Author | Lightnews

tlwest.bsky.social @tlwest.bsky.social · 12d

Attitudes tend to change pretty quickly when the leader of a country makes multiple credible threats and engages in high stakes economic warfare against Canada.

His threats may have induced eye rolls to start, but we’ve now seen that he may randomly follow through and has no checks.

tlwest.bsky.social @tlwest.bsky.social · 14d

I suspect that many believe most of their constituents *want* a strong man.

I’ve heard “I hate what he’s doing, but at least he’s doing something”, so often, I’m quite convinced that at least a strong minority of American no longer consider the compromises that democracy requires to be worth it.

tlwest.bsky.social @tlwest.bsky.social · 17d

Imagine evolving the cat gene for boxes and then waiting *thirty million years* for the box to be invented.

That’s patience.

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tlwest.bsky.social @tlwest.bsky.social · 18d

My hypothesis is that learning is hard work that your brain really, really doesn’t want to do. It’s really hard to persuade your brain to put in the effort to learn if there isn’t a person right in front of you putting in almost as much effort to teach.

And no, a video doesn’t count.

tlwest.bsky.social @tlwest.bsky.social · Sep 15

I fear this is what dooms us all.

AI’s cheerful authoritativeness combined with the fact that it’s usually right (and its hallucinations are often plausible) means our poor human brains are not up to the task of continually doubting its output.

No number of warnings is going to fix that.

tlwest.bsky.social @tlwest.bsky.social · Sep 14

Not *just* those who would be safe.

Being able to wield lethal violence while under personal threat used to be one of the most effective ways of rising through society. Practically all of society was oriented around it.

Now its allows you to excel in a street gang.

Some dream of the past.

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tlwest.bsky.social @tlwest.bsky.social · Sep 11

99% of authors not succeeding and the system being reasonably fair are not incompatible.

The vast majority of gatekeepers are trying to make money, not find “special pets”. After all, their credibility to the bookstores depends on the bookstores believing the publishers just want to make money.

tlwest.bsky.social @tlwest.bsky.social · Sep 1

Yes. That’s why he’s an idiot and we, hopefully, are not.

tlwest.bsky.social @tlwest.bsky.social · Sep 1

To be fair, saying Clinton has a 71% chance of winning is saying that they believe Clinton has a 71% chance of winning, not who will win.

Obviously claims like this are not falsifiable when you can’t rerun reality a bunch of times, but let’s not misinterpret statistics just to take a shot at him.

tlwest.bsky.social @tlwest.bsky.social · Sep 1

If I do anticipate, it’s about 50% likely that the feature is never added, and our code is more complicated than necessary for the rest of time.

tlwest.bsky.social @tlwest.bsky.social · Sep 1

I struggle a lot with this. If I don’t anticipate future needs, it’s almost 100% guaranteed that when a feature needs to be added, we won’t re-design, and I’ll end up with the new feature being badly bolted on creating some sort of Frankencode lurking on our code base for the rest of eternity.

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tlwest.bsky.social @tlwest.bsky.social · Aug 31

I consider AI to be outsourcing on steroids. And when I first encountered outsourcing, I was appalled at how badly it worked. The company had to throw away the first two attempts, and the third attempt kinda, sorta worked.

It was considered a huge success, saving 40% on the development costs.

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tlwest.bsky.social @tlwest.bsky.social · Aug 31

I just wanted to say how much I appreciated your honest run through of the game.

I’m not sure I would have been able to resist the “that was non-representative” excuse to re-film the game, especially after the first attempt.

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tlwest.bsky.social @tlwest.bsky.social · Aug 17

First, there are a fair number of people who want the status of being an artist/author without all the effort.

But more challenging is answering the person who doesn’t want art, they just want a pretty picture/story. Effort/process is irrelevant, since they only care about the end result.

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tlwest.bsky.social @tlwest.bsky.social · Aug 15

I feel this is an overreaction to an overreaction. I read the thread expecting dozens of humourless replies and all I got was one almost parodic attack, and a few more or less ignoring the joke and addressing the article seriously.

Maybe Bluesky is hiding the really eye-rolling posts.

tlwest.bsky.social @tlwest.bsky.social · Aug 14

While I don’t think human nature is particularly malleable (different from individuals making huge changes), that doesn’t mean we must surrender to it.

Civilization is 10,000 year fight to overcome our base nature to create something that man the animal could never aspire to.

tlwest.bsky.social @tlwest.bsky.social · Aug 13

> They seem okay with stealing research

I would imagine so. Otherwise I’m not certain how I would handle reading non-fiction and incorporating the knowledge and ideas into my life, including my professional life.

I prefer to see AI attacked for not buying a copy of each work they trained it on.

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tlwest.bsky.social @tlwest.bsky.social · Aug 4

That last line sounds close to contempt for a gaming demographic whose interest you don’t share.

Think of it as a form of window shopping. You can dream of this magnificent future that you are not necessarily even a part of.

I was most passionate about computer specs before I could afford one.

tlwest.bsky.social @tlwest.bsky.social · Aug 3

There is tremendous status in being a member of the “default group” of a population.

It’s little wonder that a substantial segment of that old default group would pledge undying loyalty to someone who promised to restore that status.

“Make people like me respected again.”

tlwest.bsky.social @tlwest.bsky.social · Aug 3

No group is monolithic, but you wouldn’t have to search very hard on any college campus to have your expectation confirmed.

However, I suspect it was the sharp divergence of economic outcomes for the college educated vs non in the last 30 years that exacerbated the status loss.

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tlwest.bsky.social @tlwest.bsky.social · Jul 31

It’s rapidly hitting the point where my brain will dismiss any video featuring something that would have given me a moment’s delight.

Natural vistas, animals being cute, amazing human accomplishments - all soon to be lost to my skepticism that “it’s just AI”.

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tlwest.bsky.social @tlwest.bsky.social · Jul 28

I have never understood political messaging.

Naively, I assumed that there’d be a global search-replace of “Trump Tax” for “Tariff” about 10 seconds after they were first put into effect.

Are people in the know afraid they’ll become popular, and don’t want to “Obamacare” themselves?

tlwest.bsky.social @tlwest.bsky.social · Jul 27

11/ TLDR; Yes the Visa/MC duopoly is very powerful, but they don't hold the Canadian banks hostage in any significant way.

(All in my opinion, I'm was a back-end guy, not a bank policy person).

tlwest.bsky.social @tlwest.bsky.social · Jul 27

10/ And of course when co-branded cards were first released, they advertised that fact. It was a big feature for certain Canadian customers like Snowbirds. They would have been delighted to add that feature for its customers.

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tlwest.bsky.social @tlwest.bsky.social · Jul 27

9/ If the relationship was as unbalanced as you say, Canadian merchants would all be forced to accept Visa Debit on Canadian cards (apparently a bit of a sore point for Visa).

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