so I got laid off again, for stupid AI-pilled reasons.

Anybody need a writer or editor with:
- 8+ years of technical writer/content strategist experience, mostly in software
- One published short fiction anthology (as editor)
- A master's degree in sociolinguistics
- A knack for learning new content management systems
- A love of working with invested SMEs
- A basic understanding of web dev
- Strong boundaries
- An aversion to generative AI?

Prioritizing remote work in Canada.
#GetFediHired

What Happens When a Bad-Tempered, Distractible Doofus Runs an Empire? | The New Yorker

One of the few things that Kaiser Wilhelm II, who ruled Germany from 1888 to 1918, had a talent for was causing outrage. One of the many things that Wilhelm was convinced he was brilliant at, despite all evidence to the contrary, was “personal diplomacy,” fixing foreign policy through one-on-one meetings with other European monarchs and statesmen. In fact, Wilhelm could do neither the personal nor the diplomacy, and these meetings rarely went well. The Kaiser viewed other people in instrumental terms, was a compulsive liar, and seemed to have a limited understanding of cause and effect. He was susceptible but never truly controllable. He asserted his authority unpredictably, as if to prove he was still in charge, staging rogue interventions into his own advisers’ policies and sacking ministers without warning. Sound familiar? Revisit Miranda Carter on the lessons of Kaiser Wilhelm II:

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/what-happens-when-a-bad-tempered-distractible-doofus-runs-an-empire

@charliejane reminded me this morning of this wonderful quote from Stephen Jay Gould:

I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History

today, I think I’d add refugee camps and immigration detention to the list of places

It's clear that AI assisted coding is dividing developers (welcome to the culture wars!). I've seen a few blog posts now that talk about how some people just "love the craft", "delight in making something just right, like knitting", etc, as opposed to people who just "want to make it work". As if that explains the divide.

How about this, some people resent the notion of being a babysitter to a stochastic token machine, hastening their own cognitive decline. Some people resent paying rent to a handful of US companies, all coming directly out of the TESCREAL human extinction cult, to be able to write software. Some people resent the "worse is better" steady decline of software quality over the past two decades, now supercharged. Some people resent that the hegemonic computing ecosystem is entirely shaped by the logic of venture capital. Some people hate that the digital commons is walled off and sold back to us. Oh and I guess some people also don't like the thought of making coding several orders of magnitude more energy intensive during a climate emergency.

But sure, no, it's really because we mourn the loss of our hobby.

Pretty sure that I want a Jim Bow and noter/slide for my mountain #dulcimer.

I want to be able to make as many different kinds of noises out of it as possible. 😂

Any suggestions?

#TVAC #ArtFED