CodexArcanum

That was a pretty good album, I should listen to it again. (Ah no stealth marketing! Everything is secretly an ad!)

I used to work for one of the nation’s largest survey marketplaces. Y’all have no idea how deep this hole goes.

Surveys\polls are largely requested by political polling groups, research teams, and ad agencies. They put those up on an auction block just like ads, and then we would route traffic into it from various places. Mostly the survey takers come from mobile games (take this 3 question survey for 20 Blorp Points kind of stuff) or survey taker apps that give you points for gift cards and such.

So even before bots, most polls are taken by “professional” survey takers who use banks of phones to maximize their point earnings. We spent a lot of energy on “proving” to the survey provider side that real humans were answering, and not using scripts or bots to just rapid finish them (answer B to everything kind of stuff). Using sophisticated bots to randomly answer was super common.

They were super ready for AI. We talked about it everyday, game planned how it would work, designed systems around it. “Synthetic survey” was the buzz word. Why ask humans for answers if the statistics machine can convincingly predict the answer for you? We proposed ideas like generating the prediction fast and early, then using actual polls to adjust the result towards reality over time. We had tools to track people and connect their spending to poll questions so we could ask follow up questions on purchases, to provide “lift” metrics to agencies on if their ads were working. We were working on the “verification can” tech, only it would have been “Answer this 10 question survey to continue watching your movie.”

I was so glad to leave that place. They got bought and consolidated into the world’s largest survey company a year later and they fired everyone else that had been left. All they wanted was the tech and the customers.

Hell yeah brother! Some of the old EU novels and games were pretty fun too!

My dude. Coolness is always subjective, every person is the arbiter of their own definition of coolness. If you don’t like mine, it would be very cool of you to stick to your own and not worry about what I think.

Are you worried I’m not respecting Star Wars fans enough or something?

You keep moving those goalposts and I’ll keep kicking through them lil buddy.

I never said people can’t enjoy what they like. I said they can’t like it and be cool. Coolness is a specific quality and often a high bar. I like doing crosswords but crosswords are a coolness-neutral activity, neither cool nor uncool, just a fun thing to do.

Caring really hard about main stream media, making it your personality? Uncool. Liking what you like regardless of some jackass on the Internet’s opinion: very cool.

It was part of the original Sunday lineup of Nicktoons! Along with Doug and Rugrats. Ahhh Real Monsters and Rocko’s Modern Life joined them a few years later. They syndicated and moved R&S around quite a bit, probably trying to make their money back on it or find a timeslot it fit into well. It moving to late nights and other channels with the much later Adult Animation Show did confuse the issue for many people, but I assure you it used to come on weekend mornings and was a trip to live through. You’d finish watching the wholesome adventures of a band of babies, and then in under 10 minutes a man made of toast is shoving cats between his buttcheeks.

It really is astounding that John Kricfalusi isn’t in jail and stayed working for so long.

I dunno, I’m pretty tired of star wars and find it rather uncool as well. Sorry nerds, but Star Wars, Marvel comics, and Harry Potter are all mainstream, they’re all problematic, and none of them are cool anymore. Go read indie comics, watch PeerTube, and play open source games. It was never cool to be mainstream.

I feel like that’s such a personal choice as to what you’d like your final thoughts to be. I, “funny” enough, was just talking to a friend with terminal cancer about what they’re reading yesterday. It was “The Once and Future King,” a childhood favorite. Nostolgia aside, they love the sweet tragedy of the story, the silly and earnest warmth of it.

For me, maybe something like the Doadejing or Siddhartha, something reassuring that life had been good and that a peaceful end is the best outcome to a well-lived life.

I would like to tell you that the skills you develop in any language or framework will help you with every other one. A joke I’ve been making my entire career is that every 5 years or so, someone reinvents the database or schemas or the spreadsheet or document rendering (or buses or trains) or some other fundamental tech. When you step back from the specifics and the proprietary bullshit tacked on to “add value”, most software is just a database.

If anything, working in many kinds of environments is very good for teaching one to see problems abstractly and find general solutions. From .NET (a jit compiled, memory-managed system), you might branch out into functional programming (F# is .NET and a good intro to ML-style functional languages) or into more dynamic environments (python, Ruby, typescript) or lower-level systems where you need to manage memory (c\c++\rust).

