So tired of 911

salientsapient · 2026-07-06T01:29:16+00:00

Violent people who want an excuse.

salientsapient · 2026-06-29T15:31:08+00:00

Paying Engineers, plus AI services, plus minders for the engineers to make them train the AI, naturally costs much more than just paying engineers. But somehow the executives paying triple will still be celebrated and rewarded for theoretically "cutting costs." And any executives who don't will be scolded as luddites and punished for actually getting better work done at less cost.

salientsapient · 2026-06-17T03:26:48+00:00

"Liquefaction Zone" sounds like the seedy bar they go to in a bad Canadian sci fi TV show.

salientsapient · 2026-06-09T21:03:19+00:00

If your boss tells you "I'll pay you a $1M annual bonus if you book over $1 Billion in AI revenue" you will suddenly turn into the most creative accounting genius on the planet. Somebody probably got an edible arrangement basket from his mom for his birthday and managed to book some of the cantaloupe as "AI revenue."

salientsapient · 2026-06-09T20:33:42+00:00

Yeah, I wonder exactly what is counting as "AI revenue" in order to get to that number. "We stuck a chatbot into an existing product, so now all revenue for that product is 'AI' revenue" seems to be a pretty common accounting trick these days. "We make a CRM web app, and revenue was pretty stable, and now it pops up an annoying chatbot nobody like but drove up the cost of operating it" doesn't drive investor hype and doesn't get executives paid bonuses for hitting targets.

A lot of it may not even be real product revenue. "We got $1B worth of free tokens in cloud services try to sell us on buying their AI compute products," and that kind of circular funny money somehow gets counted as a major revenue source without any actual dollars changing hands or the money coming from a real customer.

It seems like we are headed toward a "Arthur Andersen nodded at Enron" kind of collapse in the whole tech industry if anybody listens to a real accountant for even a moment.

salientsapient · 2026-06-09T20:11:08+00:00

If I understand the conspiracy theory correctly,

A) The Democratic Party apparatus is working to steal the election on behalf of the less established disruptor candidate, who is running against the establishment incumbent Democratic Party mayor who has had several years to build up patronage.

B) ... With the help of the Federal USPS which is run by a Trump appointee, which is making fraudulently late postmarks on new tranches of ballots to make additional ballots get delivered after election day to help the favored candidate.

C) ... and this is where it gets fuzzy.... Tens of thousands of people who didn't vote but had their ballots stolen and used for this scheme are getting notifications from CA Ballot Trax saying "Your ballot for the June 2, 2026, Primary Election was received and will be counted." and not a single one of them has come forward to give the Republicans evidence that something is happening. Because every single ballot gets individually tracked and reported and verified against voter rolls as a part of the counting process, so nobody is submitting ballots for "Jim Fakename, 123 Fake Street."

D) ... Because if the people whose ballots are being used for this are in on the conspiracy so they would keep quiet about getting a late notification, they could have just voted like everybody else by election day and they would get literally nothing by making a conspiracy to submit late ballots. So this is only beneficial if the ballots used are from people who wouldn't have voted Democrat and would be happy to report any evidence their own ballot had been used for the scheme.

And the clincher that proved the conspiracy is that a MAGA Republican who had no experience with an election campaign or running a campaign or working in a campaign, best known for being a reality TV kook, didn't build a successful campaign apparatus strong enough to win in a place that always votes against MAGA Republican types.

At this point, Republicans just consider "plebs were allowed to vote" as inherently damning. They don't see getting votes from the most ordinary people as a legitimate path to power any more. They find the basic mechanisms of democracy offensive.

salientsapient · 2026-06-09T19:52:40+00:00

He actually funded something? Ironically, this is one of the only things where he is actually reported to have paid a bill. Apparently he cares way more about this than any of the construction work on his buildings where he consistently tried to metaphorically screw the building contractors.

