Tootfinder

Day 18: Mark Oshiro
Having just learned that Oshiro is nonbinary, they're an instant include on this list. In veering extremely heavily towards YA, and losing a spot that would have gone to an absolutely legendary mangaka, anime writer, or feminist philosopher, but "Anger is A Gift" and "Each of us a Desert" are just that good, and I'm trying to steer a bit towards towards lesser-known authors I respect.
I already mentioned "Anger is a Gift" above, but to recap, it's a painful, vivid, and beautifully honest story of queer love, loss, and protest against an oppressive system. CW for racist police murder, intergenerational trauma, and police brutality against highschool students. It's a book a lot of Americans could benefit from reading right now, and while it's fiction, it's not fantasy or sci-fi. Besides the themes and politics, the writing is just really solid, with delicate characterization and tight-plotted developments that are beautifully paced.
To me "Each of us a Desert" is maybe even more beautiful, and Oshiro leaps into a magnificent fantasy world that's richly original in its desolation, dark history, lonely characters, and mythical magic. Particularly the clearly-not-just-superscription but ambiguously-important/powerful magical elements of Oshiro's worldbuilding are a rare contrast to the usual magic-is-real-here's-how-it-works fare, and pulling that off a all as they do is a testament to their craft. The prose is wonderful, probably especially so if you speak Spanish, but I enjoyed it immensely despite only knowing a few words here and there. The rich interiority of the characters, their conflicts both with each other and within themselves, and the juxtaposition of all that against origins in cult-like ignorance allows for the delivery of a lot of wisdom and complex truths.
Between these two books, so different and yet each so powerful, Oshiro has demonstrated incredible craft and also a wide range of styles, so I'm definitely excited to read more of their work and to recommend them to others.
I'm also glad to have finally put a nonbinary author on this list; the others I had in mind won't make it at this point because there's too much genre overlap, although I'll include them in my didn't-make-it list at the end. I've now got just 2 slots left and have counted up 14 more authors that absolutely need to be mentioned, so we'll see what happens.
#20AuthorsNoMen

Day 16: Mayra Cuevas & Marie Marquardt
Okay so this is cheating, but they're co-authors of multiple books together, and there's no way for me to separate their contributions... I've already got too many authors I'd like to list, so why not?
I read their book "Does My Body Offend You?" and absolutely loved it; it's a celebration of teen activism while also being a deep exploration of feminist issues through practical situations that bring out the complicated side of things, which the authors refuse to reduce back to a simple formulaic answer. It has a supporting cast of appropriately-complex male characters that help in exploring the nuances of issues like the line between female empowerment & male gratification, and it brings race and macho culture into the conversion as well.
CW for sexual harassment & deep discussion of the resultant trauma.
I'll cheat again here to sneak in mention of two male authors whose work resonates with theirs: Mark Oshiro's "Anger is a Gift" has a more pessimistic/complex take on teen activism along with a gay romance (CW for racist cop murder), while Jeremy Whitley's graphic novel "Navigating With You" deals with queer romance & disability, while having a main character pairing that echoes those from "Does My Body Offend You?" in a lot of ways. Another connection (to non-men authors this time) is with "Go With the Flow" by Lily Williams and Karen Schneemann. Their graphic novel about teen activism and periods is a bit more didactic and has a much lighter tone, but it does necessarily have some overlapping themes.
To bring it back to Cuevas & Marquhardt, their writing is great and their ability to discuss such complex topics with such nuance, all wrapped up in a story that feels completely natural, is amazing to me, and makes their book feel like one of the most valuable to recommend to others.
In writing this I've realized a grave oversight in the list so far that I'll have to correct tomorrow, but I'm quickly running out of days. The didn't-quite-make-it list is going to be full of more excellent authors, and I'm honestly starting to wonder whether it might actually be harder to name 20 male authors I respect now that I've found the sense to be mostly somewhere between disgusted and disappointed with so many of the male authors I enjoyed as a teen.
#20AuthorsNoMen (cheating a bit)

Join us for a casual Scrappy Hour bike ride on Sunday, August 31st. 🚴‍♀️
We'll roll out from Rocket Baby just after 9am and head to the Domes... There's about four or five of us so far but we welcome anyone to join us! 🚴
https://www.instagram.com/p/DNvbxVRXHS1/

