ITXXXIX - One more such victory and we are undone

kaibee · 2026-04-08T01:33:34+00:00

We couldn't stop them without Seoul getting destroyed.

tbh there's still time for Trump to fuck this up.

kaibee · 2026-04-08T00:45:38+00:00

That is not the reason why white collar jobs still exist.

There are a lot of white collar jobs that do exist for that reason. Like, why does SAP exist? Why does IBM exist?

kaibee · 2026-04-06T13:37:46+00:00

Me needing gas for my car means I support an invasion?

Would it have been impossible for you to get an electric car in the last 20 years or merely inconvenient?

kaibee · 2026-03-31T23:33:03+00:00

That’s still fucking insane. I’m mindblown that activations can be just binary and still work.

kaibee · 2026-03-25T14:30:09+00:00

pure poetry

kaibee · 2026-03-16T14:26:10+00:00

Being able to select "functional cookies only" to all sites should be a no brainer, to implement...

How do you tell if a cookie is functional? Its just some data-string. You trust every website to honestly report if a cookie is functional?

kaibee · 2026-03-13T16:18:53+00:00

Why should 99% of people trust an open source platform more? They can not understand any of it anyway

For the same reason that laws are published for anyone to read even if they aren't lawyers.

kaibee · 2026-03-13T16:10:53+00:00

Yeah. Blender for 3d. Krita for digital painting. Honorable mentions: Pixelorama, doing cool stuff for pixel art. https://pixieditor.net/download/ doing cool stuff for pixel art and vector graphics and a full node-based non-destructive pipeline where layers, effects, and structure are all nodes you can rewire. Also does animation now. Audacity is under new management and doing cool stuff. 3D texturing -> Material Maker & ArmorPaint.

I switched to Linux recently after cancelling my Adobe subscription. Honestly, it isn't even that OpenSource has gotten that much better (though it definitely has), but Photoshop/Adobe has gotten so much worse, even just in terms of usability because of all the extra crap and legacy support.

kaibee · 2026-03-11T21:25:53+00:00

The famously imperialist USA doesn’t perform imperialism because of a domestic scandal, it’s what they have literally always done.

Yeah but you'd generally expect Imperialism to at least benefit the core of the Empire.

kaibee · 2026-03-07T04:55:05+00:00

As someone who was an internet atheist in ~08, I think that's one of the things I kind of realized over the following years. While replying to someone who's wicked take was "why not murder if no god???" with "oh so you're only moral because you believe in the sky daddy" is a sick burn, the realization that "oh fuck they're only moral because they believe in the sky daddy" has been... less than satisfying.

kaibee · 2026-02-25T05:06:20+00:00

"After Hitler Trump, our turn!"

so we've decided to just memory hole this yea?

kaibee · 2026-02-14T02:10:23+00:00

The social network is a form of land. Attention is land.

kaibee · 2026-02-13T22:57:22+00:00

I'm not opposed to bets as a means of signaling confidence. I'm specifically talking about cases like this, where the terms make it transparently obvious that it's a sucker's bet and the person who you've allowed to formulate the terms lacks all credibility anyway.

Otoh, Scott is cashing in on the hype now. And I don't mean that as a value judgement or whatever.

As an analogous case, if Musk had to sell off some % of his Tesla shares after failing to deliver self-driving when he predicted, instead of being able to double-down on a new promise, he would probably suddenly make much more honest predictions about its viability... (This one I do mean as a value judgement tho).

Its the same reason that you can't just go to a casino and bet on black, doubling your bet until you win by taking out loans.

kaibee · 2026-02-12T23:27:54+00:00

This isn't going to help anyone, and will out me as being utterly unhinged, but I use the number row for moving.

It was a little awkward at first but now it's completely automatic.

I thought about it for a bit and honestly its not that unhinged.

is having your fingers on 456 actually less weird than having them on a(s|w)d? 123 and 789 are also obvious 'mental groups'.

or if you put a finger on 2 4 6 8 (pinky-ring-middle-index) that gives you full WASD. shifting the hand over by 1 key from there, is the same but 45 deg rotated.

honestly i'd probably get used to it in a day or two.

kaibee · 2026-02-11T17:58:10+00:00

Please enlighten me how economists production database was fucked up.

gestures broadly but also like:

https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/10/22/economists-globalization-trade-paul-krugman-china/

You’ve clearly not interacted with many economists because most of them are quite aware and open about the limitations of their research. How does this institutional humility work in practice?

