@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us avatar

raganwald

@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us

I am an author of bespoke works of prose. Every word—every single one—is literally written by hand, letter by letter.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

raganwald, to random
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us avatar

More evidence AI is a bubble: Companies have stopped asking themselves whether new features and products empower their customers to achieve anything meaningful.

Instead, features and products are viewed through a single lens: “How well does this feature or product act as a conduit for marketing generative AI, lifting our prospects through hope?”

Exhibit 1: The attached image doesn’t actually show use cases: These are hand-wavey overgeneralized business functions. It’s not falsifiable.

1/2

raganwald,
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us avatar

Recognizing that this is a bubble is useful, because we can infer things about it from previous bubbles. Like… Companies will rush to get into the business of renting AI compute and tooling out to other companies, so they can collect rents.

If you are essentially reselling AI, and have little differentiation, you are—as we say about opening a store or restaurant without a sustainable plan—working for the landlord, not yourself.

No wonder tech ❤️ AI. It’s sharecropping 4.0.

(2/2)

raganwald, to random
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us avatar

“At first you may say to yourself, ‘Hey this thing looks kinda like a Playdate’ and you wouldn't be far off.

“But the difference is the Playdate is a fun, charming, intentionally simple little console that you play for five minutes whenever you remember you own it, and the rabbit is a cretinous imposition that I don’t ever want to hear about again after this blog.”

https://aftermath.site/why-would-i-buy-this-useless-evil-thing

🎩 @dandean

augieray, to random
@augieray@mastodon.social avatar

If you criticize me for going out to empty places sitting by open windows with my CO2 monitor showing safe air during the lowest point of infections in eight months, I'm happy to block you. The vast majority of people are simply completely ignoring COVID-19. I'm not. But I think people have a right to make informed decisions to minimize risk while living life. If you accept the risk of driving in a car, don't bash others for making informed decisions to enjoy life. Life is balance.

raganwald,
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us avatar

@augieray

I won't criticize your choices, but I will point out that decisions about masking in public are exactly like decisions about driving a car, in that there are at least two things to think about:

  1. What risk am I assuming for myself, and;
  2. What risk am I imposing on those around me?

And just like cars, there is sensible discussion to be had about how much risk we allow individuals to impose on both themselves and on each other.

mekkaokereke, to random
@mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io avatar

Again for people (racists), complaining about falling birth rates:

The birth rate for women over 40 is not falling. The birth rate for women over 30 is not falling.

What's happening, is girls 15 to 17 are having fewer babies. Kids are having fewer kids.

Also, this is an interesting way of saying that "Teen pregnancy is down, due to sex education and contraception."

In 1991 25% of 15 year olds gave birth before they turned 21. That's bad. Now it's 6%. That's better.

https://npr.org/2023/01/08/1147737247/teen-pregnancy-rates-have-declined-significantly

raganwald,
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us avatar

@mekkaokereke

“The reason it’s called ‘The American Dream’ is that you have to be asleep to believe it.”

—George Carlin (1937-2008)

TalktoBeverley, to random
@TalktoBeverley@mas.to avatar

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/apr/27/work-and-pensions-committee-chair-tells-ministers-to-fix-carers-allowance-issues

' “The government defends the mean-spirited rules which penalise carers’ earnings beyond £151 a week... then criminalise carers for any overpayments of carer’s allowance. Given HMRC have the earnings data, why don’t they [DWP] just write to carers if they think they’ve accidentally gone over the earnings limit?” '

'Timms called for the carer’s allowance earnings limit to be increased in line with the national minimum wage after it was in effect frozen five years ago...'

raganwald,
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us avatar

@TalktoBeverley

Same idea:

In a publicity stunt, Canadian PM Justin Trudeau and his cabinet took a bus to work together on their first day in Parliament after winning an election.

If ruling MPs had to take public transit to work every day, how amazing would the country's infrastructure become?

raganwald, to random
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us avatar

In the centre of the back-end architecture was an app written for tellers to operate in a retail branch using terminals. This app was written in MUMPS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUMPS

The app was unmaintainable, but it was the source-of-truth for how almost every transaction was to be executed. Rewriting it was not a realistic option.

So they put a screen-scraper in front of it, with a custom JDBC interface. Our code thought it was talking to a database, but it was actually emulating a terminal!

2/2

matt, to random
@matt@isfeeling.social avatar

Honestly, I respect the hell out of looking to be a little different.