Scrappy Hour on Instagram: "It’s that time of year again! Ya, you know it! It’s Scrappy Hour BBQ BABY!!! Maybe it will be hot and we can all go swimming. Or maybe it will rain and we can all cower together. Or maybe it will be perfect and we’ll lay in the grass eating hot dogs till we have to roll us out of there. Here’s how it’s going to go down. First we’ll do a ride. We’re gonna do the Domes again, because it’s fun. Meet ups: BAY VIEW Cactus Club- meet 8:30a; wheels up 9:00a EAST SIDE/RW The Daily Bird-meet 9:00a; wheels up 9:15a TOSA Rocket Baby- meet 9:00; wheels up 9:15a Then, we SHBBQ at South Shore Park! We’ll bring some dogs and veggie alternatives. A couple sides. And a cooler of mixed bevies. We’ll bring a couple grills too. Last year our gang showed up with some really delightful offerings! There was homemade bread, and baked goods and side salads. It ruled. So feel free to bring what ever you would like to share with everyone. It will be much appreciated. Bring a baseball mitt and we’ll have a catch. Have a frisbee, bring that too. If it’s hot, good luck keeping me out of that lake, so bring your suit. If you have any questions, as always hit us up and we’ll try to answer. All our love, SH ✌️🚲🏃‍♂️☕️ #coffeeoutsidemke #scrappyhourmke"
107 likes, 8 comments - scrappyhourmke on August 24, 2025: "It’s that time of year again! Ya, you know it! It’s Scrappy Hour BBQ BABY!!! Maybe it will be hot and we can all go swimming. Or maybe it will rain and we can all cower together. Or maybe it will be perfect and we’ll lay in the grass eating hot dogs till we have to roll us out of there. Here’s how it’s going to go down. First we’ll do a ride. We’re gonna do the Domes again, because it’s fun. Meet ups: BAY VIEW …

It's also easy to imagine that Trump is sending his military to Portland. People forget that the military is actually really big and pretty complex.
Most people join the military because they want to get out of poverty. Some people join because they believe in it. A lot of people are just too young to have any kind of politics, but some of them do develop politics in the military... and some of those folks become anarchists.
There are Nazis in the military. It's a big problem. But there are also anarchists who signed up before they developed a critique of the state, and now they're kind of stuck for a few years until they can get out.
It's also worth recognizing that a lot of people join after they graduate. Basic training is like 22 weeks. So, assuming a random selection, there really aren't a lot of folks who would be deploying to PDX who would have joined under Trump. That's just assuming a random selection, and there may be other things at play that I'm not aware of, but the majority of the types of folks who would get deployed now would have joined under Biden.
The troops who will deploy (if they do deploy) may very much not want to be there. These are also not monsters wanting to kill (like Trump wishes them to be). They're kids from nearby towns. That's not awesome, most of Oregon has absolute shit politics. But joining the National Guard doesn't necessarily mean that a person has any politics at all. All of this is worth remembering.

