Stuff I consumed, pondered, and in extreme cases acted upon.
The Power Grid 🔗
How does the power grid work? It’s rather complex, and this complexity derives from an endless balancing act.
When Large Language Models Attack 🔗
Or rather, when their ever-hungry bots trash a site:
If you try to rate-limit them, they’ll just switch to other IPs all the time. If you try to block them by User Agent string, they’ll just switch to a non-bot UA string (no, really). This is literally a DDoS on the entire internet.
Burnout 🔗
Charles Hugh Smith writes about burnout in I Quit! The Tsunami of Burnout Few See :
All these experiences are viewed through the lens of the mental health industry which is blind to the systemic nature of stress and pressure, and so the “fixes” are medications to tamp down what’s diagnosed not as burnout but as depression or anxiety, in other words, the symptoms, not the cause.
Meta 🔗
Mark Zuckerberg has apparently decided to throw swathes of Meta’s users and employees under the bus - sending “back fifty years”, as Rachel By The Bay puts it.
Max Read asks Why is Mark Zuckerberg vice-signaling?
One answer, I think, is that Zuck’s new image is as much about a shifting political environment within Silicon Valley as it about the changing winds outside of the industry. A period of tech-industry labor unrest–walkouts and protests at tech megaplatforms over sexual harassment, racism, and defense contracts1–has given way to a “reset” marked by mass layoffs and corporate clampdowns.
Melissa Ryan writes Big Tech Chose Violence:
The bigger story, at least in my mind, is that Meta’s policy changes now make it easier to target marginalized groups with harassment. Under the new policies, Meta users can now say that gay and trans people are mentally ill or refer to people who identify as transgender as “it,” among other changes. Users can also refer to women as “household objects or property”.
She adds:
Here’s my advice: if you use social media to create, share, advocate, or advertise, don’t rely on any one product. Diversify, invest your time in alternatives, and build networks outside of the platforms wherever you can.
Books 🔗
I have been catching up with my John Crowley with Flint and Mirror, a mixed fantastical and historical account of Hugh O’Neill and his failed Irish rebellion.
I should mention my Christmas presents, which I will turn to next: