mitigatedchaos

[mitigatedchaos]

[ @collapsedsquid ]

Finally played through the Phantom Liberty thing for cyberpunk 2077 and "it was fine" is my review. It sort of continues the thing that the original game had of being weirdly out of date in political/thematic terms, you end up waiting for some sort of deconstruction/subversion when it starts with the "Escape from New York" plot but it never really comes.

At some point, playing things straight becomes an unexpected twist, and I admit that I psyched myself out when they started playing around with V's implant.

I could go write thousands of words about this, but I think "being out of date in political/thematic terms" actually worked to the original game's advantage.

Different people have different levels of political sophistication, and in particular young people haven't had as much time to develop that yet. There are also recurring patterns where people will reach their ceiling of political sophistication, which limits how politically-sophisticated general audience media can get.

To take three examples from the original game:

If you read the accompanying text, gang operations often don't get flagged for police bounties until someone fucks up the social context protecting them.

Corporate behavior is not monolithic, but driven by competing internal factions (and individuals).

The Mayor "lowers the crime rate" by reclassifying the most crime-prone district as not part of the city.

In some sense Cyberpunk 2077 is a cartoon; the aspects of disorder are enhanced in order to increase the contrast (and provide a violent video game), but this is actually pretty solid content.

Adapting an earlier property also allowed CD Projekt Red to foreground human interactions and concerns and push less relatable and more speculative techs (such as mind-uploading and AI evolution) into the background.

Also, as a game that wants to draw power from The Nineties...

(Above: from Hark, A Vagrant #311)

Cyberpunk 2077 is incredibly, unapologetically masculine, and has no shame about being horny.

Oh sure, it's happy to present women as complex, agentic, competent, and so on. And it's happy to position a man abusing his power over women as a villain.

But 2014-era feminist lecture clickbait? It's just not there. Post-2022, the power of clickbait feminism is waning, so by adapting an earlier property that's not actually hostile to women and LGBT people, but also not hostile to men, CD Projekt Red could basically just skip that whole entire discourse plotline.

This is the right choice for a number of reasons, including that Guardian columnists don't buy video games.

Something about Cyberpunk 2077 feels like an opera of sorts.

The original Star Trek is full of wall-sized computers full of blinking lights and special effects that look like a couple of color filters cast over a spotlight on a wall. But people still love that show. They might make fun of the stryofoam rocks, but they find the show quaint and charming.

It's because it's not so current that I suspect that 20 years on, the robotic chainsaw arms become props for that opera, a story about revenge, corruption, and capital.

I suspect it will endure a lot longer than much of the 2014-2022 media. It may become the Raygun Gothic of our era.

Beyond 20 years, it's more difficult to say.

#cyberpunk 2077 #video games

[mitigatedchaos]

That's a good summarizing rule.

You get on a bike, motorcycle, horse, elephant, or jetski because these are not enclosed.

You get on a bus, train, ship, or airliner because you do not enter your seat directly. You board these vehicles, and you are then onboard the vehicle.

You get in a car, because it is enclosed (unlike a motorcycle), but you enter the seat directly.

Similarly, you would get in an F-16.

For that matter, one would get in a velomobile.

when your grammar accidentally transfers

#language

[mitigatedchaos]

I actually use three browsers.

Articles will talk about, like, ~ultra-cookies~ that aren't deleted properly or whatever, so I figure browser usage segregation can't hurt.

If there is "no browsing history," that might also be considered suspicious, so I use one browser to establish a "normie" history by searching for consumer products such as plywood boards or rice cookers.

I am definitely a normal person who reads New York Times articles about racing pigeons and not a political person who writes 2,000 word posts about the fundamental nature of capital.

The Microsoft Edge front page is based on what you click on or your search history or something.

Vrisker's shows all sorts of things about the political fight over transgenderism in the US. Mine doesn't show anything about it.

It's all "Is Yellow Rice Healthier than White Rice?" "6 Tips to Outsmart Dementia" "Scientists Finally Explain the Lochness Monster" [Ad for smartphone you were looking at 2 weeks ago] "10 Smells Your Dog Hates". [Ad for lumber] "Avoid all salmon brands except these 7".

Due to [ replication crisis ] x [ low quality of science journalism ], it's not feasible to know if much of the medical or diet advice is true.

[mitigatedchaos]

General Post for Monday, April 15, 2024

(5,700 words, ~28 mins)

💾 "Don't underestimate computers."

6 - Social Media Notes: Recommendation: To limit distraction, limit notifications in order to make social media into its own specific context, rather than leaking into other contexts.

7 - US War Notes: Since at least the year 2000, despite its technical competence, the United States has been bad at managing the political dimension of its wars. Developments since then suggest it may get worse.

8 - Interpreting Statement A: Why "industrialization enables women's rights" could be viewed as right-wing.

9 - Computing Capital Notes 1: The basic nature of computers as capital. (It's about dimensionality in production.)

10 - Computing Capital Notes 2: How should computing be distributed? From a technical perspective, it's an open question.

11 - Computing Politics Notes: Computing has its own politics, and how computing should be distributed is one of its central questions.

12 - Desktop Internet Notes: The old Internet was implicitly gatekept by the price and complexity of personal computers. With the emergence of smartphones, personal computers are becoming less common again.

-☆☆☆-

6: Social Media Notes

Social media tends to drive people to distraction. It's obvious how negative interactions like arguments can be distracting. Someone could pop up and argue, "owning cats is bourgeois decadence," and it's very tempting to just correct them. With smartphone notifications, such an argument could come up at any time, in any context.

Positive interactions can also be distracting. It's just a lot more fun to work with your friend on writing his homebrew Dungeons & Dragons campaign than to do math homework. (Substitute whatever activity you want.)

This is why I strongly recommend muting the vast majority of social media notifications on your devices. Force social media to be its own specific context, rather than intruding into other contexts.

On Twitter, I've gone so far as to mute notifications from every account except ones that follow me. When I want to continue an argument, I just scroll down in my replies to find it, and if I don't want to, then I leave the Cats-Are-Bourgeois guy's reply unread. Would this approach be bad for Twitter if widely adopted? Sure, but it's necessary to prioritize your own life.

