@mwk

> however, rust-analyzer now gets stuck at Indexing: 4/289 (core) and hangs there.

I miiiiight have run into something like this—it attempts to index /target if you're lazy like I am and never bothered to create .gitignore at all.

(Not meant as encouragement to go back, only as an offering in case you do—if I'd run into this level of GUI decay when I was using it last year I would be thinking twice about ever opening it again.)

@mhoye It took me embarrassingly long to realize that a stopwatch lap timer is much better than a human attention span at predicting the next smoke alarm low-battery chirp, even if the inter-chirp timing is a little irregular.

(My other opinions: this task is much easier with more technology—stepstool, chunky over-ear headphones, and bisect search for the location. Oh, and don't buy Kidde. Kidde sucks because it's screamier and more prone to false alarms.)

@mcc @hipsterelectron what I want to know is

why

why have we been allowed

to shorten "Emily" to just

"em"

we even lowercased it to boot

which doesn't seem like her like at all and it makes me wonder if maybe

e e cummings

had something to do with it

@glyph @SnoopJ @mcc @whitequark Easy to evaluate? None of these are supposed to be easy for third parties to evaluate or for the subject to prove. That is a key purpose of judging interiority: the final call reverts to whoever already has authority.

All an authority has to promise is scraps of credulity, in exchange for heroic feats that will allegedly prove someone is _actually_ whatever.

And you can be aware of this dynamic and it can still brainwash you into constantly feeling like a fraud.

@glyph I recognize this is uncomfortably close to "no ethical consumption" but I swear there's nonzero juice here—like, to think about the ethics of the automated theorem prover work, we analogize it to materials science labs using light gas guns, realize there were no light gas guns in the 1300s when cannon-users were about to leave everyone else behind, and then despair at divining if micrometeorite armor was worth the Opium Wars and school shootings.

Wait, that sounded better in my head.

@glyph I'm coming from the wrong side to give you what you're looking for but I'll offer my current guiding metaphor: text generators are weapons for cheating other people out of a claim on your attention—and we'll have to understand the ethics along similar lines as actual weapons: complete with power differentials, monstrous costs, and centralizing influence.

So does deploying LLMs make someone a bad person? Idk—I'm about a hundred years behind, still figuring this out about the MIC.