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CertainlyWorse
No one is coming. It's just you.
1d ago
I missed that part. Commercial insurance coverage should be enough by a single party to cover this so I don't know why the judge went out of their way to punish the yellow light driver.
I caught my first Ryanair flight, heading down from Edinburgh to London, and holy shit.
I didn't have very high expectations (and I think I got scammed by paying for extra baggage), but the experience was abysmal.
The initial point of failure was informational. Upon checking in online, the website presented me with a series of warnings, escalating in their shade of digital red, that as a non-EU citizen (despite possessing a UK residency permit, a distinction the system seemed unable to parse), a printed, physical boarding pass was a non-negotiable requirement. Failure to produce one at the airport, it was implied, would result in some combination of fines, exile, or possibly being sacrificed to the god of baggage fees.
This sent me on a quest through the Edinburgh airport for a Ryanair helpdesk, a quest which revealed that the designated helpdesk was less a "desk with helpful people" and more a "suggestion of a desk, currently unburdened by the presence of staff." (This is presuming someone's half eaten lunch doesn't count). The system, it seemed, had a single point of failure, and had failed.
An airport assistance employee who, taking pity, escorted me through a staff channel to a hidden check-in line. Here, the ground-truth epistemology contradicted the website's stated doctrine: no, of course I didn't need a physical pass. The dire warnings were, apparently, just a sort of generalized, non-binding advisory. This was my first lesson: the Ryanair informational layer operates on a different plane of reality from its physical one.
It only got worse. After getting to the terminal, I found myself boarding a perfectly normal airport bus. Tad bit crowded, when I got there, but no biggie.
And then people kept coming. And then more showed up. The bus showed no signs of readying for departure. Yet more people kept being shoved in, and you can tell that even the legendary British tolerance for minor inconveniences was taxed beyond its limit. We were semi-apologetically informed that there was only one bus operational today, which didn't really make things better.
People were loudly asking if they couldn't just walk to the plane, others made comparisons to being sardines in a can, and I added my own take by simply questioning why they didn't just do two trips if they had one bus?
Why didn’t they? One might hypothesize that the marginal cost of a second five-minute bus journey (fuel, driver time) was calculated to be greater than the cumulative disutility experienced by 180 passengers compressed into a human brick for thirty minutes. Or perhaps it's a form of signaling: you wanted the cheapest flight, and this is what The Cheapest Flight feels like. You are not a customer to be courted; you are a parcel to be shipped, and parcels do not have preferences about packing density.
Eventually, the boarding staff ceased their efforts, which had begun to resemble viral videos of shinkansen "pushers" in Tokyo, though with less efficiency and more audible sighing. Whether this was due to hitting a hard physical limit or a soft limit on potential passenger revolt remains an open question. The ten-minute journey to the plane was a miasma of condensation and shared misery, followed by another ten minutes of waiting in the poorly ventilated bus at the foot of the stairs before we were permitted to ascend.
The aircraft itself was a masterclass in apophatic design. An angry wasp, and just about as comfortable to ride. It was defined not by what it had, but by what it had aggressively stripped away. The cabin was a symphony in hostile shades of yellow and blue, a color palette that seems optimized to discourage any sense of calm or well-being. The seats, clad in a thin, sweat-inducing pleather, were clearly selected for ease of cleaning over any consideration for human comfort. The legroom was a theoretical concept, not that the seats could recline and take any more of it away.
I had paid a non-trivial fee to place my modest backpack in an overhead bin, a transaction that now felt like a failure of game theory on my part. Observing the general chaos and the apparent lack of rigorous enforcement, I suspect the Nash equilibrium for a frequent Ryanair traveler is to simply ignore the ancillary charges and bank on the operational entropy being on your side. The airline is running a tax on the risk-averse. They won't pull the same trick on me again, I promise you that much.
This flight can't leave soon enough, but now I half expect them to charge me if I use the toilets in-flight.*
(I promise you that even the most budget airlines in India don't cut as many corners. It's frankly quite impressive.)
*I fucking knew it. Their CEO had actually floated the idea of coin-operated toilets a while back, but was stymied by airline regulations. I'm no longer a minarchist or libertarian.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
1d ago
Maybe. But there's an increasing trend of social anxiety making people just not want to go to things at all -- and of course the internet rectangle makes it easy to develop parasocial relationships or social media addictions and spend time on those instead of actual people. The flakiest people I know are the least busy.
For instance, I have a friend who wanted to hang out and I haven't texted him back in 3 days (but to be fair, it took him 4 days to get back to me). And my girlfriend is in the other room and I'm typing this right now. I'm choosing you over snuggling, faceh-less internet person! Something has gone wrong there.
I saw a t-shirt at Target the other day that read, "Canceller of Plans." And I know the rush that comes from cancelling plans. But it's still pathological avoidance.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1d ago
It never stops making me laugh that anti-immigrant Americans fucking despise the immigrants but not the Americans who pay them illegally for their labor, which is why they're in America at all.
the_Culture_is_great
1d ago
Tonight when it came up that my fiance and I walked to the bar people were shocked.
It was a half hour! On a pleasant summer night!
Reddit is a completely curated experience for the most part, and so it’s never going to be a vanguard for new ideas. It probably stopped being that in the early 2000 before the normies showed up.
What? Reddit was founded in 2005, and didn't ban its first subreddit until 2011 (r/jailbait, rest in power).
