websitejanitor

Pynchon doesn't pretend to be anything. His material mostly consists of low culture, obscenity, and engineering nerd stuff he finds interesting. He lived through the beat and hippie countercultures and draws from them for his characters and settings.

I think people get hung up on the difficulty of his writing. He writes word puzzles and he's having as much fun with it as he can.

People like his work because they have fun untangling the obscure mess he puts on the page.

The base interest rate has gone up.

Businesses don't pay for costs solely with revenue, they also use cash from loans. Revenue is used to pay off loans, so higher interest rates mean loans become more expensive. To maintain constant loan repayment costs through a projected year, the total amount of those loans has to go down. With lower cash from loans, costs have to be cut and payroll is one of them.

I think this partially explains why everyone is doing layoffs regardless of revenue performance: they all have to adapt to the same conditions of higher interest rates.

Ordinary people will sign up for Bluesky instead of Mastodon. Removing friction is absolutely essential to growing a user base.

Not everyone finds value in signaling how technical they are by overcoming/dealing with FOSS jank

The weird thing about these is that they blame Google's search results on spam. I work in SEO and I can tell you that they are much better at ignoring spam than they were in 2010, where a lot of these people quoted still have their heads at regarding SEO.

What's been going on at Google is reliance on neural nets to take care of various ranking algorithm tasks. We want better keyword matching to generate results, but Google is developing ways to match query vectors to document vectors using stuff like BERT. Google is looking at the knowledge graph of entities that emerges out of the content we write and is trying to figure out which relationships between entities are important to a query and which result set has the best coverage and diversity. This incentivizes publishers to write a lot of text that covers multiple related topics and bury the point inside of it.

The other major shift in Google is how they consider links. PageRank is still around in some form, but there could be other link-based algorithms that serve similar purposes. The last few years of core algorithm updates put a lot of importance on receiving links from news websites for any keyword with commercial intent. If you want to rank, go hard on public relations.

The result is a real loss of accuracy and a lot more false positives that are semi-related to the query.

I like to know which page I'm on

I'm going to argue no. Unemployed people are not lazy sponges mooching off of an extra, measly $300/month.

The easiest explanation is that teenagers are cheaper to employ for a certain segment of jobs and won't quit when their 5-15 year career job opens back up.

I have read Anathem. It's math as occult magic riffing on harry potter.

>what if the math is the reality, what happens then?

Magic. Reversing the relationship between reality and our interpretation of it literally means bending reality with ideas. In this case magic is matrix multiplication.

This is idealism getting lost in the sauce to the highest degree. If you ever find yourself thinking "reality is just math", you must remember: the map is not the territory.

>Apple's pricing isn't higher than the competition

Back in the Intel days you were paying twice as much for a Macbook laptop that used the same CPU as whatever Windows laptop with similar specs.

Yes, but you wouldn't know it by how Google ranks news websites.

Except that dark matter is often described as exotic and actually existing but not yet discovered. And I'm not talking about the publications that platform charlatans like Michio Kaku

I always wonder if dark matter doesn't exist and it's just hard to measure the mass of stuff very far away.