YourNetworkIsHaunted
I’m glad I’m not the only one who picked up on that turn. The implication that what we need is an actual Bismark instead of a wannabe like we keep getting makes sense (I too would prefer if the levers of power were wielded by someone halfway competent who listens to and cares about people around them) but there are also some pretty strong reasons why we went from Bismark and Lincoln to Merkel and Trump, and also some pretty strong reasons why the road there led through Hitler and Wilson.
Along with my comments elsewhere about how the dunce believes their area of hypothetical expertise to be some kind of arcane gift revealed to the worthy, I feel like I should clarify that not only do the current top of dolts not have it but that there is no secret wisdom beyond the ken of normal men. That is a lie told by the powerful to stop you fro tom questioning their position; it’s the “because I’m your Dad and I said so” for adults. Learning things is hard and hard means expensive, so people with wealth and power have more opportunities to study things, but that lack of opportunity is not the same as lacking the ability to understand things and to contribute to a truly democratic process.
You’ve got to make sure you’re not over-specializing. I’d recommend trying to roll your own time zone library next.
First and foremost, the dunce is incapable of valuing knowledge that they don’t personally understand or agree with. If they don’t know something, then that thing clearly isn’t worth knowing.
There is a corollary to this that I’ve seen as well, and it dovetails with the way so many of these guys get obsessed with IQ. Anything they can’t immediately understand must be nonsense not worth knowing. Anything they can understand (or think they understand) that you don’t is clearly an arcane secret of the universe that they can only grasp because of their innate superiority. I think that this is the combination that explains how so many of these dunces believe themselves to be the ubermensch who must exercise authoritarian power over the rest of us for the good of everyone.
See also the commenter(s) on this thread who insist that their lack of reading comprehension is evidence that they’re clearly correct and are in no way part of the problem.
A lot of the spamming at the SC2 tournament level is about staying warmed up so that when you get into a micro-intensive battle later on where all of those actions might count (splitting your marines to protect from AoE while target-firing the suicide bombing banelings, for example) you can do it. Doesn’t make it look less ridiculous, especially in the first couple of minutes before the commentary has anything to really talk about so they try to act like stealing 5 minerals at that stage could somehow decide the game. But there is a slightly more reasonable logic to it than just speed running an RSI to look cool.
The original StarCraft also offers a lot of opportunities to use your “extra” APM to optimize around the godawful AI pathing and other “quirks” of the engine. It’s not as bad as, say, DotA in terms of “this was a limitation of the original engine that is now a major cornerstone of playing the game well and if you complain about it you’re just bad” but it’s definitely up there. As the game goes on you’ll usually see players start getting slightly more fast and loose with, say, optimizing the mining at their new base because at that point in the game splitting your focus that much is more detrimental even if you can move that fast.
I definitely ended up in the occasional spectator and campaign player for all that, though. Especially now that I’m starting to have creaky old man wrists of my own.
Unfortunately it doesn’t look like he was properly banned, just booted out of his session for having suspiciously-high APM. Now, the true eSports nerds among us will already know that high APM is a staple of high-level play in some games but is also an easy way to check for certain types of cheaters. Because of the association with skill in e.g. StarCraft it also became a very easily gamable metric if for some reason you wanted to feel like you knew what you were doing or show off for your friends and strangers online. For example, certain key bindings let you perform some actions as fast as your keyboard’s refresh rate allows by holding down a key or abusing the scroll wheel on your mouse. This can send your measured APM through the roof for a time. My gut says this is what Elon was doing that triggered the anticheat program, rather than any amount of actively gaming or actually cheating.
Please note that the hard-won knowledge of my misspent youth has no bearing on how pathetic it is for the richest man in the world to be doing the same kind of begging for clout that I did at 14, especially since I’m pretty 14-year-old me was frankly better at it.
I got bounced back to Casey Newton’s recent master class in critihype and found something new that stuck in my craw.
Occasionally, they get an entire sector wrong — see the excess of enthusiasm for cleantech in the 2000s, or the crypto blow-up of the past few years.
In aggregate, though, and on average, they’re usually right.
First off, please note that this describes two of the most recent tech bubbles and doesn’t provide any recent counterexamples of a seemingly-ridicilous new gimmick that actually stuck around past the initial bubble. Effectively this says: yes, they’re 0 for 2 in the last 20 years, but this time they can’t all be wrong!
But more than that I think there’s an underlying error in acting like “the tech sector” is a healthy and competitive market in the first place. They may not directly coordinate or operate in absolute lockstep, but the main drivers of crypto, generative AI, metaverse, SaaS, and so much of the current enshittifying and dead-ending tech industry comes back to a relatively small circle of people who all live in the same moneyed Silicon Valley cultural and informational bubble. We can even identify the ideological underpinnings of these decisions in the TESCREAL bundle, effective altruism and accelerationism, and “dark enlightenment” tech-fascism. This is not a ruthlessly competitive market that ferrets out weakness. It’s more like a shared cult of personality that selects for whatever makes the guys in top feel good about themselves. The question isn’t “how can all these different groups be wrong without someone undercutting them”, it’s “how can these few dozen guys who share an ideology and information bubble keep making the exact same mistakes as one another” and the answer should be to question why anyone expects anything else!
To his frequent “no, people really are this stupid” refrain I would like to add an argument. If it didn’t work on enough people to be profitable, the business model wouldn’t have persisted and been replicated and refined into the dominant model of online advertising, and/or online advertising would never have been able to become the primary monetization framework for online content. Like, it’s fucked how much of the existing Internet is effectively subsidized by exploiting people who don’t know better, and I don’t think people are really okay with this as much as the system is sufficiently obfuscated that we don’t have to notice or think about it.