Unlurker

↙ time adjusted for second-chance

This is getting panned, probably for good reasons. But, in a similar vein, I really think that generative applications are going to be big in the future. User speaks (or OS predicts) what they want and an app spins up on the fly. I don’t think they’ll wipe out traditional apps, but I could see lots of long tail cases where they meet users needs.

> Users get personalized interfaces without custom code. Personalized interfaces are bad. I don't want to configure anything, and I don't want anything automatically configured on my behalf. I want it to just work ; that kind of design takes effort & there's no way around it. Your UI should be clear and predictable. A chatbot should not be moving around the buttons. If I'm going to compare notes with my friend on how to use your software, all the buttons need to be in the same place. People hate UI redesigns for a reason: Once they've learned how to use your software, they don't want to re-learn. A product that constantly redesigns itself at the whims of an inscrutable chatbot which thinks it knows what you want is the worst of all possible products. ALSO: Egregiously written article. I assume it's made by an LLM.

Yes and this is my biggest anxiety of future software and interfaces to come. You won't remember how you got there or did what because there are n permutations of getting there or doing that, except they're vaguely similar but not exactly the same thing. I too want predictable software (including UIs) that stays the same until I want to change/upgrade it myself as a user.

it is a case of "those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it. Microsoft already tried this in office when they made the menu order change with usage frequency. People hated it

"Your thumbs will learn" is a famous Steve Jobs quote from the 2007 iPhone launch.

But AI?

Using LLMs at Oxide (rfd.shared.oxide.computer)

> assurance that the model will not use the document to train future iterations of itself. believing this in 2025 is really fascinating. this is like believing Meta won’t use info they (i)legally collected about you to serve you ads

As usual with Oxide's RFDs, I found myself vigorously head-nodding while reading. Somewhat rarely, I found a part that I found myself disagreeing with: > Unlike prose, however (which really should be handed in a polished form to an LLM to maximize the LLM’s efficacy), LLMs can be quite effective writing code de novo. Don't the same arguments against using LLMs to write one's prose also apply to code? Was this structure of the code and ideas within the engineers'? Or was it from the LLM? And so on. Before I'm misunderstood as a LLM minimalist, I want to say that I think they're incredibly good at solving for the blank page syndrome -- just getting a starting point on the page is useful. But I think that the code you actually want to ship is so far from what LLMs write, that I think of it more as a crutch for blank page syndrome than "they're good at writing code de novo". I'm open to being wrong and want to hear any discussion on the matter. My worry is that this is another one of the "illusion of progress" traps, similar to the one that currently fools people with the prose side of things.

Writing is an expression of an individual, while code is a tool used to solve a problem or achieve a purpose. The more examples of different types of problems being solved in similar ways present in an LLM's dataset, the better it gets at solving problems. Generally speaking, if it's a solution that works well, it gets used a lot, so "good solutions" become well represented in the dataset. Human expression, however, is diverse by definition. The expression of the human experience is the expression of a data point on a statistical field with standard deviations the size of chasms. An expression of the mean (which is what an LLM does) goes against why we care about human expression in the first place. "Interesting" is a value closely paired with "different". We value diversity of thought in expression, but we value efficiency of problem solving for code. There is definitely an argument to be made that LLM usage fundamentally restrains an individual from solving unsolved problems. It also doesn't consider the question of "where do we get more data from". >the code you actually want to ship is so far from what LLMs write I think this is a fairly common consensus, and my understanding is the reason for this issue is limited context window.

I argue that the intent of an engineer is contained coherently across the code of a project. I have yet to get an LLM to pick up on the deeper idioms present in a codebase that help constrain the overall solution towards these more particular patterns. I’m not talking about syntax or style, either. I’m talking about e.g. semantic connections within an object graph, understanding what sort of things belong in the data layer based on how it is intended to be read/written, etc. Even when I point it at a file and say, “Use the patterns you see there, with these small differences and a different target type,” I find that LLMs struggle. Until they can clear that hurdle without requiring me to restructure my entire engineering org they will remain as fancy code completion suggestions, hobby project accelerators, and not much else.

A problem I’ve found with LLMs for docs is that they are like ten times too wordy. They want to document every path and edge case rather focusing on what really matters. It can be addressed with prompting, but you have to fight this constantly.

