A podcast I listened to recently spoke about failure modes of AI. They used an example of a toll bridge in Denmark where it was impassable recently because it only took card payments, and the payment processing system was down. It would be sensible in this scenario for the failure mode to be for the toll barrier to be open and for them to just let cars through if technical problems means it’s impossible for people to pay the toll. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case, and no-one had the ability to manually make the barrier go up. Apparently they ended up having to dismantle the barrier while the payment system was down.

This is very silly, and highlights one of the big dangers of how AI systems are currently being used (even though this particular problem doesn’t have AI involved, I don’t think, just regular tech problems). The point is that tech can be awesome at empowering us, but we need to think about “okay, but what happens when things go wrong?”, and we need to be asking that question in a manner that puts humans at the centre.

That was a far more trivial scenario than the situation described in the article. If AI tools help improve detection rates, then that’s awesome. But we need to actually address what happens if those technologies cease to be available (whether because the tools rely on proprietary models, or power outages, or countless other ways that this could go wrong)

That sounds like you’re doing TDD, albeit informally.

Something I love about this piece is that it being written by a person who cares deeply about stuff means that I now have a positive opinion towards the two places linked as being good places for recipes ([https://www.theguardian.com/profile/meera-sodha](http://www.meera.com/ Sodha) and Smitten Kitchen). I’m going to promptly forget about them, because I’m not the kind of cook who uses recipes, but still, it’s striking to me how transferable caring about stuff is. I don’t know the author of this blog, but based on this post (and the zippity-fast speed that their website loads), I’m positively inclined towards them, because I am a silly human, and that means I am a deeply social creature.

A friend who works in anti-aging research saw this image and joked that if anyone could figure out how to make pets immortal, it would be her. Then she laughed until she began crying about her recently deceased dog.

Because the AI industry is a bubble that exists to sell more GPUs and drive fossil fuel demand

I’m not American, so perhaps there’s something I’m missing, but when has there been a real leftist on the ballot? My impression was that the perceived lack of meaningful choice is plausibly driving poor election turn out

Fun fact! The Roman emperor Diocletian abdicated the throne after he stabilised the Roman empire after the Crisis of the Third Century. He retired to his villa in what is now Croatia to grow cabbages. This was an unprecedented move — typically an emperor served for the rest of their life and/or were violently overthrown. However, it took only a few years for the peace that Diocletian had established to begin to crumble into civil war again; when his friends and colleagues beseeched him to return to stabilise things, he was reported to have said “If only you knew the peace and tranquility I gain from tending and growing my cabbages, you would understand the impossibility of such a request!”^[1][2]

I sincerely wish Dylan a life of as much peace and tranquility as the MVP ex-emperor Diocletian.

[1]: I don’t remember the source of this particular translation, but the original source for this is Epitome de Caesaribus 39.6

[2]: A different translation of the same line is “If you could show the cabbage that I planted with my own hands to your emperor, he definitely wouldn’t dare suggest that I replace the peace and happiness of this place with the storms of a never-satisfied greed.”. I prefer this one, because it makes it sound like he was disproportionately proud of his cabbages rather than just glad to be away from the shitstorm of Roman politics. However, the one I actually used fit the sentiment of my comment better.

n.b. I am not a Historian, just a scientist whose late best friend was a Historian, and thus I am morally obligated to use what he taught me to make shitposts.

Edit: formatting

I agree with you. I think that what most people think of as “objectivity” isn’t a thing that exists in reality, but as an ideal that we can strive towards. In practice, there is no neutral journalism — especially in this topic, my instinct is to be extra cautious of pieces that appear objective at first glance.

The piece you shared is a good example of how the bias in reporting can be found both in the micro-level prose, and the macro level framing of the piece (in this case, the macro framing being that the killing of journalists sets a scary precedent).

That’s a really good point. I remember at the most recent DEFCON, Cory Doctorow got a heckton of cheers when he was talking about tech workers waking up to the fact that they were workers, and are beginning to push towards unionising. In the comments, people were glad to hear the cheers, seeing it as evidence of the shifting tide that Doctorow spoke of.

However, as you highlight, this mass squeezing of the middle class will also send a significant chunk of people over to Fascism. We definitely shouldn’t become complacent

It depends, but even people who are released on bail (more likely to happen if there are many arrests) may still be charged at a later date.

I mean, whilst it might not be the worth thing that could happen from trying this, the thing that already has happened is bad enough: I threw away the majority of stuff that I owned, which did involve getting rid of a lot of clutter, but also involved getting rid of a bunch of important and/or necessary things. Some of those things were necessary enough that they got repurchased. However, because of difficulties in organising what I do have (even when that’s only the bare essentials), then I am living in chaotic inconsistency.

To give a concrete example, I have asthma and I’m meant to take a preventer inhaler twice a day. My asthma is practically non-existent if I keep on top of that, but I haven’t been able to be consistent with it. That led to me having to have paramedics come out a while back because after a flare up, I also wasn’t able to find my blue reliever inhaler. Fortunately I live in a country where that doesn’t cost me an arm and a leg, but that kind of situation is what I’m trying to avoid — the cumulative impact of not having the things that I need to be okay

I do have a diagnosis of ADHD (I probably should have mentioned that in my post). I think that I struggle with knowing what the essentials are, especially given that I’m in this situation as a result of cutting my life down below even the essential essentials. A lot of the stuff that’s causing mess isn’t necessarily clutter that could be gotten rid of, but important stuff that needs to have a home

I have a reasonable amount of space for the stuff I need, but I’m in a weird position where, when it’s tidy, my room looks weirdly sparse and empty (with the exception of various boxes). It looks like the home of someone who has recently moved in.

