Lvxferre [he/him]

[Off-topic] I got curious about the comment chain, checked it in a private window, and… well, I don’t remember when I blocked that poster, but by their profile I’m glad I did it — it’s a waste of time to chat with assumptive fools, you spend more time brushing off their assumptions (only so they vomit yet another assumption, and another, and another…) than actually saying what you want, or reading something meaningful. You probably won’t miss them.

[On-topic] I got the same experience as in your second link, but with translation instead of programming — using machine translation to give me ideas on how to translate specially problematic excerpts; idiomatic expressions, tricky grammatical distinctions lacking in the target language, stuff like this. Just ideas, mind you; I wouldn’t copy the machine translation, I’d pick one or two words from it and come up with my own, so it was still human-made.

Then I noticed the “problematic excerpts” were becoming more and more common.

Some might argue “than mite as well not uze calculatorz lol lmao u’ll get rusty math”… you know what, it’s actually a fair comparison, and one of the reasons I do think people should do maths by hand sometimes. Tools are supposed to allow you to do more, not to cripple you until you’re doing less.

We are tools assisting them. I don’t want to spend my life as an “LLM output checker”.

It’s possible you read this text already, but if you didn’t, Cory Doctorow wrote a great piece about this. Some good excerpts of it that fit really well what you said:

Start with what a reverse centaur is. In automation theory, a “centaur” is a person who is assisted by a machine. You’re a human head being carried around on a tireless robot body. Driving a car makes you a centaur, and so does using autocomplete.

And obviously, a reverse centaur is machine head on a human body, a person who is serving as a squishy meat appendage for an uncaring machine.

Obviously, it’s nice to be a centaur, and it’s horrible to be a reverse centaur. There are lots of AI tools that are potentially very centaur-like, but my thesis is that these tools are created and funded for the express purpose of creating reverse-centaurs, which is something none of us want to be.

The AI can’t do your job, but an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can’t do your job.

The results revealed a troubling paradox. Workers who were more susceptible to corporate BS rated their supervisors as more charismatic and “visionary,” but also displayed lower scores on a portion of the study that tested analytic thinking, cognitive reflection and fluid intelligence. Those more receptive to corporate BS also scored significantly worse on a test of effective workplace decision-making.

This is only a paradox under the assumption that gullible people are smarter. Because, yes, you need to be at least a bit gullible to see “charisma” in the others, or to not acknowledge everyone and their dog has a “vision”.

The study found that being more receptive to corporate bullshit was also positively linked to job satisfaction and feeling inspired by company mission statements.

“Chrust me, you’re happy!” “Yay, I’m happy!”

This applies also outside working environments, I think. It’s more of a general thing, on how bullshit spreads and gets enforced over sanity. I think the vicious cycle the text points out should appear elsewhere too.

Perhaps some pressure towards critical thinking might counter it?

A lot of the text is good advice for any project, not just programming. Whatever you’re working on, if it’s meaningful, should have a simple and definite scope, and clear priorities. Even it’s something like oil painting, pepper breeding, or a cardboard war tank for your cat.

A few additional tidbits. Not contradicting the text itself, but things people often get wrong about this sort of advice.

Constraints are advantages

Only to the point they force you to prioritise. You can’t really give someone raw dough and say “we were making bread under a time constrain”.

Ignore feature requests — don’t build what users ask for; understand the underlying problem instead

This does NOT mean “be an assumptive piece of shit”. You do not know what the user “wants” or “needs”, nor you should lie you do. It means instead you should look at what your project does versus what it should be doing, see if they mismatch, and address that mismatch.

Ship early, ship often — a half-product that’s real beats a perfect product that’s vaporware

This does not mean “user time is worthless trash, might as well use those things as unpaid beta testers”. Or “it’s fine to release broken shit”. It means instead “be reasonable with your expectations of perfection, and take diminishing returns into account”.

Sensible advice (don’t use this sort of grey), bullshit reason and facepalm-worthy analogy:

I actually believe increasing contrast for everyone improves the information density of our content. It literally becomes higher fidelity. It’s like taking a WAV file, converting to a 1kbps MP3, and then re-converting to a WAV file. You just footgunned yourself my dude! You should not do that.