7: US War Notes

For decades, the United States government seems to have done well at the technical challenge of delivering bombs on to targets, but poorly at managing the political dimension of conflicts. Back in 2019, Hanania (yes, the troll one) posted a bunch of excerpts of Afghan War documents, pointing to a government that didn't know what the mission was, could not allocate money effectively, and seems to have failed to understand the needs and desires of the population.

The War in Afghanistan took place during both the Bush and Obama administrations, and neither of them managed to successfully resolve the conflict.

Why? Well, we could say that there's a failure of leadership, and I think that's correct.

More importantly, I think it's likely that the legitimizing basis for both the Bush power coalition and the Obama power coalition contained premises that were in conflict with the national development of a poor, arid, inland, mountainous country, operating under a different religion.

This is still a failure of leadership, because the necessary talent to carry out such a project, or to at least make a better attempt, existed within the American system, and a talented political leader who devoted enough attention to the problem would be able to synthesize new ideology to draw out that talent. The greatest challenge is that this would divide the political leader's attention between foreign politics and domestic politics. Bush or Obama would have needed to tap a trusted lieutenant and imbued them with significant authority, as well as working closely with them to perform the necessary political maneuvering. Could the system have provided the right lieutenant?

The United States remains a formidable opponent due to its immense wealth, technological advantage, and the quality of its institutions. It maintains its position by being well-equipped to knock down legible, modernist states, even as India and China continue to industrialize.

However, the political situation has gotten worse.

For instance...

Statement A: Women's liberation as we currently know it is primarily the result of industrialization reducing the child mortality rate from its historical level of around 50% to rates below 1% in developed countries, in combination with labor-saving home automation (such as laundry machines) dramatically reducing women's work at home, enabling women to work outside the home at much higher rates.

Is the above statement "far right"?

Statement B: The ideology of liberalism has powerful inherent advantages in economic development and trade, as well as epistemic advantages due to relative freedom of speech. (One way to think of this is that it uses peace dividends to pay competing parties for mutual disarmament, both internal to liberal society, and between liberal countries.) However, since the early 20th century, liberalism has likely gained a structural advantage due to the global dominance of the United States (enabled by the country's immense size, geographic diversity, and relative cultural unity, allowing for economic and therefore military power), both making it appear successful and making attacks on liberal countries more costly. In the event of a reduction in US dominance, liberalism may face stiffer competition from more authoritarian and particularist ideologies.

How about this statement? Is this "far right"?

I asked Nous Capybara 34B, a large language model based on 01AI's 34-billion parameter Yi model, to answer this question. Nous Capybara was trained on LessWrong posts, and provided the quite reasonable response that neither quotation is "far right," as neither quote advocates for far right positions (such as discrimination).

There's a famous Tumblr post that reads:

drakensberg: The reading comprehension and overall common sense on this website is piss poor.

poupon: how dare you say we piss on the poor

If you want to know what an awful Tumblr discourse post, Twitter tweet, or clickbait article would say, you can actually just straight-up ask Nous Capybara for an unreasonable opinion. So I did. It said:

An unreasonable interpretation of Statement A could be that it promotes extreme right-wing ideologies by suggesting that women's liberation is solely a result of technological advancements and reduced child mortality rates, rather than acknowledging the significant contributions of feminist movements, activists, and policy changes. This perspective may also argue that the statement undervalues or dismisses the struggles and achievements of women in advocating for their rights and equality. Additionally, an unreasonable interpretation might falsely attribute the statement to a far-right individual or group as a means to discredit or manipulate others' opinions about the issue.

Suppose there is a ruling power coalition whose publicly-expressed ideology is that the concept of merit is a "racial supremacist," colonialist construct, and simultaneously that they're better than you because they got into Harvard and you didn't (and that Harvard Extension School, which includes the same classes, but not the same tough admissions gauntlet, doesn't count).

How would they view the two statements? How would they speak about them?

8: Interpreting Statement A

How could statement A be interpreted as "far right"?

Statement A: Women's liberation as we currently know it is primarily the result of industrialization reducing the child mortality rate from its historical level of around 50% to rates below 1% in developed countries, in combination with labor-saving home automation (such as laundry machines) dramatically reducing women's work at home, enabling women to work outside the home at much higher rates.

Self-identified progressives generally proceed from what could be called a "default abundance" mindset rather than a "default scarcity" mindset. In their view, women's rights are the default that always existed, and would emerge naturally in the absence of oppression. In this view, women's rights could have emerged naturally at any point in history, except that the people of the past chose otherwise. Thus, the contemporary male supporter of women's rights is morally superior to the men of the past, who selfishly chose oppression.

[ women's rights ]

Self-identified progressives might extend causation, but primarily to place "women's rights" as part of a broader network of non-oppression. For instance, they might say that "women's rights" both depends on and reinforces "democracy".

[ women's rights ] ⇄ [ democracy ]

The right wing generally have a "default scarcity" mindset, e.g. "if no one plants the field, then there will be no wheat."

In statement A, women's rights are the result of a particular level of economic development, capable of producing modern medical technology and automating household labor.

[ industrial production ] → [ medical technology ] & [ household labor automation ] → [ women's rights ]

The typical self-identified progressive would not say that medical technology, such as vaccination, is bad. Rather, what makes them upset is what could potentially be attached to the first node, "industrial production."

[ social norms & values ] → [ industrial production ] → [ medical technology ] & [ household labor automation ] → [ women's rights ]

Let's take "punctuality" as an example of what I will call a "production value." We'll use the Smithsonian infographic on "white culture" that was yanked down in 2020 as an example. The authors of the infographic wrote:

‣ Follow rigid time schedules. ‣ Time viewed as a commodity.

For many people, punctuality is viewed in moral terms. Being late is considered immoral, or at least rude. However, punctuality also has mechanical effects - if an assembly line depends on 20 workers all being at their stations, and one worker is 30 minutes late, then the assembly line will not run as long, and will therefore produce fewer items.

If those items are, say, vaccines, then fewer children will receive vaccines. If fewer children receive vaccines, then more children will die of childhood illness. If more children die of childhood illness, women will have to spend more time having and raising children, and will have less time to work and earn money outside the home. If women don't raise more children to make up for the deaths, then that society's population will decline, and that society will, eventually, be replaced.