I think probably my most common prompt is "Make it shorter. No more than ($x) (words|sentences|paragraphs)."

Find it interesting that the section about LLM’s tells when using it for writing is absolutely littered with emdashes

There was a comment recently by HN's most enthusiastic LLM cheerleader, Simon Willison, that I stopped reading almost immediately (before seeing who posted it), because it exuded the slop stench of an LLM: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46011877 However, I was surprised to see that when someone (not me) accused him of using an LLM to write his comment, he flatly denied it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46011964 Which I guess means (assuming he isn't lying) if you spend too much time interacting with LLMs, you eventually resemble one.

I believe Bryan is a well known em dash addict

> I believe Bryan is a well known em dash addict I was hoping he'd make the leaderboard, but perhaps the addiction took proper hold in more recent years: https://www.gally.net/miscellaneous/hn-em-dash-user-leaderboard-v2.html https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bcantrill No doubt his em dashes are legit, of course.

> That junior engineer possibly hasn't programmed without the tantalizing, even desperately tempting option to be assisted by an LLM. This gives me somewhat of a knee jerk reaction. When I started programming professionally in the 90s, the internet came of age and I remember being told "in my days, we had books and we remembered things" which of course is hilarious because today you can't possibly retain ALL the knowledge needed to be software engineer due to the sheer size of knowledge required today to produce a meaningful product. It's too big and it moves too fast. There was this long argument that you should know things and not have to look it up all the time. Altavista was a joke, and Google was cheating. Then syntax highlighting came around and there'd always be a guy going "yeah nah, you shouldn't need syntax highlighting to program, you screen looks like a Christmas tree". Then we got stuff like auto-complete, and it was amazing, the amount of keystrokes we saved. That too, was seen as heresy by the purists (followed later by LSP - which many today call heresy). That reminds me also, back in the day, people would have entire Encyclopaedia on DVDs collections. Did they use it? No. But they criticised Wikipedia for being inferior. Look at today, though. Same thing with LLMs. Whether you use them as a powerful context based auto-complete, as a research tool faster than wikipedia and google, as rubber-duck debugger, or as a text generator -- who cares: this is today, stop talking like a fossil. It's 2025 and junior developers can't work without LSP and LLM? It's fine. They're not in front of a 386 DX33 with 1 book of K&R C and a blue EDIT screen. They have massive challenged ahead of them, the IT world is complete shambles, and it's impossible to decipher how anything is made, even open source. Today is today. Use all the tools at hand. Don't shame kids for using the best tools. We should be talking about sustainability of such tools rather than what it means to use them (cf. enshittification, open source models etc.)

It is not clear though, which tools enable and which tools inhibit your development at the beginning of your journey.

Agreed, although LLMs definitely qualify as enabling developers compared to <social media, Steam, consoles, and other distractions> of today. The Internet itself is full of distractions. My younger self spent a crazy amount of time on IRC. So it's not different than spending time on say, Discord today. LLMs have pretty much a direct relationship with Google. The quality of the response has much to do with the quality of the prompt. If anything, it's the overwhelming nature of LLMs that might be the problem. Back in the day, if you had, say a library access, the problem was knowing what to look for. Discoverability with LLMs is exponential. As for LLM as auto-complete, there is an argument to be made that typing a lot reinforces knowledge in the human brain like writing. This is getting lost, but with productivity gains.

I remember in the very first class I ever took on Web Design the teacher spent an entire semester teaching "first principles" of HTML, CSS and JavaScript by writing it in Notepad. It was only then did she introduce us to the glory that was Adobe Dreamweaver, which (obviously) increased our productivity tenfold.

I miss Dreamweaver. Combining it with Fireworks was a crazy productive combo for me back in the mid 00’s! My first PHP scripts and games were written using nothing more than Notepad too funnily enough

Hmmm, I'm a bit confused of their conclusions (encouraging use) given some of the really damning caveats they point out. A tool they themselves determine to need such careful oversight probably just shouldn't be used near prod at all.

Medication is littered with warning labels but humans still use it to combat illness. Social media can harm mental health yet people still use it. Pick whatever other example you'd like. There are things in life that have high risks of harm if misused yet people still use them because there are great benefits when carefully used. Being aware of the risks is the key to using something that can be harmful, safely.

