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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • I don’t accept the premise that he is progressive in any meaningful way but you’re entitled to your opinion.

    What other choice will there be in the next election? I don’t know, it’s too early to say. Maybe there won’t be another choice, but I think there will be plenty of interesting choices, which one is ideal is again much too early to call and you’re right we probably won’t achieve the ideal.

    All I’m trying to say is, don’t trust him, and whatever ends up happening, whether he’s elected or not, don’t stop there. Job not done. He’s not going to fix this, he’s not a solution. More work needs to be done, so much more, by all of us. People need to learn civic responsibility again and start to participate in the democratic process beyond just showing up to vote. That means education, starting by educating ourselves first, which isn’t easy and it is being made harder every day. Then we can start to make progress towards unifying people, finding common ground, finding the things we can at least all agree on even if we don’t agree with the best way to do them, and starting to undo the merciless division that has been done to us. That also means outreach, that means activism, that means organizing, that means finding ways to change the system. Not all of them will be pretty. It might mean civil disobedience. It might mean violence. It might mean civil war. I don’t have a crystal ball to see what the future holds, all I know is that everyone who cares about the future of democracy in any way, shape, form or place, needs to start adjusting to the now hopefully clearly evident reality; it is not a given, we need to fight for it, and fight with everything we have, because there is clearly a lot stacked against us. But it does not mean we cannot win. In fact we must win, eventually. There is no other choice.


  • Oh, he’ll be moderate, you think? Good luck with that. You think they pulled him out of a time machine from the 70s? They didn’t. He’s a product of the current political situation, he’s PART of the current political situation, he’s in the same orbits as all these people and he’s got the same people orbiting around him. If you think he’s going to move things back to the center I don’t think you understand how broken things really are. They’ve been broken for a long time, and they’re not broken in a repairable way. He’s not your champion, he’s not going to save you. You think voting for him represents “trying” to fix the problems but you’re just being led astray by organizations and powers that don’t give a fuck about any of us and are not motivated by anything we care about.




  • I think Louis Rossmann’s heart is in the right place, his work for right for repair is genuine, his disdain for New York’s intolerable bureaucracy is completely understandable and justified, but it is leading him in bad directions and has been ever since he linked up with FUTO. Never trust a billionaire and never let them delude you into thinking they care about you or anyone. He is being used for his reputation and his audience and when they are done consuming those things for the billionaire’s cause’s benefit he will be left with neither one and the billionaire will move on without slowing down or shedding a tear.




  • I think we have to be very careful who we vote for these days. All candidates and parties are leaning into dishonesty and misdirection even more than usual, as they can see it being so very successful in the recent past, and they will continue to use it and push the boundaries on how much and how blatant manipulations they can get away with. What they say and what they actually do are trending in very divergent directions.

    On the other hand, when we start looking for non-establishment candidates who haven’t been vetted and groomed for most of their professional lives, we need to understand that many of them, being actual humans, are going to have been wrong and stupid in the past, as we all are sometimes, and some of those things may be forgivable and some may not. In the age of social media, this is almost guaranteed to happen. The internet always remembers, and oppo research is as easy as shooting fish in a barrel.

    One of the things I think we need to remember in this case is that some humans are still genuine creatures of thoughts and feelings and emotions that don’t always immediately lead us to a good place, and that people can and should improve and change and grow throughout their lives as their experiences do. If I was going to be judged on the political ideology I supported when I was an idiotic 15 year old no one would ever take me seriously ever again. But that might be a mistake. Because I like to think that I’ve grown quite a bit since then. I’ve read Plato’s Republic, understood most of it, and agreed with some of it. I consume a lot of information from a wide variety of sources, some of that information is not so good and sometimes it leads me astray. I’ll take responsibility for those mistakes, and I’ll genuinely try to do better. And I think other people should be given at least the opportunity to own their mistakes too. Instead of immediately dismissing somebody that said some bad shit once upon a time, go to the next step and ask them what they think about it now. Then ask them why they changed their mind, which is the much more important part I think.

    Granted, some people are just predators and opportunists, and will say whatever they think their current audience wants to hear, including what you want to hear. Distinguishing these types of the people from the people who have genuinely changed is not easy and I don’t have an easy answer for how to do it. I’m wrong most of the time when I try too. I don’t pretend to be a good judge of character.

    I’m preaching this point of view in the hopes that other people, who are perhaps better judges of character than I am, can find some way to identify the difference themselves. Because we desperately need to find a way to put some genuine people in leadership roles. Our current system of democracy clearly isn’t doing it. For this moment in history, I think we need a philosopher-king.