Are you able to talk more about how you have been slowly finding places for things? Like if you come across an item that has no clear place to go, how do you approach that problem? For me, I usually start with “okay, if you don’t know where it would go, perhaps it’s unneeded and you should throw it out”. Whilst there have been times when that has been true, and I have binned the item, by now, the majority of the times I ask myself this, it’s something that I definitely do need, but I’m not sure how to go about carving out space for the item.

I appreciate the perspective in your second paragraph. I am aware of how tumultuous history makes me better at handling huge, high stakes crises (despite struggling to cope with minor issues), but I hadn’t considered how that dynamic could be affecting this quest.

When you are aiming to give everything a place, do you tend to do it from a bottom-up, item-by-item perspective, or a top-down, categories-then-items approach? For example, the top down mode is like if I defined a category like “nail-care”, and then listed/gathered the items that belonged to that category (nail clippers, cuticle oil, nail file, etc.) and designated a home for that category. The bottom up one might start with me actually using the nail clippers and then thinking “where should this one item go?” I find it especially hard to find homes for individual, loose items like this, but if I don’t put them somewhere, then when I stumble across other things in that category (cuticle oil etc.), I can’t find the nail clippers, which hinders the ability of categories to begin to form.

I find categories useful because my working memory is trash (likely ADHD related, which I should have mentioned in my post). Like, by encapsulating a list of 3 items (e.g. nail clippers, cuticle oil, nail file) with a category, it abstracts away a lot of unnecessary information and I’ve reduced the problem from “find homes for these three items” to “find a home for the nail stuff”. Currently, the default place for most of my stuff is for it to be spread across a couple of large boxes, and that makes it impossible for categories to form. I also often find myself paralysed with dread because I have historically found it useful to ensure I return items to their designated places, and my inability to find places for things causes me to just not use the things.

I do have a diagnosis of ADHD (I should have probably mentioned that in the post).

“Build systems that work for you today and get you closer to where you want to be.”

The problem is that I don’t think there are any systems that work for me today, in the sense that I am so deeply unfulfilled with my life at present that trying to build around me as I am now just leads to a sense of stagnation that really harms my morale. I think the key part of the above snippet is the “and get you closer to where you want to be”, and that’s the million dollar question.

I’ll check out the book you recommended, thanks.

I have found that a similar approach has drastically decreased the amount of unnecessary stuff I have over the course of many years. The problem that I’m faced with now is that the various high quality things that I mindfully bought are functionally out of reach because everything is boxed up and disorganised.

It’s so good. I moved somewhere with a large Chinese community, so items like this are stocked in my local supermarket. I had heard about it and assumed it was overhyped, but after trying it, I see how versatile it is.

Fla already explained the rough logic behind it, but I also think a big part of it is that people have a habit of approaching advice like this too dogmatically. For example, guidance that says “commenting your code is not a substitute for sensible structure and variable names”, and someone may read that and go “I shouldn’t use comments, got it”. Certainly I have seen (and written) code that overuses comments in a manner that the average comment has pretty low information value — for me, this was because I was inexperienced at writing code other people would use, and comments were things that I felt I should do, without properly understanding how to do it. Like if there’s a line that says a += b, I don’t need a comment that says “# adds b to a”. That misses the point of comments entirely, and would make important comments harder to see, and the code harder to understand.

Another area where I often see this overly rigid mindset is the acronym “DRY”, which means “don’t repeat yourself.” It’s a decent principle, and it’s helped me to identify larger structural problems in my code before. However, some people take it to an extreme and treat it as an absolute, inviolable law, rather than a principle. In some circumstances, repeating oneself would improve the overall code.

If I had to choose between code that had sensible variables and structure, but no comments, and code that was opaque but heavily commented, I’d probably choose the former. However, in practice, it’s a “why not both” situation. It’s less about the comments than how well they’re used, and identifying comments as a code smell may be an attempt to get people to approach code readability slightly differently and using comments more wisely.

Well damn. I wasn’t expecting to be adding a new book to my reading list as a result of this thread, but y’all’s enthusiasm is such that I feel I have to.

Borrowing a passage from David Graeber:

“At their very simplest, anarchist beliefs turn on to two elementary assumptions. The first is that human beings are, under ordinary circumstances, about as reasonable and decent as they are allowed to be, and can organize themselves and their communities without needing to be told how. The second is that power corrupts. Most of all, anarchism is just a matter of having the courage to take the simple principles of common decency that we all live by, and to follow them through to their logical conclusions.”

Or phrased another way:

• Humans have the capacity to be and to do good
• Humans can also do terrible things
• Hierarchical power structures can lead to harmful feedback loops where bad actors who gain power can continue to gain power
• Even well intentioned people can slip into modes of unhealthy power dynamics
• Thus building a truly equitable and just system requires ongoing work

If the question at hand is “bad actors exist. What should society do about them?”, Anarchism as a school of thought is an attempt to answer that. It’s not a solved problem, so Anarchism is far from the only possible answer to that question. For example, someone else might argue that an authoritarian government is the best way to solve the bad actor problem. Of course, I would disagree with this hypothetical person, but my point is that social movements like anarchism arise in response to some crisis, tension or problem in society — if society was working well for everyone and everyone got along, then anarchist thought would have never emerged. Whether you feel it’s an effective answer to the problem is a different matter, but to properly analyse it, we need to recognise what anarchism is trying to do.