Should we teach vibe coding? Here's why not.
Should AI coding be taught in undergrad CS education?
1/2
I teach undergraduate computer science labs, including for intro and more-advanced core courses. I don't publish (non-negligible) scholarly work in the area, but I've got years of craft expertise in course design, and I do follow the academic literature to some degree. In other words, In not the world's leading expert, but I have spent a lot of time thinking about course design, and consider myself competent at it, with plenty of direct experience in what knowledge & skills I can expect from students as they move through the curriculum.
I'm also strongly against most uses of what's called "AI" these days (specifically, generative deep neutral networks as supplied by our current cadre of techbro). There are a surprising number of completely orthogonal reasons to oppose the use of these systems, and a very limited number of reasonable exceptions (overcoming accessibility barriers is an example). On the grounds of environmental and digital-commons-pollution costs alone, using specifically the largest/newest models is unethical in most cases.
But as any good teacher should, I constantly question these evaluations, because I worry about the impact on my students should I eschew teaching relevant tech for bad reasons (and even for his reasons). I also want to make my reasoning clear to students, who should absolutely question me on this. That inspired me to ask a simple question: ignoring for one moment the ethical objections (which we shouldn't, of course; they're very stark), at what level in the CS major could I expect to teach a course about programming with AI assistance, and expect students to succeed at a more technically demanding final project than a course at the same level where students were banned from using AI? In other words, at what level would I expect students to actually benefit from AI coding "assistance?"
To be clear, I'm assuming that students aren't using AI in other aspects of coursework: the topic of using AI to "help you study" is a separate one (TL;DR it's gross value is not negative, but it's mostly not worth the harm to your metacognitive abilities, which AI-induced changes to the digital commons are making more important than ever).
So what's my answer to this question?
If I'm being incredibly optimistic, senior year. Slightly less optimistic, second year of a masters program. Realistic? Maybe never.
The interesting bit for you-the-reader is: why is this my answer? (Especially given that students would probably self-report significant gains at lower levels.) To start with, [this paper where experienced developers thought that AI assistance sped up their work on real tasks when in fact it slowed it down] (https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089) is informative. There are a lot of differences in task between experienced devs solving real bugs and students working on a class project, but it's important to understand that we shouldn't have a baseline expectation that AI coding "assistants" will speed things up in the best of circumstances, and we shouldn't trust self-reports of productivity (or the AI hype machine in general).
Now we might imagine that coding assistants will be better at helping with a student project than at helping with fixing bugs in open-source software, since it's a much easier task. For many programming assignments that have a fixed answer, we know that many AI assistants can just spit out a solution based on prompting them with the problem description (there's another elephant in the room here to do with learning outcomes regardless of project success, but we'll ignore this over too, my focus here is on project complexity reach, not learning outcomes). My question is about more open-ended projects, not assignments with an expected answer. Here's a second study (by one of my colleagues) about novices using AI assistance for programming tasks. It showcases how difficult it is to use AI tools well, and some of these stumbling blocks that novices in particular face.
But what about intermediate students? Might there be some level where the AI is helpful because the task is still relatively simple and the students are good enough to handle it? The problem with this is that as task complexity increases, so does the likelihood of the AI generating (or copying) code that uses more complex constructs which a student doesn't understand. Let's say I have second year students writing interactive websites with JavaScript. Without a lot of care that those students don't know how to deploy, the AI is likely to suggest code that depends on several different frameworks, from React to JQuery, without actually setting up or including those frameworks, and of course three students would be way out of their depth trying to do that. This is a general problem: each programming class carefully limits the specific code frameworks and constructs it expects students to know based on the material it covers. There is no feasible way to limit an AI assistant to a fixed set of constructs or frameworks, using current designs. There are alternate designs where this would be possible (like AI search through adaptation from a controlled library of snippets) but those would be entirely different tools.
So what happens on a sizeable class project where the AI has dropped in buggy code, especially if it uses code constructs the students don't understand? Best case, they understand that they don't understand and re-prompt, or ask for help from an instructor or TA quickly who helps them get rid of the stuff they don't understand and re-prompt or manually add stuff they do. Average case: they waste several hours and/or sweep the bugs partly under the rug, resulting in a project with significant defects. Students in their second and even third years of a CS major still have a lot to learn about debugging, and usually have significant gaps in their knowledge of even their most comfortable programming language. I do think regardless of AI we as teachers need to get better at teaching debugging skills, but the knowledge gaps are inevitable because there's just too much to know. In Python, for example, the LLM is going to spit out yields, async functions, try/finally, maybe even something like a while/else, or with recent training data, the walrus operator. I can't expect even a fraction of 3rd year students who have worked with Python since their first year to know about all these things, and based on how students approach projects where they have studied all the relevant constructs but have forgotten some, I'm not optimistic seeing these things will magically become learning opportunities. Student projects are better off working with a limited subset of full programming languages that the students have actually learned, and using AI coding assistants as currently designed makes this impossible. Beyond that, even when the "assistant" just introduces bugs using syntax the students understand, even through their 4th year many students struggle to understand the operation of moderately complex code they've written themselves, let alone written by someone else. Having access to an AI that will confidently offer incorrect explanations for bugs will make this worse.
To be sure a small minority of students will be able to overcome these problems, but that minority is the group that has a good grasp of the fundamentals and has broadened their knowledge through self-study, which earlier AI-reliant classes would make less likely to happen. In any case, I care about the average student, since we already have plenty of stuff about our institutions that makes life easier for a favored few while being worse for the average student (note that our construction of that favored few as the "good" students is a large part of this problem).
To summarize: because AI assistants introduce excess code complexity and difficult-to-debug bugs, they'll slow down rather than speed up project progress for the average student on moderately complex projects. On a fixed deadline, they'll result in worse projects, or necessitate less ambitious project scoping to ensure adequate completion, and I expect this remains broadly true through 4-6 years of study in most programs (don't take this as an endorsement of AI "assistants" for masters students; we've ignored a lot of other problems along the way).
There's a related problem: solving open-ended project assignments well ultimately depends on deeply understanding the problem, and AI "assistants" allow students to put a lot of code in their file without spending much time thinking about the problem or building an understanding of it. This is awful for learning outcomes, but also bad for project success. Getting students to see the value of thinking deeply about a problem is a thorny pedagogical puzzle at the best of times, and allowing the use of AI "assistants" makes the problem much much worse. This is another area I hope to see (or even drive) pedagogical improvement in, for what it's worth.
1/2

Very good take on this topic. I was about to say nuanced, but it's not really. It’s pretty plain, just not a POV you hear all that much.
Also, props to @… for the boost. I absolutely would not have seen this toot without the boost from Allison, and I’m so glad I did.

Well, step 1 of this migration is done... Managed to get Backblaze's B2 backend working for the S3 provider, (after spending far too much time to realize that "S3_ENDPOINT" is in fact not "S3_HOSTNAME"...)
I'm not creative so it'll just be social.(newdomain).
I am going to give Glitch a shot to see what all features it can provide. Since it's already an unstable/beta application, I figured I'll just run on master. May switch it to a stabl…

Well, step 1 of this migration is done... Managed to get Backblaze's B2 backend working for the S3 provider, (after spending far too much time to realize that "S3_ENDPOINT" is in fact not "S3_HOSTNAME"...)
I'm not creative so it'll just be social.(newdomain).
I am going to give Glitch a shot to see what all features it can provide. Since it's already an unstable/beta application, I figured I'll just run on master. May switch it to a stable/* branch at some point, but not worth …

I feel it's coming to an end. Distrohopping, that is. Just noted I actually might have one NUC too much. KDE, nwg-hyprland, niri and dwm are all running on Slackware. And it all works great. Slackware covers all bases and more, and is rock solid. What more do i need? The laptop has been booked for the FreeBSD KDE experiment.That's it.Done.
#slackware

