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

AI didn't create skewed workplace incentives. They were already aligned towards churning out artifacts to create the illusion of productivity.
Of course, if there is one thing AI is good at, it's making plausible-looking artifacts. Then those artifacts get passed on and become your problem.
HBR is calling this the workslop era.
We must kill the logic underlying workslop: that anything going wrong after a handoff can be blamed on execution problems.

"Workslop" was the logical outcome of productivity maxxing
Local throughput optimization always externalizes costs onto downstream colleagues.

I've been searching online to find reasons to use "mutate()" in R rather than directly assign to the column in the DF. No luck, lots on "how" but nothing on "why".
So I gave in and tried AI, which immediately gave me a long list of reasons, many of which I had already considered likely. So very plausible.
It didn't take me long to realise it was worth absolutely nothing: LLMs' strength is supplying plausible text, but what we are looking…

From a story in today’s Wall Street Journal about Woody Allen and his new novel:

Though he’s already at work on a second novel, he rarely reads fiction—“I feel like I’m wasting time.”
More often he reads philosophy and books by physicists.
“I keep thinking I’m going to learn something of deep value that’s going to make me feel better in life,” he says.
“It never does.”

Two Number Theory Items (and Woody Allen)
James Douglas Boyd has recently spent a lot of time interacting with Mochizuki and others at RIMS working in anabelian geometry. Material from interviews he conducted are available here (Mochizuki …