Graydon

@johnzajac@dice.camp Debugging absolutely requires the short term memory COVID infection shreds. Current ability to debug is not great. Most people currently employed as programmers are able to remember being able to do this stuff, and vaguely how you do this stuff, but they can't actually do it anymore and are desperate to keep people from finding out that they can't do their jobs. It makes LLMs very popular; it doesn't get the job done but it does let you look busy. @jwz@mastodon.social @mikej@mastodon.online @mjg59@nondeterministic.computer @glyph@mastodon.social

@HighlandLawyer @cstross Far too much long term planning. Oligarchies are unspeakably terrible at planning, never mind long term logistical planning. They do fashion; they do greed. They do power and control. And public health is dead. In the bleak even more capitalist future, there will be innumerable competing prettiness viruses seeking to improve you. After a few cycles of infection, all the oligarchs are so very happy because no one ever complains.

@cstross This has many downsides (the regional commanders try more things. If one of them finds something effective they'll all try it. Plus you know less about these people and you have to get all of them to agree, instead of outsourcing get-them-to-agree to their national government) and no upsides. Honestly, all by itself this pattern of decapitation strikes is grounds for impeachment in the US and the Israeli equivalent; demonstrated detrimental incompetence. @osma @Orb2069

@osma @cstross @Orb2069 Something like a quarter of the global LNG supply goes through infrastructure in Qatar that took a ballistic hit. The Qataris say something like "two to three years" for repair and that estimate is necessarily based on a functioning global economy and (probably) nothing else massive to fix. (Which we know isn't true.) Plus it's not clear the Iranian government has control of the Revolutionary Guard; don't plan on anything sorting out the Strait this year.

@danielmunoz Politically, this is more to keep Bibi out of jail than to distract from Epstein. (The first US mistake was the B-2 attack last year, which gave the Israelis the ability to commit the US to a conflict with Iran.) Fertilizer, fuel, and spares are will be short or unavailable for the northern hemisphere spring planting season. Throw in consequent disruptions on top of existing food insecurity and 1848-but-more is possible. @cstross @mitch @lasagne @pluralistic

@FknHannu@zeroes.ca But don't assume it's airborne! Many other things are airborne; maintain airborne precautions. (I sure am.) But that's not the only way spread happens, and if we're looking at a hantavirus that spreads well among humans we don't know how it spreads yet.

@osma @cstross @Orb2069 It's not The Number (so there's less nervous money pushing prices), no one is pricing in the risk of Russian collapse, and it's spring so there's a lot less focus on heating costs. I would not want to bet on any of those having any inherent stability. Especially not in conditions where fertilizer shortages get into the public consciousness.

@N01100010@zeroes.ca For high status people, their feelings are more important than facts. (At least in as much as anyone interacting with them will say.) Many people react to an expectation that they regard facts as an attempt to reduce their status. As in any other band-forming primate, anything that would lower status registers as an hostile act. I don't know what to do about this either. (Structurally? Status is a thing no one has. Facts before feelings. Implementation would not be trivial.)

@cstross In the bleak even more capitalist future, Soylent Green is the good stuff.

@Two9A@hachyderm.io @JoshuaACNewman@xeno.glyphpress.com @angusm@mastodon.social They weren't made in Numenor; they were brought from Numenor ("seven stars and seven stones and one white tree", the palantiri are the seven (seeing) stones) but were gifts from the elves and were in their origins the work of Fëanor. Who, yeah, greatest of the elves, but also one of those responsible for the disaster of the First Age. (More or less the Elves' Original Sin made flesh.) "All-seeing, inescapable, and obeying the greater will" aren't positive traits.

@gfwellman@defcon.social I don't have a formal statistical sample. More than half of the people I work with, not just programmers, show issues with focus, memory, and expression. (What used to show up on tests as "put this in your own words".) Programmers are definitely not immune to this, and the ones who work from home are not seeming especially spared. So one of us is some value of lucky. I'm inclined to think it's you; too much support in the literature for cognitive damage from every infection.

