The more likely version of b) is not that AI improves in any way, but that the definition of “good enough” gets degraded so much that no one will care.

@self they’re doing it again, where’s the link to your rant

“everyone will be a 10x vibe coder” and “everything will be made with some level of llm assistance in the near future” vs “no-one should be letting llms access anything where they could be doing permanent damage” and “there’s so much worthless slop in crates.io”.

“The things that AI cannot do but the salespeople assure me it will In The Near Future™️ sure sound great, but the real negative effects it has right now are really bad. Gee, I wonder if there’s some bigger picture to see here, huh.”

this is not a distinct change of behaviour

This is what I disagree with. The theatrics of justifying police brutality don’t change the outcomes of police brutality – people still die – but the fact that the theatrics can now be dispensed of in favour of paramilitaries directly using violence to terrorise the people is a distinct change of behaviour towards fascism.

And I think it’s important to recognise that because, as many scholars of fascism have warned time and time again, this is not a binary where a switch get flipped and haha, since today you’re in a fascist state. It’s a progressive erosion of the social contract. ICE as deployed by the Trump regime right now is a basically textbook run: create a paramilitary force, recruit from existing criminal militias to select for loyalists and violent personalities, normalise them as keepers of order, push out or integrate any other enforcement structures so that the paramilitary becomes dominant. Basically the only difference is that Trump didn’t have to create ICE, it was already there just waiting to be pushed through the pipeline.

Does this event fundamentally change how you and I perceive America? No, if you were paying attention you knew the rot inside, and you’ve been shouting that Trump is a fascist since the very beginning. It is, however, a sign that the situation is much worse than it was months ago, that fascism is progressing, and if this is the point at which someone not paying attention wisens up and goes “shit, we are moving towards a totalitarian nightmare” then good, welcome, grab a pitchfork.

It’s pattern recognition.

Listen enough to chuds and you learn to recognise chuds based on vibes. You can approach people with 100% good faith, but the moment you sniff a chud – trust your guts.

It’s a very elaborate parkour trick in Haskell that through piles and piles or rigorous category theory manages to achieve Nothing in a type-safe manner.

There are two things here in my opinion:

1. American cops are trained murderers, but they are trained, in particular to avoid causing massive PR disasters with their murders*. A paramilitary goon with a rifle in a government organisation so opaque we still don’t even know his identity is materially worse than a cop. It also looks much worse, the police have some completely undue public trust, ICE just looks like military forces.
2. We immediatelly had video with the full event. When cops kill people of colour there’s usually no evidence since again, they know how to pull murder off without causing PR disasters. Basically the only reason George Floyd’s murder wasn’t successfully brushed aside is that we had video of it, and they tried to bury that shit hard. In this case I don’t even think the victim being white or a citizen matters, the event itself is so fucking horrifying it’d elicit outrage anyway. I am 100% sure that if there wasn’t video, just witness reports, it’d be out of the media cycle already.

* I don’t want this to seem like a moral distinction, if anything the decorum granted to police forces is arguably a stepping stone that brought the USA here. Recall Mamdami’s recent words: “For too long, those fluent in the good grammar of civility have deployed decorum to mask agendas of cruelty”. HOWEVER, to me personally this is a rather chilling escalation. It shows that the PR part doesn’t actually matter anymore. America is so far into the fascist pipeline that paramilitary forces can just execute citizens in broad daylight on the street. They don’t need to hide it, they don’t need to play coy about it, they can just post-facto label the victim as an Enemy of the State and move on. I’m sorry but to me this is like one step away from just rounding people up against a wall for fun. Human life is not only practically worthless to state actors, it’s proudly and openly worthless as a matter of policy.

But… But Y2K = Year 2000, like it’s an actual sensible acronym. You can’t just fucking replace K with Q and call it a day what the fuck, did ChatGPT come up with this??

GLP-1s

No idea what this is, but being at a rationalist conference cannot be good.

retratrutide

No idea.

might fix her mood swings

Uh-oh, nonono, red flag, red flag, run away from those people!

D.I.Y. guide by the Substacker Cremieux.

spits coffee Excuse me, by WHOM?!

Y2Q

I’m sorry, what does this stand for? Searching for it just results in usage without definition. I understand it’s refering to breaking conventional encryption, but it’s clearly an abbreviation of something, right? Years To Quantum? But then a countdown to it doesn’t make sense?

What? How would they even do that? By feeding it to grok before it goes to grok? Certainly they don’t think Twitter employs like 10k people manually looking at @grok posts?

And if we all die in nuclear fallout caused to protect chatbot profits I will be so over this whole thing

Honestly? A fitting end.

Okay but that’s more a Brensan Eichs anti-achievement than JavaScript being any good

Meh, at least go has a standard library that’s useful for… anything, really

Again, there are only two sensible ways out:

1. Stop doing that. We really don’t need Twitter to exist.
2. We agree as a society that we do need Twitter to exist and it is a public good, so we create it as any other piece of important public infrastructure and use taxes to finance it.

Satire died when my friend told me at their Very Serious Corporation with a Very Important Mission Critical Software Stack they use a thing called “Splunk” and it wasn’t a joke.

More like

Would you like to know more

I mean, sure

Here’s a 13,000-word retrospective

Ah, nah fam

for the creation of the shittiest widely adopted programming language since C++

Hey! JavaScript is objectively worse, thank you very much

domestic scenes and food imagery (sitting on my ass at the PC ingesting industrial amounts of crisps)

The search engine that dominated the industry was named for a child’s nonsense-babble word for 10^100;

And how did that work out in the long term? There were warning signs!