Maybe it’s just a result of us all getting older, but when I first got involved in this enthusiast space people loved being weird…thinking differently, if you will. Now I so often see people scoffing at anything that can’t appeal to the most mainstream audience possible and it bums me out sometimes.

Keep it weird, y’all!
https://twit.social/@ljpuk/112335732059334454

raganwald,
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us avatar

@matt

This fucking personal computing thing has been goddamn gentrified, but I’m not having it.

Keep computing weird.

johncarlosbaez, (edited ) to random
@johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz avatar

Lately I've been obsessed by Paul McCartney's song Jet. Pop music critics focus on lyrics because they're writers and they understand words better than music. So there's a lot of talk about what the lyrics mean in this song - though they're essentially nonsense designed to sound great - and not nearly enough about the startlingly abstract descending melodic line that's the centerpiece. You'll hear it in the first phrase:

I can almost remember their funny faces

and then, in a more elaborated form, in the second:

That time you told them you were going to be marrying soon

If you try to sing these lines getting the melody and rhythm exactly right, I think you'll find it hard! Or maybe I'm just bad at singing... but I don't think so - I think they're rather slippery. And so he put this melody in several extremely catchy frames:

  1. Starting the song, a repeated ominous 4-note theme. This should remind you of the phrase "band on the run" from the title song of this album.

  2. A recurring bump-and-grind thing on rhythm guitar, which anchors the whole piece. This is actually reminiscent of a reggae rhythm, since it plays the 3rd and 4th beats while leaving the 1st and 2nd silent.

  3. Most obviously, the shouted chorus of "Jet!" The whole band sings this, and its intense while still sounding cheery. They do it 3 times before the main lyrics come in with that descending melody. From then on, the first 2 of the 3 are followed by an insanely catchy "woo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo". This instantly grabs everyone.

  4. A chorus with a different type of melody:

Ah Mater want Jet to always love me
Ah Mater want Jet to always love me
Ah Mater, much later

(1/2)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwRXxtwcJus

raganwald,
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us avatar

@MichaelPorter @johncarlosbaez

IIRC, that's the album they recorded in Lagos 🇳🇬 at Ginger Baker's studio.

raganwald,
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us avatar

@MichaelPorter @johncarlosbaez

I lived in Nigeria in 1969-1971 or so, and while shitshow is the right word, I have some empathy for the difficulty of going from colonial rule to independence without institutions struggling.

ratkins, to random
@ratkins@mastodon.social avatar

FUCKING HELL AUTOCARROT, SOME TIMES I WANT TO WRITE “WELL”, NOT “WE’LL” AAARGH!

raganwald,
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us avatar

@ratkins

It’s he’ll on earth

ai6yr, (edited ) to Cybersecurity

People are now spoofing restaurants on on-demand restaurant apps (ie UberEats). Basically, listing menus for restaurants and using a virtual kitchen to deliver those items, using the popularity of those local restaurants (NOT on UberEats, etc.) to harvest dollars. https://www.msn.com/en-us/foodanddrink/foodnews/more-vegas-valley-restaurants-impersonated-on-popular-food-delivery-service-app/ar-AA1nhq0K

raganwald,
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us avatar

@ai6yr

“Enshittification” on steroids: Food delivery apps don’t just enshitten things for their client restaurants and their customers, they’re now enshittifying things for restaraunts who don’t even do business with them, by looking the other way on countrfeits.

See also Amazon, a store I no longer trust for any name brands.

grmpyprogrammer, to random
@grmpyprogrammer@phpc.social avatar

Just stopped in Flint MI to charge the MuskMobile on my way to

raganwald,
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us avatar

@grmpyprogrammer

We get it:

StillIRise1963, to random
@StillIRise1963@mastodon.world avatar

Students are not the enemies of an institution of higher learning. They are the MOST important constituency. Without them, their ideas and passions, colleges/unis do not exist.

raganwald,
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us avatar

@StillIRise1963

You articulate what should be, but are we sure you articulate what actually is?

In a democracy, citizens ought to be the only constituent. But in America, donors are the only constituents who have lasting influence on policy, to the point where corporations have the right to influence elections.