How to tell a vibe coder of lying when they say they check their code.
People who will admit to using LLMs to write code will usually claim that they "carefully check" the output since we all know that LLM code has a lot of errors in it. This is insufficient to address several problems that LLMs cause, including labor issues, digital commons stress/pollution, license violation, and environmental issues, but at least it's they are checking their code carefully we shouldn't assume that it's any worse quality-wise than human-authored code, right?
Well, from principles alone we can expect it to be worse, since checking code the AI wrote is a much more boring task than writing code yourself, so anyone who has ever studied human-computer interaction even a little bit can predict people will quickly slack off, stating to trust the AI way too much, because it's less work. I'm a different domain, the journalist who published an entire "summer reading list" full of nonexistent titles is a great example of this. I'm sure he also intended to carefully check the AI output, but then got lazy. Clearly he did not have a good grasp of the likely failure modes of the tool he was using.
But for vibe coders, there's one easy tell we can look for, at least in some cases: coding in Python without type hints. To be clear, this doesn't apply to novice coders, who might not be aware that type hints are an option. But any serious Python software engineer, whether they used type hints before or not, would know that they're an option. And if you know they're an option, you also know they're an excellent tool for catching code defects, with a very low effort:reward ratio, especially if we assume an LLM generates them. Of the cases where adding types requires any thought at all, 95% of them offer chances to improve your code design and make it more robust. Knowing about but not using type hints in Python is a great sign that you don't care very much about code quality. That's totally fine in many cases: I've got a few demos or jam games in Python with no type hints, and it's okay that they're buggy. I was never going to debug them to a polished level anyways. But if we're talking about a vibe coder who claims that they're taking extra care to check for the (frequent) LLM-induced errors, that's not the situation.
Note that this shouldn't be read as an endorsement of vibe coding for demos or other rough-is-acceptable code: the other ethical issues I skipped past at the start still make it unethical to use in all but a few cases (for example, I have my students use it for a single assignment so they can see for themselves how it's not all it's cracked up to be, and even then they have an option to observe a pre-recorded prompt session instead).

It's so much easier to decide what to have for breakfast on a work day as it has to fit certain criteria (I can expand, if you're really interested), but on an at-home day it's too much of a free for all. Today I have to eat something that will either keep me going til about 1pm and get me through a climbing session, or have something lighter and then a snack before I go out around 11. Minefield. Not helped by the now indisputable finding that the more healthily I eat the worse m…

About morbid thriftiness (Autism Spectrum Condition)
As you may have noticed, I am morbidly thrifty. Usually I don't buy stuff that I don't need — and if I decide that I actually need something, I am going to ponder about it for a while, look for value products, and for the best price. And with some luck, I'm going to decide I don't need it that bad after all.
One reason for that is probably how I was raised. My parents taught me to be thrifty, so I have to be. It doesn't matter that, from retrospective, I see that their thriftiness was applied rather arbitrarily to some spendings and not others, or that perhaps they were greedy — spending less on individual things so that they could buy more. Well, I can't delude myself like that, so I have to be thrifty for real. And when I fail, when I pay too much, when I get cheated — I feel quite bad about it.
The other reason is that I keep worrying about my future. It doesn't matter how rich I may end up — I'll keep worrying that I'll run out of money in the future. Perhaps I'll lose a job and won't be able to find anything for a long time, Perhaps something terrible will happen and I'm going to need to pay a lot suddenly.
Another thing is that I easily get attached to objects. Well, it's easier to be thrifty when you really don't want to replace stuff. Over time you also learn to avoid getting new stuff at all, since the more stuff you have, the more stuff may break and need to be thrown away.
Finally, there's my environmental responsibility. I admit that I don't do enough — but at least the things I can do, I do.
[EDIT: and yes, I feel bad about how expensive my new phone was, even though it's of much higher quality than the last one. Also, I got a worse deal because I waited too long.]
#ActuallyAutistic

Well, step 1 of this migration is done... Managed to get Backblaze's B2 backend working for the S3 provider, (after spending far too much time to realize that "S3_ENDPOINT" is in fact not "S3_HOSTNAME"...)
I'm not creative so it'll just be social.(newdomain).
I am going to give Glitch a shot to see what all features it can provide. Since it's already an unstable/beta application, I figured I'll just run on master. May switch it to a stable/* branch at some point, but not worth …

