Talent Free Studios

It looks like WordPress has been improved so much it has become unusable. I’m going to have to find or (gasp!) create my own simple blogging software.

I came here today after a long hiatus to record a link to a clear (if not concise) explanation for why all the popular Web Sites quickly transition from cool to shitty.

Now I can’t even paste a permalink from that WordPress site to this one without bringing in the whole long article. This is NOT how I think a Content Authoring Tool ought to work. I’m too old to invest the time and effort into learning the New Way, because I know that there will be a New New Way right behind this one.

Well, WordPress refuses to let me copypasta the URL in here, so I’m going to have to try to just type it in thee old fashioned way: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

For this timbl got a knighthood.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/15/we-could-have-been-canada

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Biculturalism.html

http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/winstupid/1

http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/userfriendly/1

“Windows shines in instant-acquisition, or the ability to use without learning. They lack something in learnability, since there’s no clear path of advancement available. They fail terribly, overall, in true usability, since their products focus on how they want something done, rather than how you the user want to do things.

Unix has traditionally shined (practically scintillated) in usability. It provides you the tools, and then stays the hell out of your way and lets you use them. It has also traditionally been pretty wretched at learnability. It’s got plenty of reference, and plenty of power, but without someone who understands it to help you, the first few steps are pretty nasty. And it utterly lacks the ability to be used without knowledge.”

https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditForGrownups/comments/jr1uow/presidentelect_joe_biden_delivered_remarks_on_the/gbqlthh/

Two events cause sick people to stop taking medicine: they die, or they’re cured. The incentive for the medical industry is to prevent both of those events.

A little gedankenexperiment: Imagine you are an executive in the medical industry, say a pharmaceutical research company. You probably believe that, given time and a whole lot of money your company could solve any medical problem. If you didn’t, you probably wouldn’t have that job. But you know that time and money are not infinitely available, and you take seriously the responsibility to “get the most bang for the buck”.

One of the medical problems you’re looking at is something like the flu or pneumonia. It’s a serious medical problem, e.g., top 10 leading cause of death. In any given year, say 5 or 10% of the population get at least a mild case, 5 or 10% of those cases are severe, and 5 or 10% of severe cases are fatal. Some people get at least a mild case say 20 or 30 times in a lifetime, but many people get it once, twice, or never in their lives.

If you can create a cure with acceptable side effects you can sell it to about 5 or 10% of the population every year. If you can create a “once and done” vaccine, you can sell it to nearly 100% of the population just once each. If you can only create a vaccine that needs a booster every year, you can probably sell it to about 50% of the population every year.

Do you see the problem?

This instance is from https://www.inverse.com/mind-body/male-female-body-evolution, but I don’t want to pick on that instance in particular. I see this stuff all the time in contemporary writing[1]. You want your prose to be “punchy”, even “hard-hitting”, so you choose words like “irrefutably debunked”, but you don’t want to be caught saying something that turns out not to be accurate, so you add a weasel word like “may”. I suppose “may have cast some doubt on that idea” just doesn’t have quite the same “zing”.

[1] On the World Wide Web, which is (just about (weasel words)) the only stuff I read any more.

For those who enjoy a completely over-the-top political rant.

http://www.stilldrinking.org/trigger-space

And this is from before the 2016 election.

Reminds me of something I saw on Reddit once about taking responsibility for one’s own neuroses. If your social anxiety colors your interactions with the people around you, you have to expect those people to be affected by your social anxiety. To put it more directly, if you act crazy toward other people you shouldn’t be surprised if they act crazy back.

Signed-Only Mails Considered Harmful

This got me thinking.  I could make an argument that encrypted communication is harmful and signed but not encrypted is good.  Philosophically, I favor openness and transparency and disapprove of keeping secrets and the insidious “plausible deniability”.  If you’re tempted to keep what you’re doing secret, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it. And likewise if you think you might want to pretend in the future that you didn’t really do it.

Signing and not encrypting your communication indicates that you intend to stand by what you say, and that you don’t care who knows about it.  That you’re proud of what you’re saying.

Now I realize that there are evil people in the world that might retaliate with violence against perfectly commendable communications, so it becomes necessary for perfectly commendable people to keep their perfectly commendable communications secret.  And I understand that it would be better for those poor souls if we all encrypted all our communication all the time so theirs would not stick out.  But keep in mind that the evil, violent people are the biggest keepers of secrets.  Wouldn’t it be better for everyone if openness and transparency and not plausible deniability were the norm, and secrets drew attention as exceptions?

The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority  by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I don’t really care for his writing, but this idea is important, and it’s something I hadn’t thought much about before.

I do like this parenthetical quote:

My heuristic is that the more pagan, the more brilliant one’s mind, and the higher one’s ability to handle nuances and ambiguity. Purely monotheistic religious such as Protestant Christianity, Salafi Islam, or fundamentalist atheism accommodate literalist and mediocre minds that cannot handle ambiguity.

The point is that the vast majority of people are tolerant (in most any question) and so will accommodate a tiny minority who are not.