Which is why the industry is such a clusterfuck, forcing ad spam on people who aren't interested in it.

If you buy a paper magazine you're already interested in the ads. Doesn't matter if it's pet supplies, model railways, computers, or fashion. You've predefined yourself as a potential consumer and you're going to see the ads as a service, not an intrusion. And if they're all in one place, you can comparison shop.

Facebook and Google are going to sell you ads based on your web searches. Mostly they do a terrible job of guessing what you're really interested in. Sometimes the results are so bad they're hilarious.

So instead of providing a useful service, the ads exist to perpetuate the system that generates them, prioritising vapid metrics like "engagement" - which really just measures distraction and wasted time.

I don't understand why this is being discussed rationally. The motivation to remove social security isn't economic or rational, it's political and psychological.

A small group of people considers itself superior to the rest of the population. As a group it is convinced it deserves every break, benefit, privilege, and handout, while the second group is only worthy of intrusive oversight, abuse, exploitation, and punishment.

This isn't hyperbole. This is the political belief system that drives the rhetoric about the government spending and debt.

The proof is simple - government debt always increases when the first group is in power.

Always.

This wouldn't happen if it was really about the deficit.

The first version of Doom was around 2.4MB. ASR33 8-bit tape is 10 chars/inch.

So that's around 20 kilofeet of tape, or 440 miles.

Claude does this too. It gets into a death spiral where it repeats the entire previous output instead of changing parts and moving on.

Everyone?

How often in meetings does everyone maintain a running context of the entire conversation, instead of responding to the last thing that was said with a comment that has an outstanding chance of being forgotten as soon as the next person starts speaking?

Indeed - and since human's are susceptible to injection prompt, all it needs is one derailing comment to take things off course.

Racism and climate denial are both narratives, and people die because of them every day. (If you're not aware of how many people are already dying because of climate change, it's not because the facts aren't available to the curious and interested.)

Patriarchy is more complex. I dislike the feminist tendency to use it as shorthand for "Everything wrong with the world" - as if the world was naturally a utopia until patriarchs took over.

But there are certainly elements that are immensely destructive.

The point is that narratives define morality and self. If every movie you see features the Good Guy heroically struggling to kill the Bad Guy, that becomes the unconscious default narrative that defines your sense of self and your moral choices.

Which is why Main Character Energy is a real thing - and often not in a good way.

If you are exposed to a much wider range of plots, with more ambiguity, more complex outcomes, much richer and more challenging social relationships, and so on, you're less likely to believe that you can fix any problem with muscles, a gun, and some wisecracks.

I'll admit I don't think Le Guin manages to do this. I think she's very on-the-nose as a moralist - she's almost the anti-Heinlein.

And being a moralist is - ironically - very much a hero's journey trope itself, with the violence sublimated into words instead of weapons.

I think the argument that watching movies with a different narrative structure will solve major geopolitical issues requires more evidence.

It's a classic Worse is Better situation.

Most users don't care about the implementation. They care about the way that MCP makes it easier to Do Cool Stuff by gluing little boxes of code together with minimal effort.

So this will run ahead because it catches developer imagination and lowers cost of entry.

The implementation could certainly be improved. I'm not convinced websockets are a better option because they're notorious for firewall issues, which can be showstoppers for this kind of work.

If the docs are improved there's no reason a custom implementation in Go or Arm assembler or whatever else takes your fancy shouldn't be possible.

Don't forget you can ask an LLM to do this for you. God only knows what you'll get with the current state of the art, but we are getting to the point where this kind of information can be explored interactively with questions and AI codegen, instead of being kept in a fixed document that has to be updated manually (and usually isn't anyway) and hand coded.

What's a good master-level textbook about marketing?

You probably saw them: Marketing Management and Marketing Principles by Philip Kotler. They are a good starting point.

Strawman. No one is suggesting that. These programs are vetted by people whose job it is to assess realistic returns.

It's far more extreme - and far less rational - to assert they're worthless, and therefore need to end, based purely on vibes and ideology.

This entire discussion is a 180 from the truth.

These programs shouldn't need defending. Whatever the cranks believe, the returns have been proven decade after decade after decade.

The people who are axing them are the ones who need to justify themselves, not just economically but constitutionally and morally.

So far they've only tried to justify themselves ideologically, which is not even close to being a credible argument.

A lot of that public money somehow ends up in the private sector, usually as corporate profits.

Libertarians may want to ask themselves what happens to the private sector - aerospace, energy, R&D, infrastructure, education - when public investment stops.

I am guessing that in your mind that if a private corporation bids on a contract it should only break even? Is that it? Or perhaps - for you - even better would be - the whole thing would be done by the government. There is no private corporation?