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  ahhhh, okay, now i get it. when scientists and academics say that they're fine with using AI to do research, what they mean is that they're "doing their own research"

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  ok so you say that LLM-generated code "works" and/or is "useful." fine. but AI-generated images and video also "work" and are "useful"—they depict, evoke, convince—broadly, they do many of the things that we expect images and video to do. (right-wing social media is proof of this imo.) indeed I feel like the fact that AI-generated images "work" in this fashion is *part of the reason* that people dislike them. yet people cite the "usefulness&...

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  i made this simplified diagram of the Game Boy's internals (DMG) for the talk I gave at the NYC Permacomputing meetup a few weeks ago and thought I'd also share it here

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  some day soon i am going to have (what i'd believed to be) a conversation with someone and feel their attention wander and see their eyes glaze over and i'll say to them "hey are you listening to me?" and they'll answer by pointing at their sleek wristpiece and saying "oh don't worry, keep talking, it's got siri recap." i need to work on my right hook so i can be prepared for when this day arrives

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  honestly if the acceptability of using ai-generated code in a project governed by a foss license is dependent solely on the "legal copyright status" of ai-generated code, the license in question should be chucked into the fire

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  can't quite put my finger on why but this has gotta be the funniest, most absurd, most humiliating sentence i've read in a long long time (from https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/anthropics_watermark_text_adulteration_in_claude_is_a_perversion_of_writing)

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  *opens the hood of your laptop* welp i see your problem. you got transistors in here. lil electric switches. maybe billions of 'em. not much i can do for you

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  ok i'm putting together notes for my intro to computer programming class, and i just don't see a way to teach computer programming in 2026 that isn't explicitly rooted in like... hardcore leftist ideology

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  yeah assholes do this shit all the time, but claiming to care about someone's "agency" in the text of an *opt-out* form is still genuinely revolting https://huggingface.co/spaces/HuggingFaceCode/in-the-stack

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  so let me see if i understand this correctly. the big selling point of your coding assistant is that [checks notes] it "accidentally does cybercrime." did i get that right

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  like any other markov chain text generator, the output is always going to be hit or miss, but more often than not my little solar powered alba generator is hitting the mark imo

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  "This is *NOT* some kind of 'social warrior' project, never has been, and never will be," Linus said, thereby clearly demonstrating what kind of "social warrior" he is

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  "rejecting AI is like rejecting the automobile" yeah i know lol

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  today's millennial brain rot is mentally hearing the line "since thy duties be / To warm the world, that’s done in warming us" from Donne's "The Sun Rising" in the voice of Locutus of Borg

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  i am constantly baffled by the lack of curiosity demonstrated by retro hardware enthusiasts who use llms to make their stuff. it's like... i thought we were here to understand how computers work from a historical and material perspective, in order to build a future for computation that empowers communities over corporate interests, and to redeem the knowledge bottled up in retro hardware design to enrich the commons. but no i guess you're here for the frisson of "lookie old thing do...

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  very much recommend this beautifully written, acerbic, wide-ranging and informative piece about Arabic typography in the web browser https://lr0.org/blog/p/arabic/ "Arabic letters are strongly right-to-left. Latin letters are strongly left-to-right.... Spaces and punctuation are neutral and take their direction from whoever is standing next to them, like guests at a wedding who know nobody."

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  implemented a function to step through instructions (instead of clock cycles), along with a little disassembler, which i can run right inside jupyter notebook

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  anyway even if 100% of computer programmers *were* using AI, that wouldn't mean that AI is good or effective or worthwhile. could just mean that 100% of computer programmers are reckless shitheads

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  really wish there was a publisher of computer programming books out there that specifically promised (a) they don't publish manuscripts whose production involved generative AI/LLMs; (b) they don't use generative AI/LLMs anywhere in the editing process; and (c) they don't publish books *about* generative AI/LLMs, unless it's about how awful those technologies are (and even then, only sparingly, bc frankly there are more interesting things to read and write about)

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  @samplereality@post.lurk.org @electricarchaeo@scholar.social oh wow this is fantastic!!

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  python gotcha i just lost most of an hour to: dataclass objects will happily let you assign values to attributes that you didn't specify using type annotations in the class definition, unless you specify slots=True in the arguments to the class definition's @dataclass decorator. (for some reason i assumed that doing a typo on a dataclass object's attribute name would raise an exception, but actually no)

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  huh it's almost like technical and ethical concerns can't be cleanly separated, owing to the fact that technology always exists in social and material contexts. who'd a thunk it

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  as someone with a blossoming interest in compilers, i was very excited to learn about QBE, a "hobby-scale and pleasant to hack on" compiler backend/intermediate representation https://c9x.me/compile/ (i had been thinking "what if i had my hobby compiler emit llvm ir" but then i visited the llvm ir language reference page and scores of wailing banshees emerged)

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  researchers, scholars, activists for hundreds of years: absent radical political change, automation will entrench inequality, not relieve it 😡 every tech ceo: absent radical political change, automation will entrench inequality, not relieve it 🥳

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  hi everyone! this sunday (may 18th) at 4pm eastern, we're doing an ONLINE release show for my new book of poetry, Two of Pentacles. here's the place to sign up (free!) https://www.eventbrite.com/e/two-of-pentacles-zoom-release-show-tickets-1342086941169 (the two other readers—Holly Melgard and John Cayley—are both AMAZING btw) more info about the book here: https://shop.nothing-to-say.org/products/two-of-pentacles

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  what if instead of investing $500 billion in GPUs and data centers, we'd invested $500 billion in like... HyperCard

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  my favorite kind of AI/LLM criticism media is when the person begins with a huge hedge like "I'm not an AI hater. *of course* AI is a useful technology and it will doubtlessly have transformative effects on the way we work" and then they spend the next 8k words/45 minutes showing how AI isn't actually useful and won't actually transform the way we work. it's like... it's okay to just say that AI sucks

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  so... froggo jammed a real actual game boy color into a smart watch form factor. this might actually be the most impressive retro gaming hardware mod of all time? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTUg_NePXy8

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  @shriramk@mastodon.social @eruonna@chaosfem.tw could be the title of a rad math rock album of björk covers

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  ok there's an "open source" business scheme i've seen out there that works like (a) product itself has an MIT-like license (b) useful add-ons have a GPL license (c) want to use the GPL add-ons without having to follow GPL? pay the business money and they'll license them separately (d) public repo has a contributor agreement in which contributors essentially surrender all copyright to the business running the project i get that you gotta make a buck but this is pretty expl...