throwaway82388

hace 3 añosdiscuss

Peerless stylist of his generation, a serious thinker, and somehow managed to be fun alongside all of that. I haven’t kept up with his novels since Yellow Dog, but could recommend each and every one I’d read for something, even the duds were brimming with verve and original ideas. A major loss.

throwaway82388

hace 4 añosdiscuss

Whether the acting party is a friend or an enemy distinguishes the guilty from the blameless. Anything can be rationalized post facto. It’s the bedrock principle of contemporary politics and it’s breathtaking to witness.

throwaway82388

hace 4 añosdiscuss

I’m fairly certain that I’ve yet to visit an upper middle class household without a high end gas range, albeit hooded. Surely this disproportionally affects the foodies and amateur chefs of the world.

throwaway82388

hace 4 añosdiscuss

Plenty of think tanks and NGOs are on it. Google “personal carbon quota”

throwaway82388

hace 4 añosdiscuss

Vibe shift is just another term for a change in elite aspirant opinion. The vibe is localized to highly trend conscious social and professional milieus. These scenes are often regarded as a cultural vanguard, but are in fact often detached from the majority of the population, and are less harbingers of broad shifts in public opinion, and more simple reporters on their own microclimates. That is all to say, the hard numbers might not materialize for some time, if at all, and not for the reasons presently stated.

throwaway82388

hace 4 añosdiscuss

I think I understand your larger point, but whatever corrections or amendments need to be made to the myth of Jobs, the idea that he was in any way average shouldn’t be one.

throwaway82388

hace 4 añosdiscuss

I was politically conscious for his presidency (and a few more before it), and you make a good point or two, but I’d take issue with this characterization of the Bush years. His presidency was dynastic. He was a member of the political establishment, and a governor of Texas. He campaigned as a compassionate conservative, “a uniter, not a divider”. He (clumsily) spoke Spanish. “Global sourcing” accelerated during his presidency and he was a proponent of free trade. He was “a guy you’d want to have a beer with,” but his populist appeal didn’t extend beyond a superficial level, being photographed in cowboy clothes clearing brush on his ranch. His administration was made up of radical Nixon-era neocons with a handful of moderates who lent it credibility (Rice and Powell particularly). 9/11 of course radically altered history and enabled their worst excesses. A costly illegitimate war, naked cronyism, and a massive curtailing of civil liberties that remains to this day. Without a doubt the most destructive presidency I’ve witnessed.

He was not at all pugnacious, although, like Trump, the outrage he inspired was partly due to his lack of presidential decorum and sophistication. He put his foot in his mouth. He was a national embarrassment. But his image was that of a born-again Christian, with an upright moral posture. Quite a distance from the verbal pugilist who made ridiculous threats to celebrities like Rosie O’Donnell.

The Democratic opposition saw his election as illegitimate—the Pat Buchanan vote, hanging chad Florida controversy. Worth remembering. Not the first and certainly not the last disputed election.

throwaway82388

hace 4 añosdiscuss

I’d describe Trump and Musk as similarly adapted to the attention economy. But it is a similarity of style, as you said, and not necessarily politics.

While Bush II was far from the inventor of executive dissimulation, his administration did have a uniquely dysfunctional relationship with the truth. But truthiness was coined by Colbert, a brilliant critic of that administration, to describe things that aren’t true but feel true. It’s regrettable, but increasingly over the last five or six years, that term could be applied with similar frequency to claims made on either side of the aisle.

throwaway82388

hace 4 añosdiscuss

There are only two sides in the culture war. Any free-thinking criticism of one side places you in or aligns you with the opposition.

“If you’re not with us, you’re against us.” Intelligent commentators mocked the famous George W. Bush line when he uttered it. But a decade and a half later and it’s the prevailing sentiment among many of the same people who ridiculed it.

Paul Krugman wrote recently that Elon Musk has “gone full MAGA.” The press will tell you what they can get away with. And right-thinking readers will uncritically accept it, for the most part. Trump was good for news traffic. My guess is that Musk is similarly good for business, judging on how many journalists seem to be on the Elon beat. I expect to read and hear a lot more of this for as long as that remains true.

throwaway82388

hace 4 añosdiscuss

There are a few responses people have found useful to misdirect and shut down conversation around this topic. Nothing burger, and the claim that it was about revenge porn, are strong signals that this is one such stock response.

It’s disappointing how the commenting postures surrounding culture war issues curtail curiosity, the spirit of inquiry more generally. A now naive-seeming but widely held assumption about the information revolution was that the instant availability of primary source material would lead to more informed public debate. It’s now apparent to me that knowing how you’re supposed to feel, and what others think, are more important— at the very least more useful— than any naive interest in trying to interpret the messy reality.

throwaway82388

hace 4 añosdiscuss

It does depend on the details. In special fields, like medical software, regulation might alter the market—although code even there is often revealed to be of poor quality.