How popular media gets love wrong
Now a bit of background about why I have this "engineered" model of love:
First, I'm a white straight cis man. I've got a few traits that might work against my relationship chances (e.g., neurodivergence; I generally fit pretty well into the "weird geek" stereotype), but as I was recently reminded, it's possible my experience derives more from luck than other factors, and since things are tilted more in my favor than most people on the planet, my advice could be worse than useless if it leads people towards strategies that would only have worked for someone like me. I don't *think* that's the case, but it's worth mentioning explicitly.
When I first started dating my now-wife, we were both in graduate school. I was 26, and had exactly zero dating/romantic experience though that point in my life. In other words, a pretty stereotypical "incel" although I definitely didn't subscribe to incel ideology at all. I felt lonely, and vaguely wanted a romantic relationship (I'm neither aromantic nor asexual), but had never felt socially comfortable enough to pursue one before. I don't drink and dislike most social gatherings like parties or bars; I mostly hung around the fringes of the few college parties I attended, and although I had a reasonable college social life in terms of friends, I didn't really do anything to pursue romance, feeling too awkward to know where to start. I had the beginnings of crushes in both high school and college, but never developed a really strong crush, probably correlated with not putting myself in many social situations outside of close all-male friend gatherings. I never felt remotely comfortable enough to act on any of the proto-crushes I did have. I did watch porn and masturbate, so one motivation for pursuing a relationship was physical intimacy, but loneliness was as much of a motivating factor, and of course the social pressure to date was a factor too, even though I'm quite contrarian.
When I first started dating my now-wife, we were both in graduate school. I was 26, and had exactly zero dating/romantic experience though that point in my life. In other words, a pretty stereotypical "incel" although I definitely didn't subscribe to incel ideology at all. I felt lonely, and vaguely wanted a romantic relationship (I'm neither aromantic nor asexual), but had never felt socially comfortable enough to pursue one before. I don't drink and dislike most social gatherings like parties or bars; I mostly hung around the fringes of the few college parties I attended, and although I had a reasonable college social life in terms of friends, I didn't really do anything to pursue romance, feeling too awkward to know where to start. I had the beginnings of crushes in both high school and college, but never developed a really strong crush, probably correlated with not putting myself in many social situations outside of close all-male friend gatherings. I never felt remotely comfortable enough to act on any of the proto-crushes I did have. I did watch porn and masturbate, so one motivation for pursuing a relationship was physical intimacy, but loneliness was as much of a motivating factor, and of course the social pressure to date was a factor too, even though I'm quite contrarian.
I'm lucky in that I had some mixed-gender social circles already like intramural soccer and a graduate-student housing potluck. Graduate school makes a *lot* more of these social spaces accessible, so I recognize that those not in school of some sort have a harder time of things, especially if like me they don't feel like they fit in in typical adult social spaces like bars.
However, at one point I just decided that my desire for a relationship would need action on my part and so I'd try to build a relationship and see what happened. I worked up my courage and asked one of the people in my potluck if she'd like to go for a hike (pretty much clearly a date but not explicitly one; in retrospect not the best first-date modality in a lot of ways, but it made a little more sense in our setting where we could go for a hike from our front door). To emphasize this point: I was not in love with (or even infatuated with) my now-wife at that point. I made a decision to be open to building a relationship, but didn't follow the typical romance story formula beyond that. Now of course, in real life as opposed to popular media, this isn't anything special. People ask each other out all the time just because they're lonely, and some of those relationships turn out fine (although many do not).
I was lucky in that some aspects of who I am and what I do happened to be naturally comforting to my wife (natural advantage in the "appeal" model of love) but of course there are some aspects of me that annoy my wife, and we negotiate that. In the other direction, there's some things I instantly liked about my wife, and other things that still annoy me. We've figured out how to accept a little, change a little, and overall be happy with each other (though we do still have arguments; it's not like the operation/construction/maintenance of the "love mechanism" is always perfectly smooth). In particular though, I approached the relationship with the attitude of "I want to try to build a relationship with this person," at first just because of my own desires for *any* relationship, and then gradually more and more through my desire to build *this specific* relationship as I enjoyed the rewards of companionship.
So for example, while I think my wife is objectively beautiful, she's also *subjectively* very beautiful *to me* because having decided to build a relationship with her, I actively tried to see her as beautiful, rather than trying to judge whether I wanted a relationship with her based on her beauty. In other words, our relationship is more causative of her beauty-to-me than her beauty-to-me is causative of our relationship. This is the biggest way I think the "engineered" model of love differs from the "fire" and "appeal" models: you can just decide to build love independent of factors we typically think of as engendering love (NOT independent of your partner's willingness to participate, of course), and then all of those things like "thinking your partner is beautiful" can be a result of the relationship you're building. For sure those factors might affect who is willing to try building a relationship with you in the first place, but if more people were willing to jump into relationship building (not necessarily with full commitment from the start) without worrying about those other factors, they might find that those factors can come out of the relationship instead of being prerequisites for it. I think this is the biggest failure of the "appeal" model in particular: yes you *do* need to do things that appeal to your partner, but it's not just "make myself lovable" it's also: is your partner putting in the effort to see the ways that you are beautiful/lovable/etc., or are they just expecting you to become exactly some perfect person they've imagined (and/or been told to desire by society)? The former is perfectly possible, and no less satisfying than the latter.
To cut off my rambling a bit here, I'll just add that in our progress from dating through marriage through staying-married, my wife and I have both talked at times explicitly about commitment, and especially when deciding to get married, I told her that I knew I couldn't live up to the perfect model of a husband that I'd want to be, but that if she wanted to deepen our commitment, I was happy to do that, and so we did. I also rearranged my priorities at that point, deciding that I knew I wanted to prioritize this relationship above things like my career or my research interests, and while I've not always been perfect at that in my little decisions, I've been good at holding to that in my big decisions at least. In the end, *once we had built a somewhat-committed relationship*, we had something that we both recognized was worth more than most other things in life, and that let us commit even more, thus getting even more out of it in the long term. Obviously you can't start the first date with an expectation of life-long commitment, and you need to synchronize your increasing commitment to a relationship so that it doesn't become lopsided, which is hard. But if you take the commitment as an active decision and as the *precursor* to things like infatuation, attraction, etc., you can build up to something that's incredibly strong and rewarding.
I'll follow this up with one more post trying to distill some advice from my ramblings.
#relationships #love

