I went hunting for the appropriate Friday WTFuckery near to May 16th, 2017, but there wasn't one within proximity looking forwards or backwards. So you can just vent here about 2025 without comparison.

I did see this post on repetitive pop lyrics, which reminded me of a stray thought: The other day, Pokey declared a certain song* to be one of the earliest examples of modern pop music. Listen: this song is unbelievably conventional and breaks zero new ground. This is a great example of one of my favorite phenomenon, where you take landmarks in your personal experience and declare them to be universal. In this case, the song was released in 2012, and so was probably on the radio 2013-2014, when Pokey would have been 2-3 years old**. It's a new era!

*There is no fucking way you will guess it without clicking through, but put your guesses in the thread for my entertainment!

**My earliest concrete memory of a song is sitting in the front bench seat of my dad's proto-Suburban, with my feet up on the radio knobs, while Another One Bites the Dust played.***

***Confidential to Kymyz Mustache: we were in the 300 Club parking lot.

I don't really have anything to post, so I'll share an oddball thing I learned the other day:

Students at Heebieville High School are exempt from final exams in any class where:
1. they have an A and no more than 4 absences, or
2. they have a B and no more than 3 absences.

This is because the stinginess of the state funding formula means that admin prioritizes attendance over any other objective. (And yes! Attendance is super important for learning. Just that they have a throw-every-thing-against-the-wall attitude towards promoting attendance at the expense of everything else.

One thing I've learned, more generally, is that absolutely nothing in education matters if you don't have teacher buy-in. It sounds like teachers who teach accelerated or honors classes do have workarounds: namely, an AP test if that applies, or just making a big project be due at the end of the semester. (In Jammies' classes, roughly half the kids are failing, so that's a convenient workaround that makes the issue moot there.)

(One thing that they can't do is change the grade distribution, though. The breakdown of the grade according to percent exam/homework/participation etc is also locked down by admin.)

NickS writes: Henry Farrell's substack is very good, and I thought his most recent post was quite interesting:

He combines the following observations:

1) Ways in which DOGE is following a specific Silicon Valley playbook for very rapid expansion.
2) What that says about the current evolution of Silicon Valley thinking/culture, and where that conflicts with common intuitions about the world.

But other inputs cannot be scaled up and down so easily. Unlike rack servers, humans object to being hired and fired in response to temporary fluctuations in demand. U.S. employees furthermore often expect that their employers will pay for health care, insurance, workman's comp and the like.

According to Bracy, this explains Silicon Valley's heavy reliance on independent contractors, and pushback against laws and judicial decisions that would require them to treat contractors like employees. Hoffman and Yeh suggest that human employees are "growth limiters" because relationships with them are difficult to manage, and say that "one approach" for start-ups is a business model "that requires as few human beings as possible." Another is "to find ways to outsource work to contractors or suppliers." Even so, they acknowledge that start-ups can "delay the reckoning" but will likely be faced, if they succeed, with the need to hire thousands or even tens of thousands of employees.

3) Discussion of specific examples:

Standard-issue start-ups, and their funders, have strong incentives to ignore such limitations. They are tolerant of algorithms that make mistakes in the rush to market domination. And once successful companies have achieved domination, they will look to maintain it at scale, as cheaply as they can.

The best description of the consequences that I've read is an amazing Bloomberg article by Spencer Soper on Amazon Flex. When Amazon decided to create its own delivery service, it didn't want to hire long term employees with rights. Nor did it want to have to spend money on supervising them and making sure that they did a good job. So instead, it used algorithms to hire and fire a host of independent contractors.

4) Connecting it back to politics and (I would say) the specific feeling that modern life is fraying at the seams.

These pathologies are not unique to the algorithms-plus-data model of governance, although they are especially marked in it. Pathologies of scale are the besetting pathologies of modernity, and bureaucracies and markets too are notoriously terrible at delivering local justice. Bureaucracies, for example, have similar tradeoffs between inflexible rules and specific situations that don't fit into them. However, the fact that bureaucratic rules are administered by human beings means that there are more opportunities at street level to vary implementation in response to specific circumstances that the rules don't anticipate or fully cover (of course, the extent to which humans are willing to vary implementation may be limited, and where it is not limited, other problems are likely to creep in). Silicon Valley blitzscalers tend to skimp on humans whenever possible, meaning that they are bad at dealing with out-of-sample problems. They are furthermore hostile to outside forces that either impose general costs, or oblige them to deal with particularities, in ways that would make scaling less viable.

Heebie's take: I gotta throw this up here and run, without reading and diving in, so just keep your breath fully bated.

Mossy writes: Preparing for Rising Seas in the Maldives
HDC to celebrate 21 years of Hulhumalé being inhabited

Heebie's take: First off, now I know what the Maldives looked like on my 19th birthday.

Second, the links are both breezier and less grim than you'd expect. So click through, why doncha?

This is pretty exciting news. This guy is raising millions for a start-up that makes all kinds of diagnoses based on minute amounts of blood, urine, and saliva:

The fundraising comes as Billy Evans, an heir to a hotel fortune, is pitching his new company, Haemanthus, to potential investors, according to the New York Times. Evans's pitch: a health-testing company that can make diagnoses from users' blood, urine and saliva.

...Haemanthus' marketing materials, reviewed by the New York Times, show that the company's technology will use a laser to scan blood, saliva or urine from pets and "analyze the samples on a molecular level". The technology then would require only a matter of seconds to detect illnesses, cancer or infections.

I think that's the whole story! Also he's married to Elizabeth Holmes.

(via E. Messily)