The Way People Are Taught Programming Today Continues To Drive Me Insane Insane Insane

Throw back to when I posted this on twitter with a comment about how completely stupid it is that if your boobs are a specific shape they're deemed inappropriate or inherently sexual and I had people telling me how much the message resonated with them and how misogyny sucks, followed by " I couldn't hit like and I'm dming you about it because i have minors following me"

Like, my friend I don't think we're on the same page actually.

Something that I think should be an important part of solarpunk aesthetics is screws.

Look at your smartphone. No screws. You've got to have specialized tools to get inside your phone to repair something. There are certain pieces of tech that are glued in place and glue can't be undone without permanently breaking the bond.

But screws!

You can take apart a broken old radio, repair what's broken, and, if you were careful in taking it apart, you can put it back together and have a fully functioning radio and all you need is a common screwdriver!

It's hard to build screws and other mechanical fasteners because it requires more planning than clamps and glues, but isn't that what solarpunk is all about‽ It's about care and sustainability and and a radio or a computer built carefully with repair in mind is a sustainable computer that stays out of landfills and in use.

Headcanon: The specific wording here, “all the tales told by his species”, isn’t just a shorthand for “all the tales told about Irnakk by his species”. Rather, it’s a convention in Skakdi storytelling that the end of every story features a gruesome murder of all the characters by Irnakk, even if it has nothing to do with him. Not writing this scene indicates the author needs the characters alive for a sequel.

Yeah I’m a white American I don’t really think there’s anything I can have for culture

You're so brave for saying this

So here's my beef with ChatGPT. Even aside from the issues with plagiarism, cheating, people using it to fake the work that they absolutely need to be actually doing, &etc.

With the advent of the internet we've been in a situation where all the knowledge available to humanity could, conceivably, be made available to everyone at all times. We've had enormous public works built towards that purpose -- libraries, Wikipedia, archives, everything. But an increasing problem as the years have gone by has been the problem of sorting out the signal from the noise. Sorting out real, helpful advice from scams and snake-oil. Paths that lead to dead-ends as sources of information go down and don't come back up. Trying to figure out who's a real expert, who's even a real person in a sea of fake generated avatars. Distinguishing wheat from chaff, usable material from trash.

And the makers of ChatGPT -- and every other AI programmer who's now trying to jump on the bandwagon -- is looking at this problem and saying "You know what this situation needs? More noise. More fakes. More chaff. More dead-ends and empty shells. I think we have TOO MUCH useful information and real expertise. I think we should shake things up by adding more utterly contentless garbage to the mix." And they created an automated noise generator.

Just imagine being on the bank of a pond and saying "ah, this is a lovely pond, the fish and plants are so beautiful, I'm just having trouble seeing them through the silt in the water" and the person next to you says "I'm going to build a factory on the bank of this pond that does nothing but pour more dirt into it. All day. Every day. Nonstop." And then everyone else overhears them and says "Oh, what a fantastic idea! I'm going to create my OWN sludge-factory to get in on this action!"

Once you start thinking about humans as a species in a biome, it affects your entire way of looking at normal things.

The other day I referred to female morning joggers as an 'indicator species' in that if you see women jogging in the dark it means that the environment provides migration pathways (sidewalks, clear signs) and doesn't have any known predators of female morning joggers (guy with knife, bear, BigTruck, male morning joggers).

Though, I think that people consider framing humans as animals reacting to their environment as rude.

Guerrilla Girls 1991

I need more than infinite time. Like, give me a sideways timeline where I can spend forever on a specific project without time passing in the main world, but I don't need just one of those.

I need like five. I want to splinter into a bunch of different directions, all somehow at right angles to the timeline, only to slowly angle their ways back to this timeline and drop masterpieces of arbitrary amounts of work spent in these little atemporal cloisters

unveil your heart

the whole irony poisoned way of seeing something unusual and reacting with quips of 'kill it with fire' or 'i just lost brain cells' is such a muted way of trotting through this beautiful timeline, and such a common reaction from those raised by the internets depths. i hear this a lot with my books

and it just makes me think, 'do you realize that you have trained yourself to experience shock as dismissal?’ so many irony poisoned buds have wired themselves so that something 'unusual' equals disgust instead of wonder and curiosity and joy at the strange corners of our timeline.

i should be clear, this is not really a complaint. everyone can trot their own trot and these buckaroos often still buy or share my books out of curiosity, but i cant help but feel bad for them. there is so much wonder in this existence and some of it IS WEIRD. i mean A LOT of it is weird.

but by training yourself to react with an automatic veil will create such a haze across your experience. maybe you read a tingler and DO enjoy it. maybe you eat a food that seems unusual. maybe you listen to a musician with a video that people share to make fun of and YOU find something powerful

there will be plenty of things out there that are not to your taste, but this culture of saying yuck to sincerity to get little more than an empty laugh - it will destroy your heart.