Finished reading "The Steerswoman" by Rosemary Kirstein. It's a great little fantasy novel. I'd call it "hard sci-fi" if it was set in space. Is there a term for medieval stories that don't get too magical?
The hero of this story is a member of a special guild that is all about preserving and acquiring knowledge. Sworn to speak the truth. Much of the story is her drawing conclusions about the world she inhabits. There are swords and scheming wizards. On t…

Epstein shit and adjacent, Rural America, Poverty, Abuse
Everyone who's not a pedophile thinks pedophiles are bad, but there's this special obsessed hatred you'll find among poor rural Americans. The whole QAnon/Epstein obsession may not really make sense to folks raised in cities. Like, why do these people think *so much* about pedophiles? Why do they think that everyone in power is a pedophile? Why would the Pizzagate thing make sense to anyone? What is this unhinged shit? A lot of folks (who aren't anarchists) might be inclined to ask "why can't these people just let the cops take care of it?"
I was watching Legal Eagle's run down on the Trump Epstein thing earlier today and I woke up thinking about something I don't know if I've ever talked about. Now that I'm not in the US, I'm not at any risk of talking about it. I don't know how much I would have been before, but that's not something I'm gonna dig into right now. So let me tell you a story that might explain a few things.
I'm like 16, maybe 17. I have my license, so this girl I was dating/not dating/just friends with/whatever would regularly convince me to drive her and her friends around. I think she's like 15 at the time. Her friends are younger than her.
She tells me that there's a party we can go to where they have beer. She was told to invite her friends, so I can come too. We're going to pick her friends up (we regularly fill the VW Golf well beyond the legal limit and drive places) and head to the party.
So I take these girls, at least is 13 years old, down to this party. I'm already a bit sketched out bringing a 13 year old to a party. We drive out for a while. It's in the country. We drive down a long dark road. Three are some barrel fires and a shack. This is all a bit strange, but not too abnormal for this area. We're a little ways outside of a place called Mill City (in Oregon).
We park and walk towards the shack. This dude who looks like a rat comes up and offers us beer. He laughs and talks to the girl who invited me, "What's he doing here? You're supposed to bring your girl friends." She's like, "He's our ride." I don't remember if he offered me a beer or not.
We go over to this shed and everyone starts smoking, except me because I didn't smoke until I turned 18. The other girls start talking about the rat face dude, who's wandered over by the fire with some other guys. They're mainly teasing one of the 13 year old girls about having sex with him a bunch of times. They say he's like, 32 or something. The other girls joke about him only having sex with 13 year olds because he's too ugly to have sex with anyone closer to his own age.
Somewhere along the line it comes out that he's a cop. I never forgot that, it's absolutely seared in to my memory. I can picture his face perfectly still, decades later, and them talking about how he's a deputy, he was in his 30's, and he was having sex with a 13 year old girl. I was the only boy there, but there were a few older men. This was a chunk of the good ol' boys club of the town. I think there were a couple of cops besides the one deputy, and a judge or the mayor or some kind of big local VIP.
I kept trying to get my friend to leave, but she wanted to stay. Turns out under age drinking with cops seems like a great deal if you're a kid because you know you won't get busted. I left alone, creeped the fuck out.
I was told later that I wasn't invited and that I couldn't talk about it, I've always been good at compartmentalization, so I never did.
Decades later it occurred to me what was actually happening. I'm pretty sure that cop was giving meth he'd seized as evidence to these kids. This wasn't some one-off thing. It was regular. Who knows how many decades it went on after I left, or how many decades it had been going on before I found out. I knew this type of thing had happened at least a few times before because that's how that 13 year old girl and that 32 year old cop had hooked up in the first place.
Hearing about Epstein's MO, targeting these teenage girls from fucked up backgrounds, it's right there for me. I wouldn't be surprised if they were involved in sex trafficking of minors or some shit like that... but who would you call if you found out? Half the sheriff's department was there and the other half would cover for them.
You live in the city and shit like that doesn't happen, or at least you don't think it happens. But rural poor folks have this intuition about power and abuse. It's right there and you know it.
Trump is such a familiar character for me, because he's exactly that small town mayor or sheriff. He'll will talk about being tough on crime and hunting down pedophiles, while hanging out at a party that exists so people can fuck 8th graders.
The problem with the whole thing is that rural folks will never break the cognitive dissonance between "kill the peods" and "back the blue." They'll never go kill those cops. No, the pedos must be somewhere else. It must be the elites. It must be outsiders. It can't be the cops and good ol' boys everyone respects. It can't be the mayor who rigs the election to win every time. It can't be the "good upstanding" sheriff. Nah, it's the Clintons.
To be fair, it's probably also the Clitnons, a bunch of other politicians, billionaires, etc. Epstein was exactly who everyone thought he was, and he didn't get away with it for so long without a whole lot of really powerful help.
There are still powerful people who got away with involvement with #Epstein. #Trump is one of them, but I don't really believe that he's the only one.
#USPol #ACAB

