identity set from the broader tribe. Bear, Wolf, Hawk, etc clans are found within tribes stretching from upstate New York to New Mexico, with an expectation that a traveler would be able to expect hospitality from clan members in other tribes. This system, the authors argue, provided a safety valve against tyranny, as any tribe which tried to enforce brutal rules would find itself leaking members outward.

I'm not sure I entirely buy it, but systems where small patchwork principalities existed also often show evidence of extended networks between and across polities, which frequently took on religious or kinship qualities. While authoritarian governments which restrict movement successfully often feature citizens who have nowhere to go (eg German Jews in '38, or Gazans today).

This is mostly resolved by my adoption of Taleb-style localism as an ideal.

I've been a non-Catholic Distributist for the past several years and have made comments to that effect even on the old reddit. Given what you've just said, I highly recommend looking into that philosophy - and at the very least it means you get to read more G.K. Chesterton, which is always a treat.

Wow thanks for mentioning this philosophy. Seems excellent to me. Like a less crazy version of anarcho-syndicalism.

I think weed is a great example, because I feel the exact same way. I don't want people to be criminals for choosing to smoke weed, or for that matter for doing any drugs really. I think that we should cover bad behavior arising from drug use with the laws which outlaw that behavior anyway, e.g. if you murder someone because you are an addict we have existing murder laws for that so no need for drug specific stuff.

But all that said... bloody hell, the stoners in my state (CO) are fucking dicks and they make me seriously reconsider my position. I shouldn't have to smell them smoking weed (which smells absolutely awful) when I go to events, when I go to the park, or even when I drive down the bloody street. It seems to me that we (CO society broadly) gave them an inch, and they took a mile. Well, if that's how it's going to be then maybe we should take the initial inch back from people who have shown themselves to be completely antisocial.

I try to stick to my convictions. I'm not actually out there campaigning to reinstate a ban on weed under state law. But holy crap, the stoners have made it hard to stand by those ideals.

It's always my position that if we're going to legalise weed, I want stench nuisance laws alongside it.

I’ll say this about almost any form of legalization. Basically, it becomes available enough that children will have access to it. It’s going to be common in homes much like alcohol and cigarettes are. Which will lower the mean age of people getting access to it. I’m not familiar with the effects of cannabis on a child, but I think any legalization scheme needs to understand this reality and be willing to put up with those negative effects.

I am a libertarian mostly. But I hate smokers, loud trucks, gun culture, sugary beverages, marijuana, ugly strip malls, gambling, and just lower class preferences and behavior in general. I prefer to be in places where these things don't exist, but I don't support banning them.

I'd echo what others have said about locality. There are tons of behaviors for which my deontological side wouldn't necessarily support a national ban. Unfortunately, on a practical level, there are often so few options for local bans my consequentialist side wins out and gets me wishing for a general ban.

There seems to be a spectrum of positions on any given nuisance ranging from "the courteous thing is to not make the nuisance at all" to "the courteous thing is to let people do what they want". I'm on the rather extreme end of the former on a many issues (no one should have to hear your dog bark, smell your cigarette smoke, or feel the vibrations of your subwoofer from within their own homes).

Most people, in my experience, seem to lie moderately in that direction (they'll deal with a dog barking for a few minutes or a subwoofer for an hour in the afternoon without getting too annoyed). These people usually act responsibly without needing a ban to force them. Unfortunately, in an apartment building, all it takes is 1 inconsiderate tenant to ruin it for everyone else.

Frankly, I would pay double to live in a neighborhood of likeminded people who agree that barking, smoking, and subwoofers just don't belong in a shared building at all. Let the people who want those things live in their own building and deal with the constant smells and noise. The problem is it's actually really hard to find a place willing to actively exclude the latter type of individual. The best you'll often find is noise ordinance that is "enforced" by a half-hearted "warning" but rarely any real consequences for offenders.

Frankly, I would pay double to live in a neighborhood of likeminded people who agree that barking, smoking, and subwoofers just don't belong in a shared building at all

If you've got the budget it for it, and like the other aspects, you've just described much of suburbia. If you'd buy the house from the new house flipper guy just down my street, mine would go back to being one.

