Not that there's anything wrong with that.

(Legacy post: original date 21 July 2025)

I’ve been watching a lot of isekai anime lately, because I have had the ‘rona and been feeling like absolute garbage and lately whenever I start Starfield my machine powers down for unknown reasons. It doesn’t happen with any other games that I’ve found, just Starfield. I’m not thinking clearly enough to troubleshoot it, so I’ve just kind of back-burnered it for the moment so I can sit around watching the most generic anime possible.

I mean it’s not all isekai, a lot of it is actually tensei, but it’s the same basic concept except for the addition of going back to your childhood which I don’t think is a coincidence.

Really it’s all just varying amounts of childhood. We’re seeing a number of isekai with adults, lately; “Handyman Saitou” and “Middle-Aged Online Shopper” come to mind, and “Realist Hero” was a university student rather than a high schooler. I haven’t watched “Shield Hero” in quite some time, but I think he was also uni-level rather than high school. Typically an isekai protagonist is high school age, or is regressed to high school age in the world transfer, and the latest trend toward tensei or “reincarnation” storylines is just regressing further to infancy or early childhood.

The core desire in these stories appears to be going back and trying again. We don’t really get to do that, as a general rule. You enter a situation and you make your decisions and then time moves on and you get the results you get. Usually, we don’t make the best decisions — we can’t, since we aren’t able to see the future — and then we don’t get the best possible results. And that sticks with some people. They get stuck, thinking about what they did “wrong” and how they could do it right “next time.”

Of course, you rarely get a next time, and even if you do… you’re still unable to see the future. Existence, by nature, isn’t deterministic. So even if you make the decision that would have been “right” the last time, you don’t have any guarantee it will be right this time. We’re not good at handling that, as a species.

We don’t like things to be very different. We want them to be the same. But it’s little differences that make the difference. You write a book about a vampire creeping on a high school girl, nobody is interested. You make the vampire go to high school himself, and everybody goes wild for it. You recognise that while an adult reader is going to go “why the fuck would anyone want to go to high school forever,” a high schooler is not going to question it because high school is just what you do. If you are a high schooler you go to high school. If you’re made into a vampire at high school age, you just go to high school forever, that’s how it works.

It doesn’t make any sense, but what the fuck does at that age?

I think a lot of people get into their mid to late thirties and realise they were supposed to do something in their career, but they didn’t do it because they didn’t know what it was. So they wish they could go back and try again.

And a lot of people in their first job realise they were supposed to do something in university, but they didn’t do it because they didn’t know what it was. People in university realise they were supposed to do something in high school. People in high school realise they were supposed to do something in middle school. They should have done something in grade school. Something as a child. Something as an infant.

I think a lot of us are not where we want to be, and we really want to go back to where we went wrong and like… not fuck it up.

But there is no one place we went wrong. There is no one place we fucked up. We didn’t make one wrong turn, we made dozens of them. Hundreds. Thousands. And backing up to where we made the first one won’t magically stop us from making the rest of them.

The second major element of an isekai or tensei storyline is often just glossed over. You don’t just back up to where you were, so you can make the right turns now. You also get some sort of amazing, incredible power that makes everything easy for you. You just get it handed to you.

In show after show after show, the reincarnated protagonist is born to a wealthy noble family that provides him with a life of absurd luxury. The summoned isekai protagonist frequently arrives in a royal court and is hailed as the hero of legend. Even when he doesn’t, he rapidly discovers he’s immensely overpowered — usually with magical powers far beyond the norm, sometimes of a variety nobody else has seen in this world.

It’s very much in the vein of “and as long as I’m dreaming, I’d like a pony.” Deep down, we know that going back won’t fix the problems, so what if… what if we went back, and we had our youth, and we were rich and had privilege and were handed every advantage and then on top of that we had magic?!

It’s a much more satisfying fantasy than… what if we tried again.

No special powers. No special privileges. Just right here, right now, with the things we already have. What if we tried again?

