Sharon

@sharonjohn

30 Following

35 Followers

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Normies are people who want to go back to 1999. Weirdos are people who want to skip ahead to 2050.

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@vgr post about hypernormalization vs weirdness as two opposite modes people are using to navigate the world in 2024 articulated something I’ve been trying to get at. Ties into the institutionalist vs anti-institutionalist groups as well. Though many anti-institutionalists simply want their point of view in power.

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The discussion about where LLMs will go next seems to boil down to those who believe ChatGPT was the start of AI so it can “only improve from here” or actually the cashing out of 5 years of transformer architecture R&D at its peak.

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Noticed a character use vibes in the modern sense in an episode in Season 2 Sopranos. Kind of surprised because I thought vibes was a 2010s thing.

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Humanity is like a high budget CGI movie with poor writing. The tech keeps getting better but nothing else make sense.

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The weird thing about capitalism is that it gets stronger when you make media railing against it. This is also Mark Fisher’s point in the cult classic capitalism realism: Wall E performs anti-capitalism for us safely in a box so we don’t have to. https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/adam-curtis-on-the-dangers-of-self-expression/

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All language standardization is basically an act of top-down centralization. Human language does not organically homogenize across space and time. So nation-states throw their muscle behind an enshrined version and then disseminate it through society. The way French is maintained and policed is a good example.

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TIL there’s a term for varnishing a vernacular with a high culture language: Aureation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aureation. Quick example that comes to mind is the late 19th century Sanskritization of Hindustani to create modern Hindi

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I’ve now been in self driving taxis with no one in the driver seat and an FSD Tesla on the freeway that merged autonomously. But the self-driving affordance, possibly the most magical contemporary piece of tech, already feels too normal.

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Solid primer on the Indian subcontinent https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2024/04/12/a-short-history-of-india-in-eight-maps

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Silicon Valley looks increasingly America-centric in its reactionary era. They are true believers in American exceptionalism. For everyone else, the wider dysfunction is American. For them, the dysfunction is a symptom of rotten elites that they, the Ayn Randian heroes will deliver us from.

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Something I had never consciously thought about before is how internationalized and truly global crypto is. As a non-American I appreciate this. Though trad internet is global, it is highly US centric and pushes US norms and defaults. Contrast Vitalik here with pmarca on Twitter (trollishly) pumping Fahrenheit.

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Instagram has single handedly changed my perception of ads. A Facebook PM once told me good targeting will solve people’s annoyance with ads and he was right. I don’t mind getting high quality ads relevant to my interests. I’ve converted to purchases straight from it too as have others I know.

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The central problem in software dev is that reading code is harder than writing code. This being the case, copilots and AI agents as tools that write code for you is not as useful as you might think. What we need more is actually next-gen static analysis: code interpreters that can provide context in natural language.

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Feels like builder world is deeply hedgehoggy in the Isaiah Berlin sense. People deeply convinced of one central idea or thesis. In many cases, this is engineered post-facto grand narrative to appeal to VCs who need grand narratives because they’re big enough to provide outlier portfolio winners.

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Instagram posting serves an important purpose. It is advertising for the individual to their personal social networks. When I post every half a year or so, a flurry of people who don’t talk to me suddenly message me because they were reminded that I exist

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At this point, I’m so annoyed by the general experience of being on X and it has turned into a pure tax on following and engaging with posters I enjoy. If only they all moved here. This is of course why network effects are sticky and this “if” is a big one.

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So you’re telling me whether I still have my job in 5 years will come down to whether the increased demand for software outpaces the efficiencies in producing it?

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It’s wild that our best guiding metaphor for the ML driven future might be magic

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Watching @vgr’s Devcon talk about hypercomplexity. I like the implied idea of liberalism as a protocol for enabling pluralism. Every system is kind of a TINA within itself, what we would call rule of law.

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