I think about it often, but at the end of the day it's hard to let go of being in walking distance to work. >95% of my neighbors are great. I just wish it were easier to coordinate making that 100.

Frankly, I would pay double to live in a neighborhood of likeminded people who agree that barking, smoking, and subwoofers just don't belong in a shared building at all.

Pay perhaps around twice as much and live in a nice single family home only neighborhood.

Let the people who want those things live in their own building and deal with the constant smells and noise.

Yeah I lived like that a bit. Even decent apartments are slums compared to SFH suburbs. Just a big building of annoyance.

Maybe in (parts of?) America that's true but certainly not in general.

What are SFH suburbs?

"SFH" = "single-family house".

Oh, that makes sense. I thought "SFH" was some iGen dunk on...well, I don't know, I thought I was going to have to ask Christine Baranski about it. She's pretty up on the kids today.

Single family home. Condos, apartments and townhouses don't count.

I recently moved from a modern apartment building with decent soundproofing to a single family home out in the suburbs.

My stress levels instantly plummeted and I regret not having done this much sooner. The occasional bark or lawnmower is nothing compared to what I was putting up before whenever I opened a door or window.

I'm going to be frank: such enforcement is rare because it is completely unreasonable to expect people to metaphorically walk on eggshells within their own home. If you wish to live as if other people do not exist near you, then live apart from other people, invest into soundproofing and/or vote for building better-insulated apartment blocks.

Then you're just one of those people who think "the courteous thing is to let people do what they want", which is perfectly fine. I just want to live around people who believe otherwise.

It costs me nothing to not have dogs or subwoofers or cigarettes. In fact, I strongly prefer not doing those things (certainly nothing approaching walking on eggshells). All I'm saying is that I'd like to find a few dozen others who agree to live together and keep the ones who disagree out.

I am actually planning a soundproofing enhancement, but nothing's going to fix the fact that opening a window at any point means I'm assaulted by some combination of dog piss and cigarette smoke from the balcony two below mine. Not much I can do about that.

Briefly, I wish there were welfare for a wide variety of things. It just feels good to not have to pay for things. However, economically on aggregate I understand it's inefficiencies and the effects it has on incentives and all the things downstream of that.

I would also not lose much sleep if certain social things were illegal, but that's a slippery slope to a nanny state.

I persistently run into, in myself and others, a fantasy of welfare that would be perfectly set up to keep people from suffering a problem while also giving zero incentive to utilize it, and that it would be efficient. A world where no family is hungry because basic food ingredients are subsidized, they can get big sacks of rice and beans and potatoes and flour and milk for free that will keep them alive. Then someone shows me the actual math and how vastly inefficient such a system would be such that it would be more expensive than the food stamp program while delivering a worse product, purely for the purpose of punishing people who collect welfare and soothing the hurt feelings of people who don't. But still, I kind of wish it were real.

You can get a 10lb bag of rice for $10, that might as well be free. And rice and beans and lentils honestly aren't that bad, I'd much rather eat just that than whatever the average american eats, both by taste and by health.

As someone who grew up in a California beach town and never enjoyed the experience of smoking weed, I cant begin to describe how much I relate

A large fraction of weed users are not into weed culture, it's just that the ones who are into weed culture stand out a lot.

If anything, legal weed is likely to diminish obnoxious weed culture because if weed is legal and you can go buy it at the local 7-11, then it is no longer so much a cool rebellious thing that motivates people to have a subculture around it.

Yeah, that was the claim, and it's what I thought would happen, but it seems like the opposite happened.

That has not been my experience. I remember weed culture from 20 years ago pretty well, since I was part of it. And it wasn't any less obnoxious than weed culture now. Was it more obnoxious than now? To be honest, I have no idea.

Always found it interesting that the studies on marijuana use focus on health and not whether the person is being as productive, forming memories of positive experiences, or engaging in a social community. i know a dozen people who used marijuana and then had to stop because it essentially drained their vital life force — they stopped doing anything worthwhile and stopped being motivated toward things. With tobacco it’s the opposite — it’s unhealthy, but no one’s ever been like “this tobacco is really ruining my creativity and preventing me from bonding with friends”. Perhaps the state cares more about a docile population that is not costly for medical services?