Trains cancelled over fake bridge collapse image (bbc.com)

From 1950 - 2005(ish) there were a small number of sources due to the enormous moat required to become a broadcaster. From 2005 to 2021, you could mostly trust video as the costs of casual fakery were prohibitive. Now that the cost to produce fake videos are near zero, I suspect we will return to a much smaller number of sources (though not as small as in the pre YouTube era).

What this incident really shows is the growing gap between how easy it is to create a convincing warning and how costly it is to verify what's actually happening. Hoaxes aren't new, but generative tools make fabrication almost free and massively increase the volume. The rail operator didn't do anything wrong. After an earthquake and a realistic-looking image, the only responsible action is to treat it as potentially real and inspect the track. This wasn't catastrophic, but it's a preview of a world where a single person can cheaply trigger high-cost responses. The systems we build will have to adapt, not by ignoring social media reports, but by developing faster, more resilient ways to distinguish signal from noise.

Sir, this is AI prose. Wendy's doesn't allow AI prose.

Thanks for the heads-up! I actually wrote this based on my own thoughts about the incident, but I understand the concern. I'll make sure to keep my posts in line with the community guidelines.

Much of the world relies on general well-behavedness. The whole Andon principle doesn’t work if you’ve got asshole employees. With the public you don’t have a choice. You have to stop the trains because otherwise everyone will murder you if it turned out to be true. So better to be defensive.

When the west devolves into a low trust society because of things like this and the relentless importing of people from such, it will lose the advantage of being a high trust society. Equality for all!

You also don't need gunpowder to kill someone with projectiles, but gunpowder changed things in important ways. All I ever see are the most specious knee-jerk defenses of AI that immediately fall apart.

It's not clear to me that it "changed things in important ways" in this case if a call alleging serious damage to the rail would've similarly triggered a pause for inspection.

A phone call to railway management claiming stone fall on a track, a dead cow, a stalled car will trigger a slowdown on that line, a call to the driver, and an inspection. If that's not happening then management is playing fast and loose with legal responsibility and the risks of mass and inertia.

Again, I see this argument. “Bad X has happened before and unsolved. Why worry about bad X^2?” Personally I’d prefer if it remained at X so solutions can catch up. But that’s just me.

Yep, why give people computers? It just increases the number of bad X, before writing these type of hoaxes were much less common.

> A BBC journalist ran the image through an AI chatbot which identified key spots that may have been manipulated. The image is likely AI generated in this case, but this does not seem like the best strategy for finding out if an image is AI generated.

If it's nano banana you can give it to Gemini bc it has artifacts

Yeah that hardly talks of the "journalist" being good at their job. At worst they asked a biased question like "has this photo been AI generated and if then how" or worse. People tend to think that AI is like a specific kind of human which knows other AI things better. But we should expect better from people that do writing as their job.

Someone I know is a high school English teacher (being vague because I don’t want to cause them trouble or embarrassment). They told me they were asking ChatGPT to tell them whether their students’ creative writing assignments were AI-generated or not-I pointed out that LLMs such as ChatGPT have poor reliability at this; classifier models trained specifically for this task perform somewhat better, yet also have their limitations. In any event, if the student has access to whatever model the teacher is using to test for AI-generation (or even comparable models), they can always respond adversarially by tinkering with an AI-generated story until it is no longer classified as AI-generated

Reminds me of a Reddit story that made the rounds about a professor asking ChatGPT if it wrote papers, to which it frequently responded afirmatively. He sent an angry email about it, and a student responded by showing a response from ChatGPT claiming it wrote his email.

> Sounds like AI was utterly useless to everyone involved Maybe. Imo, I think the advances in AI and the hype toward generated everything will actually be the current societies digitally-obsessed course-correction back to having a greater emphases on things like theater, live music, conversing with people in-person or even strangers (the horror, I know) simply to connect/consume more meaningfully. It'll level out integrating both instead of being so digitally loop-sided as humans adapt to enjoy both.* To me, this shows a need for more local journalism that has been decimated by the digital world. By journalism, I mean it in a more traditional sense, not bloggers and podcast (no shade some follow principled, journalistic integrity -- as some national "traditional" one don't). Local journalism is usually held to account by the community, and even though the worldwide BBC site has this story, it was the local reporters they had that were able to verify. If these AI stories/events accelerate a return to local reporting with a worldwide audience, then all the better. * I try to be a realist, but when I err, it tends to be on the optimist side

The tech giants sucking up all the ad revenue is what killed local journalism. Unless you can find a solution to that problem (or an alternstove fundong model), it's not coming back.

Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall;_or,_Dodge_in_Hell with the Moab plot point.

I really liked the first half to 3/4ths of the that book. The last part was less interesting to me but the Moab plot line and all the parts around anonymity/online presence I enjoyed.

Kilauea erupts, destroying webcam [video] (youtube.com)

I had a look at the crater using Google maps. Does this user contributed photo look AI to anyone? Or at least 'shopped. https://maps.app.goo.gl/or6gj5XnTCTwv4Ys7

It’s not real, lava has not flowed into the ocean for many years.

I'd love to learn more about the specific failure mode towards the end. As the eruption debris approach the camera, we see glowing rock up close. The camera then flashes purple for some reason, goes black, then returns to streaming for a few more seconds, recording a vague orange glow. After that, it's gone for good.

iirc, Pompeii was a pyroclastic flow [0], a fast-moving current of hot gas and volcanic matter with speeds between 100-700 km/hr and temperatures up to 1000°C. So, probably something like that, but a lot bigger, faster, and arriving faster from further away. I was surprised how long the camera lasted getting buried. It'd be a not good end. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyroclastic_flow

i just posted a sister comment to yours about the Mt St Helens explosion, with a picture from 1980, and then i noticed that they are calling (it's a non technical article) what rained down in the photograph onto the camera and photographer "pyroclastic flow" and it looks very similar to what happened here.

Decades ago, my wife and I visited the Big Island during a fairly sedate eruption. We drove down Chain of Craters Road, got to see a tiny lava flow (talking like a couple feet of glowing honey), but were wanting more. In the distance, we could see a huge steam column where a lava stream was reaching the sea. We asked one of the ever-attendant Park Rangers if we could walk over there. He said no. But then he said - we close at 5pm, and there are no gates. OK, we can take a hint. We drove to Hilo and bought cheap tennis and flashlights, then scurried back down Chain of Craters after 6. As the sky darkened, we walked towards the steam column. The rocks beneath our feet showed incandescent glows deep in the cracks, and we started to smell burned rubber from our cheap tennis. Eventually, we came to the lava outfall. We watched nearly an hour as a river of molten rock cascaded into the ocean. We used our water bottles on our shoe soles, turning back when we ran dry. I now understand that we were stupid - apparently the park loses a few tourists to shelf collapse each year - but we lived, and the memory is a treasure. Thank you, Mr. Ranger. And yes, it's like being on a different planet - like being on our own, maybe 4 billion years ago.

Not stupid. Just experiencing life and sometimes amazing experiences have a chance of danger. You get to choose what risk levels you are okay with. Props to that ranger who agreed with that belief.

At that time, we had no kids & no pets, nobody directly dependent on us. That figured in our conversation on the drive to Hilo. Nowdays, we might come to a different conclusion, but I'm glad for the path we chose then.

Catala – Law to Code (catala-lang.org)

Catala is a fantastic project and a real attempt to bring computer science and law together. Which is not easy! That said, for practical projects in legaltech a modern pure Prolog system has a lot of useful properties. A project that attempts to use Scryer Prolog for this is VATmiral.

We really need this in India. There are 53 million cases which are pending in courts, with over 180k cases open for more than 30 years (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pendency_of_court_cases_in_India ). It is estimated that more than 300 years will be taken to dispose of all cases. If law code is a repository: 1. Each trial should be encoded into a law. 2. If the trial is already covered sufficiently in the codebase, and both parties agree to it result. Then case is solved. 3. If not, the new judgement leads to a "pull request" into the codebase.

A computer program takes digital bytes, runs some discrete logic on them, outputs some more bytes. Laws take messy real world stuff, run some subjective decision tree on them, and output some messy real world actions to take. If you model the former with the latter you end up 'shelling out' to human judgement every 2 words. Suppose you accidentally shoot somebody while duck hunting, the meaning or value of pretty much everything here can't be determined by a computer, so the code-law version of this random snippet of natural-language-law would be pretty useless: > If it is found that the defendant did the killing or wounding, but that it was not intentional or negligent, the court shall dismiss the proceeding. Otherwise, if it is found that the defendant did the killing or wounding intentionally, by an act of gross negligence, or while under the influence of alcohol, the court shall issue an order permanently prohibiting the defendant from taking any bird or mammal.