It might not be vaccines. It might be ball bearings for an industrial equipment maker that manufactures conveyor belts used in plants that make vaccines. It might be tires. It might be helicopter rotor blades. Regardless, if people don't show up, then the product doesn't get made. If the product doesn't get made, then it can't get used. If the product isn't used, then something of value may end up missing from society.

Enforcing punctuality is often inconvenient for people who don't take well to it. It can be viewed as a form of oppression - people will not get paid unless they show up on time, and for some people that's a lot more difficult than it is for others.

This is horrifying for self-identified progressives. "What about sick people? What about mentally ill people? What about people from cultures with looser time norms?"

Someone with a globe emoji (🌐) in their name on Twitter might quip, "All of those people would benefit from a wide availability of cheap, mass-produced vaccines," which reduce the required amount of labor for a particular material standard of living.

It's a trade-off. You set a target level of economic production, and given the available knowledge, capital, materials, and energy available, that takes a particular strictness of production norms to reach.

Note that positive rights, such as "every human being has a right to housing," inherently imply the enforcement of production norms.

A self-identified "reactionary," who dislikes women's rights for his own reasons, can leverage the necessity of stricter social norms for high rates of material production in order to promote stricter social norms for other reasons. This is, roughly, what would cause a self-identified progressive to describe statement A as "far right."

We could also imagine a "dark liberal" who likes women's rights, and therefore wants to impose some minimum limits on social norms in order to keep industrial production within the range necessary to support that. (Such a liberal might be a "conservative," conserving a particular liberal order. US politics tends to attribute too much to both labels, calling Communists "liberals" and monarchists "conservatives.")

Many self-identified progressives, like many political footsoldiers, primarily obtain their political opinions socially, and cannot differentiate between the two.

(How legible is all this? Llama-2 agreed once I suggested something like this reasoning, but didn't notice until I told it to. Expect a difference between progressive-tinged people and hyper-online partisan footsoldiers.)

9: Computing Capital Notes 1

I've said this before, but capital is a low-dimensionality construct, and much of the work of labor is to reduce the context of a production problem until it's simple enough that capital can be applied to it.

As an example, think of this mass production metal-stamping machine - it literally goes up and down. Over and over and over again, the main part of the machine is moving along a single axis, and uniform material is fed into it from a single direction at a steady rate.

The job of labor is to maintain the machine, to configure the machine, to ensure the production area is free of anything that might interfere with the machine (like rain or parts intersecting from other machines), and to supply the right input materials. Once the metal is loaded on to the machine, it goes in a straight line, where it gets pressed into the exact same sequence of dies every time.

A blacksmith could make almost whatever shape you like to order. He could use a variety of metals. That's labor. A machine where the metal can only travel in one direction and can only be made into 10,000 of one particular shape? That's capital.

Software is special.

Suppose we are manufacturing some metal part using a metal stamping machine. Once it comes out of the stamping machine, the parts will be painted either red or blue. Simple enough. We have two conveyor belts. One belt goes to the machine where the parts are painted red. The other goes to the machine where the parts are painted blue. We install a second machine that simply pushes parts onto either the blue or the red conveyor belt. It could be a pusher plate attached to a piston. We'll call it a sorter.

What's the ratio of red to blue parts set by our sorter?

If there's no reconfigurable control system, then it's just whatever ratio it was built for. For instance, the conveyor may have a series of belts, and the sorter may just have some gears that activate the piston for every second part that comes down the conveyor, pushing it on to the blue line. This gives one option:

{ 50% blue }

We could make a more basic control system with just a lever and some more gears. The lever would switch the assembly to different sets of gears with different rhythms. We could have three sets of gears, for three options:

{ 25% blue, 50% blue, 75% blue }

We could install a simple electronic system for triggering the piston, controlled by a knob, with ten increments, with the timing set according to the speed of the conveyor belt. This gives us ten options:

{ 10% blue, 20% blue, 30% blue, 40% blue, 50% blue, 60% blue, 70% blue, 80% blue, 90% blue, 100% blue }

We can consider the [ red-blue color ratio ] as a dimension of the production problem, with some range of possible values. In math, it would be a variable. A customer might call in and say "I want an order of 10,000 parts, and I want 6,000 of them red (and 4,000 blue), with a steel thickness of 4mm." If we were plotting out this order, we would use a 3-dimensional graph, with the variables { quantity, color, thickness }.

If we reduce the range of possible values for one of the variables, we can simplify our machine. We are shrinking or reducing that dimension. If we shrink it down to one value, then we've reduced it to a constant and effectively factored that dimension out. If the only color option is { 50% blue }, then we can omit [ color ] from our graph, and just display { quantity, thickness }.

We already had to do a lot of this to get a working machine to begin with. It would be very difficult for the same machine to manufacture both pillows and steel doors.

Computers are special, because they can increase the dimensionality of the production machine.

Suppose we hook up a computer to the electronic sorting piston. If we know the number of parts in total, and we know the timing of the conveyor, we can select just about whatever number of produced parts we like for painting, in just about whatever pattern we like. If the customer orders 10,000 parts, we can paint any number of them blue from 0 to 10,000. We have 10,000 options:

{ 1, ..., 10,000 }

If the computer doesn't have a particular pattern, we can reprogram it with new software. If the computer is hooked up to a network or terminal, we could potentially even change the color for the remaining share of the order while the order is in progress.

This ability of computers to increase the dimensionality of a production system (which makes it more general) is part of why computers and software are so valuable.

10: Computing Capital Notes 2

A floppy disk contains 1.44 million bytes. That's about 1.44 million characters (letters, numbers, spaces, etc) in an old encoding scheme like ASCII. You could fit about 200,000 words in there, enough for a lengthy book.

Let's suppose that we wanted to store a bunch of names, addresses, and phone numbers. We might allocate...

64 bytes for the first name

64 bytes for the last name

128 bytes for the street address

64 bytes for the city

2 bytes for the state

10 bytes for the phone number

...for a total of 332 bytes per record. Dividing the capacity of our floppy disk by this amount, we get around 4,337 records. We'll round it down to 4,300. (Alternatively, we could omit the city and state for about 5,400 records.)

We could describe the memory usage as "rectangular." It's based on the number of records times the size of each record.