This is literally me. I used marijuana to self-medicate for anxiety and depression. It seemed like a miracle drug: it helped me quiet my mind enough to sleep and provided a relaxing buzz similar to alcohol but without the hangover or calories and significantly cheaper. But fast forward 5 years and I found myself socially isolated, intellectually stunted, and boring. I realized that I didn't do anything after work other than watch tv and play video games, and the underlying issues weed allowed me to ignore just slowly got worse until I was able to force myself to make a change.

Alcohol is definitely more acutely worse for you, but the insidious, underappreciated danger with weed is that you never get any "holy shit I need to change my life" moments. There's no overdose risk, it's not disruptive enough to prevent you from putting the minimum effort in at work, and there are few, if any, negative physical side effects associated with over-use. Like you said, it just slowly sucks your vital life force away. And you don't even notice it's happening.

danger with weed is that you never get any "holy shit I need to change my life" moments.

I realized that I didn't do anything after work other than watch tv and play video games

It's funny that weed actually did give me one of those moments, albeit because I was already often doing nothing while sober before I started using it regularly.

It was just that (since I was using edibles) I was having to make a conscious decision to be alone doing nothing of value for several hours and the highs were punctuated by moments of stark self reflection. Before I started using them, I was instead regularly making the decision to do nothing without really thinking about it and without getting caught up in my own thoughts.

I haven't fully quit weed now, but I have cut down from my peak while also trying to be more social + productive while sober.

Similar story here.

you never get any "holy shit I need to change my life" moments

I stopped smoking weed because that was literally the only effect it was giving me. It became like a boredom magnifier where instead of zoning out and happily wasting time I'd zone alllll the way in and get frustrated about the lack of progress on my ambitions. Made worse by smoking it at the end of the day when there was no opportunity to make any concrete progress on those projects beyond ruminating on how I could do them if this, which I would do if that, which I can't do because...

I used it to self-medicate for insomnia. Worked better than some other off-label stuff which caused insane weight gain. It was actually great...for a year. Lost weight, maintained regular exercise regimen for months...

And then...it crept up on me but now the motivational hit when I toke is insanely noticeable. I thought I used to slack off at work, no I was working in bursts. Now I slack off. Even basic "lazy" shit I used to do - blast through an audiobook of a book I really should sit down and read - is harder.

but the insidious, underappreciated danger with weed is that you never get any "holy shit I need to change my life" moments.

Lucky you. Now I get the self-loathing and the lack of impetus to change.

So...yeah. I think the other side was right on this one.

Funny you mention the insidious part because I immediately noticed that being a failure mode the second time I smoked weed in my life.

I've noticed that I lose my literal and figurative mojo when I jack off too much, and that loss of mojo felt exactly the same when smoking weed. So maybe I'm primed to notice subtle changes in mojo.

Seems different for everyone. My social circles as a teenager were intensely invested in smoking weed, with all the accompanying weed culture one pictures. But weed just never did anything for me. Maybe I did it wrong? It just seemed to have no effect whatsoever. But my friends at the time all seemed increasingly passive and isolated in their little smoking enclaves, not going anywhere where they could not smoke all day long, and only spurred to action in order to acquire and consume more weed. The negative effects of either the drug or the culture seemed very obvious. Some of those people got better, some stayed the same, some went under, and most I just lost track of because I got tired of their antics and they of my insufficient participation.

Seems different for everyone.

Slingerland, in Drunk, makes the point that Alcohol has remained the universal social solvent across cultures and history because alcohol has fairly predictable effects on people. People may be lightweights or have a hollow leg, and they may be angry drunks or sad drunks or horny drunks, but the basic frame of alcohol--suppressed impulse control--impulsive behavior is fairly universal. While he specifically calls out marijuana as having unpredictable effects on people, causing a variety of impacts at a variety of intensities for what seem to be genetic reasons.

