Thanks, will be reading it!
79 karma · joined July 11, 2025
Or maybe the issue is this whole notion of "tech" as a top-down thing where companies impose products on idiots? Maybe another Silicon Valley is precisely the opposite of what we need.
Maybe solutions would look more like - how can Europe end the exploitation of the (mostly American, sure) big tech companies dominating them, while simultaneously encouraging the growth of user-first tools.
Interoperability laws would be a good start, as Cory Doctorow has been insisting. NLnet and initiatives like it are a good step in this direction too, pump money into projects who want to upend these relations.
These movements will have a hard time really going far if the big tech companies' relationships with governments in European countries isn't addressed politically. Therein lies the real thorny issue, I think.
Hadn't heard of either of the other two authors though - thank you for sharing!
I guess you're just a huge fan of Tolkien?
In which case, have you read https://archive.is/20241231024916/https://www.newyorker.com/... in which Michael Moorcock calls Tokein's work:
"...a pernicious confirmation of the values of a morally bankrupt middle class".
Which I'm not saying should change your opinion on anything, I just find it's always a good exercise to find the juiciest criticism of one's darlings.
I might as well ask here - are there equivalents for sci-fi and/or for cyberpunk? I get that there's a pervading sense of everything being bought and sold and runied and nihilistic in cyberpunk... but I don't know if it feels very political, or rebellious, or revolutionary. I don't mean that critically, art doesn't have to be political. I am curious if there were any overtly anarchist thinkers operating in that space, though.
I'd like to take responsibility for your incorrect reading of my comments, but it would unfortunately make no sense.
I implore you to take a break from the insinuations and instead quote directly any part of any of my comments that shows me saying what you believed me to be saying. You won't be able to, because it simply didn't happen.
The word cunt has radically different patterns of use in the USA vs in UK/AUS/IE/NZ. More cultural knowledge is useful and good. It's perfectly plausible that OP was unaware of that fact, and I therefore thought it could be useful knowledge, for OP and anyone else, regardless of the original anecdote, but possibly related to the original anecdote. That's for OP to decide, I don't know the details.
Is that clearer now for you?
To the left of oligarchy? I thought it was anything to the left of getting hit repeatedly in the head with a hammer that they labelled as communism? There must have been a massive leftward shift in society since I last checked the news!
> Tools for Thought is an exercise in retrospective futurism; that is, I wrote it in the early 1980s, attempting to look at what the mid 1990s would be like. My odyssey started when I discovered Xerox PARC and Doug Engelbart and realized that all the journalists who had descended upon Silicon Valley were missing the real story. Yes, the tales of teenagers inventing new industries in their garages were good stories. But the idea of the personal computer did not spring full-blown from the mind of Steve Jobs. Indeed, the idea that people could use computers to amplify thought and communication, as tools for intellectual work and social activity, was not an invention of the mainstream computer industry nor orthodox computer science, nor even homebrew computerists. If it wasn't for people like J.C.R. Licklider, Doug Engelbart, Bob Taylor, Alan Kay, it wouldn't have happened. But their work was rooted in older, equally eccentric, equally visionary, work, so I went back to piece together how Boole and Babbage and Turing and von Neumann — especially von Neumann — created the foundations that the later toolbuilders stood upon to create the future we live in today. You can't understand where mind-amplifying technology is going unless you understand where it came from.
But anyway, that hardly matters - yes, I am indeed dead wrong in the made up argument you're having about the thing no-one said.
To "grok" something is to understand it on a deep, fundamental level. Following a checklist from an LLM and the thing you're doing eventually working isn't grokking.
To be clear, I'm very glad that you and others can throw together new projects. Your excitement seems genuine, and more excitement in the world is good. And perhaps you'll be one of the miniscule minority who will use LLMs to really get to a deeper level of understanding with new things.
But I wonder if your excitement may be misleading you here and making it harder for you to grok Bret Victor's post - on any level. I don't think Victor is interested in computing in the way you think he is. There's a world of difference between being able to cobble a web project together, and the kinds of philosophical shifts a project like dynamicland is proposing and enacting.
In the interest of people expressing themselves freely, I'd go so far as to say it's particularly surprising to read all this from "an artist". There was a time when being an artist implied the person had reflected and read and thought about larger perspectives across a range of subjects - philosophy, science, religion, etc.
Here, in this instance, I can't help feeling there's some crunchy irony in the fact that a deeply radical (scientifically, artistically, technologically, socially) project like dynamicland is met by an artist excited to be able to plug web services into each other, strongly claiming from the very heart of the cultural slop wars, that the dynamicland people might be confused and maybe LLMs is the real answer.
Respectfully, consider that maybe the perspective from which they're viewing the problem is simply much deeper than what you've been able to grasp so far. I don't mean it disparagingly or cynically, in fact it's great news, you've vistas to explore here!
I suggest reading more from dynamicland directly, and bret's website too, a few of bret's talks, alan kay is very good, there's tons of stuff if you get into it. Don't neglect the history of computing, it's full of amazing ideas.
My point was simply that the word is much more common in places like the UK and Australia, to the point where being called that once ever is very far away from my experience, enough to be quite noteworthy. A point which your comment literally confirms.
And, as everyone is rushing to point out, yes, it can be used offensively, if used a certain way. What is this apparent difficulty accepting that words have multiple uses, even sometimes the opposite thing. English is a very contextual language, tone and intonation and familiarity and etc matter hugely.
For example, your last point - calling a woman a cunt can of course be sexist, but what if you and the woman for whatever reason both decide that you like calling each other a cunt? If you think that doesn't happen in the world, in respectful and mutually caring relationships and friendships, you are mistaken. Some people simply enjoy breaking taboos, it can be healthy and playful.
As an Australian, how many times have you been called the word? In how many types of context?
It can be extremely offensive, used a certain way, yes. And it can be absolutely breezy, used another way. And context usually makes it absolutely clear, as in, there's almost never any ambiguity. Right?
I know you wouldn't use it straight away in the British isles without first establishing context and familiarity, sure. But the comment I responded to said they'd only been called that once. This is culturally a world apart from countries in which the word can and regularly is used in a friendly, playful, lighthearted way.
In Australia it's even more common, and less familiarity is required before employing it. Still, of course, one has to be careful in some contexts. This isn't relevant to the point I'm making.
Is this normal? Changing laptops every 2 or 3 years seems absolutely bonkers to me
Many people find using LLM images tacky and garish. It screams low-effort slop, to a significant number of people. When it's so easy to find great usable images on wikipedia, for example, it's hard to know why a sophisticated technical person would take the risk involved in this choice.
I'd a quick look there at the images on the wp page for chains, and the one for knots - some really excellent images. One doesn't need a PhD in web design to pull it off, either.