Doug Rushkoff had a talk where he called out local currency as a thing he’d like to bring back from the medieval.

Exclusive to the community, and only valid for a short period of time, so you can’t hoard it or siphon the wealth to another community.

As an able-bodied neurotypical 30-something straight white cis male with a suburban middle class upbringing and an office job, I don’t participate in identity politics.

Silly goose, you don’t own Windows — you license it.

If Miyamoto is succeeded by someone with Gabe’s pro-consumer philosophy, Nintendo could dominate.

Sony and Microsoft are too busy doing the private equity playbook.

It is kinda brilliant though, the way they set it up.

If you don’t like the joke, you can always fall back to the meta level: this is a 40-something dad recalling how dumb and cringe-worthy he and his friends were in their 20s.

Interacting with people whose tone doesn’t match their words may induce anxiety as well.

Have they actually proven this is a good idea, or is this a “so preoccupied with whether or not they could” scenario?

I think part of the problem is that when you read about the horrors of the Holocaust as a kid, you can’t help but think of Nazi Germany as a cartoonishly, outlandishly evil place full of people who spend every waking second thinking about how much they hate impure bloodlines.

You come away with an impression that it should be obvious when genocide is happening.

Then you go home after school and you see something about genocide in the Middle East, and you ask your parents about it and they say “Well… it’s complicated.” And if it’s complicated – if it’s not cartoonishly, outlandishly evil – then it must not be genocide.

So, literally the story of the actual Luddites. Or what they attempted to do before capitalists poured a few hundred bullets into them.

Dude gave up his entire life to send a warning to as many people as possible. You think he’s gonna not post further warnings on Twitter?

I tried to be accurate instead of specific.

If I didn’t have to work anymore, I’d have more time to explore potential things to work on, so whatever project I’d pick right now would probably not be my main focus after 3 months of settling into my new life.

From where I am right now, I think it would be something to do with language-level features for distributed computing (but not that web3 nonsense). There’s a lot of potential to weaken the monopoly power of cloud providers by working on something like that, which is why it’s an under-explored area.

But I’d need more people to work with, and some specific use cases to go after. So I would expect the effort to change a lot by the time I actually found the right group of people to work with.

Work on projects that I think are important instead of just profitable.

Shipbreaking

Current Setting: Breed Groot

We do what we can, because we must.

Why is it the exposed shoulder that bothers me the most?

I need help finding a source, cuz there are so many fluff articles about medical AI out there…

I recall that one of the medical AIs that the cancer VC gremlins have been hyping turned out to have horribly biased training data. They had scans of cancer vs. not-cancer, but they were from completely different models of scanners. So instead of being calibrated to identify cancer, it became calibrated to identify what model of scanner took the scan.

Malcolm X put it well:

The white conservatives aren’t friends of the Negro either, but they at least don’t try to hide it. They are like wolves; they show their teeth in a snarl that keeps the Negro always aware of where he stands with them.

But the white liberals are foxes, who also show their teeth to the Negro but pretend that they are smiling. The white liberals are more dangerous than the conservatives; they lure the Negro, and as the Negro runs from the growling wolf, he flees into the open jaws of the “smiling” fox.

That said, many people have a mistaken view of voting.

They think “I’m picking someone who represents who I am as a person, and so who I pick is a reflection of my very soul.”

Or at best, they think “I’m picking someone who will act in my best interests. I may not like them as a person, but the actions they take are at least a good approximation of the actions I want them to take.”

The reality is more like “I’m picking someone who will inevitably act in the interest of those in power. I need to pick someone who has the right vulnerabilities. They don’t have a good rapport with certain powerful entities, so they don’t mind pissing those ones off if it means they can score some votes as a result.”

You’re not picking someone to lead your side. You’re picking who you’d rather negotiate with from their side.

It’s probably more like the Apple II than the Newton or iPhone. It cost $1300 at the time, which is about $6300 today. For early adopters, it was a revolutionary glimpse of the future. It took another 10 years for it to become widespread.

The attention economy already has people hostage and blocked off from the outside world. No goggles required.

To play devil’s advocate: If we’re gonna have a tech-centric society, I can see where being able to make eye contact with people nearby and keep your hands free could make for a more wholesome experience than staring down at your phone for 80% of your waking life. And for people who are remote, being able to feel like you’re occupying the same space and breathing and laughing together could be a solution for our extreme isolation.

But on the other hand, these are all problems that capitalism and big tech created in the first place, so…

I wish people knew how to screenshot.