No.

For text the information is encoded in the characters, that are abstract units. A “t” written in black conveys the exact same information as a “t” written in grey on white. What matters is if you’re using a “t” instead of a “d” or a “τ” or whatever. As such, information density won’t be affected by your questionable colour choices. Nor fidelity, because the information itself isn’t changing.

For audio things are different. Audio doesn’t work through those abstract units, you care about the sound wave; and that sound wave will get distorted once you convert the WAV into the 1kbps MP3.

The real reason to not use this sort of grey is that it’ll always give you a low contrast, no matter what you pair it with. And both excessively high and excessively low contrasts are harder to read and will tire the readers’ eyes down, doubly so for the ones with poor eyesight.

Yes. And, more important than that: EV batteries don’t just take energy to run, they take energy to manufacture. Usually you wouldn’t count the energy taken to produce a gas tank because it’s long-lasting, but if your battery lasts ~10y this amount of energy might be quite relevant — and probably is relevant due to the price.

(This shows the “fuck cars” community is spot on, when it comes to EVs: they don’t solve the problem of the environmental impact behind cars, at most they alleviate it. An actual solution would be to design cities so people don’t need to use cars willy-nilly.)

Yeah, the site coding was awful. Kind of expected from AI junk. However it seems to me like the data itself was actually researched, not “vibed”.

Edit: I see OP tweaked their AI prompt and delivered a watt-hour rating for petrol, which they must have pulled out of their ass.

I redid the maths:

• petrol heat of combustion should be 45~50MJ/kg, based on the the typical values for alkanes.
• 1 MJ = 277 Wh
• specific density of gasoline: 0.715~0.780 kg/L
• fuel consumption seems to be 5~11 L/100km = 0.05~0.11 L / km
• 1.61 km = 1 mile

Plugging all this stuff together, you get (45~50 MJ/kg) * (0.715~0.780 kg/L) * (277 Wh/MJ) * (0.05~0.11 L/km) * (1.61 km / mile) = 717~1913 Wh/mile. The estimate in the site is 1000 Wh/mile; it sounds reasonable.

The -ard is basically “fucking” + nominaliser (if necessary):

• wizard - fucking wise one
• drunkard - fucking drunk one
• coward - fucking tail (the initial part is from Old French “coue” tail, itself from Latin “cauda” tail. Who shows the back in a fight? Someone running away!)

The “nominaliser” part is an artefact of the borrowing, the suffix is from French. Romance languages often use adjectives as if they were nouns, but that doesn’t quite roll in English. In turn French borrowed it from Frankish, it’s apparently cognate of English “hard”.

The etymology of “mustard” is disputed. The first part is likely from Latin “mustum” must; it used to be prepared with young wine. The -ard is typically explained as ardens (fiery, hot). So basically “mustum ardens” hot must. …Capsicum peppers are from the Americas, black pepper and long pepper were expensive, European mediaevalards didn’t really have a lot of spicy flavours to work with, so… I guess mustard was spicy for them?

Emphasis mine unless otherwise noted.

The Case for Apolitical Tech Spaces
Many technical spaces have become extremely partisan

The author flings back and forth between “political” and “partisan” as if they were synonymous, when they aren’t. So, to be clear:

Something is political when it regards the defence of interests of human beings. If it involves 2+ people, you got politics. Yes, it’s that wide; everything related to human groups has at least some political aspect, there’s no way out. (Even picking which topics to discuss in social media, by the way.)

In the meantime, partisanship is the association with a group of people that share the same values, regarding some political issue, and seek to promote those values.

Both things need to be kept distinct and clear.

We need not look at the particulars or righteousness of any involved side to recognize that this politicization is an undesirable thing

Politicisation (“to make things political”) is typically desirable — it acknowledges that everyone’s actions have an impact on everyone else’s life, and that sometimes will incur in conflicts of interest, that need to be somehow solved.

Partisanship is also sometimes desirable, when it gives people power to defend themselves against other people. That’s the case with the partisanship you typically see in tech sites; it boils mostly down to “some group is trying to deny us right, we should warn other people about this, and we should gather together so we can exert political pressure so we keep those rights”. Stuff like right to repair, deplatforming fascists, not letting big tech have its way, privacy, guess what, it’s all partisanship!