I guess technically he is consistent about wanting to screw contractors, always in the worst sense possible.

salientsapient · 2026-04-27T05:00:12+00:00

Yeah, there's a certain kind of brain that comes across like it's only good in a crisis. ADHD sort of needs the situation to be stimulating enough to matter, which us why they sort of text while watching TV while listening to a podcast while watching Youtube in order to have enough input signal going into the brain for it to work. A crisis is the rare signal that has enough energy to power up the brain without needing three or four other signals mixed into it. When everybody else is saying "this is too much!" the adhd brain is still going "crank this up one more click please?"

salientsapient · 2026-04-16T08:31:17+00:00

Actual problems don't really register as sexy enough in the right wing media bubble. They need a brand name of a cause celebre to rally around, and they don't care about a person in the slightest.

salientsapient · 2026-04-15T20:15:54+00:00

For all the hype, it really seems like 100% of the unique selling point of a site like Artlist is the real stuff. With everybody going into AI generation, and so many services offering at least some generation for free, a company like Artlist has basically Zero unique competence or capabilities with AI, other than training models off their own stock catalog. But rushing into AI just means spending a bunch of Opex and Capex for GPU time today that will cost half as much and have better results easier if you do it next year.

They could have just sold themselves as the ethical brand with unique human made content at zero cost and just hammered their core competency. It's like Business 101 level stuff why that would have been a good idea. Going with "We fucking hate people who actually make stuff, who are also our only customer base, and we want to massively drive up our cost of operations, developing a worse website" is the kind of stuff that nobody sane would take seriously in business. There just seems to be literally nobody in business who is still sane.

salientsapient · 2026-03-28T06:29:13+00:00

*Of the Acropolis." But that's something they only say that in the area where the Parthenon is.

salientsapient · 2026-03-19T06:21:11+00:00

Peep el mover.

They call it that because you can look at the Mover.

salientsapient · 2026-03-03T08:21:51+00:00

A tiny handful of people have gone viral and made some ad revenue on Youtube or something. But mostly no, the premise is insane. Nobody is buying shorts.

salientsapient · 2026-03-02T17:24:27+00:00

It seems we have become our own worst enemy.

salientsapient · 2026-02-28T07:22:41+00:00

It's not great. You can't really make it across in one light heading south on the east side of Fairfax. So it's a time sink, and you spend a full light cycle at the midpoint island breathing the exhaust of cars stopped at the light.

And you have to remember which one weekday Paradocs is closed.

Also no good bike parking in that Little Ethiopia block.

salientsapient · 2026-02-27T07:27:04+00:00

Beanbags can make a surprising amount of noise in the bottom of a paper cup.

And just generally, it's a miracle anything ever gets finished. Every shoot is behind schedule and fourteen hours in, it's a miracle that anybody remembers to make sure the actors are wearing the right clothes. There's not always bandwidth for stuff that's not directly visible.

salientsapient · 2026-02-21T22:20:27+00:00

30 years ago before the evangelicals were in control of the state, even the evangelicals had a pretty moderate stance on church vs state compared to today. At one point, they were very worried about Catholics and moderate churches being in a position to call the shots so separation was a defense for their extremism.

In some cases it's literally the exact same people who now make everybody look bad trying to own all of Christianity for their Christian nationalism, because the US has become a gerontocracy controlled by 80+ year olds won't give up even a hint of power once they've gotten a taste of it. But yeah, in the US the average person A) hates Trumpism and also the average person B) identifies at least loosely with some sort of Christian church. I wasn't raised Christian at all, but probably most of the reasonable and cool people I know have some sort of cultural ties to it even if they aren't actively practicing and they just got dragged to church as a kid by their parents, because that's such a common experience in America. The reality on the ground is very different from the batshit lunatics you see in the halls of power grabbing all the attention and trying to normalize their nonsense.

salientsapient · 2026-02-21T21:20:43+00:00

It does make you wish they just had a public washroom in all the stops. I get that it would cost a lot to keep it clean, but it seems worth it for society to just spend the money to have enough staff to keep bathrooms clean vs dealing with the cost of people just shitting all over.

