Saturday Forum
Matt Bernius
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Saturday, November 18, 2023
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30 comments
About Matt Bernius
Matt Bernius is a design researcher working to create more equitable government systems and experiences. He's currently a Principal User Researcher on Code for America's "GetCalFresh" program, helping people apply for SNAP food benefits in California. Prior to joining CfA, he worked at Measures for Justice and at Effective, a UX agency. Matt has an MA from the University of Chicago.
The beginning of the end for X (formerly Twitter)?
From Yahoo news:
Just hours after losing major advertisers on X thanks to his expressing support for antisemitic statements, Elon Musk slammed the departing companies as “the greatest oppressors,” of free speech while hawking the social media’s paid subscription service.
When he bought Twitter, Musk borrowed billions from banks who are taking a big hit. How long before they sue him to try and recover some of their losses.
@SenyorDave:
Another question is, how long before Tesla’s stock holders begin demanding his ouster there?
@Sleeping Dog: The cult of Elon is one of the main reasons Tesla has maintained its stock price. Without his fanboys the stock would tank, IMO. Their last quarterly results were pretty awful, but that doesn’t seem to matter to those who idolize him.
I am often baffled by what articles Google presents to me in Chrome. Nevertheless…
AI Generated women steal housands from men looking for love in dating app and social media scams*
Did the AI determine that men who go by Jim are more susceptible to being scammed by AI generated women with chinecks who like to sketch?
Let us all hope that Joyner forbids anyone from calling him Jim for the rest of his life.
Again, I’m baffled; my name isn’t Jim. And I assume the algo has that data. But maybe, even if that is the case, it thinks I am at risk of being duped. I guess sending money to a Nigerian Prince once labels me a mark forever.
*The Chrome link does not capitalize the headline. The actual ABC page internet-screams the headline as if Trump wrote it. Why? I don’t know. Important? I don’t know.
So, what should show up late yesterday evening on the Win11 taskbar, but none other than MS’s new Autopilot software.
I keep a clean taskbar, with nothing pinned on it at all. It’s there for the programs I’m running for work only. So, first order of business was to unpin this interloper.
No such luck. No right-click menu action at all. No option to shut it down on its own settings. So I opened it and commanded “remove Autopilot from taskbar.” It has to obey, right? Second law and all (is annoyance harm and a violation of First law?*)
It didn’t remove itself (bad bot), but it told me how to deactivate it on the taskbar options menu. Second law crisis averted.
*If these bots are even so equipped. I know they are not positronic at all.
Oh, Xlon! You lost another rocket?
Damn. Maybe you’ll get lucky in court. Not likely. I mean, most likely, we’ll get lucky and you’ll get counterxued.
BTW, the Win11 Autopilot didn’t crash my work PC, not even once. That’s proof it has no Tesla software or tech.
Starship, though…
@Kathy: Call me an old lefty, but if I were going into space I’d want to go on a vehicle built by union labor — or at least by a company that valued its employees and didn’t degrade and abuse them. If the waiter is made at the boss, the worst he’s going to do is spit in your soup. If the guy putting the rocket together is pissed…
@wr:
Now that explains why Wile E Coyote could never catch The Road Runner.
@wr:
I’m reminded of of a tweet I saw once to the effect of “Everyone said Elon was a genius at designing rockets and I didn’t know anything about rockets so I figured he must be a genius, and then everyone said Elon was a genius at designing electric cars and I didn’t know anything about electric cars so I figured he must be a genius, but then he bought Twitter and and I DO know a lot about web development and I don’t think I’ll ever get in a Tesla car or a SpaceX rocket now”
@Bill Jempty:..Now that explains why Wile E Coyote could never catch The Road Runner.
