Nick Bostrom takes himself waaaaaaaayyy too seriously.

I’m only aware of a lot of what I find distressing because of my superpowers. I can know what’s happening everywhere in the world within minutes of it happening. Somebody I will never, ever meet in person can say something mean about me and put a shadow on my mood, if I choose to pay attention to it.

My day-to-day is idyllic. Modest, urban, a bit ecclectic… but comfy, by American standards. Food, shelter, medicine, recreation, community, art, adventure, mobility, and friendship are all in adequate supply. I’m employed and paid fairly. Accepted by friends and family, valued by my colleagues. If my sphere of awareness and sphere of routine travel were the same, I would think myself a prince.

But my sphere of awareness is vast. So, I know my comfort is a byproduct of privilege, which is withheld from millions of other deserving people because… reasons. I know there are other parts of the world where logic and justice and tolerance are in widespread, societally upheld ascendance, and that those places are far, far away from where I live.

Immediately outside the personal bubble I labor to maintain, there’s pain, violence, fear, hunger, and hatred. One misstep on my part and I could find myself there as well. I know that fear is wielded as a tool by people who live in fortresses made of money, by people who claim to represent the ideals of my nation, but only care that they are the winner and everybody else is the loser.

So yes, there are many nagging feelings. I wish my comfort was more than the byproduct of somebody powerful wanting something from me. Much angst, as I sit in my comfortable chair with my expensive technology, in my lovely house on a gorgeous spring day. I wish I was stupider, less aware, less experienced in the motivations of horrible people.

Scroll through your typical node_modules directory without learning a little something about software bloat. Yikes.

It’s quite a lot, what we expect from our technology now. But we made it this way because the marketplace has deemed there must always be a winner and a loser, so it’s a never ending game of accelerationist oneupmanship.

The market pressures the competitors, the competitors pressure the engineers, the engineers pressure each other to deliver faster and faster. Sometimes they’re backed into a corner and have to focus on more speed and efficiency, which is shortly thereafter consumed by frameworks, languages, and operating systems that are also competing for adopters, and thus supply stuff like JIT compilers and UI frameworks.

Even before we were plunged into the hellscape of vibe coding, you could knock an app together with a kit of parts using a pinch of glue code, having no clue what’s happening underneath the gui. Who cares? My Mac at idle is running hundreds of processes, it can take it. Until of course it can’t.

Back in olden times, a piece of software was painstakingly hand-built in assembler and C over a course of many months. But ain’t nobody got time for that when your manager can shit out an app with Claude in an afternoon.

Narrow down your inputs. Isolate until you feel calm. Yes, this by itself is very difficult and could take a while.

but, if you manage it, begin reintroducing stimuli one at a time and monitor your inner state. Sit with it for a while and see if that experience contributes to a level of unease. Record your impressions. Repeat.

“There are no poor people, just temporarily embarrassed millionaires"

Maybe its too on the nose to say so on Lemmy, but fuck Reddit right in the earhole. Their pearl-clutching, risk-averse, pro-corporate moderation-bot and tattle-tale system was the last straw.

Cool, cool. Go form a militia, why dontcha, you little bitch. We can throw down someplace more private.

“Move fast and break things” was cute when it wasn’t propping up the entire American economy.

Well, if they rere trying to put their political enemies on a war footing, this is a fine way to inspire it.

On a related note, I was unaware there was international funding available. Do I get double payments for being both anticapitalist AND transgender?

I would say leakers are acting ethically.

Trumpers AND Android users. Truly the bottom of the barrel.

/s

Psychopaths gonna psycho.

They do not see most of us as actual humans. So, who cares if a few of us get blown away, or tortured, drowned, deported, beaten, or robbed? They are above such plebian dalliances.

FEAR! FEAR THE DRIZZLY SHITS! OOOOGA BOOGA BOOOOOGA

I assume the reason they want to involve faith-based organizations is so there’s a local representative present for us to yell at after acts of God destroy our entire city.

You’re not wrong. But I also think this point of view is perceived as a kind of auto-fellatio.

I think the negative reaction from us, the great unwashed, is due to people being so sick of political processes devolving into a meta-game that revolves primarily around the ability to think cynically and act tactically.

Meanwhile we’re out in the world, dealing with fallout from actions in that sphere that don’t make any kind of sense to the material reality of most people. People with rent to pay and groceries to afford and gas to pump.

Playing 4-D chess with the law of averages, playing the long game, and cornering other narcissistic kitten-eaters in saying and supporting things that, on their face, sound horrible… We’re just not sophisticated enough to understand it’s part of the process. We have problems that need solving right now and whatever tactical victory that moves an abstract chess piece forward doesn’t seem to do anything to remedy that.

Do not tolerate the intolerable.

For those of us who are not well-versed in corporate bookkeeping, I looked up what the hell cost of revenue meant:

The cost of revenue includes expenses that scale directly with sales volume. These typically include:

• Direct Materials: Raw materials or inventory used to create the product.
• Direct Labor: Wages for employees directly involved in production or service delivery (e.g., factory workers or customer support in SaaS).
• Distribution & Shipping: Costs to transport the finished product to the customer.
• Transaction Fees: Credit card processing fees and bank charges related to sales.
• Platform/Hosting Costs: For software companies, this includes server maintenance and data center expenses.

I think its interesting how that debit bucket is separated out from operating expenses. It seems like paying for materials and labor would be part of the R&D bill, for instance. Seems like a pretty fine line that might let companies shade the truth about their success or failure, for the benefit of shareholder perception.

So, business as usual, then?

Under His eye.

That’s my girl.