If we just talked about books, it would sound like computers scale linearly. 200,000 words would be a long fiction book - it's about twice the length of The Hobbit - but roughly 5,000 records would be pretty short for a phone book (a printed telephone directory, obsolete as of 2010).

It we wanted to make a telephone directory in this way for say, Manhattan (1.646 million residents), we would need about 546 million bytes (546 megabytes), or about 380 floppy disks, which would just about fill a couple of shoeboxes. This would be a "tall" problem, with lots and lots of small records. (This isn't an important term, here. I'm just using it for the example.)

We could also imagine a "wide" problem, where each record is large. For instance, we could be storing college applications, in which each person submits a PDF of their resume (5 MB), a 10,000 word essay (70 KB), an application form with 96 64-character fields (6.1 KB), 5 photographs (300 KB each), and a 5-minute DVD-quality video (367.5 MB), for a combined total of 374 megabytes per application. If we then get 5,000 student applications for the year, we will need 1.87 terabytes (trillions of bytes) just to store them all.

In the telephone directory problem, we wanted to look at each person in very little detail, so each record is small. In the college application problem, we want to look at each person in a lot more detail, so each record is large. Either way, it adds up.

What should we make of these three simple examples, the book, the phone directory, and the college application storage? How much computer you need, whether that's one floppy disk's worth, 546 megabytes, or 1.87 terabytes, depends on the scale of your problem.

That brings us into the second portion.

Suppose the college hires 15 people to spend 3 workweeks reviewing all 5,000 college applications. Which of the following three options should the college use?

15 desktop computers, each with 2 terabytes of storage, and have a full copy of all applications on each computer

15 desktop computers, each with 2 gigabytes of storage, plus 1 server computer with 2 terabytes of storage, and copy the applications as-needed

15 low-powered "thin client" computers, each with 500 megabytes of storage, plus 1 server computer with 2 terabytes of storage, and have the server do almost all the work

This is a trick question - the information provided isn't enough to give a good answer. It depends on things like the rate of data transfer from the server, the price of the hardware, the budget for the project, and just what the workers will be doing with the applications.

Whether it's more appropriate to use a centralized system or a decentralized system, and when it's better to use a remote system or to handle things locally, is a technical question which varies from project to project, and from time to time.

11: Computing Politics Notes

The question of which computers processing should take place on, and who owns and controls them, as well as their software, is also a political one - though not in the sense that it's formally legislated by congress, or that there is some special identity-based way to use a computer.

A computer is a piece of capital equipment. A decent one might have an upfront cost of $1,500. If it's replaced once every 3 years, then the price is $500 per year - whether you use it or not. The marginal cost of electricity for actually using the computer to crunch numbers or store data is low. This creates a pressure towards centralization - every CPU cycle not used is "wasted," and a centralized system can aggregate work requests across people (and also timezones), averaging out usage.

Likewise, to actually maintain the computer, you have to learn how it works and do research, and things are constantly changing. If you like doing this, you won't perceive this as a cost. Some guys like to work on their own cars. Other guys like to install custom computer operating systems for fun. A lot of other people would literally rather pay someone else to do that (and they have good reasons to do so). This also creates an incentive towards centralization, where a lot of computers can be administered by a few experts.

Both of these trends also lean towards remote systems. With the contemporary Internet, for a lot of uses, it's just easier to have someone else build and administer a giant warehouse of computers, and then pay them to use a few computers as-needed. (This is the basic theory behind Amazon Web Services, which accounted for a majority of Amazon's profit in 2021.)

Here's how this gets political.

You don't own those computers. You can only use them in the ways that the guy who owns the giant warehouse of computers allows, and if he doesn't like you, he might cut off access.

Recently on Tumblr there have been reports of Google removing sexually-charged documents from Google Docs. Are these reports true? I don't know, but given how payment processors behave, it seems likely. If your steamy Doctor Who / X-Files fanfic is on gDocs, and Google's legal department decides that it doesn't want that liability - well, those are Google's computers, not yours.

Poof.

Similar pressures apply to computer programs. An unskilled user could accidentally download ransomware or a trojan that steals their credit card information. Many users don't want to learn how to avoid them (and some users might not be able to). On top of this, they don't want to learn about things like files, folders, file formats, or any of a dozen other aspects of computer literacy. Thus smartphones and tablets computers tend to be the computer as appliance, set up to only download new programs from restricted-access corporate "app stores."

It might not be surprising that, according to Pew Research (2021), many younger Americans only use a smartphone rather than a desktop or notebook computer.

Smartphone dependency: Some 15% of U.S. adults are “smartphone-only” internet users – that is, they have a smartphone, but do not have a home broadband connection. [...] Smartphone dependence is more common among younger rather than older adults: 28% of adults ages 18 to 29 are in this “smartphone-only” category, compared with 12% of those 30 and older.

The typewriter is a production device. The television is a consumption device. The smartphone is both a consumption and production device, but this is asymmetric - due to the device's small size and thumb-based interface, it's much more difficult to write text or edit video than it would be with a desktop computer. Programs ("apps") tend to limit power-user functionality (such as access to the file system) in order to be simpler to use for non-experts, allowing a user to access many of the common uses of a computer but with much less control over how it's done. A smartphone will also be less powerful than a desktop computer of the same price.

The idea of writing a program on a smartphone is absurd - smartphone applications are written on desktop or notebook computers.

12: Desktop Internet Notes

Kontextmaschine once wrote (2019):

And if the Anglophone internet is ::gestures:: like this now maybe it’s cause it’s less of a professional-class preserve? The dividing line maybe being smartphones where “people on the internet” went from “people who specifically spend $X/mo on it as luxury” to “people with telephone service”? That’s a real possibility, that for all the “Global Village” stuff the wondrous effect of the ‘90s internet was to create a cultural space that was MORE gatekept by wealth and education.

That’s… kind of depressing, though. “Haha you thought the world was getting better because you were eliminating elitist barriers but actually it’s cause you were making them higher, which is good because the poor and non-elite are disproportionately idiots with worthless ideas and to the extent they’re on top of things the thing they’re on top of is undermining the basis of a good society, and anyway those times were a phenomenon of a narrow early adopter base and you’ll never ever get them back unless you make the non-elite economically and politically irrelevant.”