There are Laws and rules (many if not all of which have been broken)
1. “The Road Runner cannot harm the Coyote except by going ‘Beep-Beep!’” This only applies to direct harm, however, the Road Runner is able to indirectly harm Wile E. One of the most common instances of indirect harm was done with a startling “Beep-Beep” that ends up either sending Wile E. off a cliff or up in the air and through a rock above him. Rule 1 was broken twice, once in Clippety Clobbered when the Road Runner drops a boulder on the coyote after painting it with “invisible paint,” and again in the episode ‘Out and Out Rout’ when the Road Runner runs over the Coyote with a steam roller.
3. “The Coyote could stop anytime — if he were not a fanatic. (Repeat: ‘A fanatic is one who redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim.’ — George Santayana).”
And 7 other rules.
One of the perks that my dad got when he worked at Eastman Kodak in the ’50s when I was in grade school was the Christmas party in a large movie theatre inside the Kodak Office in Rochester, New York. On a Saturday in December employees were invited to bring the kids to view a good hour or so of cartoons including the Road Runner and Bugs Bunny and the gang after which we went to the company cafeteria where the food line was loaded with candy of all kinds for us to take home.
@Kathy:
For situations like that, if you cannot find an option to disable something, it *may* be possible to accomplish the task through a command in powershell.
Speaking of options that seem as if they should be in an obvious place: making a window always on top. I searched high and low. Wasn’t an option on the window itself. I looked through a few different settings menus, thinking that maybe it needed to be enabled. I found that odd, but okay.
Still.
Nothing.
I google it. It turns out, you have to download an MS package of tools called PowerToys. Why the hell isn’t that standard?
@Stormy Dragon: You know, “genius” is way overused. It is highly ambiguous. What Musk is, is a visionary. And also a raging anti-Semite. I don’t think I need to explain the latter, but the former probably will have you scoffing. You should not scoff, in my opinion.
What do I mean by “visionary” though? He is technically savvy enough to look at a bunch of pieces (technologically speaking) and figure out that X can be done with it. And then, as a guy with a lot of money, and I do mean a LOT of money, he decided, “well, let’s do X”. X can be “electric car that’s cool and people want” or “Launch platform that is reusable and hence much, much cheaper”.
He had a plan for X, maybe he still has one. He’s always been kind of a terrible boss, and what has kept his employees going is the vision, which is usually a very, very good one. Both of those ideas – the electric car that’s cool and people want, and the reusable launch platform – are net positive on society. It’s probably time for Musk to step away from both of them since they are past the stage where they need a visionary. This is a common Silicon Valley story.
I submit that both these things have had a net positive benefit for Musk. His vision for X is so bad because he fundamentally doesn’t understand people, and has operated from so much privilege (of which he is profoundly unaware) that he can’t relate to actual problems.
Neither electric cars or launch platforms need to engage with human psyche’s much. And what Musk thinks is cool in a car isn’t that different from anybody else. The rest of the automakers are still dragging their feet, but at the same time Musk’s name is now a detractor to Tesla, who is really feeling it in their sales.
Please don’t frame me as “defending Musk”. That’s a very binary statement, and I’m trying to do a non-binary thing. I speak up because the logic of “Twitter is bad, therefore SpaceX and Tesla must be bad” is garbage. I’m disappointed that you repeated it.
@Kurtz:
It told me itself to open the taskbar options, and select not to have Autopilot active.
But I just wanted it gone from the taskbar.
@wr:
Where are you going to find that company, particularly in aerospace? (Asks the guy who grew up in Seattle and went to a church founded by William Boeing? We had about 20 or 30 guys in the congregation employed by Boeing during my teen years.)
@Jay L Gischer:
It’s amusing that folks who understand that people in the humanistic arts or sciences cannot be expected to build rockets, often don’t get that people who can build rockets should not be expected to know how to deal with humans. If Musk were as smart as he thinks he is, he should have known better. It’s the arrogance of the STEMies who imagine themselves uniquely competent to deal with complex systems, but forget that the most complex system we know of is the human brain.
