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> I don't need to reaffirm my individuality with such words.

Record scratch

incr_meon Blizzard Workers Win Historic Union Contract

Marxism is good. Here:

https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/p/r.htm

> "The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labour power and does not draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose sole existence depends on the demand for labour...

incr_meon Blizzard Workers Win Historic Union Contract

This was the essence of the actual Steinbeck quote, for the record: "Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams." Steinbeck is no Marxist, but at least he was right about the "game of dreams", which indeed is more true today than ever before.

> Gotta update it for 2026 because millionaires are broke bitches.

> If you can't retire today and never work again without having to worry about money, you're part of the proletariat.

This; this is a middle-class game of dreams.

incr_meon Blizzard Workers Win Historic Union Contract

My parent did not say "labor class" (a mishmash of words), they said proletariat, which is an abstraction that has a real history. Most of us here are petty bourgeois, labor aristocrats, or settlers. A house or a 401(k) are literally capital. So, the proletariat is defined by utter poverty more than being wage laborers, yes. That's my point. Those conditions of utter poverty define the majority of the world's population, but exceedingly few in the imperialist sphere.

incr_meon Blizzard Workers Win Historic Union Contract

I've always heard "millionaires" (the quote was always apocryphal, anyways), and that belief is much less delusional than the belief that we're part of the proletariat, that class of workers who have nothing to lose but their chains. The vast majority of people here have lots to lose. These Blizzard workers, however miserable they are, have always had a staggering lot to lose, more than the proletariat could ever dream of possessing.

incr_meon My friends all hate AI; I just joined an AI startup

Yes, they did.

incr_meon U.S. allows Anthropic to release Mythos AI to ‘trusted’ US organizations

I've been reading Marx for a long time. Everything you've said in this comment is utterly wild.

incr_meon MiMo-v2.5-Pro-UltraSpeed: 1T model with 1000 tokens per second

Obviously there isn't a hidden corpus of logs of coding chatbot assistants that has been accumulating over the years, but these coding chatbot assistants output tokens that resemble how we all imagined a coding chatbot assistant would have operated had it existed in the first place to end up in a corpus. "Training material" includes supervised fine-tuning, preference training, RLHF, and so on, so that certain outputs (like these timeline estimates) may really have been decided (at some level of conscious awareness) by product teams.

incr_meon You Can Run

Why not?

incr_meon Don't Roll Your Own

Because the web browser was burdened with the role of application host, and not just presentation of static content. There's no going backwards.

incr_meon Bun support is now limited and deprecated

No problem.

incr_meon Bun support is now limited and deprecated

Why is it so hard to believe that Jarred Sumner, a self-described "Thiel Fellow and a high school dropout", had values aligned with Anthropic's before Bun was approached for acquisition? It's not like Claude was an asteroid that crashed into Eden.

incr_meon Google's AI is being manipulated. The search giant is quietly fighting back

Some shame is good and other shame is bad. Some guilt/shame is indicative of the development of the self, other guilt/shame is a cause and effect of stunted development of the self. I like Winnicott on this:

> How important it is, therefore, for a baby to have his mother consistently looking after him, looking after him over a period of time, surviving his attacks, and eventually there to be the object of the tender feeling and the guilt feeling and sense of concern for her welfare which come along in the course of time. Her continuing to be a live person in the baby’s life makes it possible for the baby to find that innate sense of guilt which is the only valuable guilt feeling, and which is the main source of the urge to mend and to re-create and to give.

incr_meon We've made the world too complicated

The issue is not primarily psychological attachment to objects, but that private labor (labor carried out independently by separate producers, whose social validity is only realized through exchange) takes on the appearance of its opposite: labor in a directly social form through exchange. Through exchange, the values of commodities appear to individuals not as a relation between producers, but as a property inherent in things themselves. Use-value appears as value, concrete labor appears as abstract labor, private labor appears as social labor.

This has a ton of effects. Some of the most important: it obscures exploitation (profit appears to derive from capital/risk/trade/etc., i.e. anything but labor), it naturalizes capitalism (markets, competition, money, and wage labor seem transhistorical), it disempowers producers (alienation), and it produces ideological mystification in general (people attribute to greed, unfair exchange, moral failure, production scale, division of labor, or technologies what should be attributed to the specific historical form of labor).

So your example is probably a third-order effect of commodity fetishism.

This condensation of the concept really sucked. I suggest struggling through Capital Vol. I, Ch. 1.

incr_meon We've made the world too complicated

I agree. I think Stardew Valley is an exhibition of pastoral fascism disguised as a liberal cozy game. A highly mystifying piece of art. I would give it more leeway if it weren't the fact that its utopian imagination is so limited; you build relationships by gifting the exact items the townspeople desire, production still market oriented, homelessness is understood as a choice, large corporations are violently negated in favor of petty production, etc.

