Rep. Casar: “ICE just arrested a 5-year-old on his way to a soccer game in Austin.
His name is Liam, just like the little boy from Minnesota.
He should be in kindergarten this week. Instead he's in a trailer prison in the desert.
Release Liam. Release these kids. Close the Dilley children’s prison.”
https://bsky.app/profile/repcasar.bsky.social/post/3mtk7cq4b722i
While everyone is rightfully concerned about ICE’s new ‘Shock Gloves’, it’s important to know that shock devices have been used in prisons and schools for disabled children for years.
The Gloves killed an inmate in Kentucky after a guard held them to his body for well over a minute.
Disabled children are exposed to electric shocks to ‘correct’ their behaviour.
ICE should not have access to these weapons, but we must also fight to get them out of schools and jails.
We must refuse to accept atrocities.
https://www.disabledginger.com/p/ices-new-shock-gloves-are-already
#uspol #ice #abolishice #shockgloves #disability #ableism #eugenics
RE: https://mastodon.online/@WilliamsStrangeFest/117128983362427402
I love Patton Oswalt.
Same
Yes. “Moral injury” is indeed a relevant concept here.
Put more concisely:
I’d bet money that developer reaction to LLM-driven development would be •very• different if its practical effect were to force management to slow down development and sink more money into quality.
5/3
@inthehands Yes to #3. We used to have this frustration when timelines or budgets or crappy outsourcing resulted in poor quality software and now it’s just the baseline state-of-the-art
@inthehands I maintain that people would be far less upset about this if LLMs weren't the tool being used by companies to say quality, accessibility, security, etc. don't matter any more. If we had healthier markets this would be far less pronounced: companies only cut QA when they think customers won't stop buying.
@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
“Doesn't the bottom line get affected by broken software?”
Ah, the trillion-dollar question.
Under consumer capitalism, in a competitive market? Yes.
Under investor capitalism, in a world of monopoly and capture and extraction? No, no it does not.
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
The software in question is Arbiter Sports (arbitersports.com).
The headliner among the •numerous• software flaws I encountered in this single registration process: the site fails form validation when making subsequent edits — or no edits, just resaving unchanged! — to a form that the system •had already accepted•.
The only user-visible message is “Required Information Missing.” (There was no required info missing; again, it already passed validation.) The problem, visible only in the Javascript console, was that the site was rejecting non-alphanumeric characters in a phone number it had pulled from its own database.
The fix was to make some keystrokes in the offending field to force the site’s Javascript to re-sanitize it for the back end.
2/3
I just registered my kid for fall school athletics, and now feel like Heracles returning from the underworld with Cerberus on his back.
WOW is that online registration platform bad software.
1/3
@inthehands This is not in a peer reviewed publication, just a preprint, so maybe several grains of salt.
Giraffe and Bovine Petroglyphs, Neolithic Period (c. 8000 BP), Wadi Mathendous, Libya.
@archaeologyart #globalmuseum #Neolithic #archaeology #animals
I do have questions about the results just on their face. Among other things, I’d be mildly surprised if the HW / exam correlation is really that tight.
Another eye-popper that maybe needs the dust to settle a bit first before we quote it too widely.
2/2
RE: https://graphics.social/@metin/117123760167000114
An interesting result that confirms (perhaps suspiciously neatly) what you'd expect: lack of struggle results in lack of learning; letting the AI do your homework harms later exam performance:
“The learning losses are concentrated among roughly 80% of AI users whose behavior is consistent with homework outsourcing, as indicated by exceptionally short homework completion time coupled with high homework scores.”
Haven’t studied the methodology closely (nor am I well qualified to evaluate it) and the results confirm my own expectations, so…grain of salt!
1/2
RE: https://kolektiva.social/@julieofthespirits/117124675878991589
Speaking as a regular reader…yes, and it’s the UK edition specifically. Not that the US edition is perfect or anything but…yeah, when the UK stories cross over into my edition, sometimes they are really jarring.
It’s almost like The Guardian US and The Guardian UK are separate orgs. It’s wild.