Let’s say you want to engineer an upswing in public hatred of a group. For reasons. One way? Just start telling the world that group is awful. Start cranking the content mill, maybe make up some new pejorative terms try to convince people that [group] does or believes something hideous.

It helps if people already *dislike* the group; they’ll want to believe.

forum mod meltdown Path 3, Stage 9: "it has become clear that no one appreciates the sacrifices i've made to keep this board running"

https://twitter.com/curlycomedy/status/1604626630546280448

One of the genuinely fascinating things about this that "how the arc of mediated social platforms goes, given different approaches to governance, moderation, and leadership" is one of the *most talked to death topics of the past 40 years* in tech.

One of the most common complaints about digital publishing and content management is that "the editorial experience is terrible." Sometimes that means 'too slow,' sometimes it means 'not flexible enough,' other times it means 'overwhelming,' and sometimes it's just *a feeling*. The interesting thing is that almost every organization I've worked with over the course of *decades* has said this. Most CMS users learn to live with the tool, but never come to love it; often it's because few organizations put "front-end effort" into back-end tools.

This WaPo piece is… odd, in part because it seems to imply that Democrats are somehow “caving in” to polarization rather than simply recognizing and accepting that it has occurred.

washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/… It might simply be lazy, surface-level reporting that relays the contents of a survey without asking what it means… but it also seems to fit in the genre of “Wishful thinking will make radicalized authoritarians polite and civil again.”

A persistent theme in the media and pundit class’s relationship with American authoritarians: credulous refusal to look at patterns, and insistence that “fair” discussions only assess the right’s current demand. Anyone who points out likely next moves is dismissed as “unhelpful.” Over the course of years we’ve gone from “taxpayers shouldn’t pay for abortions” to “certain methods of abortion should be banned” to “states should be able to limit abortions arbitrarily” to “we would like to ban it nationwide, actually.”

Everything Everywhere All At Once is getting a lot of buzz and it’s not enough. Jesus. What a work. What a thing.

The worst kind of Internet argument is what I think of as the “stubborn category error.” A word or a description is used to characterize two things — then the shared label is used to erase other meaningful distinctions by arguing about the dictionary definition of the label. This came up earlier when someone referred to Cryptocurrency as “imaginary” because it is unbacked by societally-agreed-upon assets, and someone else said that *America* is imaginary because it is not a natural object, just an agreement in the minds of a critical mass of people.

I have worked for multiple Elon Musk owned companies, in both future-facing planning and emergency scenarios.

There is literally nothing I can imagine that would cause me to question Twitter’s long-term viability as much as “being run by Elon.”

Maybe “acquired by Livejournal.” That isn’t a knock on the skilled engineering, design, comms, and operations teams who work for those orgs, or even the explicit business goals that ostensibly drive the teams.

It’s that Musk combines The Engineer’s Disease with dictatorial pique.

Sometimes tech problems aren’t just confusing; they actively defy explanation, becoming more surreal as they are examined, inverting the normal relationship between technical knowledge and comfort. Years back @blaster151 and I were debugging a problem with our company’s custom ORM, and after hours of untangling discovered that… it never should’ve worked.

Like, the solution was clear and we were able to fix it, but we couldn’t explain how our core product had ever worked.

Reading the appendix of 1984, Orwell's in-universe essay on the history of Newspeak is interesting and illuminating. In particular, it reveals the misunderstandings inherent in reactionary objections to "academic" language as Newspeak. What I mean is that we often find reactionaries objecting to unfamiliar language (say, pronouns, or "something-something-Americans", or nuanced definitions of the word 'racism') and saying that it's "Orwellian Newspeak."

Years ago, I was brought on as tech advisor to a company building out something along these lines (social engagement, not “watching movies,” but still.) These efforts usually just burn money until investor patience runs out, because engagement arbitrage is hard and competitive.

https://twitter.com/theo_wayt/status/1491874861853126657

Underneath all the hand waving it’s an attempt to create an economy: users do a thing to get tokens, which they can use to buy a thing, and advertisers pay you a premium to fund the tokens in exchange for highly instrumented access to the users.