Have you been around on the internet when they discovered AI LLMs ?

Understanding intent is understanding interest and that's not philosophy. If it's not about interest, it's psychiatry - not philosophy either. Besides, only a lesser part of law is about intent, the major part is about punishing and avoiding harm, finding the true facts and applying the written law to them. Down-voting can't change the truth, we've been led by the nose for far too long.

[delayed]

Law isn't written to cover 100% of real life scenarios and potential cases, it's written with deliberate parts of ambiguity, that will ultimately be up to courts to set the precedents for, in various situations and context. I think the idea is that you can't really cover 100% of real-life cases in "code", either legal or software, so the areas you'll leave this out of would be those "not-entirely-strict" parts.

The same can be said about driving but self-driving cars exist.

Not even unrelated, Catala (the law-language) seems to be a French project, supported by institutions in France, and Catalan seems to have a intertwined history with France: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalan_language#France

funnily enough, the relation comes from a french jurist's last name from their repo: https://github.com/CatalaLang/catala > The language is named after Pierre Catala, a professor of law who pionneered the French legaltech by creating a computer database of law cases, Juris-Data.

Screenshots from developers: 2002 vs. 2015 (2015) (anders.unix.se)

This is really fascinating, I would love to see a 2025 version from those willing to respond. All of the screenshots strike me as "get things done". Little flourish, just windows and text mode apps where needed to finish the day's task. To me, an ideal to aspire to.

Wild how well it would fit with CL LLMs in 2025

So I can't just use it by itself. E.g. I use i3wm, would those work together? Sorry if it's a stupid question.

No. It's FVWM-specific.

I think that sort of goes hand-in-hand. "Normal", well-rounded don't decide that software licensing is the most important thing in the world and don't devote their entire life to that. A normal person would be content with a 9-to-5 software engineering job at Sun, IBM, or Microsoft. I think you see that with a lot of other revolutionaries. They often take unreasonable positions and behave in unreasonable ways. RMS' tragedy is probably that his side more or less won, so now he's just a weirdo without a cause.

This puts me in mind of the words of George Bernard Shaw: ‘The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.'

Which is weird, I've compiled and ran custom kernels and modules on debian before fedora 1.0 iso was announced on freenode/#fedora and it wasn't even good.

Ok have you considered things may have changed in the 40+ releases since then?

"I don't know how to make a screenshot" - what a fucking star.

He's just a contrarian wanker. Of course he knows how to take a screenshot. He just absolutely has to tell you that he uses text mode.

> But terminals and editors is sticky in a way that tells me it's probably close to optimal. Optimal for those users, at any rate. IMO using a terminal editor is so painful compared to a decent GUI (Sublime or even VSCode) that I have a difficult time understanding why anyone would choose such a tool. I just try to repeat the mantra of "everyone likes different things" and stop trying to understand something where I likely never will get it.

Take about anything from a standard GUI editor. In a terminal editor, they are also easily accessible. And more easily accessible (if not discoverable). But one of the major gain is how close your shell is. A lot of editors allows to start a cli tool and optionally send a portion of the current buffer as input to it. You may also be able to include the output in some buffer too. Some GUI editors allows that, but it's almost always a config maze and you're never sure of the environment in which it does run the commands. Also in a terminal environment, all you enter are keyboard keys. If you know how to touch-type, your cognitive load can be greatly reduced (personal feeling). You can also navigate something like sublime with keyboard only. But it's way more tiresome.

The past was not that cute (juliawise.net)

This is the classic pastoral fantasy, about which much has been written. Probably too much.

My go-to for thinking about the past is dentistry.

No, the past was not "cute", but it also wasn't entirely a Dickensian disaster, either. There are parts about the past we can miss: shared public spaces, authenticity, quality goods and services, ritual, deeper connectedness to each other. Why does it have to be this dichotomy? Why can't we have both now? In fact, we ought to have both. It's not like it's impossible. We just have to user the power we have to build that world. It won't be easy, but it isn't a choice between "Little House on the Prairie" and "Bladerunner".