Suppose we want to divide up the population of computer users. Remember that bit about capital and dimensionality in section 9? First, "shallow" computing needs have sufficiently simplified/reduced context that they can be easily served by software (users won't need to do things like compile code or access the file system), while "deep" needs do not. Second, the users either "want" or "need" to use the computer.

This gives us a nice 2×2 matrix classification. People love those.

Hobbyists - Hobbyists want a great deal of control over the computer. Maybe they're creating mods for a popular video game like Skyrim. Maybe they're programming Christmas tree lights to Rickroll people. Maybe they're developing desktop window managers for fun. Exactly what it is doesn't matter. What matters is that no one produces an app to do whatever it is they're doing, and if someone does, it doesn't appear on the app store. In fact, if someone did, they might not even care, and continue to do whatever they were doing anyway.

Power Users - The power users need a great deal of control over the computer for their work. Maybe they're compiling software. Maybe they're feeding dozens of spreadsheets of observed wombat behavior into a machine learning program. Maybe they're photoshopping wombat pictures for a National Geographic article. Whatever it is, they probably have to access the file system.

Casual Recreational Users - For gamers who don't want to mod games, but just pop in a disk and play, there game consoles. For social media users who don't feel the need to photoshop their photos, there are smartphones. Tablets can be used to watch movies from streaming services, like Netflix.

Casual Workers - For people doing more casual work, who are fine looking at only one application at a time, it's possible to hook a tablet up to a keyboard and stick it on a stand. For a somewhat more conventional notebook computer experience, casual workers could buy a Chromebook and do all their writing, emailing, and presentation creation in the web browser, using Google Docs and GMail. And if it's just ordering necessities off Amazon? Even a smartphone can do that.

To pick four example computers...

The IBM 7090, first installed in 1959, was priced around $2.9 million in 1960, or $23 million in 2023 terms.

The Apple II home computer, one of the most famous computers in history, was priced at $1,298 (2023: $6,530) to $2,638 (2023: $13,260) when it came out in 1977. It had a clock speed of about 1 Mhz.

1981's IBM Personal Computer cost $1,565 (2023: $5,240) at release. It had a clock speed of 4.77 Mhz.

2004's iMac G5 cost $1,299 (2023: $2,095) to $1,899 ($3,063) at release. It had a base clock speed of 1,600 Mhz.

A "decent" desktop computer, in relative terms, has continued to cost a nominal $1,200 to $1,500 since the Apple II, even as the value of a dollar in real terms declined, and even as processor performance doubled every 1-2 years.

The desktop computer starts out as something only for hobbyists who were willing to spend a lot of money (and who had a lot of money to spend), and for professionals who could justify spending the money. There was a huge market, because even without the Internet, uses like spreadsheets are orders of magnitude faster with a computer than doing them by hand.

During the late 1990s and early 2000s, there was still a broad assumption in many parts of US culture that a lot of bad ideas were due to mere ignorance. For a while, to many people, it looked like everyone would have a desktop or notebook computer, and everyone would learn how to use one. The Internet of the era leaned towards more conventional institutional information, and had less search-engine optimization. It was assumed that, with an entire library at one's desk, searchable with just a few keystrokes, people would become less ignorant, and therefore have better ideas.

But that's not how the world works. People have bad ideas for all sorts of reasons other than unintentional ignorance.

The trend of hardware becoming smaller and more powerful continued. The Internet, which had still been limited largely to wired connections in the 1990s, became available through wi-fi, and then cell phone data connections. Internet-connected smartphones emerged, and then became common, merging phones, cameras, and personal digital assistants into a single device.

And gradually, desktop and notebook computers have once again become the domain of hobbyists and professionals, because casual users don't want to spend $600 for a smartphone and then another $1,200 for either a desktop computer that they can't take with them, or a notebook computer that they have to sit down and open to use (and which is a lot more fragile than a smartphone).

But suppose we wanted to go back...

Well first, Kontextmaschine had already setup camp on Tumblr, one of the websites most like the old Internet. In terms of discourse, he was hanging around the orbit of Rationalist Tumblr (or "rationalist-adjacent" tumblr), which had maintained fairly high discourse norms, much better than whatever was going on over on Twitter, Youtube, or Tiktok (although more casual than their parent site, LessWrong). In terms of mechanics, Tumblr allows for lengthy text posts, delivered based on the order they're posted in, from the specific accounts one follows (rather than recommendation algorithms). As for site culture, many of the more dramatic "anti-shipper" sorts of users left for Twitter (and then presumably BlueSky or Mastodon). While one wonders what he would have said about Tumblr's fascination with The Coffin of Andy and Leyley or Dungeon Meshi, he would likely have been neither surprised nor disappointed by it.

In a sense, Kontextmaschine was already living in that high-barrier world, just with a fujoshi tinge rather than the straight gamer bro vibe of the 00's. Not that he would have had much problem with that, either. In 2021, he wrote:

if the last decade means AO3 replaces the ACLU in the pantheon of worthies fine

Is kind of amusing the extent to which "women are horny and want to fuck" is turning out to be the saving grace of the internet. No Girls indeed.

Second, while it's not possible to match the old Internet, because there's only one "The Internet," and any particular new network now is just a competing social media site, which isn't the same thing, some options are now opening up.

A privately-owned personal computer is a measure of power in the hands of an individual, with fewer constraints from large institutions (like corporations or governments) than a centralized computer system has. It is, in some sense, dangerous, especially in the hands of an unskilled user. And it is, in some sense, work to maintain. But it is, like a car, also a potential source of freedom and autonomy. Data is collected by all sorts of companies and you don't have much control over it, but a PC represents at least a sliver of digital sovereignty.

How would you filter a competing network? The simplest method might be a test of that sovereignty: can the user download and install a program not from an app store?

Access to the new network would then be limited to desktops, notebook computers, and devices owned by someone technically savvy enough to sideload applications outside of the app store.

A test based just on hardware capacity won't work, because smartphone hardware capacity goes up every year, and what you actually want are people with basic device operator skill (and maybe to filter out clickbait journalists from Twitter).

#politics #metapolitics #melodramatic mysticism #the invisible fist #the way of the discourse fist #mitigated present #general post series

[mitigatedchaos]

Concept: Tumblr anon, but with ears.

