keybored

Everyone reaches the hedonistic plateau, and fast at that. Except for people who sound like they just read a book from some neoliberal think smithy. They will have a euphoric fainting spell over the wonders of the convenience store.

Think about all those elated anecdotes about how someone used an inferior tool for a decade, was fine with it, then tried a better one and now “can’t imagine how I lived without it...” well it’s a bittersweet memory distortion innit.

Is choosing your favorite hegemon going to be based on WWII Hollywood stories?

I’m impressed. I had to scroll down ten top level comments in order to find a contentless but-China-regime comment. Good work HN.

No, you don’t understand: people say they might dislike asbestos and want to not live in an environment with it, but how could they possibly have that stance if they were not able to recognize asbestos by sight, smell, or touch...

You know, I think I’ve had enough of “have taken up farming”/woodworking Silicon Valley nostalgics at this point (I’m talking about them/in general, not you).

Modern computing is toxic. The Internet is shit. And all because it was designed that way. Computing doesn’t have to be shit. I would know. Plenty of let’s say local computing solutions are just fine. They are so okay and fine that I hardly think about them. They just save me time and work.

Like the AI Cretins say, the cat’s out of the bag, time cannot be unwound. But computing is not fundamentally alienating, life-draining, or doomed to be infiltrated by spooks from the worst regime in the world. That’s just what SC programmers who are hobby woodworkers and use fliphones think.

> Without LLMs, none of this would ever have happened.

That would have been better for the world.

“Editing” commits is not niche, and editing metadata like dates seems to come up a few times for a fair few number of people.

You can already expose the commit object as the headers (metadata) and the commit message. That’s like a spreadsheet: change these columns and we will make a new commit. That changed format can then be persisted as a commit object. So.

> A tool like this never sees the light of day without an LLM.

Are LLMs memory holing all the numerous tools built around Git (with git(1) or without)? There was already a query-Git-like-SQL tool before The Age of LLMs. I never tried that, but was that simpler to implement than this tool? Edit: Okay, maybe it wasn’t “niche” so that’s the differentiator.

Dunno what you are asking me for. That’s what the hypothetical person that you are confronting about their personal halo is doing.

Yeah England is a country. Like what else do we have the name “England” for? We talk a lot more about England than some non-country geography like Anatolia (Asian Turkey). For example there was no UK in the World Cup, but England made it quite far.

If that’s a bit eccentric, well this is the same place that refers to Europe as a different place even though France borders the UK by automobile road.

I know. The local newspaper believes the same thing. And the local events are all sponsored by businesses. Who could question all of this evidence?

> But it appears that is not how your world works. By default any company owner is a homo-sapiens, but a machine that only wants money. Tragically, your cynicism is creating the very world you hate.

They said companies are amoral at best.

There’s nothing like those irrelevant TV gotcha segments. Wow, we were able to find five ignorant people (out of [?]), what a joke of a cause.

You don’t want this proposed nuclear power plant because you are afraid of a nuclear meltdown? Well you thought that those plumes were emissions but they are actually steam, idiot.

Go home. Watch the TV. Don’t express any opinions. That’s right. Good citizen.

> It might not be dietary change to veganism, but when I ask, “What steps have you taken…”

Agitating for political change.

The subject of Internet anonymity and children really presents a pest or cholera situation.

No, I don’t want to scan my face or my passport to use the Web. And also no, this glib, thought-terminating, “common sense” quip about “the parents are responsible” is also something to be rejected. We should try to both collectively protect kids and leave adults alone.

Leave it all to the corporations and you would have them prey on your children on every street corner, splash screen, TV menu, and ad board, with no “parental management” option anywhere. “But parents are responsible”, they would say.

HN’s favorite CS professor homepage webpage-style author is on top of the AIs but sticking with keeping out newfangled CSS. Nothing could tell us more about clanker inevitability.

Asking the AI to believe in itself is the absurd part.

I don’t understand why people think describing something in some ostensibly dismissive way constitutes making a point. But some people spend their time banging keys with letters on them (or not with letters on them) into input fields and then pressing Return, so I guess some subset of those people will do that.

Call it blame, call it something else, but they are in the end changing the product while hiding it. I get these emails sometimes, probably because of regulations:

- We are changing the price from X to Y. [tirade about rising prices]

Maybe they should hang this in the restaurant:

- The THING is now smaller than January 2026. [And it’s your fault. You misers don’t want higher prices? Well have you heard of the Central Bank? ...]

That last part is optional.

The consumer is the last part in the value chain of cow to beef patty so of course he or she just has himself or herself to blame.

