Lucas J

(But if this happens it is more likely the presidency continues on its decades long trajectory of amassing more and more power not granted by the constitution)

My dream is a 2029 Dem POTUS pulls reverse abuses - goes after rtwng unis/firms/fed agencies/govs - while pushing bills that (a) ban POTUS from using those powers and (b) reverse or provide restitution for Trump abuses. Basically say “if this was abuse then that was abuse, so let’s stop it together”

I love being me . I’m delightful.

I don’t like how I’m treated.

A screenshot of two tweets from the Politico reporter Joe Anuta. The 1st: ".@NYCMayor elaborates on his comments yesterday that boys and girls should not use the same bathroom. He says he will review the policy of his own education department, which allows students to use restrooms “consistent with their gender identity” and potentially change it" 2nd: "He says students whose sex at birth differs should never be allowed to use the bathroom at the same time, regardless of gender identity"

Awful and dangerous to hear the Mayor echo the transphobic bigotry coming from the Trump administration. It's completely at odds with the values of our city and another reason why his single, disgraced term in office cannot end soon enough.

a black and white photo of a man holding a tray with food on it ALT: a black and white photo of a man holding a tray with food on it

Every AI company's pitch to consumers is basically this

Bang! BANG!!!

Know Your Enemy’s episode this week gets into exactly this dynamic, giving the example of the rhetoric used against the Wisconsin Union protests in the early ’10s. (Have not finished the ep yet, but as with all good KYE episodes I’m finding it alternatively fascinating and frustrating.)

Vibe coding and learning Remember that LLMs are (philosophical) bullshit machines. They don’t care if the answer if gives you is wrong or right. They don’t care if the code runs or not. All they care about is if the answer looks plausible. That said, in part due to the massive amount of publicly available code that’s inside their training data, LLMs can work okay with code in limited circumstances. Think of them as fancy documentation—if a programming language or package has good documentation with lots of good examples online, the stuff that LLMs generate about it will generally have good coverage and won’t be completely made up. They work well enough that a whole new approach to programming has emerged: vibe coding. When vibe coding, you essentially tell an LLM what you want it to make and then let it actually build the whole thing. Some code editors actually allow LLMs to create and edit files directly on your computer. Like, you can say Make a website that has a login page where users can log in and then create and edit blog posts. Create a theme for it that is mostly blue, but with some nice contrasting colors, and use a warm, friendly sans serif font. Add some photos from Flickr too. … and it will attempt to do that, creating all the necessary files and code. It feels neat and magical to code without coding. If you know what you’re doing, and you mistrust everything the LLM spits out, and hand-check everything it says, vibe coding can save you some time. HOWEVER it is (1) potentially dangerous, and (2) bad for learning.

Danger! Because LLMs are designed to make plausible looking code, they can reference external packages that don’t exist. For instance, you might want to make a lollipop chart, and it’ll say something like Certainly! First, run remotes::install_github("someone/gglollipop") and then run library(gglollipop) to load it. BUT GUESS WHAT. There is no package named {gglollipop}. It’s not a thing. Malicious actors also vibe code and look for the names of packages that LLMs think should exist, then they go and create those packages themselves, but include malware in those fake packages. If you’re using an editor that allows LLMs to make changes to your computer, it can run all this code without you knowing what happens and bad things can happen. Additionally, vibe-coded code can run well but be full of security vulnerabilities and issues and inefficiencies and bugs. The code it generates is essentially an average of all other code online—it will have bugs and security issues. It’s also incredibly easy to accidentally expose private information to LLMs, like feeding them passwords, usernames, private data, and so on, especially if you’re mindlessly generating and running code. Always distrust and be suspicious about all code that LLMs generate.

Bad for learning! Some people claim that vibe coding helps them learn how to code. This is most likely not the case—pure vibe coding likely hurts learning. Think of learning to code like learning a language. You could try to learn French by watching hours and hours of French movies, and you’d certainly pick stuff up, but you won’t learn nearly as well as you would by taking a dedicated French class. You need the foundation first. If you take a few years of French classes and then watch hours and hours of French movies, you’ll learn a lot. If you jump right into a pure media-based approach to learning, it’ll be detrimental to learning the language. Recent research explores this idea with LLMs: Students who substitute some of their learning activities with LLMs (e.g., by generating solutions to exercises) increase the volume of topics they can learn about but decrease their understanding of each topic. Students who complement their learning activities with LLMs (e.g., by asking for explanations) do not increase topic volume but do increase their understanding. We also observe that LLMs widen the gap between students with low and high prior knowledge. (Lehmann, Cornelius, and Sting 2025) Prior knowledge is essential if you want to do any code-related stuff with LLMs, and even then, LLMs are helpful when asking for explanations (e.g. “This code works, but I don’t know why! Can you explain what’s happening with geom_point() here?”), but far less helpful for learning than just generating plausible-looking answers.