We mostly don’t do that, because why would we? It didn’t work last time. Why would it work this time? Why should we pick up our old dreams and dust them off and see if maybe, just maybe, we could make a go of them after all?

Much easier to make excuses. It’s too late. We’re too old. We tried that before.

But what if?

For video games, mostly, but also just in general

(Legacy post: original date 14 July 2025)

One of the things that has kind of struck me in the last few hours is that when you are composing classical music for an orchestra, you have only got these instruments and you have only got this many of them and that is what you have to work with so whatever you are going to do is going to be done with that particular sonic palette.

Also, you should probably use all of it? Like you don’t want anybody sitting there with parts that look like this.

Now, I am not delusional enough to try and compose for an orchestra, but I am smart enough to understand that you can’t play chords on a clarinet. And whenever I am doing any kind of music for something I want to sound like a particular kind of instrument — I want an epic brass section sound in the piece I’m working on now — I always go check on some things like, how is this instrument played? What is its normal range? Can it play multiple notes at once? Can it make large leaps between notes, or does it have to go up in smaller steps?

So I have been watching a bunch of YouTube videos about playing trumpets and tubas and horns and trombones, and about composing for the brass section of an orchestra, and I’ve been sort of vaguely thinking that I might not be after an orchestral sound so much as a marching band, so I am going to have to go look at that to some degree.

Now, what I have found with this piece I am working on is that it is… actually pretty good. Like, it’s catchy. It gets in my head and stays there and I like it. Which is great! That’s exactly the sort of thing I want from a video game soundtrack. And I am compelled to wonder, why? Why did this go to such a good place this time, when I am typically stuck making little two- and four-bar loops that never evolve at all?

What my music usually does is either loop forever and be boring as shit, or I do the little two- or four- bar section and then make a transition that leads into another two- or four-bar section and then that just goes on over and over so instead of one loop thirty times I have twenty loops with little transitions between them and it is just absolute chaos.

And I think what happened here is that I went okay, I want to start with something that sounds like it could be on the original NES. That shitty Ricoh 2A03 chip with only two square waves and a triangle wave and a noise channel. The triangle wave isn’t even very good, it’s got a weird slope so it’s weirdly smoothed into a sort of half-sine waveform.

Technically the 2A03 also has a fifth digital sample channel but honestly there is just not enough RAM in the NES to use it for much of anything. But because that was the initial sound I wanted, I restricted myself to the two square waves — one for bass, one for lead — and layered the triangle with noise to produce a fair approximation of a kick drum. Which was nearly inaudible so I cheated and added two chained distortion plugins to do Eddie van Halen’s “brown sound” thing with it.

Now, typically, I am not working with a simple basic stripped-down synthesiser like this one. I am almost always working with something that pretends to be a vintage analog device with fifty knobs and dials and sliders and buttons.

And because I am working with something like this… I have a whole bunch of them… my sonic palette is effectively infinite. There is so much I can do with this control panel, I can tweak parameters and fine-tune my patch for hours. Then I run out of time to work on the music, and I go “well I will do the composition part next time.”

But guess what happens next time.

That’s right! I open up the synth and go “actually I would like something that sounds a little different” and then I tweak parameters and fine-tune my patch for hours until I am out of time and this is just not going to be productive at all ever.

But working with the NES limitations, having to do the whole piece with just bass and lead and a kick drum (even if I did cheat on the kick drum), made me stop fucking around and write some damn music.

So I think what I need to do is kind of… define my orchestra. Put the band together. When I was in real bands with real musicians, each of us had our instrument we played and that was what we played. And while there’s a lot of flexibility and power in being the solo producer-musician, there’s also that paralysis where you have to choose the things that go into your music and without some kind of real-world constraint you can just spin your wheels forever.

I think I need to do that with my synth patches. Just kind of, lay out my patch library and my synth collection and decide which patches on which synths are going to be in the mix. Fit everything together so they all have roles to fill, and there’s room for each of them, and they occupy their own distinctive parts of the sonic space without stepping all over each other.

It’s like arranging a tool belt. A tool box can have everything in it, even if you hardly ever use it. But a tool belt has to be just what you’re going to use on this job, right now. And most of what you have on it is the same thing every time, the stuff you use frequently whatever you’re doing.

Anyway that’s what I’m thinking, and it’s applicable to lots of other creative stuff. Selecting your tools can make it easier to get started, which makes it easier to get shit done.

It's not the internet.

(Legacy post: original date 7 July 2025)

I saw a pair of skeets earlier today on BlueSky that I wanted to call out and talk about.

Now, first thing’s first, Kameron is not wrong! BlueSky is a microblogging platform and there is only so much you can fit in your skeet. It is overtly stupid to complain that the skeet does not contain enough nuance or has not properly qualified its arguments. The brevity is compelled by the platform. I am adding further information, here. I am fairly certain that if Kameron does not wholly agree with me, we would find substantial common ground on the matter, differing only in a few particulars.

The problem here is not the algorithm, it is that we are accustomed to an ecosystem with a couple of factors that we’ve removed. We can put these back. There’s no reason we can’t. We took them away because we were frustrated by the ecosystem, and didn’t understand why it was the way it was.

The first factor is gatekeepers. Not so long ago, you didn’t get to have a platform unless you jumped through a bunch of hoops, and you could only speak to the people who showed up and listened. If you wanted to publish your screed about, say, “the internet ecosystem” and how “it’s not the internet” — you would have to send your proposal to an editor, who would stroke their chin and make a unilateral decision about whether you could write that for their publication. Usually that decision would be “no,” and then you would send it to another editor, and so on and so forth until you and everyone else lost interest in the subject. Then you would have to throw it out and write a new one.

This ecosystem meant that if your article showed up in “Family Housekeeping and Gardens,” everybody who read that magazine could trust that the editor thought it was a good article. And after you wrote twenty or thirty articles like it, you could publish them as a book, and then you would go around on a publicity tour and get on television. To show up on television, you needed to convince editors to publish a couple dozen of your articles, and then convince a publisher to bind them all together into a book. You jumped through twenty or thirty hoops on the way to that milestone.

Today, you don’t have gatekeepers. Any jackass can come to SubStack and open an account (even if they’re a Nazi!) where they can publish whatever arbitrary bullshit they want to publish. They can even stick a price tag on it and get paid.

I see a lot of writers lamenting that once upon a time you got paid for writing articles, and… nothing is stopping you. You can get paid. The tools are out there. If you are not getting paid, it’s probably a combination of (a) you’re not asking to be paid, and (b) you’re not worth paying for.

That’s certainly what it is here; this isn’t a profit centre, this is me writing consistently on a weekly basis so I am in the habit of doing it. The part where I make it worth paying for comes later, and only then do I think about asking people to pay for it. The important part right now is the habit.

But the lack of gatekeepers means that publishing your article no longer means anything. There is no public trust or approval of authority that comes with it. It just means you wrote something, and any jackass can write something. So how do you get your article to stand out and come to people’s attention?

Well, you don’t. Enter the second change: we all collect onto a platform that takes the place of the gatekeeper, not by having a gate only certain people can go through, but by sending an endless parade of people past us in an effort to keep us from walking back out the gate. Essentially, they say “come on in, we have this thing you like!” and then once you’re inside they assault you with eight million things people who like that thing also like, for sufficiently limited definitions of “like” — mostly “will look at instead of leaving.”

We used to collect on platforms that only had specific things. You did not subscribe to the everything magazine. You subscribed to a news magazine, and a sports magazine, and a hobby magazine, and an entertainment magazine. You got Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, Guitar World, and Cracked. Each of these cost about $20 annually, so the only people reading them were people who actually cared about them, and the lion’s share of their revenue came from ads.

If you picked up a copy of Sports Illustrated and they had an article about how the political economics of intellectual property have damaged the creative output of three consecutive generations, you would probably tell the editors that this is bullshit and you don’t want to see that. But that could easily go into Guitar World to explain why modern music sucks. Now that article shows up alongside literally everything else, competing for your attention.

