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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: May 7th, 2024

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  • When your whole identity is consumed by boundless, baseless, joyless hatred of “the other”, yes, you’re gonna be negative.

    I don’t believe Musk is controlled by any of that though. He might share in it, but it doesn’t quite dictate him as much as it dictates those in actual misery. For example, he isn’t actually opposed to letting immigrants in, if they’ll make him richer. He’s motivated by greed and grift, and no small helping of pride.

    I suspect he just doesn’t want people criticising him and his cronies. Particularly when they inevitably start enacting policies that affect their base negatively (we’ve already seen our share of face-eating leopard voters shocked to find out that their face isn’t off limits), social media could help pissed off people realise how many others are pissed off too. I don’t think I need to spell out why that could be dangerous for him.

    Better to quell dissent entirely. If nobody can complain about the government, it’s harder to organise against it. Suppress criticism, censor the media, manipulate what you get to see to shape your view…

    Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

    (Obligatory note that calling a dictatorship communism doesn’t make it less authoritarian than a capitalist dictatorship. Red boots hurt just as much as any other color if they step on your neck, no matter how tasty they might be. That has nothing to do with the topic, I’m just bracing for tankie whataboutisms.)



  • Also a good point. Personally, I’m not willing to extend the charity of Hanlon’s Razor to corporations well known to be malicious. In this event, I’d rather be wrong than off-guard, if that makes sense?

    The meta verse and apples AR flop cost them a lot of money as a result.

    I think this is more of a case where the mandate to always increase profits compelled them to take calculated financial risks and hope to be the vanguard of a new boom. Well, maybe the calculations were more estimates, but I assumed they figured out they could afford the loss if it flopped, but would make major gains by securing a foothold in a new digital space if it succeeded.

    Consider how occasionally niche technologies once mocked later turn out to be hits. I remember once reading somewhere that QR codes were a fad, had died out and were basically useless, for instance, and I bought it because I myself saw decreasing use of them. At the time, I think QR code scanners weren’t built into smartphone camera apps, and smartphones weren’t as ubiquitous either, so unless you downloaded dedicated (and in retrospect sketchy) apps for it, they remained useless.

    Now, I see QR codes everywhere. My company has them on meeting rooms to check their occupation and book them right from your phone without needing to remember or manually enter the room number. Our printers have QR codes for email templates to report errors to IT that include technical details for the printer. Restaurants have QR codes for digital ordering, invoices for automatically scanning the payment details from your banking app, the list goes on.

    Obviously, the financial scale is far different, but that’s the example that came to mind just now seeing a QR code in my train for digital schedules including current delay. I’m sure there are better examples I could think of, but it’s eight in the morning and my long-term memory won’t come online for another hour or so.

    My point is that it’s sometimes hard or impossible to predict whether something will succeed, but the nature of corporate economics in the tech sphere compells taking risks on new innovations because the potential payoff is immense. And if they can afford to take it - they’re not exactly short on money and not particularly worried about their users running away over it - I don’t know if they can afford not to. Who knows what new tech people might surprisingly latch on to?

    I do think you’re right, but I don’t think it’s the only reason for doing things we think are stupid. The tech sphere in particular has a lot of survivorship bias, but while small companies might disintegrate over a failure, a giant corporation can take the hit and keep trying for the next gold rush.








  • He uses a pencil, paper and a mechanical calculator to tally up the bill, which I absolutely understand when your career is in IT.

    When the alternative is either having to search, evaluate, compare, select and configure an application for that purpose that you’re never quite happy with, or to scope, design, develop, test, deploy, maintain, eternally find things you wish you’d done better, refactor, realise you’re spending your free time on doing more of your job, regret your life choices, resolve to only make this last improvement and then call it good enough, renege on that promise to yourself a week later, burn out, curse that damn app for ruining your hobby…

    …yeah, using the most trivial low-tech solution possible does look rather sensible.