Links, December 6, 2024

The Unbearable Lightness (and Weight) of Creation (or why you should make music)

But here’s the thing: we don’t live in the long run. We don’t live in some hypothetical, distant, and predetermined future. We live here, in this very moment. The truth is that the future we sometimes dread remains unwritten.

For many, making art is an act of self-preservation.

Collections: The Problem with Sci-Fi Body Armor

So what we’re going to do is first look at some quite obviously (to me, at least) flawed science fiction armor designs. Then we’ll look at how threats shape coverage and other concerns for body armor and from there look at some historical exemplars that might point to potential solutions (and also a bit why I suspect designers don’t use them).

I’ve been indulging in some escapism by (finally) playing Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, which I’ve been eyeing since it came out and haven’t had equipment until a few years ago, or time until I made it, and as my stealth-focused Kassandra (who fights nimbly with dodging, and using daggers) meets various Athenian and Spartan generals wearing full-torso plate, I do have to wonder at the practical mobility those would really confer.

That solution – small metal plates connected to each other, rather than a backing – we call lamellar armor and it was very common in a wide range of cultures, but it has very little purchase in modern fantasy or science fiction armor designs, I think primarily because it was not included in the Dungeons and Dragons armor system.

If you like to nerd out on these sorts of things, this is a long but worthwhile read.

My Social Media in 2024

the Internet’s business model is betrayal. Every mature social media platform has betrayed us. Every big search engine has betrayed us.

Advertising is obsolete – here’s why it’s time to end it

But fewer have stopped to ask whether there is a good reason for this infrastructure to exist at all. Why, exactly, is it a good thing for Facebook and Google to be selling advertising to anyone, let alone Russian agents?

Not that I have any hope of the title statement coming true anytime soon, but as with road safety, this is something I’ve been talking about since the 90s, which would get people looking at me funny. Keep pushing the Overton Window.

Product Safety Essentials: Selling Consumer Products to Europe Under the GPSR

Products covered under the GPSR must have an EU-based “economic operator” as a “responsible person” in order to be placed on the EU market. A responsible person can be one of the following, if based in the EU:

  • The manufacturer
  • An importer, if the manufacturer is not established in the EU
  • An authorized representative mandated by the manufacturer
  • A fulfillment service provider if the manufacturer, importer, and authorized > representative aren’t based in the EU
  • The EU responsible person’s duties include:
  • Maintaining the product’s technical documentation, and providing them to the authorities on request
  • Ensuring the product complies with certain information requirements such as including:
  • a type, batch or serial number or other identifier
  • the manufacturer’s name, their registered trade name or registered trade mark, and contact information
  • clear instructions and safety information in a language which can be easily understood by consumers.
  • Informing authorities about dangerous products and accidents
  • Cooperating with authorities and ensuring necessary corrective actions

I’m linking to Etsy’s writeup of this because it is the most succinct summary of the new law I’ve seen. I think it’s worth sharing because this is another front on which the trade wars of the mid/late 2020s will play out, that may be difficult for people steeped in tech culture to appreciate.

I’ve ran a business that would have been impacted by this. I’ve been considering starting another one. I personally know people who are having to curtail sales of CDs & Vinyl Records, ceramic mugs or art prints to Europe because complying with this law will be prohibitively expensive.

I am generally in favor of regulations, but Europe is gonna Europe, and this is going to impact tens if not hundreds of thousands of small sellers.

Building LLMs is probably not going to be a brilliant business

Really though, LLM makers have only one true supplier: NVIDIA. NVIDIA make the chips that all models are trained on - regardless of cloud vendor. And that gives NVIDIA colossal, near total pricing power. NVIDIA are more powerful relative to Anthropic or OpenAI than Airbus or Boeing could ever dream of being.

Several good points, and the comparison to the airline industry is apt in more ways than one.

modernity is stupid: a rant not about politics

But you know what, I shouldn’t have to understand the business models of every little icon on my stupid pocket supercomputer to get through life! Why am I reading books on VC funding just to figure out what parts of my digital life will inevitably decay when the money guys get their hands on it?? And don’t tell me about enshittification, that is a thought-terminating cliche that does not actually perform useful or interesting analysis and is little more than the new “just use linux” of annoying Fediverse reply guys.

10/10. No notes.