But the third major issue that causes our ecosystem to be… this… is that nobody wants to pay for anything anymore. Nobody wants to buy a magazine. Nobody wants to buy a newspaper. They don’t want a subscription or a paywall. They want everything to be funded by advertisers, but they also don’t want to see any ads. And the only thing worse than seeing an ad… is seeing an ad that has been specifically targeted to you and your interests by paying attention to what you like and want. What about your privacy?!

So instead, the one platform you want to use, so you don’t have to go different places to see different things… has to show you ads for whatever garbage they can, without regard to what you want or like, just at random. And that makes ads less and less useful, because you don’t know anything about the person looking at them, and you’re not allowed to know anything about them. So advertisers pay less and less money, and platforms need to run more and more ads, and literally nobody likes any of this.

The core of the problem is that “one size fits all” is “one size fits none” and anything free is worth the price. If we want to have what we used to have — authoritative sources that aren’t stupid and wrong, that pay real money to actual creators, and aren’t absolutely flooded with garbage ads for random shit — we have to pay for it, and we have to curate a collection of multiple sources. That is it. That is all.

We did, in fact, used to have one place where we got all our shit. It was our chair, where we sat when we read the magazines next to it. The modern equivalent would be our computer, with a few bookmarks. We tried to solve this with RSS and nobody wanted to do the work of (checks notes) telling the RSS aggregator what feeds they wanted.

The social media bullshit landscape is not here because corporations are evil and greedy. It’s here because this is what we asked for.

If you want something else, you have to ask for it. Not just out loud, but with actions. With habits. With cash. You pay for what you get. Pay nothing, get nothing.

Or, why everything free sucks

(Legacy post: original date 30 June 2025)

When you are receiving a product or service from some provider, somebody has to pay the provider. There are two choices there.

In either case, what’s being provided is being provided to you, and you’re getting what the provider is providing. The provider has to provide something you want, or you won’t be there at all. But if someone else is paying them, to provide what they want, it is necessarily something you don’t want.

If you did want it, the person paying the provider could instead just provide it for free. Because you want it, and it’s free, you would go get it. A YouTube channel is a great example. If you want to watch someone’s videos, they can simply upload them to YouTube and you will watch them.

But instead, they will upload the video to YouTube and pay YouTube to make you watch them. They don’t have to do this if you want to watch the video. They only have to do this when you don’t want to watch the video.

When they have a video you wouldn’t watch even if they paid you.

Lots of people have ad blockers now. It’s not as many as they want you to believe - about 35% of people actively run an ad blocker - but ad blockers work in different ways and it’s hard to know whether you’ve accurately tracked them. Some ad blockers prevent the ad from running altogether, obtaining the ad-supported content without the provider getting paid for it. Some let the ad run, but don’t show it to you; they simply prevent the advertiser from getting the benefit of showing you the ad, while still counting as an ad view so the advertiser has to pay for it.

It’s important to understand that both of these are stealing. You are either getting something that is supposed to be paid for without anyone paying for it, or you are preventing someone else from getting something they have paid for. Instead of using an ad blocker on the site, you are supposed to not go to the site. You are supposed to not get the thing that is not getting paid for. That is how things are supposed to work.

The market forces that operate on a platform where you keep stealing shit are not forces you are going to like. The more you steal from the platform,

Basically, either the platform says “we are not being paid for enough ads” and runs more ads, or the advertiser says “we are not getting enough results from our ads” and demands lower prices — which makes the platform say the subtly different “we are not being paid enough for ads” and run more ads. Either way they run more ads. Running an ad blocker essentially redirects your ads to someone else.

The platform, after all, still needs to be paid for the service they provide. It costs money to provide it, and they need to get that money back. They also need to make some amount of profit, or they won’t be able to keep providing the service — the people who work there will have to go get real jobs, instead of providing the service.

So when you steal the service, you’re not actually depriving the provider of the service, you are simply depriving them of the money they would ordinarily receive for providing it. This isn’t theft, because you don’t get the money. But you do get something. And since the provider wasn’t paid for it, that something is stolen.