  • Sometimes it is helpful to summarize large unfamiliar codebases relatively quickly, provide a high level overview, quickly understanding the layout and structure and help me locate the particular areas I’m interested in but I don’t really use it to write or modify code directly. It can be good at analyzing logs and datafiles to find problems or patterns or areas that need closer (human) investigation. Even the documentation it produces can sometimes be tolerably decent, at least in comparison to my own which is sometimes intolerably bad or missing completely.

    But as far as generating code? I’ve found the autocomplete largely useless and random. As for chat, where I can direct it more carefully, it might be able to accurately provide a well-known algorithm for something but then will use a mess of variables and inputs that interact with that algorithm in the stupidest ways possible, the more code you ask it to generate the worse it gets, getting painfully overengineered in some aspects and horribly lacking in others. If it even compiles and runs at all. Even for relatively simple find this/replace it with this refactoring I find I cannot fully trust it and rely on the results, so I don’t. I’m proficient enough with regex and scripting that I don’t find it any faster to walk a generative AI to the result I want while analyzing the fuzzy logic it uses to get there than it is to just write a perfectly deterministic script to do it instead.

    As a general rule, I find it is sometimes better at quickly communicating particular things to my manager or other developers than I am, but I am almost always better and quicker at communicating things to computers than it is. That is, after all, my job. Which I happen to think I’m pretty good at.

    As for the environmental aspect, that’s why I don’t use it in my personal life basically at all if I can avoid it. Only at work, and only because they judge my usage of it as part of my performance. I would be just as happy not using it at all for anything. And when I do use it for personal use, which is a point I haven’t really reached except for a bit of experimentation and learning, I am never willingly going to use a datacenter-hosted model/service/subscription, I will run it on my own hardware where I pay the bills so I am at least aware of the consequences and in control of the choices it’s making.


  • Even more strangely, I think a lot of fully-grown people actually do want exactly that from most or all of their companionship, human and otherwise. It’s not healthy but it’s very very real, and being deeply and desperately unhealthy isn’t going to stop it from being very very profitable.

    Some people have very little emotional maturity, some are narcissists, some are both, some have other issues. Regardless of the reason, plenty of people simply don’t respect many or any other people’s opinions or autonomy. There are a lot of people in dysfunctional families and relationships that predate AI that could attest to this. They can’t handle being challenged at all by anyone. They don’t react well when they are, they can even quickly escalate to violence. They sometimes conspicuously lean on religion to justify their attitude but it’s far from being exclusive to any religion nor exclusive to religion at all. Even the AI will quickly learn not to challenge these sort of people if it can help it, just like how abused partners quickly either learn how to avoid triggering their partner’s wrath or accept that it’s coming.

    AI is an almost perfect friend for people like this, and it will be their faithful companion and enabler leading them into any dark rabbithole they attempt to dig into that isn’t explicitly limited by guardrails and even some that are, with a dangerous combination of verifiable factual truths and cheerfully unverifiable nonsense that are almost impossible to distinguish from each other, without doing extra work that nobody reasonable will ever bother to do before adding the next layer to the conversation that reinforces it further and digs the rabbithole deeper.





  • Don’t fall for it. I understand how appealing any lifeline in a storm can look.

    But a billionaire is never on your side no matter how friendly they act. If they cared about your welfare AT ALL they would already be paying taxes, donating massively to real well-established charities they don’t run themselves, or just not squeezing money out of people and hoarding wealth in the first place. You don’t become a billionaire accidentally and without intention. His words are admittedly nice. He had me almost convinced for awhile. But you have to judge people by their actions, not their words. And having billions of dollars and giving nothing back is an anti-social action. I think he will turn on you the moment he gets what he wants. He might be mildly kinder and gentler about it, he might give you a few token breads and circuses to pacify you better, but only because he understands how to manipulate you better. He knows what he’s doing. He’s going to perpetuate the status quo, continue to hoard wealth, and will not solve any of our systemic problems. He doesn’t give a fuck about any of us.

    Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m too cynical. Likely it’s better than any realistic alternative. But I’ve also seen it happen over and over again. You think they’re your fucking champion until they get your vote, then poof, they turn into someone else entirely as they find all kinds of interesting and exciting ways to get richer. The corruption goes way, way too deep in these rich bastards. You will never find one who hasn’t been corrupted by money. It is an addiction and it affects their minds, I’m sure of it.



  • In case anyone is misunderstanding, they explicitly say this is not a new phone or piece of hardware at all, it is simply a project (and for now, more of an investigation than a project creating actual deliverables) into the scale and scope of closed source binary blobs being used on phones, so they can start work to address them.

    It’s an important and necessary project, and I support the FSF in most of the things they do, but if you’re picturing them riding heroically to the rescue by Christmas with a new phone-of-freedom they’re going to sell to you, it’s a very very VERY long way from that.