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YourNetworkIsHaunted

@ YourNetworkIsHaunted @awful.systems

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1
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631
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 24th May 2026

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  • For some reason once you start talking about space people stop thinking about it as one of many alternatives. If you want to think about industrializing space, simply being possible isn't enough. The unique challenges of operating in orbit (of which cooling is only the most obvious among a great many problems) need to be addressable efficiently enough that sending it up still makes more sense than building it on the ground.

    Microsoft's experiments with underwater data centers serve as a powerful parallel since it has many of the same challenges but is still significantly cheaper. If it were economical to put a data center in orbit it would be even more economical to put it in an underwater container, so if we aren't doing the latter we would need a hell of a good reason to do the former. See also the economic challenges of living on Mars, the moon, or even LEO compared to Antarctica or ocean platforms.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 24th May 2026

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  • I think the more telling aspect here isn't the possible employment impacts, it's the fact that it's making all the things it's supposed to touch worse. Like, the new textile mills may have been massively disruptive to people who had previously been skilled labor, but at least the efficiency gains meant that you could make a lot more cloth a lot faster. The affected workers bore the cost, but anyone could reap (some of) the benefits. But with AI, not only are we seeing the automation impact people's livelihoods, it's also making the experience of interacting with all these systems worse. I don't know how many people outside the tech industry would care about underemployment and retraining for software engineers, but everyone can feel that the systems they rely on are less reliable, more glitchy, and uglier. Combined with the way data centers and AI companies serve as focusing points for people's concerns, I think there's decent odds that we see blood regardless of whether the prophecied great replacement (not that one) happens as advertised.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 24th May 2026

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  • I mean, the classical pitch for an IPO is the same as any other large investment, right? You get a great big chunk of capital that you can throw at scaling or improving processes or building our your manufacturing capabilities or whatever, and then that investment of capital in your business in turn generates a financial return for investors. But in an industry and world where venture capital is plentiful, it shouldn't be surprising that when an IPO rolls around all the low-hanging fruit for improving, scaling, and stabilizing the business have already been done. Instead you're looking for a way to let your earlier investors liquidate their returns and get actual cash that they can invest in new ventures. In the best case that means that the IPO price doesn't move very much and it becomes a stable part of the market, but the incentives are all there to make sure the IPO overvalues the company as much as possible. I would need to do more research but I would suspect you can find an inverse relationship between venture funding and public market success in recent years, at least strong enough to expect the wheels to come off when the initial hype is pushed this high.

  • Present time!

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  • In modern terms I imagine that variety plays into it to a degree. Grains you can use to make a lot of different foods, make animal feed, reduce to corn syrup or ethanol or whatever other products (in the US at least that's the majority of our corn production) and so on. Even before you get into the question of long-term investments versus immediate payoffs under capitalism (how long does an orchard take to start paying off?) there's just more varieties of products and a deeper market for cereals.

  • Present time!

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  • So I'm not able to provide the kind of proper citations that I want to here, but it looks like there are a few factors here. Most importantly, cereal grains have a very short growing season, which in some instances lets you get multiple crops from the same land in a year. More importantly, it massively increases your resiliency. Like, it you plant an orchard of walnuts or something, it takes a decade between planting and being able to actually harvest, by which time your community has starved or moved along if that was your primary source of food.

    Of course potatoes and yams also have a fairly short season, and you do see yams come up as a staple in parts of Africa, for example. But the other big advantages cereals have are in preservation and byproducts. Grain will dry itself out and keep for a long time compared to most other crops, and can be ground into flour, fermented into alcohol, boiled and eaten as raw grain, etc. Potatoes don't keep nearly as well, going to seed a relatively short while after harvest. Additionally, the threshing process gives you straw in addition to the grains, which can be used as building materials, animal feed, and a variety of other things. Most plants don't lend themselves to that many purposes as easily, though this is hard (in my inexpert opinion) to judge correlation vs causation on. Did we find lots of ways to use straw because we were already growing grains and therefore had a bunch of straw leftover? I don't know and I don't know how to find out, or even if it matters on a broader scale.

    However, one specific consequence of this contrast is that in 18th-centuey Ireland the absurdly complex chains of subdivided plots being leased by multiple layers of absentee landlords meant that for most Irish farmers maximizing nutrition per acre was vital for being able to feed their families on the meager lands they could afford to cultivate. This is a large part of the reason why they took to the potato so strongly when it was introduced, and in turn is part of why the same blight that had swept through all of Europe with minimal fanfare absolutely devastated the country. It's not the only reason, but it was a large part of setting the stage for what happened next.