The provider will still manage to get paid, by showing more ads to other people, but making other people pay for your shit that you stole is a dick move. You are making honest people bear the cost of your dishonest consumption.

The way we resolve this, of course, is with a paywall. You put up a barrier, so instead of getting ad-supported access to the provider’s service, you have to pay for it whether you use it or not. If you think you are going to use this service within the next month, you pay a fairly small fee; if you don’t, tough shit, you pay the same fee anyway.

Of course, people tend to share accounts, but all that means is that the cost of providing service to the average account goes up. The provider just raises the cost of the account. You’re still a dick, because you are redirecting the cost of service provided for you to other people who are paying for it.

Which leads us to the problem all these lying sacks of shit pull out of their arse whenever you tell them to their face that they are stealing and it is dishonest and they should stop it because they are ruining everything.

“There are too many things that expect to be paid.”

This is not the actual problem. The problem is “I want to have more shit than I can afford to pay for.” The problem is that you are an entitled little fuckwad who stamps their feet and throws a tantrum when the store doesn’t have your favourite fruit snacks.

You do not have to subscribe to Netflix. All you have to do is say “I am not going to use the Netflix service,” and now you don’t have to. You don’t need to pay for something you don’t have. And when Netflix announces they are the only place you can watch the latest whatever, you can go “aww, man” and not fucking watch it.

I subscribe to Crunchyroll. I do not also subscribe to HiDive because I have more than enough to watch on CR. I don’t need HiDive. I sure would like to watch “Call of the Night,” but do you know what happens when I don’t?

Nothing!

Meanwhile, do you know what happens when I pirate the anime I want, or share someone else’s account, or run an ad blocker so I don’t have to see the ads? The money HiDive would have been paid for me to watch the anime just gets charged to someone else.

And that’s bullshit. If you’re not willing to pay the cost of what you want, it is morally wrong to make someone else do it instead. The moral thing to do is to not have the thing you want. It is okay to not have everything. It is good for you not to have everything.

This should not be a radical idea.

This is the heart of all the AI horseshit.

(Legacy post: original date 23 June 2025)

I want to start out by observing that no, you are not crazy or overreacting — the corporate world very much does have a rotten, putrescent core that literally loses sleep over the idea that anyone, anywhere has got any money they might be able to get their hands on. This is not the normal state of affairs, though; these are very, very sick people who have wormed their way into everything and often manage to get themselves into positions of power… but they’re a tiny minority of the corporate world. They get a disproportionate amount of attention because they have a disproportionate amount of power, and are exceptionally egregious in the ways they abuse it. Everybody talks about those people.

I want to talk about some true believers. People who are honestly interested in making your life better. People who are legitimately consumed by a desire to improve the world around them. And this revolves around the concept of the “un-problem.”

The un-problem is typically described in terms of innovation and creativity, but at its core it is a problem you are too stupid to know you have. You may, for example, go through elaborate processes to draw straight lines over long distances… or you can get yourself a chalk line.

It’s perfectly reasonable, if you don’t work in the trades, not to know what a chalk line is. And if you’re a reasonably intelligent person, you may think “well, I can figure out how to draw a perfectly straight line!” and start designing a process or even a tool to draw the line and make sure it stays straight.

But we have already solved this problem. You pull a string through a pile of chalk powder and stretch it across the space where you want the line. You pull the string away from the surface, then let it snap back into place, where it makes a clean and perfectly straight line of chalk that can be easily washed away. We have created a handy little tool for this - a container of chalk dust with a spool of twine in it. There’s a versatile little hook on the end to attach at one end of your desired line.

If you don’t know what a chalk line is, you know you have one problem - you need to draw a very long and very straight line - but in the process of trying to solve that problem, you are just going to give yourself more problems. And all of these problems feel like they’re necessary to solve the main problem. But once you know the chalk line exists, all of those problems disappear. You only had them because you were too stupid to know about chalk lines.

That’s not a value judgment. We were all too stupid to know about chalk lines, at first. And we remained too stupid to know until someone told us.