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1d ago
"no you don't understand, my based right wing fantasy world is SO MUCH COOLER than the soy poet fantasy world"
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1d ago
This is so unbelievably wrong I don't even know where to begin
The sheer amount of surgical techniques, mechanical/robot assistance, and drug development alone. Not to mention computerization and millions of other improvements neither of us know about too.
How can you be so blatantly and confidently wrong?
It is end of life care
The stats on this are eye watering though
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1d ago
So they need to work 38% more hours to get a car that is like, 500% better?
I think we're in the rich society
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
Interesting line of thought. On /r/4chan they often colour over the word 'nigger' even in image screencaps. There was at one time a bot that would bitch at you if you used the word 'retarded'. On tiktok rape is grape. People are unalived rather than killed. It's some variation of Orwellianism.
Often when I see ChatGPTisms in the wild, in media, from supposed experts, I get a sense of some vast engulfing monster slowly grappling with our civilization, wrapping around it to consume it. Like a white blood cell vs a bacterium. This may well be just another aspect of that.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1d ago
You think trailer trash is more judgemental about tattoos than thé PMC?
So many of my PMC friends have tattoos that I'm going to have to assume the answer is yes, although I don't really know anyone who is trailer trash so maybe they're super chill about it
The ship for "rahhhh tattoos bad" sailed probably a decade ago for downtown yuppies
FarmReadyElephants
1d ago
I think Reddit is more important than people realize. It’s long been one of the most valuable datasets on the internet, even before LLMs. I would google a question about health, products, or general interest with a “site:Reddit.com” at the end to get thoughtful commentary from real people. And now that it is LLM fuel, it’s influence will only grow
And it is entirely captured by the left fringe of the Overton window. It is one of the more progressive San Francisco companies. I’ve eaten more bans there than anywhere else on the internet. I’m not a particularly inflammatory poster! But their Overton window doesn’t extend very far to the right.
I’m troubled by this and I am a computer programmer. How to overcome Reddit’s massive network effect? I’ve thought that the Motte would be a good place to build from. We have a high quality audience. Could we start subforums dedicated to special interests and build slowly? It would give mottizens a place to have high quality conversations on issues other than the culture war without having to venture into reddit. But that probably deserves a top-level post of its own
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1d ago
I'm weird in that I would want to walk places
This isn't weird at all. Kind of hilarious the default locomotion option for the last 6 million years is seen as weird in America. No wonder you're all so unhealthy
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1d ago
Boys on the motte will clutch their pearls at the idea of defacing the beauty of the human form with art but if you try to get around using the limbs god made for you to walk around with will assume you're a DUI poor
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1d ago
flyover country being behind on the trends
Profoundly yes, any major downtown is full of lightly tattoo'd yuppies who work as lawyers, accountants and software engineers and don't get arrested for doing meth and killing people
Gaashk
1d ago
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
investors lost money on both counts
Investors have been making a tonne of money on anthropic, the valuation just goes up. Revenue goes up. Capital expenses go up too.
All that's happening is that there's a massive race because of how important the tech is, so outside Nvidia profits are low in comparison to the huge size of the investments. But investors only invest if they expect profits.
Just look at the openrouter stats. Huge growth, 22x growth in a year: https://openrouter.ai/rankings
22x growth in a year! If the AI companies were losing money per token, they wouldn't increase the amount they were losing so massively by selling more and more tokens. Selling tokens is how they make money from AI and they have to make money so they can continue the historically unprecedented capital spending. Nobody is going to let them borrow hundreds of billions to built data centres if the inference economics are actually negative like you seem to think. They're not.
Since you've held this thesis consistently, you should've been shorting the AI companies and getting wrecked. Meanwhile I've been investing in them and making money. The market has made its position quite clear.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1d ago
I fucking love this meme so much
But also see any discussion on: abortion, pre-maritial sex, Christianity. The gang may not be actual boomers (also mid 40s is young Gen X) but they're spiritually boomer for sure
Speaking of the meme, I wrote this a while ago to make fun of Doug Ford
"Bike lanes could be here," he muttered, scanning the unfamiliar suburb. "I've never driven through this part of town. They could've painted bike lanes anywhere." The cool wind felt good against his bare chest. "I HATE bike lanes," he thought. Nickelback thumped through the truck's old stereo, making it pulsate even as the Canadian club circulated through his powerful thick veins and washed away his (merited) fear of urban planning committees. "With a truck, you can go anywhere you want" he said to himself, out loud.
anti_dan
1d ago
But they bear no resemblance to the thing the commune person is thinking about. Modern seamstresses are either high end bespoke precision craftsmen making suits and/or dresses for multimillionaires and politicians, or for the majority, factory workers outputting thousands of articles a day. Neither is stress free at all, if you mess up slightly at the bespoke place the client and your boss chew you out, and you might get eventually fired. If you are slow or mess up at the factory you get docked pay and eventually fired.
The difference between the commune fantasy and many others is other types of fantasy jobs do have significant intermediate level positions. I can want to be on the Supreme Court, but then I only score 165 on the LSAT, I can work a solid career and eventually become a local judge. Or maybe I'm not even that level, I can still become some hack PI/Family Law/DUI defense attorney. Many types of aspirational jobs are like this. Sports is a well known tournament profession, but my friend has ground out a solid living as a tennis instructor after his college stint in D2.
gattsuru
1d ago
Bonus points: this doesn't seem to even be the only time that happened that week.
(tbf, JoelGrus is significantly more competent a programmer and at working with AI.)
I did pass them via cramming stuff instead of developing any real mastery which was stupid of me.
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