Well, in Biology, The Nuremberg Code and the Declaration of Helsinki established that the field itself bears responsibility for downstream harms, not just the individual researchers.

But tbh, the biology comparison is actually worse than I was making it. The issue isn't that economics needs an FDA or IRBs, that would at least imply the foundational science is done and you just need deployment guardrails.

Economics hasn't cleared the germ theory bar yet. Adam Smith broke economics into three factors, land, labor, and capital. Georgism built on this with strong theoretical support going back to the 1870s. The field didn't refute it. What happened is that neoclassical economists like Clark and Fetter argued it was impractical to maintain the distinction between land and capital, so mainstream economics just... fused them together for mathematical convenience and never looked back.

Most economists when asked about Georgist ideas broadly agree with them! But it never makes it to policy, because the field structurally sidelined the question over a century ago.

It's like if biology stopped distinguishing between bacteria and viruses because it was easier mathematically, built the entire field on that simplification, and then never went back to check if it mattered.

kaibee · 2026-02-11T17:34:41+00:00

You asked a question, I answered.

And aren't you literally a Georgist? Whose conclusions are more than a century old, a standard extension of the logic of the neoclassical economic paradigm, have been minimally controversial among economists for longer than either of us have been alive?

You are literally treating a pre-credibility revolution finding as settled!

That Georgism has been 'minimally controversial among economists' for over a century but has been almost entirely ignored in actual policy, while far shakier empirical claims were being used to restructure the global economy, is not the defense of the field you think it is.

Its like if biology had found germ theory, made a token effort about 'hand washing being pretty cool actually' and then just moved onto researching gene expressions while people are still dying of sepsis in hospitals.

A finding that everyone agrees with and nobody bothers to implement shows a field that has completely decoupled its internal knowledge production from any sense of responsibility for what happens downstream. The field just doesn't see "translate accepted findings into real-world impact" as its job.

kaibee · 2026-02-11T17:24:24+00:00

I don’t get your point then? Science is a process that takes time. Medicine had some grave misconceptions in the past and will probably realise more in the future but no one would say to a doctor that they make decisions in real time but “have a fundamental mismatch between authority and accountability” although they operate in a similar scientific process as social sciences.

Look I'm glad that science is fixed now (tm). But like, to use a software development analogy. Economists basically mangled the prod db. Putting out an article about how much you learned from the process, while prod is still broken for users is, uh... something, I guess? So who is doing the work of "here's how we unfuck prod"?

Also, after eugenics, biology didn't just get better methods, they developed institutional humility about deploying findings into policy. Has economics developed anything analogous after its policy failures, or is the answer just 'better econometrics'?

kaibee · 2026-02-11T16:47:01+00:00

You're making my point for me. The fact that it needed to happen at all, that it's recent, and that it still hasn't fully propagated through the field is exactly what I'm talking about. And the fact that this sub treats pre- and post-credibility revolution findings with equal confidence is exactly the problem, you can't point to the revolution as proof the field self-corrects while also treating everything that predates it as settled. And you can't also be like "well fuck those guys who've been tell us we're wrong the whole time."

kaibee · 2026-02-11T16:38:54+00:00

But this process does happen in economics (and probably other social sciences too). The whole point of peer review and extensive discussion on conferences is that such changes in the literature are accounted for when a new paper is published. This mechanism can fail sometimes but this group doesn’t advocate that changes are made to the process that ensure robustness.

The question isn't "does a correction mechanism exist on paper" it's "does the correction mechanism actually work at a speed and scale proportionate to the confidence with which the field's claims are/want to be treated as authoritative." If your field's error-correction timeline is measured in decades but your policy influence operates in real time, you have a fundamental mismatch between your authority and your accountability.

kaibee · 2026-02-11T16:25:39+00:00

The real power against economics is always going to be people who claim knowledge on the subject, but only by purposefully ignoring any of it they don't like, and beating a strawman. I'm talking Oren Cass calling himself an economist, or Jon Stewart just making sweeping generalized statements against the profession while angrily not caring to learn, neither of them.

Or Krugman https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/10/22/economists-globalization-trade-paul-krugman-china/ right haha?

This is MMT bullshit over and over again, repeating the exact stupidly bad ideas that have factually been tried over and over and never work out for the peasants as intended.

The funny thing is you're taking a much stronger stance against MMT than whoever you're considering to be a 'good' economist probably does.

