RE: https://flipboard.com/@aljazeera/middle-east-news-oapkqap7z/-/a-kycIE6EjTTepSqqLXb6GQA%3Aa%3A3199698-%2F0

It's #genocide, fam.
The #Israel-i regime and a large plurality of its citizens are actively, openly, overtly supporting genocide.
I speak enough Hebrew to confirm that the article's claims about what was said are accurate.
I could post a different Israeli leader every single day making explicitly genocidal statements.
If you refuse to acknowledge genocide, then you are complicit in genocide.
Open your eyes, see what is right there in front of you.
It's genocide.
#Gaza

Passed stage 3 of my Toptal interviews. One left!

Ugh, Texas is currently giving hell a run for its money, and my a/c isn't keeping up. It's been over 100F all week, with no sign of letting up. It's hard to sleep at night, and every afternoon at around 4pm, it starts getting hot enough inside to sweat even with the a/c at max. It stays hot enough to sweat until about 2am. I feel like I'm wilted like the plants in my yard. I need to move somewhere cold and never come back here.

@zzt @becomethewaifu I'm mostly pissed off at Apple for fucking the social acceptability of Airpods, which I depend on when out of the house (noise cancelation is impossible to manage without these days). I hope they're visually distinctive: if not I'm going to have to abandon some expensive earbuds, just as I wouldn't be seen dead in Raybans today.

@lukeharby @fesshole Treatment of servers, delivery persons, retail workers, and animals is an excellent test of character. I found a guy that passed all of them. 😊

1. Lit people make great engineers because they have spent a lot of time thinking about how text communicates things to other people who come along later, both in content and in structure.

2. It was a shock and then a shame when I discovered code profs didn't read my code the way lit teachers read my essays.

One of a set of 32 astronomical star-chart cards known as Urania’s Mirror or a View of the Heavens published in around 1825. Each card is pierced with holes corresponding in size to the magnitudes of the brightest stars. More here: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/uranias-mirror-or-a-view-of-the-heavens

@inthehands thank you for putting so eloquently how I feel – as a designer who codes more than as a developer’s developer.

The phrase I come back to, as my attempt to encapsulate it, is *the lack of care economy*.

That’s always been underlying financialised modernity but it’s currently running unabashedly rampant

OK, I guess I wasn't done after all.

Much of the opining about developer backlash to LLMs falls into two loose theoretical categories:

(1) Labor problem: developers now experience employment threat, loss of job security, layoffs, new levels of worry about the future

(2) Identity problem: developers used to feel special because generating code was placed on a cultural pedestal (sign of a special third brain lobe or whatever), that perceived specialness was a pillar of our personal identity, and now our egos are bruised because machines can do it and we don’t feel special anymore

While there’s doubtless truth to both of those in some / many cases, I posit a third theory:

(3) Purpose problem: contrary to popular belief, developers actually care quite a lot about the people who use our software and we derive a sense of purpose and meaning from doing what we believe to be good work; the current environment undermines that, not just LLMs but LLMs as part of a broader vortex of enshittification, and our world is effectively saying “everything you cared about doesn't matter, you can't hope to fight to make it matter, and you are stupid for caring”

I think there's evidence for that last theory in the kinds of despair you hear from developers: not just anxiety about paying the bills, not just angry feather-puffing, but a kind of existential despair that comes from the unraveling of one’s internal sense of purpose and meaning.

4/3

I’ve been thinking a lot about the gulf between people who think LLMs can cut 90% of the cost of software development or whatever and people who think that’s a pile of catastrophes balanced on top of a nonsense wish.

I think a lot of that chasm boils down to the fact that software is already •terrible•, and people have very different feelings about that. I don't just mean “Liquid Glass is ugly” terrible; I mean “it’s broken and insecure and unreliable and just doesn't flipping WORK” terrible, like Arbiter Sports.

We are right now in a war between people who think software should treat humans humanely and people who are perfectly willing to offload their development costs onto captive users in the form of wasted time, anger, anxiety, and other forms of personal harm even more severe than those. That war was raging well before LLMs entered the picture, but LLMs drove it to fever pitch. I’m extremely skeptical of the idea that LLMs make any significant positive contribution to the long-term speed or cost of writing •good• software, but they clearly have the potential to lower the floor for •bad• software to unheard-of levels at unheard-of speeds. How you feel about that fact probably predicts a lot about how you feel about the “LLMs can 10x software dev!” hype.

3/3

Hey at least glamorous theoretical stubborn old math problems are getting a little more attention these days since a lot of people are very excited if you'd be willing to say their software helped you crack it.

@dpnash

Baby, we've known this since they cracked the 4 color problem. Of course these tools can be useful. But someone is thinking "we don't need mathematicians anymore now that we have AI" and ... yeah.

"AI solves Impossible Math Problem"

*looks inside*

"Mathematicians use machine learning to help find key counterexample in still unproven conjecture"

I know nothing about the Arday case, so I'll say two things that I believe to be true in general:

• Plagiarism, as bad as it is, should never be a capital crime.
• I don't want to hear a single word about plagiarism being bad from anyone or any institution that uses AI.

Because it only works because the readers can do the same thing, and construct what's going on for the writer by imagining their point of view.

When we do this with other people, it is lovely. Literally the stuff of relationships, communities, societies.

But it is also fundamental to how we interpret language and we can't just turn it off. And that is what chatbot purveyors are preying on with their product design.

/fin

This sign is a great example for helping to explain why chatbots present such a potent illusion.

A probably not short thread 🧵>>

('Splainers of Mastodon -- thread means please read what I've written before jumping in here to share your ideas.)

RE: https://mastodon.social/@jplebreton/117128152934097719

a “prediction market” is finbro for casino. and it’s questionable to call a casino a market when you and your debt are the product.

prediction market is just the cheapest of honey traps to part losers from their money. certainly cheaper to run than a hotel casino.

The double cluster is a pair of open clusters located about 7500 ly away in the constellation Perseus.

Unlike most objects in space that appear close to each other but aren't, these two clusters are actually only a few hundred ly apart.

@zachweinersmith.bsky.social @emma_cogdev This was a problem I had with LLMs from their inception. Certain people will anthropomorphize LLMs while de-humanizing actual people who are nonverbal, or who speak a different language.

“Abolish and prosecute ICE” is such a moderate position it boggles the mind.

What would an •extreme• position look like? Look at the photo in the OP. That’s what. And we aren’t doing that. No ICE officer has come out of their tour of terror looking like Jose Mejia Hernandez looks. No ICE officer has been murdered by either immigrants or observers. None. Given what we lived through, we are the most moderate people you’ve ever met.