The tech industry is consumed with trying to find problems like this, ideally by creating a brand new product nobody else has, so you will give them money. Scott Adams is a thoroughly repulsive and detestable person, but before he lost his mind he made some fairly astute observations about engineers.

Whether we’re talking about physical products or software, engineers and their companies fundamentally try to solve problems. That’s what they get paid for: to solve people’s problems. And because they’re not stupid, they want to scale that up. When you solve people’s problems for a living, you start to notice most people have the same problems, which have the same solutions. So you package that up into a box and say “if you have this problem, here is the solution.” And then it’s a question of marketing and promotion - people who have the problem need to know the solution exists.

But sometimes the problem isn’t a problem people have.

Consider the AI industry. This does not solve a problem people actually have. The problem engineers (including myself, for a while) were solving over the last forty years has been the Turing test - how do you convince a human observer that your machine is, in fact, a human being?

Well, it’s fairly simple. Make it bad at maths. Force your computer to perform mathematical operations at a glacial pace, working one digit at a time in base ten the way a grammar school student might, and introduce an error every so often. Shift the decimal one place in either direction. Drop a zero. Forget to carry. Raise or lower a digit by 1.

Because a computer would never do these things.

We identify computers primarily through two things we know computers don’t do: they don’t have emotions or personalities, and they don’t make mistakes. If you ask them what 512 times 368 is, they will not say it’s “about” 185,000. They will tell you it’s 188,416. (Hurriedly checks on calculator... yeah, that’s what they’ll tell you.) And they’ll do it really fast — I may have gotten the right answer (lucky!), but it took me several seconds and I almost fucked it up and said 18,816.

Because in the middle of my calculations, I got the decimal point off by one, since 368 times 12 is 4,416 and my brain combined the two 4’s so when I added the 4,416 to the 184,000 I got 188,000 but then mentally skipped the next four because I just did the four. That’s how human beings do maths. We have to double and triple check our results because we suck and get things wrong all the time.

What nobody has ever really stopped to consider is that the Turing test is not a real problem. It is a puzzle posed by Alan Turing to point out that you need to clear this hurdle before he will believe a machine is “intelligent.” And we have been trying to solve that problem because for some reason, we think it is important.

But we don’t actually need Alan Turing to believe our machine is human. We don’t need anyone to believe it is human. You can be perfectly aware the machine is, you know, a machine. That’s fine. Nobody would say the computer in Star Trek might be human; it may have Majel Barrett’s voice, but it has no meaningful personality, no emotions, no opinions. It doesn’t need them. It is unapologetically a computer, and it makes no effort to pretend it is a person.

Lieutenant Commander Data is trying to learn how to be a person, and wants to be a person, but does not under any circumstances try to pretend he is not an android with a positronic brain. You would still say he’s intelligent. You would still say the computer is intelligent.

“I can’t tell it’s a computer” has been obviously unimportant for thirty years. People not only don’t have a problem with knowing it’s a computer, they actively do not want the computer to pretend it’s a person. It’s fucking creepy. Nobody likes it.

Whenever we have used a machine to mass-produce human interactions, people have gotten angry at us. Bulk mailings. Telephone answering machines. Robocalls. Voice menus. Email lists. Customer support chatbots. Nobody likes them. They make literally everyone angry. And it makes them even angrier when you try to fool them into thinking they are interacting with a person, not a machine.

The tech industry is absolutely convinced that there is an un-problem out there which can be solved with a fake person.

And there is! There is the problem of humanoid robots being creepy as fuck. If you put a fake person in it that was not too bright and kind of dorky, it would go a long way toward making people more comfortable. Think Gir from Invader Zim.

But we don’t have humanoid robots yet, although we are working on them… or at least we were; I’m told Elmo’s head of design on that project just quit… and even when we do, it’s unlikely the average person will give a shit. Most of us don’t need a fake person because we don’t need a real person. We haven’t hired a person to help us with anything, why would we buy - or, more likely, lease - an expensive machine to help us?

