one naturally feels a bit guilty if a toot goes viral.

This is a nadir for the internet as (my) republic of letters. The RSS feeds I still diligently follow have been a shadow of what they once were for years. Now, Twitter is declining, a rapid-fire recapitulation of what happened to my RSS, except on Twitter the reduction that remains is a darker and more poisonous than the ghosts of all those blogs. This, Mastodon, is a point of light, but not yet bright enough to compensate for what has been lost. Hopefully it continues to brighten.

you can check out any time you like.

People are dissing Elon Musk’s bold reforms at Twitter, but I think his efforts might really give truth.social a run for the money.

you hardened your heart in the name of justice.

and when all was said and done, all that was left—in your heart, in the world—was just ice.

algorithmic bias and self-driving cars could bring all kinds of new excitement. it already feels like the traffic is a conspiracy against me.

@maikelthedev (that’s what i mean by cross-post, albeit maybe with customizations like CW on mastodon).

if you are on multiple micro-blogging-ish services, when you post, you should

if your labor efficiency is a cheaper bill for the same (and same quality) headcount, that's not in an efficiency at all, just a transfer from workers to other stakeholders.

the emphasis on college and all variety of ed reform was a fig leaf covering, and red herring distracting from, economic changes that turned the economy from a secure provider for (nearly) all to a great game of musical chairs.

cf Freddie DeBoer https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/pushing-everyone-into-college-was

i know it annoys you how slowly i take hairpin turns, but i am curving on a grade!

it was a clear, cold day. i pointed my camera at the sun.

it turns out the sun is a QR code.

when you are a child and immature, whenever something goes wrong, even if it’s probably your fault, you blame your parents. but as we grow and mature, we stop blaming our parents for life’s imperfections. like adults, we blame our spouse.

every time i see the word “analytics” my heart sinks.

@akhilrao yeah. i'd say maybe it does offer a coherent and performable partial equilibrium choice structure. but (at least from my perspective) not a good end-state choice.

@akhilrao yeah, i agree! both important. you need to choose a good end point, and create conditions under which the humans can make individually coherent choices that would bring us collectively towards that end point. (the end point choice might be constrained by what's possible in terms of incentives and social theories people can easily understand and perform.) it's challenging!

@akhilrao at the end of the partial equlibrium piece i self-link, Nick Rowe wisely argues that good policy is about setting things up so that partial eqm reasoning composes to a good general eqm. 'cuz partial eqm reasoning is, for the most part, what people are gonna do. general eqm reasoning is hard in the best cases, and under ordinary uncertainty about magnitudes of countervailing effects, often the best you can say is you can't predict the final result, so how are you supposed to choose?

[New Post] Some thoughts on Effective Altruism https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/9660.html

Since in the Fediverse, one is housed in an instance that may represent a particular interest community, is it a usual and okay to have multiple identities for each of the different communities you belong to, or is it best to stick with one identity and use federation to interact elsewhere?

if there's anyone in the Tampa Bay area interested in cool old computers (e.g. a Sun Ultra 1, Blue & White PowerMac G3), please get in touch. my heart aches to junk them, but we don't have the space.