it's a well-trod argument in tech now that one barrier to the usa reindustrializing is western startups and talent avoid low-margin industries but a related factor is it seems like established western firms are also structurally incapable of coping with margin compression

https://twitter.com/matthewswspence/status/1972440963252719937

this article from last year makes the same argument on 2010s solar. western pv polysilicon was basically a cartel artifically holding prices high and western panel manufacturers aimed for high-margin upmarket products. china commoditized panels

https://x.com/babykelpling/status/1972706086458126381

made a remarkable discovery, in xinyi shopping district, one of the most packed and busy places in the city, there's a cafe in a residential building you have to buzz to get in. it was practically empty, open until midnight. the gimmick is no one's allowed to talk

you whisper to order and conversations are disallowed. it's meant to be a reading room. the owner has books and signs about the virtues of quiet and tranquility. I love how this city has whatever it is (cheap rent? lax zoning?) that lets people open their quirky passion projects

as a service to friends who support kamala but don't understand why some centrists have flipped trump this year, it's usually one of:
* anti-semitism at palestine protests
* just vehemently pro-israel
* west coast-style homelessness
* biden tax plan
democrats gotta address these there's another contingent of people who flipped over the 2020 riots or because they're anti-china/pro-war but these are mostly libertarians who've secretly leaned trump for a couple years but were too scared to admit it until last week, and probably can't be won back

this fails a basic sanity test because the peak isn't in 2021 which means it's more about random guys writing java at fortune 500 companies than it is about anyone in stanford or waterloo or who works in tech companies or startups

https://twitter.com/SamRo/status/1802673017148846219

there are multiple virtually nonoverlapping job markets for dev work and almost no one on twitter with us is in the job market this chart describes. they list a median salary as $130k. it's not about tech

this discourse is broken because "self-made" properly means "built up a new endeavor yourself" not "had no advantages" but raised with role models of agentic action and a model of rules as a game to win rather than guiderails or punishments is 1000x more valuable than seed money

https://twitter.com/JustAnkurBagchi/status/1789024987804037189

I spent my teens immersed in video games and first half of my 20s in urban underclass escapades because those felt like the only environments you could actually do things and every interaction with parents teachers bureaucracy and law taught me that "society" is the enemy

I posted a new thing last night! please read it if it sounds enjoyable to do so

https://twitter.com/alicemazzy/status/1627531514186440704

incidentally it's a shame the musk takeover was botched because the playbook was literally just copy discord and tumblr in making regular users pay for the platform fun rather than cringe

after ten thousand years I have my first substack post, written in a six hour sprint on the plane after several days of fighting and gushing over fighting. it's about the scifi I've been reading recently, I'll probably edit and post tomorrow I promise it's shorter than my usual things, I'm trying very hard to stick with the whole "lower effort, lower stakes, more output" idea that I made the substack for in the first place

I rewatched fight club the other month and one of the things that stuck out to me about the quirky disaffected genx vibe was how much he hated travel. it struck me like "oh wait, right, before the internet people didn't have friends in most cities"

https://twitter.com/evilJBP/status/1622826700009512962

not that the character as depicted seemed to have friends at all but it just stood out to me how different business travel was back then for that reason. hadn't thought about past secret societies being internet-style social infrastructure

rubber ducking rules, a five minute text convo just solved a problem in a really simple and obvious way that I've been contemplating solving in an insane complictated way (and consequently ignoring) for like a month semi-related it seems obvious when you think about it but the fact that ideas come naturally in the shower and when walking indicates there's probably something with circulation going on there. I wonder if people have "sauna thoughts" too

I have this pet theory that there's four basic models for how gifts/debts work among peers. and sort of like communication styles, they're largely unspoken, and a lot of perplexing misunderstandings result between people operating under different models

https://twitter.com/Lithros/status/1612491503456161792

confident in the models, not as confident in the class identifications:
* underclass: "if I got it, you got it"
* working class: "give nothing, take nothing"
* professional class: "ensure the scales balance"
* capitalist class: "give freely, to secure future favor"

somehow I've already managed to mentally commit myself in 2023 to: learning sailing, snowboarding, welding, diving, muay thai. two asia trips, europe trip, south america trip this is aside from reading writing and coding (which I do as a matter of course), climbing and lifting (which I'm already decent enough at to do for fun), or learning real engineering skills (punting to 2024)

ok after some detective work (she loves archaic language, I don't even think "kyatsura" is a word? but I got the kanji because she used it once before) her tour is called「椎名林檎と彼奴等と知る諸行無常」and tickets go on sale to the general public february 24th I can't believe I never would have found this if not for one random google search and one random article. literally the only information in english is that copy-pastes of the tokyohive headline

guys you can describe *novel* games to it it doesn't perfectly understand the concept but it comes entirely down to ambiguities in the language I used to describe the rules. it also can tell when I try to cheat (although I suspect I could convince it if I explained it as if it were a "new rule")

I had to coax it a bit ("I know you can't set a board" to get around short circuit complaints it's not capable of setting a board) and something's wrong with the board rendered but it... actually has a model of how to play chess? unfortunately it would not let me take the interaction further. I kind of hate how it can actually do all the things it claims it can't do, but if you don't word them right to get around the filters it just ruins the dialogue arbitrarily

I made a substack, if anyone would like to subscribe. no promises if/when I'll use it, but it will of course be entirely free alicemaz.substack.com this is a) just in case twitter goes offline, b) because twitter algo sucks and makes it impossible to esnure people who want to see a thing will see it, and c) an attempt to encourage myself to be "less ambitious" in what I write about

sometimes I think that most people are capable of secure attachment, and anyone who is just goes and does that. and almost all the interesting stuff is done by people traumatized as kids, trying to fill that lack with something else

https://twitter.com/AskYatharth/status/1569874489688870912

for a long time never understood the two car garage and picket fence type people. I came up with false consciousness arguments, I saw them as "lesser" in the manner of a classic teenage nietzschean asshole. but now I think they're just normal. good for them

bouldering is great for developing body-sense (something more general than proprioception, maybe just general agility?) I bounce and prance around everywhere now, and I've gotten really good at counterbalancing my weight intuitively all kind of dumb little things like sitting on the floor and sticking my leg out in the air in front of me to tip myself over and grab something behind

midsummer in riga is like one of the most magical things I've ever experienced. this is so wonderful and alive there was a huge bonfire with a big fire wagon thing and then we danced from like 11pm to 4am it was so so so fun

bros I think the hostel I booked in tallinn has been destroyed I booked a second hostel and immediately after the first one emailed me back saying they moved lmao

I'm pretty sure I'm naturally unsuited to a "normal job" where you consistently produce a bit of output and have a bit of leisure like a character in the sims. my ideal lifestyle is probably working 70+ hour weeks for months and then taking a few months off my latest half-serious, semi-totalizing theory is that there are three basic genders--normal/adhd/schizo (plus nonbinary variants)--and that these correspond to natural worker/hunter/shaman roles in a tribe, which then obviously correspond to dumezil's worker/warrior/priest

I hope you all know that the process by which part of your social value is determined by how funny you are on twitter is just this era's incarnation of "salon wit" I used to read 19th century french-style epigrams and think the droll/pithy style they cultivated would sound so odd in the present day. but we use the same humor on here (urbane, reference-dense, meta, quick, quippy) it's only different in the details