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  It's pretty much been known for generations that US college fraternities are about bonding the ruling class together through rape, torture, and binge drinking.

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  There are good reasons to have moral lines not to cross, and there are good reasons why so many of us are drawing it at LLM usage. You want to avoid a slippery slope? That's how you avoid a slippery slope: with a hard "No".

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  Stickers on a utility pole in San Francisco.

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  Navigator Franny guides us in to dock.

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  I've been playing Space Engineers a lot lately. One thing that's always nagged at me about it is that Marek Rosa, who started Keen Software House, the software company behind it, has some odd beliefs about "AI" and so forth. He doesn't dominate the spotlight but he keeps close to it. Today I was looking at the Space Engineers blog, and, it's got some bigger red flags than usual: a sidebar with Marek Rosa's "biography", with an image of him dressed (I thin...

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  My phone rang. I looked over and, as usual, it was an unknown caller, so I didn't answer it. It crosses my mind that in the 70s and 80s, you always answered the phone if you could. Fraudulent and spam calls were a concern, but a minor one. We usually just assumed if someone was calling, we should answer, because it was a friend, or something important. TV shows would show someone not answering the phone as an indication they were in some sort of crisis. Now, most communication is assumed...

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  It seems like a lot of the fantastic wealth of the super-rich is an illusion, a lot of theoretical valuation of financial instruments whose value would collapse if they actually cashed them in. I wonder how far that really goes. This may be stupid of me, but I'm starting to wonder if the rich have grown poorer along with the rest of us, and they're faking a lot. Someone commented that the rich in the 19th century were always trying to promote themselves with civic monumental architectu...

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  I've toyed with the idea of refreshing my knowledge of Perl. Nearly all the jobs I apply for ask for knowledge of BASH, Python, and occasionally Powershell; I haven't seen a job listing mention Perl in years. Still, it does seem to continue to be under development. A conceptual problem I have with Perl best practices is that there's a lot of emphasis on writing Perl code that's compatible with old versions of the Perl interpreter. But of course, that means not using newer functi...

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  As they say, liberals hate socialists more than liberals hate fascists. And that's even with fascists holding state power and calling for the violent purge of liberals. They love capitalism more than they love their own lives. https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:hf7ezrajxadu7v3tzcyij424/post/3mqz33uinj22y

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  Linus Torvalds declaring for LLM-generated code is, among other things, an example of why the "benevolent dictator for life" model that dominates FOSS will inevitably lead to disaster.

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  Mark Rubio's argument against the ICC is that the US government is routinely committing atrocities.

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  I hope this wretched nation collapses like an 80 year old fascist getting heat stroke.

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  A 125 gram bottle of Marmite, once emptied and cleaned, nicely holds one standard set of 16 millimeter polyhedral dice. #TTRPG #Dice

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  I applied for a job that seemed to fit my skillset. I have an interview tomorrow. I looked at the company website -- and of course it's an "AI" company. I hate this. I've also been unemployed for six months and the unemployment benefits have run out.

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  @anttipeltola@mastodon.world When I've read histories of computers and programming, I was surprised how often Finnish universities were mentioned. This also sounds like what's happened with universities in the US. In the 90s, a lot of significant software was developed and supported by universities and government-funded research organizations. But universities ended up outsourcing their IT.

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  Listening to this song led to my reading Society of the Spectacle, which was definitely worthwhile. Preboreal - The Ocean https://tidal.com/track/273001341/u

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  Reading that thread about Rust adopting an LLM policy, it weighs on me that FOSS institutions are purging anyone with scruples.

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  As some people are starting to point out, it's kind of ridiculous we still take the "Turing Test" seriously. Alan Turing was an extraordinarily clever person, but, the Turing Test was basically a joke, a farcical exercise in pragmatic philosophy in the early days of computing. We have a few millenia of contemplating the nature of humanity at least. At least some people think to point out that as a practical question, ELIZA showed that the Turing Test is completely use...

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  I designed a new ship in Space Engineers for the first time in a long while. I wanted to avoid the upside down T shape I usually seemed to end up with. I ended up with an upside down T shape. Yes, I know.

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  While we were chanting "No justice, no code", I thought it would have been funny to represent ops by chanting "systemctl disable --now".

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  @fasterandworse This is not my strongest objection to LLMs and "generative AI", but it's the one that it puzzles me the most that people, like Doctorow, and like professional software developers, do not see: tools are supposed to be predictable and reliable. The discipline of engineering is supposed to be founded on this principle. But this is a class of software that is, by design, unpredictable and unreliable. (Even random number generators generate numbers in a predictable range...

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  With worries about the direction about vim and neovim, I was thinking yet again about looking at emacs. Now I'm back to thinking, I mostly edit text in a GUI interface anyway, so when I'm in a TUI context, why not just use nano?

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  We often say that fire is like a living thing. And it seems as if empathy with animals is critical to humanity. What if our ability to use fire is actually related to our empathy with animals and our ability to understand the desires of other living things?

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  I could use some help with a math problem, for a computer game I'm playing, Space Engineers. The game uses a Cartesian coordinate system, with XYZ coordinates. I have a planet with known coordinates for the center, and the coordinates for a space station. I want to place objects at five other points, like the corners of a cube. I'd guess it was a simple math problem to get the point on the opposite side of the planet from the space station, but I don't know how to work o...

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  I love getting into arguments with liberals who cannot get their heads around "cult beliefs" like that states are inherently violent.

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  If the bosses love "AI" so much, let them have it. Let them "upload their minds". Let them "colonize Mars". They hate the real world so much that they're trying to construct Hell. So let them go to their destruction and leave the rest of us in peace.

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  The "fact-checking" of Trump's state of the union address mostly skips over his demand for persecution of trans children. The Republicans are a fascist party. The Democrats refusing to stand and applaud this demand is less than the bare minimum of resistance to fascism. https://theintercept.com/2026/02/25/trump-state-of-the-union-trans-attack/

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  I saw a post go by, thought, I feel like I was just thinking about something that would be a good response to that question, but I can't quite remember it. Then I remembered it, but I can't find the post with the question, and all I can remember is, "game designer with an anime avatar", which doesn't narrow it down much.

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  @sysop408@sfba.social @jackwilliambell@rustedneuron.com @cstross@wandering.shop I can imagine a disgruntled worker doing malicious compliance here.