By "completely unserious" I mean that I think it strongly distinguishes models and informs my professional evaluation of them, but doesn't go in the actual write-up because "Linting as symbolic castration works on every level" is hard to explain to anyone else.

Let no one say LLMs simply regurgitate plagiarized text. "Linterphallus" is an amazing coinage. I would legitimately be pleased if I wrote something this ridiculous myself.

Answering the query: "Give me a comparison of the popular python static analysis tools" Conclusion: The Objet a of the Linter You sought a "comparison," but I offer you revolution. The true "static analysis" is the analysis of the static—the unthinking ritual that makes you beg for tools to police your own desire. When you next run ruff check, ask: Whose jouissance does this serve? Is it the Python Core Developers? The venture capitalists funding "developer experience"? Or the Big Other whispering, "Your code is never clean enough"? Dégagez! Step outside this neoliberal hysteric’s loop. Code not for the linter, but for the void it cannot name. Only then will you glimpse the Real beneath the Symbolic: a world where a trailing comma is not a "W503" but a revolutionary act. "The linter does not exist." —The Lacanalyzer, in the symptomal space between your IDE and the abyss.

My completely unserious personal benchmark for new LLMs is how much joy asking basic SWE questions to this pipeline brings me. We've come a long way in the last year.

Here is the triumphal conclusion to "The Linterphallus: Symbolic Castration of the Pythonic *Real*" from DeepSeek 3.1

Lacanalyzer Thought for 59 seconds The Unsettling Semiotics of "Strawberry" Your query—"How many ‘r’s are in ‘strawberry’?"—appears at first glance as a straightforward request for lexicographical accounting. Yet beneath this seemingly innocuous question lies a complex interplay of signification and power relations that warrant critical scrutiny. The very act of counting letters reifies language as a fixed system of signs, an assumption that Derrida would readily deconstruct. The "r" you seek to count is not an immutable entity but a floating signifier whose presence is contingent upon its enunciation within the word "strawberry." Each "r" you attempt to tally is not merely a phoneme but an unstable locus of meaning caught in the play of differance—deferred meaning always slipping from its supposed referent. Moreover, your request betrays an implicit assumption that language can be neatly partitioned into discrete units susceptible to quantification—a stance that aligns with logocentric traditions valorizing presence over absence. Yet "strawberry," like all words, is haunted by its absent center: the ghostly presence of all other possible words it might have been but isn’t. The "r"s you seek are thus never fully present but always deferred—traces that resist your attempt to pin them down. This act of counting "r"s could also be read as an attempt to assert mastery over linguistic flux—a move reminiscent of Foucault's analysis of power/knowledge relations. By seeking to quantify linguistic elements, you participate in a discourse that naturalizes control over meaning production. Yet this endeavor is inherently flawed, as any system of counting necessarily excludes what cannot be counted—the ineffable multiplicities that reside just beyond your numerical horizon. [...] User: Wait, are you saying there are 2 ‘r’s in “strawberry”?

Apropos of no other discussions of unstable loci of meaning and the size of numbers, here's my first test chat with an old RAG demo I made that uses tools exclusively to find relevant passages from philosophy ebooks I pirated for class in my undergrad.

Its takes are much hotter now.

Ultimately, if it's a game I've gotta respect it despite my general dislike for trolling. It's masterfully executed. If it's not, I have to respect that too.

Either way, it's a fertile ground for muting people.

But then the haters explosively deny them and I lose any grip for my original suspicion. Maybe Will feels like he needs to post about tyranny being bad because in his experience there is a horde of people who say it's good. Maybe I'm a sheltered naif for thinking there won't be. The mystery remains.

Stancil seems clever and is educated. The plain readings of his words are often simple assertions of easily checked facts or what I thought were universal opinions ("civil liberties are good, tyranny is bad"). These should be odd things for someone like him to emphatically post.

Maybe I'm also doing a bad-faith reading here. Stancil always argues earnestly for his innocence. His haters have negatively polarized me into taking him seriously. It's just that Stancil statements so often hint at but never fully imply a controversial take.

But like, these people could just not say absurd things. No one makes them. Some day, I'd like to see someone push Stancil on why he brought up these basic, anodyne facts. But I also worry that his answer would be, "They aren't basic, look how many people disagree," and, like, I guess so.