@Robotistry@fediscience.org I am sorry to hear that and glad you've managed a degree of recovery. (I didn't get much cognitive impairment but I did get three of the four forms of neurological vertigo. Do not recommend.) @johnzajac@dice.camp @jwz@mastodon.social @mikej@mastodon.online @mjg59@nondeterministic.computer @glyph@mastodon.social

@stingraz Solarpunk outcomes are a best case for #4, yeah. Not especially likely without an active effort to abolish fossil carbon extraction, which takes a lot of cohesion because the famine risk is not so much a risk as a certainty without a lot of collective effort to produce fertilizer by other means (and all that implies and entails), but anything, even the Fatal Slump, that abolishes fossil carbon is preferable to an End Permian 2.0 Atmosphere. @cstross @mitch @lasagne @pluralistic

@Sine_Nomine That's #4, famine-driven new world order. @cstross @mitch @lasagne @pluralistic

@johnzajac@dice.camp And (AIKYK) the effects on kids are different; it does things to cognitive development, and it's pretty likely it makes them anxious as well as giving them diabetes, etc. "Permanent spoon deficit in adulthood" is looking likely to be a thing. @utterfiction@mastodon.me.uk @jwz@mastodon.social @mikej@mastodon.online @mjg59@nondeterministic.computer @glyph@mastodon.social

@fred@social.fthevenet.eu I think you're right about baseline skills, "menial" and "not enjoying". I think that extends to writing code at all; many many people are in the trade because it paid well, not because they had any particular aptitude or fondness for the work. The distinction I was after there was more between "could do the thing" and "cannot do the thing" rather than between "was skilled and fluent" and "awkward and ineffective". It seems like a notable change. @johnzajac@dice.camp @jwz@mastodon.social @mikej@mastodon.online @mjg59@nondeterministic.computer @glyph@mastodon.social

@utterfiction@mastodon.me.uk One of the first studies on the cognitive effects of COVID infection was done in 2020 by the UK NHS, who fortuitously had just complected a baseline ("what is normal?" (for this population, in this time, by segment)) study and had something to compare. They got "cognitive impairment, every time". (Not necessarily enough for the patient to notice, but statistically significant in testing.) Every study since has found the same thing. People won't internalize this. @johnzajac@dice.camp @jwz@mastodon.social

@peterbrown Industrialization includes enclosure; private property was already extending, agriculturally, to a whole lot of things that had been historically common, but now it's coal seams and iron ore and so on. Extractive norms get added to the mix. ("I have the right to nigh-all the profit from extraction based on a philosophical abstraction"; this is a more or less linear progression from pirate->colony->mineral rights.) @darkling @cstross

@darkling Pretty much, yes. Only with greater scope; private equity firms don't have the ability of a sovereign to make things legal. (You can view everything since 1500 as a process of enclosure and not be hugely wrong in terms of economic history. Which is a detached way of saying "farming human lifespan".) @cstross

@jalefkowit@vmst.io The incumbent play looks like making AI essential; the entire financial system is on the internet, fine, we're taking the internet hostage. Pay us from tax revenue to keep our AI running. This requires all of the tax revenue, the political ability, and an AI that can do the job. All are increasingly doubtful. With only a few small miracles, we'll get an actual public internet out of this. But I would want to have some cash on hand before and during. @davidgerard@circumstances.run @audunmb@todon.nl @tante@tldr.nettime.org

@arclight@oldbytes.space I think you're entirely correct about this. "The modern expectation" is a process of enclosure; the money has decided to make it impossible for anyone to profit from a computer without paying them rent. (They've been quietly escalating to "use", just in case.) They're not doing well with the open source model in general (e.g., Oracle's Java debacle) but they've got no real need to figure that out to enserf individual people. Enserfing individuals is a solved problem.

@arclight@oldbytes.space Coding, having been stolen from women ("calculator", as a thing you got paid to do) had a couple generations of being a semi-elite specialty; the gold rush meant you could make a lot of money at it. After the gold rush, it's like being a plumber. The result has to work, you can make decent money, and most people both wouldn't want to and ought not, because it does take a certain specific view of the trade to be effective. The social change isn't free from stress. @meena@cathode.church @badger@mastodon.social

@NunavutBirder@mas.to I have nothing like 300,000 photos so I can't speak confidently about volume, but I find I use https://rawtherapee.com/ more than I use Darktable.