For what it's worth, even ignoring the fact that "uselessness" is an ideologically mediated concept, and so taking his horizon for granted, Graeber's work is empirically incorrect. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09500170211015067 His was the bullshit job.

incr_meon We've made the world too complicated

The reason Marx developed the more advanced category of commodity fetishism was, in a way, to expose the real alienation in the fantasy that one could opt out of "alienation" by becoming a baker, bike repairman, etc. The heart of a heartless world, indeed.

incr_meon US healthcare marketplaces shared citizenship and race data with ad tech giants

You wouldn't need such a modern privacy rule if it weren't for the need for information portability in the digital age. The distinction between whether or not portability or privacy is primary in the law kind of doesn't matter. The real purpose of HIPAA was to help make the newly emerging market forms of health care sustainable. Protocol standardization and modernization of the Hippocratic Oath were both necessities, technical and ideological respectively.

incr_meon It's time to reclaim the word "Palantir" for JRR Tolkien

No, it's that I think Thiel and Obama are both evil, even if the former is cartoonishly so and the latter is a gentleman. Both separatism (itself plain evil) and multiculturalism (itself morally relativistic) are ideological forms bounded by the limits of capitalism that cannot exist in any meaningful form in any sort of humane world. Is this really not interesting?

incr_meon It's time to reclaim the word "Palantir" for JRR Tolkien

No, we read the same book, just in different ways. I'm interested in a symptomatic reading. To complain that Peter Thiel read Lord of the Rings incorrectly because he drew inspiration in Sauron instead of Gandalf is plain boring. Thiel, Obama, yourself, the OP author, and Tolkien himself "claim" Lord of the Rings. That needs explaining, and you cannot do that by reading in the way that you read Lord of the Rings.

incr_meon It's time to reclaim the word "Palantir" for JRR Tolkien

Yeah, the author is claiming that Tolkien had a radical message: the palantir is meant to show us that the knowledge it yields is not neutral, not total, and is dangerous to wield politically. I'm saying that the author is wrong and that Tolkien's lesson has been thoroughly integrated into the thought of political actors. Peter Thiel and Obama and whoever else are all aware of the dangers of the palantir, and they act empowered by this awareness. There's nothing to reclaim.

incr_meon It's time to reclaim the word "Palantir" for JRR Tolkien

> ... the betrayal of the legacy of Tolkien ...

Today's world is the legacy of Tolkien. We've come to understand the world through the categories of Tolkien, without which we could not bear to act. We can act out a disavowal of Palantir, but we'd be disavowing Lord of the Rings at the same time. It's not like Tolkien ever overturned the palantir, he only went as far as to show the palantir to be politically dangerous, much like Bush and Obama saw sanctions against Iran. Tolkien never achieved a full critique. He stops at the point of a liberal plurality of knowledge (hobbits have experiential/ethical knowledge, elves have cultural preservation, wizards have lore/interpretation) so that no single group has a monopoly on truth, and they're all locked within their racial categories. He never writes about the erosion of race and the universalization of knowledge.

You should read Tolkien to understand Palantir. This business of "reclaiming" amounts to disavowal of reality.

incr_meon Dad brains: How fatherhood rewires the male mind

The author does not lay out their definition of nurturing explicitly. The most complete definition I can derive from the article is that nurturing is engaged caregiving marked by responsiveness and physical closeness that is supported by hormonal changes in the caregiver.

They have nothing to say about nursing other than that it involves oxytocin release (presumably an instance of nurturing).

In your short comment, you didn't make any attempt at determination beyond saying the names "nurturing and protection" and "birthing and nursing". OK, so what is the distinction? Are you claiming that birthing and nursing are mechanical acts that secure existence of the organism, but fail to secure some other thing that is called nurturing and protection? Or are birthing and nursing mere instances of a homogenous nurturing and a homogenous protection, and so one's quota for nurturing and protection are filled in the same way experience points fill up in a video game?

So it's the opposite: your OP and I are the only ones here making a concrete distinction between nursing and nurturing (although your OP didn't really say much, either).

Like I said, Donald Winnicott explores this question at length. Unfortunately he is not a good Marxist who historicizes these categories; he works squarely in post-war British society and so obviously has his limits. But he has the courage to criticize the emptiness of medical empiricism and the fear of determinateness of people like the article's author.

Here's Winnicott in The Child, the Family, and the Outside World:

> The infant who has had a thousand goes at the breast is evidently in a very different condition from the infant who has been fed an equal number of times by the bottle; the survival of the mother is more of a miracle in the first case than in the second. I am not suggesting that there is nothing that the mother who is feeding by bottle can do to meet the situation. Undoubtedly she gets played with by her infant, and she gets the playful bite, and it can be seen that when things are going well the infant almost feels the same as if there is breast feeding. Nevertheless there is a difference. In psychoanalysis, where there is time for a gathering together of all the early roots of the full-blown sexual experience of adults, the analyst gets very good evidence that in a satisfactory breast feed the actual fact of taking from part of the mother’s body provides a ‘blue-print’ for all types of experience in which instinct is involved.

