“In reality equity and fairness are narrowly defined, contextual notions. When we decide it’s fair to use a FICO score in order to determine an interest rate on a loan, that’s very different from using a FICO score to decide how many weeks of unemployment insurance you should receive after breaking your leg. You cannot decide that ‘FICO scores are legitimate discriminators’ as a universal rule, just as ‘diverse skin tones and genders’ is not a universal good” #CathyONeil https://mathbabe.org/2024/03/12/googles-mistake-with-gemini/
it’s the freedom agenda. ht @xerophile
i think i’ve had my most kafkaesque customer service experience ever on a Spirit Airlines chat line. more than two hours, allegedly three humans in addition to the chatbot, but i’m disinclined to believe there were any humans in the loop at all. no comprehension, no help, now in addition to the problem we were trying to resolve we’re in danger of missing the plane. this is a brave new world where really, really, there is nobody on the other end who has any inclination or capacity to give a fuck.
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Unsurprisingly, @akkartik is well ahead of me:
"it is all too common for seamless experiences to hide all manner of deeper malfeasance. When we push for more seamless experiences we’re also encouraging the organisms we interact with to grow more tentacles (hiring! HR!), make them more muscular (growth team!), use them more ceaselessly in search of advantage (an ad protruding slickly from the bottom of the pane! Marketing materials persuading people to not organize!)" https://lobste.rs/s/idi1wt/open_source_vs_ux
i have come to have a very negative reaction to high quality user-interfaces. not just dark patterns and stuff like that, but genuine user-interface quality.
UI quality is painstaking and expensive, much more than most backend functionality. i associate investment in UI with well-funded growth-seeking ventures, and i associate those kinds of ventures with traps, enshittification, neofeudalism. 1/
the world of UNIX command lines and emacs/vi-ish editors is, not unreasonably, associated with a kind of bearded-dude elitism, a caste of self-styled wizards not always very inclusive or kind to those who have better things than try master its arcana. 2/
but what has been touted to supplant that caste is capitalist "democratization", which has nothing to do with democracy at all. it just means widespread access to products in the role of often captive consumers, rather than agents who exercise meaningful control. 3/
i think it's probably more helpful expand the circle that enjoys the broad, flexible agency provided by cheap user-interface tools than to treat as progress expensively making capabilities very widely accessible, but always under the control of and largely captive to the people who paid the expense. /fin
winning isn't everything it's the only thing only in places where soon there will be nothing at all.
if you’re going to be mad, be mad you ever had to do “standard” time, not at daylight savings time, which is brilliant and bright.
why can’t one simply make both choices, and then snip away the timeline that least well works out?
"the Americans are arriving at the conclusion that supporting Netanyahu means being harmful to Israel. There is a distinction between Israel’s interests and Netanyahu’s interests." #NogaTarnopolsky https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/the-biden-plan-to-ditch-israels-netanyahu.html
changing the subject to wokeness lets plutocrats find solidarity with broad classes of people who might otherwise realize that, despite sharing a penis and pale skin color, their interests are rather at odds with those of our billionaire caesars.
a politics of “protecting what’s ours” is naturally promoted by those who have a lot.
we need to reform our institutions so they take us toward a politics of what rather than who.
i'm in a motel in Grants Pass, Oregon, was talking on the phone, and the AT&T network just... disappeared. SOS only at the top of my iphone. Is this a very local outage?
484480 is your secure sign in code.
"there’s a whole big world out there, and we need novelists to help us make sense of why it’s collapsing." @michelle on my sister #AdelleWaldman's new novel "Help Wanted". https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/04/opinion/adelle-waldman-help-wanted.html
c3p0 is a JDBC Connection pooling library I first published in 2002. It is very old-school, but i like to think it is still cool.
c3p0 v0.10.0 is the first major release — well, the first release at all — in a very long time. It now includes pluggable threading with loom support, much simplified connection testing by default, a more modern, more automated build, and many many fixes, improvements and enhancements.
https://github.com/swaldman/c3p0
when will AI replace expensive professional athletes?
as you get older, you find it harder to be young.