@LilahTovMoon You're presuming attraction exists.

@Taffer None of my personal stuff does, either, but my current employer uses the thing and code I'm responsible for is hosted there. I am not looking forward to those future outages, however much I agree with you about their probable scale. @Viss

@Taffer @Viss If Mephistopheles manifested out of hell and offered you a serious bet that at no time in the next three years would GitHub start rewriting your code with "AI" without asking you, would you take it? It should be the case that the only thing causing a second thought in that scenario is the "fiend of hell" part, and trying to remember if they've all got the gift of prophecy. It should in no way be the case that such a thing feels any amount of plausible, and yet.

@RyeNCode@mstdn.ca That's a serious yikes! from this corner and I'm glad to hear treatment went well. Bat diseases (for lamentably straightforward evolutionary reasons) are the stuff of nightmares. @gfwellman@defcon.social

@drsimevans@mastodon.energy Price scales with parts count, and EVs have inherently lower parts counts. (Battery packs add a little bit of nuance to this, but only a little bit.) Thus the overall value of the global auto market decreases. Big parts of politics, especially local politics, are held up by the car-dealer-and-real-estate axis. Devaluing (= not being such policy numpties) about cars is a major change in the power base available to the political process. (Overtly abandonment of the post-war order…)

@peterbrown I think that's more bookland/charter land (=permanent tenure for entities smaller than a sovereign, aka it's not a gift economy where the king rewards service but it all resets when anyone involved dies) rather than feudalism as such; feudalism works pretty well, and arguably better, pre-bookland. And, yes, growth of wealth because this is the invention of private property. It's enclosure zero, the idea that land is a thing you can own. (As distinct from hold.) @darkling @cstross

@peterbrown It's not precisely slavery; or at least, it doesn't have the chattel aspects. It's just really hard to do anything but the stuff that surrenders your lifespan to another's purposes, because the penalties for non-compliance are death by exposure or starvation. And this really gets going as an identifiable, post-aristocractic-autocracy stultification thing, with the Pirate Kingdom of Elizabeth I and just kept rolling on selective advantage thereafter. @darkling @cstross

@peterbrown All wealth arises from work and if you want to be really rich you have to capture the work of others, which means the whole progression of the norms of enclosure (which are functionally a selection pressure; the better you are at this, the greater your relative success, and that includes "my culture colonizes effectively so children born to it eat better") is about "how much of this person's life span can I structurally compel them to use for my purposes?" @darkling @cstross

@avilewis It's not time for profit caps. It's time to Chapter 7 liquidate all the oil companies (and anyone else doing fossil carbon extraction) and shut them all down. Yes, that would mean a whole bunch of other activity so farming would keep working, but we need to do all of that, too.

@ravenonthill @cstross The US attempt to abolish the slave system did not work (it failed, completely) in the case of the US Civil War, which is why the US slave system is run by government entities in forced labour institutions called prisons. Such attempts generally can't work because we live in a system under selection, not a moral universe. Effective opposition to slavery has to combine greater distribution of agency and greater power (including economic). Otherwise is gets crushed.

@LordCaramac@discordian.social You're making an analogy to plague. Climate change is global; loss of the conditions which allow agriculture is similarly global. Past disasters generally weren't. "Year without a summer" volcanic eruptions are a better analogy than plague, but those lack comparable scale. On geological scales, ten thousand years is quick; two hundred is a blink. The Carbon Binge is novel, abrupt, and inescapable. Also in human terms a millennium is a long time. @davidho@mastodon.world

@freya@social.highenergymagic.net Sympathy! @gfwellman@defcon.social

@log The purpose of a system is what it does. Society exists to make you buy gas. Making you buy a car is so you have to buy gas.

