Your engine hasn't earned your rent

I keep seeing people make this error, especially in social media discourse. Somebody wants to “use” something. Except obviously, it’s not theirs, and so it’s absurd for them to make that demand, right? Quick examples§ I’m not trying to pick on this person at all: they’re not a twitter main character, they’re not expressing an unusual opinion...

Societal alienation, intensely depressive. Harris, 68.0 million popular, 226 electoral. 43%. Trump, 72.6 million popular, 295 electoral. 57%. I am haunted by what these numbers represent. I am not writing you a proof. I am upset, and this is a reflection. My basic worldview has been that things, on average, will continually get worse. Even before...

This was originally something I was going to talk about in Corporations have Rejected Copyright, back when that series was going to just be one long post (really!). But since I saw Nintendo apparently sued Palworld today, I wanted to put this up as background information. You should definitely read You’ve Never Seen Copyright first, particularly...

Part 2: Growth, Waste, and Externalities§ The AI tools are efficient according to the numbers, but unfortunately that doesn’t mean there isn’t a power problem. If we look at the overall effects in terms of power usage (as most people do), there are some major problems. But if we’ve ruled out operational inefficiency as the reason, what’s left?...

Recent tech trends have followed a pattern of being huge society-disrupting systems that people don’t actually want. Worse, it then turns out there’s some reason they’re not just useless, they’re actively harmful. While planned obsolescence means this applies to consumer products in general, the recent major tech fad hypes — cryptocurrency,...