attacus || Lilly Ryan

YouTube video by PyCon AU "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Reality" - Lilly Ryan (PyCon AU 2025)

A great talk by @attacus.net from this year's #PyConAU

All models are wrong, but some are useful.

Aw, thank you!

You're Not as Smart as You Think You Are First, some housekeeping! I have written a novel about a trans witch who teaches her broken-hearted mother how to do magic. She also researches a mysterious...

My father was supposedly one of the smartest people in the world, and he hated that elitist nonsense.

He loathed the idea that intelligence is something you're born with, a single trait that can be measured. It leads to eugenics and bad policy.

My latest newsletter:
buttondown.com/charliejane/...

I don’t mind people knowing it was me 😅

In food history, we notice how super-refined foods--gelatin, vienna sausage, white bread--lose class and become horrifying once they become industrialized. Suddenly, fingermarks in bread dough demonstrate skill, not clumsiness.

Post-chatGPT, I'm feeling this about writing. Smoothness feels gross.

YouTube video by PyCon AU "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Reality" - Lilly Ryan (PyCon AU 2025)

Last weekend I gave a talk at #PyConAU.

It’s about quality, scale, LLMs, science, systems thinking, hype, & what happens when the subjective nature of reality meets the assumption that the human experience can be accurately represented to or by machines.

You should watch it!

youtu.be/GBHGHrlRlKs

Medieval manuscript image of a spotty green creature with a long, trumpet-like nose, two hoofed feet and a short tail.

nosu, f.n: nose. (NO-zuh / ˈnɔ-zʌ)
Image: Bible; France, c. 1270-1290; Bibliothèque d'Agglomération de Saint-Omer, Ms. 5, f. 246r.
#OldEnglish #WOTD

It’s so beautiful, and learning about it made my entire day

Indeed. Interesting choice, that.

An LLM-generated list of Australian Prime Ministers, including “John Gillard”, two Scott Morrisons, and a lot of spelling and factual errors.

Here’s the one it generated when I tried.

Maybe the real Ship of Theseus was the Ship of Theseus we made along the way

important context for headlines like this: Altman also runs a company (Worldcoin) that he claims will solve this problem he also created

Book Launch, 'The mechanic and the luddite' Jathan Sadowski in conversation with Lizzie O'Shea and Chris O'Neill for the launch of 'The Mechanic and the Luddite'.

Melbourne Folks! I will be hosting a book launch to celebrate The Mechanic and the Luddite! Come hear me chat about the book with Lizzie O'Shea and Chris O'Neill — and have a free drink!
• August 14th, 6pm, Victorian Trades Hall
• Register for free: events.humanitix.com/sadowkski-th...

We should be putting a gargantuan amount of money into solar and storage. War economy levels. It should be free to have a guy from the government solar your house up. Electricity should basically cost nothing.

Oh yeah? Just wait until they hear about the human capacity for relentless perfectionism 😅

To be fair, the meeting included us investigating the log events generated by us investigating the log events…

Sleep-deprived Effy has proven too much for Zoom's meeting summary AI, which has managed to produce something significantly less coherent than even my babbling. ft @attacus.net

David R. Hagen just solved a small mystery that I mentioned 13 years ago in the mouseover text of a comic drhagen.com/blog/the-mis...

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

Art by Frey Catton and ZZ Claybourne. Gray word balloon against a black background, text reading "Maybe I'm not saying anything we don't know, but isn't that all art/communication anyway? Reinforcement of the known to battle the untrue?"

You counter evil with real life.

Handwave it because by then “AI will be good enough to solve that one”, the same way it will for the climate 🙃

Recently I found myself on Antipope Instagram, where there are endless reels of the current Antipope of the Palmarian Catholic Church.

This is, of course, extremely my jam, and I started reading up on them hoping to find some wild theology, but instead I found something WAY better...

African workers labeling data and providing content moderation are the invisible backbone of AI development. They perform critical labor under challenging conditions, often for minimal pay, yet remain absent from our conversations about the AI value chain.

Someone should have called Semple an “inhueëncer” by now, surely

www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...

Just had a sudden mental image of a melting moment shortbread cookie, but they were called “teachable moments” and filled with faux pas and the experience of sticking a fork in a toaster

I don't think that "bikeshedding" is a good name for what it represents, we should discuss alternatives

Programs: Byte Into IT – 19 March 2025, Byte Into IT — Triple R 102.7FM, Melbourne Independent Radio An episode of Byte Into IT on 19 March 2025

I was interviewed by @attacus.net for last night's broadcast of Byte into IT on RRR Melbourne Independent Radio. This is such a great conversation about my new book! Honestly one of my favorites so far. Huge thanks to @attacus.net. Listen to the episode here. www.rrr.org.au/explore/prog...

Cover image: red book cover with hammer and wrench surrounded by cog wheel, with book title ‘The Mechanic and the Luddite - a ruthless criticism of technology and capitalism’ and book author ‘Jathan Sadowski’ next to vertical slice of author portrait, smiling man with glasses and beard, wearing white shirt, blue suit and tie.

Tonight hear @jathansadowski.com in conversation with @attacus.net on his latest 📕 release
‘The Mechanic and the Luddite’. production by @rowenamurray.bsky.social 👏
Dan and me live from 7pm AEDT tonight for tech news & events too! @3rrrfm.bsky.social 📻 ❤️

If there is one leap that the infosec community consistently fails to make, it is this: people who are not like me, who have different needs and priorities, who have less time or are less technical, STILL DESERVE PRIVACY AND SECURITY.

Also feel bad for Nikolai. Done dirty first by Edison, then by Elon