There was a time I wanted a Tesla, but I don’t anymore. This is just another reason why.

Does Tesla care about making a “neat thing” or do they care about making “a car that can drive me places”. The doors clearly show they prioritize making a “neat thing”, but I want a reliable car.

Opening and closing doors was a solved problem. Somehow Tesla made it worse.

At least C++ build tools are easier than modern JS.

🎵 Don’t wanna close my eyes 🎵

There’s also websites hosted in countries that don’t care about US law. We can access those even without a VPN, for now…

Google doesn’t index Discord, which means the billion dollar ad industry makes little effort to push their ads on Discord.

It’s like if a bunch of people were gathered in person talking about something, with many of the same pros and cons.

I was thinking about why a small landlord might be better, and I know there are exceptions, but usually a small landlord is is not going to squeeze every penny out of their rentals, sometimes out of the goodness of their heart, but most importantly, a small landlord has other ways to be productive.

A small landlord who has a normal job, if they want to improve the world, they do it through their job or personal projects, they build something or create something or whatever.

A big landlord who does nothing else, they aren’t actually creating anything, they’re just rent seeking and the most creative way they can imagine to improve the world is to rent seek even harder.

Our economic system gives greater rewards to those who move money around than to those who create things or cure cancer or anything else. The ways of turning a lot of money into even more money are taxed less (usually not at all) than more common ways of earning money like working a job or creating physical goods. The richest people didn’t get rich by creating something that improves everyone’s lives, they got rich by moving money around.

Yep, can I play it at 2x speed or skip ahead? If not, then it’s the ad. At the very least blank the video and mute the sound. I’ll enjoy a moment to breath and consider if there’s something better I should be doing.

Surely the free market and competition will deliver what customers want, right? … Right?!?

The market is filled with products people hate.

Explain to me again how free markets and competition are supposed to work?

It helps make things more self-contained. If a Linux distribution comes with an LLM that knows how to use and tweak the OS and also knows a lot about various programming languages and lots of things in general, that’s a big step towards having an OS that can be operated locally without using the internet.

I wouldn’t like it if Linux required an internet connection to function, and yet… I’ve never been able to configure or do much of anything in Linux without referring to the internet.

It’s no different than what the internet has been doing for us for decades. People tell us commands to run, we use our best judgement, maybe check a couple things, and then run the commands. If the internet suggests a command or a LLM suggests a command, what’s the difference?

Maybe.

Like, if I could type “extract the audio of this video and re-encode it as a medium quality MP3, break up the audio into 30 consecutive tracks” in a shell, and the next line was populated with the appropriate ffmpeg command, but not yet executed, I could quickly look over the command, nothing looks fishy, so I go ahead and run the command.

LLMs have a high coolness-to-code ratio; very cool and not a lot of code. This is the type of thing open source developers are more interested in, so I hope Linux will have some good AI built-in and running locally.

Half of Linux usage is on the text-based command line anyway, just what LLMs are good at.

We often make laws without a way to enforce them 100% effectively. For example, my road has a 25 MPH speed limit even though we haven’t yet installed speed limiting chips on every single car in the nation, we still went ahead and put a speed limit on our road though, and it mostly works, but sometimes someone drives 30 MPH.

It seems the people who are the most staunch defenders of capitalism and free markets are the most resistant to the capitalist and free market solution.

Clean air (or rather, air with normal levels of carbon) belongs to the public, and anyone who wants to take it away should pay the public.

They are doing extra work to change the product in ways that customers don’t want.

Can someone explain to me again how “free markets” and “competition” are supposed to work?

I’m okay with algorithms not recommending certain posts. I just don’t like shadowbans because the platform is lying to the user, the user interface is essentially telling the user “your post is available for viewing and is being treated like any other post” when it really isn’t.

There’s a balance between the free speech of individuals and the free speech of the company. I think a fair balance between the two is, once a company is big enough to control a significant percentage of the entire nation’s discourse, the company at least has to be up front and avoid deceptive practices like shadow-banning. (This should only apply to large companies, once a company is large enough it has a responsibility to society.)

Speaking of Valve games, why did I ever stop playing Left 4 Dead? I need to play that again.

I don’t appreciate being called out like that!