Notices by James Widman (jameswidman@mastodon.social)

RE: https://mastodon.online/@sarahtaber/117362300150466466

i was not prepared for the order of magnitude of money being made in the modern agricultural slave trade in the u.s.

i was also not prepared for the fact that there is basically no penalty for committing enslavement.

@jk the thing is, it becomes most effective not with a threat of violence, but instead with sheer numbers.

when the numbers are so large that the cops know that they have family & friends in the protesting crowd, that's when cops lose their usual desire to start a riot.

(and also it's a lot easier to build up those numbers in the first place if potential participants know they won't be fighting.)

it would help a lot if open source projects could make it a standard thing to have a boilerplate pro-Diversity, pro-Equity, pro-Inclusion statement on their project page.

there are lots of good reasons to do this, but one simple practical reason is that if you do that, then we won't need to spend time doing detective work to figure out whether any of the maintainers is a fucking nazi.

anyway, drop neovim.

feeling pretty nauseous right now.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@JamesWidman/116942889237518751

re-upping this thread.

folks, please don't ignore those red flags. they may not be cause for immediate action, but they are cause to keep your eyes & ears open.

edit: on 2nd thought: maybe just keeping your eyes open isn't enough. maybe it's better to actually do a little digging after you see a red flag. because it turns out that justinmk, a lead neovim maintainer, has a yt playlist labeled "history" featuring multiple talks by curtis yarvin.
https://circumstances.run/@mawhrin/117169303672770112

@GeePawHill @mcc what if there were an organization like Little Free Library, but instead of a small book library on the sidewalk, it's small library of miscellaneous cables & power adapters on the sidewalk

@futurebird @mdhughes more generally, i think probably a lot of americans' attitudes about violence stems from the fact that violence in popular fiction is almost always depicted as pretty much consequence-free: the heroes get a happy ending; or they take some losses but the ending doesn't actually show them in any of the stages of loss; nobody has a permanent medical condition; real-life trauma surgeons were not consulted on wounds; dead people come back to life; etc

@futurebird @mdhughes it couldn't hurt to have more popular fiction where characters that people love die in wars for reasons that are 100% realistic (and by "realistic", i mean stupid, completely preventable, etc)

#CostOfAI

unicode mavens, please correct me if i'm wrong, but this:

> "Furthermore there are practical issues, such as bidirectional text [...]"

does _not_ seem applicable to the question of whether a _compiler_ should allow non-ascii characters in identifiers. (iiuc, you only need to worry about bidi stuff when you're rendering glyphs. and compilers generally don't have render pipelines.)

so this seems like a bullshit excuse.

a nice unexpected benefit of godbolt.org is that it's making me aware of more system languages.

today, i learned about the C3 language via the godbolt language pull-down menu.

for prototyping purposes (not for production, which requires memory safety), C3 seemed to check a lot of boxes.

but then i got to the part where it milkshake-ducks itself:
https://c3-lang.org/faq/rejected-ideas/#unicode-identifiers

they might as well have asked, "why would anyone think in their native language, even in their personal experimental code?"

as the ai hype people like to say, we can't un-invent it.

however, we can & must destroy it.

(ofc it goes without saying, but: another group that has lost the right to own things is the entire trump family.)

Yes, this would kill the oil & auto industries as we know them, and yes, this would kill microsoft, google, and many others. That is the point. This is necessary, because they are destroying our one and only home in the solar system.

Individuals/entities who should be viewed as having lost their right to possess land/stock/cash-above-basic-necessities/etc (a starter list):

- people/companies who are major shareholders in oil or car companies

- people/companies who are major shareholders in "genAI" companies

At some point, we must acknowledge that a corporation's right to possess property must be viewed as contingent on that corporation's good behavior. If they do too much damage to the environment, or to too many people, they lose that right. This applies in every industry.

Ditto for their leadership/shareholders. For example, they don't have an unconditional right to own stock (or to any other type of wealth), or to steer a company.

Either we acknowledge that, or we get runaway climate change.

This is also another way in which Reconstruction was incomplete: former slave owners ought to have permanently lost their right to own things.

(They also should have been given prison sentences, but)

We needed, and still need, a constitutional amendment for this: when your damage to people or the environment exceeds some threshold, you permanently lose your right to basically all major forms of property.

maybe these things are too obvious, but I don't hear enough people saying the obvious things, so

RE: https://mastodon.social/@JamesWidman/116542802636202217

psa: the term "open source" means that there is some _source_ information (like the source code of a computer program) whose license permits anyone to copy, inspect, use, modify, and re-distribute the source information.

so in the context of LLMs, "open source" implies that you have a license to copy, inspect, use, modify, and re-distribute any **training data** used to generate a model.

if LLM proponents _don't_ mean that, then they're making fraudulent use of the term "open source".

unhelpful/misleading term: "train" as applied to LLMs

better terms: "compile", "build"