Part of the path leading there is convincing people to get a fake person without a body to help with things. If we can convince people they need a fake person to help them think and talk and write, it will be fairly easy to convince them their fake person would be even better if it could open doors and get them a beer and have sex with them.

The problem is that most people, where they have a person in their lives, have that person there for reasons that kind of hinge on them being a real person.

This isn’t a problem you can solve with fake people. If you don’t have enough people in your life, filling your life with fake people doesn’t solve the problem. It just covers it up. And we’re already doing this! People will cover their beds with stuffed animals, or their walls with posters, or parasocially fixate on some arbitrary celebrity.

The problem isn’t that the fakes aren’t good enough. The problem is that the fakes aren’t real. We had previously solved this problem with social media, which lets real people find other real people, but there was not enough money in that so we are systematically destroying it with repulsive ads and divisive politics.

The actual un-problem here is that if you stopped being complete fucking freaks shoving your bullshit in everyone’s face all the time, trying to get every last dime they have, they would like you and want to buy your shit.

We’re all living in little bubbles where we don’t know what the fuck we are doing because we don’t challenge a little laundry list of incorrect assumptions. It’s easy to sit out here knowing “everybody wants this” is complete horseshit, but when you are sitting in there you are living in a world where everybody working on the thing is saying “man I want this so much.”

I used to work on automated highway systems. The idea was that while we could use AI to drive cars, it was a Good Idea to set the AI on the sole task of avoiding collisions while the job of navigating was done by reading waypoints embedded in the highway. Essentially, we would use a kind of enhanced GPS system — and this was before GPS was widely used in consumer products — to do the routing and navigation. The only thing the AI did was override the general commands if weird shit happened on the road.

And this was fairly simple. The AI would use a series of sensors designed to identify any solid objects near the vehicle, and if that object moved into the vehicle’s path the AI would reduce speed or alter course to avoid the collision. It wasn’t even a particularly sophisticated AI; by modern standards, you might not even call it AI at all.

Everybody I worked with wanted a car that could drive itself. Literally everybody. The whole team. The teams working on other projects. Everybody thought a self-driving car was so cool. And then one day someone was saying “like, just imagine: you go out and you get in your car and it just goes where you tell it to go, you don’t even have to pay attention.”

And I thought… that’s a taxi. We already have that. It is already a thing.

But then I realised almost every argument for why you don’t take a taxi is an argument for why you don’t want a self-driving car, so selling this to the general public was going to be every bit as hard as selling taxis for primary transportation. “Don’t buy a car, take a taxi” would be an absolutely insane marketing message. Nobody wants this. Nobody is gonna want this.

Which was my “naked emperor” moment. The emperor had no clothes. We were getting investment and doing work and building a project that nobody wanted, that nobody was ever going to want, and literally nobody seemed to care. Everybody was firmly of the belief that because we were working so hard and doing so much, we would all be applauded and rewarded in the end.

That’s what I see going on in AI at the moment. They’re all completely and totally full of shit, but I don’t think the people in the trenches know they’re full of shit. The people at the top probably know; that’s generally my experience, the executives know we’re never going to do what we’re trying to do, but it’s their job to go out and tell people we are. Meanwhile, the people at the bottom are believing every word.

So this is like twice as long as I wanted it to be, and I don’t know that the extra length helped. But the entire purpose of this Substack is just for me to keep writing, so… yay? Mission accomplished? Go, me? Whatever.

Or, why I still use Substack

(Legacy post: original date 16 June 2025)

Every once in a while someone will directly criticise me for using Substack, on the grounds that there are actual Nazis using Substack and the people who own and run Substack are just fine with those Nazis being here and refuse to kick them off the platform, because they get some of the money those Nazis are collecting here.

But where does this end?

I’m not going to be upset with you if you don’t want to be on Substack. That’s fine. But here on Substack, I follow specific people and read specific newsletters, and none of them are Nazis. I am not confronted by Nazis on the platform. I do not have to interact with Nazis at all. There is no material difference for me between Substack, where I do not see any Nazis, and a platform that verifiably has zero Nazis on it. Either way, I do not see the Nazis, I do not need to interact with them.