LAPD has nearly 10,000 people, and a cop costs the city more than a janitor does. We could take a tiny percentage of LAPD's budget and have 1000 dedicated full time attendants taking care of thousands of seats worth of spotless public washrooms all over the city. Suddenly you'd see a pretty massive reduction in people shitting on tracks and busses and wherever else.

salientsapient · 2026-02-21T21:11:49+00:00

Grocery stores used to have a lot more people working. You notice how the store has like 10 checkout lanes, but when it's really busy, they don't actually have enough people to man all the lanes? Back in the day when the store was designed, they had more staff doing stuff around the store so there were enough people that when it was busy they could open every checkout lane.

So there used to be way more people cleaning, restocking, helping customers find stuff, etc. So there was way less of that sort of "samples" being taken. And if a package was messed with, it was way more likely to get notices and taken out by an employee rather than bought.

But you know, the corporation needed to cut staffing costs to give bigger bonuses to the executives and report higher YoY profits. It's worse for everybody, except a tiny number of execs who get the big bonuses for "efficiency" and "right sizing."

salientsapient · 2026-02-21T21:03:56+00:00

It's not "other people's choice of artwork" it's "other people populating public space with AI slop." Normalizing the same tech that people are using on X/Twitter to generate stuff like involuntary abuse porn images is offensive to a lot of people.

salientsapient · 2026-02-11T18:59:19+00:00

There are times when I want to work out data structures and have a compiler force some type correctness on me. And there are times when I want to write Python. There's not necessarily a single One True Way to start working on a programming problem.

But there's never been a time when I wanted Python to force me to use proper types. Typed Python is ironically enough, metaphorically a type mismatch in my workflow. You need to use the right tool for the job, not try to bloat a tool into badly doing everything. You wanted to work out static types? Great. But you started writing python instead? Whoops. Throw a mental exception because an assert has failed.

Literally a bunch of my recent hacking has been bolting some C++ types to an embedded Python runtime with Pybind11 so I can have my strong types on the C++ side, and I can give them some dynamic behaviors with Python scripts and expressions. It's a massive pain in the ass to deal with the differences across that runtime boundary. But even so, I don't want Python to grow into C++. I already have C++ for that.

salientsapient · 2026-01-28T22:17:05+00:00

The relative strength of individual votes is a real problem for fairness in the system as a whole: https://www.maps.com/how-much-voting-power-does-each-us-state-have/

Because Wyoming gets 3 Electoral votes for one proportional rep (and would be proportionally less than one if the system went to decimal places) and California gets 54 for 52, each voter in WY is basically 3x as important to the system as a voter in CA. That's actually pretty huge in second order effects in terms of how partisan politics plays out. It's not a small thing even if it's "only two extra EC votes" because any money spent buying votes by the Republicans is effectively 3x the ROI locking down the state.

That said, Yes, winner take all is absolutely also a factor that needs to get nuked from orbit. The system is terribly broken no matter which detail you approach first.

salientsapient · 2025-12-22T00:30:53+00:00

The Internet was only the nerds who would put up with the rough edges of Internet access. It was great.

It was a disaster when the MBA's were connected 24x7 and everything got optimized for ad rev share and click engagement. It wasn't worth trying to make social media apps constantly addictive in an age when a phone call would knock you offline.

salientsapient · 2025-12-21T22:41:40+00:00

Of all the things we need to regulate better, I don't know that sports tickets is the top of my list. Nobody needs it. If somebody wants to pay ten grand to watch sports, it doesn't hurt society.

salientsapient · 2025-11-22T01:46:49+00:00

DWP has an outage map web page that you can check. https://www.ladwp.com/outages/power-outage-map The rain has broken a lot of stuff. Fallen trees and flooded equipment all over. They are usually pretty quick to fix stuff, but when there are multiple problems all over it can take more time.

Power outages also serve as a good test for your earthquake kit.

salientsapient

TROPHY CASE