Personally, this aligns with my own observations of my daughter. The sensuous conflict of breastfeeding is a negotiation of the psychic and physical line between self and other where everything is at stake and desires are understood and worked out at the level of the skin. It's practically impossible to make a bottle (or anyone/anything else!) fulfill this function.

Anyway, Winnicott goes on in great detail for chapters. Also relevant is a draft of a talk he gave titled This Feminism, which is probably more relevant to the underlying tensions in these comments:

> This is the most dangerous thing I have done in recent years. Naturally, I would not have actually chosen this title, but I am quite willing to take whatever risks are involved and to go ahead with the making of a personal statement. May I take it for granted that man and woman are not exactly the same as each other, and that each male has a female component, and each female has a male component? I must have some basis for building a description of the similarities and differences that exist between the sexes. I have left room here for an alternative lecture should I find that this audience does not agree to my making any such basic assumption. I pause, in case you claim that there are no differences.

Again, he's unfortunately not interested in how psychic development might be a historically limited category; he naturalizes "nurturing" (he doesn't use this word often, actually), but at least he acknowledges the concrete limitations of mother and fathers (and all the other characters) as they actually exist. And he does this without ever invoking the name of a hormone once.

incr_meon Dad brains: How fatherhood rewires the male mind

Why are you scare-quoting your own words and supposing it is only your interlocutor who is treating them abstractly? Just tell us what you mean. What do you mean by non-threatening? What domains?

incr_meon Dad brains: How fatherhood rewires the male mind

Sure, but "every bit as protective and nurturing as the most committed mother" is indeed an overstatement if you believe, as Donald Winnicott did, that there's something qualitatively advantageous about what a mother can provide, namely breastfeeding. Bottle-feeding, if done in an attuned, consistent, and emotionally present way, can support the same psychological processes as nursing does, but it is certainly less likely to unfold so favorably. Breastfeeding can make the integration of bodily and emotional attunement easier. Things can still go wrong, of course, but it is a unique situation.

The distinctive qualities of the mother's womb are not as easily studied, but on the other hand it's pretty obvious that there are functions provided by the mother and her womb that cannot easily be replicated (i.e. replicated by a father).

None of this to say that fathers cannot or do not nurture and protect. It's just that replicating certain things is difficult and we shouldn't be so sure of ourselves yet. It's like trying to grow a plant without sunlight: possible, but only very recently, and still apparently too challenging to do at absolute scale.

incr_meon Many African families spend fortunes burying their dead

Colonialism blocked endogenous capitalist classes from developing freely in Africa. Internal dynamics should be understood in the context of the actual history of Africa.

incr_meon Agents of Chaos

HIPAA was introduced to support the massive expansion of the healthcare market (privacy accountability is a very minor aspect of HIPAA). In the name of profit, amidst the chaos, why not try to eschew what was once politically necessary? This move probably hurts humanity more than it benefits it, but that was the case with the healthcare market in the first place. I wonder what will become politically necessary around AI. Probably not much.

incr_meon Pretext: TypeScript library for multiline text measurement and layout

https://wicg.github.io/virtual-scroller/#find-in-page-apis

As far as I can tell, this went basically nowhere. Except this:

https://github.com/WICG/display-locking

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element/bef...

incr_meon Things I've Done with AI

I know this sounds sarcastic but I really mean it: For years everyone has been monastically extolling some variation of "the best code is deleted code". Now, we have a machine that spits out infinite code that we can infinitely delete. It's a blessing that we can have shitty code generated that exposes at light speed how shitty our ideas are and have always been.

incr_meon Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion

In the past month, in my spare time, I've built:

- A "semantically enhanced" epub-to-markdown converter

- A web-based Markdown reader with integrated LLM reading guide generation (https://i.imgur.com/ledMTXw.png)

- A Zotero plugin for defining/clarifying selected words/sentences in context

- An epub-to-audiobook generator using Pocket TTS

- A Diddy Kong Racing model/texture extractor/viewer (https://i.imgur.com/jiTK8kI.png)

- A slimmed-down phpBB 2 "remake" in Bun.js/TypeScript

- An experimental SQLite extension for defining incremental materialized views

...And many more that are either too tiny, too idiosyncratic, or too day-job to name here. Some of these are one-off utilities, some are toys I'll never touch again, some are part of much bigger projects that I've been struggling to get any work done on, and so on.

I don't blame you for your cynicism, and I'm not blind to all of the criticism of LLMs and LLM code. I've had many times where I feel upset, skeptical, discouraged, and alienated because of these new developments. But also... it's a lot of fun and I can't stop coming up with ideas.