Posts

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Right now, the average interested autism-American with a cumulative $10k invested has technical parity with all but the elite individual soldiers fielded by the US military. Imagine a team of somewhat disciplined guys with full NVGs, M855A (or even M855A1) Ammunition, smoke grenades, and body armor getting in a fight with the local police force. It’s very likely the militia-types would win, at least initially.

But the 2020s do not reflect the conditions of the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921

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Direct violence is becoming secondary to the control of information, the control of high technology, and the exploitation of information asymmetry.

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technological development has rendered the gun an ineffective tool for demanding redress from a recalcitrant government.

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https://substack.com/home/post/p-209879372

Interesting question: What _are_ the relevant units of force today ?

[Kull] stopped short, staring, for suddenly, like the silent swinging wide of a mystic door, misty, unfathomed reaches opened in the recesses of his consciousness and for an instant he seemed to gaze back through the vastnesses that spanned life and life; seeing through the vague and ghostly fogs dim shapes reliving dead centuries - men in combat with hideous monsters, vanquishing a planet of frightful terrors. Against a gray, ever-shifting background moved strange, nightmare forms, fantasies of lunacy and fear; and man, the jest of the gods, the blind, wisdomless striver from dust to dust, following the long bloody trail of his destiny, knowing not why, bestial, blundering, like a great murderous child, yet feeling somewhere a spark of divine fire...

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Robert E. Howard, (1929) 'The Shadow Kingdom', in "The Masterworks of Robert E. Howard. Volume I: Kings of Unchristian Lands" (2024), pg. 31-32

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If generating is cheap, rewriting is cheap too. Build fast, throw it away, rebuild. Why should anyone care about architectural debt in a world where an agent can regenerate a service in an afternoon?

Because code is the disposable part, and code is not what accumulates. What accumulates is state.

- The data your systems have already written and that other systems now depend on.
- The integrations other teams built against your interface while you were not looking.
- The contractual and regulatory obligations attached to where that data sits, how it moves, and how its lineage is established.
- The operating processes built around the system, and the habits of ten thousand users who depend on it behaving a particular way.

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https://architectureintel.com/when-anyone-can-build-software-who-decides-what-not-to-build-ae07fdb370e4

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The era of the printing press was not normal times, and it led to centuries of intense conflict and turbulent technological growth after centuries of sleepy normalcy. The period of the American and French Revolutions was not normal times, and Americans flourished while France entered a period of repeated wars, regime changes, and social uncertainty before a new order asserted itself. The Age of Wonders, called by some the Gilded Age, was not normal times, and those born in 1875 in frontier cabins without plumbing or electricity lived to see almost nothing but abnormal times, as electricity and cars and airplanes and two world wars and nuclear bombs and the space race fundamentally and irrevocably changed the nature of the world they lived in. ... Each time, people in the moment felt both the blessing and the curse of living in interesting times.

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https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/we-will-never-have-normal-times-again

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The Naked Emperor is an expression of power… People trick themselves into believing it, and even staking their wealth and reputations on it… It is a relationship of power and the purchase into power. The lie gains power the more people repeat it. It snowballs. It becomes impossible to break it… Or at least impossible to break it without violence. That people will fight to maintain the lie, that they’d be ruined if they ever acknowledged it was false.

They are not tricked. They know that they are lying.

Even if the linguistic part of their brain tries to trick themselves into thinking that they are tricked.

If a child could dispel it, it would mean that the spell was already broken by the Emperor and his attendants' poor maintenance of the power relations… One might as well say that the “clothes” blew off the emperor in the wind, or a wizard stole them, as attribute it to anything said by the child.

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https://substack.com/home/post/p-213234525