Harris ran a perfect, civil, persuasive, charismatic and relentless campaign. Her opponent was a malicious blundering idiot with a criminal record four years after he staged a coup, mumbling nonsense to half-empty crowds, pitching tacky luxury goods and NFTs, and promising revenge and ethnic cleansing. And it still came down to a coin toss.

I've been keeping faith in democracy for so long, but doesn't this disprove it? What possible path forward is there, but another four years of constant headlines of some fresh new disastrous executive order, this time with no "adults in the room"? Will I live long enough to see us recover?

There are cities where only cars can get you where you need to go, and people who can't drive. I'm one such person living in one such city.

I'm in the Waymo self-driving car's test area, and right NOW, the Waymo cars are comfortable and the ride is smooth and there's no chance I'll end up in there with a driver making a phone call or listening to political talk radio or whatever. And I don't have to tip anyone. But it's only a matter of time before they realize they have a consumer trapped in a box and decide that they have the right to sell my attention through more and more of that ride. And the people responsible for inflicting that on us will never face responsibility for it.

If they can't make it affordable without selling ads, then I shudder to think what life will be like when landlords start putting advertisements in their apartments. We always wondered how we'd end up with the 1984 telescreen, the TV-camera combo that we're not allowed to turn off -- this is how.

I saw this story when it broke on Jobst's YouTube channel, and everyone who reacted to it went into full schadenfreude mode and assumed that it was enough evidence to sink Mitchell on its own.

but I think it'll come down to whether they can prove, or at least strongly support, that the replacement joystick was an 8-way. If his lawyers can convince the court that it was a 4-way, then Mitchell can claim it as an acceptable in-kind replacement part used in routine repairs, even if the shape was different.

This guy is too slippery to get sunk by one photo. Hopefully the rest of the evidence stands regardless.

Aren't there several fault lines between Los Angeles and Las Vegas? Or at least one big one?

Is this another enormous lie, designed to take up all the oxygen and suffocate better proposals?

They're not measuring productivity, they're measuring devotion.

Modern society is full of bullshit jobs that don't benefit anybody, where people write reports and documents that are never acted upon, but might be proofread or judged or filed to be procured during discovery in some future lawsuit. For jobs like these, keylogging and eye-tracking employees is just an extension of the purpose of the job: you're not earning a living through productivity, you're earning a living by demonstrating devotion to the system.

This whole pandemic has shown us what can happen when you have a culture where admitting fault or showing vulnerability is an invitation for vultures to dine upon your entrails.

The origins of the pandemic were an entirely random event, even if some human error along the way enabled it. The Chinese government trying to deflect it reflects the deepest, most fragile version of this kind of culture, and this story is only the latest iteration. There have been plenty of stories on this site about the technological arms race between the CCP and anyone who wants to breathe a single word about the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

The Western version of this fragility is evident throughout America's fractured political discourse. The simple process of learning more about the virus was used as fuel for conspiracy theorists trying actively to discredit scientists. "First they're saying herp but now they're saying derp?" and then they use that to support the conspiracy theory of their choice, and discredit and troll those of us who continue to believe that the pandemic is happening at all, that scientists are doing their best, that institutions can be helpful or may be essential. After a year of literally every new piece of information being used as an info-weapon, one gets antsy. So when Jon Stewart goes on Colbert's show and brings up the lab leak theory, I'm among the people who freaked out over it, because whether it was true or not, I was afraid that if it became an acceptable mainstream theory, then it would push the Overton window far enough that the people with theories about secret CIA bioweapons will start getting airtime, and so on and so on. And so it goes for all kinds of news, because if a study says "the herpderp vaccine may cause blood clots in almost nobody" then when Joe Podcast shortens it to "vaccines give you blood clots," he thinks he's relaying accurate scientific data. There's lots of information or hypotheses out there that become info-hazards in this way: even if they turn out to be true or close to the truth, they're very unlikely to help the pandemic end more quickly, and may well prolong it, and embolden the kind of people who profit from conspiratorial thinking. So the instinct to just shut people up about it is very strong.

Vaccine side effects are another way that perfectionism pervades our culture. When someone actually knows the numbers, and thinks that after millions of doses, 6 people getting tachycardia is too many, or when they tout every breakthrough case as evidence that the vaccine doesn't work at all. If they're arguing in good faith then they're implying that a 100% effective vaccine with no side effects is a realistic standard. The US has even paused administration of some vaccines "out of an abundance of caution", guess how the vaccine skeptics responded, hint: they weren't reassured. The very act of demonstrably doing the right thing backfires.

but the most direct harm of a culture where mistakes and imperfections aren't tolerated is just the day-to-day coverups that result, and the chilling effects it has on human behavior in general. People refusing to help each other because of the liability they might take on by doing so. People working around long-standing problems because they know getting it fixed involves insulting the wrong person. Everyone just covering their asses constantly.

so three years ago this was a krazam comedy sketch and now it's science fact!

The public ones generate messes that might, at best, serve as rough sketches. It's especially bad at faces, or at least, its weaknesses are most apparent when subjected to the extra scrutiny that our brains give to faces and human figures.

The real DALL-E is pretty good at generating objects and sketches. It can even do human faces that aren't horrifying, and celebrities that are recognizable, though still with slight distortions or otherwise might not hold up to scrutiny.

A lazy enough designer could replace their graphic designer with DALL-E.

I've heard both proponents and critics of DALL-E say that it can't replace good graphic designers, that the lack of imagination is palpable enough that it'd be best used as a labor-saving brainstorming device, or a starting point generator. of course, we all know that most businesses don't value imagination, and would gladly replace good people with a slightly worse machine if they could.

