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@articlesofnote
a shocking twist
it might be surprising, but ultimately I do want the same thing as Elon Musk which is for Elon Musk to go to mars and never return
superstitious? me?
there are certain Brands that are Very Good and Trustworthy, to the point that when I need a certain class of Thing i will simply buy whatever version of Thing that Brand is selling, directly from Brand, without doing any other kind of research. i am sorry i cannot tell you what Brand is, because then Brand will inevitably be consumed by the insatiable destructive hunger of Private Equity. this is a normal and reasonable viewpoint to hold
deep suspicion of "AI" yet again validated
been reading "Imagined Communities" recently trying to get a handle on yet another aspect of this fucked-up country I was born into, that aspect being "rampant nationalism" still early in the book but was deeply struck today by a specific theme: modern understanding of "history" is, in fact, modern; i.e. your average medieval catholic would have had a sense of the past (and future) as basically being like the present; "as it is, so it was and shall be," rather than an understanding of the past and future potentially being very different and very distant from "now." the book notes this was reinforced through the media culture of the time, particularly a visual culture where the themes and stories of the catholic church were represented using local shading e.g. the guy who paid for the painting of the sermon on the mount or whatever, gets painted into the scene and represented as one of those present at the event being depicted. the book asserts that this "ahistorical" (to our modern sensibilities) representation wasn't problematic in the way we moderns might think now; the impression I get is that "it didn't happen that way" wouldn't have been a critique that would have occurred to anyone during that era. the modern sense of history must depend (at least in part) on people both having access to artefacts of the past, and needing to make sense of them for whatever reason, as well as being ABLE to make sense of them. historical sense-making being the foundation to important systems like "science" and "law" it therefore might be extremely dangerous if a technology were developed that could create endless variations of written and visual artefacts with insignificant marginal cost (so everybody would want to use it to 'cheaply' generate artefacts if needed), particularly if those artefacts were costly to validate against actual ground truth such as by eg "looking right" and therefore tempting to accept at face value and mostly, but not always, being right, requiring much effort to filter out the bullshit. the risk would of course be that people who want to make sense of reality would have to wade through deeper and deeper floods of bullshit to get to actual ground truth as this technology was used more and more widely, making it harder and harder to get a sense of the world; fewer and fewer people would have the skill and patience to do so. at some point it might come about that most folks simply accept these artefacts directly as ground truth rather than as the simulacra they really are, while at the same time destroying the trust that the rest have in the reality of the world they encounter; "trust everything" and "trust nothing" both being simple approaches to this kind of situation. anyway, fortunately there is no technology like this that could completely destabilize the fundamental intellectual structures that our particular culture is based on, potentially tempting economic and political leaders to use it to try and re-medievalize our society and allow them to totally control the main means by which people try to learn the truth about the world we live in. because that would be, you know, bad
realizations
rewatching "the parent trap" and realizing for the first time how objectively insane the premise is. the parents were like "yeah ok we each get one kid and we'll never speak again, sounds like a plan" but you know what, the soundtrack is pretty good
I just had an argument with someone who was like “why would we settle for food stamps when we could have universal basic income?”
And it’s just like. People need food right now you know.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Hippie church moms donating quinoa chips to my local food bank have done more for me materially than any internet idealist ever has.
People get pissed at me for being a pragmatist in my political ideals but I’ve been in the position where I was out of food right now.
And who helped me with that? Not people calling for some nebulous revolution. Not people telling me that the system was useless. Not people preaching at me to grow my own food. It was a church food bank partially funded by the state of Texas that some southern hippies donated a bunch of Whole Foods nonsense to.
And you know what? I’m sick and tired of defeatism. What can we get done right now, huh? Are you gonna accept something a bit better to help people right now or are you waiting for your perfect utopia to come to you?
Yeah, UBI is better than the quinoa chips. Sure. But right now the quinoa chips are stopping people from going hungry and if all we can do is get the food bank quinoa chips to more people, then I say so be it. That’s something. I’ll almost always take baby steps over nothing.
"why would we settle-" that's the neat thing, rando internet idealist, you don't have to settle! it turns out you can do a smaller helpful thing now and also fight for the big helpful thing that comes later. the wildest part is that doing the small helpful thing now sometimes - often even! - makes it even easier to do the big helpful thing later.
your email finds me extraordinarily unwell today, thanks for asking
in retrospect, a fairly obvious omission
anybody who is seriously concerned with "AI alignment" as a real problem should probably consider that they still haven't figured out how to ensure sam altman is broadly aligned with human values
UPDATE: the new yorker looked into this and i gotta say that it's not looking great for the "sam altman is broadly aligned with human values" hypothesis: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/sam-altman-may-control-our-future-can-he-be-trusted also it seems like the article is not-so-subtextually comparing interactions with sam altman to interactions with chatgpt and other LLMs i.e. "no regard for truth or consistency, says whatever they think you want to hear, extremely limited memory"
Whenever I think about the value of something being done by a person who really understands the job from a lifetime of experience, I think of my first restaurant job. My goal was to work every position, and I started with a year and a half in the dish pit at 16yo.
