Notices by JP (jplebreton@mastodon.social)

i am not saying they are "not smart", i am saying that smartness as a concept conceals how the world actually works - that societies and processes and organizations and tools are what "make people smart" - and that these people are part of a rotten, sick, deluded society/organization with fundamentally flawed processes and frameworks for evaluating reality, which prominently include "the concept of smartness".

@charlesrandall it's the same way so many people can still believe that the earth was created ~6000 years ago. it's sustained on pure faith and social context.

when the social-economic maelstrom that is the current LLM hype wave fizzles or collapses there's going to be so much "how could so many smart people be so wrong?" and it's imperative you do not accept their framing of themselves as "smart people" - they are, in judgment and values and intellect, deeply compromised from living inside a machine that harms humanity for profit.

[suddenly growing a flowing gray beard] what if the little guys you must keep safe... were the workers of the world...

gerrymandering game genre boundaries to create a new "little guys you must keep safe" category that includes Lemmings, Pikmin, Chu Chu Rocket, etc

everyone who helped build this vision of the world, defended it, justified it, normalized it, insisted there was no alternative, profited from it - should be obligated to a weeping mea culpa before the entire world

@jonny "only crimes are occurring" is an incredible list item

@clarity lol @ any american making that argument

"will Half-Life 3's story bridge to the Skibidi Toilet fictional universe" - the greatest thread in the history of forums, locked by a moderator after 12,239 pages of heated debate,

feels like if the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction event were something that happened in a story, its impact crater would still be extremely obvious on our world map 66 million years later. but no, even something that big kinda gets erased by eons of continental drift, erosion, changing sea levels, etc. it was only when we excavated shocked quartz and tektites from there that we confirmed it was where the Big One came down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater

worldbuilding is when: (pick any 3)
- floating islands
- there's an area called the Zone
- a giant tree, no like *really* giant
- world map is fucked up in some way
- lost civilization that was more technologically advanced than current civilization
- non-spherical planet
- history refers to "the Old Empire"
- big ass wall with all of recorded history written on it somewhere
- ancient legends talk about a technological thing in poetic / allegorical terms
- aliens did something sneaky

if your "beautiful, elegant, futuristic" huge ring-shaped HQ requires a truly colossal fuck-ugly parking garage that dwarfs it, it's not actually a very beautiful elegant futuristic HQ now is it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEO7RCD7jVg FF6's "Searching for Friends" really has gotta be one of the best moods in its parcel of game history. It would be unreasonably hard to pull off at AAA scope today: entire world destroyed, your party scattered to the far winds, but you hope they're out there somewhere, and reunite one by one with a cool airship.
Definitely not thinking of this in the context of the ongoing destruction of the centralized social web, nope.

"I'll call this the architectural fallacy of level design: the over-emphasis of architectural aspects of level design (layouts, blockouts) over non-architectural aspects of level design (pacing, encounters, economy, scripting, storytelling).
Pulling back from architecture is the best way for level designers to refine our thinking -- and thus, ironically, become better architects." - good stuff as usual from @radiatoryang https://www.blog.radiator.debacle.us/2025/05/space-is-not-wall-toward-less.html

@emma i don't have a specific link handy but @emilymbender has probably at some point spelled out exactly what "reasoning" means for these systems; my understanding is that it is just a pattern for building successive understanding-free prompts on the basis of an original human prompt, with the main benefit being that there's like a smidge more of a paper trail that humans can scrutinize rather than the complete black box of the classic prompt-response with tiny context window loop.

you also need to reckon with the fact that even if you know exactly how the tech works and clearly understand its limitations, an overwhelming majority of the people making policy decisions that affect millions of other humans do not. they believe all the mystification and lies and consent-manufacture, from the worst most self-interested people, about how the tech works, what it can and can't do, and what its potential is. your being "smart enough to see through the hype" doesn't count for much.

even if you think it's fine to use LLMs for something like coding it's critical you understand how widely the tech is being deployed in human-to-human cases where it's egregiously unfit for purpose, frequently in ways that are outright insulting and disrespectful.
if you find the backlash scary, regressive, or excessive you have not made sufficient effort to understand peoples' very real and legitimate anger, and that is a moral failure on your part.
https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/05/01/seattle-worldcon-science-fiction-convention-vets-panelists-with-chatgpt/

cool that any of the monopolies are getting broken up even a wee bit, but it would also be so cool if regulators forced all the big companies with messaging services to move to a secure interoperable open standard. imagine never having to have the "what chat services are you on, oh no i'm only on poob and you're only on peeb" conversation ever again. decades of nonsense they've forced us through for no good reason.

it's infantile and clownish that fosstodon made it to 2025 with a "no politics" policy. everyone has politics bro you're just insisting that yours are the neutral default. it's time to live in society.

@mhoye the early stages of a programming education are to be celebrated and valued, they are important moments of discovery and consciousness-building that reverberate over decades, even if their actual products are rudimentary. vibe coding sucks insofar as it treats this entire period - the very process of learning how to think - as unnecessary/undesirable, an annoyance to skip past, and by extension that the details and deep intentions of a codebase don't matter, are interchangeable.