Author: polistra
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Should have kept it
Interesting trivium in the latest Post Office podcast. When Morse made his first official trial, What hath God wrought, he was working for the Post Office. Makes sense. The PO was meant to supervise national communications infrastructure. It already supervised national roads, some navigable rivers, and some coastal waterways. Many Euro countries continued the setup,…
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More homeless arsonists
One major arsonist was caught two weeks ago. Another homeless arsonist was caught and jailed Saturday, a female who was working on the east side. She had all the makings for fires in her shoulder bag. Kindling, hair spray, matches. She was arrested last year for the same crime in the same place, but of…
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In one sentence
Seen on substack. Allegedly a Chinese saying. Extremely wise whether it is or not! Only kids argue over right and wrong. Adults see the nuance. One plays to win. The other plays to understand. How to deal with a psychopath. When your opponent changes all the rules all the time solely to WIN every single…
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Oddity
Just noticed an odd contradiction. The way we learn math in school is NOT the way math is really done in business. We learned each addition as a single process with a single answer. 3 + 4 = 7 Real math by mechanical processes, from the abacus to the Addiator to adding machines to cash…
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Good!
The agency that runs PBS and NPR is closing down. GOOD. PBS and NPR lost their public purpose 50 years ago. PBS switched from education to entertainment. NPR switched from unbiased to pure DNC. Government is supposed to serve ALL the people, not just the members of one party or one elite class. Education was…
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Direct dial
Via Verge: Reddit is trying to build a direct access search engine, making itself an alternative to Google. The management noticed that people search Reddit via Google when they want to find human discussion of a topic instead of AI or carefully filtered and edited content. I’ve done it often. You need to be aware…
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Dream about intellectual humility
Unusual dream this morning about intellectual humility. In the dream I had a conversation with Prevost and found him to be impressive. Message is clear! At first I found him impressive, then immediately dismissed him when he went along with Gaia. I should be less perfectionist, recognize a leader who is mostly doing the RIGHT…
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Goddamnit.
I’m way past tired of partisan mindless fucks. If you can’t do any better than pasting DNC talking points or RNC talking points or Activist Group A talking points or Activist Group B talking points or the same old misquotes from the same old Ben Franklin and CS Lewis and GK Chesterton, GO AWAY AND…
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Misses part of the history
Interesting article about Craigslist and its effect on newspapers. Craigslist is generally credited for taking the important classified ad business from papers. The article gives an insight into the founding principles of Craigslist. But the article misses the earlier part of the decline. Craiglist was simply an online replacement for free Shopper’s Edge and similar…
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Must be end of the month
How do you know it’s the end of a month? Aside from the increase in drug overdoses when the EBT cards are issued, the most reliable online signal is Substack screwing up its UI. Normally they mess with the CSS formatting so the page looks random and impossible to read. This time they left the…
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Real opposition?
If it’s real, this could be the first real crackdown on the Tech Tyrants by the Trump admin. It’s aimed at a sneaky trick by Amazon and other America-hating corporations to get around customs and tariffs. The ‘de minimis’ exception was made a long time ago to assist ordinary tourists who wanted to bring home…
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Idiotic
Substack is now following Facebook’s idiotic practice of keeping the SAME item on top of your feed for days at a time. The SAME item is never something you want, never something you actually read, and it’s usually stupid and pointless. Newspapers didn’t follow this rule. When a story was continuous, with new events each…
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Tired of the missed point.
A long time ago I got tired of people who miss the point of AI. You simply can’t argue or worry about the qualities and actions of the MACHINE. There’s no line between ChatGPT and the endless history of predictive math. Life is infinitely full of predictive mechanisms. Most plants and animals predict daylight, moons…
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Subscriber vs advertiser
Nice example of the difference between subscriber-driven and advertiser-driven media. When a business is focused on customers, it wants FEEDBACK from the customers. Collectible Auto has been pure subscriber since 1985. They often fix a problem when enough readers dislike a new feature, or dislike the deletion of an old feature. They listen to serious…
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Trump is a normal US president.
Canadians are working together to develop a newly designed nation. They’re doing it both officially and personally. It’s a fine thing to watch. MANY countries have been forced to develop their own best skills when we blockaded them. We pulled the same nasty trick on Cuba in 1960, Persia in 1980, and Russia in 2000.…
Polistra's Mill 