@peterbrown The second thing is that by the time of the protracted struggle over who has the biggest world empire/colonial holdings/external cash inflow with the French, the UK is far enough into maritime norms that their oligarchs will accept that the choice between Napoleon guillotining them all and sharing some power socially ought to come down on relaxing the utility of incumbency. Combine that with the institutions created to supply the navy and industrialization. @darkling @cstross

@peterbrown Once you have enough organization for professional armies and centralized power (that is, you've got a working bureaucracy and can more or less tax reliably), you can get back to god-king autocracy (Great Harry, in the UK) and from there you get to the beginnings of an aristocratic oligarchy with very low social mobility, only two things happen. One is the creation (by adopting ship-crew social norms into wider society) of the Pirate Kingdom by Elizabeth I. @darkling @cstross

@Nonilex That would be the idea that money is more important than hunger being the general constraint on policy that oligarchy always makes it.

@lina@vt.social Y2K made it necessary to pay programmers more than management. Generally a lot more than management. Old programmers, often. Women programmers, a fair bit. People cutting the cheques got traumatized. Some of those people have COO and CFO titles now. They still believe axiomatically that money exists to confirm the social hierarchy, not to create efficiency through accurate prices. AI is a way to enforce the social hierarchy by appeal to the oracle. And to never pay programmers again.

@peterbrown Pre-feudalism we could have the Divine Augustus or Sargon of Akkad! lots of direct taxes before the feudal period. The thing I'd consider unusual about feudal taxes would be a combination of hierarchy-by-public-oaths (effectively contracts) and the change from a gift culture setup (the king gives you stuff, including land tenure, for service) and the creation of permanent land tenure by Christianity. (Can't give a temporary gift to an eternal god.) @darkling @cstross

@LordCaramac@discordian.social My sibling in the void, you are making a big serious claim here which you have not supported. Everything sits on food; people eat every day. Food sits on agriculture; agricultural collapse is ongoing and significantly driven by temperature excursions. Any "compare to 1850 to 1900" temperature graph is going to make it clear that as the temperature increases, the slope of the graph also increases. "You will die before it gets bad" is not the thing to expect. @davidho@mastodon.world

@infobeautiful Most ecosystems need a large grazer species or they go away, and so does nigh-everything adapted to live there. The human-centric "land area to feed humans" is, well, yet more mass extinction, rather than virtue. Yes, open-loop farming practices are terrible things and should be replaced with more responsible practices. This is not the same thing as an argument that beef is unbearably agriculturally expensive or that agricultural monoculture is a desirable use of land.

@aeva I have no idea if you can usefully search the term, but "capital strike". This is the idea that holders of capital/capital as a social entity asserts power not by not spending (it's capital, it can't not be spent, that's not how it works) but by spending on harmful things. And once you're fueling the whole thing off habitability loss/certain genocide/upping the risk of human extinction, a little social collapse hardly seems notable. @cwebber

@peterbrown From 1860 for about the next century there's a hiccup, because from 1860 or so power rests on rifle regiments (and after 1914, industrial mobilization) and you have to get the majority of the male population to believe they're in on it; thus the Century of the Common Man, universal suffrage, and so on. This ALSO involves the maximum territorial expansion of territory under colonial (=purely extractive) administration, because rifle regiments are North Atlantic. @darkling @cstross

@freya@social.highenergymagic.net Want some "it ain't great, but it isn't always nothing" suggestions? @gfwellman@defcon.social

@peterbrown From there you get the VLSI Oops, the resulting gold rush, displaced incumbents (or at least incumbents with rivals), and the semblance of innovation. The problem is the only actual innovation was to create a global panopticon, and suddenly the administrative possibilities, stuck on quill-pen-and-ledger for millennia, change. Which means the kind of state you can have changes, and the whole progression has been toward extraction. @darkling @cstross

@markgrieveson Banning predatory pricing is kinda meaningless. When you make the penalty for predatory pricing "pauperizing the Westons" and "chapter 7 liquidation of the corporate entity", then you've got something. (Think hard about adding a general "and this is how the workers can buy the functioning entity" if it was indeed functioning clause to Chapter 7, too.)