markjgsmith

2024/08/04 #

• It certainly was another one of those days yesterday. Big time. One of the big themes was people sprinting in the opposite direction to whichever way you are walking in. Often right before I’d get both a 'you learn' followed by a 'yah'. It must have happened at least 4 times. Then when you get to where you are going you get blocked in some way. The thing you want is out of stock, and so is the backup thing. Or only two items of the thing you want are left, same with backup item. Or a combibation of these.

  No matter what you do you are wrong in some way. Even if you get one of each of the main thing and the backup thing, that would cause another infiniti no! I ended up just saying 'yes no' to everything. You have to say something, and since you get blamed no matter what you do, including doing nothing, then 'yes no' seems like the least untruthful thing you can say. The problem of course is that things just get worse, I think because the hive mind is waiting on a decision from you but doesn’t get it, and so eventually everything becomes blocked in every dimension. But that was going to happen anyway, and at least this way it’s possible to not get yourself overloaded, so you can keep your cool and not get angry.

  I bet none of this makes any sense. Anyway needless to say I didn’t get a whole lot done yesterday. Whenever I tried to actually do anything like write or listen to a podcast or whatever, that would get immediately blocked too. Like clockwork someone or some group of people would arrive and start being very aggregious, and no matter what you do, they are unhappy. Unhappy if you stay, unhappy if you go, unhappy if you write, unhappy if you talk, unhappy if you stay quiet. Sometimes they would earnestly say 'sorry', and just continue on their infiniti no! campaign.

  This morning as I started writting this note a morning exercise cyclist in a group said 'lie' to me followed by a small laugh, like just joking. And it would be funny but I know if I find it funny then I’ll get yah'd, so my only possible response is 'yes no'.

  According to Elon, heard in his latest interview with Lex Friedman, training robots at scale is a bit like conducting a very big orchestra. I think that’s likely not a bad description for humans at scale too. Some days everything is a total escallating stop start race condition mess. #

• On the way to the internet place this morning, weird old humper lady was at the corner doing her humping thing. That was immediately preceded by the people that run the nearby cafe shouting 'mother' as I walked past them. Yesterday they were shouting 'learn'. There’s usually something they are warpathing. My reply to everything is still 'yes no'. That will eventually turned against me too. That’s life. #

• cat << EOF > Trump assassination counter factuals

  It’s interesting to consider, as they call it in history circles, the counter factuals of the recent Trump assassination attempt. The assassination itself had a lot of very weird things from the young shooter, to the secret service handling of the situation. Imagine if Trump had actually been killed. These were the things that would have occurred in rapid succession afterwards:

  • The CrowdStrike cyber attack which affected millions of small and medium sized businesses would have scared the heck out of a nation still recovering from the murder of a former president
  • A nation in total disarray from a murder and an attack at the core of millions of businesses would still have to decide on how to deal with the Biden situation, making that decision even more difficult
  • In addition to the war in Ukraine, and the one in Gaza, they would have to deal with the assassination of Hamas leader by Mossad in Iran, an assassination which had been in motion for months already, perhaps destabilizing the whole region
  • The rise of the far right across Europe, in elections but also some riots
  • Trump would not have appeared at the Bitcoin 2024 conference, giving the crypto industry what is being widely reguarded as the most crypto bullish bit of legitimisation to ever have happened to some of the smartest people on the planet, many of whom could literally become the richest humans alive over the next few years

  As it happened the attempt was unsuccessful, and though it caused a bit of a flareup, it’s been mostly absorbed and the news cycle has moved on. Had it succeeded the world situation might have been very different. I’ve only mentioned a few items here, there are more. One wonders if it might have been part of a larger plan to destabilise the global balance of power.

  EOF

• Got a reasonable amount done today. There was a bunch of harrassment after I left the internet place this morning, including 'Pay' harrassnent. Just noting it here because that has a tendency to spread and turn into a tsunami even if it’s totally false. I of course payed for everything that I got in the shops nearby the harrassment.

  Interestingly, in the shop the bloke behind the counter kept calling the receipt the bill. I politely corrected him and said it was a receipt not a bill. The shop bloke seemed very suprised, saying wow. I added that I didn’t owe him anything. It’s the second time in 2 days that I’ve had the receipt being called the bill. I guess this receipt bill false equivalence is probably being used as a pretext for more escallations. Happens quite a lot, I always assumed it was just a foreign language thing, but I’m starting to question that as it always seems to be from trickster types. #

Today’s links:

• Norman Ohler (Joe Rogan Experience Podcast) - I thought this was a pretty fascinating look into a side of german cultural history that has been completely missed. It’s about the drugs that germans were taking around the time of the second world war. The attrocities of the war were of course happening but in parallel, psychadellic drugs were literally being discovered by scientists, and they were having hippie like experiences, hoping to spread love and togetherness to the world. These were the origins of the psychadelic movement in the US. It was also a time where mild stimulants like coffee didn’t exist yet, so people took meth instead! Norman’s research adventure took him deep into the archives of companies working on drug programs, and he discovered a treasure trove of information that paints a much more complete picture of what was actually going on around that time. It’s almost as if the seeds of destruction and it’s solution where somehow being created at the same time. And the story of how Norman got to the information, in it’s own way, is as interesting as the stories he eventually found. Really worth listening to this one. podcastindex.org #

• New Post: Trump assassination counter factuals markjgsmith.com #

• Zuckerberg says Meta will need 10x more computing power to train Llama 4 than Llama 3 - We need more power Captain! There’s a dilithium crystals joke in here somewhere. techcrunch.com #

• Why CSV is still king - I’ve really only used CSV a few times personally, but I can imagine that many businesses do use it all the time. The simplest data exchange formats tend to get widest adoption. These days it’s actually quite rare that I need to export and re-import data between applications, which might be a sign that we are far too silo'd. konbert.com #

• Government warns that rioters ‘will pay the price’ as wave of violence sweeps UK - Riots across many cities in the UK. It will be interesting to see how the new government handles the situation. Riots as bad as they are, perhaps are a bit like error logging in an application. You obviously don’t want them to happen but they at least do communicate that there are serious issues that need addressing. If you crack down too hard on them, you are really just turning off error logging without addressing the problem. So the resentment still builds but you won’t even know about it next time. In hell there are no flareups, but everything is resentment, but noone can be sure. www.theguardian.com #