Tesselation Games’ ‘Berrymandering’ tabletop game is also a fun way to depress yourself - and a fun way to introduce the idea of gerrymandering to friends and family who don’t ‘get’ it - and depress them too!
Is Craigslist still the go-to classifieds site in some places?
Around here it’s (very sadly IMO) been almost completely replaced by Facebook Marketplace, to the extent that people make Facebook accounts just to use Marketplace.
I sell on CL and FB Marketplace. Some items that I listed for months on CL sold in days on FB, but I prefer CL. FB search results are inferior often because FB posters created misleading ads and don't delete ads for events that have already occurred. Never tried Nextdoor because they required I give them my cell phone number. My landline number was not enough.
That’s quite the understatement. FB marketplace search results are pretty close to useless. Search for something, it will show you maybe a couple of that something and then ads that look like listings, and things that are supposedly related (they aren’t), hours away from your search area. No way to filter or anything. I go out of my way to not use FB marketplace, that’s how bad it is to me.
In Wisconsin and Illinois, I had far better luck both buying and selling on CL. I moved to CA fairly recently but the story seems to be the same here.
As a seller, FB marketplace is just a neverending stream of "Is this still available?" "Yes" and then radio silence.
I also found it far less common for CL sellers to share a different price in DMs than they list in the ad. CL users are also better about taking their ad down when the item is sold.
Going to a separate website and (gasp!) sending an actual email or calling someone, those are strong filters for intent that FB Marketplace lacks.
Sure, but no-one on Earth today is willing to pay for a pyramid - or anything like it - even with the convenience of modern construction.
I have a similar feeling looking at the great cathedrals.
These structures took up a huge proportion of the community's money, labour and talent, for decades on end.
They're orders of magnitude bigger than any 'normal' building of the time or for centuries later.
All with no prospect of any tangible return.
If we set out now to build the largest structure that the limits of our technology allow, designed almost purely as a work of art with little regard to any function, what would that look like? I don't know, no-one's done it for centuries.
The closest thing is the Eiffel Tower.
It's a national icon, the wrought-iron equivalent of a pyramid - but it took two years to build, not twenty. What would an Eiffel Tower with 10x the resources look like? And that's more than a century ago.
It's not hard to believe that humans could build these things, but it's occasionally hard to believe that they chose to.
I suppose the Burj Khalifa, the Sky Tree, the Sphere, and the Luxor don't count? Mount Rushmore? The only thing that's changed is that we've gotten more efficient at megaprojects and, I suppose, they've become so common you don't register them as interesting anymore.
So only around 500 times as much moving material around, feasible I guess. You might need a dedicated rail line built direct to the quarry.
Funny to mention cathedrals considering that they finished one in Spain just recently. There's also Guédelon Castle in France, still being slowly built.
For anyone interested in modern humans' ability to move material around when it is economically advantageous to do so, try a web image search for "largest open pit mines".
I found out that classical building with ornaments aren't that more expensive than modern glass boxes. The Berlin Baroque palace costed 680 Million euros which isn't atypical for buildings that size, and it includes carved stone ornamentation [1]. Modern CNC robots have made stone carving much more efficient.
can’t help but suspect they’ve fallen into deep LLM psychosis
This is what came to my mind first too. It feels like the sort of thing you could come up with after a lot of ‘that’s a great insight!’, with the LLM eventually projecting absolute certainty that it’s a ground-breaking idea that’s definitely going to work.
I’m not sure whether I like that this is my knee-jerk reaction.
Do they have any sort of prototypes of this hardware that’s going to be working reliably in their custom-built spa in the notoriously difficult-to-get-permits-in San Francisco by the end of next year?…
The ‘technically impossible’ arguments always frustrate me. I used to buy into them to - but over time I’ve come to realise that the people making these arguments are not speaking the same language as lawmakers - or most of the rest of society.
It’s ‘technically impossible’ to stop convenience stores selling alcohol or pornography to minors, or to make people to adhere to contracts. Non-engineers don’t care what’s technically possible, they care what’s legally possible, or societally possible.
It’s the same thing when techies try to decipher what _exactly_ a law does and look for loopholes, when to the rest of society the standard is ‘whatever a reasonable person thinks it does’.
You need to make the argument about why the proposed thing is bad for society for it to be taken seriously.
This is a very good essay when you get past the arrogant tone evident especially at the beginning (is that a form of engagement bait?…)
The argument that communicating an idea is a necessary part of shaping it feels counterintuitive, but it’s really true.
Whether it’s debugging, ‘big’ writing, or even down to the scale of a tweet (RIP Twitter) or an HN comment, I’ve often had the experience of starting to explain a process or opinion and only then discovering that it’s inconsistent or even indefensible.
I suspect (I hope!) that this is something everyone can empathize with.
The author doesn't come across as arrogant to me, more like frustrated. The tone is certainly not for everyone but I enjoyed it. And I agree that it's a good essay!
> This is a very good essay when you get past the arrogant tone evident especially at the beginning (is that a form of engagement bait?…)
We have reached the point where you have college professors who defend[0] using AI to write scientific papers (in a seemingly AI-written tweet). Everywhere I go online, I see spam written with the exact same voice. Scientific journals and literary magazines are inundated with AI-written submissions. Software projects have shut contributions because maintainers are tired of reading AI-written slop pull requests.
What's the right tone to take here? "Please stop defecting"? "I wish you would kindly stop ruining the commons"? I don't know. Maybe, if we raise the reputational cost of slop, we get less of it.
Perhaps I meant ‘crude’ rather than ‘arrogant’. Or another word that a blend of the two.
I mean, I think there’s a middle ground between defending all uses of AI writing and saying “It’s like making yourself into a eunuch so Claude can fuck your wife.”
Edit: or “if you use AI to write, you are a waste of biomass”
Yeah I don't know. I mean the author says only smart people can write good. And then says anyone who uses AI to write is basically giving up their genetalia so that Anthropic's AI model could make love to your wife (apparently without her consent because you can obviously just decide who has sex with your wife).
The author should learn how to write properly and communicate ideas in a less sexist and disgusting way if he wants to make a point about writing well.
> you can obviously just decide who has sex with your wife
That's your fantasies, not author's. He merely implied that one can obviously decide whom to allow to fuck one's wife. He hasn't implied that wife's consent is unnecessary or automatic.
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