The Infinitely Prolonged

@wowbaggert

he/him/his Either way - patriot or treason it's gonna be one long hard ride Melissa Etheridge

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The Infinitely Prolonged@wowbaggert· 28d

Alien: "It's an interesting combination of elements, making him a tough little son of a bitch."

The Infinitely Prolonged@wowbaggert· Jul 14

Our opponents are kind of mopping the floor with us.

Aliens quote: "Hey, maybe you haven't been keeping up on current events but we just got our asses kicked, Pal!"

The Infinitely Prolonged@wowbaggert· Jul 12

The Republican Party is more structurally and ideologically robust than the Democratic Party. It would be good for us to learn from the principles of their robustness while rejecting all the terrible things they believe, and want.

I know that most of you see the Republican Party as nothing more than a Donald Trump personality cult, but it's really more of a hive mind. Wherever the dominant figures in the party stand on a particular issue, that's where just about everyone else in the party stands. When Graham's replacement glides to victory in November in South Carolina, and McConnell's replacement does the same in Kentucky, you'll barely notice the difference in how Republicans do business.

The Infinitely Prolonged@wowbaggert· Jul 12

Kirk, from Wrath of Kahn: "But like a poor marksman you keep missing the target!"

The Infinitely Prolonged@wowbaggert· Jul 11

From the movie Real Genius: "Well then I'm happy and sad for you"

The Infinitely Prolonged@wowbaggert· Jul 11

More SCOTUS fuckery.

Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly
This was a 2007 Supreme Court judgement that radically raised the bar to win (or even bring to trial) any antitrust case.

It says that parallel conduct — actions from companies that, from the outside, would appear to suggest that they’re working together to disadvantage new competitors, or to weaponize their market dominance at the disadvantage of consumers in a coordinated manner — is circumstantial evidence of collusion in a Sherman Act case, and such evidence is, in and of itself, insufficient to launch an antitrust investigation.

It made it so that a complaint needs to contain enough facts to show that antitrust behavior is “probable,” not just “plausible”.This is called the Twombly Test, and any case that fails to meet this standard is vulnerable to dismissal at the earliest stages.

The Infinitely Prolonged@wowbaggert· Jul 10

If I absolutely have to plant a flag, it's Chicago style for me.

The Infinitely Prolonged@wowbaggert· Jul 10

thegrimhistorian.substack.com/p/has-americ... cc @owillis.bsky.social @yastreblyansky.bsky.social @stevemnomoremister.bsky.social @wonkette.bsky.social

Then something happened that isn’t supposed to happen, and I want to be precise about what it was — because the story you know is wrong in a way that matters.

The story you know stars the trust-busters: Teddy Roosevelt swinging the big stick, Standard Oil broken up in 1911, the reform laws stacking up — direct election of senators, food and drug regulation, the eight-hour day, and eventually Social Security. All true. All late. The legislation was the lagging indicator, the fever breaking after the immune system had already been fighting for twenty years.

The actual first movers were, and I cannot stress this enough, nobodies.

Between roughly 1870 and 1920, Americans went on the greatest civic-joining spree in the country’s history — Putnam’s data show more enduring civic organizations founded in those decades than in any comparable period before or since. Unions, granges, fraternal lodges, women’s clubs, settlement houses, mutual aid societies, congregations, the PTA. Millions of people who had every reason to conclude that honesty was for suckers instead went out and found the other cooperators.

They weren’t being noble. They were being practical: alone, each of them was lunch. Together, they were a market where decency broke even.

The Infinitely Prolonged@wowbaggert· Jul 10

"Readers who might be unaware of this facility should imagine an amusement park minus the fun and whimsy" While reading that, was struck by how much it also describes Trump's terrible "state fair"

"Great American State Fair" showing joyless, nearly empty fair grounds, and National Guard troops in the foreground

The Infinitely Prolonged@wowbaggert· Jul 10

Davey and Goliath?

The Infinitely Prolonged@wowbaggert· Jul 2

www.wheresyoured.at/the-ai-indus...

I’m sorry man, you have an addiction, and I worry it’s ruining your life. What is this producing? What are you actually doing with this time? Because if you’re allegedly 100 times more productive, wouldn’t that, y’know, produce something fairly incredible? I have no idea — and don’t want to put this man on blast — how significant his commitments on GitHub may or may not be, but the return on investment of “obsessively checking your laptop at all times in case you might not be productive” should be something on the order of curing a disease.

The Infinitely Prolonged@wowbaggert· Jul 1

Assuming it's got something to do with whether you're a white landowner or some such, but would be "fun" to press them on what, exactly they're thinking.