So no matter how you interpret the slop the author said in this utterance (as politicisation strictu sensu or as a complain against partisanship), it’s clear they’re 1) vomiting an assumption, and 2) treating the reader as if they were gullible filth, eager to eat the author’s vomit.

As a side effect, we can develop a bit more empathy or at least understanding for the people who’ve said “hey, can we just keep politics out of tech spaces”.

Yeah, nah.

In another situation I’d potentially agree with the author, given a lot of people use the word “politics” to refer to “divisive off-topic, derailing the discussion into the same handful of topics regarding GAFAM, government affairs and individuals, and parasites/billionaires/leeches”. In those situations “please no politics” conveys “I want to discuss the topic at hand, and share info”, so it’s mostly fine.

In this case, though? Screw it. To “show empathy”, in this case, means “stop fighting for your own rights! You should shut up, and lower yourself from a human being into a living doormat”.

The types of games we play // There are three types of payout structures in game theory:

More often than not, when you split a quantitative matter into a dichotomy (or tri-, or tetra-, etc.), the conclusions are bloody dumb. It’s simply better to acknowledge you have a quantitative matter; otherwise you’ll end lumping together things that are orders of magnitude different as if they were “the same shit”, and wrongly cancelling things out. (For example: “-100 is negative, +5 is positive, so if we add them it becomes neutral”. Yup, it’s that dumb, but when you simplify things like this you don’t notice it.)

This will be relevant later on.

Every participant comes away with knowledge at no real cost beyond that of the time spent participating.

“At no real cost, except the thing that matters the most in this context”. Pfffffft.

at this point, things go from being positive-sum to potentially zero-sum, as every work I share must compete for limited headspace

First off. Following the idiotic categories the author himself set up, “zero-sum” would mean either

• the interaction neither benefits nor harms either side of the interaction; or
• the interaction harms one side of the interaction as much as it benefits the other

Neither is the case here. The author is coming up with a dumb model, but not even arsing himself to follow it.

And when you do follow the model, you get the following:

• if the submitter is a perfectly rational agent, they’ll only share something if the cost associated with producing and sharing the content is outweighed by the sum of the benefit associated with each visualisation of the content, including further interactions. As such, from the PoV of the submitter, it’s always a positive; otherwise they wouldn’t bother.
• for the people viewing the content, the interaction can go from a mild negative (that submission is junk) to a large positive (the submission changes their life meaningfully, to the better) to anything in between. That is of course expecting submissions that actively harm viewers (e.g. harassment) are removed/moderated.

It’s almost always positive, except if the submission is something people actively don’t want to see. But to realise that you can’t really split the gradient into a trichotomy, you need to deal with it as a gradient.

Now, which “tech sites” was the author talking about, again? Slashdot, Reddit [sic], Hacker News? All of them have a voting system exactly for this reason — things people don’t want to see get out of the way.

How politics destroys discussion // Politics is ultimately about which group has power over other groups.

Wroooooooooooooooooong. As already explained.

Power–by which I mean the ability to make binding decisions without the consent of all parties (e.g., use of force but equally importantly things like status and access)

Yeah, soft power doesn’t exist at all. *rolls eyes*

in bounded communities is, by definition, a zero-sum game. This is unavoidable: if I get my way then you cannot also get your way (unless it agrees with mine).

Only if you use such an esoteric definition of “politics” that excludes the outcome of the policies being defended.

Alright. This text is shitty enough for me to bother further with it.

Temporal: that would explain it. But it still sounds funny.

Copromorphidae: I stand corrected. Shit-shaped moths!

I also found a frog called Allobates niputidea. That’s from Spanish though, not Latin. (ni puta idea = no fucking idea.)

I have no idea on why they decided to call the common European frog Rana temporaria, but “temporary frog” sounds really funny. “Eh this species name is just temporary, I swear”.

I’m also kind of surprised I couldn’t find a single species called merdicula (little shit). Seems like the sort of humour some would have.