I’m not surprised that there are some. Once a platform gets to a certain level, literally every group with any meaningful representation among the world’s population will be there. You can find Nazis on any large social media platform, even if the platform explicitly doesn’t allow Nazis.

You can find children under 12 on any social media platform, even though it’s literally against the law to be on social media until you’re 13. This implies that every group will be on every social media platform, even if it is against the law for them to be there, provided they are at least as cunning and clever as a twelve year old.

Which probably does keep a lot of Nazis off social media, honestly.

What makes me roll my eyes is the number of people who will say something like “Nazis need to be forcibly removed from every aspect of modern society,” and that is just fine, but if the Nazis were to say that some other group… just like, any arbitrary group, no specific group in particular… should be “forcibly removed from every aspect of modern society,” that would be interpreted as a direct threat of violence. Or even a call for genocide.

There’s a lot of rhetoric online that sounds exactly like Nazis, but is supposed to be okay because the people saying it are not Nazis.

The problem is the thing you’re doing, not why you’re doing it. Your bake sale is not automatically evil because these brownies were baked by the children of Nazis, and your fundraiser is not automatically okay because the money is for a refugee who just happens to be in a country you’re not allowed to run fundraisers for on that platform.

We complain about conservatives doing this all the time. They make a law about something, and then just sort of… look the other way, when one of their own does it. Matt Gaetz verifiably paid teenage girls for sex and gave them drugs and bragged about it and showed people pictures that were technically child pornography, and yet nobody ever did a damn thing.

Meanwhile, we have people committing actual wire fraud to collect money for desperate people in war-torn countries, and they’re horrified when their accounts get closed. How could someone do that? Deprive that poor innocent refugee of their much-needed assistance to get out of the country? They’re supposed to look the other way when we have a good reason.

And it is a good reason. Don’t get me wrong on that. If you are trying to collect money to feed starving people whose children are suffering, that is a very very good reason to commit wire fraud and I understand why you are doing it.

But you are still doing it.

Everybody thinks their reasons are good reasons. Nazis may not really believe their bullshit conspiracy theory, but at the very least they think this bullshit conspiracy theory is a good enough reason to do what they’re doing. Maybe the guys you’re fundraising for aren’t really desperate starving refugees, but they really think being desperate starving refugees would be something you see as a good reason to help them, and if you help them it means they were right.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s true. It matters whether it is a good enough reason. Because people are constantly slinging bullshit. All the time. They will say whatever they need to say, make whatever excuse they need to make, so they can do whatever they want to do and you will let them.

Nazis will pretend not to be Nazis so you will let them deliver their totally not-Nazi message. It doesn’t mean they’re suddenly not Nazis. Substack will pretend to be taking a stand on free speech, so you will let them take their cut of every Nazi newsletter subscription on their platform. They are not making an ideological statement. They just want the money.

Most of the Nazis just want the money, too.

It isn’t much of a comfort, really, to know that most people screeching about the evil machinations of Jews do not actually believe their own bullshit. Because what they believe is that screeching about Jews will get them lots of money, and when they do get lots of money… they’re right. They make a bet that so many people really hate Jews, they can make a good living pretending to hate Jews, and pardon me for being a little disturbed - as a Jew - when I see them win that bet.

Nothing changes if you won’t let them make that bet here. It stays a winning bet, because antisemitism remains rampant, and lots of people hate Jews so much they will literally pay you money for hating Jews with them. Making them go place the bet somewhere else doesn’t alter the odds. It doesn’t change the playfield.

It doesn’t change the playfield if I go somewhere else, either. If I switch to a different platform, and move my newsletter somewhere else, it will be the same newsletter and have the same content and there are probably Nazis over there too. It’s a pointless waste of time. It doesn’t send a message to anyone. It just makes dumb people feel better about themselves.

Because even if you go to a different dance club than the Nazis do, the Nazis are still dancing.