It’s extremely hard to truly understand the past, how they thought, what they believed, what they saw as acceptable vs. what today seems crazy. For example the founding legend of Rome is called the Rape of the Sabines, which is how the brave men who founded Rome kidnapped all the women from another tribe so they could have wives and reproduce https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_of_the_Sabine_women Imagine if the USA’s founding legend wasn’t the honorable Founding Fathers, Declaration of Independence, and all that jazz, but instead how our ancestors kidnapped and raped the women of the neighboring tribe . The psychology of such a people to remember and retell this story is pretty incredible

Yes, we clearly have a lot more options. We could pick and choose the parts of the past that are worth reviving. However, in general, most of the past really was terrible. More than half of the people who ever lived were subsistence farmers who, if they were lucky, grew enough food to live on and a little bit more. Less than half of their children lived to adulthood. To make up for staggering mortality rates, women had to have roughly six live births for the population to replace itself. And in peasant households, everyone has to work if they're able to, including children as soon as they were able. More here: https://acoup.blog/2025/07/18/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-ii-starting-at-the-end/ You can read more about the drop in child mortality rates here: https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-big-problem-in-brief

> The food was extremely good. . . . everything was fresh from the garden. Was it this, or was it that your mother/grandmother was a great cook? I hear a lot of older people talk about how awful their food was, limited ingredients, everything was boiled... Food also probably tastes better when you're actually hungry, and not able to Doordash whatever you want to eat at any time of day.

> The food was extremely good. . . . everything was fresh from the garden. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_sickness > Milk sickness, also known as tremetol vomiting, is a kind of poisoning characterized by trembling, vomiting, and severe intestinal pain that affects individuals who ingest milk, other dairy products, or meat from a cow that has fed on white snakeroot plant, which contains the poison tremetol. In animals it is known as trembles. > Although very rare today, milk sickness claimed thousands of lives among migrants to the Midwestern United States in the early 19th century, especially in frontier areas along the Ohio River Valley and its tributaries where white snakeroot was prevalent. New settlers were unfamiliar with the plant and its properties. Nancy Hanks Lincoln, the mother of Abraham Lincoln, is said to have been a victim of the poison. Nursing calves and lambs may have also died from their mothers' milk contaminated with snakeroot even when the adult cows and sheep showed no signs of poisoning. Cattle, horses, and sheep are the animals most often poisoned. Nice, Fresh, Honest Milk.

I will pre-empt this by saying I most certainly look to the past with rose colored glasses, and some of this is for sure childhood nostalgia, but one thing I appreciate about the aesthetics of the past is they felt more… Honest; for lack of a better term. Things made out of wood and metal were actually made out of hardwood and metal. Not so many composites that fall apart instead of wear ala wabi-sabi. So I think there’s something to the fact that the past was kind of “cute”, just not in all storybook way. Theres a lake I visit in the summer that I’ve been visiting since the 80’s, and the houses used to all be wood cottages with no fences, now they’re all mansions, many walled off. Sure the houses weren’t insulated, and you would be crammed in there together, but it felt way more…. Human? Communal?

A lot of people think this, but if I'm being honest modern materials are amazing. They survive pretty rough washes, they're incredibly cheap, fire-retardant, and last forever. Synthetics are amazing. Coincidentally, it was only a couple of days ago that I was thinking about this[0] when I thought about how the microfibre fleece my daughter was lying on was the cheap microfiber fleece I'd bought when I encountered my first American winter. A student's cheap blanket has lasted me over a decade and still keeps me warm and cleans easily. My wife and I have had Caspers and Tuft & Needles and Tempurpedics and we sleep now on an Ikea foam mattress. It's fantastic. Modern manufacturing and materials are incredible. I feel like I'm living in a golden age. 0: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-11-29/Things_Do_Last

Maybe, but really consumerism wasn’t a thing for most of history because almost no one had the money to decorate intentionally in the way we do today. The very wealthy did to varying extents. When we look at the past we always imagine ourselves to be the ones in Downton Abbey, but most people were lucky to inherit some furniture. I would argue that the reverence for real wood and craft you espoused (and I share) is in part possible due to living in a consumerist society. For what it’s worth it is still possible to buy those same quality goods today, and certainly at lower cost . However, I would balk at paying the historical fraction of my income (or multiple if we go back to the 1700s), for a new bed. In short cheap dishonest crap is what we ultimately want. It lets us focus our time and resources elsewhere

My first exposure to this - tired of $40 particleboard bookshelves and tables, I went looking for solid wood furniture, reasoning it was fine to spend a little more for something that would last. I found it- and discovered humble, small tables were a months pay. I don't want cheap crap, but I suddenly appreciated why we've moved away from tables that can support a car.

