Day: January 23, 2025, 3:22 PM

Choosing

Chill Regular-ass Post

Leftists/liberals hate this stuff because it reveals social truths that they wish weren’t the case. But it’s incredibly interesting to me. And we should think about these things. It shows how much women actually do not understand what is attractive to most men aesthetically.

I would’ve ranked them similarly except the tall blonde woman with striking features I would’ve put first and changed her place with the short Asian woman. She’s the prettiest and has the most appealing personality to me (of the very little you can see of it). The blonde woman is being penalized essentially because she has short hair and has a somewhat masculine affect, and a lot of men hate both of those things. If she had long, flowing hair with those features she would’ve been chosen by almost all of them.

Prone

Chill Political Economy, Prediction

I am going insane. This company will lose $10bn this year! Generative AI has peaked! There isn’t a sustainable business model, and the products are mediocre and error prone and don’t even do anything cool despite costing billions and accelerating climate change and stealing everybody’s artwork!

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— Ed Zitron (@edzitron.com) January 22, 2025 at 6:03 PM

I like Ed, but this is a clueless take. He’s not thinking predatorily enough, like an MBA would. The point of GenAI is to eventually replace workers, not to be these little toys we have now. The MBAs simply DO NOT CARE if AI does not do work that is as of the quality that a human can do. If a GenAI costs 1/20 the price and does work that’s only 1/4 as good — that is still a net win. In MBA thinking, anyway.

Ed is wrong, wrong, wrong. “Mediocre and error prone” at a low price is just fine in capitalism. Preferred, even, if it never talks back, never demands higher wages and has no actual human needs.

Understand this or you understand nothing.

Wake

Chill Clowns

It’s odd that the corporate world is so dependent on email but people barely read theirs, especially if it comes from IT or HR. Which is doubly odd if you think about it, because emails from those two departments are the ones most likely to have a huge impact on your working life!

In my own field, I’ve sent out emails in quadruplicate about some system outage and then people are completely unaware there’d be any planned disruption. These days I’ve had people ignore 4+ emails, two notices in Slack, and a post on the company intranet.

Just…how? Why? Are these people awake?

Chill Links

Concept Cells Help Your Brain Abstract Information and Build Memories.

People are bad at reporting what they eat. That’s a problem for dietary research.

Psychodynamic nonsense. For twenty years, I was a practising psychotherapist. Today I believe it has no foundation in science and often causes harm.

Trump is this generation’s ‘normal.’ Here’s what that means.

He Did The Right Thing.

The strange loophole that transformed Berlin from tenant’s paradise to landlord’s playground.

Automation in Retail Is Even Worse Than You Thought. New technology is not just making shopping more challenging for workers and consumers—it’s poised to rip off the most vulnerable.

Growth is a policy choice.

China’s overlapping tech-industrial ecosystems.