Ants making a smart maneuver

This isn't just good leaflet copy, this is why politics matters and different parties aren't all "just the same". Here's a collection of similarly devastating graphs 🧵 (1/11)

This is a pretty cool image. x.com/deepfates/status/17010…

US Congress members by age, %

One aspect of historical life that most misunderstand is the degree to which things could just... happen, without any possibility of averting them. We live in an administrative state, with Lovecraftian levels of bureaucracy dedicated to dealing with every possible occurrence. This hasn't always been the case. For example, take it back a few centuries and people could just... walk into your village with swords and say you're now their slave. What are you going to do, call the police? The men of the village *are* the police, and if they're overpowered there's no recourse. For women, being taken as a war bride was a non-zero possibility in life. That was just a possibility you had to live with. Even more recently (18th, 19th centuries) sailors could be "recruited" by press gangs. Kidnapped, often from a tavern or similar, and forcibly interred in the Navy. That's just your life now. Got too drunk and woke up on the HMS Victory as a deckhand. There are dozens more examples. This sort of randomness is a more primordial way of life, one that we've done our best to excise from modern society. But in reality, it is still the base form of life - we just do our best to work around it, to make such actions undesirable in the long run. However, this is a double-edged sword. While you're unlikely to be pressed into military service or taken as plunder... alienation from such risks creates a false sense of control. A sort of false belief that because these things are disincentivized, they can't happen. After a lifetime exposed to such an environment, you begin to believe that everything in your life is under your control, that nothing can happen without your approval. This manifests as anxiety, neuroticism, fear of loss of control. At the same time, it disincentivizes action in the moment; everything should be planned long-term, played prudently and slowly. Because everything becomes a long-term game, we build an unfamiliarity with intense, life-changing situations. Emergencies, acts of violence. People freeze up, think "this can't be happening"... "this isn't allowed to happen." Very dangerous, and distinctly modern, way of thinking.

This painting has no brush strokes — it is made from over 2,000,000 individual dots of colour. And though this may look like nothing more than a sunny afternoon in Paris, it has a much darker hidden meaning...

Some quotes about the National Minimum Wage from 1997 and earlier: Tory Philip Hammond told parliament; “I predict that, at the margins, the result of minimum wage legislation, set at any effective level, will be to drive some small businesses into the black economy.”

1960s: "COBOL will let non-programmers make the software!" 1980s: "4GLs will let non-programmers make the software!" 2000s: "UML will let non-programmers make the software!" 2020s: "AI will let non-programmers make the software!"

“It’s likely that we are currently living in the lag – a delay between Wile E Coyote running off the cliff & gravity starting to take effect.” With many in the property industry “trying to convince themselves & everyone else that we haven’t run out of rd” bit.ly/3XZZXVN

My 2023 advice for all young engineers: Respect a running system. There are reasons it works that way, most of which will be uncovered when you try to replace it. Make incremental changes, don't burn the building down. No one way doors. Never be unable to rollback.

If I had ten dollars for every team who told me they chose RDBMS because that is what their developers know how to use I might have a million dollars by now. If I had that for every DBA who agreed I would still be waiting for my first hundred.

The trouble is that the real world is not behaving like this right now. We actually have inflation despite most households (excepting those of economic policymakers, who are doing just fine right now) not having the means to pay their bills.

DUDE WTF engraved.blog/building-a-vir…

OK so @OpenAI's new #ChatGPT can basically just generate #AIart prompts. I asked a one-line question, and typed the answers verbatim straight into MidJourney and boom. Times are getting weird...🤯

Sometimes people who have limited experience in #NoSQL try to tell me I am wrong. Most of Amazon's retail infrastructure runs on some variation of the #NoSQL design patterns invented by my team. #ProbablyNotWrong

Elon is just demanding random people on his website tell him how it works now

The early crypto skeptics deserve more credit. Not only did they call all of this, they did so in the face of constant shaming and harrassment. (Not to mention everyone pointing to the increasing value of their crypto wallets as evidence that they were wrong.)

This @JamesSmithRF chart spells out the unmitigated disaster of the last 15 years