我实在没有说过这样一句话

we're a few years at most from it being common knowledge that captchas don't work. and when captchas don't work, what do you do? add ID verification? make people pay? elaborate behavioral analysis that flags new human users as robots 20% of the time and nobody notices?

tbh sites have been using "give us a persistent full-service cell phone number linked to a reputable major provider from the same area you're logging in from" as their captchas for ages now, so that will probably just get worse. people don't really care about whether someone is human or not, they care about volume, and so onerous and costly barriers to entry are ideal so long as you can avoid getting personally blamed for them

I think people have a persistent and mistaken view that the part of captchas that you interact with (e.g., image identification or whatever) is actually all that important to the captcha system. There's a reason that Google provided a "click this checkbox" version of recaptcha.

I'm thinking about how, okay. There's this strain of utopian futurism descended from liberal modernism, yeah? It's pro-capitalist in the sense that it views corporations and entrepreneurs as the engine of improvements valued by society. And corporations aim to evoke that when concocting their own visions of a futurist utopia, because it's obviously a flattering paradigm, but they can't quite do it, because the liberal-modernist utopianism ultimately still sees micro-scale actors as oxen pulling society's plough, and that is not something they can countenance in their own utopia. And so when a corporation paints a rosy picture of the future it will bring about, it always depicts itself as hegemonic, even when appealing to an audience that values its freedom of choice.

In consumer-facing depictions this is usually latent, just depicting a world where (for example) everyone drinks Coke and loves it obsessively and no one ever drinks a soft drink other than Coke. Internally and toward investors, these visions can be more overtly monopolistic, but even then, they often envision an irrationally unchallenged dominance -- a world where no one would ever dream of going without the company's products, and their competitors could never make anything that compares, and all this without the perpetual rat race that real companies face in trying to outrun their patents' expiry dates. 3M doesn't do this Jetsons stuff much, it's much more "look at all this great stuff we did in the past, here's what we've got cooking this year." But then, 3M is in Minnesota and the World of Tomorrow guys are all in California or at least Seattle, and that is not necessarily explanatory but it is, at least, symbolically resonant, yeah?

(For whatever reason, Facebook was always especially bad about this. Even when faced with mainstream skepticism, their pitches had a way of veering off into "after our inevitable ascent to the throne of all creation we will rule over a thousand years of peace on Earth", which is one of the reasons they were ahead of the pack in being seen as cartoon villains. Don't say that part out loud!)

Anyway, people tend to overestimate the durability of corporate dominance, but even still I think this type of thing was usually viewed as an odd self-indulgence of the corporate mindset, a kind of fairy curse pitiably undermining their ability to compel the hearts of the public. But it feels less like a joke nowadays, because there's been an extroardinary degree of consolidation, and a vibe shift where monopoly potential is touted over and above innovation as the engine of profitability. There is a greatly reduced faith in the ability of either the market or the government to assure a level of competition which keeps the plough moving, and whether that's justified or not, this whole "in the glorious dawning age we will be to economics what ATP is to biology, thanks to our network effects and first-mover advantage" schtick is not really helping.

I think something weird happened where the zero-interest post-GFC apocalypse world restructured the upper half of the economy around a subconscious belief in the TRPF, so everyone was chasing miracles that seemed transformatively unlike the normal explanations for profitability; valuations inflated to levels that would only make sense if all that were justified, and now it's a huge fraction of the paper value of the US economy. When the money seems to think that eventually one of these companies is going to become the emperor of the universe, and the blue chips already seem to have more control over the government than it does over them, it becomes easier to feel threatened by all those airy fables about better living through world domination.

Ezra Klein's "Abundance Agenda" as I understand it is less about being something you campaign on to win but something that you do to win, it's not "voters really like these ideas"(we are all deeply cynical and doubting) but "voters would be less insane if they could afford housing and healthcare." I feel it is becoming a campaign message for dems regardless though.

It seems most relevant to governance at a state and municipal level. I'm partly saying that because a bunch of it is just land use and permitting reform, but also because it's a huge drag on dems at a national level that many dem-run states and cities have a well-deserved reputation of being run like absolute crap.

