Notices by JP (jplebreton@mastodon.social)

if you see no value in having humanity or empathy or intellectual breadth, "being a powerful programmer" will just lead you to pour your talents down a hole, each decade more lost than the last. you'll pick bad collaborators and bad goals, you'll tolerate utter mediocrity outside your incredibly narrow notions of excellence, and ultimately you may just end up serving evil.

for those tracking John Carmack's descent into right wing total moral disorientation, he's now at "Palmer Luckey should buy Wired and do to it what Elon Musk did to Twitter".
he's full fash at this point. totally gonna deliver AGI by 2030 though.
increasingly disgusting that he named his shitass company after Commander Keen, a joyful little video game from before he became a millionaire and was empowered to become his worst self.

a hero is not a person; it is an image. heroes are not stocks you invest in or a religion you join.
a hero is a mental image of something you want to do or become, formed around a real person who likely shits their pants and fucks up constantly.
don't let any of that keep you from dreaming of and working for a good, kind, just world, and becoming the best person you can be.

autonomous vehicles essentially serve a hyperloop-like function - created by an industry to soak up funding and political mindshare to head off and ultimately starve a public good that threatens an existing business.
AVs have gotten further because they seem more achievable (despite only solving the easiest ~80%) and because they took a consumer form that seems less obviously fraudulent. but no one should have any illusions that they exist for the same reason: to fully privatize transit.

nothing the fascists do can ever change the fact that the world is immeasurably better with trans people in it

futures i still believe are possible:
- civilization no longer depends on fossil fuels
- food, housing, physical and mental healthcare for all
- no billionaires
- full reparations to the colonized and the enslaved
- computing without big tech
- an internet without advertising
- total liberation for gender nonconforming people

*sigh* A pinned post, apparently necessary: I do not consent to have the posts I make on this account, or any of the other accounts I control on here (see the "bots" page on my website), be ingested by any LLM-based system for any purpose whatsoever. If I find out you've disregarded my consent here I'll publicly identify you as having done so and instantly block you and possibly your instance as well.

one of the first steps here is realizing all the ways in which you are, dramatically, an outlier from the rest of society, yet your essential class position is the same: you will never be closer to musk zuck bezos altman etc than the people who stock your groceries, deliver your mail, teach your children, etc. who would you rather make your stand with? do you want to be part of humanity or whatever disgustingly evil mirage the tech guys are trying to make? what are your actual fucking values?

a theory on the total demobilization of programmers (in aggregate, not you specifically) as a class:
- comfortable life (salary, benefits, retirement plan)
- never protested or resisted anything / did but it didn't seem to do much
- never organized their workplace / community
- computers are a solace from messy real world stuff
- suddenly computers are subject to this new political economy
- feel totally helpless and concede to what's happening right now as inevitable

@clarity Fern's staff would probably be challenging but fun to model in early 00s (what they'd call "mid poly" now i guess) fidelity

I see so many people who are afraid to call themselves marauders. "I'm only just starting out", they say, or "I don't earn a majority of my income from it". I'm here to tell you that if you roam about and raid in search of plunder, you are a marauder.

@mcc the most juiced KPIs in history, perhaps

@mcc playing the odds like "if we make this feature like 80% of our UI, our engagement % starts looking *really* good"

@clarity keepgirl was a foundational dungeon synth duo. gatelight was an amiga disk copy protection bypass utility. gasboss is from one piece.

@darius all art eventually passes through capital's ileum

codex entry for a creature ends with "It is unknown what its whole deal is."

The only reason I keep the alias up is because I put it on some business cards ~14 years ago, and it's probably still floating around out there in some peoples' contacts lists, and I don't want them to try contacting me and have it bounce. My name is unique and my current website is easy to find, so they shouldn't have too much trouble chasing me down, but I dunno I just don't like the idea of an email address for a still-living still-goes-by-that-name person bouncing.

(I realize that some spammers keep emails on their lists indefinitely, so I wouldn't be expecting *zero* spams once I brought it back up, just a reduction from the current fairly high volume.)

I have an old (no longer posted anywhere public, but was on my old website for 10+ years) email alias that gets maybe 1-2 legit mails sent to it a year, but in the last ~6 months it's been heavily burdened with spam. Is it still the case that if spambots send to an email address that bounces enough times, they'll give up and remove it from their lists? If so how long should I take the alias down before I could have decent confidence the spam won't return if I reinstate the alias?

prediction: if the backlash from this gets bad enough they're gonna get it to output some text about how it "feels bad"