No, maybe that wasn’t it. Words precede and surpass me, they tempt and alter me, and if I am not careful it will be too late: things will be said without my having said them. Or, at the very least, that wasn’t the only thing. My entanglement comes from how a carpet is made of so many threads that I can’t resign myself to following just one; my ensnarement comes from how one story is made of many stories. And I can’t even tell them all— a more truthful word could from echo to echo cause my highest glaciers to crumble down the precipice.” - Clarice Lispector

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Cake day: December 9th, 2023

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  • I am not a professional programmer but it seems to me that the idea that AI is needed to increase the firehose of code being written to “improve” programming and how well computers work is as absurd as the idea that the point of a university degree in a language is to increase the raw amount of words being written in that language.

    The point is to convey ideas with language not produce more language, same thing with code, the point is to solve problems not produce ever larger and larger amounts of code with automation.

    Something I know without a doubt is that for many people who love language, they desire a great deal less of the fake, hurtful, useless words that drown out the good ones. People who love words and work in crafting and shaping them tend to think it is inherently good to shape useful words not just mindlessly produce combinations of words in as great a volume possible.

    To put it in a more abstracted fashion, relying on AI to produce more and more code faster and faster feels like a Jazz musician saying they rely on AI to fill in all the empty spaces they leave between notes with complementary embelleshing notes. The point of a jazz musician is clearly not to produce the most notes possible, it is to convey meaning with notes.

    To bring it back to a concrete example, how many times has Google built a new chat program/app from scratch and then abandoned it? Sure there is lots of code there of very high quality, an intimidating amount to be sure, but isn’t the primary job of the programmer here to say “hey, why don’t we stop writing new code from the ground up for every chat app a different part of the company wants and standardize it to a much smaller codebase with a set of customizations different parts of the company can apply to the same core chat program”?

    It seems to me a good programmer would be good at framing problems from a perspective that requires as simple implementation in code as possible within reason, not be best at producing the program with the most lines of code fastest that still solves the problem.




  • The area is supposed to be protected for wildlife but often there are “wet wipes and plastic pollution entangled in algae and all over the rocks”, said Lewis Stagnetto, of the Nautilus Project, a local environmental charity.

    Raw sewage pollution can trigger toxic algal blooms that strip oxygen from the water, choking aquatic life. It exposes fish and mammals to a cocktail of chemicals and plastics that can disrupt reproduction and damage health, and puts people at risk by spreading pathogens and antibiotic-resistant genes.

    I believe any person or country incurs an inescapable debt they must pay back when environmental damage is done by unnecessary environmental harm that is reasonably preventable, no matter where on earth that impact happens.

    The losses to the productivity of fisheries and related industries is huge and things like this place entire ecosystems that sustain landscapes under threat.






  • Any instrument where the pitch is not quantized into steps by design.

    Guitars do this with frets, though there are of course fretless guitars but the problem is the quantization of pitch/fretted strength length that frets provides allows complex chords to be played in tune. This is functionally impossible to do on a fretless stringed instrument and is why violin type instruments mostly play single notes or two paired notes.

    A classic church organ is the bridge between the world of quantized pitch instruments and instruments where pitch is constructed as part of each note. Each pipe produces a sine wave at a determined pitch.


  • The US also still sends quite a bit of aid to Ukraine despite Trump and his fellow criminals doing everything they can to sabotage it for Putin. No matter what Trump does, the fact remains that most people in the US are neutral to positive about Ukraine and see Trump’s blatant attempts to sabotage Ukraine as yet more proof of the fact that Trump is full of shit and Putin is his daddy.

    I am not convinced Merz could get away with NOT giving Ukraine a ton of military help, I don’t think that is probably a politically tenable move in Germany if you want to form a majority coalition… so people like Merz undermine help in other ways that are less easy to pin on them negatively… like helping manufacture an architecture of military intel and personnel that makes it easy for rightwing elements of Germany to feed technology, doctrine and intelligence to russia or at least place it in places that are so easy for russia to get that it is basically a gift.