Tootfinder

"When you behold the prompt file of a coder using A.I., you are viewing a record of the developer’s attempts to restrain the agents’ generally competent, but unpredictably deviant, actions."
Coding After Coders: The End of Computer Programming as We Know It
https://www.

Coding After Coders: The End of Computer Programming as We Know It
In the era of A.I. agents, many Silicon Valley programmers are now barely programming. Instead, what they’re doing is deeply, deeply weird.

Developers on AI coding: many show enthusiasm and now feel more like architects than construction workers, some think software jobs might actually grow, more (Clive Thompson/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2…

Coding After Coders: The End of Computer Programming as We Know It
In the era of A.I. agents, many Silicon Valley programmers are now barely programming. Instead, what they’re doing is deeply, deeply weird.

Willem challenged us to ask ourselves what we would do if we were living under Nazi occupation. Before all of this, I doubt anyone thought they would be complicit. I doubt anyone said to themselves, "nothing. I would cower in fear and do nothing."
But for 4 years or so we all answered that question again and again with our lives. Now here we are, answering it again... Every day. But it's no longer "what would you do during the rise of Hitler?" It's now, "what would you do after the invasion of Poland," and "what would you do after you knew about the concentration camps?"
For some people, the answer is still, "nothing."
But a lot of people have been brave in the face of it all. A lot of people have died, and a lot more will die. He will die, perhaps after a ruling by some court or other but, honestly, probably not. That's just how these things work out. Lots of people die, some for no reason, some because they stood up against injustice. A whole lot of people do nothing, until it's safe to claim victory... Until it's no longer safe to be on the other side.
That's just how these things go. Fascism is self-defeating, but it causes incredible harm on it's path of self-destruction. The more people who stand up, who risk themselves, the faster it collapses and the fewer it can hurt. That's also just how these things go. It's incredibly dangerous for everyone until enough people take some extra risk and make it safe for everyone again.
But that question still stands... Which one of those groups are you in? Are you proud of what you are doing, or will you look back with shame? Some of y'all have a lot to be proud of, but, if you're not, it's never too late to earn your way into that proud group.

For decades, we have pressured junior scholars to pump out publishable articles in a race to attain scarce tenure track lines.
...
Journal articles aren’t ... science. They’re just a unit of measurement. They’re how we keep score. Producing journal articles isn’t what we are actually meant to be doing — we’re supposed to be learning meaningful things...
academia as “the only profession where people are paid to think slowly.” stole my heart ❤️

Can AI Replace Social Science Researchers?
No. No it can't. Come on, now.

#Rant
Rob Shaw is solidifying his position as the new Dean of Right Wing, anti-Worker Legislative Reporters in British Columbia.
With these gems, it's incredible that he has an education or goes to a doctor at all…
"The BCTF is typically one of the most militant unions, and quickly prone to job action.”
BCTF Strikes since 2000:
2005
2014
phew! almost got to three!
Remember that this was at the time of a union-busting BC Liberal government that had to go to the Supreme Court of Canada to get told that they ripped up union contracts unconstitutionally and were *forced* to compensate many years later.
"The ratification is a win for a New Democrat government. And extraordinarily expensive for taxpayers, too."
“extraordinarily expensive. Really? How is a wage increase that is *barely* in line with inflation after literally decades of below-inflation increases, “extraordinary”? I'll wait.
"Teachers can thank the BCGEU for turning what was an initial 3.5 per cent wage offer over two years by government, into a more than 12 per cent increase over four that is now forming the baseline for all other union deals."
Indeed! For those who can do math, that means 3% each of 4 years instead of 3.5 over two. But thanks Rob for making it seem like 4 times more!
Thanks BCGEU members for your solidarity and perceverence! I have been on strike. It sucks HARD. But it was worth it and it works.
"The ratification by the BCTF means roughly half of the 450,000 public sector employees now have deals of some sort with the province. Two majors left on the table are nurses and doctors.”
Oh no! Let’s not pay doctors and nurses! Surely they'll stay regardless in our incredibly overworked and under resourced healthcare system!
Like how does Mr Shaw believe we are to stay competitive or attract people. Or is he just not worried about getting sick….
"The skyrocketing deficit has the NDP government inking sweetheart deals with organized labour on the one hand, while pledging to cut public sector jobs with the other.”
Ya, we could have kept those public sector jobs if it weren't for fools like you who demanded governments cut taxes over the past 20 years instead of reasonable rises to... again…keep up with inflation and retain service!
It is a crappy balancing act that the NDP is doing and I do not like a lot of it. At the same time as Mr. Shaw complains about "sweetheart deals" for people in post-secondary, I am seeing historic cuts in that same sector. It's a blood bath actually. So the potential wage increases are going to be welcome, but feel pretty hollow as so many collegues have left.
Rob Shaw would have had us all lose our jobs and take a pay cut at the next one for good measure.
Thanks but no thanks Rob, your world view sucks.
https://www.nsnews.com/economy-law-politics/rob-shaw-ndp-deal-with-bc-teachers-sets-another-costly-precedent-for-public-sector-talks-11966874