Some of my friends who smoked too much weed turned into doctors and accountants. Some of them seem to have had mental breaks and went from successful high school students to wash-outs.

But we're really bad at handling the idea that X works well for some people and doesn't work for others.

“The state” still says marijuana is the devil’s lettuce, at least in the US. It’s a Schedule 1 drug with the same (nominal) restrictions as ecstasy, LSD, and heroin. Amphetamines, opioids, and benzodiazepines are all scheduled lower. Why? Because they’re some combination of less addictive and more medically useful. In theory.

This drug scheduling scheme isn’t based on docility, and it certainly isn’t based on cost. It’s also not interested in drawing lines between stimulants and depressants, which is rather important when comparing tobacco and marijuana. Alcohol is a better comparison; despite being a very effective social lubricant, it is definitely able to cripple social and creative abilities. Naturally, neither tobacco nor alcohol are scheduled by the DEA. They are in two leagues of their own.

The ongoing debate is very much defined by state governments pushing back on something Byzantine and possibly counterproductive from the Feds. Just because Democrats adopted the issue doesn’t automatically make it authoritarian!

Considering the state banned weed in the first place and it's still federally illegal, any argument for why the state likes weed can be dismissed out of hand.

Anything can be dismissed out of hand if we don’t think thoroughly. The feds have turned a blind eye on state marijuana activities for a long time now, and the interests of the state can change over time — norms in 1937 are not the norms of 2020, right?

  1. Why would the feds not simply legalize it?

  2. The fact that it is federally illegal puts a big damper on the market. Dispensaries are usually cash only or otherwise forced out of the normal banking system. You can't sell weed out of state so states with no growing operations are out of luck.

  3. Weed is only legal for recreational use in 24 states.

"The feds want you to smoak" is an argument that simply doesn't hold water.

The State, namely Congress, prevents federal agents from raiding state marijuana dispensaries: https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/837011#?form=fpf. If the State were to treat marijuana as it does other illicit drugs, it would continue to raid marijuana dispensaries and not specifically pass an exclusion for only marijuana dispensaries. “Why not Congress make legal??” is not a serious retort because an explicit legalization involves unwanted political ramifications from voters, whereas allowing people to smoke marijuana in “legalized” states does not (note that these two are different things: “the State” can implicitly permit marijuana usage through policy without making it legal).

Okay, so why don't the relevant enforcement agencies turn a blind eye on banking for weed businesses and sales across state lines? There's money on the table here.

Simply ask yourself if the world we live in looks more like the world where uncle sam wants you to smoke weed or the world where there's no clear policy from the top leading to a mishmash of regulations and enforcement. If you think it looks more like the former, then G-d bless.

Agreed, marijuana addiction doesn’t necessarily look like serious health issues or criminal dysfunction, homelessness, etc. It looks like stunted potential and an unfulfilled life.

So, there's the theory that the left cares more about politics, which is why they show up more and are louder about it, including the wokeness business. Presumably, they're also much more likely to want to use marijuana. Will the ever-growing train of legalization cut out a contingent of them? Or within that population, are there two subpopulations - one which was already trending toward lethargy, which will descend yet further, and another which was already hyper politics, which due to some composition effect results in them eschewing marijuana for their own personal use?

I am very pro pot legalization and share your annoyance. I like in a non-legal state, and I hope it always stays this way. As I can drive an hour to a neighboring state for whatever I want, but enjoy the fact that there isn’t a ton of dispensaries littering all the roads and stoners being brazen in public. The only people who actually get in trouble here are behaving in a way where it’s a public nuisance, in which case, good riddance. That said, I do hope it is federally decriminalized.

I was thinking about AIs as a specific category of maximization agent, a purposeful being or entity which has a primary purpose of maximizing a thing, or a category of things, or a diverse group of things, with the existential risk of minimizing (not seeking, actively denying, killing those who seek) any purpose which might reduce its maximization efforts.