But of all the examples of cheap and convenient beating quality: photography, film, music, et al, the many industries that digital technology has disrupted, newspapers are more analogous than builders. Software companies are publishers, like newspapers. And newspapers had entire building floors occupied by highly skilled mechanical typesetters, who have long been replaced. A handful of employees on a couple computers could do the job faster, more easily, and of good enough quality.

Software has already disrupted everything else, eventually it would disrupt the process of making software.

throwaway82388

hace 4 añosdiscuss

Anyone who has doubts has to look at the price. It’s free for now, and will be cheap enough when openai starts monetizing. Price wins over quality. It’s demonstrated time and time again.

throwaway82388

hace 4 añosdiscuss

That stereotypical insecure sportscar owner is certainly real. But not every one of them is insecure. Some just feel like they’ve won and deserve the spoils. And of course there are far more variables than I listed. I was just making some sweeping generalizations. I’ve met both. Old money, true to stereotype, tend to drive inconspicuous cars. I’m not old money, but I do the same.

throwaway82388

hace 4 añosdiscuss

A few weeks ago, no one would have predicted a major Google service going down before Twitter.

throwaway82388

hace 4 añosdiscuss

The question about cars is largely one of personality. Who drives bland cars? People who feel social pressure to not stand out, possibly who feel powerless, or who appreciate anonymity. Who drives flashy cars? People who feel important, who feel in control of their own circumstances and image, who think of themselves as iconoclastic.

throwaway82388

hace 4 añosdiscuss

I enjoyed the observations in this essay, but I missed the answer to the question in the title. I have a few thoughts in that direction.

Neutral colors like greige are fitting for our hypernetworked, hyperconformist age, where eccentric behavior, unconventional views, and standing out generally get you odd looks at best, surreptitiously filmed and socially shunned at worst. Being boring is an aesthetic survival mechanism, and entirely apt. As is the flimsy built environment.

Clothing is subject to fashion cycles so rapid, why would anyone make anything to last when it’s likely to be discarded and replaced in a year anyway?

Another banal observation, but architecture is subject to survivorship bias. Most of the mediocre buildings of the past have long since been demolished and replaced. We’re mostly familiar with successes. But the fact that buildings today are generally cheaper, uglier, and flimsier is true. And yet, people were making the same observation 100 years ago. And for decades before that.

General aesthetic degradation has been a more or less continual process since industrialization. It’s put more goods in the homes of more people, and the price is more uniformity and more ugliness. And it is relative. Our ugly present environment will possibly be an aesthetic high water mark to future generations, as midcentury aesthetics, derided for their ugliness in their time, seem to us today.

throwaway82388

hace 4 añosdiscuss

Google seems to be holding back due to AI safety concerns, and the problems inherent in doing anything at Google scale. I’m curious to see if potential market competition will change that.

throwaway82388

hace 4 añosdiscuss

I enjoy Rao’s writing, but he has a tendency to overindulge the occasional (and not particularly funny) mean-spirited joke, as well as over-stuffing his essays with half-formed ideas and references to his other work. His frequent insights make it worth it. He doesn’t seem afraid to occasionally get it spectacularly wrong. I admire someone willing to work out their ideas in such a public way.

As a milquetoast center-right op ed columnist for the Times, Brooks is a favorite target of a certain ideological bent (journos and bloggers who use twitter). And some of the criticism is deserved, but it often has the flavor of off-putting, personal vitriol. And Brooks has had a few decent pieces. His book Bohos in Paradise, although fairly dated, is recommended, and includes a few sharp and entertaining observations.

throwaway82388

hace 4 añosdiscuss

That sounds like a bad experience, but it’s not universal. It’s challenging to understand a platform from our individual vantage points (without access to internal dashboards), particularly on a network with between 2–3 billion MAUs. And if your personal interests are elsewhere, and your generational cohort is underrepresented. I’m an ‘elder millennial’ who got Facebook when it was still only for edu domains, and I’ve grown older with the service. I just briefly checked in with mine and within the last 24 hours I can see at least a dozen updates (all with decent engagement) from family and friends, some distant and others close. Babies being born, kids doing kid stuff, holiday posts. Pretty typical, particularly at this time of year. All that is to say, it’s all a function of your real world network. If I were the age I was when I started using Facebook, I’d probably find it desolate and boring, too.

But I would say ‘fairly durable’ is an apt description of an 18 year old service still operating at its scale. Exciting, maybe less than it once was. But fairly durable, certainly.

throwaway82388

hace 4 añosdiscuss

I regretted the Twitter comparison as soon as I reread my comment. I was thinking in broader terms — apps where the bulk of users follow creators and not personal contacts tend to grow and sustain very differently. But it’s so obviously most similar to YouTube, from a user perspective, it’s an accelerated YouTube experience.

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