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  Worried about KDE. I don't want to have to use GNOME

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  New article: this one has some thoughts about a part of the discussion around LLMs that has been underdiscussed so far: namely, the fact that you can only control their behaviour using prompts. https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/llms-on-the-boundary

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  The one thing I would like the queer community to understand about trans women is that, unfortunately, we are hypervisible and, in a lot of ways, the major group targeted by the more unpleasant bigots. This isn't anything inherent to us or particular about us: it's a largely socially situated thing. This does mean, though, that we're going to have a different perspective on things to people who aren't directly being targeted by the worst people in the world.

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  New article: this time, we use Heidegger to explain why the "it's just a tool" line that often comes up in tech is so very silly: https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/no-such-thing-as-just-a-tool

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  There has to be a Steven Yegge Gas Town Carbon Monoxide Poisoning joke out there somewhere.

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  Omnes, gentes, please behold my latest cursed marketing idea. It is a quiz that tests your knowledge of some engineering fundamentals (specifically, in this case, git and the unix command line). Have fun! https://deadsimpletech.com/quizzes/some-fundamental-skills

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  One thinks that a good guideline for life might be "don't believe things that disfigure your soul, no matter how correct you think they are"

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  The moment someone says the phrase "real simple question", you know they're trying to slip something past your radar. ... I really shouldn't have to say this, but arson attacks on synagogues in New Zealand have *nothing* to do with Gaza.

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  RE: https://wandering.shop/@susankayequinn/116982181052064171 I, for a variety of reasons, have trouble maintaining a vegan diet (my partner has had an eating disorder, I'm autistic and have trouble switching diets and so on and so forth). Not driving, by contrast, is very easy for me (I live in the middle of a city, am fit enough to walk or cycle most places). Sometimes you just have to lean in to what you *can* do

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  New article time! This time, I've talked about writing C is so much more enjoyable than a number of other things, and tech's regrettable tendency towards shallowness: https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/tech-aint-deep

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  RE: https://mastodon.sprawl.club/@ludicity/116939432745772414 Ludic has done the thing!

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  Anthropic's article on cultural differences in LLM behaviour is *fascinating*. It tells me that Claude expresses the following specific values in Polish: Says when it is unsure Backs claims with evidence Pushes back on false assumptions I hadn't realised that *basic epistemic rigor* was a culturally encoded trait, and (dropping my deep antipathy to the tools in general for a moment), it's a little concerning that apparently other languages *don't* do this so much. https://www....

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  Some good (if terrifying for me) news: Arca is now in early access. That's right: now you can buy access to my notes on statistics and engineering fundamentals, exercises and access to a community of fellow students where you can ask questions, comment on others' questions and get them answered by me. It's a great opportunity to learn something that will make you better at basically everything you do from someone cool. Take a look! https://deadsimpletech.com/arca

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  I am tired and fed up and need to do something to feel better, so I'm writing a piece about how learning Latin can change your software career (and your life)!

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  I think I actually have to go live with billing for Arca (my learning platform project) tomorrow, and I am *terrified*. Getting people to pay you online on a monthly basis is hard, and there are so many things that can go horribly wrong

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  Have had a thought about social media bans for young people: there's a good chance that this actively backfires and pushes young people towards writing and publishing their own blogs, which is much harder to regulate.

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  RE: https://mastodon.online/@zl2tod/116866612922005826 This one's truly incomprehensible. Like, even taking the horrific ethics out of the equation a) New Zealand has no strike capability to speak of and b) how well did the "precision strikes" in Iran work? As far as we can tell, they were basically useless in achieving any meaningful effects

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  RE: https://cloudisland.nz/@exlibrarykris/116870571038982179 My heart swells with civic pride ! I am so glad to call this city my own.

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  My current in-progress essay is about Kurt Vonnegut's review of Hunter Thompson's *Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72". I'm kinda excited about it.

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  RE: https://social.coop/@scottjenson/116871738193741080 I really do empathise, but I also think that being misread in bad faith is just part of being a writer. I've had some truly hideous misreadings of my work, and well... I don't know whether an LLM can do shit to stop that without completely defanging my work?

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  New article, as as promised, it's the Vonnegut one! This is one for those of us who feel like reality is killing us because it's so ugly and cheap: https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/thompson-vonnegut-ice-9

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  After working my ass off trying to make the stars align for several months, I finally got my fucking estrogen back. Have had my patches for a few hours, and I *already* feel way better

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  I am feeling uncharacteristically good

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  An interesting factoid for those interested is that when I write, the categories of "gets lots of readers", "gets lots of email sign-ups" and "gets lots of reader mail" are almost entirely disjoint.

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  We have a lot of smart and well-educated people in this country. It would not kill us to perhaps develop our own drone or AsM program, which would give us the freedom of action we need to pursue our own values. (Because New Zealand is nuclear-free, I won't say the other thing, but a nuclear-sharing agreement with say, France might not be the worst thing in the world) https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/07-07-2026/getting-closer-and-closer-on-beijings-ballistic-missile-in-the-pacific

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  I think the trickiest thing to communicate to people in the Anglosphere at the moment, as an Eastern European, is not how *bad* things are but how quickly these bad things can change. I see a bunch of people saying that it will take multiple decades to fix the atrocities, especially the transphobic ones, that the Supreme Court has inflicted on us and... it will not. The cat's out of the bag. People *know what freedom and a good society look like*. They will not forget easily.

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  RE: https://chaos.social/@kbob/116830360213339044 "We expect another doubling of tulip bulb prices by 1638..."

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  @pheonix@hachyderm.io Are... people actually doing that? What the fuck?

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  Well, I tried Claude Code. It's less bad than GLM, but alas, I didn't get the "Hallelujah! I see the light" moment that would let me become an AI grifter. Pity, really. I did notice an interesting thing though: the people who get the best results from coding agents tend to be the people who think they're awful, which says some interesting things about engineering judgement. Read the article here: https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/engineering-judgement-c...

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  The fact that what feels like 95% of our economy currently functions on the basis of being able to grab other peoples' attention as effectively as possible does not seem like a good thing to me.