Notices by Cassandra Granade 🏳️‍⚧️ (xgranade@wandering.shop)

Reading that the idea that I can and should exist is a "radical left" position is at once depressing and infuriating.

My existence is not a negotiation.

I even think being on the radical left is a pretty damn fine thing.

I just don't think that recognizing the importance of economic and climate justice should be a prerequisite for my very fucking existence.

I vastly prefer the second approach, as the first one doesn't actually challenge the core assumption that gives the threat of gatekeeping its teeth.

Also the differentiation between writing a program (very *very* roughly, an executable sequence of instructions) and markup (very *very* roughly the declaration of some data upon which a program acts) is an important one, and I don't think we should let gatekeepers co-opt that distinction to be assholes.

Amongst other things, arguing against gatekeeping by asserting that HTML is a programming language just lets the gatekeeper shift the goal posts. "Writing documentation isn't programming," "triaging issues isn't programming," "project management isn't programming," "UI design isn't programming," and so forth.

I fairly strongly believe that challenging the core assumption is an effective way of cutting that line of gatekeeping off entirely.

As with most of my hot takes, I believe the above about 63% seriously, and offer it by way of making a point more than as a literal truth.

It's perfectly reasonable, I posit, to have a taxonomy in which HTML is absolutely a markup language, but is not a programming language, and in which different *mutually beneficial skills* are relevant for each kind of language. Computing isn't just programming. Hell, software development isn't just programming!

It's been a few days, with a lot of misunderstanding in replies. That's on me for not communicating my point effectively, so let me expand on and clarify.

Suppose you encounter "HTML isn't a real programming language" as an example of gatekeeping people out of tech. It's a real and really awful canard that techbros use, even now.

Very roughly, you can respond in one of two ways:

• Expand the definition of "programming language"
• Challenge the idea that programming is necessary to be in tech

@ireneista @Radgryd Has a very "what if Geocities didn't decide what city names were unilaterally" feeling to it all.

Amazing. Just amazing. "Microsoft Office Clippy" is just so bloody on point.

https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/office-365/microsofts-dumbest-rebrand-in-its-near-50-year-history-just-got-even-dumber

Also, this shit is one of the many reasons I keep harping on about how ridiculous the idea of "prompt engineering" is. OpenAI and MS can just sweep away blame for the fact that their products not only don't work, they cannot work.

Just make it users' fault!

https://mastodon.world/@paninid/113841657759167868

Never mind that that cuts against the whole narrative that's being used to sell AI: that people can, irrespective of skill, access immense amounts of knowledge in a conversational and context-aware fashion.

When that pipe dream fails to materialize, they just invent a new buzzword to explain away the abject failure of AI to do anything bloody useful.

Anyway, xkcd said everything that needs to be said about "prompt engineering" back in #1827.

https://xkcd.com/1827/

@silverwizard I don't even think it's bad per se. It's very much so not my thing, but also, I'm glad he's living his best life. Just confusing that the series manages to stick around as long, is all.

Wait, there's a fourth Riddick movie being made? That's confusing, somehow.

AI grifters have basically invented a new "fact," that LLMs can be "programmed," and built a whole epistemological chain to back that up. Where does that leave non-experts trying to critically evaluate AI claims?z

It's another way that AI grifting is a bleak mirror of earlier "intelligent design" grifting. Academic publishing is a complete disaster, and at the same time, is held up by institutions like Wikipedia as a marker of scientific legitimacy — and to some degree, rightly so. After all, there's not a better system already out there that people outside of a field can use to evaluate knowledge within a field.

So we're left with a situation where someone can just piss in the knowledge pool.

One more thought on the whole Wikipedia / "prompt engineering" thing: AI marketers have abused the absolute hell out of weaknesses in the academic publishing system in order to manufacture the idea that "prompt engineering" is real.

Namely, preprints exist due to extensive problems in peer review and for-profit publishing. It's become the standard in many nascent fields where for-profit publishing has less of a chokehold.

But then AI grifters capitalize on that to just say whatever they like.

Hot take: "HTML is a programming language" is gatekeeping in effect, if not in intent.

That is, something need not be a programming language to be a the subject of highly useful and important technical skills — viewing all of computing through the lens of programming languages is inherently limiting.

@cwebber The Trump election has really given these guys permission to go fully mask-off, huh? Fucking wild.

It's ironic that the Verge is now telling people to delete their Facebook accounts, given that they still haven't apologized for using garden-variety transphobia to mock earlier criticisms of Facebook.

https://mastodon.social/@verge/113800367365072988