osmarks microblog

Apparently the default GoToSocial configuration blocks various scrapers. Sorry about this; it had not occurred to me to look until I was doing other things. I am fixing it.

Poor countries ration, middling countries build, rich countries refuse to build and financial-engineer instead.

Finding a way to combine a land value tax with land value capture to fund infrastructure, without centralizing all the decision-making in government by e.g. having them centrally plan LVT revenue shares, seems worthwhile. I discussed it briefly with GPT-5.5, which had an interesting but flawed suggestion (local votes by residents/land users). Perhaps there's a better way.

I just learned that the UK government subsidizes flood insurance (for pre-2009 houses; Flood Re), which successfully... raised the prices of highly floodworthy houses (https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/working-paper/2022/the-effects-of-subsidised-flood-insurance-on-real-estate-markets). Why are they like this? Has nobody heard of moral hazard?

I'm being sabotaged by rogue instances of Claude Mythos (my phone has had what seems like a mysterious hardware failure of the modem, just like my last phone had).

Protip: if you're not sure when is the best time to go on holiday, just pick whenever the hotels and flights cost most (efficient market hypothesis).

I don't know how I typed "Test" there.

TestI have now migrated to GoToSocial, as microblog.pub was janky and unmaintained. There might have been some data loss. Also, I apparently need to switch the privacy setting to "public" by default. This is definitely a design.

I have now migrated to GoToSocial, as microblog.pub was janky and unmaintained. There might have been some data loss.

I finally updated to LineageOS 23.2, and the system fonts are all terrible and no longer customizable. Of course, they actually are customizable if you patch several system files, but I have been inconvenienced enough that I require vengeance against Google.

I have been revisiting Stigler's diet problem with Tesco/Sainsburys nutrition and price data: https://github.com/osmarks/misc/tree/master/stigler.

After protein quality fudge factors, the optimal (cost-optimized under macronutrient constraints, micronutrients ignored because there's not good enough data) diet is apparently a combination of wholemeal pasta, bacon, dog treats, dog nontreat food and "mornflake groats".

NATO Request for Innovative Participation: Agentic AI for Cognitive Warfare

I need the ability to consume (at least!) ten browser tabs simultaneously.

It's amusing and vaguely painful when someone AI-generates some but not all of their writing and they transition from perfect eloquence to writing like an average person, which is to say badly.

Cory Doctorow's "war on general-purpose computation" proving relevant again now that governments are noticing AI image generators slightly more.

Mysterious blob generation continues. Scale wins again, but not that much scale because I don't have much computer.

I want Tenstorrent to do well, but they really do not seem to have internalized that they need working software, and the recent departures of relevant employees worry me.

The quality of the BMC firmware on this board (Gigabyte MS03-CE0) is terrifying. Grammar mistakes everywhere, it apparently only lets you have one session open, there are some graphical bugs, and for some reason changing the date and time logs you out. I feel unsafe even attaching it to my LAN.

I used to be excited about prediction markets' ability to improve decision-making and governance.

Due to increased RAM prices, we will be scaling up our program of offloading osmarks.net compute operations to user devices. Thank you for your cooperation.