John Robb Profile picture
28 Nov, 4 tweets, 1 min read
"racing to enact the biggest change to the federal civil service in generations, reclassifying (tens of thousands of) career employees at key agencies to strip their job protections and leave them open to being fired"

washingtonpost.com/politics/trump…
FWIW, this should happen after every policy disaster.

For example, after the financial crisis, everybody in top positions with an influence on economic/financial policy prior to the crisis should have been fired/blacklisted from government service/consulting.
There's a long list of policy disasters over the last 25 years, yet all of the people involved never paid any price for their bad decision making.

We did.
Of course, the news media just glossed over these failures and their complicity in selling them.

Worse, they squelched any discussion of them with a steady diet of hyper-normalized news like this.

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More from @johnrobb

22 Nov
What would an AR overhaul mod do?

It would change everything in the visual/auditory/logical environment that you are living in to provide a compelling experience.

For example.

- Lighting. Gamma. Color palette. Contrast. Shadows. Particles. Bloom.
- Sound. Dynamically triggered background music and background sounds (triggers - location/interactions/etc.).

- Changes (in real-time) to the appearance, voices, etc of the people you interact with. From skin to clothing to accents...
- Changes to architecture. From materials to color to embellishments to design to period.

- Changes to the natural world. From stary night skies to post-apocalyptic scrub trees.

- New objects. From pictures to furniture to curios. Everything that clutters the background.
Read 4 tweets
29 Sep
A small example of networked social cascade:

1) We get a parking ticket from a community college we never visited that lists our license plate but incorrectly describes our car make/model. Apparently, the private security guard transcribed it wrong. We ignore it.

1/n
2) Six months later, I try to renew my driver's license online, just before my birthday. It's denied due to an unpaid parking ticket (the one from the community college). Apparently, it is a state school. We call them, they say it is too late to dispute it.

2/n
3) While working through the problem, my driver's license expires. A few days later, a cop in a nearby town stops my car (driven by my daughter's boyfriend) looking for me. The cop was using a license plate scanner and my cars were flagged for an expired license.

3?n
Read 4 tweets
14 Sep
I'm watching "The Social Dilemma" on Netflix.

It interviews people who worked at Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc.

All of them claim that they didn't know that social networking was revolutionary technology and that the disruption it has caused is a surprise.

1/n
They simply went along for the ride.

I can tell you, when a few of us were building social networking, long before Facebook, Twitter, etc. were even ideas...

we knew...

2/n
We knew what we were building was revolutionary.

It was a technology that would change everything... once we got it going. And it did. It still is.

It changed warfare.

That's why I started writing about "Global Guerrillas" back in 2004...
Read 4 tweets
22 Aug
Pilot vs. AI (in F-16s)

"On the first run, Banger survived 80 seconds. On three runs, he survived less than a minute (58.8, 53.1, 53.4), and on the final run, 164 seconds."

Here's a great in-depth discussion

mailchi.mp/b7c63e06f571/c…

https://t.co/scuzVdp8ZE
> “the AI… would hold 7-8 g turns for minutes at a time…” something that humans can’t do

> “the AI aircraft consistently skirted the edge of stalling the aircraft… humans would be hesitant to push this hard
> “the winning system from Heron did show one superhuman skill that could be very useful – it’s ability to keep perfect aim on a target.”

> “the AI had perfect physical awareness, so it always knew where Banger was”
Read 4 tweets
21 Jul
This thread is important
2/4
3/4
Read 4 tweets
26 Jun
"One of the early objectives of the Cultural Revolution in China, which began in 1966 and goes on today, was to wipe out the “four olds”—old things, old ideas, old customs and old habits."

1971 Archive NYT
nytimes.com/1971/05/19/arc…
In the turbulent years from 1966 to 1968, what remained of old religious practices, old superstitions, old festivals, old social practices such as traditional weddings and funerals, and old ways of dress were violently attacked and suppressed. 2/n
Visual evidences of old things were destroyed, and there was an orgy of burning of old books and smashing of old art objects.

Young Red Guards invaded homes and shattered family altars that denoted continued Confucian reverence for generations of forbears. 3/n
Read 4 tweets

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