[mitigatedchaos]

The Microsoft Edge front page is based on what you click on or your search history or something.

Vrisker's shows all sorts of things about the political fight over transgenderism in the US. Mine doesn't show anything about it.

It's all "Is Yellow Rice Healthier than White Rice?" "6 Tips to Outsmart Dementia" "Scientists Finally Explain the Lochness Monster" [Ad for smartphone you were looking at 2 weeks ago] "10 Smells Your Dog Hates". [Ad for lumber] "Avoid all salmon brands except these 7".

Due to [ replication crisis ] x [ low quality of science journalism ], it's not feasible to know if much of the medical or diet advice is true.

#politics

[mitigatedchaos]

General Post for Monday, April 8, 2024

(~1,600 words, 8 mins)

1 - Robot Jobpocalypse Notes: A brief theory that long-term redistribution to manage job losses from automation should consider focusing on inherently more scarce factors of production (land and materials), rather than more dynamic ones (labor and capital).

2 - Niche Smartphone Notes: If the pace of the smartphone industry were slower, niche smartphones might be more feasible.

3 - Coalitional Politics Notes: Many coalition-internal communications take place in public. Possible implications for loyalty vs. truthfulness.

4 - Lab Leak Notes: Separating the "strong" from "weak" lab leak hypothesis for Covid-19.

5 - Property Notes: Not all labor is equally effortful or valuable, so should claims on property be weighted? Entropy implies the gradual degradation of land and products to a "natural condition," which we might expect to either invalidate or weaken a property claim.

-☆☆☆-

1: Robot Jobpocalypse Notes

I've said this before, but I just want to reiterate:

Everyone already knows about the problem where automation can take over a job faster than the economy finds new jobs for those currently employed in that category. (Obviously we could talk about abstract skill capital that they've invested in the job that has now been made less valuable.)

But over the long term, the thing to think about is a bidding up of the prices of land, materials, and energy. For the first two, we can think of this in terms of rents (e.g. "land rents"), as the supply of land is highly inelastic. In theory, the gains from trade should make everyone better off, but that's only if you can bid high enough to get enough resources to survive. If people could always go back to subsistence farming if they had to, the trade would (almost) always make them better off than subsistence farming.

But without land, they can't. It's not just a matter of not selling, as land is taxed, and higher-value uses will bid up the price of the land, and thus the assessed tax.

We want a redistribution that's dynamic and which will respond to changes in market conditions, which won't dampen investment in capital and production, and which is less subject to political capture. Thus the thing to focus on is rent for land and materials, the inherently scarce factors of production, rather than labor (highly responsive to effort) or capital (material configurations).

2: Niche Smartphone Notes

[ @jadagul ]

They're currently putting out a 4.7" rugged phone, which is actually tempting. But if I wanted a keyboard phone from them, the most recent option is the Titan Slim, which came out in 2021 and runs Android 11. (My current phone is on Android 14.)

[...]

They can make some niche phones, but they just can't cover all the niches. There are too many! And because they're a niche producer, they also have lower quality across a variety of metrics: they can't put as many resources into their software stuff because they can't amortize it across nearly as many phones. In order to get the full advantages of a modern industrial toolchain, you need to standardize some stuff so you can spread development work across a ton of devices.

It's interesting to note that the extremely rapid rate of software development, including finding and patching security flaws, is such an obstacle.

In an Elfworld scenario, where some users are buying a phone for 15-25 year use, firms might be able to amortize the costs by updating the model less frequently, and charging more for the base model. They would likely also maintain smaller teams, who would work on the phones for longer.

Smartphones probably won't become such a stable technology for decades, however, and even if they did, we should expect fashion cycles.

3: Coalitional Politics Notes

We've all seen politicians, political operatives, and political party enthusiasts lie a lot. Why don't they lie to (or bullshit (as in speak as though 'indifferent to truth')) outsiders all the time?

There are a number of reasons. One may be that an insider who constantly lies to outsiders all the time could also lie to fellow insiders, and insiders cannot reliably tell whether someone is a general liar or merely a partisan liar.

Since people range in their level of partisanship, this suggests a curve where, from the perspective of someone who is moderately partisan, a speaker can trade some integrity for some partisan loyalty, and vice versa. Someone who has no loyalty and no integrity is of little value. At some point, partisan loyalty will be at odds with the truth due to the inherent contradiction in interests of the coalition members or else just simple imperfection, so someone cannot be both perfectly loyal and perfectly truthful.

For political coalitions, a lot of what is essentially coalition-internal communication takes place in public.

4: Lab Leak Notes

The debate over the potential lab leak origin of Covid-19 has not been settled yet, despite the article on ACX. People are arguing over the individual studies cited in responses to themotte's tracingwoodgrains.

However, we should differentiate between the "strong" lab leak hypothesis and the "weak" lab leak hypothesis.

Strong Hypothesis: Covid-19 was a bioweapon deliberately designed by the government of China and leaked on purpose for some strategic goal.

Weak Hypothesis: Covid-19 was a coronavirus being studied at the lab in Wuhan which studies coronaviruses. This virus may have been the subject of gain-of-function research not intended to create a bioweapon. Subsequently, as the result of an unintentional accident, the virus leaked from the lab, resulting in a global pandemic.

The criticism of the lab leak hypothesis from the more censorious 2020 libs was that, "The lab leak hypothesis is a racist conspiracy theory." The strong hypothesis is a conspiracy theory, but there is no requirement that it is racist - it is sufficient that the government of China openly identify as Communist. The weak hypothesis is neither of these things.

5: Property Notes

There is an Anarcho-Capitalist theory that ownership of unclaimed land is gained by "mixing your labor with it." Many people would ask why this creates a morally-valid indefinite ownership claim.

Alternatively, we could consider a functional decomposition of the operation.

"Mixing your labor" with the land means using [ attention ] to direct [ energy ] to configure [ matter ] according to your intentions. That might mean, for instance, cutting down trees on a lot in order to construct a fence, and then plowing the lot in order to plant a farm for later harvest. However...

Some people may have the intention for the lot, "It should be a wildlife preserve," which looks an awful lot like doing nothing, or perhaps just posting some signs.

Not all labor is of equal intensity. Should someone who uses less labor, or transforms the lot less, have a proportionally lower % claim on the lot? What does a % claim look like as compared to a full claim?