AI is on the whole bad but it’s impossible to forget that the ostensibly human-curated Web as presented by modern search engines is bad too. Invasive ads, popups, and worst of all the substantive content has a nine inch frame of SEO filler and a three inch picture (what you were after). And some things are not even high-tech slop stolen. It is just old-school verbatim copied from another website and repackaged with another frame.

But yeah, text remix machines are not a long-term solution to that problem.

The problem with political organizing in order to solve ecological or environmental problems is that it makes too much logical sense. For solving the problem, that is. It’s better to not build a data center in the first place than to build a data center and then fight against its use. It’s better to build and retrofit transportation architecture than to scold people who are not Work From Home workers to not drive to work. Which is why it gets attacked with non sequitors about feeling like you are solving the problem without having done your own personal penance.[1]

Your linked ChatGPT-structured listicle is sound in what it proposes for the individual, but spends no time motivating the change or balancing out of political organizing. Like how to balance individual action versus political action? A big fat nothing. The one single hinge: evErY cHanGe MatteRs. This trivial observation is supposed to balance nine individual-effort phrased points versus one limp-wristed political action point.

At least it admits its corporate stooge tradition by mentioning BP and “carbon footprint”.

We are told that we need a cutthroat and efficient economy for commodities. For sweaters and automobiles. But for not ruining the planet? We need to incentivize individuals to not-do-bad-things. These are not serious ideas.

> I support the goal, but worry its a distraction.

You support people opposing data centers. Presumably you think that building them is bad. And presumably pressure against data centers can help them not be built. Which means that you would get less of the bad things. And yet this development which can cause less of the bad things is a distraction? This isn’t really coherent.

[1]: Curiously this critique is about feeling like you are solving the problem without the consequence explicitly outlined as not solving the problem. Is feeling better while also helping solve the problem... a problem?

Any retort to do this like “but why would they just openly release this”[1] pretty much answers itself. Public relations.

If a company can spend money to redeem itself then, well, it can (game theoretically or whatever) do whatever it wants in the future and then spend money to wipe the slate clean.

[1] By which I mean: the very act of being prompted to ask such a question, of planting a seed like hmm, Meta might have some aspects which are good for us. You don’t have to be convinced of it. Just the seed itself can pay for itself.

Become an anti-democratic economist. I call this the easy mode project.

> Different diseases, one pathology.

I know. My opinions are facts too.

Everyone with a stake in AI wants that ship to have sailed.

Reads like capitalist romanticization to me.

The point about concentric circles (of care) is true e.g. for workers. If you have ownership. Not corporate-speak ownership like you feel like you are invested in outcomes but real, legal ownership.

Maybe these are capitalist cooperative enterprises. Then you really have concentric circles.

AI critics and honest AI executives of 2023 might say that AI companies are automating labor so that Capital can capture all productive value. But we have to give them some credit. They are hiring real humans. And not even hounding them about how they are not being sufficiently useless-meatbag relay points for the AI models and agents. And that demonstrates that they are actually being real humane mensch.

Meanwhile, how many jobs have AI critics created? Crickets.

Writing for investors in the AI Era

- We have embraced everything about the AI Era at our company

- Arbitrary topic about how that changes something

Ha ha, the USSR was a silly thing. Anyway, what was the topic about?

Sometimes I wonder if these comments are about lamenting the state of big corporations, about defending big corporations, [1] or about lamenting how fungible value exchange were even the Rule of Law can be reduced to an expense makes everyone except for conentrated wealth into losers.

[1] “They won this battle and the last one. But the other side has millions of soldiers. They will just replace them.”

> Hold that exchange still for a second. Nobody in it is stupid. That’s what makes it worth understanding.

The room falls silent. Except there is no room. There is no scene to dramatize. So I have to instruct you.

Two things. Both of them true. Yet I’ve decided that your imbecile mind can’t imagine that. How can they both be true? One word. Nuance.

I would know. On one hand I haven’t written a line of code in a year. But that’s table stakes. Everyone does not write code any more. I also haven’t written even a four-minute blog post in a year. (Arthiritis? AI? Both. It’s both.) On the other hand I am critical of AI. I think fully autonomous coding and writing is not here. Yet. Nuance.

My pieces used to be about writing. Now? They are about understanding.

My pieces used to be about individual inquiry. Now? I string you along for a series of posts. That’s collective inquiry.

By the end you won’t need me to spell out a conclusion. Bubble. Revolution. Dark. Light. Contrasts. It’s not discrete. It’s analog.

The privileged First World are supposed to profess their faith that constant war is normal and that we were lovingly watched over by our local super power and the threat of mutually assured destruction. You don’t have to remind us.