My moment of clarity in the last few weeks was coming back to “Oh right, copyright is a hack, and one that is not serving us, particularly us on the margins”
The moral rights of authorship and the way we situate our legal process of ownership are, actually, kinda at odds. And it entirely misses the idea of a commons, both as community and as a cultural base to draw from.
I've long believed that we, collectively, should own our culture — to have modern myths be Copyright 1972 LucasFilm, the traditional songs we sing Copyright 1922, now owned by Warner/Chappell Music is one of the things I find repugnant about the situation we find ourselves in.
That said, reconciling that with the behavior of the AI companies, _particularly_ the American ones? It's hard. Google abuses its monopoly position; Microsoft has forced harmful and terrible tooling on people at every turn; OpenAI is run by someone who actively despises art and does not understand it; and Anthropic is run by a guy who is trying to make sure the apocalypse has a pleasant demeanor and doesn't offend any corporations on the way. All of the above have scraped the web with no active consent — and that's largely fine, that's what putting things in common _is_, that's the beauty of the open information world we have the remnants of — but also actively evading measures people put in place to stop it and with absolutely no willingness to engage with the process. Extracting from the commons _is_ the tragedy of the commons.
It does not mean that enlarging the commons with the resulting tools is bad. The doctrine of original sin is a Christian concept I do not subscribe to. The concept of 'fruit of the poisonous tree' is a legal tool to fix power relations not a moral stance. They're worth understanding, but they are not absolute moral stances that are self-evident.
These are not harmless tools, but so too putting hard regulation and corporate, legalistic scrutiny on everything has a vastly negative impact: it is a yoke on human creativity and community to the reins of capital.
And, so too, disruption has huge costs. We are, apparently, committed to doing things the worst possible way. One can just hope that we capture the good too, because the ride has started and it's rather late to get off.

People tell me that #AI code is fine, because you can run automatic tests. But tests can only tell you if code is doing the thing you want it to do.
To know what it SHOULD do, we used to have requirements. But now requirements are themselves vibe-coded slopotypes.
People were hoping that this would get them higher velocity, but testing the requirements in production only produces waste an…

Checking an LLM's work is a systemic, not an individual, problem.
Only a culture of design critique can prevent sloppy AI-generated problem definitions.

I think this is an anti-capitalist framing that fails to really engage with intersectional feminism. (Now, please call me out if I'm wrong on this, because I'm still figuring a lot of shit out but...) Racism, misogyny, transphobia, and other forms of bigotry are not distractions that allow capitalist exploitation. They are interlocking systems, of which capitalist exploitation is a part.
The standard framing fails to engage with *what power is.* Impoverishing communities is not the goal. The goal is power. The goal is to create more coercive relationships, which interlock with all the other forms of coercion.
When you understand what the #Epstein class was doing, when you understand the way he specifically leveraged transphobia, misogyny, and economic power *together* as part of his sex trafficking, you realize there's actually something else going on here.
The anti-capitalist framing misses one of the the most important opportunities we have in this moment: the ability to permanently tie this structure to the natural repulsion we all feel towards coercion (especially as it manifests as sexual violence against children).

Quotes from @… : “Plan the learning. Not the solution. Not less planning. Different planning.
The question isn’t “How do we plan less?”, but “What are we actually trying to plan?”
Plan the learning: decide upfront what you need to understand, how you’ll find out, and what you’ll do with what you discover.”
—
We’ve been doing Q2 planning, and folks want estimates on when projects can be completed while we don’t even know yet what our options might be, let alone what an appropriate solution is.
I’ve been trying to focus on what to do next that will move us forward, and only give estimates for that.
But I can only estimate what I’ve done before, or can abstract from previous similar activities. Doing work breakdowns for very near horizons helps, but that develops over time. I can’t estimate past what’s visible to me now.
https://medium.com/thrivve-partners/you-cant-plan-your-way-to-discovery-0798f2797852