The configuration on the lot will degrade actively with time if it is not maintained. In our example, the wooden fence may break down and rot. Does this degrade the claim on the lot itself?

The metadata about the lot will also be lost, until it may not be feasible to resolve disputing claims of ownership with reasonable certainty.

Back in January, I wrote:

(Side note: The configuration of material inputs, like ore deposits, in the environment, relates to the amount of energy and attention required to recover them. Recycling is mostly about reducing the long-term recovery costs, keeping materials “near the surface.”)

Let's consider an example.

Joe mines a bunch of iron ore beneath a plot of land. The energy and attention required for most desired human uses is reduced.

Joe refines the iron into steel. The energy and attention required for most desired human uses is again reduced. (Did you know 93% of structural steel is recycled?)

Joe shapes the steel into a grill. This reduces the value of the material for other industrial uses, but increases the value for those who want a grill specifically. The steel is now configured as capital equipment.

Joe opens a hamburger shop, and uses the grill to grill hamburgers which he sells to customers.

After deciding to close the hamburger shop, Joe decides to explode the grill for a gender reveal party, scattering pieces all over the lot. The steel has been scattered throughout the environment, increasing the cost in energy and attention to gather it again if someone wants to do something else with it.

The value of the iron is subjective. That's conventional economics. However, there are typical uses that we can say will be common in most near-term human preference environments.

What makes this interesting is that within that common frame, in steps #1 and #2, Joe is pushing the iron up a value gradient. This value addition could then be lost to entropy through abandonment. For instance, in step #1, a landslide could occur, covering the iron back up and requiring it to be mined again. In step #2, the steel could be left out in the rain to rust, requiring it to be refined again.

Preventing this loss to entropy requires active attention and energy. (For instance, securing a nearby hillside to prevent the landslide scenario, or building and maintaining a barn to keep out the rain in the weathering scenario.)

Suppose that Joe abandons the land for 100 years. The steel rusts, and a landslide covers it up. A new prospector, Harold, comes across the land, finds no markings, excavates the rusted iron, refines it to make tools and sells those tools.

Shortly thereafter, Joe returns. Given that the land and materials returned to the natural condition, wouldn't it be strange to invalidate Harold's claim in this scenario?

Supporting a governing system, which could track ownership of the parcel of land and extracted materials, would require ongoing energy and attention on Joe's part. However, the system of deeds and records could be used as an alternative to Joe physically hanging out on the plot of land at all times, which he would have to do anyway to prevent the reversion of the plot of land to the natural condition.

This movement of materials along value and energy gradients is something to consider for a deeper analysis, perhaps oriented towards the development of new ideological principles.

#weekly post #politics #the invisible fist #general post series

[mitigatedchaos]

This blog will be going on semi-hiatus (posting on Mondays only) until May 2.

(The sideblog has a lot of content queued up.)

#blog meta

[mitigatedchaos]

Worth it to drive 6-8 hours for the total solar eclipse?

[mitigatedchaos]

2027: Youtuber Astroblob336 attempts a "distracted driving" prank, appearing to eat a 5-course meal while his car is driving down a highway, to views of stunned onlookers. He is pulled over by a police officer. A crew member for the shoot, who has been controlling the car using a phone app and a game controller from the trunk, pops put of the trunk, startling the officer.

The police officer draws his gun, but does not fire. However, in attempting to step back from the officer, the crew member enters a lane of traffic. The driver of a fuel tanker truck witnesses this and swerves to avoid hitting them. The truck rolls over on its side, and the tank hits both the police car and the Youtuber's car before igniting, killing all three people in its path.

This becomes an issue of national discourse, as the crew member's family sue the police department, alleging the officer created a dangerous environment, while the police union sues the Youtuber's estate, alleging that the original distracted driving prank was itself a crime and caused the dangerous situation, including the loss of the officer's life.

#the year is #discourse preview

[mitigatedchaos]

There is one firm that still makes keyboard smartphones - Unihertz, a Chinese company. Apparently they've decided to camp the small phone and keyboard phone niche since others have ditched it. As the sole remaining manufacturer, this lets them get just enough buyers to make a profit.

The camera seems weak, but the $299 price doesn't hurt.

Problem is, it's obviously not a flagship. In the old world, even flagship phones came with keyboards. Flagship phone means more processing power, longer updates for the software ecosystem, more compatibility with 3rd party products, and a better camera (which is a big deal if you want to carry fewer devices).

So the keyboard enthusiasts are making another go of it. If they come out with an android version, I might finally replace my old phone just to give it a shot.

Nothing makes me more viscerally sympathetic to the "corporations decide what products people are going to want regardless of what people actually want" argument than the fact that all phones are giant tablets with no buttons. No one is making anything else, so everyone "has" to want one of those.

Except.

I really did care about this issue, so I looked into the details, and that's exactly backwards. When Motorola killed the Droid line of phones with slide-out keyboards, I went and read an interview with the product director. And he was like "yeah, I loved that feature, I really liked those phones, but we just couldn't get people to buy them."

And similarly, I'm always upset that no one is making reasonable-sized (under five inches) phones any more. But the thing is, when they do make those they can't sell them. For a long time Apple hung on with the mini line, which was the only thing that ever tempted me to do business with Apple. But they're discontinuing it because they just can't sell enough of them to justify keeping that line open—even though they have a total monopoly on the market for "small decent-quality smartphones".

These are both cases where the corporations keep trying to create demand for exactly the products I want. And it doesn't take because people authentically, organically, do not want them.

#mitigated present

[mitigatedchaos]

It's a multi-pronged thing.

Every coalition is composed of people with different interests, and so the broader the coalition, the larger the amount of contradiction in the interests of the coalition members.

Thus a lot of political slogans are vague, or have multiple contradicting definitions. What is the meaning of "Build Back Better"? How specific is "Family Values"?

This is basically a tradeoff. An ideology can allow coalition members to work towards the coalition's interests without coordinating directly. This makes a lot of practical sense, as it allows looser organizational coupling rather than a rigid, top-down, military-style formation.