Probably worthwhile to separate that span into smaller chunks. We blame boomers not for what happened in the 50s or 60s, we blame them for voting in and supporting Ronald fckng Reagan and all the bullshit his policies have affected since his presidency. See: https://thelinknewspaper.ca/article/why-almost-everything-is-ronald-reagans-fault

Blaming boomers is stupid ... it conflates many different and different kinds of people. I'm a boomer who helped develop the ARPANET (so I'm not technically illiterate ... that's my parents' generation) and I'm a democratic socialist who protested vehemently against Nixon and Reagan (who many in my parents' generation supported). The people to really blame are right wingers and corporations and the uber rich who create bogeymen and false targets like "boomers" for gullible people to be distracted and deflected by.

Yeah, like I said, we blame boomers who voted for and supported Reagan. I’m very aware that a healthy minority opposed him and his policies. Thank you for your work on ARPANET and remaining a proud socialist! Computer networking is what drew me in to the technology space (not programming like most folks here, I presume), and socialism just might finally be having its due time here in the US (e.g., Mamdani, Katie Wilson).

> The fact that our relatively small population supports the GDP it does is wild. Yes and no. It is very impressive what humans can do and the US is a remarkable country for managing to achieve what they have. On the other hand, if we're talking GDP it is basically just a trendline [0] of whether you let people better their own lives or not. The main reason for US success on the GDP front is that the median administrator chooses to make people fail and the US does the best job of resisting that tendency. To me the mystery is less why the US succeeds but more why polities are so committed to failing. It isn't even like there is a political ideology that genuinely wants to make it hard to do business [1]. It mostly happens by accident, foolishness and ignorance. [0] https://www.grumpy-economist.com/p/the-cost-of-regulation - see the figure, note the logarithmic axis [1] I suppose the environmentalists, maybe.

I think you have one big piece of it: economic progress has a lot of search problems and it is impossible to master-plan it; consequently free intelligence beats centralized regulation. It's a bit out-dated now[0] but The Fifth Discipline distinguishes between 'detail complexity' (things that have a lot of bits you have to figure out) and 'dynamic complexity' (systems that have feedback loops and adaptive participants). It might simply be that handling systems with dynamic complexity is out of the reach of most humans. Economic regulation strikes me as something that can be particularly like a thing that modifies a dynamic system. In fact, creating good policy in a modern economy might be so dynamically complex that no mind alive today can simultaneously comprehend an adaptive solution and act in such a way as to bring it about. Perhaps, given this, we are simply spoiled by the effectiveness of certain economic actors (e.g. the Federal Reserve) in maintaining an monetary thermostat. Their success is not the norm so much as it is extraordinary. 0: which is humorous given this, because the Seinfeld Isn't Funny effect applies to things that become mainstream - insight and humor both disappear as the spark or joke become common knowledge

Having grown up less-well-to-do and post-communist/socialist, my favorite thing to remind people is that working class women always worked . The idealized past of stay-at-home moms never happened for a large majority of families. Sure sure my great grandma was “stay-at-home”. That meant feeding an army of ~8 kids and any additional farm workers every day for 60+ years. She wasn’t stay at home, she ran a cantine. And worked the farm during peak harvest season. I’ll never forget a quote from a BBC documentary (Ruth Goodman I think): ”While victorian science cautioned that weight lifting is bad for women, the women working their kitchens tossed around 100lb pots every day”

Maybe the reason that victorian scientists cautioned that weightlifting was bad for women is because they noticed poor women without better options lifting a lot of heavy weights in the course of their labors, and noticing that this seemed to be bad for their health. Also, is that actually a claim that "victorian science" made? That weight lifting is bad for women? I'm just taking for granted that the person quoted in this BBC documentary is accurately characterizing a commonly-held view among Anglophone scientists of the victorian era - but I haven't looked into this myself. Maybe this was not in fact scientific consensus of the time. Maybe Ruth Goodman is uncritically repeating a myth about what the past thought, rather than what the past actually thought.