Arubis

When I started using emacs it already felt past well-established and perhaps past its prime. Decades later it feels perhaps more relevant than it did the then. The easier-access defaults kits of the mid-2010s got a lot of new user investment, and it feels like the community really ticked up around COVID. Yes, agentic development has us spending a lot of time in harnesses; relevance-wise, things that aren’t an editor feel more threatening than alternative editors. We’ll see how that lands over time! Most of the reason I use a harness outside Emacs is to take advantage of a Claude subscription.

Technological progress is multifaceted. Some of it is more value-neutral and tends to be a general accelerant.

In terms of social effect, there's two axes that jump out at me for things that are _not_ value-neutral:

  - technology of violence, where the axis is whether it makes it easier or harder for some people to have direct power over others, and
  - centralization/decentralization technologies.

I think there's a decent argument to be made that the former category is mostly a subset of the latter anyway.

In a _very_ hand-wavey, un-nuanced take, decentralized systems shift power and profit away from the establishment and are inconvenient to use, and centralized systems tend to be easier to use -- and they support and create establishments, and give them power and profit. Unsurprisingly, a fair number of establishments exist and grow precisely because they found a way to centralize a decentralized technology.

The choices that we make in our lived systems mean these axes are mere tendencies, not predictions. The "old" Internet was largely a decentralization technology. The shift towards platforms (Facebook, Xitter...) made many of the old-internet functionality easier to use by centralizing it. Blockchain is superficially and deliberately a decentralizing technology, but with the choices we've made, it's mostly empowered people positioned to centralize it (initially in the form of fiat currency exchange points).

LLM progress is currently in a centralizing phase, but overall its direction remains unclear; will open-weight models running on cheap commodity hardware (once OpenAI won't or can't clear the aisles of available VRAM) turn the tide, or will the frontier labs retain a permanent structural advantage -- and what market and regulatory choices will we make to nudge that direction?

The descriptor that I ran across the other day that kinda lumps this all together: the internet is a store. Some of us remember that it used to be a library.

In total fairness, a Denhac membership is basically signing up to be nerd-sniped for live entertainment. (Denhac is wonderful and I wish I made it over more often.)

This is why it's virtually impossible right now to hire (a billion fake/BS applicants) _and_ to find a job (good luck standing out in aforementioned flood, _plus_ there's AI spammed posts that aren't even for real jobs), or to connect with someone via cold email (swamped).

The US political "flood the zone" strategy is being applied to anything an agent can interact with.

The regulatory overhead to grid-connect is a _significant_ portion of the price, both for the actual paperwork labor and because of the premium it imposes on the system components (you can't use inexpensive non-UL-listed panels)

This might be (unintentionally?) part of the reason for the original subject: how many jobs does the Avengers IP pipeline support? How about for a single artifact output by it--one TV show, for example?

And how many people work on a well-loved indie artifact of about the same market position?

Gonna guess the latter supports way fewer jobs. (This isn't meant as a judgment in taste or moralizing--my own entertainment tastes run indie towards pretentious, so economically I'm part of the problem.)

I am mostly in agreement. And I suspect there are many folks that’re trying to ship something AI-assisted that’s sufficient to get to income security first, and who would use success there as a stepping stone to greater things.

Identify theft/identity fraud is a bullshit risk-shifting move by the banking class.

The actual crime is classic fraud and it's directed at the banks and financiers. By inventing "identify theft", the financial sector shifts responsibility and financial consequences from themselves to the uninvolved, innocent, and frequently totally unaware individuals that fraudsters represent themselves to be.

With this system in place, instead of then requiring that banks spend the resources to verify who they believe they're doing business with (or else risk being defrauded), we have "credit monitoring" and "identity security" services and individuals being held financially and criminally liable for crimes they're often so uninvolved in they _literally don't know they happened_.

Twiiit.com/(your link) rewrites to a pool of nitter servers.

1000%. Paid upfront years ago, installed it everywhere I look at code, and the world’s a better place.

You can preview working with it with Blink.app for iOS; I’m unaffiliated but satisfied. Comes with PragmataPro preinstalled.

I can feel my shoulders unlocking looking at the screenshots.

And less mature businesses that are in highly regulated industries, since they know nobody will fund them if they can’t prove they aren’t a legal timebomb. I’ve worked across clients in edtech, fintech, healthtech, aerospace, and in all of them making sure they didn’t die by regulation was present from early on. (Granted, places that don’t care about things like that don’t work with people like me.)

Edtech in particular tends to be pretty conscious of just never having the data in the first place. PII for minors is radioactive.

In Discord’s…defense? Description? At least for understanding—it’s gamer chat. And it’s been that from the beginning. That’s the design and the intent, and while it seems Discord-the-company is trying to adapt Discord-the-product for the increase in popularity for other uses, its roots are showing. Navigating it feels similar to navigating the menu system of a AAA game.