When i started as a dishwasher, i was trained by an old career dish pit man named Claudio. He'd spent his whole life washing dishes. It allowed him to move to just about any city in the world that he wanted to and get a job without having to deal with complex hiring processes or strict resumé requirements. Which was the main thing he wanted out of a career. I still think about him.
He'd seen a lot of people come through that station who either didn't consider it a real job or thought it was beneath them, on their way to "better" or "more important" things. And, in retrospect, those first two days he was sort of doing the minimum with me that he could do and still respect himself when he told the manager he'd trained me.
But, maybe it was because i was really interested in learning all the positions there were in a restaurant because i knew they were ALL important, or because i was a hard worker, or maybe it was because i tried to have real conversations with him in my broken spanish and did my best to not make him speak any english unless he wanted to, but after a couple days there was a big shift in the way he and i worked together, and he started to really teach me.
That place ran the dish pit with one dishwasher, so when he was done training me I was going to be doing the job on my own.
The thing that stuck with me the most, for the rest of my restaurant career, was this... and it wasn't just the actual things he was saying, but a completely new way of looking at what i was doing within the context of how the restaurant ran. I came in for my 3rd day and he said
"When you work alone, you want to go home by midnight?"
we clocked on at 3:30 and took a half hour lunch break and usually skipped our tens, so, yeah i absolutely did want to get off work by midnight
Then, even tho i already knew where most of everything was by that time, he took me around and showed me all the dishes, cups, pots and pans, spatulas, silverware, had me look at all of it. Then he told me to remember that almost every one of the dishes I was looking at would be used more than once by the end of our shift- we were clocking on to wash the entire building full of dishes multiple times.
Then he led me back over to the industrial dishwasher most restaurants have, which looks like this:
and then this 60 year old career dishwasher from Mexico City said the thing that changed how I looked at restaurant jobs forever
"This machine takes two full minutes to run a cycle. We are on the clock for 8 hours. That means we have a maximum of 240 times we can run this machine. If you want to wash all those dishes, clean your station, mop, and clock off by midnight? This machine has to be on and running every second of the shift.
If you don't have a full load of dishes collected, scraped, rinsed, stacked, and ready to go into the dishwasher the second it's done every single time? You can't do it. If, over the course of 8 hours, you let this machine lay idle for just one minute in between finishing each load and being turned on again? Instead of 240 loads, you'll do 160 loads.
[like, literally, he had done this math, he had these exact figures]
160 loads instead of 240 loads means you are doing 20 loads in an hour instead of 30 loads. That means the dishes are going to pile up. The cooks will run out of pots and pans and will have to stop and wait for you, the servers will run out of plates and cups and have to stop and wait for you, and your night is going to SUCK. Every part of how this restaurant works can grind to a halt because of that idle minute between dish loads, and if it does you'll have an entire building of people in a hurry and all waiting on you.
And it means you're going to be here until 2 am doing the 200+ loads of dishes this restaurant goes through every night.
For this to work, you MUST have this dishwasher on and running every minute of the shift. As soon as you turn it on you have two minutes to have the next load ready. See these large items i put to the side down here? One or two of them takes up all the space in the machine. I keep them here so that if the machine finishes and shuts off before i'm ready for it i can stick one of these in there and turn it on again immediately. You have to think like that to do this job without stress."
The way he was looking at how the whole restaurant ran, the way he was looking at how he'd spend each minute of the entire shift, the way he broke down what the physical limits were and how to max them out so he could do his job and go home on time without stressing out... The way this 60 year old guy, who had never had professional ambitions beyond being a dishwasher, was still such a competent and brilliant expert in his field.
It was all such an important lesson, and one that stayed with me through every position i went on to work in restaurants, dish pit, busser, server, cook, all the way up through manager before I finally got out of my restaurant career
Claudio never wanted to be anything but a dishwasher who didn't stay any later than he had to.
But he knew how that restaurant ran better than most of the other people in it. I never had a chance to truly thank him for the specific lesson he taught me, because while it had an immediate impact, I didn't really understand how valuable a lesson it was until much later.
But I've thought about Claudio and what i learned from him many MANY times in my life.
All of this. Disaster befalls any company that holds no regard for the expertise of the lowest level staff.
In my younger years I worked at a medical office that managed both mental health and addiction recovery. The company had purchased an empty lot down the road from the building we rented to build a better facility with larger capacity. The CEO worked for months with the architect, and just as they were finalizing everything they happened to let me - who was the receptionist at that time - take a gander at the blueprints. It took all of three seconds for two major issues to jump out at me.
