I found a free port of Civilization (unciv) on the phone and immediately lost like 3 hours. That shit is dangerous. There are better phone games, but there’s certainly a lot of slop.

I just tried “Language Drops” and it was… interesting. It didn’t place me at the right level, so I got a very beginner lesson when I’m closer to intermediate (but definitely not fluent). I’m not sure I liked matching the pictures- the picture for “thank you” could mean different things depending on how you interpret the person’s face and body language- and then I hit the end of the free content for the day. It didn’t get to different tenses or even whole sentences- just basic vocabulary and no verbs. Maybe it ramps up quickly?

I hate space yielded to cars that would be better used some other way.

All those cars parked on the side of the road? Could be a bike lane. Could be outdoor seating for the restaurant. Could be benches. Fuck those cars.

Big ass parking lot? Could be something green. Could be another building. Fuck those cars.

i don’t think we should promote private car ownership. If someone needs point to point transit occasionally, we can solve that some other way. I know people that have a car because they go on trips a couple times a year. Wasteful.

If people want a car of their own, they should pay all the externalized costs.

Just walked home from the bar. Extremely pleasant. Under no circumstances would I prefer to have driven.

What kind of sad sack is so anti-bike that they run a whole “no bike lanes” social media account?

I think I posted this the last time this topic came up, but Ed Zitron’s article about how business idiots run things despite not really understanding the users or product is pretty solid. Long, but solid. https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/

One of the reasons I don’t want to live anywhere else in the US is NYC had public transit that mostly works. Even if this weekend I had to do a Q to the N to the 7 to back to the N to get to queens. I played a whole game of Lords of Waterdeep on my phone and read some of my book.

There’s still going to be production, and I don’t think we should continue with the capitalist class extracting value and making bad decisions

If you introduce basic income without addressing that, you’ll still have all the enshittification

Basic income seems like an obvious solution.

Many people would pursue happy lives. Do some art. Do some gardening.

You’d also want to have like public housing or something so you don’t have parasitic landlords and homelessness.

My understanding is the most “useful” thing a CEO typically does is schmooze with other rich assholes. A lot of companies need funding, and a lot of funding is handed out based on vibes. A good CEO makes friends with the assholes handing out money. That’s hard to replace with AI, probably.

On the other hand, CEOs routinely make stupid decisions. Maybe cutting that out makes up for the loss in funding opportunities?

Also this capitalist hellscape sucks. labor should unite instead of letting business idiots take most of the value they create.

Oh yeah. Cars are bad on like every metric.

Socially they isolate people. You don’t interact with anyone when you’re driving except to get angry. The micro interactions you have on the train matter. Seeing people that aren’t just like you, also annoyed that the train is delayed, or just having a nice time with their kids, matters. More than makes up for when other people are annoying.

Economically they hurt. It’s much harder to just pop into an interesting looking shop when you’re cruising along at 40mph. All the space dedicated to parking could be used for other stuff- housing, commerce, communal space, whatever.

They make spaces less safe. Other than the direct impact (no pun intended) of people getting hit by cars, or crashing into stuff, a space that has steady foot traffic is generally safer. If everyone was in their car instead, you’d probably be alone on foot with no one to help if something happened.

They’re bad for the environment. Air pollution, micro plastics, whatever.

Drunk driving is way more dangerous than drunk “riding the train”.

The more non-car options are built out, the better it will be for people who need to drive for whatever reason.

Cars culture is trash and if we ever escape from it, it’s going to take years.

I wonder if it’s exceeded the max length and caused a poorly handled error

I guess it’s like the difference between a parasite that doesn’t kill the host, and one that does. The current breed looks like it’s going to kill the host.

I canceled my subscription. In part because fuck using AI to hurt labor, but also unemployment. Capitalists want us to spend spend spend, but they don’t want to give us any money to spend.

It’s funny because adding more non-car options tends to make using a car more pleasant. But conservatives aren’t known for being smart, correct, or good at long term thinking.

This reminds me of the new vector for malware that targets “vibe coders”. LLMs tend to hallucinate libraries that don’t exist. Like, it’ll tell you to add, install, and use jjj_image_proc or whatever. The vibe coder will then get an error like “that library doesn’t exist” and "can’t call jjj_image_proc.process()`.

But you, a malicious user, could go and create a library named jjj_image_proc and give it a function named process. Vibe coders will then pull down and run your arbitrary code, and that’s kind of game over for them.

You’d just need to find some commonly hallucinated library names

Do the needs stay satisfied, or is it going to be like 2 years later we have billionaires and starvation again?

Many people have found that using LLMs for coding is a net negative. You end up with sloppy, vulnerable, code that you don’t understand. I’m not sure if there have been any rigorous studies about it yet, but it seems very plausible. LLMs are prone to hallucinating, so you’re going to get it telling you to import libraries that don’t exist, or use parts of the standard library that don’t exist.

It also opens up a whole new security threat vector of squatting. If LLMs routinely try to install a library from pypi that doesn’t exist, you can create that library and have it do whatever you want. Vibe coders will then run it, and that’s game over for them.

So yeah, you could “rigorously check” it but a. all of us are lazy and aren’t going to do that routinely (like, have you used snapshot tests?), b. it’s going to anchor you around whatever it produced, making it harder to think about other approaches, and c. it’s often slower overall than just doing a good job from the start.

I imagine there are similar problems with analyzing large amounts of text. It doesn’t really understand anything. To verify it’s correct, you would have to read the whole thing yourself anyway.

There are probably specialized use cases that are good- I’m told AI is useful for like protein folding and cancer detection- but that still has experts (I hope) looking at the results.

To your point, I think people are trying to use these LLMs for things with definite answers, too. Like if I go to google and type in “largest state in the US” it uses AI. This is not a good use case.

That’s really not the same thing at all.

For one, no one knows what the weather will be like tomorrow. We have sophisticated models that do their best. We know the capital of New Jersey. We don’t need a guessing machine to tell us that.

You shouldn’t trust anything the LLM tells you though, because it’s a guessing machine. It is not credible. Maybe if you’re just using it for translation into your native language? I’m not sure if it’s good at that.

If you have access to the internet, there are many resources available that are more credible. Many of them free.