Anyway, I say “I would like to tell you” because as my initial comment laments, I kind of think this industry is dying. The push to replace development teams with one dev and some AI (or even one cheap non-technical “manager” and some AI) is breaking the ersatz system of mentorship that sustains actual knowledge transfers in this field.

I’m starting to feel like a dinosaur, not sure the kind of tech world I learned to survive in is going to exist much longer.

As a writer, yes.

Most of my career is built on MS’s stack (I fell into .NET development and got good at it. Now I’m in the same boat as COBOL, Java, and Ruby-on-Rails devs: I’m basically a software doula.)

Every job I go into now I’m reccomending they get a migration plan for self-hosting and self-owning. The American tech system is collapsing. AI is causing massive ruptures in knowledge: it obscures searches, it deskills devs, it’s castrated the junior-senior-principle ladder such that we’re not training enough developers to even pass along all of the knowledge of how current systems work. SaaS is reaching the enshittification threshold and all those businesses that moved everything into the cloud are about to discover that they’re hostages and the sinking empire will drag down a lot of collateral damage with it.

Yes, Jiffy is a very popular and inexpensive brand of corn bread mix, in groceries all over down here.

Riding somewhat on what other’s were saying regarding the neutron bombardment experiments: there’s also stuff like the “demon core,” the fissile core for the planned-but-never-made-or-dropped 3rd nuclear bomb. The scientists did create nuclear piles that were subcritical and measured them and such. Those are the “small (and extremely slow) explosions” that led to the big (fast) ones later.

We value “breakthroughs” way too much, for precisely the same reason we overvalue critical “climactic” events in history: we’re storytelling apes and good stories have singular inflection moments that teach lessons. But real life doesn’t have that, real life has incremental change that humans arbitrarily assign a critical moment after some accumulation to in order to make narratives.

This discussion was kinda interesting, but I feel like it kinda lost the plot after a while. Anyway, this is my kinda response post: funny, succinct, kinda antagonistic. Great work ddplf, you’re kinda my kinda people.

Having now read the article, I will also add that this article is exactly emblematic of why Western elites simply do not get this stuff. They don’t even have language to describe it.

Describing these videos as “Trojan horses” is such a bad metaphor. Likewise all the fake-history and myth-making that being politically informative and entertaining are somehow left-wing phenomena invented by Jon Stewart.

People don’t engage with politics rationally, they do it emotionally. Most people engage with most things emotionally; thinking is hard and energy-intensive. Easily absorbed cartoons and entertainment are not “Trojan horses” because there is no secret message. This is the fundamental misunderstanding conservatives have about media: the messages aren’t secret, they are overt and obvious, you just aren’t trained to understand them.

Taking a media illiterate person and flinging complex jargon and symbols at them makes them feel stupid, so they reject it. Feeding them simple symbols (made for children) that speak in the language of simple emotions makes them feel like an insider who understands secrets. This feeling is so good that people start hunting for symbols in things with limited understanding of how to properly do so or experienced knowledge, so they start finding whatever their mind expects to find: demons, angels, enemies, government communist agents, whatever they’re afraid of.

Trump’s camp has become so insular they’ve forgotten that even media illiterate people understand things like not being able to afford food while the president posts a video of himself shifting on you.

Interviewer:

"In your opinion, if anyone around the world wants to take their revenge on the assassination of Soleimani and intends to do it proportionately in the way they suggest — that we take one of theirs now that they’ve got one of ours — who should we consider to take out in the context of America?

Iranian Cleric Shahab Moradi:

“Think about it. Are we supposed to take out Spider-Man and SpongeBob? They don’t have any heroes. We have a country in front of us with a large population and a large landmass, but it doesn’t have any heroes. All of their heroes are cartoon characters — they’re all fictional.”

They’re brilliant: using Lego to create violent short form cartoons. In a very “master-slave dialectic” way, it’s quite apparent that Americans know nothing about the world while the rest of the world understands us all too well.

It never stops being funny that business dorks and tech bros adopted “drinking the koolaid” as a phrase to mean getting buy in. That and “dogfooding” really tells you a lot about how we think of ourselves, or at least how the executive class wants us to think of ourselves.

I once encountered a legendary seis leches cake. In addition to the standard tres, it also had I believe coconut cream, almond milk, and dulce de leche.