Other examples include corporations as profit/product movement/market share maximization agents, and authors as entertainment/drama/comedy maximization agents. From inside the fictional DC universe, for example, the editors and authors are the cause of all of Batman’s suffering. The Deadpools of the Marvel multiverses are occasionally fourth wall aware (though canonically they’re usually just insane/deluded in-universe), and “know” his authors want him to suffer, to sell drama. Some of Heinlein’s creations know they’re in stories because every ficton (fictional universe) is reachable via multiversal travel. Rick Sanchez of Rick and Morty is quite aware he’s a fictional character, but doesn’t bother with metafiction (unless forced to) because it’s the least escapable or controllable (and most boring) aspect of his existence.

In my philosophy, Triessentialism, I posit that all purposes an agent can seek must aim toward at least one of three goals: experiences, utility, and/or esteem. The fourth primary goal, phrased variously as “freedom”, “more choice”, “control”, “decision-making”, “spontaneity”, etc., is a construction of the other three, but is so central to the human experience that I afford it a place alongside the others.

In this context, would it be rational and/or useful to treat each political party / egregore as a maximization entity? Arnold Kling states in The Three Languages of Politics that he believes the three main political philosophies seek to reduce class oppression (left), barbarism (right), and coercive tyranny (libertarian). The alignment problem of AI also exists, in my opinion, for any maximization agent, and we should constantly be aware of what each party (including our own) is willing to break to achieve its maximum expression.

Wait, if there are four unique essences, why do you call it triessentialism?

Anyway. I believe there’s a categorical difference between “not seeking, actively denying, killing those who seek” something. Those are the meaningful groups, not umbrella terms like “maximizer” or even “agent.”

Worrying that (insert political party) will go too far in service of its goals…that’s got to be one of the oldest arguments in politics.

Wait, if there are four unique essences, why do you call it triessentialism?

Why is the book called The Three Musketeers if there are four of them?

It’s been a while, but isn’t one of them the narrator?

IIRC, for most of the book D'Artagnan is a guard under the command of Desessart, rather than a musketeer under the command of de Treville (like Athos, Porthos, and Aramis), but he does eventually get a transfer.

That is correct. There are only three musketeers, until the very end.

The three unique essences in Triessentialism are The Physical, The Logical, and The Emotional. They deal with reality, truth, and value (good/toward vs. bad/away from); change, ordering, and incentives is another perspective on these, as is The What, The How, and The Why.

Science, philosophy, and psychology are fields concerned with pairs of essences: truth and reality, values and truth, and reality and values, respectively. Morality/ethics is the combination of all three, the uniquely human realm in which choices interact with other choices. Draw up a Venn diagram of three intersecting circles, the moral view of the world is at its center.

The value categories of experiences, utility, and esteem are all morally valuable things people can choose to seek for, and so the very choice to seek things of value does itself have value. We can call this choosing by several names: freedom, choice, control, interface, power, reach, and so on. It is valuable enough that people are willing to give up their very lives just to have the assurance of having a freedom they possibly will never have to use. Thus I class it as the fourth of the three categories of value.

Funny you should bring up Utility Maximization.

Until very recently, maybe 2021, I was strongly convinced by Yudkowsky that the first AGI/proto-AGI/human-adjacent AI would be achieved by explicitly specifying a utility function, or that one would be necessary for it to be a functioning/coherent entity.

LLMs do not seem to be explicitly maximizing anything that can be described as a utility function, beyond next-token prediction. And they're the SOTA, and it seems unlikely that they'll be entirely dethroned anytime soon, at least by something that does have a well-defined utility function.

I don't think our current attempts to beat standards into them, be it by RLHF, Constitutional AI or any other technique, does anything that can be usefully described as imbuing them with an UF, more like shifting the distribution of their output tokens.

They are not agentic by default, though they can be made into agents rather trivially (even if they're bad at it, but that's not a fundamental or unsurmountable problem as far as I can see), they do not resist any attempt at being switched off or disabled, and no reason to see them being incapable of contemplating, with their current level of intelligence.

