Software Architect (deprecated: use Staff Engineer), Casual Gamer ⌨️🖱️+🎮️, Sci-Fi & Fantasy 📚️🎥️
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| Site | https://zimzat.com |
It _feels_ like we were so close to moving the needle away from a dependency on slavery (servitude, wage slavery, ...) toward a more equitable society, and then LLMs exposed how few people actually care. It doesn't matter what the personal, economical, or ecological harm is as long as _someone else_ is the one to pay the cost (for now).
I know both points are pretty far from the whole truth, even as generalizations, so I will just hold the line, for myself, and hope things get better.
Goodhart's Law [^3]: Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.
Lucas Critique [^4]: It is naive to try to predict the effects of a change in economic policy entirely on the basis of relationships observed in historical data, especially highly aggregated historical data.
The Lucas Critique is new to me but embodies the grain of salt necessary when "Economists say"
[^3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
[^4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucas_critique
December 2023: "The consumer sentiment index says things are really bad but everything else says it's fine; oh well, the index must be wrong 🤷" [^1]
November 2025: "Actually, turns out lower income folks are spending relatively less while middle and upper income folks are spending more. Oops 😳" [^2]
I remember listening to the 2023 episode and being frustrated that they were completely blanking on their later realization.
[^1]: https://www.npr.org/2023/12/01/1197955840/planet-money-consumer-sentiment
[^2]: https://www.npr.org/2025/11/21/nx-s1-5616629/consumer-sentiment-spending-wealth-gap
Have you heard the advice to "manage up"?
Maybe it sounds empowering, I've mostly heard it in the context of someone trying to grow their career, but the more I think about it the more it sounds like an implicit acknowledgement that management doesn't know how to do its job. You're not a manager, why should you have to manage your boss? That's literally their job and you're expected to do your job and theirs? 😒
We gotta stop promoting folks to managers and then not training them. Or anyone.
A lot of people are correctly noting the galling hypocrisy of US conservatives who spent decades fetishizing gun rights and specifically the insurrectionary theory of the 2nd amendment suddenly justifying a man’s public, summary execution on the grounds that he was (legally, non-threateningly) armed when he encountered police.
And I get it. They are hypocrites. The hypocrisy is galling. I get it.
But I am begging you to move rapidly past this realization to a place where you never, ever take this people seriously for even the tiniest moment. Everything they say, every single thing, is said instrumentally to achieve their goal of power in that particular moment. There are no principles. They will not feel shame when caught in the discrepancy. Do not waste time on it, do not entertain it, do not debate it, do not lend it credence as an idea that warrants a serious and considered rebuttal.
Do not take them seriously ever again.
So... I took a glance further down the rabbit hole of getting started with GrapheneOS and in particular "degoogle"... and I'm ready to run screaming from the entire thing.
Some of the presenters have that "fear for your life" salesman vibes. The links to cryptocurrency are concerning. Then I noticed some of them are rubbing elbows with, or are, fascists and realized it's the atheist alt-right pipeline all over again: Everyone is out to get you and only these guys can help you. 🤦
I needed a new phone so I decided to try the #GrapheneOS thing. The install went smoothly enough.
Now the question is: How to I migrate my old phone to the new one? How do I install all my existing apps and configs? *crickets*
"Manually"? "[Using] encrypted methods or direct connections"? What?
This is why there will never be a "Year of the Linux Desktop". The FOSS doesn't matter if it's this hard to use.
I could have hit "Transfer from existing device" on the stock OS and been done already.
I stumbled across a YouTube channel that had accidentally linked a video of their appeal for being demonetized for using inauthentic content.
In less than five minutes they showed how they used ChatGPT, Midjourney, Illustrator, and a text-to-speech tool to create 45+ minute clips of completely fabricated stories.
Their claim was that the effort of feeding a prompt and copy-pasting between the services made it authentic content.
🤦
HeavenlyPossum