@SethCotlar A digital pointer that holds information about an asset that exists somewhere else, and whose “ownership” is tracked by a big network of other computers. @SethCotlar That’s the technical part; the complexity and stupidity is in what happens based on that, and the unfounded assumptions that get layered on top of the technical baseline.

So, a cryptocurrency business was rolled for $30m. Thing is, it wasn't "hacked;" Someone just found an edge case in the code that defines the 'smart contract' inherent to the business model, and used it to "trade" a few Mono tokens for millions of dollars, draining their funds.

https://twitter.com/BlockSecTeam/status/1465690478414761992

This thread digs into some of the technical details:

https://twitter.com/Mudit__Gupta/status/1465726874974187524

One of the more nuanced breakdowns of Bari Weiss' career arc, from John Ganz' The Political Economy of Reaction. johnganz.substack.com/p/the-politica… Reminds me of a side conversation we had with @danieleharper and @_Jack_Graham_ on @idsgpod, in reference to Weiss' membership in the ~Heterodox Opinion Havers Society~. Ganz compares Bari and her fellow-travelers to the losers of 18th c Paris' crumbling linterary class.

It's impressive how densely packed these two tweets are with the language and social cues of abusive Christian fundamentalism.

For those who don't recognize them, Moore here is obliquely responding to the "exvangelical" movement that's been blossoming over the past few years. I can't say whether the movement is *numerically* significant or not, but it's certainly had a social and cultural impact: people, many of whom experienced religious abuse and trauma in authoritarian spiritual communities, are leaving *and talking about why*.

This afternoon's system-design ramble is brought to you by LEGO Part Number 41530: "Propeller 8-Blade, 5 Diameter." I've talked before about the ways the LEGO building system demos important qualities of consistent, flexible, growing systems. One of the most important ways it "keeps its promises to itself" is ensuring pieces use recurring magic numbers for their measurements and proportions.

Fascinating thread about the current supply chain + labor market conundrum that's squeezing many manufacturers.

TL;DR: It's not the lack of workers, it's that JIT manufacturing culture that makes recovering from disruption nigh impossible.

https://twitter.com/VioletWanderers/status/1448786440138153985

IIRC it was Dell that really popularized the JIT manufacturing philosophy, back in the days when computers were purchased like cars — you hoped someone had the configuration you wanted in stock.

Good piece by @TonyByrne at the @realstorygroup on the challenges Acquia faces turning a suite of acquired products into a coherent platform. It's a problem many vendors have, but it's relevant RE their @Widen acquisition.
realstorygroup.com/Blog/what-make… Quite a bit of the complexity we end up helping *our* clients navigate, regardless of vendor, boils down to "making sense of a complex multi-product integration…"

Vaccine Disinformation. A case study.

Friends know that I've long subscribed to "bottom of the barrel" conservative email-lists. GOP PATRIOT NEWS and other fly-by-night popup "news services" litter the conservative landscape, firehosing ad-encrusted email blasts on the hour. The reason they exist is well-documented: the conservative base responds to fearmongering and lib-mocking. And when they respond, their clicks and shares can be monetized. The system doesn't require diabolical propagandists, just profit-seekers leeching off the echo chamber.

One of the interesting things about the @CRightcast podcast has been realizing just how interconnected many right-wing fundamentalist groups are with white supremacist and even white nationalist groups.

https://twitter.com/idsgpod/status/1427693379601801217

In most cases (IMO) it isn't a dark conspiracy: rather a natural consequence of the psychological building blocks that both movements share: authoritarian power structures, fixation on rigid gender roles, terror at outside corruption, and yearning for an ideal (imagined) past.

For language and meaning nerds, the actual ~things~ that live outside the vocabulary and syntax of a sentence but carry important meaning — like emphasis or rhythm — are called "suprasegmentals". In linguistics, "Prosody" is the study of suprasegmentals, and it rocks.

https://twitter.com/cs_ratliff/status/1423082813264367617

This matters a lot in digital content, because the push to make content more flexible and less brittle often means "removing decoration so it can be handled somewhere else." When done naively, though, that can strip away the "suprasegmentals" and discard real meaning.