Photuris

All those old fairy tales have one single core lesson for children: stranger danger!

In that light, the original Sleeping Beauty plot makes sense. Don’t get shit-faced and pass out at a house party around a bunch of horny drunk randos. Most of the guys there might be decent and honorable, but it only takes one horrible creep.

That is, sadly, a better outcome lesson than waking up to a gentle kiss from a kind and handsome prince, no?

You scoff, but this is exactly the future CEOs and upper management absolutely want.

Why? Because labor is too expensive and “entitled” (wanting things like time off, health insurance, remote work, and so on).

They will do everything they can to squeeze labor and disempower the bargaining capability that knowledge workers have.

Why do you think Microsoft has been trying to screengrab everything that knowledge workers do? To train their models to do that work instead. Why did they just lay off thousands of workers and direct something like $80 billion towards AI investments?

You know why.

Quality doesn’t matter. Income minus expenses matter. You are an expense. They will do everything they can to replace you as soon as they catch even a whiff of economic viability (or even before), because even if it’s more costly right now, it can drive down labor costs by putting the squeeze on employees.

And that is the point.

Point 3. is what I’m getting at. They desperately want to unload expensive developers, so bad. They’ll try it, and keep trying it, even as products suffer, in the hopes of driving down labor costs.

That’s a fool’s errand

Of course it is.

They’re still gonna do it.

For now.

But when a mid-tier or entry level dev can do 60% of what a senior can do, it’ll be a great way to cut costs.

I don’t think we’re there now. It’s just that that’s the ultimate goal - employ fewer people, and pay the remaining people you do employ less.

The point isn’t to increase employee productivity (or employee happiness, obviously).

The point is to replace most employees.

In order for that to happen, LLM-assisted entry-level developers merely need to be half as good as expert human unassisted developers, at scale, at a lower aggregate cost.

I let everyone know:

1. Text messages are for asynchronous communication. That’s literally what they’re designed for. I will not communicate over texts synchronously.

2. I will respond to texts within 2 days usually. Do not expect an immediate response.

3. If you need me immediately or within short order, call me.

4. If you call me for non-urgent matters that could have been handled over text, I might not pick up the phone right away. The boy who cried wolf, and all that.

5. I do not always have my phone on me 24/7. Sometimes I am untethered. I return calls far more quickly than I respond to texts, because I assume a call is more important than a text. It had better be.

6. If you call and I don’t pick up, leave a voicemail. If you don’t leave a voicemail, I assume it wasn’t important.

We should roll over then.

The solution to guns is to ensure that only the state can ever have guns.

Why? Because the state will never be taken over by bad actors who seek to destroy democracy and institute autocracy.

The well-meaning liberal-minded and just people in power today will be in power tomorrow and forever, so we can always trust them to have all guns, hold the cryptography backdoors for all consumer electronics, hold the reins on banking, have sophisticated mass surveillance capabilities, curtail free speech and open protest, and so on. Because they’ll never use their power to intimidate rumblings of labor unionization, clamp down on people advocating for Palestinian people, disproportionately imprison brown people and immigrants for infractions that white people walk away from consequence-free, and so on.

And they’ll certainly never use their far-reaching powers to dismantle democracy and implement fascism. That’ll never happen, because it can’t happen in the West anymore - so don’t even worry about it.

Why must we trust the state so much? Because terrorism must not win, and we’ll never ever change what the poorly-defined word “terrorism” means on a whim based on current perceived political enemies or anything.

It’s good to practice, because one day you may need to shoot fascists.

Everyone has a fucking camera in their pocket.

I cancelled my Audible subscription and stopped using Amazon entirely.

Eat shit Bezos.

I’m considering a pine phone, but honestly idk.

IoT has gotten way out of hand

I’ve often thought that 90% of success is having enough energy. I wonder why some people have the energy to get out of bed in the morning and do a bunch of shit, while the rest of us struggle to screw up enough energy reserves to want to live another day.

Rednote 小红书 is much better than TikTok anyway, obvious propaganda and all.

And now I’m officially 100% done with gaming, since that’s the last game I’d continued playing from time to time (when I have a spare few minutes and a whim to fire it up, that is).

Oh well, part of getting older. I think I also have Halo and a Modern Warfare on that XBox, but, meh. WWII was the best CoD (the most fun, at least to me).

More sites in general are blocking mullvad traffic lately (in my experience), and I’m not sure what, if anything, can be done about it.

Productivity will go up, wages will remain the same, and no additional time off will be given to employees. They’ll merely be required to produce 4x as much and compensation will not increase to match.

It seems the point of all these machines and automation isn’t to make our individual lives easier and more prosperous, but instead to increase and maximize shareholder value.

Quite recently, many (mostly Republican-run) US states have made ranked choice voting illegal (including the state in which I happen to live).

I foresee Democrats working hard to roll back ranked choice voting in NYC as well.