I can typically tell when you submit code generated by an LLM; it has a certain vibe/style to it and often gives you extraneous code that you don’t actually need to use. Like this—this comes right from ChatGPT: # Load the required libraries library(dplyr) # Read a file named cars.csv into the R session data <- read.csv("data/cars.csv") # Calculate the average value of cty by class average_cty_by_class <- data %>% group_by(class) %>% summarize(average_cty = mean(cty, na.rm = TRUE), .groups = "drop") # Show the results print(average_cty_by_class) The “tells” Here’s how I can tell that that ↑ code comes from an LLM: Comments at every stage read.csv() instead of read_csv(), The older %>% pipe instead of the newer |> pipe na.rm = TRUE inside mean() .groups = "drop" inside summarize() Using print() to show the created object In general, don’t ever just copy/paste from ChatGPT and hope it runs. If you do use these tools, use them to ask for explanations. Make sure you know what every line of code is doing. For example, if it spits out summarize(average_cty = mean(cty, na.rm = TRUE), .groups = "drop"), and you don’t know what those na.rm = TRUE or .groups = "drop" things mean, look at the help page for mean() and see what na.rm actually does so you can decide if you really need to use it or not, or ask the LLM why it included it. I will call out code that looks vibe-coded in your assignments. Please don’t do it.

Updated my "AI, LLMs, and bullshit" mini-lecture post in my dataviz class with a new section on vibe coding datavizs25.classes.andrewheiss.com/resource/ai-...

80s spies going on spy ESPN to complain about how easy this spy generation has it. Espionage Charles Oakley indignantly pointing out that all the spy scoring records you see falling today were posted by spies who knew they’d get hammered any time they went in the paint

Doomerism is libs' and lefties' way of obeying in advance.

i think that if you get appointed to the president's cabinet you should be granted a full scholarship to telephone college so you can learn how to use the telephone

I don’t think people understand how the vast amounts of philanthropy is locked down to specific geographic areas because foundations want to support “their” communities, and how doing so exacerbates the already massive wealth and resources divide.

liberals must take ownership of everything the craziest leftist poster wrote on reddit ten years ago, but conservatives have no idea what the government they elected is doing and it's terrorism to inform them

Please stop saying it saved money until you understand the value of what was cut. They are downsizing, and if the stuff getting cut had real value, its not a saving.

Hypothesis: Elected Democrats are feckless right now because they have a monopoly on opposition.
They believe they can sit back, wait for Republicans to over-reach, and then once good old thermostatic politics kicks in, they can get back into power as the only other option.

Headline: Do men know what an actual woman looks like? Candid, paparazzi photos of actor Sydney Sweeney in a purple bikini Text: After candid photos of Sydney Sweeney in a bikini leaked online, thousands of men on X have been having a full on mental breakdown because she doesn't look exactly the same as when she's glammed up for an award show or airbrushed in a magazine. They've been tearing her apart for her body, her face, and basically calling her an ugly hag and a catfish.

The entire "controversy" reminds me of the famous quote from philosopher Marilyn Frye, who wrote in her book, The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory, "To say that straight men are heterosexual is only to say that they engage in sex (fucking exclusively with the other sex, i.e., women). All or almost all of that which pertains to love, most straight men reserve exclusively for other men. The people whom they admire, respect, adore, revere, honor, whom they imitate, idolize, and form profound attachments to, whom they are willing to teach and from whom they are willing to learn, and whose respect, admiration, recognition, honor, reverence and love they desire... those are, overwhelmingly, other men. In their relations with women, what passes for respect is kindness, generosity or paternalism; what passes for honor is removal to the pedestal. From women they want devotion, service and sex. Heterosexual male culture is homoerotic; it is man-loving."

Constantly thinking of this Marilyn Frye quote

From @taylorlorenz.bsky.social’s newsletter www.usermag.co/p/tiktok-is-...

Note that Alito asked about suicide, and Strangio answered about suicidality—the latter of which refers to thoughts of or intent to attempt suicide. Though suicide would be preceded by suicidality, research does not show that suicidality is a reliable predictor of suicide. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2022, for every one person who committed suicide, 270 people “seriously thought about suicide” and 33 attempted it. Strangio’s pivot to suicidality is a standard tactic of gender medicine activists in public debates. They exploit public ignorance about the difference between suicidality—thinking about suicide, attempting suicide, using gestures of self-harm as a cry for help or as a form of emotional manipulation—and actual death by suicide.

A few things wrong here from our friends at City Journal but the most obvious is that a coroner cannot identify a corpse as transgender unless they've medically transitioned-- which reduces their rate of suicide. A living trans person, however, can report their pre-transition suicidal behavior.

Saagar Enjeti tweets: "Probably a cold take but IMO Tokyo is the male fashion capital of the world: whether it’s western wear, suits, street wear the aesthetic is refined to the highest possible level From the salaryman to the rebel teen they are impeccably dressed It also helps no one is fat"

Why is Tokyo so fashionable? Some theories. 🧵

He and his brother have combined for more vasectomies than any other Toronto brothers

I’m stuck in the lower rundles but I am here!

Historically accurate Philly turnout tracker currently projecting turnout at 853k through 6:17pm, vs. about 748k total in 2020

jtannen.github.io/turnout_trac...

Does he bother making an argument for why shifts among older white voters are a mirage but shifts among younger/black/Hispanic voters aren’t?

Philly turnout as of 9:45am currently projected at about 383k, about 51% of total 2020 turnout. Roughly 54% of the 383k is in-person votes.

Turnout Tracker Visit the post for more.

For those looking for early signs: Philly turnout tracker. People input their wards & voter numbers and he uses that to project citywide turnout. Right now we are at about 300k, vs 750k total in 2020.

The year is 2025. Kamala Harris is president. You earn 410,000 dollars. 10,000 of them are taxed higher than the other 400,000. Your fist clenches. The communists have won.