Notices by Jeremy Kahn (trochee@dair-community.social), page 4

@inthehands

Someone in trouble with a challenging technical task needs

1/ the tools to change a bad situation
2/ the grit to tolerate or grind through what cannot be changed about that situation
3/ the wisdom to know the difference

a lot of techies approach less techie people assuming that they want 1/ — tools to fix it

when often they want 2/ — support in getting through a bad situation

And the techies themselves are lacking in 3/ — they often can't tell the difference

2/fin

Hah, catch this small world moment where my uncle @dangillmor cites my brother in (correctly) calling out my employer as "ahead of their skis"

Thanks for the pointer, Uncle Dan !
https://mastodon.social/@dangillmor/112255639551683319

@inthehands

Every time I watch this video I laugh until my eyes water

And it's been that way for _years_ now

@inthehands

Critically, it's an A implies B but not necessarily vice versa situation

One can easily have thinking without writing; many of the trades barely require literacy to apply ingenuity and creativity.

But — until recently — one could not do writing without thinking. it was usually easier to actually do the thinking first, than to fake it and still do the writing.

Good writing was a low-error-rate* sign that "thinking has been done"

*Some exceptions apply, of course

@baldur

The point of writing is not to generate a written document

It's to communicate an idea. In business writing it's usually to communicate a _persuasive_ idea

The people @baldur referred to here,who dislike reading and writing and would rather a machine generated that writing for them — they don't get this bit.

https://toot.cafe/@baldur/112195750146424691

@Alice

When I was in college in the early 90s, I encountered flyers for a budding right-wing grievance paper that called itself "The Precept" (think "do you feel persecuted for being right wing on campus?")

So I used my editor-of-the-highschool-paper digital layout skills and made identically-formatted counter-flyers for "The Pre-crypt", a cannibalism-curious paper that asked "do you feel persecuted for exploring alternative protein sources?"

Proud to say they both disappeared thereafter

OMG this is so good

as someone who has been in a fairly exciting field (speech and language tech) for >25 years and at least a dozen technical self-reinventions, this 💯 rings true

The negotiation cycle. — Ethan Marcotte ( @beep ) via @grimalkina
https://ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/the-negotiation-cycle/

@SallyStrange @blogdiva

🔥 ✊ hero badges for you both. Dawkins is a pest and exactly the kind of dude who would get invited to all Jeffrey Epstein's parties.

@mcc

Sounds as fake as a YouTuber named "Jim Channel"

Or maybe I'm one or two layers of irony off, here

@futurebird @cstross @feliks @RustyBertrand

I wrote a two page short story with this premise in, uh fifth or sixth grade (age 11, for transatlantic purposes) in 1985 or '86*

The hippie/late-boomer co-teachers, fresh from the satanic panic and countless after-school specials, called in my parents because they saw it as a sign of self-harm risk (I just thought it was funny to have Gorlox the Child wipe his blue marble clean of that icky green gunk)

@grimalkina

💚 Will be using "jargon monoxide poisoning" I just haven't found the right place yet

@gvwilson @KFosterMarks

@parismarx

Ugh the article takes 1000 words to describe what could fit in a toot

"Dune book lore says there are no computers because of the Butlerian Jihad 10k years prior.

They use mentats (Hawat) and genetic memory (Lady Jessica) and drugs (the navigators) instead.

Villeneuve could have changed it but fans would have rioted. The low-fi tech of Dune is 1000% part of the vibe."

Feels like someone took those fifty words and fed it to a "lengthen this to 1400 words" prompting engine

I mean, I get it, but why compromise your principles of inclusion to prove something that everyone convince-able already knows?

"See, he really _would_ punch me in the eye"
https://mastodon.social/@randahl/111878307245921121

The boom in LLMs is going to hollow out a number of knowledge-worker industries — for example, writing boilerplate code or technical documentation

Not because it does it well but because the flacks can sell upper management on the idea that it can do it at all, as @pluralistic recently pointed out

This sale is a pig-in-a-poke, and the winning move is to not be holding the bag when the actual code or documentation is found to be terrible

1/

#TIL that 'samizdat' ("clandestine sharing of literature banned by the state") is etymologically "self-publishing" in Russian.

@jonny

It looks like markdown on my Tusky app; hope that's a useful data point

@phiofx

@mekkaokereke @craignicol @nathandh @jynersolives

Yes

And the original purpose of the electoral college was to make sure that individual states' electors would count in proportion to their population -- & slaves counted for 3/5ths of a person at the time, and imprisoned people COUNT TOWARDS EC VOTES to this day

Also, low-population rural (mostly white) states are overrepresented bc each state gets minimum 3 EC votes, so Wyoming voters are effectively worth more in the presidential race

@forrestbrazeal as one of the sad engineers in figures A and C, I love this and I want to boost it
...and I don't have time to write the alt text

OK, last night at a local pizza joint I saw the creepiest TV ad during the Mariners game

appeared to be an online learning college-esque program for "teaching our great American history"

was giving Prager U vibes but wasn't Prager.

It had a hyper anglo name like "edgewood" and used an .org TLD not .edu, & I witnessed exactly 1 non-white person in the 2m ad (in a 2s b&w clip of a civil rights protestor pushed around by Bull Connor)

Anybody know who it was, & should I be worried?

#lazydon

Ooh I think it was these guys

https://online.hillsdale.edu/

And I was right about their not so hidden agenda to whitewash[sic] American history.

Those boring stock videos of white people enjoying coffee at laptops and nodding sagely at how wise the forefathers were (Lincoln notably absent)

Turns out they're a Koch Bros Operation

https://www.reddit.com/r/KochWatch/comments/14pfczn/hillsdale_college_ads_on_youtube/