How popular media gets love wrong
Had some thoughts in response to a post about loneliness on here. As the author emphasized, reassurances from people who got lucky are not terribly comforting to those who didn't, especially when the person who was lucky had structural factors in their favor that made their chances of success much higher than those is their audience. So: these are just my thoughts, and may not have any bearing on your life. I share them because my experience challenged a lot of the things I was taught to believe about love, and I think my current beliefs are both truer and would benefit others seeing companionship.
We're taught in many modern societies from an absurdly young age that love is not something under our control, and that dating should be a process of trying to kindle love with different people until we meet "the one" with whom it takes off. In the slightly-less-fairytale corners of modern popular media, we might fund an admission that it's possible to influence love, feeding & tending the fire in better or worse ways. But it's still modeled as an uncontrollable force of nature, to be occasionally influenced but never tamed. I'll call this the "fire" model of love.
We're also taught (and non-boys are taught more stringently) a second contradictory model of love: that in a relationship, we need to both do things and be things in order to make our partner love us, and that if we don't, our partner's love for us will wither, and (especially if you're not a boy) it will be our fault. I'll call this the "appeal" model of love.
Now obviously both of these cannot be totally true at once, and plenty of popular media centers this contradiction, but there are really very few competing models on offer.
In my experience, however, it's possible to have "pre-meditated" love. In other words, to decide you want to love someone (or at least, try loving them), commit to that idea, and then actually wind up in love with them (and them with you, although obviously this second part is not directly under your control). I'll call this the "engineered" model of love.
Now, I don't think that the "fire" and "appeal" models of love are totally wrong, but I do feel their shortcomings often suggest poor & self-destructive relationship strategies. I do think the "fire" model is a decent model for *infatuation*, which is something a lot of popular media blur into love, and which drives many (but not all) of the feelings we normally associate with love (even as those feelings have other possible drivers too). I definitely experienced strong infatuation early on in my engineered relationship (ugh that sounds terrible but I'll stick with it; I promise no deception was involved). I continue to experience mild infatuation years later that waxes and wanes. It's not a stable foundation for a relationship but it can be a useful component of one (this at least popular media depicts often).
I'll continue these thoughts in a reply, by it might take a bit to get to it.
#relationships

LLM coding is the opposite of DRY
An important principle in software engineering is DRY: Don't Repeat Yourself. We recognize that having the same code copied in more than one place is bad for several reasons:
1. It makes the entire codebase harder to read.
2. It increases maintenance burden, since any problems in the duplicated code need to be solved in more than one place.
3. Because it becomes possible for the copies to drift apart if changes to one aren't transferred to the other (maybe the person making the change has forgotten there was a copy) it makes the code more error-prone and harder to debug.
All modern programming languages make it almost entirely unnecessary to repeat code: we can move the repeated code into a "function" or "module" and then reference it from all the different places it's needed. At a larger scale, someone might write an open-source "library" of such functions or modules and instead of re-implementing that functionality ourselves, we can use their code, with an acknowledgement. Using another person's library this way is complicated, because now you're dependent on them: if they stop maintaining it or introduce bugs, you've inherited a problem, but still, you could always copy their project and maintain your own version, and it would be not much more work than if you had implemented stuff yourself from the start. It's a little more complicated than this, but the basic principle holds, and it's a foundational one for software development in general and the open-source movement in particular. The network of "citations" as open-source software builds on other open-source software and people contribute patches to each others' projects is a lot of what makes the movement into a community, and it can lead to collaborations that drive further development. So the DRY principle is important at both small and large scales.
Unfortunately, the current crop of hyped-up LLM coding systems from the big players are antithetical to DRY at all scales:
- At the library scale, they train on open source software but then (with some unknown frequency) replicate parts of it line-for-line *without* any citation [1]. The person who was using the LLM has no way of knowing that this happened, or even any way to check for it. In theory the LLM company could build a system for this, but it's not likely to be profitable unless the courts actually start punishing these license violations, which doesn't seem likely based on results so far and the difficulty of finding out that the violations are happening. By creating these copies (and also mash-ups, along with lots of less-problematic stuff), the LLM users (enabled and encouraged by the LLM-peddlers) are directly undermining the DRY principle. If we see what the big AI companies claim to want, which is a massive shift towards machine-authored code, DRY at the library scale will effectively be dead, with each new project simply re-implementing the functionality it needs instead of every using a library. This might seem to have some upside, since dependency hell is a thing, but the downside in terms of comprehensibility and therefore maintainability, correctness, and security will be massive. The eventual lack of new high-quality DRY-respecting code to train the models on will only make this problem worse.
- At the module & function level, AI is probably prone to re-writing rather than re-using the functions or needs, especially with a workflow where a human prompts it for many independent completions. This part I don't have direct evidence for, since I don't use LLM coding models myself except in very specific circumstances because it's not generally ethical to do so. I do know that when it tries to call existing functions, it often guesses incorrectly about the parameters they need, which I'm sure is a headache and source of bugs for the vibe coders out there. An AI could be designed to take more context into account and use existing lookup tools to get accurate function signatures and use them when generating function calls, but even though that would probably significantly improve output quality, I suspect it's the kind of thing that would be seen as too-baroque and thus not a priority. Would love to hear I'm wrong about any of this, but I suspect the consequences are that any medium-or-larger sized codebase written with LLM tools will have significant bloat from duplicate functionality, and will have places where better use of existing libraries would have made the code simpler. At a fundamental level, a principle like DRY is not something that current LLM training techniques are able to learn, and while they can imitate it from their training sets to some degree when asked for large amounts of code, when prompted for many smaller chunks, they're asymptotically likely to violate it.
I think this is an important critique in part because it cuts against the argument that "LLMs are the modern compliers, if you reject them you're just like the people who wanted to keep hand-writing assembly code, and you'll be just as obsolete." Compilers actually represented a great win for abstraction, encapsulation, and DRY in general, and they supported and are integral to open source development, whereas LLMs are set to do the opposite.
[1] to see what this looks like in action in prose, see the example on page 30 of the NYTimes copyright complaint against OpenAI (#AI #GenAI #LLMs #VibeCoding