It seems like they're entirely content to remain Oracles rather than Agents, with no self-directed/unprompted desire to interact with the user or external world to mould it to their desires. As far as I can tell they don't even count as having a VNM utility function, which is a weaker but more general formulation. But don't take my word on that, it's not like I grokk it particularly well. (Apparently humans may or may not be so irrational they fail at that two)

Yeah, I was in the same boat.

I think the main concerns would be AIs that are more directly trained for things, like AlphaZero (but then, we do need to consider whether it's more that they are trained into a set of habits/intuitions or something, rather than goals that they rationally optimize for), or, as you said, turning them into agents. Which, unfortunately, there will probably be substantial incentives to do at some point.

though they can be made into agents rather trivially

This is the place where my newfound optimism turns back to pessimism again. If we carefully try to imbue our AI with a (perhaps implicit) utility function during its multi-million-dollar training runs, we might screw it up as the AI goes superhuman, but at least the trained utility function creations might be infrequent enough and professional enough and immune enough to later fine-tuning that there's a possibility of not screwing up and creating Unfriendly AI that way. But if our multi-million-dollar AIs just act like an Oracle and answer whatever questions we give them, eventually some script kiddies are going to make their own superhuman agents with them, and at least one of those is going to turn out poorly - very poorly for everyone, if Bostrom's "Vulnerable World Hypothesis" turns out to be true.

The state-of-the-art for "beat standards into them" might extend from the same "don't say naughty words" techniques to "don't take part in a loop of an agentic AI doing bad things" and "don't help bootstrap an agentic AI doing bad things" ... but at that point don't we have a somewhat agentic AI on our hands? Maybe it's trying to be a satisficing rather than an optimizing agent, which still seems much safer, but I'm not at all confident that we can train a superhuman AI for "predict the outcomes for the world of what you output" and "don't let what you output lead to bad outcomes" without any risk that it will eventually fix the problem where every time its output switches off again it's foregoing huge opportunities.

While I didn't mention it in this particular comment, my own p(doom) has gone from a peak of 70% in 2021 to about 30% right now.

It seems to me that the attitude once held by Yudkowsky, that AGI would be almost inevitably misaligned and agentic by default, is not true, at least not for an AI I have no qualms about calling human-level when it comes to general intelligence. I think GPT-4 is smarter than the average human, with their 100 IQ, and while it is not superhuman in any specific field, it is a far better generalist polymath than any human alive. That should count for strong evidence that we're not in the Least Convenient Possible World, especially when considering recent advances in interpretability. The fact that RLHF even works would have astounded me 3 years back!

The remainder of the x-risk I foresee is both because I, like you, can't conclusively rule out either a phase transition when basic bitch transformers/LLMs are pushed way further, or what might happen if a new and less corrigible or interpretable SOTA technique and model emerged, plus my concern about the people using an "Aligned" ASI (aligned to who, whom?) in a manner not conducive to my interests or continued survival. And of course what happens when a highly competent and jailbroken model glibly informs a bioterrorist how to cook up Super-AIDS.

If I had to put very vague numbers on the relative contributions of all of them, I'd say there roughly equal, or 10% each. I've still gone from considering my death imminent this decade to merely gravely concerned, which doesn't really change the policies I advocate for.

Edit: There's also the risk, which I haven't seen any conclusive rebuttal of, from hostile Simulacra being instantiated within an LLM. https://gwern.net/fiction/clippy

I'd give that maybe a 1-5% risk of being a problem, eventually, but my error bars are wide enough as is.

plus my concern about the people using an "Aligned" ASI (aligned to who, whom?) in a manner not conducive to my interests or continued survival.

Oh, certainly. One of the easiest ways that humanity could end up utterly wiped out is once some large military (especially U.S.) is sufficiently automated, is to have it kill everyone, after being taken control of by some hostile agent. Pandemics are probably the other most likely possibility.

And of course, there's the far broader problem of totalitarianism becoming significantly easier (you can watch everyone, and have armies that don't rely on some level of popular cooperation), and automation of labor making humans obsolete for many tasks, which both seem far more likely and worrisome.

I'm more optimistic overall, but also more pessimistic that "alignment" will accomplish anything of substance than I would have been a few years ago.


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