Charlie Loyd @vruba@everything.happens.horse

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.

A little free advice from crusty old Uncle Charlie: When an “AI” company (like any other company) says they have to stop doing something because the way they were doing it was dangerously good, our first reaction should be “wow, a PR strategy” and not “wow, it was TOO GOOD, imagine!”

Good-intention–adjacent online shitbirds saying that Boeing whistleblower didn’t die the way he did because he didn’t act exactly like they think someone in that situation must act is just extremely callous and ignorant and bad and will lead to a lot of unnecessary suffering in the world.

Amusing myself by injecting false reflectances into pansharpening inputs. (CC BY-NC data from Maxar.)

It’s Monday and once again time to remind the world that “nation state” has a very specific meaning, different from “country”, and it’s easy to say something on the spectrum from technically wrong to actively ethnonationalist by throwing it around at random.

When other people take a long time to reply to e-mail: lazy, unfriendly, irresolute, displaying a kind of disorganization characteristic of an unconscious and wasted life. When I take a long time: busy, thoughtful, rich inner world, applying the effort to do a good job, generous and sincere, an admirable and worthy friend.