Sasa Sekulic

A bookstore shelf with sf books, including books from John Scalzi, Jeff VanderMeer, Adrian Tchaikovsky, China Mieville, Martha Wells etc

I'm somewhat disappointed I couldn't find any of the newer @scalzi.com books at the Dussman bookstore in Berlin, but still I managed to get something new to me - Starter villain! Also, this shelf is very different to how it looked like ten years ago, and only a few authors were in there 20 years ago

I am (self-evidently) very interested in language. And also in technology. From that perspective, the rise of LLMs has created many new things for me to think about.

One is: why is it that certain very small clusters of words are *clearly written by an LLM*? What is the quality of that writing?

you don’t understand bro, if we didn’t lie, no one would buy our product 😩

Well, it's still better than anything that I can come up with

Hey Jude Law and Let It Be Me

Yeah, but not all of them! Like you could have the first 5-6 like that, and then have one that says "April fools - I'm alive b*tches!", then one that says "psych - still dead! ", and then continue with the "still dead" ones

I bet a product owner thought "how can we incentivize people to use our AI feature? I know - if they don't pay, we will show the feature as disabled, that will pique their curiosity and make them pay up!" 😂😂😂

The thing a lot of people miss is that at the beginning, they were useful idiots for capital owners because they saw they were stupid and easy to manipulate (see apple/Tim cook). But stupid people with a power trip are very dangerous over time if unchecked b/c they might fixate on dangerous ideas

But you don't understand - they'll make up for it in volume! 😂

a man wearing sunglasses and a shirt is saying `` looks good to me ! '' Alt: Ray Charles wearing sunglasses and a shirt is saying `` looks good to me ! ''

I will always remember the scene in the Blues Brothers movie where they complain that the keyboard has sticky keys and then Ray Charles sits at it, plays it wonderfully and then says: "looks good to me" 😂

I keep reading about things like detailed up-front Sprint plans, about "failed" Sprints, about people panicking when a Sprint doesn't go according to plan, etc. There is no agility in that thinking, whatsoever.
1/7

That will certainly take care of vibe developers 😂

It seems like LLMs are not some sort of magic bullet that can solve organizational, maybe they should try solving those first? Reducing the team size to max 5-6 people with specific competencies, and maybe assigning a lead to talk to the stakeholders and management and help organize the priorities?

Ok, I agree that software developers, like squirrels, "are notoriously prevalent in our society today", but I'm not sure it will be that easy to strap them to toy cars...

It was heartbreaking when he was in the hospital, and my other cat couldn't find him anywhere - she spent hours looking for him! The funny thing is: when he came back, she didn't recognize him (all those different smells) so she stared hissing at him! She still keeps her distance. Cats are strange.

An example of meowing:

Recently operated-on tuxedo cat, Tom, imprisoned in a camping pet playpen. He's not happy about it.

Recently operated-on tuxedo cat, Tom, imprisoned in a camping pet playpen with food, water and a litter box. He's not happy about it.

So, last Sunday my tuxedo cat, Tom, thought to check if he knows how to fly. He does not. He was in the window of my second floor apartment, got spooked by a curtain and jumped down. 🤦All in all it could've been worse - a broken elbow and a perforated palate. Now for two months of meowing. 😅 #cats

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Begging someone to go into the Google offices and just spend every day yelling at random managers "remember when your products worked? Remember when they worked so well your company name became a verb? Have you considered doing that instead of shoveling this AI dogshit all day????"

I thought it was a college production of Spy VS Spy!

A comic showing anthroporphized Google and Google +. Google+: Papa, why do they not love me? Google: I do not know, little one, but it is of no concern. I will make them love you.

It reminds me of this:

"Goldman is the first major bank to use Devin, according to Cognition, which was founded in late 2023 by a trio of engineers and whose staff is reportedly stocked with champion coders."

What are champion coders?!

A person reading a book, with a tabby cat resting on his legs and a tuxedo cat sleeping next to them, with all four paws in the air

What do you mean it's not #caturday today?!

There is no such thing as liberalism — or progressivism, etc. There is only conservatism. No other political philosophy actually exists; by the political analogue of Gresham’s Law, conservatism has driven every other idea out of circulation. There might be, and should be, anti-conservatism; but it does not yet exist. What would it be? In order to answer that question, it is necessary and sufficient to characterize conservatism. Fortunately, this can be done very concisely. Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time. For millenia, conservatism had no name, because no other model of polity had ever been proposed. “The king can do no wrong.” In practice, this immunity was always extended to the king’s friends, however fungible a group they might have been. Today, we still have the king’s friends even where there is no king (dictator, etc.). Another way to look at this is that the king is a faction, rather than an individual. As the core proposition of conservatism is indefensible if stated baldly, it has always been surrounded by an elaborate backwash of pseudophilosophy, amounting over time to millions of pages. All such is axiomatically dishonest and undeserving of serious scrutiny. Today, the accelerating de-education of humanity has reached a point where the market for pseudophilosophy is vanishing; it is, as The Kids Say These Days, tl;dr . All that is left is the core proposition itself — backed up, no longer by misdirection and sophistry, but by violence.

So this tells us what anti-conservatism must be: the proposition that the law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone, and cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone. Then the appearance arises that the task is to map “liberalism”, or “progressivism”, or “socialism”, or whateverthefuckkindofstupidnoise-ism, onto the core proposition of anti-conservatism. No, it a’n’t. The task is to throw all those things on the exact same burn pile as the collected works of all the apologists for conservatism, and start fresh. The core proposition of anti-conservatism requires no supplementation and no exegesis. It is as sufficient as it is necessary. What you see is what you get: The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.

I think it's now possible to make a poli-sci course that equips one for modern political analysis better than most classic theory and has a syllabus sourced entirely from random internet posts.

Text 1. Wilhoit's Law, born as part of a 2018 blog comment
crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/l...

Comments on my t-shirt (I got the white one) were only positive but then again, my friends are nice and I didn't post it on the internet and I don't have that many followers anyway. Thanks for the inspiration! Next, to buy some (more) guitars... 😂

John scalzi wearing a pink? Mauve? T-shirt with a rainbow flag and a unicorn saying "alpha male"

Hmmm... 🤔

You wanna verify if they're of adult age or of retirement age? 😂😂😂

Paraphrasing Frankie Boyle: "of course we have the British option - you can fuck right off"

There are lots of avenues to challenge any study like this, especially when the sample size is so low (n=16).

But it is 1000% more transparent in its methodology than ANY marketing claim about increased developer efficiency with AI tools. 1/2

I'm not a writer but the ideas keep coming:
- "because you're a distinguished person of good taste" (must feign sincerity)
- "wait, you can see me?! I didn't think your kind could!" (look very nervous)
- "ah, but that's what they want you to think!"

But I would probably just say "eh I don't care"