The Infinitely Prolonged@wowbaggert· Jun 29

This is going to be a disaster for all seven states in the Colorado River Compact.

diagram showing the seven states in the Colorado River Compact:
Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California

The Infinitely Prolonged@wowbaggert· Jun 29

Death By Toys:
Great American State Fair
Action figure playset
Just like the real thing! Minutes of fun
includes barely any people!
contents: one [1] "giant" crowd of people
shows three small figurines, photo of state fair with almost nobody there

The Infinitely Prolonged@wowbaggert· Jun 25

GoT: We can only help them from a position of strength.

The Infinitely Prolonged@wowbaggert· Jun 21

The frenzied, reality-defying hype around Anthropic, OpenAI and Large Language Models is a direct symptom of a tech industry with nowhere else to go. There are no other industries that have any sign of becoming the next Google Search or Facebook or Smartphone, which is why everybody — the media, the markets, and every hyperscaler — is conspiring to try and keep the bubble inflated through accepting effectively any viable narrative and blessing even the most vulgar of circular financing arrangements. If anybody for even a second breaks the kayfabe that AI is the biggest, most hugest, most important bubble of all time, everybody has to accept that none of this makes sense…

…and that there’s nothing else on the other side.

The Infinitely Prolonged@wowbaggert· Jun 8

What’s actually happening is that these tools are — at a remarkable price — shoving a lot of stuff out the door. Is the stuff good? No. Do people like or use it? No. Does it make money? Also no. While we’ve discovered the shovelware, that’s all that LLMs have given us — “more” apps, with the vast majority being useless, insecure slopware.

This is meant to be the era of agentic coding! This is meant to be the era where any dickhead with a Codex or Claude Code account with $1,000 of free API credits should be able to create the next Salesforce or whatever it was that dimwit Citrini talked about a few months ago.

I’m sorry to be a little surly and dismissive, but the AI industry has burned over a trillion dollars and I’ve spent two years being told I’m a luddite and an ape for not celebrating it. I don’t care! I’m not impressed! I’m not coddling this mediocre, expensive crap!

Like I said earlier: isn’t the tech industry meant to be a glorious bastion of meritocracy? Isn’t this meant to be a cold, harsh community of rationalists?

The Infinitely Prolonged@wowbaggert· Jun 4

We're talking a lot about cattle, but these things aren't actually very picky about what they lay their eggs on, are they?

An illustration of a sad dog infected with screwworm

The Infinitely Prolonged@wowbaggert· Jun 4

The Infinitely Prolonged@wowbaggert· Jun 4

Gamifying Brewster's Millions

Movie poster for Brewster's Millions: "You don't have to be crazy to blow 30 million in 30 days, but it helps"

The Infinitely Prolonged@wowbaggert· Jun 3

The Gladiator: Are you note entertained? Is this not why you are here??

The Infinitely Prolonged@wowbaggert· Jun 3

His precious

Smeagol sez "Because It's my birthday and I wants it!"

The Infinitely Prolonged@wowbaggert· Jun 3

The Terminator: It is in your nature to destroy yourselves

The Infinitely Prolonged@wowbaggert· Jun 2

I've had conversations about exactly this at my company. I wanted to take a stab at actually computing ROI, and the "I" term in that formula is basically impossible to nail down. It's literally undefined in the mathematical sense.

If you can’t measure how good something is, how much it might cost, or what your return on investment might be, it’s fair to ask why you’re even paying for it in the first place.

People are (reasonably!) harping on about the ROI problem, but I think the “can’t really measure the cost” part is an even bigger problem.

The Infinitely Prolonged@wowbaggert· Jun 2

King Arthur from Monty Python's and the Holy Grail: On second thoughts, let's not go there, 'tis a silly place!

The Infinitely Prolonged@wowbaggert· Jun 2

The horrors persist, but so do I

The Infinitely Prolonged@wowbaggert· Jun 1

lol that is amazing

beavis: "you mean, ironic?"
butthead: "no, an english word, dumbass"

The Infinitely Prolonged@wowbaggert· May 30

Randy Watson & Sexual Chocolate have dropped out of Trump's Freedom 250 concert

Randy Watson and Sexual Chocolate everybody!

The Infinitely Prolonged@wowbaggert· May 29

Malcolm McDowell's evil twin?

The Infinitely Prolonged@wowbaggert· May 29

The Dems thought Kerry's military background would neutralize the usual Republican attacks: "Dems are doves and bad on national security" The Republicans fucking steamrolled right over all that. And the Dems didn't learn a single thing from that experience.