Channel motto: Life is pain, only potato. 
For sharing gloomy poasting, whining, abd complaining. The more apocalyptic or petty the better. It’s always darkest before it turns pitch black.

Main

gloom

Surprise when cleaning the tap. Is there a category for macroplastics in tap water?

Lead by example. https://apnews.com/article/trump-cell-phone-mobile-made-america-3e03af70b6a9b161b522cc8055f1b25b

Tragedy is about what you can’t undo. Horror is about what you cannot unsee. Terror is about what you cannot prevent.

freezing assets to use as leverage & selling data to market makers before executing txs
 
they are quite literally bullies

The biggest emerging blocker to using AI for public stuff for me is the growing species of people who will critique my choice of model if I declare it, and demand to know it so they can critique it if I do. It’s worse than being around wine people or indie movie watchers.

It’s like being in a damn Seinfeld episode.

99% of the time it makes zero difference for me. And if you care that much you should stop reading me 🤬

Update, second day in a row off yo a terrible start. Entire damn bag of trader joe teeny avocado was bad. My own fault for buying a suspiciously too-ripe bag that was the last one left (I normally buy them green and ripen them in a paper bag for a few days and then put them in the fridge…100% yield usually).

Also several others things of the same sort going wrong lately 😡

Low-level crap going wrong in a hundred different minor ways really throws you off your game. Enshittif8cation of life systems.

Yesterday ended up even worse than it started. Stuck for hours in traffic due to 405 closure we hadn’t properly anticipated but should have.

Today is off to a better start but only because my expectations are really low. Batch of dosa/Idli batter I didn’t think would come out well, didn’t. But it wasn’t worse than I expected, which is a win. The breakfast was edible.

Plans for rest of day built around similar low expectations around highly suboptimal preconditions.

Forecast for next week is slow recovery. 

Whether I have a good or bad day is 90% a function of the enshittification level of domestic and neighborhood systems. A kind of protocol weather. Right now it’s fragile and low-potential with a chance of messy breakdowns.

“… you may know about the Kessler Syndrome. That's when collisions between satellites and space junk create enough debris to cause *more* collisions, leading to a runaway chain reaction”

“… you may know about the Kessler Syndrome. That's when collisions between satellites and space junk create enough debris to cause *more* collisions, leading to a runaway chain reaction”
https://mathstodon.xyz/@johncarlosbaez/114765857000929713

What country's capitol is growing the fastest?

Ireland. Every day it's Dublin!!!

cyborg vs. cyborg

when planning a vacation post-singularity you launch a swarm of agents that harnesses the energy of a small powerplant to build software that dodges a new generation of ads, spam, scams, surge pricing algos, fake reviews, and finds you reasonably priced airfare

teddit

we used to rely exclusively on newspapers, radio, or letters for information. so limited, so slow. no way to “fact check” unless you were there on the frontlines.

now we have endless resources to access information, the ability to fact check in minutes if not seconds, and… the majority of the world just doesn’t. this is egregiously bad on tiktok (more on this below). 

i know it is human nature to default to system 1 thinking (lol Daniel Kahnemann reference): fast, intuitive, emotional. i know that we tend to process information in ways that reinforce our group identity. and i know that emotion drives virality.

and so ofc i know that if we keep treating misinformation as an individual problem, this will only get worse.

platforms like groundnews are great, but that’s opt-in so it attracts users who already care about truth (unfortunately that’s magnitudes smaller TAM).

to me it is much more interesting to think of it as a platform problem. with AI, the design space could expand significantly (but obviously comes with its own risks).

two good built-in platform examples:

- twitter community notes on inaccurate tweets cut retweets by at least 50% and increased user-initiated deletions by 80% (but right now it is too slow, should be done within an hour not 12 hours!)

- twitter reminding users to read an article before they retweet actually reduced blind shares by ~33% (a little bit of friction can be a good thing!)

tiktok, however, hasn’t done anything really at all.

some labels for COVID, a politifact and snopes partnership i never saw, and a bullshit STEM feed for “reliable, vetted data” (hint: it was a paid partnership for two science brands to get guaranteed distribution).

the most dangerous feature of tiktok, imo, is its algo-driven echo chambers. it can ensure the content you see is what you want to see, that the comments are what you want to read. 

it pushes users deeper and deeper into self-reinforcing narratives. you can scroll for hours and never be exposed to an alternative perspective on a single topic.

when users are exposed to entirely different information ecosystems, there’s zero foundation for shared discourse. this has got to be the most powerful, least visible force driving division today.

SAD!!!

Beautiful recap @ted, from the trenches 

Do bad actors overwhelm good actors in most systems? Has everyone seen Erin Kissane’s series on Facebook in Myanmar?
https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-full-series
also Bad Shape

building farcaster | surfing @ venice, ca | eating @ gjusta / gjelina | “lucky me, lucky mud” 🤠

Beautiful recap @ted, from the trenches 

Do bad actors overwhelm good actors in most systems? Has everyone seen Erin Kissane’s series on Facebook in Myanmar?
https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-full-series
also Bad Shape 
https://www.wrecka.ge/bad-shape/

These folks put in some effort. They connected brand new Twitter accounts that all end in numbers, made pfps, generated bios, and all follow the exact same number of people. 

It’s so obvious when you can see them one right after the other in a row, but at first glance, they don’t look super terrible, which is making it scarier and scarier because the amount of effort they’re putting in is upgraded every month.

Governance Public Utilities for @zksync at @thezknation