I just finished "An Ember in the Ashes" by Sabaa Tahir. I picked it up because I found her non-fantasy novel "All My Rage" extremely compelling, and I enjoyed fantasy a lot as a genre in my youth but as my politics have changed I'm too disappointed to enjoy a lot of fantasy any more but I thought Tahir might not fall into that.
Although I don't think Ember in the Ashes is bad, it's definitely not what I was looking for, and I don't think I'll pursue the sequels, at least not right now.
Overall the writing was weaker in a lot of ways than All My Rage, and in terms of basic fantasy quality, the worldbuilding was noticeably lacking, the romantic subplot felt stilted, and the politics were a bit murky. Compared to what I felt was Tahir's deft, delicate, and very meaningful handling of trauma in All My Rage, trauma in Ember felt overused and thin.
I also recently finished "Black Panther Red Wolf" by Marlon James, which had excellent world building and (to me) a much more nuance in both romance and in handling trauma. The politics felt a bit off for this one too I guess, but for me it was an overall more enjoyable (if much more difficult) read.
#AmReading

TL;DR: what if nationalism, not anarchy, is futile?
Since I had the pleasure of seeing the "what would anarchists do against a warlord?" argument again in my timeline, I'll present again my extremely simple proposed solution:
Convince the followers of the warlord that they're better off joining you in freedom, then kill or exile the warlord once they're alone or vastly outnumbered.
Remember that even in our own historical moment where nothing close to large-scale free society has existed in living memory, the warlord's promise of "help me oppress others and you'll be richly rewarded" is a lie that many understand is historically a bad bet. Many, many people currently take that bet, for a variety of reasons, and they're enough to coerce through fear an even larger number of others. But although we imagine, just as the medieval peasants might have imagined of monarchy, that such a structure is both the natural order of things and much too strong to possibly fail, in reality it takes an enormous amount of energy, coordination, and luck for these structures to persist! Nations crumble every day, and none has survived more than a couple *hundred* years, compared to pre-nation societies which persisted for *tends of thousands of years* if not more. I'm this bubbling froth of hierarchies, the notion that hierarchy is inevitable is certainly popular, but since there's clearly a bit of an ulterior motive to make (and teach) that claim, I'm not sure we should trust it.
So what I believe could form the preconditions for future anarchist societies to avoid the "warlord problem" is merely: a widespread common sense belief that letting anyone else have authority over you is morally suspect. Given such a belief, a warlord will have a hard time building any following at all, and their opponents will have an easy time getting their supporters to defect. In fact, we're already partway there, relative to the situation a couple hundred years ago. At that time, someone could claim "you need to obey my orders and fight and die for me because the Queen was my mother" and that was actually a quite successful strategy. Nowadays, this strategy is only still working in a few isolated places, and the idea that one could *start a new monarchy* or even resurrect a defunct one seems absurd. So why can't that same transformation from "this is just how the world works" to "haha, how did anyone ever believe *that*? also happen to nationalism in general? I don't see an obvious reason why not.
Now I think one popular counterargument to this is: if you think non-state societies can win out with these tactics, why didn't they work for American tribes in the face of the European colonizers? (Or insert your favorite example of colonialism here.) I think I can imagine a variety of reasons, from the fact that many of those societies didn't try this tactic (and/or were hierarchical themselves), to the impacts of disease weakening those societies pre-contact, to the fact that with much-greater communication and education possibilities it might work better now, to the fact that most of those tribes are *still* around, and a future in which they persist longer than the colonist ideologies actually seems likely to me, despite the fact that so much cultural destruction has taken place. In fact, if the modern day descendants of the colonized tribes sow the seeds of a future society free of colonialism, that's the ultimate demonstration of the futility of hierarchical domination (I just read "Theory of Water" by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson).
I guess the TL;DR on this is: what if nationalism is actually as futile as monarchy, and we're just unfortunately living in the brief period during which it is ascendant?