I agree with this; I think part of the societal problem is one of poor urban planning. I’m lucky to live in a neighborhood in New York (Sunnyside) that has a park that is the hub of everyone’s social life—most nights of the week, people show up, bring some food, and chat/share dinner and drinks while the kids run around playing unsupervised. This is extremely rare in the US, which is dominated by suburban typologies that feature individual homes and relatively few communal spaces. The shared spaces, like restaurants/bars/etc. tend to be places you have to drive to, and therefore have less of a connection to their community and less of a regular clientele. Everyone wants to have their own backyard…which is fine, but leads to people hanging out alone in their own backyard rather than with their friends and neighbors.

People speculate this is what happened to Graham Linehan—I heard a funny story on a podcast in which somebody, a number of years ago, sent him an email saying that they were a big fan of the IT Crowd, but there was an episode that they felt used trans people as the butt of a mean joke in an unfair way…and he wrote back with a very thoughtful and sincere-sounding apology! But it’s easy to imagine questions like these being the start of the rabbit hole that he went down, starting to self-justify those aspects of his work, finding support from more radical people online, and ultimately transforming himself into a person with monomaniacal focus on this one issue, leading to the ruin of his professional life, the estrangement of his own family, and the loss of his own mental health.

i suspect this happened with j.k. rowling as well, but maybe i'm giving her too much credit. pretty stunning the difference in results for each based on their similar mental/social curdling. i guess it's easier to stay at the top when you're already there.

I’m familiar with the Grasshopper visual scripting environment for the Rhino CAD system, and what you’re describing happens there as well…but I don’t really perceive it as a negative. Users who aren’t comfortable with text programming continue to use the visual method, and users who are tend to migrate their more complicated functions to single blocks. There’s a limit of complexity beyond which the visual programming becomes an impediment to understanding. It’s OK if moving things to a text-based block will make the internal logic of that block inaccessible to some number of users, given that those users would struggle to understand the visual version of the function as well.

> I worked in retail loss prevention

Your salary was the exact kind of thing that needs to be balanced against the cost of fraud; if it was larger than the amount of fraud you prevented, then the company would have been better off just accepting the fraud as a cost of doing business. The closer you get to zero fraud, the more expensive it becomes to reduce it further (and the more likely your countermeasures will negatively impact the business in other ways), so there definitely is an "optimal" balance to be struck between fraud and preventive measures.

This is what I do—it can even be a detailed slack message. I start writing the message with the goal of asking for some guidance, but in the process of carefully outlining the problem and what I’ve already attempted (in order to respect the time of my colleague) I usually arrive at the correct solution. I then delete the email without ever needing to send it.

Putting it into words, methodically, structuredly, seems to do the trick eh

They are clueless kids at their first job, following the orders of their hero. You think they’ll resist when the boss tells them, “cut everything”?

It's a much lower bar to sow discord and chaos vs. being able to maintain a stable, functioning, low-corruption society. Just because a country is capable of one does not mean that they are capable of the other; also, the characteristics that lead a country to be effective in the former may prevent them from being successful at the latter.

There are several theories in this, which may feel plausible but ignore some other possibilities.

First, the assumption that Russian propaganda works on the West. There are no signs of that.

Second, that Russia does have those capabilities. Their main problem is that they don’t understand the modern West and still think in categories and definitions of XX century.

Third, that West is vulnerable. Western domestic propaganda is much more powerful and it’s budgets are much bigger.

> First, the assumption that Russian propaganda works on the West. There are no signs of that.

Wow, that is the statement. I would say that Russian propaganda is the mainstream now in conservative media and among republicans. Half of Joe Rogan's talking points is spreading russia propaganda, half of Lex Fridman opinions - is russia propaganda. Elon Musk retweets and amplifies russia propaganda all day every day.

The problem is - you just don't know when you hear it since you don't have a frame of reference.

It is the same as I don't recognise Chinese or North Korean propaganda. Sometimes I see an obvious example of it on reddit, but in general, I cannot immediately recognise it when I hear it (since half of the top reddit commends are bots - I have problem to sometimes understand what their goals are).

I don't know whether they understand the west or not, but my intuition is that the understanding is not required. With modern social media you have enough feedback to perform complex information operations and have the desired outcomes.

Maybe I'm in the minority, but I wish there were an similarly popular vector drawing format that did much much less than SVG. Any time you want to support vector drawings in a project, the obvious approach is to support SVG...which basically means you have to bring in the equivalent of a browser. What is the minimal alternative?

Unhinged comment. Is the Parthenon not architecture because it’s not ADA-accessible? If someone installs an elevator does it become architecture again?

I used “architecture” to refer to the discipline not as a synonym for “a building.

It would be very surprising if the results from this approach were superior to simply machine-translating the entries from another language—because e.g. English already has so much content and contributor activity, and LLMs are already very good at translating. I can’t imagine you’d get more than a fraction of people’s interest in authoring entries in this abstract language.

LLMs are good at translating between languages that have significant amounts of written content on the internet. There are few languages in this category that do not already have correspondingly large Wikipedias.

There are plenty of languages with millions of speakers that are only rarely used in writing, often because some other language is enforced in education. If you try to use an LLM to translate into such a language, you'll just get garbage.

It's very easy for a hand-crafted template to beat an LLM if the LLM can't do the job at all.