Could it be that institutions of higher learning also end up beholden to their sources of funding, be they donors, politicians working for donors, or even sports coaches?

raganwald,
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us avatar

@StillIRise1963

As a little boy, I stared at pictures in LifeMagazine of students murdered by a country that would not tolerate their speech.

https://slate.com/culture/2013/05/may-4-1970-the-kent-state-university-shootings-told-through-pictures-photos.html

It is absolutely the given.

raganwald, to random
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us avatar

Oh wow, I bought a MessagePad 100 and wrote a text encryption app. I put it up on CompuServe and in the fullness of time, received my first ever cheque for “Selling something online.”

I still have that physical cheque.

raganwald,
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us avatar

A brief review of the algorithm will convince you that when I describe myself as a digital dilettante, you’ll know that I’m serious:

https://raganwald.com/2023/01/10/ncrypt-lite.html

Thirty years later, I believe the most interesting thing about it is that we believed we had to use pseudocode instead of source code when discussing the algorithm, because of laws prohibiting “the export of cryptographic munitions” or some such nonsense that everyone evaded.

raganwald, to random
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us avatar

Falling in love with flight in the 1960s, I grew up surrounded by British culture, including an obsession with the Second World War’s aircraft and their exploits.

I now have deeply mixed feelings about “warbirds” as a hobby, but I can’t deny that when I spotted the Horten IX / Ho 229 jet-powered flying wing for MSFS Flight Simulator, I felt a massive pang of nostalgia for my more innocent boyhood when such things were wondrous inventions.

dangillmor, to random
@dangillmor@mastodon.social avatar

As @pluralistic reminds us, capitalists absolutely hate capitalism, and they're systematically returning us to their favorite system: feudalism.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/18/in-extremis-veritas/

raganwald,
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us avatar

@dangillmor @pluralistic

Seem isomorphic to the Paradox of Tolerance:

“The paradox of capitalism states that if a society's practice of capitalism is inclusive of the feudal, feudalism will ultimately dominate, eliminating the capitalists and the practice of capitalism with them.”

raganwald, to random
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us avatar

I quote Julius Nyerere on a regular basis, but I should be fair and describe Canada from the same point of view:

We’re a two-party state, with the NDP being the token opposition who are never elected. Our Liberals and Conservatives have always acted like two failsons squabbling over the estate their father stole from the First Nations.

https://social.bau-ha.us/@raganwald/112294120013924144

raganwald, to random
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us avatar

Alice:

“YCombinator was, in a sense, venture capital disrupting venture capital by industrializing seed-stage investing.

“What if the next such disruption is AI that vets startup pitches for investment, and all the pitches it reviews are generated by a different AI that hallucinates startups and finds founders if any of the pitches win an interview?”

Bob:

“AI putting VCs out of work? A ray of sunshine in this otherwise drab, grey, boring dystopia. Stop it, you’re making my mouth water.”

raganwald, to random
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us avatar

Reminder that “If you aren’t paying, you aren’t the customer” is a misleading tag-line.

Try, “If you aren’t paying, you definitely aren’t the customer.” The implication of that extra word makes all the difference.

raganwald, to random
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us avatar

Oh the Humanity:
Why You Can't Build Apple with Venture Capital

https://www.sandofsky.com/humane/

This essay has two themes, as exemplified in the head and subhead.

“Oh the Humanity” is about the saga of the Humane AI Pin. “Why You Can’t Build Apple with Venture Capital” speaks to the dynamics of VC and VC-backed startups, and has some choice nuggets of wisdom to digest.

🧢 @daringfireball

raganwald,
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us avatar

This quote transcends all discussion of Humane:

“I love Apple's products, and that's why I build my own products outside the venture capital system.”

It certainly gooses my confirmation bias. I’m a heavy iPad user and we love our AppleTVs at home. Both were products Apple was happy to patiently nurture and iterate on.

I don’t think either would be as good if they had been launched by a company with pressure to find an exit or from a company that IPOs and has to do quarterly earnings calls.

danilo, to random
@danilo@hachyderm.io avatar

So the CFPB has Lambda School and Austin Allred dead to rights as scammers

Allred, noted crook, is not allowed to do anything like student lending for ten years

https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-takes-action-against-coding-boot-camp-bloomtech-and-ceo-austen-allred-for-deceiving-students-and-hiding-loan-costs/

raganwald,
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us avatar

@danilo @gaberivera

“Here on Mastodon Hits 97.3, we play all your requests!”

https://youtu.be/eMnO8rkubVU

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