Charlie Loyd @vruba@everything.happens.horse

[Looking at a society where decision-making power is strongly inversely correlated with exposure to the consequences of one’s decisions:] Now hang on, why are there so many bad decisions?

Giant malign forces of capital 20 years ago use a weird interpretation of copyright as a tool to hurt normal people.

Giant malign forces of capital today use a more or less opposite weird interpretation of copyright as a tool to hurt normal people.

Reasonably well-informed commentators with mostly good takes: Ah, clearly the problem is that we don’t have a perfect interpretation of copyright. Consider the following thought experiment – an artist in a state of nature approaches a cave wall and…

I’ve said this before and I fear I’ll have to say it again, but watching the flip of politically connected, ridiculously wealthy, more or less unregulatable companies v. well-meaning knowledge workers on the issue of “copyright is absolute and inviolable” v. “copyright is just an idea, man” has been real unpleasant!

Running $(find ../../.. -type f -mmin -5) to learn where this code put its outputs because it’s easier than figuring it out.

I have written some bad python lately, but I spent the day reading other people’s code that accomplishes similar things and some of it would feel cruel to describe at all.

I relish the opportunities that software offers to remember that not everyone has the same perspective on whether, for example, things identified by their times should be sortable according to their times. What a gift this is; I honor and celebrate and wallow in this wonderful moment.

Through a loupe.

Plant ID, anyone? I picked up a handful of these from a free box in someone’s yard on my morning walk. The label just said “free succulents”.

I do not 100% agree with everything Alison Gopnik ever says but the way I was grumpily muttering, a year ago, that people were critiquing LLMs wrong, and should be thinking more about children, and cultural transmission, and feedback loops, and then Gopnik popped up and did all of that far more clearly than I was even imagining, and with way more intellectual grounding – it’s been very satisfying, thank you.