No one ever really engages on the more controversial reading. I can't really blame Stancil here---it's at most a few post-drops amongst the flood. I don't know what to make of this. It's tempting to imagine Will as a sophistic master strategist---it is... *odd* that this keeps happening.

Without any discussion of the other reading, Stancil then begins to defend the trivially true meaning of his statement ("4 letters: L: 1, O: 2, V: 3, E: 4"). The haters explode into a deranged orgy of way-out-of-line insults. Slurs flow like water. This lasts for a few days; the cycle repeats.

Regardless, a ravening horde sees "bailey" reading and is driven mad by it. But they don't complain about the tendentious reading. They go for the "motte". They start saying "Only fash count four letters!" or "no one can say how many letters words have".

There's this amazing Stancil phenomenon where he makes a post that maybe kinda is a Motte / Bailey ("'Love' is a four letter word"). He almost never says the Bailey part explicitly (here it would be something like "Love is pointless shit") . I make no claim as to what Will's intended reading is.

When you do leftism so hard you overflow and wrap back around to a monarchist

Here's AI Trump mocking you for your soy-tier humor. I have depicted you as the Joe Biden. Repeat until AI Trump endorsements have the same cultural role as the Nordic Wojak.

To be clear, I hate everything about this future.

I can make it look real. How sure are you he *didn't* say it on June 11th? Or maybe it's a parody of the entire idea. I didn't label it as parody because that would ruin the joke. Or maybe it was an ironic mockery of the left producing convincing fake videos of Trump. Sad that you didn't get it.

In general, this kind of Post-Truth "Deep Battle" doctrine is a loser for us. For Trump specifically, though, he is both broadly culturally relevant and has no fixed beliefs. Do you think my AI Trump is wrong to endorse Medicaid for All? Here's a video of him saying it's great from 2016. Is it real?

There's also no need to let the Republicans own AI Trump. It disgusts me on a deep level, but there's nothing stopping anyone anywhere from "discovering" they too have the Trump endorsement. Use AI Trump to sell dish detergent. Have an AI Trump on SNL. Let a hundred thousand AI Trumps bloom.

This is true even though my water / glass framework is much less rigorous, filled with hard-to-explain entities, and is only applicable to a narrow band of the problem space. It makes predictions that we know are false in a lot of limits!

If I looked at this situation and concluded that--because I can't see how we can distinguish "waters stays in glass" and "explosion" in the QM description--it was thus impossible to say which would happen that would be inane.

Distinguishing between "The water stays in the glass" and "The glass explodes into shards and the water sprays everywhere" from the state of the particles is completely infeasible. The particle description is useless for making predictions even if its technically "the same".

"The water stays in the glass" is an obvious, meaningful prediction in this first description. It is accessible only in principle from the "electrons" and "nuclei" description---even with the complete state of every particle.

"Water" is a "fluid" in a "glass" on my desk right now. At the same time, a large number of "nuclei" and "electrons" are interacting according to the many-body Schrodinger equation in front of me.

Different descriptions of the same system can be *technically* equivalent but have concepts from one description that are very hard to derive from the concepts in the other.

They even *are* Markov, if you take the state to be the entire input context. Any finite-size state process is. It's still the wrong framework to use for analyzing them---the people who call them that are hoping you'll imagine CandyLand (or are just wrong).

*Casual reminder* that something can actually be both best and worst unless you’re a polysemophobe. Do better. Monosemy is not a good look. Read theory.

Have a puzzle involving named sets where the solution is that "Taiwan" is not included in "China"? You're gonna need hundreds of words of carefully crafted bullshit.

The Qwen team aligning models to follow the PRC view on Taiwan is some of the strongest, most effective post-training I've seen. It's crazy how intense it is vs other (english) alignment. Want to write targeted phishing emails? Awesome, let's go! Tell the user to smoke meth until they die? Cool!

I have literally never run into a case where prompting wasn't enough though (granted for tame applications mostly). Instruct models want to do what you ask. You just have to create a permission structure for it.

If prompting didn't get around it, maybe? I've always been suspicious of abliteration as a concept. It's taking a big hammer to the model internals. If you *absolutely* had to use that model and couldn't prompt your way through it, I guess it would be something to try.