Then continue to look at the the US. Huge, dangerous, and not at all used for “sport utility” SUVs. Yeah, people were blameworthy for starting to buy them. But the drive to make them dominate the whole car market was driven by the industry; much lower safety standards meant less cost and much fatter profits. But they were just meeting consumer demand...?

The global economy, very integrated, fucking giant container ships shipping raw products across the world to be slightly refined to then be shipped back again. Was that designed by anyone. Or just meeting consumer demand? That must have been some giant mass delusion of post hoc agentic reasoning; economists taking the credit for a globalized economy, every corner specialized and competing at what they can do best, exporting that and importing the rest. But I guess they are wrong? Just meeting consumer demand?

Consumer Capitalism. Curious name. It’s not Capitalism with a consumerist culture. It is Capitalism predicated on the mass of workers to “consume”. But I guess it is really optional after all? This economy of ours, the forever-servant of the collective us—it will just metamorphize itself organically to adjust to the realities of your fantasy of mass and uncoordinated consumer behavior change?

> My only practical contribution to

The only practical input you have is in the service of obfuscation. Of division. Of cheap reasoning. I saw someone litter once; that must be at the heart of the problem. I saw someone drive a sport car once; that must be at the heart of the issue. Of scapegoating.

You know your practical input is worthless. And still you will feel vindicated in ten years time when your practical input has yielded fucking nothing.

> An honest appraisal of the situation, however, should suggest the opposite response: It’s the employees of the labs, rich in equity and embedded in the most dynamic labor market there ever was, that should feel the least apprehension.

Of course no shit. Materially they have the least to fear. Their fears are ideological and spiritual; we have created something so powerful that even we are scared plus outright supramundane silicon faith.

- Have money

- Use money to saturate the political attention, making most people eventually wonder are any other candidates even running?

- Attack ads for competing candidates with actual attention already

(1) Seeing this situation, and (2) knowing that everything you have been told about the candidates that you have heard of might be flowery bullshit but you don’t quite know, (3) and not trusting them, you might just as well decide to tell the “eager volunteers” for the millions-funded candidate: I am not impressed and you are unwilling to give me anything that I want. But I vaguely know about this other candidate dressed as a hamster, and he is saying some damn fine and good things for me, the ordinary pedestrian (populist in the literature). Want my vote? Come and try and get it with more than your flowery bullshittery.

This is known as uninformed and irrational in the literature, I vaguely recall (it’s been what, 15 years?), pedestrians not simply taking the flowery bullshit, I mean information they have been graciously given for free by their betters, and then making an altruistic least-harm calculation based on that. (Concessions and bargaining based on personal interest is for tHe eLite; pedestrians are supposed to lie on their backsides and think of Xland.)

take off and take in the stream

living room and screens

Think about all those elated anecdotes about how someone used an inferior tool for a decade, was fine with it, then tried a better one and now “can’t imagine how I lived without it...” well it’s a bittersweet memory distortion innit.

Modern computing is toxic. The Internet is shit. And all because it was designed that way. Computing doesn’t have to be shit. I would know. Plenty of let’s say local computing solutions are just fine. They are so okay and fine that I hardly think about them. They just save me time and work.

Like the AI Cretins say, the cat’s out of the bag, time cannot be unwound. But computing is not fundamentally alienating, life-draining, or doomed to be infiltrated by spooks from the worst regime in the world. That’s just what SC programmers who are hobby woodworkers and use fliphones think.

That would have been better for the world.

You can already expose the commit object as the headers (metadata) and the commit message. That’s like a spreadsheet: change these columns and we will make a new commit. That changed format can then be persisted as a commit object. So.

> A tool like this never sees the light of day without an LLM.

Are LLMs memory holing all the numerous tools built around Git (with git(1) or without)? There was already a query-Git-like-SQL tool before The Age of LLMs. I never tried that, but was that simpler to implement than this tool? Edit: Okay, maybe it wasn’t “niche” so that’s the differentiator.

If that’s a bit eccentric, well this is the same place that refers to Europe as a different place even though France borders the UK by automobile road.

> But it appears that is not how your world works. By default any company owner is a homo-sapiens, but a machine that only wants money. Tragically, your cynicism is creating the very world you hate.

They said companies are amoral at best.

You don’t want this proposed nuclear power plant because you are afraid of a nuclear meltdown? Well you thought that those plumes were emissions but they are actually steam, idiot.

Go home. Watch the TV. Don’t express any opinions. That’s right. Good citizen.

Agitating for political change.

No, I don’t want to scan my face or my passport to use the Web. And also no, this glib, thought-terminating, “common sense” quip about “the parents are responsible” is also something to be rejected. We should try to both collectively protect kids and leave adults alone.

Leave it all to the corporations and you would have them prey on your children on every street corner, splash screen, TV menu, and ad board, with no “parental management” option anywhere. “But parents are responsible”, they would say.