Klara commits to the cause

I've... only had that experience with alcohol with one person, and it was such an "oh I understand some human things now and also some me things" kind of thing.

(At the time it was really sweet and special, but now that that's over I'm of course inclined to be a sad overthinking lesbian about it.)

Wait. Wait.

Super Sentai ended??

Like I don't even have a personal attachment here, but that feels so... wrong.

There will be more gay porn.

Everyone I work uses it now. And I know I'm lucky that I'm not required to. *sighs*

Yeah, I wouldn't pay for it if it _wasn't_ powered by exploitative labor and built to further exploit additional labor and also a blight upon computer hardware and _also_ the justification for obscene datacenter buildout in a time when we should be trying to _reduce_ pollution / energy consumption.

I've heard people say, well, I don't want to write YAML templates or Jenkinsfiles or whatever, and I don't either!

Thus, when appropriate, I copy what other people wrote and fiddle with it. Using an LLM is just that, except you're paying $20/month, and the other people in question got fucked over.

Unalone toward dawn we go, toward the glory of new morning!

It's in fact a reference to a book I like, specifically [rot13.com for spoilers] Nhthfg Pynexr'f Zrgny Sebz Urnira.

Whereas in programming, the people who claim impressive* results are all, well, you've gotta write the spec/tests real tightly first, of course. So, oh, you spend _more_ time on the tedium and _less_ crafting technomagic with your very thoughts. Cool.

* if you ignore how LLMs actually work, that is

And, like, when I wrote conference papers in grad school I actually did prefer editing to writing sections on a blank page! But that's because it was a dialog with another human (co-author, advisor, reviewer) applying their mind to whatever. The sludge machine can only fake that, not actually do it!

I know there are some professional writers who really struggle during the writing, but even for them it's only a particularly reckless minority who are advocating for the sludge machine to crank out first drafts for them?

They're out there, don't get me wrong. Making other writers real mad at them.

Wait for the oil to reach the next phase of its complex and slow life cycle, where it will emerge from the ground like a brood of extraterrestrial cicadas and leave this planet for parts unknown.

I'm also sorry! I know it's so much at everyone.

(I deleted and reposted because of a typo, btw.)

Btw, I am pretty fucked up about the wars, and the continued anti-trans campaigning, and ICE, and the number of people near smaller levels of power who've abdicated their responsibility to meaningfully oppose these things.

It feels useless to talk / share news about. But oh, the feelings are there.

Like, do you know me? Do you know how much more stubborn I've been on substantially less important matters?

You're not going to convert me to a customer of the plagiarism and underpaid contractors machine even if it _can_ successfully automate some of the actually-pleasant-at-times parts of my job.

Sorry to post about "AI" again, but: the chatter among programmers lately (at work, reshared posts I've stumbled into various places, etc.) has been all "oh wow, I'd dismissed LLMs as generating bad, buggy code, but Claude lately is really good; I've started using it to [...]", and... no.

Fuck no.

Did he recount that in his 1942 mid-year performance review, by any chance?

I sometimes envy those girls/etc. who switch to exclusively using "this girl" or "this one" for themselves and do it so naturally that, instead of coming off as an awkward sexually suggestive affectation, it's something that you can almost miss that they're doing.

Just, the raw forwardness of it.

I was gonna say, you have a 5:1 follower-to-following ratio, and those labels are usually about stuff like mass follows and then unfollows, and also none of the labellers I use have marked you.

But also I don't wanna deprive you of a chance to feel naughty and transgressive! So I dunno!

Yeah, though my favorite is actually approval voting, after witnessing just how bad of a time a lot of regular people have understanding ranked choice.

But just _something_ to save us from getting someone awful because all the progressives ran at the door at the same time and knocked each other out

I wonder if Jan Schakowsky understood what she was doing to all her former constituents when she decided to step down.

it's been a while since i made a dumb website for these letters. what do you think? for a growing archive of letters - this might not be the smartest format, but i really didn't want to do a drop down? asofterworld.com/OQ/

Fuck.

I am so there with you. *sighs*

They do! Once upon a time I attended a destination wedding; that whole experience was managed by a travel agent.

(It honestly wasn't great? She couldn't understand that I was sharing a room with someone who didn't share my last name and that we weren't coming from or going back to the same places.)

What the fuck.

I guess it just sounds like it would be nice if I could envision and try out something other than this to be with my fellow humans. And also if my following the not-a-script (to remind that this was prompted by a game??) wasn't so load-bearing so frequently.

These are two separate problems, really.

But they don't; there's no cathartic finale and epilogue around the corner if you finally fall apart on them, either.

I dunno, I feel like I should be going towards a conclusion here, but that's part of the problem-- just writing this has been such a fight against my instincts of why I even post.

And then what do you lean on when there's no Right Thing To Say/Do?

But even when it works, social dynamics that lean this way don't tend to balance out into mutual support over time. In my head they should, if you've picked good people, 'cause it's not like only one of you can remember past events

...it's based on Knowing And Saying/Doing The Right Thing, which is such a fucking trap long-term.

Because, first, you know that fallacy about how tending towards perfectionism doesn't leave one surrounded by things that have actually been done really well? Well, there's an equivalent of that here.