“The receptionist can’t see the waiting room from her desk with this layout.” I said. “It’s around the corner and blocked by a wall.”
“Is that important?” They asked.
“Do you want me to be able to keep track of the patients who are waiting?” I asked.
“Isn’t that what the sign-in sheet is for?” They asked me.
“Not everyone who comes here is signing in for an appointment, some are coming to check in, some people are here for the group therapy and need to be directed to the other side of the building, some people are painfully shy and if I don’t appear warm and inviting they won’t approach.” I explain.
“How often does that even happen?” They asked.
“Every day.” I explain.
“Bullshit.” They said.
“I’m not joking at all. Also, where is the chart room?” I asked.
“Oh, over here.” They said, pointing to a tiny closet on the far side of the building from the receptionist and check out desks. It was tucked neatly beside the CEO’s office. To get there the secretaries would have to go through two sets of security doors and it would be a five minute walk each way.
“Why isn’t it next to the front office, since that’s where the people who use it are?” I asked.
“We had concerns about people just going into the chart room to goof off and not do their work. It takes them away from their desks too much. You should only go in the chart room twice a day - once in the morning to pull the charts for the day, and once in the evening to put way the charts. It would remain locked and the CEO would have the key and let you in to supervise.” They said.
“We pull charts the day before so everything is ready to go and we can alert staff if a patient with additional needs is coming in. We have to go in the chart room every time a patient calls in that’s having a problem with their meds or is in crisis or otherwise has a question for the nurse. We have to go in there every time someone cancels and we are able to fit a waitlisted patient in. We go in there 20 - 30 times a day for legitimate reasons. The only reason any of us has ever gone in there to take a minute was when we got news that a patient had died and we were crying. And even then, we filed charts as we sobbed because no one in this office has free time.”
They stared at me.
“Sit with me for an hour and see what happens up here.” I said.
They took the blueprints away from me before I could keep looking at them, but they took me up on sitting with me. They didn’t last an hour. They changed the blueprints to fix both things I’d pointed out.
Unfortunately, they didn’t let me keep looking at it and they never asked the janitor what he thought, so no one caught the final fatal flaw in the design.
There were no closets in the entire building. Nowhere to put our supplies. And I’m not talking just a place for stationary and pens. I mean no janitorial closet. Nowhere to put paper towels and toilet paper or cleaning products. Nowhere to put holiday decorations or anything at all. They completely forgot about storage of any kind and immediately started eyeballing my hard-won chart room for it.
They wound up putting all the supplies in the cabinets under the sinks in the public bathrooms. And, surprising to no one, all of it got stolen after our first week in the new building. All our spare keyboards and monitors and phones and even our paper towels just walked out of the building. Because the CEO who had never worked a lower level job in his life wasn’t convinced closets were worth it.
reality is infinitely complex; competence will expand to fill the available space; no job is inherently menial.
and it's not just me
just remembered that i have no idea how many of my beliefs about the world come from having seen part of a headline of some totally unverified internet thing sometime in the last twenty years, other than "it's not zero"
but then, also, that's part of what it means to be alive and in this world, so that's kinda just how it is. just gotta remember to check my assumptions. like newton's method, but for belief!
it's complicated, but it's not mysterious
any opinion you have about what people - including yourself - should do, or be, or have access to, or what is or is not important... is political. politics IS "what can people do?" - hence that old phrase, "politics is the art of the possible." not that this is an original thought, but hell, can't hurt for me to say it too (he said, politically)
Every time you catch yourself going, "Fuck, are humans just inherently evil and naturally inclined to selfishness and harm," you HAVE to remember that that's literally a core ideal of Christianity.
so if it feels inescapable and like evidence of it is everywhere, whether at times or always, that might just because you're in a Western country where you're surrounded by Christians who believe that, fundamentally, in their worldview. And also they talk and make art about it all the time and run on the news outlets. And spent over a thousand years burning any art or texts that disagreed with them. Etc. etc.
If you're gonna come to as drastic and painful a conclusion as that, at least take the time first to make sure you're not just surrounded by too many people and cultural products that believe original sin is real.
And if it turns out the feeling WAS partly the result of cultural Christianity, then hey, that's great news, because it means there's that much (and it really is SO MUCH) less evidence that humans inherently suck (which is good, because we don't)
get your medals everyone
cosigned, good work everyone, have your bricks at the ready when they try it again.
you know, he's absolutely right
water is important, sure, but it's a medical fact that you can spend the rest of your life NOT hydrating
more like "a series of tubes" dreams
yes, obviously i fantasize have I mentioned the one where we buy tumblr and run it as a public service
A carbon sequestration factoid
Recently did some rough calculations which suggest that if we sequestered all the excess CO2 produced by human activity since 1850, and turned it into plastic for long-term storage, it could make a mountain the size of Everest. So uh, better get started!