Viewing profile — underlipton

Someone is going to chime in about the tone of this post, with the ramifications of a decade-and-a-half of rejection on one's outlook flying right over their head. If the underempl…

Survivorship bias. You know what's as bad as a criminal record for your career prospects, in America? Being a black man. Having autism. Being over 50. Being a single mother. Being …

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The g-word has, unfortunately, led to some changes that have impacted the system's aesthetics over the past few years. Lighting was brightened and switched to white LEDs in many st…

You don't get to unbundle the technology that was achieved by bundling and call it okay because the components are benign. The best you can say is that dynamite was a safer alterna…

I didn't say anything about ingesting.

Google caused this by pushing people towards "brands" rather than individual pages. Those platforms only exposed the data necessary for SEO and Google refused to punish them for it…

Is that what's happening? Search has sucked for a while, and I'd just assumed it was partly because they'd been pushing compute to AI-related activities.

Yes. These corporations now run on fascist logic. (Hold up, stay with me here.) The goal isn't to right, or ethical, or principled. It's to (appear to) be strong and capable, and l…

Can you imagine if they'd skipped all of that and put the effort into keeping Search profitable without enshittifying it? Or even just skipped the second part?

Indirectly. Direct application of dynamite to the human body is considerably more fraught an event than direct application of penicillin. As the fundamental goal of technology is t…

This is also why nothing will lower housing prices significantly. The problem isn't inventory, or that we're not subsidizing builders enough, or whatever. It's that we've decided t…

>Pirates weren't holding back until they got really upset about something. They weren't pirates until now. This is radicalizing hubris. >If some secret torrent of piracy is somehow…

GPM was amazing for keeping my library accessible on a device with all of 16GB of storage space, but for recommendations, Grooveshark took the cake. Spotify, Pandora, Tidal, Youtub…

The through-line there is not a love for optical technology, but a desire for control. UMDs and MiniDiscs and the like existed because Sony thought that they could impose a monopol…

I think you misunderstand. The disc was the practical tie-down and compromise that allowed gamers to stomach what was happening. Whether or not gamers actually took advantage of th…

>They may ask about specific procedural issues that they would otherwise have no idea about that I then need to explain in greater detail. My favorite part about LLMs is that their…

We already suspect that many non-human animals have a "sense of beauty" and a sense of humor. At least one other species spontaneously dances on the "beat" to music (parrots). I th…

But they only need so many robot housekeepers. And their standards are going to be higher than the average consumer's. If you're targeting that demo, slumming it with a $20k robot …

>Even a 50th percentile US household is very wealthy by global standards. Not by purchasing power. We're also in a weird position compared to our "peers" in that most of them have …

We almost eradicated several diseases, usually screwed over by designating an Omelasan child (though, that's a bad characterization, because letting parts of the world continue to …

> While unhappy microbiomes can be unhappy in their own way, we do not have a consensus on what a “healthy” gut microbiome looks like, either. In collaboration with a continent-wid…

The hiring rate can be high while companies are still under staffed, and I think that's the case. A US that has 25% more programmers than it did prior to the pandemic is likely sti…

>programmers and IT were severely overhired during the pandemic 1) I hesitate to believe that losses were disproportionately technical roles as opposed to administrative. 2) Over-h…