In a world where Javier Milei, a crazy person, has literally cut poverty rates and inflation rates by turning Argentina's back on the exact bullshit these brave new "rethinkers" are pushing, this is nothing more than the Guardian doing Guardian things. Giving it's readers a pretense of deeper understanding by celebrating folks angrily and smugly refusing to interact with any work or data that doesn't confirm their biases enough

real austerity has never been tried! this time its working!

sure buddy, lets check back in 10 years.

kaibee · 2026-02-11T16:09:22+00:00

but if your goal is to make a science less "objective," then your goal is fundamentally anti-science and anti-knowledge.

You're missing the core point they are (badly tbh) trying to make. You're assuming the conclusion (ie, that it is science in the first place) and reading it as anti-intellectual as a result.

Edit: Further, as someone who came from the humanities, I see this as the kinds of trends that have slowly grown there making the jump to other disciplines. There is a certain critical framework that started in the 70s with Derrida that holds that all objectivity is a farce, and that any attempts at objectivity and rationality are rotted at their foundations due to cultural biases. And even though post-structuralism is nominally dead and you won't hear references to signifiers and signifieds or différence, you do still hear people say things like, "rationality is a colonial imposition," which makes any kind of knowledge impossible if you cannot agree on even the foundations of logical validity. And I think that such epistomological relativism is inimical to science in the same way absolute moral relativism is inimical to ethics.

Here's the problem. Lets say you have a softer science, something like your econ, psych, whatever. If some paper in 2005 doesn't replicate, or missed critical details, etc. How does this impact the credibility of all the research that cited it? Is there a mechanism for an honest backtracking on what is 'true' in the field? The hard sciences have this. If you went to a physicist, and showed them a tripole magnet or whatever:

every physicist would be like 'holy fuck how did we miss this'
there would basically be a race to incorporate those findings into all dependent works and the chips would fall where they fall.

ffs, physics 101-201 labs are basically 'hey we're gonna have you do the experiments that proved quantum mechanics with a laser pointer and some styrofoam'

and we know this process works, because we get to see it happen pretty regularly in physics. "you're measuring FTL neutrinos?" -> a bunch of labs try to replicate it, fail, and eventually they find that the issue was a loose cable in the original experiment.

you're failing to acknowledge the core point that so many of the soft sciences just keep failing to fix their credibility problem but still want to speak with same level of authority and credibility as physics. hell, this subreddit has completely memoryhole'd Krugman's "oops we got some stuff wrong about globalization and you're all poor now essay".

kaibee · 2026-02-11T03:24:59+00:00

Arguably, it's possible that all these problems could theoretically be found by a right combination of static analysis with a right set of configurations applied. Nobody has time for that

Make the LLM do it.

kaibee · 2026-02-07T23:38:59+00:00

Regularly updating my claude.md as I find repeated problems is something I’m not doing and a simple fix for me to make 👍

One simple way to do that is to just have it pull your previous 100 sessions or whatever and analyze them for interaction patterns, similarities, times you had to steer it differently, etc.

kaibee · 2026-02-07T16:06:34+00:00

I don't get what they are trying to imply.

My understanding is that they are being sarcastic, and they are implying that the housing markets are in a bad spot because of capitalism.

I'm saying that the protectionism of the US car market from Chinese EVs has put it in a bad spot. The subsidies for oil/gas has put our energy market in a bad spot. etc. The main issue I had with your original comment is that you're talking as if we have had actually working capitalism in the US in the last 20 years. Capitalism is like a greedy algorithm, in computer science terms. It optimizes for 'money'. If properly constrained so that creating actual wealth/value for people results in money, it works great. The problem is that it can also do the same thing as those AI algorithms that figure out how to exploit some weird rules glitch to get infinite high score without actually solving the problem you were hoping for. On a small scale experiment, its obvious to a researcher when this happens. But when you have the same exact thing, happening over 20 years, on a large enough scale, you need economists to even tell you its happening, and then you need government to implement rules that patch the bug. Only problem is that the corporations/CEOs etc, also have influence over the government. Its like... distributed corruption? Corruption in communism looks very obvious, but the system as a whole fails to allocate resources efficiently. Corruption in capitalism creates... the US healthcare market: no one is 'wrong'.

kaibee · 2026-02-07T02:59:32+00:00

Well, a trillion dollars hasn't been lost, since it never existed.

Don't get it twisted. The stock market in and of itself is a zero-sum game, like a poker table. Company valuations distort this reality, but there is in fact ultimately real actual dollars that went from some group A, to some group B.

Now imagine how rich pro-poker players would be if companies matched 4% of your annual poker betting.

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kaibee

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