I've been hearing bits of this with increasing frequency, as all the hype dies down... and I'm adding it to my great big list of things to be pissed off about.

and what I dread coming out of this discourse, is that instead of holding the petrochemical industries accountable for the lies they've been publishing for generations, instead it's going to turn into conservatives dunking on liberals and using it as an excuse to tear down what little recycling is still happening.

I'm already seeing people in this comment section trying to patiently explain "no, recycling isn't communism" and getting dragged into semantic arguments. But we all know that Stalin didn't rise to power by distributing curbside recycling bins in Tbilisi. They're just using "communism" as a buzzword to rally an audience that will respond to it, and prime them for a good ol' wholesome Individual Responsibility solution to the problem, and reject anyone who would infringe on the rights of corporations to keep putting plastic into our lives, or worse, who would in any way deter them from continuing to trick the public.

Indeed, recycling was originally the Individual Responsibility solution to waste. We all watched the Earth Day special back in 1990, and saw all the calls to action by all the TV stars, and we started demanding recycled products from our stores, and asked our cities to support our recycling efforts. Next thing you know, there's blue bins everywhere and we're all separating our trash, doing our part to make things right. well, it's 30 years later and none of it mattered.

indeed I'm still putting cans and cardboard into my blue bin. My neighbors across the street, though are just using theirs as another trash bin. and I'm just sitting around waiting for that first 130-degree day to hit Phoenix.

not so fast there... Vitalik Buterin is trying to popularize the idea of bailing out Luna's investors, citing the FDIC's protection of bank accounts as a precedent. of course, FDIC is insurance. Banks in the US must pay into the DIF and follow certain regulations. And the FDIC covers deposits when a bank goes insolvent, not investments that become worthless.

but talk like that kind of tips his hand that any talk the crypto industry has about welcoming regulation is just them trying to weasel their way into the Too-Big-to-Fail club and getting bailouts. If all they wanted was insurance, they needn't wait for regulation -- I hear Lloyd's of London will insure anything. Had anyone ever gotten a venerable insurer to underwrite their coin's value? of course not, that's what "stablecoins" are for, aren't they...

This is like saying that astrology is not ready to replace MRI machines.

It buys into the "mass adoption right around the corner" rhetoric that Bitcoin has been coasting on forever, and at this point it's irresponsible to keep talking like that.

What is the point of a "verified" checkmark if you can change your display name without losing it? I know everyone has fun changing their names to something spooky in October, but security and information integrity is more important.

Ideally there should be a simple and timely procedure for changing the display name in a way that is also verified. Like, fill out a form with "new name" and "reason", and within 24 hours someone can verify that the new name is indeed an iteration of the old name, and matches the reason given, maybe ask for a source if there's any doubt. That may be too much to ask, since tech companies pride themselves on hiring as few humans as possible to do human tasks.

I had an idea that next year, on New Year's Day, we could turn our hackerspace into a public domain printing press for all the new freed works. We might even be able to do it on New Year's Eve, as we're well-situated in a downtown location that might have some slightly tipsy foot traffic after midnight.

of course, we'll need to plan ahead. Will it be important to get them from a clean source, or will pirated works magically become legal? If not, do we just refresh the Gutenberg Project website until it all shows up? Will we be able to print and bind books cheaply enough to give them away? Are our printers fast enough to print on demand, or should we print a few copies of the most important works in advance? And of course we'll have to secure volunteers and fix up donated printers.

Making TVs smarter has other drawbacks, that won't be alleviated by simply unplugging from the network.

For one, when you turn them on, they have to "boot up", and this takes longer than whatever warm-up period is required. And once they've started, they're in a multitasking OS, so they have better things to do than respond immediately to your remote control presses. This is especially frustrating when you switch inputs; you can't just tap "input" three times. You have to tap "input", and wait for the box to move before pressing "input" again. If it takes too long to move, you might try pressing "input" an extra time, but this time it gets buffered and you end up going too far.

Unfortunately, I expect smart TVs are here to stay, because the presence of those "Netflix" and "Amazon Prime" buttons on your remote are subsidizing the low cost of the TV. And there aren't enough of us nerds that would pay more for a TV that does less.

I've been noticing since the election how odd it is that whenever I meet a Trump supporter, or a Hillary hater, If I bring up Russia, their nationalistic sense of American sovereignty will completely evaporate. To a person, they deflect concern about Russian hacking or Putin's oligarchy with such skill as if they've attended an 8-week media training course. They'll claim the Russians did us a favor by exposing Democratic corruption, and even shed a tear for the plight of the Russian people suffering under Obama's sanctions.

When I meet someone who says they "don't support Trump" but somehow only attacks liberals, I can just imagine the Facebook group that got their hooks in them. I keep seeing groups for political causes that used to have their own identities, but now only post pro-Trump or anti-liberal messages. "Being Libertarian" had a perfect example – libertarianism is diametrically opposed from authoritarianism, and yet it showed up in my feed because a friend of mine clicked "Like" on a picture of a parody of that one poem. It said "They came for the socialists, and I said nothing. Then everything was better and they stopped coming for people." Thousands of likes, each one from someone who labels themselves "libertarian" but totally signed off on the rounding-up of their political enemies, and declared their trust that strongman authority only takes away rights temporarily.

And that's what is worrying, because even if Trump gets impeached, the national psyche is already gravely wounded, and the Kremlin has a fresh truckload of salt for us every day to stop it from healing.