@Kurtz:
An interesting example of how jargon works. The above statement would have been as lucid and meaningful for me if it had been written in Mandarin Chinese or Minbari, yet it’s possible that a “plain English” version would be no more lucid, merely orders of magnitude longer. It’s important to remember that jargon isn’t always about obfuscation, but is always about sharing common vocabulary.
ETA: Power Toys isn’t standard because the wouldn’t be able to rent them to you a year at a time if they were standard.
Also, yet another example of what causes me to click “not quite yet” on my offers of a “free” upgrade to Win 11.
@Jay L Gischer:
The Cybertruck would disagree with you.
And a combination salesman/spokesmodel. And general White Supremacist rather than simply an antisemite. And, as you note later on, a shitty boss.
And, by the way, this description also works for Trump.
The salesman/spokesmodel bit is really important, because it’s a key part of whatever he’s involved in — a fan base that believes it is better simply because he is attached to it.
(Meanwhile the Tesla is an often-stylish, mediocre car with questionable build quality and some dubious design decisions, but which demonstrated that an electric car doesn’t have to be a golf cart)
Anyway, I’m glad he can’t run for president. He has a lot of the same charm, and could win it otherwise.
@Michael Reynolds:
It’s that “should have known better” that makes me question the rockets and the cars — he clearly doesn’t listen to those who do know better, and even if he has great ideas 80% of the time with the things he (allegedly) knows about, he’s forcing shitty ideas about 20% of the time.
I reject @Jay L Gischer’s claim that the logic of “Twitter is bad, therefore SpaceX and Tesla must be bad” is garbage. Mx. Dragon may be making a few leaps, but they’re not unlikely leaps.
(Plus, we’ve seen enough “Tesla Autopilot goes rogue” incidents to see that it’s pushing a tech vision of Musk’s that isn’t there yet. Reasonable to assume SpaceX has similar problems)
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
In between the FDR and Reagan administrations.
@Jay L Gischer: @wr:
After we sold my wife’s BMW Cabriolet, this is the actual conversation we had.
Wife: I really want an electric car. I like your Leaf, but I want something with more range.
Me: Okay. Which one are you thinking about?
Wife: Pretty much anything except a Tesla. Not giving any money to that racist, anti-Semitic douche-bag.
We purchased the Kia Niro, the EV, not the hybrid. Loving it so far.
@Kathy: Not from my recollection of the time. Boeing Aircraft’s employment practice was to hire draftspeople and engineers by the hundreds and lay them off at the ends of projects by the thousands. After the SST layoff, unemployment in Seattle went so high that someone bought billboards asking “…the last person leaving Seattle (to) please turn off the lights.”
My daughter and her friends all dislike Musk but they think he got one big thing correct. When a lot of people were investing in bits he decided to invest in atoms. He did well by that decision. When he did decide to do bits it has not gone well for him.
Steve
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Nah, Power Toys is free. You can even get it from GitHub
@Michael Reynolds:
Musk isn’t in STEM. He’s a finance bro who likes to pretend he’s an engineer. His only real talent is buying things and taking credit for the work of people much smarter than him but who weren’t born into fortunes.
@Stormy Dragon:
If Musk likes to pretend he’s an engineer, he’ll take on the (worst) qualities of one. The poseurs are often worse than the real thing.
@CSK: I suspect Musk is a bit like the guy who made the Titanic sub. He gathers together some engineers, gives them an all but unlimited budget and tells them what he wants done…then fires the ones who say “There are unsolvable problems”. Only the ones who merely say “There are problems” get to stay. He then orders launches even with those problems. Creates a culture of risk-taking. Gotta get to Mars…there HAS to be a way, cuz I got billion$$.
@CSK:
I know, but as a for real software engineer, business people who pretend to be STEM people are one of my beserk buttons =3
OMG! If they can get Eric Adams, they can get you too!
@Kurtz: Oh. In that case, I don’t know why either.
@Kathy: Then the secret is to become so small that they don’t notice you or so ubiquitous that they no longer pay any attention.