A political coalition can be viewed as a kind of formation. A tight ideology which puts more constraints on behavior makes for greater force coherence, which is useful if you're trying to accomplish some concrete goal. A loose ideology where instructions have multiple interpretations makes for a more incoherent force, but increases the potential size of the coalition by allowing for a greater amount of contradiction before it becomes too obvious that a contradiction has occurred.

Different people apply a different search depth, so some people are more likely to identify contradictions, or more likely to care about contradictions.

You've probably noticed that while it's easy to rephrase proposals in the language of the "woke left," they're surprisingly resilient to, say, being "tricked" into acting like 2008 liberals. They're quite focused on ingroup/outgroup distinctions. In some sense it's more social and less ideological.

boeing if it did PR on tumblr: yes you're interested in planes but are you normal about ones that malfunction?

#politics #metapolitics #idpol

[mitigatedchaos]

This year's Tumblr April First activity originally looked to be a success.

However, the counter is now climbing at a very fast rate, and it's possible someone rigged up some Javascript to make it go faster. We'll probably know in a few hours.

Ah, I see that it is April 1st.

#the blue website

[mitigatedchaos]

Ah, I see that it is April 1st.

#the blue website

[mitigatedchaos]

You have to be a certain level of online to understand what's at work.

can I share a hot take on here. is this a safe space

#gendpol

[mitigatedchaos]

Ah, I see that it is April 1st.

#the blue website #some people complain about all the websites doing ~wacky hijinks~ for April 1 but I think it's fine actually

[mitigatedchaos]

Alright, so it's a magic program that's added on to an American public high school by a lone philanthropist. That gives you a lot of options, since the program would be so heavily influenced by one guy.

Presumably this means that magic isn't common (or it would be a standard subject), and also it isn't so useful militarily that it's a central pillar of most countries' warmaking doctrines (or the late 20th-century United States wouldn't be relying on a "stapled-on" program).

[ * checks pinned post * ]

Alright. Melanie is the character from a favorable background. Marksteppers are "spirit magic shamans," in contrast to Wardens, who are "rules-magic engineers." Florentino, who had a great deal of influence on the town, is a Warden.

Florida's population went from about 1.8% of the USA's in 1943, to about 6.8% in 2023. There's commentary out there that the US south couldn't develop until widespread air conditioning (sometimes applied to hot, humid areas more generally, such as LKY's comment on aircon in Singapore).

...which leaves me wondering how much you set this location selection up on purpose.

Florida is new. You can treat whatever was built there as having arrived after Disneyland (1955), allowing you to draw out the traits of late 20th-century America in specific.

New Orleans is well-known for having been colonized by the French, and being somewhat culturally distinctive from the rest of the United States.

Switzerland is 22-28% French-speaking. Then of course, that's just if you want to create some distance from actual France.

For "the East Coast," the obvious play is New England, which is more Anglo (or Dutch) in contrast to French if you want to increase the contrast with New Orleans. Within New England, in or near New York City would provide a footing that's more diverse and global, while in or near Boston could be used to imply a more elitist school (either via connections (Harvard) or testing (MIT)). Someplace like Maine or Connecticut could be used to emphasize more classical colonial-era-descended Americans.

(If you want a school more focused on espionage or government contracting, then you could skip New England and put it near Washington, D.C. I don't think you want to emphasize either aerospace or information technology, or you would've picked the west coast instead.)

Anyhow, that kind of sets it up right there, doesn't it?

There is an English school of magic that was imported to America during the colonial era and began diverging around that time. It has a very light sprinkling in of some Native American elements, and it's more adapted to the sunny and broad frontier of the United States rather than the claustrophobic and rainy British Isles. (Why, didn't you know? Ben Franklin himself was a magician!)

There is a French school of magic that was popular shortly before or around the time of the French Revolution, which was then integrated with other magic from the various French colonies (and other migrants) and from Native Americans, and showed up in New Orleans as this rather blended variety of magic.

There is another French school of magic that reflects the development of France since French Revolution - here you have the option to go with a high modernist magic, a postmodernist magic, or have the pre-revolutionary magic users flee to Switzerland if you want something more traditional, or even have a revival. There may also be, as a joke, an Academie Francaise which regulates the French use of magic in order to keep it distinctively French.

Florida magic then represents the Post-WW2 US that we're more familiar with.

The idea of spirit-magic shamans suggests working with spirits, and this presents an opportunity - whether people are making contracts with spirits, or whether spirits are just helping them out, the spirits themselves might prefer to stick to some particular geography. To be a true practitioner of some schools, it may be necessary to journey to a particular place. The benefits available, and associated learning paths, and associated development from generations of magic users, might be fairly different from place to place.

That could provide the students with plenty to talk about.

As for a specific topic: little is more post-1955 America than cars.

Floridians take it as a given that you can ward a car, as an enclosed space. This is actually not trivial, and is the result of a great deal of work.

Euros have spells related to trains.

East Coasters still have spells for sailing and cycling and maybe also sports.

In New Orleans, people use magic to summon a horse.

So I'm about 60% done with the draft of this manuscript, and have more or less figured out how the endgame is gonna go. At this point, Melanie is attending, with several teammates (and several others, including Tabby and Lynd, staying home) a spring-break gathering for magic users and supernaturalists at the country house of a veteran Warden family in east Tennessee. There, she'll learn a lot more about her family history and what Marksteppers really are--that I've got pretty much planned out. What I wouldn't mind some ideas on is that there are going to be three other student delegations, all from private academies devoted to the magical arts, one in the New Orleans area, one somewhere on the East Coast, and one in Switzerland or maybe France.

These other schools are, metatextually, the sort of blueblooded, centuries-old, gothic institutions that normally take center stage in books like mine, whereas the Lost Kids are stapled onto a normie-ass American public high school founded by the very new-money and future-focused Florentino Cervantes, and I'm not sure how I want the culture clash to work there. I want to avoid the sort of 'ew, commoners' reaction, because I think that's hacky and predictable (although it will probably bubble up at some point), and I think it would be more interesting just for the groups to be curious about each other. In a "Wait, you don't do x? Our school does that all the time" way. Part of my purposes with setting this book in the late 90s was to evoke the bigness of a world without Google or smartphones, so I wanna get this right.

Anyway, if any of you have any ideas I'd love to hear them, particularly of the 'I always wanted to see someone take the piss out of such-and-such Magic School trope' kind.

#writing_tag