~ Popular Mechanics, April 1930

The party's a flop until Bob and his harmonica show up. Be like Bob

Saw just the top of this in my feed, and I thought it was an absurdist parody of the Sealion comic. Bob shows up mid dinner conversation and just starts shredding some face melting blues, and the people are like "You're in my house Bob, and boy is that swell!".

the sociological posture to interesting philosophical questions is so damn annoying. "art is what they put in art galleries, math is what mathematicians do". an active turning-away from an interesting question, towards a boring non-answer. people should throw tomatoes at guys who say this

@youzicha said:

i think you're confusing "true" with "weak" (in the math sense). this sociological claim is very *weak*, it tells us very little. that makes it easier for it to be true than other, stronger claims. and i agree, those statements are true! art museums are full of art, mathematicans are doing math. but this isnt very informative! and i think we can and should go farther! we should, yknow, try to prove difficult theorems, so to speak

@youzicha said:

this is an allowed usage of the word "mean", a linguist's definition. but i think there's another more useful meaning of the word "mean" in this context. back to the hat example in another branch: when people refer to a "hat", they mean something! the definition of the word "hat" could change over time, such that the word starts to mean something else, and then it will mean that. but the IDEA that people had, what they meant, in the past, by that word, well. we can ask what they meant by that! what characterized that meaning, were they describing a natural category, and if they were, what were the properties of that category? now for hats that's not such an interesting question. but for art, we can say "what do we mean when we talk about art", "why does this category of unlike things seem natural to us", "what are the properties of said category".

like...my point is that when we group unlike things together as "art", we are making a fact claim about the world! that these things have some commonality. and yet the nature of that commonality is not obvious. and i think that fact claim is true, i think this category is a result of perceiving something actual! and we can elaborate and clarify that perception

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but it kind of sounds like you're treating "art" as corresponding to a latent definition which defines the criteria that make something art? As far as I can tell very few intuitive categories work this way; the model by which people categorize things seems to be much more about prototypes and "family resemblances", and in the case of "art" I'm not even sure there's any stable single "centre", since people are constantly challenging the definition and yanking around the archetypal idea of what art is.

This is still saying something -- it is a meaningful statement, when made sincerely! -- but it's saying something vague and diffuse, which can't be compressed into a concise "closed form", and the nature of this type of categorization is that the boundaries are fluid -- the binary distinction between "in" and "out" is somewhat arbitrary, either non-factual or minimally-factual, because you're dealing with something more like a continuous and multidimensional measure of proximity.

In practice, of course, you need to circumscribe things a bit more than this to have a theory of art, just as you do for a theory of games, and perhaps in the context of that theory you simply define "art" to mean some subset of the category as broadly construed. That's fine, as long as you're doing it to put a handle on your theory rather than to make some kind of prescriptive point about how other people use language. But this is ultimately just synecdoche, using a common word to talk about a referent that lacks a conventional name; you can't trace it back outward to learn more about the whole of "art".

I think there's a useful version of this in foreign language learning / teaching.

It is routinely the case that you are faced with the question, "What does word 'X' mean? How is its usage different from word 'Y'?" (It is perhaps the most common question to ask or be asked.)

There isn't, like, an essence to a word in some deep sense. Words don't work like that, either diachronically or synchronically. But for any given speaker of the language at any given point in time, they do have some specific definition of a word, even if it's a bit messy and not universally shared among speakers of the language.

And, well, you need some definition of a word to get by as a language learner, and if you could learn some particular native speaker's definition, even if it's mildly idiosyncratic, that would be pretty damn useful. Certainly more so than just winging it based on a dictionary. Once you have a footing from some concrete definition, you can begin to notice variation between speakers (or ongoing language change).

Another thing to note: excavating these definitions is hard! Speakers usually don't have a particularly clear idea of how they distinguish a word from similar words, and they have to empirically work through some examples, you know, test some ideas against their intuition, in order to formulate something worth sharing with a second language learner. And this is in the best case! There are of course plenty of unreflective prescriptivists who fail to even notice how they use the language themselves!

So, while I'm not sure "art" is a particularly useful concept to bring this to bear on--it's one of the most consciously contested categories you could think of--, I think it's actually pretty useful to spend time doing this sort of conceptual archaeology, digging up concepts you don't reflect on very much, turning them over, looking at them from different angles, and trying to figure out how to say something true and useful about them to someone who'd like to take them for a spin.