I’ve had this contingent of the language police show up in my replies a few times now over the word “cosplay,” and look…
OK, I get it, I get the instinct to say “Don’t drag me into this!” and I applaud the effort to push fascists out of communities, yes to all that…
…and also we need to recognize that what ICE is doing absolutely •is• cosplay. The word means “costume play.” It refers to assembling and wearing costumes that are not necessarily functional, but show affinity for a particular subculture by reproducing characters from that subculture’s popular narratives.
ICE are cosplaying Call of Duty. That is an accurate description of what’s happening. (Listen to “Gear.”)
I make software and I make music. I don’t think either one of those things •should• be about violence. I don’t •want• them to be about violence. But both are used in the service of violence, like it or not. I shout the violence out whenever it shows up. But would be ridiculous for me to point at what Palantir does and say “That’s not software!” Unfortunately, it •is• software. To deny that would be beyond self-defeating; it would be irresponsible.
ICE •is• doing cosplay, and we hate it. It’s an insult to the cosplay subculture. It is an insult to the whole of humanity. Fascism creeps into all of our spheres, into every beloved craft and community, and the response is never to pretend it’s not there. The response is to drive it out.
@…
https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@wildrikku/115956545807535535

Mailbag: How did Super Bowl teams rebuild? https://www.dallascowboys.com/news/mailbag-how-did-super-bowl-teams-rebuild

Cynicism, "AI"
I've been pointed out the "Reflections on 2025" post by Samuel Albanie [1]. The author's writing style makes it quite a fun, I admit.
The first part, "The Compute Theory of Everything" is an optimistic piece on "#AI". Long story short, poor "AI researchers" have been struggling for years because of predominant misconception that "machines should have been powerful enough". Fortunately, now they can finally get their hands on the kind of power that used to be only available to supervillains, and all they have to do is forget about morals, agree that their research will be used to murder millions of people, and a few more millions will die as a side effect of the climate crisis. But I'm digressing.
The author is referring to an essay by Hans Moravec, "The Role of Raw Power in Intelligence" [2]. It's also quite an interesting read, starting with a chapter on how intelligence evolved independently at least four times. The key point inferred from that seems to be, that all we need is more computing power, and we'll eventually "brute-force" all AI-related problems (or die trying, I guess).
As a disclaimer, I have to say I'm not a biologist. Rather just a random guy who read a fair number of pieces on evolution. And I feel like the analogies brought here are misleading at best.
Firstly, there seems to be an assumption that evolution inexorably leads to higher "intelligence", with a certain implicit assumption on what intelligence is. Per that assumption, any animal that gets "brainier" will eventually become intelligent. However, this seems to be missing the point that both evolution and learning doesn't operate in a void.
Yes, many animals did attain a certain level of intelligence, but they attained it in a long chain of development, while solving specific problems, in specific bodies, in specific environments. I don't think that you can just stuff more brains into a random animal, and expect it to attain human intelligence; and the same goes for a computer — you can't expect that given more power, algorithms will eventually converge on human-like intelligence.
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, what evolution did succeed at first is achieving neural networks that are far more energy efficient than whatever computers are doing today. Even if indeed "computing power" paved the way for intelligence, what came first is extremely efficient "hardware". Nowadays, human seem to be skipping that part. Optimizing is hard, so why bother with it? We can afford bigger data centers, we can afford to waste more energy, we can afford to deprive people of drinking water, so let's just skip to the easy part!
And on top of that, we're trying to squash hundreds of millions of years of evolution into… a decade, perhaps? What could possibly go wrong?
[1] #NoAI #NoLLM #LLM

I am so sad and annoyed this morning.
They are topping more trees in Cathedral Grove.
The place that was literally shown to the world during the Opening Ceremonies of the 2010 Olympics now has dozens of headless 30-50ft tall, 300 year old, stumps.
Because “safety”, I assume.
There has been a road through this park for 100 years, but it took until the 2020s for someone to decide there were “danger trees”.
We’re all idiots.
I am going to try to take a picture this morning of the new cuts but it is all blocked off as they work so it will be hard or impossible. I’ll do my best.
What are we doing. Why are we like this? 😢
The photo is from earlier this year. Most of the headless trees are along the road, but not all. This shows one along the walking path.
cc: @… @mlabotterell @…
#thicktrunkthursday #throwbackthursday #cathedralgrove #bcpoli #mosstodon #nature