    Anyways, thanks for giving me an interesting question to research instead of doing any of the shit I actually needed to be doing.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 17th May 2026

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  • I particularly appreciate the argument he makes about the tech industry pivoting from creating value to exercising control. I disagree that this trend is specific to the tech industry, but with the possible exception of Monsanto they have been the most successful at it.

    With the obvious failings of the American state to perform it's basic duties and the cross-pollination of the American political and corporate elites it seems plausible that at least some factions in the tech industry are awaiting an opportunity to take advantage of this weakness they've created and exercise that control over the functions of the state directly. I feel like I should be saying this into a webcam from behind a cartoonishly-large desk in between shilling for nutritional supplements, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't fear what rough beast, it's hour come at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 17th May 2026

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  • I mean, to be fair that's not unique to them - software engineers have been worse than physicists in assuming that all of reality and human experience is downstream from their chosen field.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 17th May 2026

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  • I was trying to reply by way of linking a piece by Robert Kingett that had been shared here some time ago that, in excruciating detail and with righteous fury distilled to cold analysis, explained why AI is absolute shit for accessibility aids. His experience is in the realm of physical disability rather than neurodivergance, but that only makes the problems more starkly illustrated rather than unique.

    Unfortunately I couldn't find that piece, but I found this one and needed to explain to the kid why I randomly laughed out loud.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 17th May 2026

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  • I'm not going to start a punch-up with a dev team or maintainer who believes that AI tools can help good programmers do good work or whatever, but time and again we see that, just like crypto before it, you aren't inviting good programmers to work with you. You're inviting the bros. AI bros and crypto bros are a specific type of Guy. I'm sure there were dotcom bros in the 90s. This is not a new problem, even if the current economic circumstances makes being this type of Guy more viable than ever, apparently.

    It's not just that the tech is bad (though it is bad), it's that it's uniquely privileged by culture and economics to empower the worst assortment of morons and grifters outside of Wall Street (and also inside of Wall Street, because of fucking course it does).

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 17th May 2026

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  • Pete Steinberger shares his OpenAI bill on Twitter. The headline number is $1.3 million in the last 30 days.

    But in his (own) defense, it takes so many tokens to do so many bad ideas at once.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 17th May 2026

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  • But I listened and agreed that you had serious concerns about certain aspects of this technology. I even agreed when you talked about how frustrating it was that specifically other people wanted to do bad things. I listened as you asked whether I had any options to address those concerns! What more do you want from me before you agree to let me do and say whatever I want!

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 17th May 2026

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  • The whole slice-of-life subgenre is all about this. No real conflict or plot, just scenes of the characters existing in their world. My wife both reads and writes that kind of thing and let me tell you the level of research and worldbuilding that goes into writing a simple meal scene or whatever.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 17th May 2026

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  • I only know that word from an old (pre-pandemic) book episode of Behind the Bastards, so the immediate association is esoteric antisemitism. I'm not sure how common this is but it seems to support your thesis here.

  • This is getting (Rule)diculous

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  • Some may find her "cringe" but she's doing critical work in stopping the sites you use being DDOSed by AI scrapers.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 17th May 2026

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  • I mean it's the same thing with sponsored content anywhere, right? The user assumes that the system is providing information in accordance with purposes, but the ads and sponsored results create opportunities for the platform hosting them to profit at the user's expense. AI platforms are absolutely subject to the same economic incentives for corruption as say, search engines, but I don't think they're uniquely so just because the model in question has a more humanlike UI.

  • Rule and the big short

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  • But the effectiveness of the fraud is ironically predicated on people continuing to treat it as gambling.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 17th May 2026

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  • Adding on that this does feel like another application or consequence of the Great Man Theory of Everything, the idea the only the people with power and money matter because their power and influence are intrinsic to their person rather than being contingent on their social position. The average people empowered to commit insider trading by prediction markets have sufficiently limited individual agency that even collectively they don't actually matter. In fact we want them to try their hand at the grift so that their insights can flow to the enlightened ones who can better use that information. They don't matter enough to do real harm, but by watching the attempt we may be able to learn something.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 17th May 2026

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  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 17th May 2026

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  • Following on from yesterday's discussion of Scott's close brush with reality on prediction markets, The Aussie PowerPoint Man is talking about the strategic risks posed by the new insider training opportunities opened up by these tools. A lot of what he's saying applies to normal financial markets, but what's striking is the way that prediction markets create those opportunities for people with much less immediate power and information by allowing them to bet directly on the kinds of immediate decisions they do have information on.

    I also thought the idea of integrating insider training red flags on public prediction markets into your early warning system was an interesting idea. These things aren't actually useful for forecasting or making decisions because of how bad the incentives are, but people acting on those incentives absolutely creates a spike that can be meaningful in the short-term and potentially enable a few extra hours or minutes to prepare.