Mastodawn

Allow me to introduce #MLL coding, the counterpart to #LLM vibe coding. MLL (Manual Labor of Love) coding allows one to spend more time doing a thing, and lets one get better, faster, and 100% understood code.

ganxel Feb 19

JA Westenberg Feb 19

We haven't seen the first great AI collapse. We haven't seen a foundation model company make the BlackBerry mistake or the Nokia mistake, or the Roman mistake, or the Ottoman mistake or reach their Bunker-in-Berlin mistake. But we will, and we'll see it multiple times, because these mistakes = features of power concentration.

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-empire-always-falls/

The empire always falls

A citizen of Rome in 117 AD, under Emperor Trajan, would've found it difficult to imagine the empire not existing. The roads, the aqueducts, the legal system, the trade networks stretching from Britain to Mesopotamia: all of it seemed to be a near-fact of nature, like gravity // the Mediterranean itself.

Westenberg.

ganxel Feb 19

jnkrtech Feb 17

This is something that probably sounds obvious to some folks and unhinged to others, but I think it’s worth saying anyway: “workers who don’t adopt AI will get left behind” is right-wing propaganda. It’s more than just a surface-level advertising message. It makes the unstated assumption that workers are all in a state of conflict, racing against one another in competition for acceptable employment. This is the literal opposite of class consciousness! All workers should be aiming for a world where we don’t have to fight each other to earn a chance at a decent life.

ganxel Feb 18

Joanna Bryson, blathering Feb 17

https://bsky.app/profile/nkalamb.bsky.social/post/3mf3cjpixvk25

Nathan Kalman-Lamb (@nkalamb.bsky.social)

“I don’t want to be in this place I want to go to my school.” - 7 year old imprisoned by ICE for 70 days in a concentration camp in Texas. Today, after @propublica.org published this story, the camp was raided to confiscate letters from the children. https://www.propublica.org/article/ice-dilley-children-letters

Bluesky Social

ganxel Feb 17

https://ratfactor.com/tech-nope2

I was starting to wonder if I was the only one who felt this way; totally perplexed and disturbed that so many fellow programmers seem to have never had the slightest interest in the craft and art of programming, and saw it merely as an irritating barrier to "generating outputs" at the absolute maximum possible speed.

I guess in retrospect, this should have been apparent earlier, whenever I met pushback from technical management wanting me to produce code more quickly as a way of "taking ownership" rather than asking questions about what we were doing, why we were doing it and whether it was the best way.
But certainly the commercial LLM hype era has made that gulf in purpose and philosophy much, much more obvious.

So the industry is mostly fucked and I'm not sure there's much of it left that I would be compatible with (to the limited extent that I ever was).

Anyway, glad I'm not *uniquely* insane in feeling that loss.

A programmer's loss of a social identity - ratfactor

ganxel Feb 15

Aral Balkan Feb 14

This is the only correct action to take when a web site asks you for age verification.

Tell all your friends.

ganxel Feb 15

4am ❧Feb 15

RE: https://mastodon.social/@a2_4am/116072144942640899

Meta-note: this is the GOOD STUFF. This took me HOURS to debug, and in those hours I developed a mental model of a complex operation AND learned something new about ProDOS internals AND tested and discarded several theories before finally discovering the root cause and it was ALL WORTH IT. I don't want to outsource that to Dr. Flattery the Always-Wrong Chat Box. Why would I want to skip this? This is the WHOLE THING.

If you don't want to write software then don't.

ganxel Jan 29