glasshalftrue

Mozilla, in its finite wisdom, embedded LLM bots into recent versions of Firefox for the vitally-important purpose of… naming tab groups. Now, some users are noticing CPU and power usage spikes caused by a background process called Inference.

Ugh. Reminder again for Firefox users to visit your about:config page, search for the browser.ml.chat.enabled key, and set that to false:

If yours says true then double-click it until it reads false.

[Context for normies: "Abundance" is a recent book written by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson which argues that US liberalism requires a renewed focus on the ability to build things effectively (i.e. housing, infrastructure, clean energy, etc.) It has sparked widespread debate and discussion in policy circles.]

To be honest, I've been avoiding Abundance discourse for a while for at least four different reasons. First, I was so overexposed to the discourse surrounding it around the time of its release that it frankly annoyed me into trying to ignore it. Second, I haven't read the book and only know about it through secondary sources (a few book reviews from some favorite analysts of mine, discussions online, etc.). Third, an Abundance movement quickly formed around the book that seemed more interested in backing the moderate establishment wing in intra-Democratic party fights than they were in the book itself (i.e. Ritchie Torres, Matt Yglesias, etc.) Fourth, I watched as the discussion around the book/movement hardened into pro- and anti- camps that seemed only tangentially related to the book's arguments, which made the discourse even worse.

With all of that said, I have mixed feelings about the "Abundance agenda." I think that it contains quite a few good policy ideas, but that it errs in trying to combine those ideas into a cohesive "agenda" or "movement."

On substance, I actually agree with quite a few of the Abundance positions. It is a serious problem that building, repairing, and upgrading things is far slower and costlier in the US than it is in most other developed countries. The US housing crisis can be partially addressed by eliminating exclusionary zoning laws and embracing greater urban density. NIMBYism and an excess of veto points in our permitting processes do often block the development of projects that genuinely serve the public good. Furthermore, I think that scarcity is one of the biggest driving forces of reactionary ideology, and that a project which aims to meet people’s needs “in abundance” is worthwhile for turning people away from zero-sum thinking. Any leftist political project that wants to bring about transformative change in the US will inevitably have to address these issues.

As far as I can tell, much of the policy talk in Abundance is essentially pointing out examples of "regressive regulation," regulatory policies that serve to benefit status quo powers in a way which ultimately harms the least-powerful. There are definitely policies like this, I could name a bunch. But they are not so common as to serve as the basis for a generalized political movement, particularly in comparison to the more progressive frames of analysis which directly confront the sources of power that impede progress. I am extremely skeptical of those who see deregulation as a key to fixing everything, or even as a policy approach that is frequently desirable.

Most of our problems cannot be addressed by eliminating regressive regulations, and even in the policy areas where these regressive regulations do exist, eliminating them would not even come close to fully addressing the issues at hand. Loosening zoning rules is one ingredient in a recipe to fix the housing crisis, but other ingredients include a massive expansion of public housing and cooperative housing, a housing first campaign to end homelessness, renter and homeowner protections against landlords and mortgage companies, progressive tax reform, expanded low-income housing supports, and many, many other policies. While some of the left-most members of the Abundance movement (shoutout Paul E. Williams) would agree with all of these goals, I get the feeling that most would not.

Many of the people attracted to the Abundance movement seem to be people who are excited about deregulation in general, a collection of neoliberals, libertarians, and others who think that mass deregulation can serve as a blanket solution for all of our problems. While the Abundance book seems to be focused on identifying specific policy areas where current regulations are counterproductive, it has been embraced by a movement that sees this as the beachhead in a war against all modern progressivism, Cato Institute and 🌐 emoji-types who see this as a way to push the Democratic Party towards mass deregulation, shrinking the public sector, anti-labor policies, and "market-oriented" approaches to all of our problems. This is a view which I am strongly opposed to.

"It was funny tho and anyway he's a white man so who cares" (actual real claim I've heard multiple times): arsehole, and almost always a radfem

"He's evil actually because of [random incorrect rumour]/he's creepy/etc. so it's okay": arsehole

"He should've expected to be horribly bullied and had his family threatened because that was just The Culture": arsehole (do you defend toxic gamers sending racial harassment and rape threats too, or is only Tumblr toxic 'culture' sacred?)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56143249-tumblr-porn

Now if you’re wondering why I felt the sudden need to dredge up this post from 2022, it’s because of a couple other posts I won’t go into now that reminded me of it.

This post is a prime example of how casually and insidiously we can re-write history. When the OP made this post so many people in the notes nodded along, acting as though it were an obvious, incontrovertible truth that Tumblr in the late aughts/early ‘10s was a wholesome safe space for children, and it was therefore normal and natural in the tumblr culture of that time to treat adults as unwelcome interlopers.

But that’s not an obvious, incontrovertible truth.

It’s a complete rewriting of history.

It’s a brazen, boldfaced lie.

Or it would be, if I thought OP were lying intentionally. But actually I don’t thing they were. I think this might actually be how OP (mis)remembers tumblr. OP painted a pastel colored soft focus filter over their childhood memories without even realizing that’s what they were doing. And it’s fine if the way you like to remember something is different from the way it actually happened. But it stops being fine when you start using your fabricated whitewashed sanitized memories as “evidence” when crafting an argument, thinking no one will bother to fact check you.

I’m bothering.

And john green was clearly trying to connect with the teens here, because they were the intended audience of his fucking novels. he didn’t come here to hang out with adult sex workers

you should not embrace your heritage actually.

see yourself as an individual who is equally part of all of humanity. ignore the accident of who turned out to be your ancestors as an irrelevant footnote in your causal history. interact with others as themselves and not as if you both are a tendril protruding from the inhuman horror that is your notion of 'heritage'.

I'm sure some people get really into the cultures of their ancestors for benign reasons. I know people get into those things because someone else decided that who their ancestors are made them worse, and they want to put the lie to that, and that's an understandable impulse.

I also know some people get into that sort of thing and then start thinking who their ancestors are makes them better, or conceptualising ethnicities as first-class moral actors rather than abstract groups of individuals, or deciding that if someone who shares a heritage with Alice did a bad thing to someone who shares a heritage to you, this is more-or-less the same thing as Alice doing a bad thing to you.

if you're going to do it, walk into with your eyes open. consumer advisory: if you make 'who your ancestors were' a big part of your identity you are stepping close to a worldview which reduces people to their ancestry, be careful you don't fall in because that worldview is both evil and stupid.

You always knew it happened! You are an adult! You know horrific accidents happen, innocent people are hurt, fawns die in the woods without witnesses! But as soon as it’s not “somebody” and it’s you, you stop believing in a loving God?

If you say “I can’t reconcile all the bad things that happen on Earth with a God who is good” I get it.

If you say “I can reconcile all the bad things that happen on Earth with a God who is good” I get it.

But YOU are virtuous* and god-fearing, YOU have done nothing wrong*. In a world with a loving god, YOU are safe.

And that's what breaks it.