violet

evergreen post

Me: *points out misogyny*

You: aww it wants to be a woman so badly! *pats head*

I can tell you're a really smart person. That counts for something. Are you putting your energies in the right place? Are YOU also perhaps guilty of caricaturing your opposition? Has it occurred to you that there are competent coders with similar aims to yours that are enjoying this?

But you're not gonna achieve any clarity of thinking by assuming a) that ANY CODER EVER, regardless of luck, regardless of professional networks, has always just been able to jump ship to a job that cares about code quality, and b) that everyone uses the model in the stupidest way possible.

Look: I can see that this is as much a cultural problem as it's a technical one. I can't do anything about the culture of our times anymore than you can. It's destructive, partisan, and dismissive of alternative epistemics. I'm sorry that so much hostility gathers in this domain.

I've now been coding exclusively through the model for about two years. I've never spent more time thinking deeply about data structures, query paths, algorithmic efficiencies, failure modes. This is all in how you prompt the model.

This is my whole point: HOW you use the model is way more important than WHAT the model is. You say elsewhere that the point of the model is to separate the human from the code. That has not been my experience. That's how bad users use the model.

Without malice: not every job lets you say fuck shipping. Lucky you if that's your job. But the person sitting at the computer does not always get to make these calls. Besides which, you can totally work through the model to create a tool you understand.

What if I care about shipping a tool that can autogen CRUD?

Okay. So what you're saying is: none of these problems would exist if only everyone did their job in the very special smart way that I have always done mine. You wouldn't need the llm, and also you'd have the same productivity gains that the llm claims to give us. So why didn't that happen?

My point being: you're talking about orientation. The model is orientation-agnostic. If you gave a shit about formally proving every line of code, you would use the model to build a tool that actually made that feasible.

You gotta give in to your times. A surrender of the territory of formal notation? Oh, yeah, because we were totally writing coq proofs for every CRUD API we wrote at our shitty jobs before the model came. Every I/O operation was optimal before the model. C'mon. The model can output formal notation.

The demise of the French ‘tabac’: How bar closures are fuelling Le Pen’s far right France’s iconic bars-tabacs are closing in droves, stripping communities of a key social lifeline and influencing their politics, according to a study that links the decline of neighbourhood bars with...

“When there is no longer any place to talk to each other, politics becomes a face-off between the isolated individual and the grand narratives of the media – and in this face-off, discourses that offer simple answers have a structural advantage,” the study adds. 

f24.my/Bixk

Indeed! And it's iterative. Others push u in and u also push out bc u have a vision of ur identity that you assert. It's not a clean, settled, set of constraints. It's negotiated by the subject themself, the subjects around them, and what's possible/real in the universe itself

Right, we're all ontologically interdependent. Part of what it means to be Violet is being able to observe others move in the world and think "those people are not me." We constrain each others' possible spaces into regions dense enough that we can individuate.

DW penny I also have to remind myself that I exist. This is really the basis of neo-subjectivity. Yes: a human mind is actually an assemblage of impressions, vibes, electrical and eidetic signals from diffuse spaces, barely anything, BUT to the world there's just Violet.

white ppl telling other white ppl that brown bodies are super special and work very differently than white bodies. you wouldnt even understand how broken these brown bodies are. you wouldnt even understand what a loud whistle might do to these people, look at them, they're half dead as it is.

And so it becomes important to try to generate new stories that explain what's happening.

Yeah, I think it's also about what are the available narratives and what do they obscure. There's been a dominant narrative in american progressive discourse that has kinda collapsed all racial minorities into one category of "the oppressed." That narrative is both illuminating and overstated.

Of course. I'm not trying to be hostile to your take or perspective at all. It's less about telling YOU "hey please be aware of this" as it is about telling the audience around us (incl white ppl who will know no better) "hey don't overindex on simple takes. There are layers you don't see."

Sure, but please don't erase the fact that Latin American societies are also racist. I say this as a Latina. There are racial and class dynamics that play out in Latin America that gringos are totally blind to in their refusal to see a world beyond the 50 states.

Racial aspirationism is the bane of Latin America. There's a class of Latino who just wants to be a white American so badly. This needs to be talked about. Simplistic narratives that collapse Latin American communities into heterogeneous demographics will only obfuscate the dynamics in play.

Cartoon: no lineups for Melania compared to a huge lineup for root canals.

Globe and Mail cartoon

This would be so profoundly stupid from Hughes that I'm convinced it's gonna happen

hello doll. thank you for the great tool

CL final day in the new format

literally racketeering

It's also not like writers and journalists were being compensated adequately before the advent of LLMs... the business model has been broken for a while. I think a lot of (well-meaning!) people are conflating their discomfort around tech with a broader societal devaluation of the written word.

Photo of a sculpture in Wood resembling a person swimming from the front view with arm raised and bent and head hidden in small wave splashes

'The Swimmer', wooden sculpture by contemporary New York based sculptor Stefanie Rocknak #WomensArt

First Nation says Manitoba Hydro's 'environmental colonialism' decimating lake sturgeon | CBC News Tataskweyak Cree Nation says Manitoba Hydro operations have compromised the ecosystem of the lower Churchill River and caused the "near demise" of lake sturgeon.

"First Nation says Manitoba Hydro's 'environmental colonialism' decimating lake sturgeon"